4.16.2011

A Supers Campaign Inspired By A Dream

So, I had this dream, right? When I woke up, I spoke all I could remember of it out loud, and I've been mulling it over, just to keep it fresh in my mind. Since, I've been thinking quite a lot about superhero gaming, and so I decided to go ahead and post the contents of the dream, since it obviously inspired me quite a bit.

The first of the dream I remember is that I was at Taylor and Angela's place, my game group was gathered around, as normal except Paul, John, Tony, and Chris were there, which doubled our usual numbers.

We were discussing the government contracts that each state of the U.S.A. were allowed to give, and how restrictive they were to the superheroes in them, not letting them perform "unsanctioned heroic acts," and Angela brought up a hero named Arkansas Twister being penalized by the state, and threatened with having breach of contract drawn against him because he stopped to help people in an automobile accident.

The talk was politically driven, but also asked the questions "Would you work for the state for $500k a year as their lapdog hero if you had powers?" and "What made the Federal government decide that state-ran hero programs could only include ratios of 1 hero to every million citizens?"

Heroes not sanctioned by the government were operating on a gray area, where they were allowed to go about their business without having to register or anything, but if deemed to be performing illegal activities by any government agency, would then receive vigilante/villain status. All collateral damage performed outside state sanction would be paid in full restitution within a 1 month period or be moved to vigilante/villain status.

Not sure what vigilante/villain status is, but I can assume that the punishments would be extreme once the government found out identities...frozen assets, etc., not to mention having heroes on your tail.

Basically, the dream felt narrated. I feel like I'm forgetting things now, but it seemed like everyone was talking 90-to-nothing about this phenomena, and we (being game nerds, I assume) were all very interested in and excited about the goings-on. Tons of information to digest, but a skeleton that a campaign could be hung on.

I do realize that a bit of it is familiar...there are elements of both The Fifty State Initiative and The Superhuman Registration Act present in the framework, but I'm sure they came to the fore in my dream due to Civil War being one of the last major comics storylines I read.

I really want to flesh this out. I could definitely run with this idea, but what rules-set? Aberrant is the supers system I'm most familiar with, and my friends have all played Storyteller system, so that might be workable...there are others out there, though, that might fit. Not too familiar with many, but maybe Mutants & Masterminds or some other system would sit better with my group?

Thoughts, comments, questions, concerns...all are welcome in the comments!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Definitely could be the makings of an interesting setting. Makes me think of the movie "Mystery Men" with a bunch of wannabe heros and the "sanctioned" hero Captain Amazing. You could have various "tiers" of hero, World, National, Regional, and Local with appropriate power levels. Kinda look at it like sports teams where you start small and work your way up to the major leagues. Starting with nabbing purse snatchers and petty crooks, and work your way up to fighting off the interdimenional mechanohordes form planet X.