Silent Legions of Superheroes

I've talked with certain people quite a bit about the pros and cons of the scenario tools in Silent Legions. One of them has argued that it doesn't do enough to create a holistic mystery.  Instead of having each new piece of information compounding to create a picture of the incident, they act as breadcrumbs to lead you to a preset resolution.  This isn't necessarily linear (indeed non-linearity is part of the point) but Silent Legions' goal is focused on having certain types of scenes rather than replicating a police procedural.

However, that structure works better for the kinds of superhero games I want to run. Having the kind of action and investigation "beats" (for lack of a better word) allows problem solving to be tied to the heroes' abilities and superhero stuff while still keeping it from being a bunch of fights in a line. I've made a couple of these before, but for this post I'm going to use one I made while writing it to show how it's done.  I'm going to roll on the Silent Legions tables, provide the results, and then convert the whole thing into a supers scenario.

First we need a resolution.  I roll that it's going to be a Time Sensitive Resolution and get the following result: An Enemy seeks to destroy a Friend or an object which is impeding its Scheme. Investigations will reveal the existence of the threat and the means by which it intends to do this.


So we need to figure out what clues lead to the Existence of Threat and to the Means.  I decide that both are people/events (the means being an actor of some type) and for the Existence of the Threat i get: The event was related to a Secret in the location, and those that are trying to protect the Secret will also try to dissuade the PCs from examining the event.


For the Means I roll: The Actor involved has been kidnapped by agents of the Enemy and taken to a remote Place. They mean to keep him or her out of events until the Scheme has come to completion, but they’ll kill him or her if necessary to preserve their silence.

Now I decide I want a clue to the Scheme itself and get: The event was hushed by local police, and getting the facts requires either the cooperation of an Actor involved in the investigation or a stealthy inspection of local police records.

For the Introduction scene I got: A Friend gives the PCs the results of their own research which aims the PCs at one or more Investigations. They’re still looking into things; if the PCs don’t dissuade them they’ll discover a useful clue for the heroes, but will perish hideously.

... and the Hook: The site's Enemy needs victims or recruits, and just happens to pick the heroes for an attack that is decidedly less overwhelming than it should be. The assailants have some sort of clue that traces back to the site.

To give a little more description I want to flesh out some of these.  I decide the Hook is an Ambush and so roll an ambush scene: The Enemy threatens a known Friend or ally of the PCs in order to goad them to come to their aid, and then attempts to deal with them all. The PCs will be aware they’re heading into danger, however, and may choose not to respond.

I decide the Means is going to be some kind of physical Combat scene (the thing guarding the captured Actor) and get: an eldritch entity summoned by the cult.  I decide to ignore the direct text - since this isn't a Cthulhu game - and instead that it's going to be some kind of non-human baddie as guard.

For the Actor involved with the police I decide I want a social encounter with Someone Who Fears Something and get: fears a person present with them

And finally the clue found that points towards the existence of the threat needs someone to..: recognize the residue of an occult ritual or event.  Again I'm ignoring the word "occult" and just going to say they need to recognize that some kind of villainous activity took place.

Taking some cues from the current political moment, I decide that HYDRA is working to get Taskmaster to train some Watchdogs recruits so they can infiltrate the NYPD. Ben Urich has been doing a report on the Watchdogs and wondering who is funding them and what they're planning.

A group of trained but not yet initiated into the police Watchdogs take Urich hostage and are overconfident in thinking they can take out the team of heroes that arrives to confront them.  From interrogating the Watchdogs or perhaps from some card or written address they can track down where Taskmaster is training them. Taskmaster doesn't exactly know who's funding him or why they want the guys trained but he's not one to leave money on the ground.  The PCs can either confront him directly or stake out the place to become aware of his presence and then figure out how to proceed from there. 

If they want to follow the cop angle there's a non-crooked member of the NYPD, we'll call him Officer Joel because that name popped in my head, who realizes that all of his buddies are being replaced by real racist assholes but isn't in a position to talk about it and is usually followed, even off duty, by somebody in with the Watchdogs.

While the PCs are working on one of those two angles, Urich continues the beat and gets kidnapped by actual HYDRA members.  They lock him in a warehouse with some robots made by Arnim Zola and you got some things the PCs gotta fight to save him.

It also leads some loose ends, like where are the HYDRA brass opperating out of? Do they have a goal with the police beyond just turning a blind eye to hate crimes? Do they have any other schemes with the Watchdogs?

So hopefully that shows how you can use the Silent Legions tables to make super hero scenarios.

Superheroes: Year One

Despite my posts about the end of the world, I've actually been running FASERIP/Marvel Superheroes for a few weeks now.  I've been missing making hexmaps and figuring out what ruins go where and whatever, which is why I was thinking about those other ideas, but I'm having a lot of fun running a supers game.  This is the first time I've ever been able to get one to go for more than one session, mostly because my players seem into it.  I'm still trying to find my sea legs with it, but I think it's going well.

I originally wanted it to be kind of a sandbox-y affair but that ended up being untenable in part because of the nature of the genre and in part because my players wanted to start sooner than I could get one prepped.  What we've been doing instead is a thing that I think is a fairly common practice on G+ where I throw out somewhere around three different hooks and they pick one to pursue.  Most of the first few sessions were them trailing after Mysterio (report on that shortly), but the other threads were open if they wanted them.

This pitch is not based on what I am running.  Instead it's based on something that came up in a conversation I had with Cole.  The premise is that it is the first year that anyone in the world has been a superhero, your PCs are those first superheroes, and you are in the most crime ridden city in the US.  For this idea to work, you probably need something within the power-scale of Robert's Marvel '78 houserules.  My gut says that you should try to stick to "basically a tough human but with fancy gadgets," but seeing the players try to figure out how to turn any situation into one where their powers are useful is part of the fun of the game.*

However it's not really who the characters are that makes this idea interesting but the structure.  It is, to borrow Zak's parlance, an anti-sandbox.  The city needs to be so crime ridden that the upright heroes are fighting an uphill battle.  The cops either "don't go" into certain districts or are so corrupt that they implicitly or actively support the criminal activities of the various crime lords.  Crime lords that, at the start, are of the more mundane variety.

I hope to be able to go into this more at length in a future post, but here are the basics of how you set up your anti-sandbox:  First you divide the city into districts and give each one (or groups of them) to various crime lords.  You don't want too many that the prep becomes overwhelming but you also don't want to have all the power in the hands of a single figure.  Even Kingpin had to tangle with the Maggia.  Next you create some rackets the crime lords are running.  In the end you're going to want the rackets to be in a kind of onion-skin pattern, with hints in each leading to some deeper secret, but all you really need to design at the beginning are the outer layers for each crook.

PCs get hints about these rackets from their contacts, friends, or just from beating up some thug they know to be associated with the appropriate gang.  As they bust up the various rackets eventually one or more of the crime lords will collapse.  That's when the game enters Year Two.  The costumed antics of the PCs inspire villainous NPCs who become supervillains, replacing the structured organized crime of the crime lords with madness and pumpkin bombs.  Eventually the threats might become even greater - requiring the PCs to enter Subterranea or travel to the Savage Land or to outer space or whatever.

This structure has some quirks to it.  The main one is that it turns from an anti-sandbox where the players are making their decisions to a more typical supers game where the heroes are reacting to crimes.  This might be a bad thing or it might not be depending on what you think of typical supers games.  Layered within that is a more positive element, I think, which is that the game has a more obvious sense of advancement.  You have kinda three tiers - crime lords, supervillains, cosmic threats - and advancing through them is not something one normally sees in a supers game.

The biggest negative I can see is that it's hard to integrate pre-existing heroes into this scheme.  For one thing, I can't really think of a Year One type thing that involves a team.  I guess you can do the Bat Family, but even then Robin and Bat Girl are pretty clearly aspects of a post-Year One Batman. Some of you may not see a problem here, but I've found running a game for people playing pre-existing heroes extremely fun, in no small part because they roleplay more than I've ever seen in any other game.**  Also, superheroes are kind of silly.  I think they're silly in a wonderful way, but making something intentionally silly is a good way to tell your players "this setting doesn't matter."  Picking Moon Knight or whoever alleviates this somewhat because the character is taken seriously in the comics even if the things he's doing are inherently silly in a real world context.  

A smaller negative would be the lack of enemy variety within a tier.  You'd spend a good chunk of your early career not fighting a guy in a costume.  That's kinda lame.  However, I think the progression from tier to tier will help alleviate that somewhat.  Plus, Marvel Characters don't swing as wildly in power over time as D&D ones due, so you can always try to punch above or below your weight class.

* That is a post all on its own I plan to do semi-soon.
**Post on this coming later too.