Adrift: Games that will never happen

It being a holiday weekend, and my evil friends made me play Atlas Reactor last night, I am a bit late getting this Monday post up. One thing Fezzypug and I talk about is the lost campaign, that game that you get the idea for and just never gets off the ground for whatever reason. Maybe you played one or two sessions and it just wasn't working. Maybe you just never found time to run the game. So we are using Adrift to highlight some of these campaign ideas that will never be.

Poking god in the eye

I had this idea when the first Avengers movie came out. Shield has this awesome floating base, all kinds of tech and gadjits, a world wide network of surveillance, government support without government oversight. The coolest thing about Shield is that basically everyone in it is a normal person. No powers to speak of, just highly trained dedicated professionals. This got me thinking about the role of normal people in a super powered world. There are a lot of comics about this. There are characters like the Punisher, or even supposedly Batman who are normals playing with the big boys who have powers that can destroy the world. These characters are still super heroes, they have plot immunity, and take superhuman levels of bodily punishment.

What if the charcters were actual normal humans? They may be the best in their field or whatever, but still just normal people. If a normal decided to fight even a B list super villain they would be killed in one attack. This game would be about the players coming up with a plan, an organization, some way of taking out a heavy hitter supervillain.

The backstory would be that a group of super villains banded together and pulled off the ultimate plan. They would get rid of all the major super heroes, either by fighting and killing them, blackmail, imprisoning them somewhere, or whatever means necessary. At the same time one of the villains takes control of all the people in Canada, turning them into his personal mindless Canadian slave army. He claims that he can reproduce this wherever he wants, so if the world governments don't give in to the villians demands, he will mind control everyone. The governments give in, and chop up north America into super villain fiefdoms with the villains each running their own tiny empires.

The actual villians were never worked out, just some archetypes that would be fleshed out in the zero session probably. A hulk type indestructible, infinitely strong guy. A super powerful mentalist, obviously, professor X gone bad kind of thing. A super scientist, probably hiding in a powerful suit of armor with killer robots patrolling his lands. They could be anything, basically as long as they were powerful enough that defeating normal humans was trivial for them.

The players would take the role of the resistance. Just a handful of motivated individuals looking to take down the super evil. At the time I was into radical sandbox style games. So the players could take literally any path to victory they wanted. I was going to suggest that they work on one villain at a time.

They could build up a crazy organization like shield, with adventures focused on acquiring tech, bases, an army. They could build a terrorist organization, decentralized, harder to destroy but also harder to mobilize for a plan. They could just keep the group small and remain just the player characters, and work on setting clever traps and schemes. So there could possibly be a base/org management part of the game.

The adventures would be very espionage based, gathering information, finding weaknesses, recruiting assets. With the players finding ammunition against their target until they are ready to fire the plan, in some climactic showdown probably.

In my head it was a short term game, maybe 8 to 10 sessions, limited to the buildup and take down of one of the villains, with the option of extending it if the game seemed to be running well. Character death would be on the table, and the stakes would be high. Player progress could easily be destroyed if things didn't go well.

There are some issues with this game. The big hurdle I hit was player buy in. The idea of a game where you are a mouse trying to kill a tiger doesn't appeal to everyone. Some players thrive on these kinds of hard mode rpgs but they aren't for everyone. Another problem is keeping the characters involved in the fun parts of adventures, the actiony bits. It would be easy for the players to put themselves in a position where they would just stay back in the base and send minions to do things. As part of the zero session I think you have to suggest that the players build characters that want to be in the mix of things, that believe if something is worth doing, it's worth doing yourself. Using minions to do side missions would be an thing for sure. But the players need to be present for the big plot things. I feel like this kind of game doesn't fit well with my current rpg group, we tend to have shorter sessions with one fight per night as a rule. I think this game needs some room to breath so longer sessions that are potentially more boring from an action and combat perspective.

Hope you enjoyed a little insight into some of the thinking that takes place before a campaign launches. There are many more games that will never see play,