Mutant & Mastermind settings

[Nebulous]

I haven't read the 2nd edition book yet, although i plan to get it soon. Several years ago i ran a short campaign based on the old X-com UFO Defense game. It was scads of fun, and the ruleset seemed well attuned to it (basically a game of power armor, high tech weapons and eventually psionics).

Are there any other official settings besides Freedom City that take a lot of liberties with M&M? It is an extremely flexible ruleset, and i wonder how far anyone else has taken it, even if homebrew. I heard that there is a magic book coming out this year, and hopefully Steve Kenson is writing it. If he can make an ingenious, scalable magic system like he did for the powers, i might consider even using that for a fantasy campaign.

 

[Walt C]

I'm currently running a campaign that uses the Witchcraft (Eden Studios) universe with the M&M ruleset. It's working out well so far. The PCs are a psychic, a wizard scholar, and a chi-using martial artist police detective (no superheroes).

Walt C

 

[Ranger REG]

I haven't read the 2nd edition book yet, although i plan to get it soon. Several years ago i ran a short campaign based on the old X-com UFO Defense game. It was scads of fun, and the ruleset seemed well attuned to it (basically a game of power armor, high tech weapons and eventually psionics).

Are there any other official settings besides Freedom City that take a lot of liberties with M&M? It is an extremely flexible ruleset, and i wonder how far anyone else has taken it, even if homebrew. I heard that there is a magic book coming out this year, and hopefully Steve Kenson is writing it. If he can make an ingenious, scalable magic system like he did for the powers, i might consider even using that for a fantasy campaign.

There are a few other official settings, though they're compatible to MnM 1.0:

Noir and Nocturnals.​

Compatible settings for MnM includes:

San Angelo: City of Heroes.​

For official MnM 2.0 settings:

Freedom City 2.0, Golden Age, Iron Age, Agents of Freedom, Hero High, etc.​

 

[EditorBFG]

Compatible settings for MnM includes:

San Angelo: City of Heroes.​

And also Big Finger Games' Infinite Universe, currently rolling out as a series of expanded character books-- the best M&M character books you can get, if I may be so bold in patting myself on the back-- available here

Also, there is Arbor Productions Autumn Arbor setting, which is a popular city setting much less four-color than Freedom City, and Khepera Publishing's GODSEND Agenda, a non-superhero setting dealing with superhuman powers. The smaller independent publishers are lucky in some ways, in that they can take more chances and more liberties than the bigger guys, so all of these are worth checking out.

 

[Graf]

Atomic Think Tank is really the place to go for this stuff.
The board is down right now, (hopefully for an overhaul since it used the oldest, or at least most oddly configured, BBS I think I've seen).

They've said they'll have old posts and the place is a font of people doing different stuff with M&M. Scads and scads of stuff really.

They have an "agents" book out that might be interesting to you.

At some point M&M is also coming out with Paragons (which is basically just heroes-in-the-real-world-a-la-the-Heroes-TV-show).

Some stuff, like the Algernon Files, is also rated quite highly by people.

 

[RigaMortus2]

Is there any way to run a HEROES "type" setting without completely ripping off the show, and making it exciting for the players. A lot of players play superheroe RPGs for the powers, and if you just had 1 power, and weren't proficient in it, that could make for a bored player or a boring game. That would be my main concern. Ordinary people with Extraordinary powers works well on TV and the big screeen, but how well does that translate in a game setting?

 

[Graf]

It's a good question.
With the caviate that I've only seen the pilot of Heroes (not legally availible here yet) I would have to say: it depends on the kind of game you want to run.

If you wanted to run a game like capes then it could work extremely well as a setting.
Jack wants to be a politician... Conflict: your mother is shoplifting, etc. etc.

I have to admit that I find Paragons to be totally uninteresting as a concept, but Kenson has done a decent-to-brilliant to job so far with M&M. If he and Green Ronin think Paragon is where the market is headed...

 

[Nebulous]

Thanks for the replies. I've only flipped through the first ed. Freedom City book and haven't really read it yet. What we're planning on doing is sort of a round-robin campaign, where we have an overarching theme, but we'll take turns running chunks of it. I'm just trying to get an idea of what is out there (and there's a hell of a lot to choose from). Ideally, i think we want to have a bunch of characters to choose from, sort of like a Justice League, without having a player permanently tied to any one character. I guess it sounds sort of like the troupe-style play of Ars Magica.

 

[Bretbo]

There will also be a setting coming called Paragon written by Steve Kenson that deals with a world where people begin to develop superpowers. That concept may sound familar, but development on Paragons began well before Heroes premiered.

I would suggest looking into True20, which is meant to be a universal system that has roots in the M&M system.

 

[SWBaxter]

There will also be a setting coming called Paragon written by Steve Kenson that deals with a world where people begin to develop superpowers. That concept may sound familar, but development on Paragons began well before Heroes premiered.

Well, comic books have been doing the same concept long before Heroes, too - often in very different ways. So have other related media (the Wild Cards novels, the Aberrant RPG, and so on). There's lots of room inside that concept for a unique take, and I'm pretty sure Mr. Kenson is familiar with many of the past takes.

An M&M setting that I wish we'd seen more of is the Meta-4 universe, as seen in Crooks! and the M&M 1e rulebook.