Spitballing: The Superhero Sandbox

Would supers games benefit from a vigorous sandbox-like approach to mapping and statting out the parts of the heroes' home city? You could use the Wilderlands/Traveller numbered hex approach.

1032 McSleazy's - bar containing 3d6 cheap thugs and d6-1 wise guys

1034 Museum district - see submap 3

1036 warehouse lair of Professor Doominstein and his Funtime Cyborg Jamboree

Or you could assign each neighborhood some stats. A make-your-trait system like Risus can be handy for this.


Argentville
declining neighborhood trying to recapture former glory(3) domain of the O'Bryan Mob(2) best bakeries in the city(2)

Heck, you could probably get a lot done with just some encounter tables with built-in change conditions.

Uptown Patrol Encounters, Night
2 Mr. Ripper encounter [capture to remove from chart]
3 d8 teen punks with nothing to do
4 Petty crime in progress, d8 cheap hoods [break up 6 times to swap with spot 3 on the chart]
5 Mugging in progress, d4 muggers [bring in 10 muggers to swap with spot 6]
6 d12 carousing hooligans, nothing more severe than drunk & disorderly conduct
7 Robbery in progress, 2d6 cheap thugs
8 Monster rampage

This way diligent heroes can actually make the city a better place, one neighborhood at a time.

Super Samurai!

As a kid I thought this dude was wicked awesome. Super Samurai's deal is that he's basically a samurai-themed Captain Marvel: this little Japanese kid turns into a badass flying samurai superhero. He used to hang out with Isis, Hercules, and Sinbad as the Freedom Force. I think their cartoon show lasted all of five episodes.

the very definition of mainstream

Every workday morning I cross the lobby of the bank I work at. I don't really need to do this to get upstairs to my third floor cubicle, but it allows me to walk by my boss's office to see if she is in. She travels to other branches quite frequently and I find knowing she is or is not at her desk to be useful information.

Anyway, as I was walking across the lobby this morning two of my fellow employees were engaged in some light chitchat before the bank opened. One of them is a highly competent power secretary. She's one of those behind-the-scenes types who some days seem to hold the bank together by sheer force of will. The other has been in lending for almost as long as I've been alive and now oversees maybe a couple hundred million dollars in loans.

The subject of their conversation this morning? The plot of Spider-Man 3.

New (old) comics

I went to the FLGS today in search of an old module, but the place was inexplicably closed. The comic guy who shares space with the gamestore said John (the gamestore owner) probably overslept. Again. Did I mention it was 1:30pm when I arrived.

But the comic dude was more than happy to take my money. And he was running one of those "Please Buy This Old Crap, We Assure You It Is On Sale" sales. Six bucks got me the treasure trove below.

I don't know much about the Atom outside his one Superfriends appearance. But a dude with a sword fighting a dinosaur to protect a scantily clad alien chick? That's right up my alley. I've got to take a few points off for wearing a loincloth over a standard spandex supersuit. That's got to be some sort of fashion faux pas.

Title Undetermined's Wild Dog Week convinced me to give this book a try. Wild Dog is like the Punisher of the DC universe, only he wears a hockey mask and fights terrorists in the Quad Cities. No, seriously.

I greatly enjoyed the two JSA trades available at the local library, but what really sold me on this was the fact that the pencils are by Mike Parobeck.

If you can look at this cover and not want to read this issue, then I can only assume you are not a fan of stuff that is awesome.

I remember reading on some comics blog a while back about 'Mazing Man. It was a short-lived comedy series about a good-natured dude who just started wearing a funny costume and helping people. I'm a sucker for that kind of tale. Because, really, don't all superhero fans daydream about doing just that? At least once in a while? Hello? Is this thing on?

Hmmm, this may be the first time I've ever gone to the comic store and came back with only DC stuff. I eyed some issues of the original run of Howard the Duck, but the price was too rich for my blood.

The Paul Czege Effect, Part 2

In part 1 of the Paul Czege Effect I described how Our Hero Mr. Czege came up with a hella-tight technique for distinctive and flavorful supers campaigning. In brief he recommends constructing your own super naming conventions so that you don't end with a world filled with the likes of Fill-In-The-Blank Man and Captain Whatever. It's a great idea, but Mr. Czege forgot somewhere along the way with great powers comes a great responsibility to be awesome, and instead chose to use his technique to support serious, mature superhero gaming. Think about that for a minute. Serious, mature superhero gaming. Let's ask our good friend Captain America what he thinks of serious, mature superheroing, shall we?

Oh, that's right. He's too busy punching the crap out of Hitler to be able to weigh in on this issue.

(Man, that cover never gets old.)

As regular Gameblog readers already know, I don't do serious or mature in my gaming. I save that crap for when I put on a tie and got to work. For me, a game has to pass the Three Trashmen Tests to be good: Is it loud at any volume? Is it annoying to grown-ups? And most importantly, is it stupid? Any game that says 'yes' to all three question is aces in my book.

Fortunatelty, Mr. Czege's basic technique ("new naming conventions") can be put to work in support of non-serious, immature play agendas. Just for grins, I'm going to outline the naming conventions of New Bronze City, a setting I just made up. New Bronze City is meant to sorta evoke Marvel Manhattan circa 1979 or so, without being tied down too much to its inspiration.

Rather than stick to one single rule like Czege's "all names must have prepositions", I'm going to build my naming conventions as a series of Do's and Don'ts. In the section below I'll be dropping the term 'Element' a lot. Don't freak out. I'm not trying to beat you with some new jargon. It's this simple: Superman's element is 'super', Captain America's element is 'America', The Hulk's element is 'hulk'. Got it?

New Bronze City naming conventions

Don't name your super Element Man, Element Woman, Element Boy, Element Girl, Element Lad or Element Lass. Man/Woman/Boy/Girl are too bland. Lad/Lass makes me think of Silver Age DC.

Do name your super Element Guy, Element Gal, Element Dude, Element Chick, or Element Kid. Guy and Gal work best with whitebread types, while the cool cats use Dude and Chick.

Don't name your super [Military Rank] Element unless your character actually holds that rank in a military. Similarly, avoid things like King Element unless the character actually is royalty.

Don't name your super Captain Element, ever. Captain is just overplayed, man.

Do name your character Mr. Element or Ms. Element.

Don't name your character Doctor Element unless they have actual medical skills. Too many civilians will assume you're a medical doctor, like that one time Higgins from Magnum PI ended up delivering a baby because he mentioned that he was a doctor. Doctor of Mathematics, that is.

Do name your character Professor Element if the super in question is some sort of egghead. No one cares if they are really a professor or not.

Don't name your character The Element unless they are really, truly badass. If you think you can stand up to The Doom or The Bat you can use The Element. Otherwise, don't go there.

Do call yourself Element [Name] where [Name] is a relatively short and common civilian name. Examples: Zombie Joe, Atomic Rodriguez, Amazing Heather.

So that's how you name the characters in New Bronze City. It's a little quirky, a little retro, and noticeably different from just another Marvel of DC ripoff setting without being so far off the beaten track as to confuse players.

The Paul Czege Effect, part 1

If you know Paul Czege's name, it's probably because of his indie role-playing games My Life With Master or Nicotine Girls. Or maybe he registers on your radar as simply as one of the usual suspects in the indie gaming scene. But for me I'll always associate the name Paul Czege with one beautiful, half-throwaway idea of his that has been reverberating through my skull for the last five years. At one time Mr. Czege was playing Theatrix, which happens to be the first diceless RPG I ever owned. Theatrix is basically a set of light cinematic generic rules, which Mr. Czege's group was using to power a superhero game. If you can stand diceless games and aren't one of those points-crunching power-minutae freaks, then I could totally see using Theatrix for the cape-and-cowl set.

Anyway, back in '01 I must have still been regularly reading the Forge, because I stumbled across a thread where Mr. Czege talked about this game. The thing that stuck with me all these years later was the naming convention he came up with. He breaks it down like this:

One thing I haven't described about the game is the naming convention for superheroes and supervillains. It's an idea I had last summer, that you could create a superhero scenario without seeming derivative if you invented an alternative naming convention. So all names have prepositions in them. The gun toting villain in the very first scene of the game is Quick on the Draw. The villain that bursts into flames is Point of Ignition. My character is No Appetite for Pain.

Other characters in the game include heroes War on Crime (the local Batman-type), Champion of Fair Play (the Superman equivalent), as well as Keeper of Faith, Justice of the Piece (gotta be a gun-toting Punisher type), Day of Salvation, Spirit of America, Mind over Matter ("who's a brain in a jar"), and Up from the Earth. The campaign featured villains with names like Life from Death, Born from Concrete, Impossible to Find, Falling through Reality, and Harvester of the Weak.

Hot damn, but that's good stuff. By a simple change in the rules on how you name your supers, Czege has left an indelible stamp on the campaign. If you think about it, you can see a little of this in the comic books themselves. If I tell you a character is Magma Man, that's pretty blank. It's tells you nothing but the dude's power base. But if he's Magma Lad, suddenly I read into that character a lot of Silver Age innocence without knowing anything subtantive about the dude. Similarly, if you called the guy The Magma it's a pretty good bet he's one of those grim and gritty guys that stunk up so many 90's comics.

It must be noted that Mr. Czege came up with this delightful technique for what I personally think of as all the wrong reasons:

And I think for us, it enables the game to have to work less hard to achieve a mature tone. Traditional superhero naming conventions have become somewhat associated with Saturday morning cartoons: Spiderman and His Amazing Friends, Superfriends, X-Men. I think the alternative naming convention kind of breaks down those associations and defaults us to treating the characters and their relationships with seriousness..

But in part 2 of The Paul Czege Effect, I will use this technique to outline a superhero world my way. A way that is less mature, less serious, and more stupid. Stay tuned.