Well, I managed to make it 3 months without running late on a game. Now I bet you’re already expecting that “wait! I have a perfectly good reason!” Good for you. Honest truth, my gaming group went through a period of collapse after pax south, and we were having trouble starting it up again. I was able to rally most of the folks in on a Wildemount themed D&D 5e campaign, but that was before I had a chance to read the new source book and its utter lack of anythig other than setting and some extremely questionable new rules (I’m looking at you, effectively infinite fire sword blood hunters).
I don’t really know why I decided to turn it into a megadungeon, I think becaues I kind of think the world of Wildemount is a huge hack on top of Forgotten Realms that isn’t even really very interesting. It was probably also related to Dungeondraft’s early access release. So we started with the free roll20 adventure that takes place in the frozen north regarding the players stopping the spread of a particularly aggressive and novel sickness with an edgy name that kills people by turning them into blocks of ice.
I’ve always wanted to make a good megadungeon, as I have never actually played a good one. I’m attempting to introduce basic metroidvania mechanics into the map, which is probably more interesting to me than the players if I’m being honest. But at least I think people are having fun. Well this takes an incredible amount of time. I’ve made about 40 maps and their respective monsters in new and crashy Dungeondraft, and am about 30% through the dungeon. I’ve also got the factions and whatnot figured out (allowing the NPC organization objectives to change to the players whims in a somewhat systemic way).
I’ll eventually release the whole thing here once it’s mostly done, but in the mean time I still need to produce monthly games. So please consider this April post to be a late March game, and April will be a 1 shot 5e adventure (unrelated to the previously mentioned megadungeon).
So, in late february, my good friend Will asked that I make a superhero game (I think because he was sick of hearing me complain about Joker and Suicide Squad). I had a few goals in this mini-game. First, I wanted a situation where characters like Rorschach could be on the same team as Superman without being hidden in the shadows. That means that we can’t have a sitation where relative powers are required and purchased with some sort of a budget. It also means we need something that normal people can do to help super-people who can fly and shoot lasers. To this end, I settled on “Preparation” as an attribute, allowing players to add details into the scenes that wouldn’t normally be there. Secondly, I wanted a situation where very powerful superheroes were weak mentally, in the way that Superman can basically do anything he wants, but he has to sulk for months in his literal fortress of solitude after somebody makes fun of him in a newspaper. And last, I wanted a game where the the true part of the game has little to nothing to do with being super. Anything that fits within your character’s powers “just happens” without contest, as a binary operation. In reality, the game is about the Nemesis (GM) stretching and breaking the heroes down by forcing them to do things that goes against their ideals.
The canonical if somewhat overdone example is forcing heroes to choose between saving 1 person on a train track or 5 passengers on a train car, but there are many more examples. This was the poorly constructed premise of at least several thousand Marvel movies after all. What I like most of these situations is how there are no answers that the heroes can make that are ultimately “good”. You can save the world from invading slug people, but in the end an entire city is destroyed in the ensuing battle and the nation suffers economically and is subject to political upheaval and bullying from foreign powers. In this respect, you may take actions that maintain your idealism and mental fortitude, but are extremely unpopular publically.
The peculiar mechanical component of this is that superheroes if played long enough, will most likely either self destruct or become villains. I don’t think it’s actually a great game to play (I suspect our real lives are entirely too full of this kind of thing these days), but it is an interesting experiment. We have not had a chance to play this game, and probably never will. So there are very likely some rough spots in it, and missing rules that work in my head but not in practice. But without further adieu, I present to you Becoming Heroes.
