I've had supers games on my mind for some time now. When I was younger, I was all about Heroes Unlimited from Palladium Books. Hell, all the way up until around 2001 I was a rabid Palladium fan. I had just about everything they ever published, ran some very long-running Palladium Fantasy games, and for years in high school we combined HU, Ninjas & Superspies, Beyond the Supernatural, Mystic China, and TMNT and Other Strangeness into one giant game.
I experimented with the original Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP) RPG, but never liked how rigid the rules were--I'd witnessed Gambit, for example, charge entire cars and phone poles in the comics to do catastrophic damage, but in the game he could only charge small objects and do "Good" damage unless he achieved a Power Stunt, which required an obnoxiously good roll. It was a fun game, it was just too rigidly locked into place.
Over the years I've played a number of supers games and few really captured what I wanted. HERO System--way too complicated. Mutants & Masterminds--fun for what it was, but a bit too crunchy. Silver Age Sentinels Tri-Stat I liked a great deal. The first edition of Cartoon Action Hour was a blast. Soon my sunday gaming group will be giving the Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG a go. I even did my own take on supers with Amazing Adventures and the Book of Powers supplement, and the Amazing Adventures 5e core rulebook gives a full supers system that's 100% compatible with the 5e fantasy rules.
Which brings me to my current thought. Has anyone done a superhero game set in a typical fantasy world? If you think about it, it seems like both a strange mix and yet, a very natural one. The PCs in your typical swords and sorcery, elves, dwarves, and orcs fantasy game are supposed to be superheroes, after a fashion, anyway. Why not add characters with legit superpowers into the mix? This is something I think I'd like to explore in a future game. I think it'd have a unique feel to it and potentially be a lot of fun.
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Hammering out Archetypes
Fantasy gaming depends heavily, if not entirely, on archetypes. These archetypes were taken partially from Joseph Campbell, partially from myth and legend, partially from fantasy fiction (which in turn game from myth and Campbell), but really, in terms of gaming, were defined in the first fantasy role playing game, which we are all familiar with, upon its debut back in 1974, or at least, the first three major archetypes were. The fourth was added a year later in 1975. Though it's probably not necessary to hammer these out, they come down to:
- Fighting Man, or later, Fighter (subdivided into rangers, paladins, knights, barbarians, etc.)
- Cleric
- Magic User (later subdivided into wizards, illusionists, warlocks, and a million others)
- Thief (later subsumed into rogue)
You get the idea.
These archetypes would need to be present in a fantasy supers game to maintain the "fantasy" feel, but that's not really a problem. If you examine superheroes in comics and other media, you'll see that almost all can be placed into one of these archetypes. "Strong men" characters, martial artists, and the like, are fighters. Wizards, obviously, are magic users. Those that wield divine powers fall into the clerical end of the spectrum, and there are a ton of superheroes that are grifters, tricksters, and the like who all fit the thief archetype.
You don't even really need to outfit these archetypes with superpowers. Assuming that normal people don't have "class abilities," the class abilities themselves, then, become superpowers. Look at the range of heroes out there, for example, who themselves have no superpowers, but are still able to rub shoulders with cosmic heroes. They might use gadgets. They might have ninja training. They might be expert detectives.
Dealing with Superpowers
As we've seen in two previous blogs I've done, there are two ways to handle superpowers in the O.G.R.E.S. system: via the Supernatural Character Species, and via the Inventor Character Class. Both of these are entirely serviceable with a fantasy game, allowing you to easily pop in superpowered heroes with standard character classes and keep everything balanced. In effect-based system would also work nicely, allowing powered heroes using the modified Inventor class above to "build" powers for their characters. Indeed, the one outlined in the Book of Powers above should work as it sits with very few modifications needed.
So upon thinking about it, adding supers into a game that already has magic users and possibly psionics isn't realy an issue from a balance standpoint.
Setting
Setting is the real catch, becuase for the most part, a superhero setting has a wildly different and distinct feel than a traditional fantasy setting. The first step is to assume that all of the tropes of fantasy apply, across the board, from mythic stories and dragons to a European medieval/renaissance feudal system-style society (assuming we're talking about typical Western fantasy, of course).
Once we have this in place, it's time to look at the most vital part of our setting: where do superheroes come from? This is tricky--it's tempting simply to say they're demigods or have some spark of the gods in them. That's an easy answer, but it also doesn't really keep the feel of superheroes. Scientific experiments are likely off the table as well, as the kind of advanced "science," per se, required for this experimentation doesn't generally exist in fantasy settings. In some it might, but in general, no.
We could, feasibly, shift focus to magical, sourcerous, or alchemical experiments. This gives us the same element as that particular background, but leaves it firmly rooted in magical grounds. Another option is to add just the barest touch of sci-fi into our fantasy: a "runaway star streaks across the sky," and suddenly, powered people start to appear.
Anyway, just a bit of spitballing for today. This is something I'm going to need to revisit, however, and soon.
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