Superhero Lessons for Fantasy Games
Even if you don’t play a superhero game, this month’s RPG blog carnival on superheroes needn’t be a wasted month for you. There are qualities of a superhero game that can be adapted to enliven your new fantasy campaign — or to revitalize an old one with a change of direction. Consider some of the lessons of a superhero campaign:
Symbols (and Names) Matter
When you think of Superman, you probably think of the big red S on his chest. It’s a distinctive sigil. When you think of Batman, you probably picture his scalloped cloak, which resembles the wings of a bat. When those two get together with a couple more of their friends, it’s not just any gathering — it’s the Justice League.
Categories: Advice, Comics, Manga, and Anime | Comments (6)
Strange Superpowers
In the spirit of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival on superheroes, I present some of the strangest superpowers ever to grace the pages of a comic book. Perhaps you’ll find them inspirational. In no particular order:
Eyes in your Fingertips. This is the rather unique superpower of the Ten-Eyed Man, an old Batman villain. He was blinded in an accident, but a skilled doctor was able to reconnect his optic nerves to his fingertips, allowing him to see through them. Somehow, this made him a master escape artist as well — when he was imprisoned, he had to be kept with his hands locked into a box, or otherwise he’d escape. He had a couple other gadgets, like a jetpack and a bullwhip, but for some reason, everyone he met was really impressed by his ability to see through his fingers. The character was finally, mercifully killed off in DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths series.
Categories: Comics, Manga, and Anime | Comments (1)
(Super)Heroes are Made
There’s a bit of a stir in the RPG community lately over a certain product, Carcosa, by one Geoffrey McKinney (to which I choose not to link — I’m sure you won’t have much trouble finding it, if you care to). It seems this unofficial OD&D supplement contains descriptions of various sorcerous rituals, some of which include rather nasty elements… one of them involving the multiple rape and murder of an eleven-year-old. Cue flames from many people, some of whom have never seen the product, followed by counter-flames from other people, who feel for whatever reason such an element is justified as part of their game.
I’m not going to say much about that, directly… ultimately, the game’s theirs. I wouldn’t want my PCs playing out such a ritual “onstage”, as Geoffrey’s PCs did — but I run heroic games in the first place, so it wouldn’t even come up. How about NPCs? Maybe, offscreen. I’ve had evil societies deal with slavery, human sacrifice, and crimes of all sorts up to and including outright genocide. The key thing, in my mind, being that these are things for the characters to oppose and perhaps, at least on a small scale, prevent, rather than to wholeheartedly participate in.
Leaving aside the campaign report (which I find in poor taste, but… it’s not my game), I can’t muster up a whole lot of righteous indignation at the inclusion of such things. Encouraging PCs to engage in them, that’s creepy, but it’s your business what you play out in your private fantasies. As far as the product itself (which I have seen a copy of, and which I will not purchase): the only thing I really found at all offensive about it was the decision to subtitle it Supplement V. That’s chutzpah. It’s also ultimately minor.
The cynic in me wonders whether that, and the child sacrifice, might not have been planned. No such thing as bad publicity, after all — and it’s certainly got publicity, now. But anyway, on to the main point.
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Wrapping Up Warcraft
When I ran the first part of my Shadowfang Keep adaptation, I brought a stack of pre-made characters. I explained the basics of each class and the d20 mechanic, told them we’d get to the rest during actual play as it came up, and jumped right into the adventure. This is a faster start than I’ve normally used in the past, but it seemed to work pretty well. During the first encounter, with the extremely simple terrain, they were able to pick up most of the combat rules very quickly. But the game really took off when they reached Baron Silverlaine’s hall.
“It’s going to be tough to fight all of those,” one of the players mused.
“Is that what you want to do? Fight them?”
“…What?”
“Well, he just demanded to know what you’re doing in his keep. It’s up to you to decide how your characters respond.”
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Stealing, By the Numbers (IV)
Map of Warcraft's Shadowfang Keep
At about this point, I ran into another quandary with my adaptation of Shadowfang Keep. I’d eyeballed it at ten encounters, but, after four encounters in, I was running low on potential roleplaying encounters. There would inevitably be some roleplay before the confrontation with the archvillain Arugal, but aside from that, my options were limited: most of the remainder of the keep was filled with aggressive, borderline-feral worgen.
Ordinarily, I would simply have changed that fact, but I wanted to keep Shadowfang Keep relatively recognizable to the players who were familiar with it from Warcraft. On the other hand, six straight combat encounters would be at least a full session, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a full session of nothing but combat — it was probably back in the days of the B series modules. So I decided to proceed by trimming the number of encounters and trying to ensure that each one had an element to define it and set it apart. I also did what I could to add a little more roleplay to the second session by expanding the role of the undead.
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