Project Swamplight

Some of you may have noticed that the good doctor has been pretty quiet lately, with no-hobby related posts to speak of. One reason is that between how busy the lab tech program has been keeping me and the place near me that I had been playing the warhammer league at closing down back in March, I haven’t really done much of any gaming, painting, or modeling in a while now.  The other reason is that I’ve been working on a secret project for the past six months or so and now the time has come to unveil it to the club.

See I’ve been really missing getting to play with everyone on a regular basis anymore these past couple of years since I’ve been down here and have been trying to come up with the right format for a game that can cross the distance gap we now have. Eventually I hit on the idea of doing a super hero role playing game since the episodic style seems well suited for it and with the totally awesome Avengers movie and all the other super hero films out there these past few months, I figured people might be in the mood for some manic superhero action.

You know you want to wear the tights

In the months since I’ve been steadily working at building a living breathing campaign world that my Ordo-Ineptus friends can romp around in.  I have created the fictional location of Swamplight City, Florida, using an out of print sourcebook for an old futuristic RPG as a template and so far I’ve got a big map and a 60 page Word document full of locations, personalities, contacts, and encounters.

Pictured: the big map

The reason I’ve taken so long and done so much work is that my goal was to set up a fully fleshed out world, that, once the characters were created and popped in, could almost run itself with minimal preparation for each session, which would be necessary for me with the way my school schedule has been with this accelerated program I’m doing.   We’ve been on a three week break from school and I’ve been able to get a lot more hammered out and am at a point where I think we’re almost ready to go.

So if wearing spandex, saving the city, fighting zany over the top villains in ridiculous costumes and punching robots in the face is your thing, then read on, True Believer!

Campaign Structure and Interface

Game sessions in the campaign would only be once a month, so there wouldn’t be any huge commitment. Every once in a while we could probably go bi-weekly whenever things are slow for everyone involved, but I think monthly is probably the best bet.

Now obviously, since I’m down here and you’re all up there, I would be running the game remotely, via Skype video, which actually kind of works really well with this kind of game because interacting with a talking head on a computer screen fits with the whole superhero genre.  Having a laptop set up in front of the players also allows me to send pictures and files that players can reference in game.  I may even set up a web portal at some point, assuming I figure out how. I really like what Eric and Brian were doing with the Thanatos campaign portal.

Initially, the campaign will only be available to a few people, (currently I’m sending invitations to five club members) as I build the core of the superhero team, get the campaign world going and get used to the game structure and playing remotely via Skype. I’m sending out a few invitations to players and the initial game sessions would most likely take place at someone’s home. Eventually, by next summer, I’ll open it up to the rest of the club and the sessions can be held at Hobbytown. Basically the idea is that once the campaign world and the main characters have been established, other characters can pop in and out without throwing things out of whack, and I’ll have several sessions Skyping the game for a small group in a quiet remote setting before trying to do it at a table in the store while a bunch of other games are going on simultaneously. Again, this fits well with the superhero setting, since with hero groups like the Avengers, you started out with a small core of central characters, and then eventually the roster grew with other heroes that would be active members for awhile then go inactive, or heroes from other books doing guest appearances.  You get the idea.

The game system I’m going to be using is Mutants & Masterminds.  I did some research on superhero RPG systems when I first began working on the project and picked up the book over the winter.  I think it’s pretty good and allows for a lot of flexibility with what kind of characters you can create.

This is basically what's going on inside my head at any given moment

It’s a D20 based system (like AD&D) where the  hit points (or wounds as with the Warhammer RPGs) is replaced by a set of universal damage conditions, where instead of being about how much damage a character can take, it’s about how well the character resists taking the damage. So basically everything in the game has the same amount of damage it can take before they die (if lethal damage) or are knocked unconscious (if non-lethal damage), the difference is just how much or how little of the damage from a given source they are actually dealt. I would be supplying the club with a copy of the book that would be kept wherever the games are played, and as the campaign gets rolling players can pick up their own copy if they’d like to, but it would be completely optional.

Miniatures

This kind of a game doesn’t really need miniatures, but I think the potential for having the brightly colored spandex costumes and the availability and cheapness of heroclix minis (I take Electros head, put it on Lex Luthor’s body, give it a repaint, and presto: Dr. Sparkplug) makes it a ‘gotta have’. Really what they’ll be there for is to convey the colorful characters and give relative positions of things. In this kind of game, charge lanes and distances aren’t that important. A third of the participants in a given battle will most likely have some kind of ability that lets them be anywhere on the table they want to be at any given turn, so really what the minis do is just show all the parties that are involved, and their relative positions to one another.   In other words, you have Goon #1 holding a deathray on the hostages, while Goon #2 arms the doomsday bomb and the big bad guy stands there looking big and bad, and on your turn you say something like “I want to throw a sonic boomerang at the first goon and try to knock the deathray out of the his hands” or “my character is going to run straight for the guy arming the bomb and tackle him” or “I’m going to pull a palm tree up out of the ground and run over and smack Dr. Machismo across the face with it” (which will probably become known as the Mike Gavlik maneuver) .  How I plan on handling it is that I’ll have all of the miniatures and stuff set up on my end and whenever we reach a point in the game where miniatures will be used, I’ll zoom in and pan the webcam on the setup and all the miniatures and then pull back leave the camera focused on the table for the rest of the scene.  Players will always be able to ask for a measurement check or “am I in range” before acting, and I’ll move the miniatures around as the participants take their turns, with players basically describing where on the field they want to be.

 I’ll eventually make a custom mini for all of the core characters based on whatever  descriptions or sketches of theirs characters the players provide, then I’ll make a mold and cast a copy to use for the miniature battles and send the player the original to keep. (or if there’s an existing mini a player wants to paint up to use or if they want to make their own custom, I’ll just pick up or make a similar one to use down here on my end.

The Campaign World

My campaign world is going to pretty much be an amalgam of EVERYTHING.  In other words, it is assumed to be in the same continuity as DC, Marvel, and a bunch of other worlds too, from video games, movies, novels, cartoons, etc, so you never know what you might see. 

Like this billboard, for instance

Again, I’ve set it the campaign in Florida in the fictional Swamplight City, which occupies an area of the southern coast which is in our real world is just part of the Everglades. The nice thing about Florida is that it’s pretty spread out, so there’s lots of room to fit your fictional city in. The northeast has Metropolis and Gotham City. Florida will have Swamplight City.

The scope of the campaign will be much smaller than the Avengers or the Justice League, at least at the beginning.  There won’t be any saving the world or fighting Galactus or saving the universe or the time continuum or stuff that the big name teams do.   Think of it more as early Batman where he mostly stuck to fighting Gotham City villains rather than global menaces, or Daredevil before they started having him make routine trips down to hell to fight Lucifer. The characters will be still learning how to use their powers at the beginning, and a third rate Spiderman villain like the Trapster or Boomerang could probably wipe the floor with the entire team in the early part of their career as they learn the ropes of the superhero world. Their villains will still be appropriately over the top and colorful, however, the scenarios will have the same feel as the stories of the more powerful heroes, just with a smaller scope. Eventually as they improve their skills, the scale of the campaign will increase as well and the group will be fighting those giant robot monsters with the best of them.

Character Creation

The first session (which I’m hoping will be sometime in September) will be all about character creation. The players will probably have some ideas for their characters going in, and this is where things will get hammered out and characters will get created.  I’ll be there to answer questions and make suggestions and everyone can bounce ideas off of one another and come up with possible connections between characters, such as how they might know each other or under what circumstances they might initially meet under.  Also elements of the team as a whole will get fleshed out;  what kind of a team they will be and how they will function together, what the name of the team will be, whether they’ll have a headquarters and what kind of cool stuff will be in it, and whether the team will have a unifying theme (X-Men), team costumes (Fantastic Four) or if they’ll be a collection of different heroes from varying backgrounds each with their own look (Avengers, Justice League). We’ll also be running each character through a modified version of the background generator I used with the players when I started my last Ravenloft campaign.  It’s really good as a starting point to get ideas from when fleshing out the character backgrounds, and also good for possible story points and contacts to use during the campaign. It’s also a lot of fun rolling through the charts – last time we all got a real kick out of some of the random stuff that came out and working it into the character backgrounds. For instance, the character that was a caliban (basically a human born with Quasimodo-like deformity but possessing of greater strength than normal) ended up having a love affair with a woman that ended badly when she got pregnant. We decided he hooked up with the local rat queen down in the sewers.

This is also where players will bounce around ideas for what their heroes might look like and what costume they might wear.

Origin Story

As we know from the comics and the movies made from them, the first story is almost always the origin story of the character or characters, and so in keeping with tradition, the first actual gaming session will be the origin story.  The story elements of the scenario will be formed from three things: what we come up with rolling through the background generator, the general elements of the characters’ origin that the player comes up with when they create their character, and the elements I come up with in my role as gamemaster to flesh it out and create a scenario which can be played through.  Basically what is going to happen is that the players will give me the basic concept, and I as GM will be fleshing it out and filling in all the details of the exact circumstances, so as to tie in plotlines and elements from the campaign world. So for example, if your character were Darth Vader, the player would give me something basically like what we were told in the original trilogy about Darth Vader’s origins; his name was Anakin Skywalker, he was a good starfighter pilot when Obi Wan Kenobi met him and decided to take him on as a pupil, he was seduced by the dark side of the force and ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and becoming Darth Vader, he betrayed and murdered the jedi, when Luke and Leia were born to him they were separated at birth to protect their identities and keep them out of the hands of Vader and the Emperor, he is more machine than man now - twisted and evil.  What I’d be doing is the equivalent of the prequels (one would hope without the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks), fleshing out the story with elements like the Trade Federation, Jango Fett, Darth Maul, Count Dooku, etc, and creating situations, conflicts, and obstacles to throw at the characters like the pod race, the arena battle on Geonosis, the battle of Coruscant, etc.

So that’s pretty much it. I’m really excited about the prospect of this campaign and hope some of you will be too. I’ll post up more stuff in the future, starting with more details about the campaign setting and character creation. In the meantime, feel free to post any thoughts or comments.