(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.

This month, the RPG Blog Carnival is dealing with superheroes.  And the furor surrounding Carcosa reminds me of a literary truism:  the hero is defined by his struggle.  As the saying goes, heroes are made, not born.

What makes a hero?

In the case of modern comic-book superheroes, there are usually several struggles going on at any given point, working on different levels.  The most obvious is the surface-level conflict of action that takes place on the pages.  Rare is the comic book that doesn’t include at least a little bit of physical action or fighting in each issue.  When Marvel’s Captain America punches out the Red Skull, the physical conflict — two men struggling for victory in combat — is very clear.

With some comics, that’s all you get.  That sort of story is inevitably very shallow.  There’s limited depth of character involved — we may know the plot rationale for the fight, but often it’s a pretty plain excuse.  This sort of conflict is sometimes used as an aside:  the superhero will “just happen” across a robbery, a mugging, or some other crime, and will beat up some thugs and put a stop to it in a page, perhaps two.  In these cases, it’s an excuse to get some action into what’s otherwise generally a character-driven issue of the comic.  In the better cases, that’s not all it is — there’s some foreshadowing, or a plot element that will be recalled later on.

In the worst case, that’s all it is — and there’s a whole issue of it.  This is the comic-book equivalent to walking your nameless randomly-generated PCs into a randomly-generated dungeon to randomly fight a bunch of randomly-generated monsters and win their randomly-generated treasure.  The surface conflict is there, but there’s nothing substantial behind it.

Cover of Whiz Comics #2 (1940), art by C.C. Beck -- posterized by yours truly. Captain Marvel belongs to DC Comics.

A well-written superhero story has at least one additional layer of conflict to it — generally, a symbolic conflict.  Captain America punching out the Red Skull isn’t just about two guys in spandex hitting each other.  The Captain represents the purported American ideals:  liberty, equality, integrity.  Truth, justice, and all the rest of that stuff.  (And yes, even he’s become disillusioned with the actual America, from time to time, in his comic — so let’s not dwell on that.)  The guy he’s fighting, the Red Skull, represents Nazism, tyranny, oppression, and so forth.

This is still a pretty obvious conflict, by the symbolic nature of these two characters, but now it’s at least working at a level deeper than just two guys:  it’s two philosophies.  The physical action is representative of the underlying moral conflict.

Deeper and subtler conflicts are not uncommon, either.  Spider-Man’s main trait is his sense of responsibility:  “With great power…”  One classic conflict for him is to set his sense of responsibility to people at large against his sense of responsibility toward his family.  If he’s swinging across the city to deliver the medicine Aunt May needs, does he stop to apprehend those thugs pouring out of the bank?  If he’s in the middle of fighting Dr. Octopus and he realizes he has five minutes left to get Peter Parker’s photos in before the deadline, what then?

Dark heroes and even anti-heroes aren’t immune, either.  DC’s Batman, in recent years, is portrayed as an obsessive loner, arguably paranoid, for all his genius nearly as insane as some of those he battles against.  But there’s the key:  nearly.  Enemies such as the Joker, the Penguin, and Catwoman are lacking in various degrees both sanity and morality, but Batman stands for a greater good than himself.  He might break the law on occasion in order to pursue it, but he does so in accordance with a strict moral code.  There’s a reason he’s called the Dark Knight.  In terms of the symbolic conflict, that’s exactly what he is:  a knight of the romantic sort, guardian and defender of the weak, strict soldier in opposition to the immoral.  The worst of his villains are the new monsters — consider Joker as the Grendel of the modern world.

Great heroes confront great evils… more or less by definition.  That’s where all of that nasty stuff I mentioned using in my campaigns — and even the stuff in Carcosa — comes in, in my opinion.  The physical conflict is still important.  The symbolism behind it, equally so — and symbolically, child sacrifice is about as blatant as you can get.  (So much so, in fact, that I’d tend to avoid using it, for just that reason:  it risks becoming almost a caricature of itself.)  Yet the latter can make up for the former.  If the Red Skull represents Nazism and supports genocide, then he doesn’t actually need to commit genocide in order to play his role in the story.  Doing so might well be one of his goals, and favoring it is certainly part of his character, but the act itself need not occur onscreen in order for him to be a credible threat.  This is part of the power of symbolism:  it can “fill in” a lot of gaps.

It’s why your players know something is wrong if Batman pulls a gun, or if Spider-Man shrugs off his responsibility, or if Captain America denounces democracy.

So next time you’re running a superhero campaign, when the time comes to pick out opposition, be sure to consider what each of your player characters stands for.  Think about what they symbolize, what their primary traits are.  Brainstorm about conflicts on the symbolic and inner levels.  Then create villains and plots that present physical conflicts that also work on those other levels.  They’ll resonate that much more strongly.

Related posts:

1. Captain America
2. Superhero Lessons for Fantasy Games