Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shadow" data-source="post: 4955479" data-attributes="member: 16760">Thanks!  I hope you're enjoying the Story Hour as well.Good question!  Some of both.'Super' and 'norm' go back all the way to the beginning, as far as I recall.'Brick', 'speedster', and to a lesser extent 'blaster' are classic Champions terms for different kinds of hero that we picked up as a matter of course.'Wizard', 'sorcerer', and 'artificer' are terms our group has long used for different styles of mage, both inside and outside the Shadow-Force game.  (The terms LONG predate D&D 3.0 - there is no connection to the D&D sorcerer, despite a superficial resemblance.)When I wrote the new, improved background story for the Phantom several years ago, I had Erebus use the phrase 'our blue brethren', intending it as off-the-cuff snark.  When we started creating the Super subculture in earnest, it got taken on board.Likewise, when we were first discussing the ground rules and history of the new campaign, we started using the terms 'old-school' and 'hardcore', little dreaming at the time that we would actually put them into the game as IC slang.Then when I wrote 'Life and Light' as a proposal for how to start the game, I had Photon use 'hero' as a verb, with the vague idea it might be common usage.So far as I know, 'capes' got used spontaneously in the game for the first time in 'Stone of Night', though SP tells me he's had a vague idea of an opposition between 'capes' and 'masks' in his head for quite some time.  Ditto with the whole idea of a Super subculture to start with.Shortly after 'Stone of Night', SP told me that he saw a real theme surfacing of supers - both heroes and villains - being set apart from norms.  He wanted to explore the idea that they had a common culture and code, despite the fact they were constantly fighting each other.  (This ended up having the happy side effect of explaining some genre conventions - why people seldom die in some comics, and when they do it's shocking and unusual, but why body counts are higher in others.  It's just a matter of who's hardcore and who's civilized. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  So we started pondering.Then halfway through 'Smoking Mirror', life issues forced us to put the game on hiatus for about a year.  (That's why the game is set in 2008, though I'm only posting it now - we didn't want to mess with advancing the timeline again.)  We were still in contact, though, and threw brainstorming ideas around.I came up with 'wigjob', 'the Loyal Opposition', and 'Sid' (I think I was truly inspired with that last one) among others, and SP came up with 'slacker', 'specks', and 'citizens' (both kinds), along with others.  At that point we hit a critical mass and ideas really started to flow.  The creation of 'toyboy', for example, spawned a number of other terms:  'Toy soldier', 'toy cape', and 'toy mask'.  (Though ironically, chronologically in the game world it's probably the most recent of the four!)There followed some polishing, and the creation of a few terms to fill in chinks we'd missed - notably 'godfather' and 'shaker'.  'Jedi' also came late, and I'm quite proud of it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Makes a nice opposition to 'blaster', as well as the obvious "use the force" rationale.We're quite happy with the final product.  (A third post, on characteristic super actions, will come soon.)  I especially like the fact that you can sense the layers of terms evolving over the decades...  It seems to me, for example, that 'our blue brethren', 'our dear friends', and 'the loyal opposition' hang together, and probably date back to the early Golden Age, maybe even the Mystery Man era.Meanwhile, 'specks', 'wrench', 'Sid', and maybe 'wigjob' have a Silver Age feel to me.  'Jedi' and 'slacker' are more 80's, and 'toyboy' and 'muggle' are fairly recent.As mentioned on the Story Hour thread, there are good reasons why Photon wouldn't have become familiar with a lot of these terms, which explains why they didn't make a big showing in the first sessions of the game.</blockquote>

Verification