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Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Supersworn: The Victory Academy Part Two

[Begin a Session: External factors create new danger, urgency, or importance for a quest]

Thread: Time Cop on Patrol
Oracle: Strengthen Alliance

Tempus Wright is hurtling through the time stream and picks up an anomaly from the year 2080. He reroutes his journey to 2024 to make this stop further into the future. When he emerges, Forge City is in ruins, and strange cybernetic spires rise above a black cloud-choked sky.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Supersworn: The Victory Academy Part One

This campaign started as a world-building exercise. Click here to see how we got to this point.

What has come before:

The Naxramman Alliance had its attempted invasion of Earth thwarted by the largest coalition of superhumans ever assembled. Even some villains bordering on antiheroes joined the fight to save their planet. Thousands of tons of wreckage litter the globe. Governments are attempting to secure it, some for good and others for ill. Supervillains and their minions are also grabbing up as much as they can.

The death of Silver Sentry signaled the end of The Silver Generation and the transition into the darker Bronze Generation. A battle with Bombardier left the android’s body in pieces. He was laid to rest by his family & friends, with his adopted human daughter taking on the mantle of The Silver Rose in her late father’s honor. Months ago, rumors that Sentry was alive again started to circulate. He was spotted in Hong Kong, Cape Town, and Rome. Other androids, robots, and AI all started to vanish. STRIKE believes Sentry is gathering these beings under something called The Machine Collective. Its purpose is unknown.

Aiden Bell used to be Captain Quantum, a child’s fantasy of a superhero. As a thirteen-year-old, he would blow the right notes on the quantum whistle and swap places with the alien super-being Quantum. Along the way, things went sour, but he’s in his fifties now and claims to have been reformed since then, or at least pretending to be. This rebranding has been so persuasive the city leaders have appointed Bell the headmaster of The Victory Academy. He’s interested in making this a pathway for young superheroes working directly for America’s institutions. The instructors at the Academy are highly suspicious of this move.

Solo Tabletop RPG – Worldbuilding: Becoming the Villain

You can purchase Becoming the Villain here.

Check our last session with Microscope here.

Becoming the Villain is a solo tabletop RPG that uses Tarot cards and prompts to fashion a villain’s origins. It can be a stand-alone bit of fun or used as part of a campaign’s worldbuilding. For our purposes, we’ll construct the main villain’s backstory in our solo superhero campaign. You’ll create elements that define your character, but those will change a lot through play, and by the end, what you started with will likely be completely different.

Solo Tabletop RPG – Worldbuilding: The Location Crafter Part Two

You can purchase The Location Crafter here.

Read my brainstorming session in our first part here.

The Location Crafter is another solo play tool created by Tana Pigeon, designer of the Mythic GM Emulator. This module is intended to solve a problem of solo play – how to keep the fun of being surprised during exploration in a way that mimics traditional tabletop roleplay rather than Choose Your Own Adventure. In this way, you can have a framework but not feel like the story is on rails.

Solo Tabletop RPG – Worldbuilding: The Location Crafter Part One

You can purchase The Location Crafter here.

For this session, I focused on the location details I rolled up in the last session with Random Realities. I used Tana Pigeon’s The Location Crafter, a spin-off of their Mythic GM Emulator engine to further develop these details into a playable space. Like all Mythic-related content, the Location Crafter is intended to be modular. A solo player can choose what they want to add to their core RPG system. In the case of The Location Crafter it is about creating an explorable space with lists. You’ll roll on these lists, adding a score for how much has been explored already, which enables items from lower on the list to be “unlocked.”

Comic Book Review – Palestine

Palestine (Fantagraphics)
Written and illustrated by Joe Sacco

Journalist/cartoonist Joe Sacco visited the Palestinian territory during the First Intifada (1987-1993). You may have seen the word, Intifada lately, and, depending on how you had explained it to you, you very possibly got the wrong definition. The Intifada was a period of sustained protest and civil disobedience by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation. 1987 was the twentieth anniversary of the Arab-Israeli War, which saw the occupation seizing even more territory, pushing the indigenous Palestinians into smaller & smaller walled-off spaces. Sacco spent a lot of time visiting the West Bank and Gaza Strip, having conversations with Palestinians of all ages who had all experienced brutality at the hands of the Western occupying force. He recreates these moments in this incredibly moving graphic novel.

Comic Book Review – Parasocial

Parasocial (Image Comics)
Written by Alex de Campi
Art by Erica Henderson

The other day, I was looking over the upcoming DC Comics solicitations and realized something. I am old now. I just looked at the covers, the blurbs for stories they were announcing, the lead-ups & preludes to the next big event, and I thought, “Boy, am I tired.” I know part of this is that the writers that are up and coming in comics right now are, for the first time, my age or younger than I am. It was an inevitable point I would reach one day, but experiencing it is still strange. Having grown up reading comics written by mostly Baby Boomers, there’s a particular style & tone I’m used to. It’s not better than what is new; it is just different. When I read something like Parasocial, I have mixed feelings – I like a lot of the ideas, but the execution is not what I expected, so I’m left feeling ambivalent.

Comic Book Review – Monica

Monica (Fantagraphics)
Written & Illustrated by Daniel Clowes

When I think of the great indie comics creators from my younger days, I typically think of three names: Charles Burns (Black Hole), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth), and Daniel Clowes (Ghost World). Each artist has a distinct style, and their personality comes through in all their work. The common theme between them all is a bleak look at humanity. Clowes’ work, in particular, focused on the alienation of Generation X, whose identities were tied to ironic nostalgia and difficulty being vulnerable with others. But time has passed, and Clowes is no longer a young man. As good as his early work is, he’s matured into something incredible, and Monica is a perfect example of this sophistication.

Comic Book Review – Carmilla, The First Vampire

Carmilla, The First Vampire (2023)
Written by Amy Chu
Art by Soo Lee

Of all the “classic” monsters, vampires have just never clicked for me. I’ve seen many different takes on vampires from multiple cultures, but I’ve never found them particularly scary. I think part of this is that the vampire has shifted in the culture from being a strange, animal-like predator to either a fetishistic totem of erotic fiction or a metaphor for Other-ed groups we’re meant to empathize with. When that happens, the monstrous fades, and they become just a storytelling trope. I stay open to new takes on vampires, hoping that someone might make them horrific again, and Chu & Lee’s Carmilla graphic novel does a decent job of it.

Comic Book Review – Klaus

Klaus (2016)
Reprints Klaus #1-7
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Dan Mora

So many origin stories have attempted to explain Santa Claus’s roots. I just reviewed a middling Netflix animated film a few weeks ago, also titled Klaus, that provided its own explanation. I’ve always been a fan of writer Grant Morrison and their genre-reinventing work in comics. From devouring their run on JLA in the 1990s to going back through their catalog to read Animal Man and more modern work, like Seven Soldiers and Morrison’s extremely engrossing Batman work, I am a fan. Not an uncritical one, though. Some of Morrison’s work just doesn’t click for me, but I always know they will do something interesting, and at least the kernel of fascinating ideas will be in there.