Wednesday, November 05, 2008

In Which The Warlock Remembers He Has a Blog!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently--the weeks have been hectic recently, as work has had me hopping on IEP and MFE documentation, to say nothing of my normal workload. As such, it's been a touch rough to focus on gaming during all this time.

That said, I have come up with something of an idea for a game...if I can pull it off.

The premise would be something of a coupling of Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen and some of the more recent Ramsey Campbell Cthulhu Mythos work, with a touch of Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth thrown in for good measure.

Players would take the role of low-powered superheroes--think Punisher, Batman, or Moon Knight instead of Green Lantern or Iron Man--as they investigate psychotic supervillains, vile cultists and serial killers, and the conspiracies behind the banning of global "superheroes".

The biggest problem in this centers on the system to use in this. There's no easy answers here...

I'm tempted to use Mutants and Masterminds, as many people are familiar with the d20 system. However, M&M suffers from the rules bloat of 3.5e D&D, and is really numbers heavy. While I'd always have d20 NPC Wiki to fall back on, I hate to do that on a consistent basis. Plus, it seems like most of the orientation in M&M is towards high-powered, Golden Age superheroes, which isn't exactly the time period in question.

I've heard good things about Silver Age Sentinels and Champions, but I own neither, which is...well, more money for only a singular game. And further, I don't know much about the actual nitty-gritty of either system.

As such, I'm left with my old stand-by: Heroes Unlimited. While I love the quirky little Palladium system, it's not exactly the most elegant thing out there, and many players balk at learning a new system just for one game. However, for low-powered supers, there might not be a better system to catch it.

Suggestions? I'm all ears...

2 comments:

  1. The easy answer is... WEGS, the Wickedly Errant Game System! I just haven't gotten around to "supers-sizing" it yet... Think of powers as skills/spells... And spoints as their power pools / energy / stamina... SPS can stand for Super Power Strength, too!

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  2. Just for that, I'm going to play Rorscach in your next WittCon game....

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