I am almost ready to start playing this superhero campaign I’ve been world-building, but I wanted to use three more tools from superhero tabletop RPGs as some finishing touches. I decided to use Starforged as the system with some fan-made superhero assets, but these other games provide instruments that help get a sense of how the world operates. I discovered these by reading other blogs and paging through the PDFs on my laptop.
Wild Talents
Purchase Wild Talents 2nd edition here
Wild Talents is a superhero role-playing game published in 2006. It continues a setting started in another superhero RPG, Godlike. The basic idea is that following World War II, superhumans called Talents began emerging across the globe. Prior to the war, a smaller number of Talents seemed to be able to counteract each other’s powers through sheer will. This new breed of Wild Talents cannot do this. Beyond the included setting, this can also be used as a generic superhero system.
One of the system-agnostic tools is the Axes of Design. These four color-themed world aspects are set on a scale of 1 to 5. The higher the number, the more fantastical you make your world. The axes are Red (historical), Gold (superhumans), Blue (the lovely and the pointless), and Black (moral clarity). Below, I have set the axes for my game world.
Red: Historical Inertia
Red 2—Superhumans have the potential to change history, but many established moments still happen. One exception is that Exemplar intercepted the atomic bomb that was to be dropped on Hiroshima, changing the course of the post-war era. The United States didn’t become as dominant during the Cold War, and the Soviet Union exists today, with other European and Asian countries joining it in the United Socialist Nations (U.S.N.).
Gold: Superhuman Inertia
Gold 5 – Superhumans live alongside non-powered humans; sometimes their cultures intersect. Your average person lives a life where superhumans are a part of the zeitgeist in the same politics and sports might be. The humans most directly affected by superhuman antics are their friends and family. It’s a standard comic book universe.
Blue: The Lovely and the Pointless (gods, aliens, gadgets, etc.)
Blue 3—Aliens have invaded, Atlantis is real, and magic is practiced fairly widely. The fantastic exists alongside the mundane as something people accept.
Black: Moral Clarity
Black 4 – Good and evil are defined much more clearly than in the real world, but some conflicts emerge even between people who believe they are fighting on the same side. Personal ethics can clash with social norms. Superheroes can often be pushed to kill if left with no other options, but that carries an intense moral weight.
Spectaculars
Spectaculars is another superhero tabletop RPG system that captures the feel of classic comic books. One of my favorite elements is the Setting Book, sixty pages of typical comic book elements that reminded me a lot of the Truths in Ironsworn/Starforged. This is comprehensive, so I selected some archetypal things I wanted to include in the game.
It starts with The Basics with questions like “In what decade does the story begin?” or “What makes this city different from every other city?” It overlaps in several places with the Axes from Wild Talents, so I focused more on specific elements within the world. Some I haven’t filled out (yet) were things like “The Bad Neighborhood,” like Marvel’s Hell’s Kitchen, “The Star Empire,” which recalls things like the Skrulls or Shi’ar, and “The Crime Syndicate,” which can lead to things like the Legion of Doom or The Masters of Evil. Below are the four elements I chose to detail for this campaign.
The Powerful Artifact – The Book of Destiny
Properties: a glowing book with bright cracks
Danger: Can show the user what will happen moments from now
What makes it impossible/dangerous to control? Perpetual target
Most obvious power: Warping reality
The Super Science Lab – The Atomic Foundry
Who owns it: The Family Forge
How well is its existence known? Think tank – most of what it produces is unknown to the public.
Location: Secure Facility
Type of tech: Theoretical
Interaction with heroes: Field testing
The Government Agency – S.T.R.I.K.E. (Superhuman Threat Response and Intelligence Keepers Elite)
Core Mission: Monitor all superhuman activity
Agent dress: black suits and shades
Authority: International
Headquarters: Decentralized cells
Notable advantage: Network of deep-cover agents
The Hero Academy – The Victory Academy
Physical nature: A state-of-the-art campus in the city’s heart
Sponsor: Another hero team
Kind of Students: targeted youths
Greatest threat: government crackdown
Venture City
Venture City is a setting developed for use with the Fate tabletop RPG system. Fate is a really unique system that is sort of the anti-DnD in every way possible. It has nearly zero crunch and is more about the narrative potential of characters rather than being a simulation. For people who are more interested in tactical play, this is not the thing for them. For people who want to collaboratively tell stories & not get bogged down with lots of calculations, it is about as pitch-perfect as it gets. It has had a significant influence on many games as well.
Venture City presents an interesting way of lightly detailing Places, People, and Factions. Places have Issues. People have Agendas. Factions have Slogans and Secrets. These aren’t too complicated, but they provide a clear, single-sentence direction for these things. If you’re unsure what should happen next, go back to these Aspects, which should inspire the next step in the story.
The Victory Academy – Issue: Internal Struggle for Control
Aiden Bell – Agenda: Turn The Victory Academy into a soldier factory
The Machine Collective – Slogan: Forging a Future for Artificial Life, Secret: Using predictive computing to manipulate humanity
We’re ready! In our next post, we’ll play out issue #1 of The Victory Academy!
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