Starting a new M&M campaign...

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator
Staff member
Supporter
As the title says, I'm starting a new M&M campaign.

I'm basing it on the best campaign I ever ran- a supers game set in 1900, using elements from H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, William Gibson's Difference Engine, Atlantis legends, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Wild, Wild West, Kung Fu, certain James Bond movies, and of course, the Space: 1899 RPG...all in the HERO system.

In it, the PCs were agents of an International/Interplanetary police organization modeled somewhat after INTERPOL, called G.A.I.A.

It was good enough for me to dust it off, especially since none of the players in question have ever seen a bit of that campaign.

However, many of my files were lost when a young and unsupervised cousin of mine successfully downloaded a harmful Mac virus onto my machine- what are the odds?- so I'm starting almost from scratch.

The one change I can think of that is defninite is that instead of being Agents of G.A.I.A., they will be students/alumni/faculty of the Cavor Academy. (Being an agent of G.A.I.A. will still be an option, probably.)

Modeled after the Xavier Academy of Marvel Comics fame, it is funded by the immense fortune of the Cavor family. Cavor invented cavorite, the metallic alloy that allows for heavier than air flight by "tacking" against gravity waves (see H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon), enabling the Empires of the West to create ironclad airships of immense power that patrol the skies of Earth, Mars and the Moon, and are now exploring the jungle world of Venus.

IOW, its time to brainstorm...while I'm learning the finer points of the M&M system.

So what, if any, ideas spring to mind?
 
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Qualidar

First Post
So what, if any, ideas spring to mind?

I'll tell you what springs to mind: an instant and insatiable desire to play in your game! :D

Honestly, nothing concrete, but as I'm gearing up for a weird science take on Wild, Wild West myself, I've been looking at a possible source of inspiration lately: the episode recaps of the old Wild, Wild West show. There's nothing there that I'd take verbatim, but little nuggets of cool characters suggest themselves when you read through.

Personally, I'm planning for a cabal of weird-scientists in-fighting over the pieces of a lost Atlantean artifact to be my background structure for the campaign, with different scientists having differing schticks: the Captain-Nemo guy with a bunch of Aquanaught minions, the mad Toymaker, the Mesmerist with his circus, etc.
 
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Piratecat

Sesquipedalian
I agree with Qualidar. You should move to Boston.

I think I'd make the PCs be Power lvl 6 or 7 to start, and be specific about what sorts of characters are cool and what isn't. It sounds like a great game.
 

Qualidar

First Post
Are your players familiar with M&M character creation? When I started up my campaign I described the campaign (Pulp Superheros) to the four of them and we brainstormed on their characters. I went home and stated them up. Once the players had a feel for the system we revisited them to see if they wanted to shuffle anything around.
 

ValhallaGH

Explorer
Are your players familiar with M&M character creation? When I started up my campaign I described the campaign (Pulp Superheros) to the four of them and we brainstormed on their characters. I went home and stated them up. Once the players had a feel for the system we revisited them to see if they wanted to shuffle anything around.
This is a great way to handle a new system if you've got the system knowledge, time, energy, and player trust needed to pull it off.

As general advice goes, I've got the following (which repeats and expands upon my fellow posters):
  • Make sure your players understand the genre, and what's appropriate in it. This will cut most of the inappropriate concepts.
  • Have everyone understand that the rules are very flexible and abstract, with little flavor text included. Meaning that everyone needs to add their own descriptors and trappings to what their characters do.
  • In a world where the regular threats are human, a PL of 6 to 9 will have an appropriately pulpy feel. Most humans are in the PL 0 (innocent bystanders) to 6 (SWAT teams) range, as reference.
  • A few appropriate concepts have problematic powers. Keep an eye on them, and make sure they understand that you can make them change / remove powers that turn out to be a big problem.

Good Luck.
 

The_Warlock

Explorer
Dannyalcatraz said:
So what, if any, ideas spring to mind?

1) Beginnings of a secret war with nations on earth that can't bring power to bear against the Ironclad Airships. Result: Molemen Drill Vessels

First some isolated destroyed villages to test the concept, which can lead to arcs to prevent the war, or watch it blossom.


2) Triffid-like tentacled tree-monsters from Venus try to smuggle their way aboard vessels to literally plant the seeds of their interplanetary domination of the human occupied worlds.

While most agencies want to stop the possible spread of the creatures, a few are actually TRYING to smuggle them in so they can do Victorian Era Bio-weapons research on them.


3) Someone, or something, calling itself the Eye of God is bringing fractious Martian tribesaliens together into a army in the desolate wastelands of the Red Planet.


4) A reclusive inventor has discovered a way to use cavorite to A) make Gravity Mines/Orbital Kinetic Spike Bombs; B) Cause Earthquakes; C) bend time and space to view other times and places; D) Open up a portal into a sub-dimension that allows Faster/Instant travel, but also allows cross-dimensional horrors into reality.

No less than 13 special agencies, secret cabals, and super villains all learn this at roughly the same time.

Hilarity ensues.


That's all I got at the moment....
 

fireinthedust

Explorer
4) PL is not how powerful the character is; rather, it's a numerical range for their bonuses, from 0-PL. They could make a character with the vulnerability of a soap bubble at PL20, or an indestructible PL5.
PL can affect size of powers, and strength of DC relative to other powers, but the point I'm getting at is that having a low PL won't make the game more "real". It may help, though.



I imagine this would be fun. However, and this is only if I was running the game, I'd get them to come up with concepts for non-combat characters; like Gentleman Cuttle, who works at the dockyards, and recently found out he could breathe underwater.

Or think about characters who would fit in a Jules Verne novel, or non-superhero comic book. Like, the street detective, or the ship wrecked sailor.
Theoretically, Batman started as a street level kinda guy; more as a mystery man who got more popular as time went on. Now, sure, he's this unbeatable Chuck Norris figure (stupid Frank Miller's magical ninja fixation; Daredevil, Batman, every guy in Sin City for some reason... mumble mumble). Back in the day he was a colorful Dick Tracey.

Try to impress upon them the horse and carriage aspect of the world. The mindset of 35 mph as fairly fast. That will allow super to really mean "fantastic" rather than "generic" the way it so easily does with this sort of thing.

Other sources: Steamboy, Brisco County Jr., Bram Stoker's Dracula. Mike Mignola did a great Batman story set in victorian England.
Dark Knight and Batman Begins, while modern, may give you ideas of how to do a super hero story in a thoroughly "realistic" way.

The Prestige: two magicians battle it out for the best act. Killer movie starring Hugh Jackman, Michael Cain, and Christian Bale; also David Bowie, and other amazing actors.

If you've read League of Extraordinary Gentlement, check out Tom Strong, same writer.
 

fireinthedust

Explorer
IMPORTANT: who are the PCs? Like, a six-armed indian woman? An erudite detective from Bakerstreet?

If Cavorite means everyone can fly, that's fine. How common are aliens? Is there class struggle? racism? economic downturn?

Scarlet fever. Croup. Polio. Poverty in the lower classes. Orphans named Oliver and the Artful Dodger; Fagan, the old man who runs a pack of pick pocket children.

The Sif.

Jack the Ripper, and no one cares to raise a stink.

Coal-produced smog and ash? Kids who never get to see Cavorite. Really bad psychologists and oppressive social structures.

Expansionism. The French.

Romania is a lot like Dracula; no one but the PCs believe this. "be rational, man, not this rubbish."
 

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator
Staff member
Supporter
Thanks for the suggestions, y'all!

To give you more info so that you can give me more info:

1) At this point, no PCs have been generated. I've handed out a couple of the 2Ed core books to let some of the players familiarize themselves with M&M (almost everyone in the group is an experienced gamer). If they like what they see, they'll pass the books on to someone else in the group.

If I can, I'll take those PC gen ideas to heart and try to help everyone design their PCs to be genre appropriate as well as mechanically sound.

Does everyone agree that PL 6 sounds about right?


2) I'm planning on keeping some of the background from the original campaign in this one. That includes:

a) Dr. Cavor is killed in the custody of the Selinites, but his Marconi broadcasts to his companion Mr. Bedford reveal the secret of its manufacture. In his honor, he masters the technology to manufacture cavorite and quickly licenses it to a number of Empires- America, Germany, Great Britain, France, Russia and Japan- and these are the predominant spacefaring Empires. It makes Bedford impossibly wealthy- moreso than the Babbages, DuPonts and others- but he dislikes the way the Empires use their power without mercy. To "attone" he founds the Cavorite Academy, which educates "talents," in hope that their abilities will help temper the militaristic powers of the world (X-Men).

b) An asian necromancer who has assembled a super team of his own, and is plotting to take over the world. His means vary- he has stolen a Babbage Difference Engine to control an Archimedean Death Ray to sink ships off the coast of China and plunder them with his submersible soldiers (see The Man with the Golden Gun + 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea).

He also has discovered that the opium that turns Martians into workaholics of inhuman power- allowing Terran empires to effectively enslave them- can, in massive doses, turn them into fearsome berserkers (Alien Nation + Turtledove's Worldwar novels). By smuggling additional opium to Mars, he starts an uprising that distracts the Empires from his true goal...smuggling liftwood (Space:1889) back to Earth to manufacture his own lightweight and maneuverable skysleds to fight the world's cavorite equipped ironclads (Moorcock's Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy, esp. Warlord of the Air).

c) G.A.I.A. will exist, but barring an unusual PC background, this agency will be only tangential to this campaign.

d) Atlantis is real, and inhabited. Magic works. Steampunk will be the aesthetic of the "superscientist."

e) Yep- other sources I used and will use again include Briscoe County, Jr., Gotham by Gaslight, Dracula, Frankenstein, werewolf legends...and anything else I can make work!

3) The aliens will largely be distributed as per Space: 1889. IOW, Martians stay mostly on Mars, Selenites largely remain on the Moon, and as yet, the main form of life on Venus is dinosaurs.

Venus is the big question mark. Its a paradise for big game hunters, and I suppose I could work out some kind of Tarzan-esque plotline, but I'm not sure why Cavorite Academy students- or anyone else, for that matter- would be there.

4) I like both the Molemen and the Triffids/Alien idea! The former could dovetail nicely with a Journey to the Center of the Earth!

And the Triffids could be smuggled to Earth by a wealthy industrialist for his greenhouse...kind of like what happened in Dr Who Seeds of Doom (with the Krynoids).

The trick is that I want to design plotlines that make sense for students, staff & faculty as opposed to paid super-agents.
 
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ArghMark

First Post
(I just saw Stephen Kings The Mist and read Viriconium) A (mad) scientist breaks into another dimension, releasing a strange mist over London. At first no-one can tell the difference, until people start being infested. A growing cult of nihilists, called the Locust Path start plotting to change reality. They have strange mutant-y powers.

At some point you could have a strange solar event happen that causes everyone but the PC's to freeze in time, and gradually become nothing; the same as above, with a time limit.
 
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