Running Superhero Campaigns

Since college, I've run 2 superhero campaigns and played in a handful of others run by my friends, many in the same fictitious city, Capital City, Maryland.  Capital City started as a nebulous place a friend set a his superhero campaign in for a short campaign to give me time to write the next part of whatever I was running at the time, which I think was one of the longer session gaps in Tim's Outlanders.

At a certain point I decided to give running a superhero campaign a try and I needed a map and some history.  I looked at a map of Maryland and decided a port town on the southern shore would work.  I did some reading on the history of the area and picked the actual town of Port Tobacco as the kernel to build a fictitious city around.  I made one divergence from real history - when the bay silted up, rather than that being the end of the town, smugglers approached the town council and offered to dredge the bay in exchange for "unique docking privilege's".  The town council accepted "The Arrangement" and everything else grew from that.  That gave rise to The Bold and The Determined, a campaign with a high-level team and a street-level team, so I could run whatever adventures popped into my head. 

Then I had to write some sort of adventures.

Superheroes is a hard genre to run for me as I never had a working example of what a long term campaign looked like.  This is surprising for me as I devoured comics when I was growing up, reading widely.  I also had access to the comic book collection of one of my uncles (Silver Age material) and eventually my dad's Golden Age comics.  Despite all that, I never gave a lot of thought as to how the stories were put together.

It has taken me quite a bit of time to work out what was missing and what I was doing wrong.  First, superhero comics are soap operas.  Without the drama a campaign is just a series of fights and that gets boring quick.  That lesson took a long time to learn and work out a solution to.  The last superhero campaign I ran, SABRE, I think succeeded at this.  There was drama and secrets between characters, culminating in one PC needing to convince the team to save his secret ID but without explaining to them that was who they were saving.

I've also learned that I currently cannot write a superhero campaign for more than 5 players and that group had 7-8 players in it at any one time.  I felt that some of the characters were not getting enough screen time and some I just had no plot for.  My next superhero campaign will be limited to 4 players max until I can "git gud" at spinning up the drama.

All of this is due to reader Brian Rogers asking to read about my superhero campaigns and me realizing how little of them made it onto this blog.  I have 3 sessions for SABRE, which I do not think is complete, and nothing of The Bold and The Determined or the villain game, Four Summoners, which I wrote some supplemental fiction for.

I'll spend some time this week getting a landing page for my superhero campaigns set up and link in the SABRE material.  Then I have to track down the material for The Bold and The Determined, which I think is still over on Obsidian Portal, and port it over here.

That's it for now.  Type more at you later!