Choosing a Supers System, Part 1: What I’m Not Playing

On December 1, 2024December 28, 2024 By MagicJMSIn Age of Wonders, Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying15 Comments

It has been great fun over the past six months playing Dungeon Crawl Classics solo, documenting my sessions as both a game log and fantasy fiction (if somehow this sentence is news to you, start the dozens of installments here!). I’ve learned a ton from this experience, not only about DCC and solo play, but how I might relaunch a similar series using a superhero TTRPG (which, as I’ve said, is my first love) in an entirely weird homebrewed setting, operating without the safety net of published material. That’s right: Today I officially switch gears.

I’m not done with DCC, not by a long shot. But I’ve had a story idea niggling in my head since before the pandemic, and the past year’s posts have provided clarity on how I might explore it. What I had originally conceived as a series of science-fantasy/superhero mash-up novellas works better, I think, as serial fiction, and solo play keeps the project energizing for me. So, at least for now, I’m planning to move my DCC love into GMing an online campaign for a group of players while simultaneously turning my solo-play/fiction energy towards my brain-worm of an idea.

I, uh… own a lot of games, superhero and otherwise. Indeed, collecting superhero TTRPGs has been a hobby of mine, and I’ve even tried to document every superhero game ever published (this list is neither current nor comprehensive… I get bursts of energy to update it a couple of times a year). For me, then, one of the most profound questions to answer is: What the heck game system do I use for my solo play?!

This decision is a weighty one. At any point in time, of course, I can switch game systems in the background without messing up the story (and might even want to do so from time to time). What I believe deeply, though, is that the underlying system fuels the narrative, and will either work with or against me when I’m writing. Besides, I’m choosing which game I’m going to dedicate months, if not years, of my life to playing. Do I pick something already familiar to me or something brand new? Do I go rules heavy or rules light? Do I reskin a game built with a strong setting or choose a system that’s inherently setting agnostic? Etc. etc. etc. These questions feel almost overwhelming. Scanning my bookshelves and PDF libraries, I’m paralyzed by choice.

As a result, I’m going to dedicate multiple posts to sorting out my thinking on this topic. Settle in, boys and girls, because the next several weeks are going to entail a lot of TTRPG navel-gazing. By the end of this first series, though, I’ll have selected a game system and be ready to dive into the setting and character creation.

First, a note about the story I want to tell: It’s a post-apocalyptic Earth that has become, with the fall of modern civilization, a feudal, fantasy-like setting where humans face off against monsters. No one remembers the world as it was. Suddenly a set of superpowered people—think comic book powers layered onto fantasy archetypes—emerge. What is the origin of these strange abilities? What do these powerful beings herald for the world? Can they save humanity? You get the idea.

My oddball requirements for this project are:

A superhero game that can be played in a fantasy setting, plus allow for anachronistic weapons and technology. Basically, the superpowers and fantasy elements need to be satisfying, but allow for other genre shenanigans.
Is neither too crunchy (if I’m consulting forums or rulebooks more often than writing, that’s bad) nor too lightweight (I need to feel like the dice are guiding the story and enhancing the narrative). I want to feel like the mechanics support the story.
Level-up jumps in power. My idea is that the PCs start as “street level” heroes and become demigods as the story progresses. Something will be pushing them closer to godhood, which is a core part of the story. The game should not only allow for those different levels but be fun to play at all of them.
No hard-wired comics tropes (like secret identities, costumes, etc.). The story will be a genre mash-up, so I can’t hew too closely to any overly specific formulas.

To help bring my unique story to life, today let’s talk about the systems that I am not considering, even though this list represents many of the most popular games in the superhero TTRPG genre, past and present. Heck, a lot of these games are true favorites of mine, and some represent literal years of memories. For one reason or another, however, each doesn’t sound quite right for this specific project.

The OGs

Villains & Vigilantes was my first superhero game, and something I played through middle school and high school. I was immediately enthralled by the art of Jeff Dee and Bill Willingham, which would become constant inspirations for my own drawing. My first time playing in a long campaign of any kind was a wild V&V series of adventures GMed by dear friend Ted. At one point in that campaign, our group of heroes entered an alternate dimension, and, upon exiting, each PC’s power set and appearance completely changed, permanently altering our heroic identities. It blew my mind how satisfying sticking with the same character over long story arcs could be, and how gonzo wild superhero tales can become.

Why not take V&V for a nostalgic spin, then? The revised edition of the original rules, which is what I played during those years, is a product of the early 1980’s and, truly, does not hold up well in terms of creating satisfying characters, simulating comics action, or telling deeply narrative stories. On the other hand, after a lengthy legal battle, Jeff Dee and Jack Herman finally released a more modern, updated game in 2017, called Mighty Protectors. This third-edition of the game, which I own but have never played, has an old-school vibe but seems to, based on many positive reviews, hold up well under today’s modern scrutiny. Which is all to say that I’m tempted. For this project, however, I worry about all three of my requirements above. It seems like work to make the system into a fantasy world, character creation is gradual and incremental, and some Disadvantages are hardwired into tropes. As a result, I’ll save Mighty Protectors for a future project.

A special, side-note shout-out to Longshot City, a delightful superhero hack of the very-weird Troika! system. Longshot City, to me, has an even better V&V vibe than Mighty Protectors, and is something I would immediately be comfortable playing solo. It also, however, suffers from all the same issues in terms of fit for this project. Making characters is a hoot, though. I recommend checking out this game.

The single superhero game I played for the most years of my life, the one that unseated V&V and became my obsession through college, graduate school, and beyond, was Champions. Indeed, the first long campaign I ever GMed was with Champions 4^th edition, with the sweet George Perez cover. I also still own the 3^rd, 5^th, and 6^th editions of the game, the latter of which is the current edition and has its own fantasy supplements. Champions introduced “point buy” systems for superhero character creation. The rulebook is an absolute tome, with a mathematical, balanced answer to creating any superpower or character concept possible, and it’s a system I know back to front. In addition, because it’s all based on points budget, my “level up requirement” is easy to handle in Champions; if I want a jump in power, I just need to, for example, add 50 points at story milestones.

It is equally tempting to dip back into the nostalgia lake of Champions. But, and I say this with great affection, the HERO System is work, man. Creating characters—heroes or NPCs—can take hours of tinkering, and combat can be equally persnickety. I’d like the system to be in the background for this project, not the primary time commitment. I’ve loved putting in the math-miles in the past, but not this time. For all of these same reasons, I am also not considering GURPS Supers, which is a point-buy generic system that I’m sure at least one person thinks I’m stupid for not using. GURPS is really, really, really flexible as a system, but if I wanted to use something generic here that’s based on balanced, simulationist math, it would be the HERO System, which I know far better.

One of the original superhero games that still has a surprisingly cult-like following is the original Marvel Superheroes, which pioneered the famous FASERIP system. I own the original yellow boxed set in 1984, and the advanced set released a year later. Marvel Superheroes has a terrifically narrative approach (especially for its time) and can be a lot of fun to play. The game never really captured my imagination for creating new heroes, though, and I find it’s better suited to a “I want to play Wolverine and fight Deadpool” sort of game experience than a homebrewed world with novel characters. It’s important to nod my cap at FASERIP, but it’s not my system of choice.

I’m more tempted by the most recent Marvel game, the Marvel Multiverse RPG. I like that it’s actively supported by Marvel and still pumping out sourcebooks. I also know that the Glass Cannon Podcast crew love it. The more I’ve read about Marvel Multiverse, though, the more detractors I find, suggesting it has some real balance issues, that some character concepts are currently impossible to realize, and that there is less of a focus on character advancement. Even more, the game and setting are deeply interwoven, so it seems difficult to use for a non-Marvel game, and, especially, a fantasy setting. I’ll also not be delving into the other Marvel (or DC, for that matter) games from over the years.

Another nostalgic favorite of mine that is oh-so-tempting is Golden Heroes. I’ve written a deep dive look at Golden Heroes, so I won’t rehash it here. Suffice it to say, I’ve spent a long time thumbing through my copy of Squadron UK (its more modern successor), wondering if this project might be the time to bust it out. Good sense tells me, though, that the fun of Golden Heroes has always been rolling up characters, not so much the gameplay.

The People’s Favorites

The game many, many people consider the granddaddy of superhero TTRPGs is Mutants & Masterminds. With over twenty years of updates, supplements, and support, the M&M community and resources are vast. At its core, Mutants & Masterminds is a d20 system recognizable to fans of Dungeons & Dragons, but it is a game uniquely its own, and specifically designed to tell superhero stories. For years and years, I had a Hero Lab account for the sole purpose of making M&M characters in my spare time, even when I never had a group with which to play them. Character creation here is also a point-buy system, and it has so many options that pretty much any idea is possible.

Although making characters (PCs or NPCs) in M&M is not quite as time-consuming and intense as in Champions, it’s still significant, tinkering work. It also has d20 baggage from D&D 3E that I don’t love, including the restrictive action economy that doesn’t, in my opinion, simulate the cinematic, superpowered battles that are the stuff of my daydreams. For all these reasons, I enjoy making characters in M&M more than playing it. The staying power and popularity are nothing to sneeze at, though. Mutants & Masterminds deserves its flowers and would be easy, because of its adjacency to D&D, to use in my homebrewed setting.

The only game I hear talked about more than M&M is Masks, a Powered by the Apocalypse game meant to simulate and capture the spirit of teen superhero drama. Gone are the fiddly, crunchy bits in all the games above in favor of pure, thematic, storytelling gusto. Masks was somewhat of a revelation for many people, able to tell stories that superhero games to that point had struggled to tell. Unfortunately, like most PbtA games, Masks fits a very specific niche in terms of genre and is thus mostly unable to tell stories other than teen superhero drama. Since I want my tale to be broader than that, I’m skipping this system.

A quick sidenote that Worlds in Peril attempts to broaden PbtA into more general superhero tales, but I haven’t been super interested in that game. The creators eventually adapted it into a game I really like, though. Speaking of which…

Close, But No Cigar

So, Worlds of Peril begat a really intriguing game in a different system, Galaxies in Peril. I absolutely love Blades in the Dark’s mechanics, but (and I know these are both controversial statements) the setting of Doskvol turns me off, and I have zero interest in playing scoundrels. As a result, I often keep an eye on Forged in the Dark games that have different settings or flavor. The idea of a supers FotD game was immediately appealing, and I’ve devoured the Galaxies in Peril book cover to cover twice. There is a procedural element to the mechanics that would make for excellent serial storytelling, and it’s fundamentally a system that focuses on the meatiest part of adventure tales, with a fun narrative way of interpreting die rolls. For a long time, when I envisioned playing games in my homebrewed setting, I assumed that I would use Galaxies in Peril.

Unfortunately, the more I’ve considered the reality of using this game, the more I realize that the city that replaced Doskvol in Galaxies in Peril is highly specific, and not at all conducive to classic fantasy. To make it work, I would essentially have to create my own city, with my own factions. I ultimately might end up doing exactly that, but having to do it all as prework is daunting. I’d still love to play Galaxies in a longform campaign, but like many games in today’s post, I get the sense that it’s most fun right out of the box, embracing the baked-in setting.

When people ask me for my favorite superhero game, my current answer is Sentinel Comics RPG. Sentinel Comics does so many cool things that other games don’t that it blew my mind when I first played it. Character creation is semi-random and yet creates wholly satisfying PCs. Combat, with its innovative, timed Green-Yellow-Red mechanic, is epic and fast-paced. The environment is an actual NPC in combat, with its own moves that change any scene cinematically. Game sessions are called “Issues,” and there are story milestones once you’ve created a “Trade Paperback” worth. So cool! Running it as a GM is a joy. Everything about Sentinel Comics is just so fun. And yes, the game takes place in its own “Sentinel Comics” universe, which is four-color, bright-and-shiny in theme. But there’s nothing about the setting that is hardwired into the mechanics, and it’s an easy system to reskin.

The fatal flaw of Sentinel Comics, at least for my purposes, is that it has basically no level-up advancement at all. This omission makes some sense, since comic book characters over time rarely get more powerful… they just change. Sentinel Comics assumes that the fun is seeing those changes in characters without obvious jumps in power, sort of like my high school game with Ted. It’s a system that very much mimics the experience of comic books at every turn.

I’ve thought long and hard about whether I could make Sentinel Comics RPG work for this project, and I just don’t think it’s fit for this particular purpose. Alas. If you haven’t heard of the game and love superhero stories, though, I can’t recommend buying it highly enough.

Another modern system that has sorely tempted me is City of Mist. The basic conceit of City of Mist is that each PC is an avatar of mythos that sits just beyond human perception. PCs can be embodiments of Thor, or Little Red Riding Hood, or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, or whatever. Pretty much anything goes in City of Mist, both in terms of character concept and powers. Thanks to its Fate-like system, playing the game is less about measurable stats and more about thematic “tags,” qualitative descriptions attached to characters. If you can argue for why a tag works in a situation, you get a bonus to your 2d6 roll (and, like PbtA, every roll is a 2d6 roll and considered a “move”).

Thematically, there is a lot about the game that works well with my homebrewed concept. If I replace the modern city with a fantasy world, the same toggling between “Logos” and “Mythos” is not only possible, but something that I want to actively explore in my story. The lack of crunchy mechanics means that fighting with swords or eyebeams is irrelevant, and though City of Mist, like Sentinel Comics RPG, doesn’t have an “advancement” mechanic per se, changing the thematic tags does fundamentally shift characters in ways that can feel like growth. A lot fits here.

I’ve consumed a ton of City of Mist reviews, listened to interviews of the creator and actual-play podcasts, and read the books cover-to-cover. What I’ve come to understand is that a) the system is extremely narrative, open-ended, and feels unlike most other TTRPGs, and b) the quality of gameplay is highly dependent upon (as with many narrative games) the skill of the GM and trust of the players. What I cannot for the life of me figure out is whether City of Mist would be terrible for solo play. It seems like much of the richness of the game lies in the collaborative storytelling mojo between people, so my fear is that during solo play it would feel sort of, I don’t know… rule-less. Which is all to say that City of Mist intrigues the heck out of me, but I want to play it with a group before committing to it solo. Champions is too much crunch. City of Mist, I’m afraid, might be too little.

Speaking of too little crunch, I like that we have so many “rules light” superhero games like Tiny Supers and BASH, but I likely need more heft. I’ll be trying out some light-rules systems in upcoming installments, but these feel a bit too light.

A game that I originally placed into Part 2 of this exploration is Scion. On the surface, Scion has a ton of features that feel exactly like what I need for this project: Like City of Mist, it’s a game about humans becoming inhabited by myths. There are clear jumps in power levels that are both story-driven and tied to mechanics, and each power level has its own book associated with it: Origin, Hero, Demigod, and God. The Storypath System seems cool and a huge improvement on the first edition of the game, with the right balance of dice-rolling and narrative focus. From everything I’ve read, combat is fast-paced and fun.

I ultimately decided to shelve Scion for two reasons. First, like City of Mist, the idea of urban fantasy feels hardwired into the game. The specific gods in Scion are tweak-able, but the game expects that you’re playing off the major pantheons and mythos, whereas I’m planning to create my own divine forces. Would it be possible to replace their detailed explanation of cosmology with something homebrewed, and replace the modern aspects of the setting with traditional fantasy? Maybe, but I feel a little lost at the full scope of implications. Which leads me to my second reason for not using Scion: I don’t know if it’s the way Onyx Path writes its books, but I’ve read through Scion: Origin a handful of times, and I just don’t “get” it. I’ve read tons of TTRPG rulesets and supplements, and there is something oddly impenetrable to me about the way the game is showcased. It’s a beautiful book and I absolutely love the concept (American Gods is one of my all-time favorite novels), but my eyes glaze over every time. If I’m not grokking the rules the first several reads, tweaking it right out of the box feels nigh impossible. Like City of Mist, I need to play Scion with a group before going solo.

Finally, it’s worth briefly touching on other popular systems that I’m not considering for this project:

There isn’t another game like Spectaculars, and I would looooove to play with a regular in-person group. At its heart, Spectaculars is a journaling game that invites a group to spontaneously and organically create the world as you go. Innovative. Cool. I really hope they release digital journals at some point so I can drag my online group into trying it out someday. For this project, however, the assumptions the game makes about embracing superhero tropes doesn’t fit my goals.
I’ve written a deep dive into Aberrant, but wow does it seem like a lot of work to fit into a custom, fantasy setting. The world of Aberrant, and by extension the whole Trinity Continuum, feels fundamental to the game design. Could I force-fit something like Trinity: Aegis to make my concept work? Like Scion and City of Mist, with a system I don’t know well, it’s too much effort.
Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion takes the very cool SWADE system into the world of superheroes. I like Savage Worlds, in general, and find it fun to play. It can also easily toggle between fantasy and superpowers. From everything I know about it, though, and everything I’ve read, it is far better for “pulp” stories than epic ones involving demigods. I’m going to start small in my tale, but eventually want to get big.
I’m intrigued by Claim the Sky, the superpowers expansion for the Cypher System. However, in reading through reviews of the Cypher System, it seems to not so much have fans and detractors as a lot of… middling. It’s a solid generic system that some people think is slightly too fiddly and others think is slightly too narrative. It’s unclear how the vastly different role the system expects GMs to take versus players would work in a solo game. Basically, I don’t have any good reason to break the seal on these books and pilot them through such a complex project as this one.
Just for the sake of completeness, I don’t have any interest in dusting off my old copies of Superworld, Heroes Unlimited, or Silver Age Sentinels. I didn’t really love these games when they were new (okay, I had some fun with HU), so they’re not really in the running here.

Alright, alright, enough about the pile of games that I won’t consider for this project. Next time, let’s begin a much deeper look at the SEVEN (yes, really) games that I’m currently exploring as my game system of choice. I truly don’t know which one I’ll choose at the end, but fingers crossed that all this navel gazing will help clarify my muddled thoughts.

If you have thoughts about any of the games above—including any you think I’ve prematurely ejected—please comment below. You can also feel free to guess as to what systems I am considering, if you’re a superhero game afficionado.

Until then!

Choosing a Supers System, Part 2!

Gaming at Fifty One

On May 22, 2024August 24, 2024 By MagicJMSIn Superhero Gaming, Tabletop Roleplaying11 Comments

Today is a (rather long) State of the Union address on my gaming life.

As best as I can remember, I started playing tabletop role-playing games (or TTRPGs) in Fifth Grade, in 1983, which would make me ten years old. It was one of those phenomena where a friend–though I can’t remember who Gamer Zero was–received a boxed set as a Christmas gift and we all dove in. Soon we all asked our parents to supply us with books, dice, graph paper, and pencils. Throughout the Spring, we played a mix of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, not understanding that they were two largely different games. It didn’t really matter, though… what we actually played was some rules-light, make-it-up-as-you-go game that didn’t even try to involve the many complex tables in the books we didn’t understand. Usually our first-level characters wielded something like a +5 Sword of Dragon Slaying that could cut through anything.

As we transitioned to middle school, a subset of that original group began playing anything we could get our hands on. The biggest boon to our fledgling group was my buddy Russell’s older brother Jim, who was happy to run our games for us. I’m not sure this is an exhaustive list, but I remember playing a lot of Tunnels & Trolls, Gamma World, Car Wars, Top Secret, Marvel Superheroes, Villains & Vigilantes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT), Heroes Unlimited, Superworld, Champions, GURPS, and, yes, a good helping of D&D (this time using the rules and their published modules). Just seeing the covers of those games triggers a flood of nostalgic make-believe happiness. Those were fun times.

I had a new group of friends in high school and quickly introduced them to the hobby. We almost exclusively played superhero games, primarily Villains & Vigilantes and Champions, though we sprinkled in some TMNT, Golden Heroes, DC Heroes, and Super Villains as well. My good friend Ted ran us through a particularly memorable V&V campaign, which clued me into how cool a longform set of adventures with the same characters can be.

We all scattered to different colleges, and I met new TTRPG enthusiasts. Throughout my time at Occidental College, I ran a monthly Champions campaign, even drawing the “comic covers” for each session we played as keepsakes. At that point, Champions was my only game, and I was deep into the HERO System and its math-heavy fun.

Then it was off to graduate school, where I met both my wife and a little game called Magic: the Gathering, which would be the object of my obsession for years. Then my working career started to take off, I had kids, we moved around, and, as these things do, TTRPGs faded into the background of my life for nearly two decades. I remember trying to organize a D&D adventure with my wife and some friends once or twice during that time, but it never stuck. During that time, I bought-and-sold the D&D 3E and 3.5 rulebooks without really doing anything with them.

In 2018, I took a year off work to recoup, then in 2019 started a job in San Francisco that, unlike most of my previous roles, didn’t require heavy travel. Around that time, I started listening to a ton of podcasts, including the Glass Cannon Podcast. The TTRPG bug started inching its way into my brain, and I began to seek out my local game stores to see if there were people with whom I could play. After some false starts with Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition and Pathfinder at local stores, I found a group that was playing D&D 5E and were happy to have me join. They were interested in switching to Pathfinder 2^nd Edition once it was released, and eventually I GMed us through the game’s first 1-20 Adventure Path, Age of Ashes over three years. During those years we took occasional detours, experimenting with Blades in the Dark, Symbaroum, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, and, at my urging, even returned to supers for a Sentinel Comics RPG one-shot.

That gaming group was my first experience with serious personality clashes in TTRPG groups. I ended up feeling picked on by a person there who was close friends with two other members, and after trying-and-failing multiple times to talk it out, my best recourse was to leave. Suffice it to say, it was the only real negative chapter I’ve had with TTRPGs, which have otherwise been a source of unqualified joy in my life.

For months I was genuinely wounded by my abandoned group. Thankfully the global pandemic had introduced me to virtual tabletops and online games. Eventually I found a couple fun virtual tables, including a delightful online group of Europeans that has met weekly now for almost two years. We mostly play PF2E, but have rotated GMs and done several sessions of Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy, and most recently Mörk Borg. On our “really want to play list” are Vaesen, Dragonbane, Traveller, Forbidden Lands, Dungeon World, Lancer, Savage Worlds, and countless others.

It’s fair to say that, at age fifty-one, I’m in the midst of my Second TTRPG Renaissance. At the same time, the whole TTRPG industry is going through its own Renaissance, with intriguing new games popping up seemingly every week. Not surprisingly, my game shelf has exploded. I now own most of the games listed above, plus a metric ton of others I’ve Kickstarted, found in bargain bins or eBay auctions, or used birthday gift certificates on. I’ve even sold old game books and given my college-age son my D&D 5E collection to make room for them in my house.

There are two major differences between my TTRPG life as a gray-bearded geezer compared to my young, wispy-mustachioed self. The most obvious one is that it’s more difficult to find a group with which to play. Throughout middle school, high school, and college, I rolled dice with my core group of friends. Most of our interests were shared and we spent a ton of time together… easy squeezy. These days, in contrast, the vast majority of my contemporaries have neither the time for, nor interest in, TTRPGs. While online platforms make the pool of potential players wider, these online groups are ephemeral. It’s clear to me that if one of my current group members (all of whom are twenty years younger than me) has kids, takes a new job, or moves, it probably spells the end of the group… that sort of “life event disruption” can happen with any group, but somehow in-person groups feel stickier because the investment feels somehow deeper. Meanwhile, I’ve tried to think of how to conjure another reliable, fun in-person group and failed to come up with a solution.

The second difference is in the type of games I’m playing now versus in my youth. If it’s not obvious from the banner image on this blog, my first love is superheroes and comic books, and at one point in college set my sights on becoming a comic book illustrator. As my TTRPG life deepened as a young person, it skewed heavily–and eventually exclusively–to superhero games. Yet all of my groups in the last six years want to play fantasy or investigative horror games. That’s okay, because I can get excited about those games. But none of the groups I’ve encountered want to play superhero make-believe.

The feeling of being an odd-shaped puzzle piece continued recently as I started to discover the “Old School Renaissance” (or OSR) movement within TTRPGs. These games are built by people who love early Dungeons & Dragons and want to recreate the feel of those games for modern audiences. I’ve looked at OSR-type games like Old School Essentials, Knave, Ironsworn, and have absolutely fallen in love with Dungeon Crawl Classics. I’ve also rescued a bunch of my old D&D modules from my mother’s garage, joined the Ancient Dungeons & Dragons Players Facebook group, and have been bingeing the Vintage RPG podcast. Yet when I tell my online group that I’d love to run them through a DCC beginner adventure to test out the system, I get the same lukewarm response that I received when I tried to get my in-person group to play a superhero game. They’ll probably roll with it because they like and trust me, but there isn’t an itch there they need to scratch.

All of this has me reflecting deeply on the years ahead. I’ll certainly keep seeking out online groups and brainstorming how to form an in-person group, because these are games that are most fun when they’re social and played with friends. Just last week, for example, I jumped online with a bunch of strangers to learn to play Dragonbane, a game I own and have considered running for my regular group. I’ll also keep collecting games, because I find real pleasure in reading the books cover-to-cover and seeing them on my shelf. We truly are living in a glorious period of TTRPG innovation, and the sheer diversity and volume of options is awesome.

But I’m beginning to accept that a) I may never have a long, stable group of gaming friends again, even as an empty nester nearing retirement where my time is beginning to be more spacious, and b) the number of games I own and want to play far outweighs the number of hours I’ll be able to play with friends. I surely won’t ever get a chance to play everything, much less everything beckoning to me.

The final addition to my reflections is the rise of solo play in TTRPGs. Solo play has always been a feature of some TTRPGs dating back to the 1970s, but thanks to the global pandemic it has a lot more support now than ever. Many games, like Ironsworn and Vaesen, have solo play built into the base game as an option. Meanwhile, tools like the Mythic GM Emulator allow for being able to play any game solo, without the need for a gaming group. Indeed, one of my recent podcast obsessions is Tale of the Manticore, a great audio production of a guy solo-playing an old-school D&D system.

Maybe the answer is to begin solo play on the games no one but me wants to play? Would I enjoy that, or is the fun of TTRPGs really tied to a group? I’ll probably dip my toe into these strange, solo-play waters soon, while continuing my epic quest to find more time with awesome groups like my current online one. My enthusiasm for TTRPGs is as high as that ten-year-old kid pretending to swing his overpowered sword around. How best to channel that enthusiasm, though, is something I’m still contemplating.

If you have any thoughts about the TTRPG hobby these days, or ways you’ve tackled the hurdles I’ve outlined, I’d love to hear it. Comment below or shoot me an email at jaycms@yahoo.com.

Enthusiastically adventuring,

-jms

Goings Ons and What Comes Next

On March 7, 2023 By MagicJMSIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Hoo nelly… it’s been a looooong time since I’ve written anything here. The reasons for my lack of activity are threefold.

First, a lot of what I was posting here was cutscene blurbs from my weekly, in-person Pathfinder 2nd Edition Age of Ashes campaign. That group has broken up indefinitely and the campaign ended (at level 18 of 20… so close to the end!), a result of clashing personalities made worse by trying to make a podcast together. It’s a bummer, but in-person gaming groups are a rare and precious thing, really only disbanding because of either conflict or life-events (moving or having kids, usually). We had a fun three-year run, and I’m thankful for those hundreds of hours of memories.

Second, I started a new job last Fall. It’s an incredibly different job than I’ve had before, and has demanded, among other things, a major shift in schedule. It’s taken me awhile to figure out how to layer in online games to replace Age of Ashes alongside a brand new kind of work, plus establish modified exercise, family, and friend routines. On top of that, my seventeen-year old daughter is in the heart of college recruiting for soccer, which is taking up a ton of time (exciting! but stressful. but exciting! but stressful).

Finally, I actually HAVE been writing regularly, on a novella that I’m planning to publish on the Pathfinder Infinite site later this Spring. I’m genuinely excited about this project and you better believe I’ll link to it here when I’m done — I just crossed 33k words this morning and have the final proof of the cover art. I’m guessing that I’ll have a complete first draft in a month or so, and then spend a few weeks getting feedback and editing before I hit “Publish.” But I haven’t wanted to spoil any of the prose here.

Right before I took my hiatus, I had just started a series of deep-dives into various superhero tabletop role-playing games (you can find my Golden Heroes exploration here, and the Aberrant one here). These two installments were great fun to write. Unfortunately, while I’m still obsessed with my list of every superhero TTRPG ever published*, given everything I’ve said above, those deep-dives are rather more work than I have the bandwidth for right now.

But! Obsession is obsession, whether I have an in-person group, or life is full, or even whether I’m currently writing a long-form story in a different genre. Superhero TTRPG lists must be explored, people. I don’t make the rules, I just live by them.

So, very soon, I’ll begin a different sort of series based on my list. I’m going to just focus on modern superhero games (and I’ll define “modern” in the first installment), and zero in exclusively on the character-creation process of each game.

Why just modern games? Primarily because, while there is a lot of nostalgia woven into my love of superhero role-playing games, some of the older systems are truly obtuse and clunky. Thinking about writing about those older systems sounds slightly painful, whereas the chance to familiarize myself with newer games is exciting. Plus, the list is just too danged long; narrowing my focus to the past decade or so of games helps give me a manageable group of games to tackle.

Why just the character-creation process? Because it is my belief that one of the distinct features of superhero gaming is that making characters is at least half the fun. In other genres like fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, making characters is awesome, but playing those characters is considerably more awesome. It’s the unfolding story and those surprising die-rolls that keep me coming back again and again. Meanwhile, playing superheroes in stories where literally anything can happen (aliens! mutants! robots! time travel! martial arts! magic! other realities! spycraft!) is great. Honestly, it would be a dream come true to have a local group of friends who wanted to play a long campaign of supers. But, oddly, superheroes is the only genre where some of my fondest memories are making characters instead of the game sessions themselves. Writing about making new superheroes for new game systems sounds like a blast, even if I don’t get to play them immediately (or ever).

I’m not sure when this new series will kick off, exactly, but getting an idea like this one in my head usually means my fingers start moving of their own volition. So… sometime soon.

Fun fun!

* As always, if you know of a game not on the list please let me know! Literally every time I do even a small bit of research I discover new games.

An Aberrant Brain

On June 27, 2022June 27, 2022 By MagicJMSIn Superhero Gaming4 Comments

Oh my goodness, I did not intend to have so much time pass between posts. A big work development plus two major trips (a third next week!) plus my first bout of Covid have all kept me away from my laptop.

And yet I had a lot of fun pouring over one of my favorite games of my childhood, Golden Heroes. It was a nice validation of what I want to write about these days: the long list of superhero tabletop roleplaying games (hereafter TTRPGs) that rarely get enough attention. I’m going to continue jumping around the list of games, spotlighting ones I either love or that intrigue me.

Since I started in the 1980s, let’s fast forward a decade. Honestly, the 1990s isn’t a particularly interesting span of superhero games. It’s the time when Champions and, to a lesser extent, GURPS Supers, took up most of the oxygen in the room. Goodness knows I spent my TTRPG time in the ‘90s running two different Champions campaigns and loving the crunchiness that would become the HERO System.

But right at the end of the decade entered a game that I’ve owned for more than twenty years yet barely played: Aberrant. My curiosity in this game abounds. I picked it up at a time in my life when I had just moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, was deep, deeeeeeeep into Magic: the Gathering, and without a dedicated roleplaying group. By the time I was back into TTRPGs there were newer, fresher games to play. As a result, it’s one of those handful of games I own that I’ve played only in a couple of one-shots.

The more I’ve explored Aberrant as part of this blog, though, the more curious I’ve become (and also slightly poorer, since I bought the next two versions to compare them). Let’s see why…

A few weeks ago, I only had three books. Hm…

A Brief History of Aberrant

I couldn’t find a rich, narrative history of Aberrant like I did Golden Heroes, so here is the story as I understand it. Apologies in advance for anything I’m somehow misinterpreting or not seeing clearly.

White Wolf Publishing was a new and powerhouse European game publisher in the 1990s. White Wolf was most successful and famous with its World of Darkness games, but it also produced some fantasy TTRPGs and, right at the end of the decade, the trio of games now known as the Trinity Continuum.

The Trinity Continuum was ambitious because it was essentially three different games interconnected by the same basic mechanics and fundamental lore: Adventure! was an action-pulp, alternate-1920’s game. Aberrant was a near-future superhero game. And Æon was a far-future sci-fi game. All three shared, essentially, one universe with each taking place on a different part of that universe’s timeline. It’s a cool idea, and one that has followed each game through various editions. Although this post is focused on Aberrant, each time the game appeared it has been joined by Adventure!, Æon, and a variety of Trinity-spanning books.

This is speculation on my part, but in looking at White Wolf’s projects I suspect that they saw the success of their World of Darkness games and thought the future was in taking these properties into videogames. They merged with an Icelandic videogame company in 2006 and were acquired by another in 2015. Shortly after that, a scandal led to the dissolution of White Wolf as an independent entity.

Whatever the case, after three years and quite a few supplements, Trinity generally and Aberrant specifically in 2002 ceased publication. The games tried a d20 reboot in 2004 (because pretty much everyone at the time was seeing if they could make d20 work, sort of like 5E now), but they never found their footing. There is shockingly little content I could find on this d20 foray.

Then, for fifteen years, Aberrant faded into the background as a cool setting with a sometimes-unwieldy game behind it. Eventually Onyx Path Publishing, founded by a White Wolf alum, obtained the tabletop publishing rights to a lot of White Wolf’s old games, including Aberrant. After a recently successful Kickstarter, a new version of Aberrant was born using Onyx’s Storypath System. For these reasons, sometimes this new Aberrant is called “Second Edition” and sometimes “Storypath Edition.” Almost everyone calls the 1999 game “First Edition.” (And again, no one refers to the d20 version as anything, really.)

I was able to find this 2019 interview with the most recent version’s core authors, Steve Kenson and Ian Watson. There isn’t much history-telling to fill in the blanks above, but it’s a great introduction to the broad brushstrokes of the Trinity Continuum generally and a deep look at what excited the authors about this newest incarnation of Aberrant. Check it out!

It’s amazing to think that the original game only lasted three years. As far as I know, people are still playing Aberrant campaigns from First Edition, and it’s still some people’s favorite “crunchy” superhero game. And hey, it spawned a reboot twenty years later that is already seeing a ton of new supplements. What makes it so intriguing, you ask?

What’s Great About Aberrant

The single best thing about Aberrant is the one thing that has endured across three distinct game systems: the setting.

It occurs to me that superhero TTRPGs fundamentally need to decide how much to invest in worldbuilding a setting that explains – and potentially sets the boundaries for – superpowers. Most games just assume that it’s a comic book reality, in which radioactive insects, mystical artifacts, aliens, time travel, interdimensional demons, and giant robots just exist, and that people with amazing powers (often bestowed by some combination of the above) choose sides and battle with their fists and eye lasers.

Aberrant does deep worldbuilding. Indeed, the first HUNDRED pages of their 285-page core book in 1999 are dedicated to fleshing out how superpowers came to be and how “novas” – the people with these powers – exist within society. Those pages are also the only ones in color, full of rich, creative entries detailing news reports, science journals, celebrity interviews and, yes, comic book pages. The art throughout is consistently excellent and evocative of the “Iron Age” of comics, clearly a core inspiration for the tone and flavor of Aberrant. In the newest version, the setting takes up even more space (over half of the roughly 300 pages) and is still the centerpiece of drawing you into the game.

I won’t try and do a full review of the setting here. Suffice it to say, Aberrant takes place about ten years in the future after an international space station blew up and irradiated the globe, spawning the rise of novas. The authors have created a richly textured story as to how the world embraced these thousands of superpowered individuals, full of factions, internet celebrity, private companies, and varied government interventions. Playing Aberrant means becoming facile in terms like quantum flux (and quantum tech and, honestly, quantum everything), The Utopia Society, eufiber, the Æon Society, The Teragen, OpNet, the XWF, Mazarin-Rashoud Coils, and yes… Aberrants (both a slur term for novas and a formal organization).

Getting steeped in Aberrant’s setting is as daunting as learning the game’s mechanics, and in fact creates a sort of dual barrier to entry for new players. The First Edition book didn’t help matters by making the setting a series of wildly creative but unorganized snapshots, something very cool when you spend time with it but incredibly difficult to skim or reference later. The newest edition, thankfully, does a bit of indexing and exposition, but it’s still dense stuff.

But just like any deep worldbuilding, the density and depth of the setting are also the things that fans of the game are most passionate about. The world of Aberrant is evocative and full of intrigue. Reading those first hundred pages of the original book or the setting chapters of the new one, it’s impossible not to have your mind explode with campaign and character ideas, very much like modern Blades in the Dark or Symbaroum, but even more globally expansive.

Aberrant’s setting strives to take a realistic view of how the world would react to superpowers. It’s also, as I said, steeped in the Iron Age of comic books, full of the gray morality and grittiness of the 1990s. There is a very real sense that power corrupts. It’s even baked into the mechanics, as the thing most likely to take your character out of a campaign isn’t death – it’s the tainted transformation from modern god to monster. There are rules in the most recent edition for adapting Aberrant to different tones, but I’m a big believer in playing to a system or setting’s strengths. Aberrant is about the costs and perils of having superpowers as much or more as the glory. It’s a game about tough choices in a complicated world.

Here’s a terrific summary from a very good 2019 review of the original game:

“You are placed as central figures participating in a tragedy played out in slow motion. All Novas are doomed to be tainted by their powers in time, despite any good intentions. No matter how hard they try, they will lose that which makes them human. It’s inevitable. It’s a devastating bit of storytelling, and creates a setting rife with narrative rabbit holes to fall down. I haven’t found a superpowered RPG that comes close to this level of depth in its world building.”

For a detailed look at all things Aberrant, check out the OpCast podcast – a podcast completely dedicated to the Trinity Continuum. There is an episode specifically looking at the First Edition of the game, and a five-episode breakdown of the new Storypath book. Not surprisingly, these episodes slant heavily towards the setting.

Let’s Talk Mechanics (And Lots and Lots of Dice)

The strength and richness of Aberrant’s setting are, I believe, what has engendered so much nostalgic love for the game and the reason why it’s respawned into a new edition. It’s certainly the reason I kept cracking open the original 1999 rulebook over the years. But I’ve made it almost to the end of this write-up without mentioning the mechanics. So how does Aberrant actually play?

The 1999 edition was based on White Wolf’s Storyteller system, which uses d10s exclusively. At its core the system is elegant: You create a dice pool when trying something, and every 7 or better on a d10 is a success. The more successes, the better the result. Aberrant built on this core idea by adding “Mega” (or superpowered) attributes and abilities, which count two successes for a 7-9 and THREE for a 10, resulting in much splashier results.

Although elegant, the original Aberrant broke down in how big the dice pools became. It wasn’t uncommon to have twenty or even thirty d10s in a pool. Although rolling dice is fun, it’s apparently possible to have too much of a good thing. Add in that a 1 on a d10 is a “Botch” and those big dice pools start getting weird. Most longtime players of the First Edition shake their head at how out-of-control silly the game experience could be, especially as the power level increased. As one player commented in a Reddit forum: “The idea [of Aberrant] is fantastic, but you will need to houserule the crap out of it.”

Unlike Golden Heroes, character creation is time consuming and complicated, using a point-buy system that isn’t hard to grasp but does involve a lot of steps. It’s nowhere near as crunchy as Champions (which, as I said, was the dominant superhero game when the first edition of Aberrant came out), but it’s not easy either. The good news is that the system allows for pretty much any superpowered concept, but it’s also a process that a GM is going to have to supervise.

I mentioned earlier the inevitable decline from god to monster inherent in Aberrant’s system. This mechanically in the 1999 game is called “Taint” (which, yes, everyone made fun of then and still do today) – basically, the more Taint your character accrues the less human they become. I really like the idea of this system, but in practice it was a little clunky and surprisingly easy to avoid, a better concept than execution.

So along comes the Storypath system from Onyx Path Publishing, an updated version of White Wolf’s Storyteller system. It’s still d10 based, still with Mega attributes and a point-buy system to create any and all powers. Dice pools are less unwieldy. Taint becomes “Flux” and is more flexible (and less narratively inevitable). And the rulebook is definitely, definitely better organized and thus easier to navigate than the First Edition one. For a good overall review of the new Aberrant compared the original, check out this write-up.

Alas, though: I haven’t yet been able to play the newest edition of Aberrant. It remains on my “super interested to try it out” pile. So consider today’s post a nostalgic reminiscence of the 1999 game more than an analysis of the update. Still, my interest is piqued. Here’s hoping the power of my nostalgia and the strength of the overall Trinity setting is one that pulls you into checking it out. And if you do… drop me a line and let me know how it goes!

Next time I’ll jump forward another decade into the 2000s and pluck some fun-but-lesser-known game out of the pile. Until then, uh… may your Summer be Taint-free and all of your experiences Mega? I don’t know, man. I didn’t really have a closing in mind.

My Golden Heroes Brain

On May 29, 2022 By MagicJMSIn Superhero Gaming6 Comments

Starting in early adolescence and continuing through college, I mostly played Villains & Vigilantes and Champions (shhh… yes, I’m old), and someday soon I’m sure to have a lot to say about these two beauties. They are two of my all-time favorite games in any genre.

Amidst epic, mask-clad campaigns with friends, my broader exploration of superhero tabletop role-playing games took root. Of the “other” (meaning, not V&V or Champions) superhero games from my teens and twenties, my favorite is a little-known British game called Golden Heroes.

**A Quick Golden Heroes History Lesson**

The year is 1984. The original Apple Macintosh computer runs its first television commercial. Los Angeles hosts the Summer Olympics. Cyndi Lauper and Wham! are dominating the radio. And a skinny Jay Salazar, just starting middle school, convinces his grandmother during a regular visit to their local gaming store to buy him a new superhero game just hitting the shelves.

It’s amazing that Golden Heroes and I found each other that 1984 day, back at Wargames West in Albuquerque. The game didn’t stay in print long, particularly in the United States. I’m the only person I know across my many gaming groups who ever owned it. Heck, I probably bought one of the few copies in the state of New Mexico.

Why was its tenure so short? Years earlier and across the pond, authors Simon Burley and Peter Haines were university students and friends in England, inspired by Chris Claremont and John Byrne at the height of their powers. They self-published copies of their game and sent it to major publishers hoping for a deal. Check out how the original looked!

The original *Golden Heroes*, pre-Games Workshop

It was Games Workshop, a London-based publisher now famous for the Warhammer miniatures game, that showed interest. Although few people associate the two, Golden Heroes became GH’s first-ever homegrown game.

Unfortunately, Games Workshop lost access to the Marvel Comics license they had intended to use for Golden Heroes, a license that would instead get used for TSR’s famous FASERIP-system Marvel Superheroes game. Marvel Superheroes beat Golden Heroes’ release by weeks and soaked up consumers’ attention, even though many people – me included – thought Golden Heroes was the superior game. A year later, having published two adventures (Legacy of Eagles and Queen Victoria and The Holy Grail), a Supervisor’s (GM) kit, and some embarrassingly bad miniatures, Games Workshop quietly closed the doors on Golden Heroes.

For a lovely look into Simon Burley’s stories of the game’s founding and rules, check out the Grognard RPG Files podcast (Part 1 and Part 2). There are a ton of fun stories there, including Simon and Peter going to conventions with their new game, stirring interest by simulating famous battles from the comic books like the X-Men vs. Shi’ar Imperial Guard fight in Claremont/Byrne’s Dark Phoenix saga.

Despite its lack of commercial success, I love this game. My good fortune to discover Golden Heroes led to countless hours of joy for me during those painfully awkward middle school years. I’ve carried the books with me for forty years and counting even though I have yet to play it for more than a single session with friends.

What’s Great About Golden Heroes

Before I get into the game, I want to say something about the art. Art matters in any TTRPG, but for me it matters even more in a genre meant to simulate a visual medium like comic books. Golden Heroes showcases art from several different artists, and the quality varies. But the good far outweighs the bad, and I am nostalgically giddy about the stuff from Alan Davis, Mike Collins, Brett Ewins, and Jon Glentoran.

As I’ve spent the last week reading reviews of Golden Heroes (for two stand-outs, check out here and here), I’m relieved to see that what everyone loves most about the game is character creation. Those reviews make me feel significantly less self-conscious about the memories of me and my friend Ted rolling up character after character after character, then drawing them into our sketchbooks and going back for more. I sort-of-almost-remember actually playing the game, but not in any way that stands out. What I vividly remember is the joy of making characters… all told, probably more than a hundred of them over the years.

Character creation is fully random in Golden Heroes, which on the surface sounds like a nightmare. You roll on four Attributes: Ego, Strength, Dexterity, and Vigour (yay for British spelling!). You roll on how much damage your character can take and dish out. You of course roll up your superpowers. Finally, you roll on the character’s Background, or life before becoming a hero.

That series of random rolls can potentially lead to a mess, but there’s a safeguard built into the system. Golden Heroes gets around the goofiness of rolling up someone with incredible Strength, low Vigour, a Chameleon Ability, Replication, Teleport, and a Vehicle by making a player rationalize how these particular powers hang together. From the Players Book:

“This is where you must use your skill and imagination as a comic-book writer. You must concoct, possibly with the help of the [GM}, a plausible background for your character which explains how they got their Superpowers. You should attempt to explain as many of your character’s powers as possible, for which the [GM] deems are inconsistent are forfeited.”
p.9

You can trade off power rolls as you go for upgrades to already-rolled powers or for an Advantageous Background (like being a Bruce Wayne / Tony Stark billionaire). So while character creation is indeed random, it gives the player a ton of latitude to sculpt those initial rolls into something that’s fun to play.

Simply put, character creation in Golden Heroes is quick and easy, full of flavor and guided by narrative. At the end of this post I’ll roll one up to demonstrate.

Golden Heroes’ “let’s remember that we’re all comic-book writers” vibe permeates the rules of play as well. There’s a heavy focus on combat and set pieces, dividing combat actions into Frames. Different activities cost different amounts of Frames per round (very similar to the modern Pathfinder Second Edition, actually), giving the action a delightfully comic book feel.

Combat can get overly crunchy, unfortunately. For example, there are different rules to resolve a Parry versus a Dodge, and they use different dice (and to be honest, Parry rules are just bonkers). Tables rule everything, as was common in the 1980s. My guess is that, if I ever got into a regular campaign, I’d eventually simplify some of the mechanics to keep everything moving and as fluid as character creation. Even amidst the crunch, though, there are some cool ideas. In addition to Frames-as-actions, you have two hit-point pools: Hit-to-Coma (HTC) and Hit-to-Kill (HTK), and this distinction helps simulate the fact that comic books can toggle between characters beating each other to a pulp but never dying and life-or-death stakes.

Between combats, characters get a certain amount of downtime phases, which is also easy to picture making their way into comics books. And in a truly narrative RPG innovation, every campaign in Golden Heroes has a set of Campaign Ratings that are built collaboratively between players and Supervisor (the GM) that fluctuate based on the adventures the characters undertake and their role-playing. Campaign Ratings also get awfully crunchy, but it’s clear that despite the complexity the goal here is to have a dynamic world and story built off individual character backstories. Supervisors reward players for being heroes instead of murder hobos or powermongers, and these rewards help them achieve more success in the campaign world. It’s a cool rewards system that veers away from individual level-progression and, again, mimics what superheroes experience within comic books.

If you’re intrigued by the game but either don’t want to track down expensive, hard-to-find books or play outdated crunchy tables of the ‘80s, Simon Burley has gone on to update the system as Squadron UK. It’s easy enough to pick up on DriveThruRPG. Because I can’t help myself, I’ve ordered a copy and may dive into it in a future blog post.

Let’s Roll Some Dice!

As I’ve said, the glory of Golden Heroes is the character creation. In fact, there is an absolutely wonderful section in the Players Book that dedicates three full pages to showing the “now you interpret your powers” system in action – using one set of powers rolls to flesh out eight (!) in-depth character ideas. Let’s walk through the steps and see what happens.

For the four core attributes, it’s old school D&D style: Roll 3d6 and that’s your score. Alright [rattles dice in hand]. Here we go.

Ego is a measure of my character’s willpower. I roll 5,4,3: 12.

Strength is, um… how strong my character is. I roll, 3,5,1: 9.

Dexterity measures manual dexterity rather than physical agility. I roll 5,4,3 again: 12.

Vigour (ha!) is a measure of how fit and healthy my character is. I roll 6,2,2: 10.

Wow. My character is pretty much the definition of average.

Hits to Coma (HTC) is the amount of damage my character can take before passing out. I roll 1d6 for each point of Vigour, or 10d6. Fun! I roll 1,1,2,3,4,1,5,2,6,5: 30. Blech. My character will be Staggered at 1/5 of my HTC, or 6, and will be Stunned at 1/10, or 3.

Hits to Kill (HTK) is the amount of damage my character can take before dying. 10d6 again yields 6,6,4,1,3,2,3,6,3,1: 34. My character will be Hospitalized at 3 HTK.

Movement is how far my character can move in a Frame, measured in metres (ha!). The calculation here is (Strength + Dexterity + Vigour) / 6. My character’s movement is 5.

Now comes the fun part.

I get a number of power rolls equal to 2d6 halved + 4 (why not 1d6+4? I don’t know, man. I suppose the idea is that rounding up gives you slightly more rolls on average). Since I’m rolling mediocre today, of course I roll 7, rounded up is EIGHT power roles. Wheeee!

Each Power Roll can be used to either:

Determine an Advantageous Background
Roll on the Superpower Generation table
Upgrade a Superpower already rolled
Enhance Superpowers and skills (used for campaigns)

Roll 1-2: 55 = Psi Powers, which the table tells me immediately costs an additional power roll. Psi Powers are COOL and makes a ton of sense for someone with decidedly average stats.

Roll 3: 56 = Psi Powers! This automatically bumps me from Grade 1 Psi Powers to Grade 2, something I would have probably done anyway. Neat.

There’s a subsystem in Psi Powers to determine my powers. I get 15 + 1d10 Psi Points and I roll a 9. 24 Psi Points, which is a resource pool for using my psychic powers. What psychic powers? Let’s roll four d10s and find out:

Psi roll 1: 6. Telekinesis. This is my Specialty Power (meaning it costs less Psi Points to use than the others).
Psi roll 2: 4. Precognition
Psi roll 3: 5. Psi Blast
Psi roll 4: 8. Telepathy

Roll 4: 02 = Agility, which as I said is different from Dexterity. This means my character can leap 4 metres in a Frame, swing at 2-4 times my Movement, gain a bonus to dodge, and can do extra damage by swinging or leaping into combat.

Roll 5: 33 = Health. Another table here, which I roll 5 on a d6: Toxin Immunity. My character will be immune to poison.

Roll 6: 20 = Energy Attack. Another table, which I roll 6 on a d10: Vibration. My character can emit destructive vibrations.

Roll 7: 24 = Flight, which is what it says it is and doesn’t require another roll.

Roll 8 is my Advantageous Background roll (which the rules allow me to pick, but I’m embracing full randomness): Previous Training, which allows me to add 2 to any Attribute or 1 to two Attributes and should represent some sort of elite training.

My character’s Superpower rolls:

Psi Powers (Grade 2 – Telekinesis, Precognition, Psi Blast, Telepathy)
Agility
Health (Toxin Immunity)
Energy Attack (Vibration)
Flight
Background: Previous Training

Now comes the time to rationalize and make sense of these rolls. As the Players Guide says, I need to come up with an origin story and narrative that ties everything I’ve rolled together, forfeiting what doesn’t make sense.

Can I get eight distinct concepts out of this list? Gauntlet thrown!

Concept 1: Hand of Gaia

Maasa Abebe is a young, talented archeologist (Previous Training, +2 Ego). At a dig she discovers the literal heart of the world, an artifact linked to the primordial goddess Gaia. Thereafter she is a living avatar of the goddess, able to tap into the ancient soul of the Earth itself to move objects, read others’ thoughts, and even unleash localized earthquakes. Her connection to her goddess makes her immune to natural toxins and preternaturally light on her feet.

I can’t really make Flight makes sense here but kept all others.

Concept 2: Psion

Cassidy O’Toole is in the prime of her life and a doctoral student of cognitive psychology (Previous Training, +2 Ego) when she discovers her terminal illness. Her wealthy parents sign her up for an experimental set of treatments to find a cure. The bad news is that the treatment facility is destroyed during a super-powered battle, with Cassidy the only survivor. The good news is that the chemicals and supervillain powers combine to cure Cassidy and leave her with superior health and psychic powers. She is adopted by the superhero group responsible, becoming an invaluable member.

I don’t really see a room for Energy Attack here (Flight, I’m saying, is a result of Telekinesis on herself).

Concept 3: Quake

Adam Johnson is a dedicated, albeit mediocre gymnast (Previous Training, +1 Strength, +1 Vigour, also accounts for Agility) and geology student at UC Berkeley. During a particularly humiliating competition, Adam’s mutant powers manifest and his rage causes an earthquake to level the gymnasium. Horrified, he retreats from school and vows to understand these new abilities before returning to society. He is quickly found by a group of mutants who train him in his vibration-themed powers (including flight and a metabolism so high it’s resistant to toxins) and give him purpose.

In this version, I’m dropping the highly valuable Psi Powers and would likely request that the Supervisor allow me to upgrade Energy Attack to at least Grade 2 to compensate.

Concept 4: Nomad

No’madd is the sole survivor of an alien spacecraft that has crashed on Earth. In a desperate gambit to save their species from a dying planet, No’madd’s people rigorously trained countless explorers (Previous Training, +2 Ego) and sent them to the far reaches of the galaxy. Now stranded here and utterly alone, No’madd has vowed to ingratiate themself to the local populace and improve life on Earth as much as possible, always hoping more of their people will find their way here.

Aliens always feel a little like cheating in Golden Heroes because I can basically keep everything and say it’s innate. I’d probably ask the Supervisor to switch from Vibration on my Energy Attack to Cosmic.

Concept 5: Prana

Sunita Singh was born and raised in a monastic order (Previous Training, +2 Ego) where she quickly became a prodigy of the mindfulness and inward-centered teachings. At fifteen years old, she had surpassed all masters of the order. At twenty, she went into a meditation so deep that she did not eat or sleep for years. At twenty-five, finally, she awakens with a glowing third eye on her forehead and manifests a broad array of psychic abilities. She has perfect control of her body, full of grace and immune to toxins. Sunita, without a word, flies up and away from the monastery, full of intent to change the world.

I’m keeping everything here except the Energy Attack.

Concept 6: Noir

Christopher Knight was a hardboiled detective (Previous Training, +2 Ego) in Chicago in the 1920s, killed during a case investigating a crime boss. Now he has reappeared, spectral but solid enough to interact with the world. Why now? What is he here to do? Chris doesn’t know, but he picks up the trail of that cold case, intent on finding out.

The Psi Powers, Flight, and Health are all easy enough to fold into “dead guy powers,” and the Agility is decently noir-style pulp detective. I’d work with the Supervisor to say that his Energy Attack is his spectral pistol, using Vibration as an energy type but saying it’s basically ghost bullets.

Concept 7: ATHENA-5.5

Nine years after Dr. Dara Melamed’s death, the ATHENA prototype artificial intelligence she created finishes building itself a physical shell (stretching here, but I’m saying self-educating itself for years has led to Previous Training, +2 Ego). The smooth, silver globe rises from Dr. Melamed’s secret laboratory and drifts out into the city. (It’s the story of Ultron from Marvel Comics, but a creation that strives for making the world better through collaboration with its fellow populace.)

I don’t think it makes sense to keep Agility, since a floating globe won’t really be leaping or swinging anywhere. Everything else makes sense, though I would talk to the Supervisor about making the Energy Attack Sonic or Laser instead of Vibration, which is more what I picture.

Concept 8: Medusa

Deep-sea diver (Previous Training, +2 Vigour) Sophie Kim discovers a new, bizarre species of jellyfish, an amazing and groundbreaking find. Unfortunately, it stings her and sends her into a coma for nearly two years, and the jellyfish is never seen again. When she awakes in a government science facility, Sophie’s body has turned translucent like a jellyfish, her hair a mass of tentacles and her brain pulses with electricity within her iridescent skull. She has amazing psychic powers, immunity to toxins, and she can swim at astounding speeds. Government officials give her the codename Medusae (which the media mistakenly changes to “Medusa,” a name that sticks) and send her out on aquatic missions.

No Energy Attack here, and I’d say the Agility and Flight are water-based. She can’t technically breathe underwater, so I’d either ask for a device to allow her to do so or to provide a Grade 2 on Health from the Supervisor to compensate for the self-imposed limitations on my powers.

There we go! Eight distinct thumbnail concepts from the same random rolls, all of which I can see being a fun foundation for a series of adventures. So yes, fully random rolls can be a mess. But there’s enough freedom in character creation that somehow solid characters still emerge. It’s fair to say that very few of these ideas would manifest in quite the same ways if I was using a point-buy system and starting with my own concept. That’s the joy of Golden Heroes character creation, and why it’s so addictive.

Holy cow this post became a beast. I’ll set my eyes on another game from my master list of games and see where the next post takes me.

In the meantime, may your Vigour be high and your Movement take you many metres!

A New, Heroic Adventure

On May 20, 2022May 20, 2022 By MagicJMSIn Superhero Gaming1 Comment

For the past couple of years, my posts here have primarily been scenes I’ve written for my longstanding Pathfinder campaign. Because of some dynamics within the gaming group, we’re taking an extended break. Being a Game Master of a deep and complex story has been soaking up my creative energy for almost three years now, and I suddenly find myself with time and space for something new. I’ve learned over the years that a) I only have room in my brain for one creative project at a time, and b) there must always be a project.

What to do with this fresh, blank canvas? Normally I would turn to superhero fiction, either character sketches in preparation for something ambitious or short, contained stories. But I’ve been loving this tabletop role-playing renaissance in my life, and I’m not ready to fully replace my TTRPG creative space with something entirely non-TTRPG related. The switch from traditional fantasy to superheroes is an easy one, but my grip on my dice bag is white-knuckled and fierce.

Alrighty then. It’s time to turn this blog into a blog.

Superhero Tabletop Role-Playing Games

For as long as I’ve played fantasy TTRPGs – which for me started in middle school back in the 1980s – I’ve played superhero TTRPGs. I’m a lifelong comic book reader, and the opportunity to live those stories was and continues to be a siren’s call.

The first superhero tabletop game, Superhero 2044, followed the more popular Dungeons & Dragons by a mere three years (1977 vs 1974). Since then, for forty-five friggin’ years and counting, a handful of superhero games have continued to regularly pepper the broader role-playing game landscape, nowhere close in popularity but ever-present.

The lack of popularity, by the way, confuses me. Even in our modern age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe dominating cinema and television, superhero games take a backseat to elves and dragons, steampunk industrial fantasy, horror, and futuristic sci-fi. I mean, look at the top graphic from this 2021 analysis, where a superhero game doesn’t even crack the top fourteen Google searches (unless you count small slivers of the Powered By The Apocalypse or Blades in the Dark systems). That same article says that the superhero genre makes up a measly 6% of the broader TTRPG market.

Maybe it’s that simulating superhero action – where traditionally anything can and does happen, full of characters with wildly different power levels – is more difficult than other fantasy genres. Maybe it’s that people want to watch adults dress in spandex, imagine it, but ultimately get embarrassed actively pretending it with friends. I don’t know. For now, the important point here is that, okay, these games aren’t incredibly popular with most people.

To me, though, they’re THE BEST.

Indeed, I have a full cabinet full of superhero TTRPGs I’ve collected over the years. Many I’ve played with friends over the decades, but just as many I’ve only made some characters and wished that I had a gaming group eager to tell superhero stories with me instead of sword-and-sorcery ones. It’s fair to say at this point that I’ll probably never play all the comic book-inspired games that I own.

At some point in the last year, the collector in me started getting curious as to what percentage of the entire superhero TTRPG market I knew, and if there were any new or major publications I’d missed over the decades.

(This sort of side quest, the need to generate a list or framework, is common for me. Heck, two years ago I started compiling a “Favorite 300 Albums” spreadsheet and hope to finish it before Christmas. My brain is a demanding, dissatisfied master.)

The result of my curiosity is this list. Or perhaps I should say THE LIST. It is beautiful and daunting and full of masks… every superhero role-playing game ever published. I’m not saying it’s perfectly comprehensive because every time I dig through the internet, I miraculously find little gems I never knew existed. But I am saying that this list is the most complete list of superhero TTRPGs around.

Basking in Superheroic Glory: A Blog Pivot

Now that I have this wonderous, sparkling list, what do I do with it?!? On its own, it’s cool but not particularly useful. At one point I fantasized about launching a podcast where I walked through each game, systematically looking at what made it special or fun and taking it for a test spin. But the technical start-up costs of a podcast are daunting and not something I’m particularly excited to take on right now.

But you know what I am excited to do right now? Write, baby.

Welcome to my new creative project. I’m going to take some time to explore these superhero role-playing games, one by one. I’m not going to march in order down the list, because wow does that sound like grappling with a lot of archaic, bad games early on. Instead, my intention is to cherry-pick games I either love or that intrigue me, and just generally see where this series goes. Maybe I’ll only write about a small handful of games and feel ready to jump into more fiction writing. Or maybe this list will be satisfying enough to keep going. I’m excited to find out.

We’ll begin next time with a low-key favorite game of mine from high school, often overlooked but utterly delightful. Here’s a hint: I probably should have said “low-key favourite game.”

Stay tuned!

i. Ironside

On November 5, 2018July 15, 2024 By MagicJMSIn Alpha Squad, Superhero FictionLeave a comment

The room was one-way glass on four sides, two facing the Hollywood studio’s bustling office and the other two facing the hazy, morning urban sprawl of Los Angeles. In this mirrored box, high above the City of Angels, three laughably diverse celebrities sought to change the world.

“Alright, let’s get started,” Christina Ng said. She was often described behind her back as the Corporate China Doll, a petite, seemingly ageless CEO of one of the world’s most successful companies. Christina barely capped five feet tall even in her heels, yet she was clearly the leader here.

“We’ve got video of their auditions if we need it, plus interview transcripts from our conversations with them, photos, and bios in those packets in front of you all. Our goal today is to cut our group in half, from sixteen candidates down to eight. It’s going to be a long day, and we’ll take breaks as we need them. First up is John Bliss from upstate New York, whose Guardian name is Ironside.”

“He’s too fucking nice,” Hudson barked. “This is an extermination service, not a nursery. I need killers.” Nearly seven feet tall, Hudson was built like a comic-book version of a pro-wrestling action figure. An ergonomic office chair strained under his muscular bulk. His simple tank-top displayed not only his physique but his oily jet-black skin, patterned with yellow like a salamander. Hudson was the first videotaped Guardian, and thus one of the most famous and iconic figures in the world, a true American hero. He was also an asshole, and Christina immediately found herself annoyed.

Christina sighed. “You weren’t a killer when you transformed. You were an electrician. Guardians are rarely killers when they change.”

“Alright, fair,” Hudson said reluctantly. “But I wasn’t no choir boy even before I transformed. This guy is.”

“Fair,” Christina nodded. If they were going to spend the entire day debating candidates, it wouldn’t do to fight with Hudson in the first minutes. “Remember that this is a brand play for AlphaTech as much as it is an extermination service, as you put it. You need people who can fight. I need people I can market.”

“He’s definitely marketable,” Andromeda Stacey, twice People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Person in the World, purred.

Andromeda looked fake she was so perfect, even here where all the cameras were off. Her Disney-large eyes, pouting lips, and long neck were as unbelievable in person as the lithe, toned curves beneath her halter top. Blonde hair piled on the supermodel’s head except for a couple of artfully curling wisps brushing each high cheekbone. Whereas Christina sat perfectly erect, Andromeda draped across her chair like a swathe of silk. Christina was a heterosexual woman well into her forties and even she found Andromeda distracting.

“He’s like a 1950’s poster,” the model continued. “Beefy, blonde, handsome, and wholesome. And the kids will think his powers are cool.”

* * * * *

“Alright, John,” the skinny cameraman said, “We’re ready when you are. We’re rolling.”

John Bliss nodded and took a deep breath. The southern California sun beat down mercilessly.

John grew up in White Harbor, a manufacturing town in upstate New York, and except for four years in the Army he hadn’t traveled much elsewhere. When John had auditioned for Alpha Squad, the world’s first privately-funded team of Guardians, with its big Hollywood studio crew and high-tech corporate backing, he’d assumed everything would be slick. Like a sci-fi show.

So far, it felt sort of the same as New York.

He’d flown coach to Los Angeles. The hotel right near the beach was pretty nice, he guessed, but the room was awfully small. And here he was, miles and miles from Hollywood in some no-name California town, in a big, sprawling junkyard for his first and maybe only audition. Nothing so far had matched his fantasies about Alpha Squad. John was not an entitled guy, but he found himself a bit disappointed by something he’d hyped up in his mind so much.

Still, best thing was to do his best, like his Mom would tell him. The instructions from the film crew were simple as day:

Destroy the truck.

It was a big truck, a Ford F150, sitting about fifty yards away. New.

Everything about the task seemed absurd. There were literally junk cars piled up around him that people had discarded, but here was a perfectly good truck that his Daddy would have loved to drive, and that was the thing John had to destroy. It wasn’t even moving, just sitting there unsuspecting and innocent. John didn’t see how beating up on a defenseless truck was going to tell the judges whether he could or couldn’t defeat a Demon. But instructions were instructions. The Army’s drills didn’t always make sense either. He’d do his best and make his parents proud.

John turned away from the truck and jogged the other way, about another thirty yards further from that doomed, new truck. It was as much distance as he could get in the junkyard with a clear path between him and his target. A pile of old appliances loomed a couple feet from his back like a scrapyard totem pole as he turned and faced the truck again.

He blew out another breath and rocked his neck back from side to side. This is why he came all the way across the country. Time to do his best.

Time to be a Guardian.

He started running. With a thought, wrought-iron metal plates appeared from seemingly nowhere to wrap around John’s body. The entire process took less than a one-Mississippi, and it looked and sounded a lot like something from a Transformers movie. Slabs of metal several inches thick slapped around him in a shifting mosaic, encasing him in armor as he ran. The metal was black, pitted and industrial, like pieces of an unpainted locomotive. Pistons ran along his arms and legs, connecting at running gears on his elbows and knees. A large blast pipe started at his waist and wrapped to jut from behind one shoulder, billowing steam as he moved.

When it was done, John Bliss had become considerably taller and wider, encased in full armor that appeared to be a cross between a medieval knight and an ancient train. His head was an iron cylinder with one Cyclopean eye that glowed white even in the bright sun, an iron, wedge-like grill in front.

CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK

His armored feet bit into the arid dirt and weeds as he ran, leaving churned craters behind. Faster and faster. Pistons worked. Steam puffed from the blast pipe and occasionally one of his joints. John, now fully the Guardian his town had dubbed “Ironside,” barreled forward.

His Daddy had clocked him at well over a hundred miles an hour when he got going, as long as he was moving in roughly a straight line. John figured he must have been close to that speed when he collided with two-and-a-half tons of Ford.

The sound was deafening, and for a moment all John could see was twisted metal everywhere. Blind and deaf, he instinctively threw both hands out wide, ripping the mighty vehicle in two and sending both halves spinning away.

As the violent noises of the collision died away, John looked around him with his one, shining eye. Debris from the Ford truck was everywhere… behind him, in front, and especially to each side. He hadn’t realized it, but he must have carried the truck dozens of feet before ripping it in two. That beautiful new truck was now unrecognizable junk for the junkyard.

“Is that it?” John asked. In his Ironside form, his voice was much louder, deeper, and echoed as if he were standing at the bottom of a well. “Am I done?”

The camera crew gaped at him from thirty feet away.

“That was awesome,” John heard one of them say.

Meet the Judges: Andromeda Stacey

On October 2, 2018July 15, 2024 By MagicJMSIn Alpha Squad, Superhero FictionLeave a comment

Andromeda Stacey, twice People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Person in the World, evaluated her face in the mirror.

“You are stunning,” said the man to her right.

Andromeda almost pointed out the many flaws. For starters, those three damned freckles, too-large pores on her nose, the shadows under both eyes, how one nostril was slightly larger than the other, and the faint remnants of a pimple near her lower lip. But she never said such things out loud.

Instead, she quirked one corner of her mouth into a smile and said simply, “Thank you, Peter.”

Peter Moore had aged well, thanks in large part to unending wealth and power as a studio executive producer. He possessed a strong jaw and clear green eyes, the kind of looks that melted young Hollywood aspirants into spread-legged piles of drool. Peter could easily have been a rugged forty years old or a fit sixty. Only the deep smile lines around his eyes revealed more sixty than forty. His shaved head glowed in the bright lights surrounding the mirror.

“Listen,” he said in his deep baritone, straightening his tie in the reflection, “I know you’ve caught a lot of flak for being part of this show, but I hope it’s falling on deaf ears. You’re the perfect third judge for Alpha Squad. The audience is going to tune in because of you.”

The other person in the room, her make-up artist Barbie, was applying concealer below Andromeda’s eyes. The shadows there disappeared as she brushed out the concealer with practiced, quick strokes. Soon the other obvious flaws would be obscured. Goodbye until tonight, freckles.

“Thank you, Peter,” she said, almost without moving.

“Don’t move,” Barbie scolded.

“Good luck today,” Peter said, smiling his brightest at her in the mirror and winking. “Knock ‘em dead, and don’t take any shit from either of them, you hear?”

Andromeda quirked her lip again. After a second or so, the smile faded.

“Right then. See you on set, gorgeous.” He turned and walked out of her dressing room, the door closing behind.

“Asshole,” muttered Barbie.

“Peter? He’s not so bad.”

“Don’t move. If you say so. All he did for five minutes was talk about your looks and then ended by putting you in your place. You’re better than him.”

Andromeda put her hand up, signaling Barbie to stop with the brush.

“Put me in my place?” she asked, quirking an eyebrow.

Barbie was built like a twelve-year-old boy, all skinny limbs and sharp angles. Her pink hair was short and spiked out from her head artfully. Today she wore a simple tank top, showing off tattoos that covered every inch of skin below her chin. The most dramatic ink was the Asian-looking tiger crawling from shoulder to elbow, but Barbie’s body was a mosaic of fantastical animals, obscure symbols, and cartoon characters.

“I shouldn’t have said anything. Sorry,” Barbie said, not sounding sorry in the least.

“No, please. What did you mean?”

“It’s just…” Barbie sighed loudly. “I mean, ‘third judge’? Like the other two are obvious and you’re the tag-along? And that follows a reminder that some people don’t even want you on the show. It just felt like tearing you down more than building you up, is all. Saying people will tune in because of you is just telling you that you’re hot, like you’re only there as eye candy. This sexist industry gets to me sometimes is all.”

Andromeda settled back into the chair, signaling it was time to resume. Barbie started expertly applying highlighter along the top of her cheekbones in silence.

In a couple of minutes, Andromeda spoke. “I don’t even hear those things anymore, to be honest. And let’s not kid ourselves. I’m only on this show as eye candy.”

Barbie snorted. “No. You’re not.”

“How so?”

“If you were here as eye candy, you’d be the host. You’re a judge. You’re here for your opinions.”

“And as eye candy.”

“Okay, sure. But it’s your words that are going to shape this show, not the luscious lips saying them. I get really tired of people treating you like you don’t have a brain, and I’ve been working with you long enough to know you do too. Your looks get you in the door, but you are smarter than anyone at the studio and both of those judges combined.”

“Hm,” Andromeda said noncommittally.

Several minutes later, Barbie was using a fluffy blending brush across her eyelids when Andromeda spoke again.

“It’s ironic,” she said, “that the person hired to enhance my looks is saying this.”

She heard Barbie snort again. “The fact that you see that irony only proves my point.”

Nearly an hour later, both women stared in the mirror, evaluating her face critically. Clay, her hair stylist, had artfully piled Andromeda’s blond hair atop her head, with spiral locks curling down each side to frame her face. That face was now smooth, perfectly symmetrical, and, Andromeda silently admitted to herself, flawless. Cheeks shone. Lips naturally pouted. Her eyes looked back from the mirror large and sensual. Purple eyeshadow glittered, ready to match the miniskirt dress that hung behind her. She had become an airbrushed photograph come to life.

“I think we’ve got it,” Barbie said.

“Yes,” Andromeda said, “Me too. The Trojan Horse is built.”

Barbie blinked, startled. Then her face broke into a huge smile.

“God yes. That’s what I’m talking about. Go get ‘em.”

Meet the Judges: Hudson

On September 25, 2018July 15, 2024 By MagicJMSIn Alpha Squad, Superhero FictionLeave a comment

The door to the Blue Cat bar crashed open, a panting, skinny white kid silhouetted in the door frame. He wore hipster slacks, a button-up shirt with a too-big collar, and those thick-rimmed glasses that made nerds seem cool. In a glance, Hudson decided the guy was a complete waste of a life. He turned his back on the kid and returned to his Dos Equis.

A few seconds later, the kid was breathing heavily behind him. Hudson frowned.

“Mr. Hudson, sir?”

Dammit. Fanboy.

He sighed and looked at Sylvette, the bartender. She was a pretty thirty-something black girl with a halter top and a sweet afro. Hudson liked Sylvette, which is why he always came back to the Blue Cat whenever he was in LA. She saw his expression and winked, leaning back against the counter to watch the show.

Slowly. Dramatically. Hudson slid off the barstool. Stood up. Turned around.

The kid stepped back involuntarily, just like Hudson intended.

Hudson was about six-and-a-half feet tall. Right now he was wearing a white tank-top, fully displaying his physique. Oh, and his oily jet-black skin, patterned with yellow like a salamander. Seeing Hudson on TV and in person were different experiences, he’d found. He looked down on the kid with pupil-less, white eyes. The punk hipster swallowed audibly.

“Something I can do for you, man?” Hudson rumbled.

“Ah. It’s just, well…” he stammered.

“Yeah? I’m sort of busy here, as you can see. So get to it.”

“Mr. Hudson, sir…”

Hudson grunted. “Shit, man. That’s not my name.”

The kid faltered. “Um, what?”

“My name is Deshawn Andrews, so you can call me Mr. Andrews. Or you can call me Hudson. My fucking last name sure as fuck isn’t Hudson, though. That’s my Guardian name.”

“Oh. Right. Okay.” He was sweating and seemed to gather himself. “Mr. Andrews, sir. I’m from the studio.”

Hudson crossed his massive arms over his massive chest.

“And?”

The kid almost wet himself. It took him a couple of tries to find his voice. “And you’re supposed to be on set now, sir.”

Hudson paused, frowning. He turned back to the bartender.

“Sylvette? What day is it?”

She smiled a bright white smile, framed by those luscious chocolate lips. She had a big gap between her two front teeth. Damn fine woman.

“It’s Monday, honey.”

Hudson grunted, “Damn.” He turned back to the kid, who took another step back.

“When were we supposed to start?”

“Um,” the kid checked his phone. “It’s eleven AM, so we don’t start shooting for a couple of hours yet. But you were due at nine for make-up, wardrobe, and prep.”

“Shit, man. A couple of hours?” Hudson eased his bulk back onto the barstool and turned back around. He took a long swallow of his beer.

It took the kid almost a full minute. Hudson didn’t move. Sylvette didn’t either, though her smile became bigger the longer the silence stretched on. Finally, the kid cleared his throat.

“Mr. Hud– Mr. Andrews, sir?”

Hudson took another swallow. Sylvette shook her head, still smiling.

“Mr. Andrews?”

“What, man?” He still didn’t move. The kid appeared in his peripheral vision.

“Um, we have to go, sir. I’ve got a car outside.”

“Nah.”

“Um, what?”

“You deaf? I said no. I’m enjoying a beer with this fine woman in a mercifully empty bar. Go away, kid. I’ll be there before they start shooting.”

“But… The studio wants you there for…”

“I don’t need that other shit. They get me when I get there. Thanks for letting me know.”

“But…”

“Fuck off.”

More silence. Sylvette couldn’t help it and bust up laughing. She had a sexy laugh, that Sylvette. Hudson thought he would ask her out one of these days.

“I’m, um, I’m going to call the studio,” the kid said uncertainly. “I really think they want you there now.”

“Cool. Do that. Outside.”

Another few seconds of awkward silence, then footsteps and the Blue Cat’s door opened and closed.

“You really filming something today?” Sylvette asked, cocking her head to the side. Big hoop earrings flopped around when she did that, which Hudson thought was sexy.

“Yeah. Apparently.”

“Commercial?”

“Nah. Television show called Alpha Squad.”

Sylvette’s whole face lit up like fireworks. “Oh! I heard about that! That’s the reality show for a new Guardians group! You going to be in it?”

Hudson shrugged. “I’m one of the judges. Then they want me to lead the group after the show, I guess.”

“That’s so sweet! That show’s going to be epic.”

“Hope so.”

“So why you giving that studio guy such a hard time, then?”

“Punk kid annoys me. I’m not taking orders from him. Besides,” he opened his arms out wide and smiled. “Like I said, I’m enjoying a drink with a fine woman. Nothing should interrupt that.”

Sylvette laughed and shook her head. Those hoop earrings jangled around.

“You ever going to ask me out, honey? I’d say yes.”

Hudson kept smiling. “Someday.”

The door opened again, letting in daylight for a second before shutting. The kid all but ran over to his side again. He was holding his phone out like passing an Olympic torch.

“They want you there now, sir. Mr. Moore wants to talk to you. He’s on the phone. Here,” the kid waved the phone around. He looked terrified and sweaty. Good.

Hudson sighed and took the phone in his enormous hand.

“Hey Peter,” Hudson said. “Yeah? Yeah.” Pause. “Okay. I know, I know. I lost track of time, man.” Pause. “No, it’s cool. I’ll come over now.” Pause. “Annoys the fuck out of me, actually. Where’d you get him from?” Hudson listened, then laughed. “Okay, yeah. I won’t kill him until after I get there. Thanks, man.”

Hudson tossed the phone back to the kid. He fumbled it and it clattered to the floor. Fucking useless.

“Sylvette, my dear, my chariot awaits. Thanks for opening up for me.”

“Anytime, honey.”

He reached into his back pocket for his money clip, unrolled a Benjamin and laid it on the table.

“Don’t forget what I said,” Sylvette said, taking the bill and smiling her fine, gap-toothed smile.

“Someday,” he said.

“Well, you got my number.”

“I do. Alright,” Hudson turned to the kid, who had recovered his phone and was looking appropriately uncomfortable. Hudson was going to make this ride hell for the punk, just to fuck with him. “Let’s go then.”

“Okay, great. Great! My name is–”

“Don’t care.”

He could still hear Sylvette’s sexy laugh as they left the Blue Cat behind.

Meet the Judges: Christina Ng

On September 20, 2018July 15, 2024 By MagicJMSIn Alpha Squad, Superhero Fiction1 Comment

Christina Ng sat in her expensive office chair, staring at a framed photo on her desk. A clock over the closed door ticked seconds ominously in the otherwise silent room.

It was a sizable office, but spartan. Various marketing and business bestsellers lined a modest bookcase mounted on one wall. On the opposite wall hung a framed document–AlphaTech’s first approved letter of funding as a new start-up in Silicon Valley. A tasteful white orchid, to match a tasteful white throw rug. A few modern chairs in which to sit, also white. Occasionally, someone at AlphaTech would ask her about adding some character to her office, and Christina would point out the wall of windows overlooking the San Francisco Bay Bridge behind her. To her, the view was the only aesthetic needed.

The photo showed a younger Christina at her MBA graduation from Stanford University. In it, she wore a red robe and cap, hugging a classmate with eyes shut and smile wide. She could remember that day so well, perhaps the happiest day of her life. Graduating was an accomplishment, but even more a beginning. The day after graduation, Christina began sketching out the business plan that would lead to AlphaTech’s framed funding letter. Staring at the photo brought Christina peace, and hope in troubled times.

Someone knocked on the door twice and then opened it a foot. Samantha Winters, Christina’s executive assistant, stuck her head into the room. She was a young, plump, pale, blotchy, and generally unattractive woman with glasses, and she always had a perpetually startled look on her face. Wicked smart and capable, but easy to underestimate just looking at her.

“Christina?”

Christina blinked from her reverie and looked at Samantha. “Hm?”

“Five-minute warning. Then they’ll escort us to the airport. I’ve got your bags ready.”

“Okay, thanks Sam.”

“Do you need anything?”

“No, thank you.”

Samantha stepped more fully into the room. She was wearing jeans and an unflattering floral top. “You okay?” she asked.

Christina blinked again and smiled with lightly-freckled cheeks. The freckles were the only blemish on her China-doll face.

“I guess. Just sort of thinking about beginnings. It’s a big day, right?”

“Yep. And a fun one. It’s going to be great. Let’s see how you look.”

Christina dutifully stood up and stepped around her desk. White blouse, gray business blazer and matching pencil skirt. She was a small woman–just barely topping five feet tall in her stiletto heels, and petite in every way. Her straight black hair was pulled back in a ponytail and fell to the middle of her back. She smoothed her skirt unnecessarily as her assistant looked her up and down.

Samantha cocked her head. “Beautiful and polished, as always. But…”

“But?” Christina quirked an eyebrow.

“For a Board meeting? Perfect. For today, though, I think the people at the studio are going to spruce you up a bit.”

“Spruce me up? What needs sprucing?”

“Just some color, maybe. A dramatic hat, or a scarf. Something for the audience to talk about.”

Christina smirked. “I’m not exactly aiming for the audience talking about me.”

Her assistant crossed meaty arms and smiled. “Well, maybe I’m wrong.”

“You are, frustratingly, rarely wrong, Ms. Winters.”

A male voice shouted from behind Samantha. “Christina!”

Samantha flicked Christina a look that said, “Want me to get rid of him?” and Christina flicked back a quick shake of her head. It was one of those near-telepathic interchanges both women valued about their partnership.

“And here’s Gareth!” Samantha said, falsely beaming. She stepped aside.

Gareth Graham was a medium-height, skinny Englishmen with perpetually unkempt-yet-stylish hair. He wore a navy-blue suit and a salmon tie, loosened to also look unkempt yet stylish.

“There you are! I’m glad I caught you. Listen, before you kick off this ridiculous enterprise I wanted to try one more time to tell you what a bloody disaster it’s going to be.”

Gareth always had a wild, insistent energy to him. Christina, meanwhile, exuded an aura of serene calm. Their two styles often clashed in AlphaTech’s boardroom. Christina crossed her hands behind her and met Gareth’s panting figure with a half-smile. A moment of silence passed.

Gareth straightened, and exhaled loudly.

“That is to say,” he said less emphatically, “I’d like a word, if you please.”

Behind him, Samantha smiled. “I’ll leave you, then. The studio folks will be here any minute so make it quick.”

“Thanks Samantha,” Christina said as the door closed. Christina backed up a bit and sat lightly on the edge of her desk, gripping the edge with her hands. “Now then, Gareth, we’ve been through this, and the Board agrees with me. You know that.”

Gareth grimaced. “I know. Of course I know. I’m appealing to you to step back and see the wider picture here, Christina. Everything is coming up roses for AlphaTech, and there’s no need to take away that momentum. This could ruin us.”

“I appreciate your concern.” Gareth started to say something, and she held up a hand, cutting him off. “And I appreciate it’s a risk. Companies take risks, Gareth. My job as CEO is to make these decisions. I made the decisions that brought us to such a rosy P&L, you may recall.”

“Yes, but…”

“And if Alpha Squad is a disaster, well…”

“You’ll be out,” Gareth said violently. “You’ll be done. A laughing stock. This company you built will be taken away from you.”

Christina cocked an eyebrow. “Paving the way for a new, vibrant, visionary CEO, perhaps?”

“Dammit. If I wanted the job and wanted you to fail, I wouldn’t be here pleading with you. I’d let you bloody fall flat on your bloody face.”

“Fair point. So why come?”

“In hopes that on the precipice of this disaster that you’d see reason. Don’t do this. Please. I don’t understand why you’re so driven to make us such a public spectacle. I didn’t think you wanted to be a celebrity.”

“Is that what you think this is about? This is about building a brand, Gareth. AlphaTech’s, not mine. And doing some good while we’re at it.”

Someone knocked on the door.

“Well, I’m off to Los Angeles, it seems. I’m afraid the die is cast, Mr. Graham.”

“Mark my words,” Gareth said, shaking a finger, “this Alpha Squad nonsense will. Not. Work. You may have a meaningless reality TV show career at the end of this, but it will be the end of you leading a global enterprise.”

“I suppose we’ll see,” Christina said gently.

“I suppose we bloody will.”

The door opened, and Samantha stood there with an older, bald white man and several young people with tablet computers held to their chests. Gareth turned on his heel and pushed through them angrily. The group looked on briefly as he stormed towards the elevators, then turned their full, smiling attention to Christina.

“Big day,” the man said in a deep voice, stepping forward and extending his hand. “It’s good to see you again, Christina. You look beautiful.”

“Thank you, Peter.” Christina pulled herself away from her desk and met his grip, her hand comically small in his. “Well, let’s get going.”

As the two of them made their way out of the office one of the young people, a cute girl with sunglasses perched on top of her head turned to one of her young companions.

“I’m thinking we need color,” she said.

“Definitely. We’ll do that in LA. I have some ideas. A yellow scarf, maybe?”

Christina overheard and paused long enough to look at Samantha. Her assistant shrugged.

The group moved to the elevators, leaving the office door open. Only the ominous sound of a clock ticking filled the silence.

My Hero Brain

Tag: Superhero