I’ve started Rising Tide, an Astonishing Super Heroes campaign set in Boston, MA. This article will take a deep-dive behind the GM’s screen on how I setup a superhero campaign loaded with historical detail with very little prep.
This is about building the campaign setting itself. I’ll talk a little about the setting of Boston, how I pulled together an awesome roster of NPCs and a few cool locations, and how I generated the first scenario of the campaign. Best of all, I’ll show you how I was able to do it very easily and very quickly by putting most of the work on the players!
Origin Stories
The first thing I did was use the new lifepath-style character creation we’re working on for ASH Book 2, in a chapter we call “Spectacular Origins.” This system is heavily derived from systems like R. Talsorian’s lifepath system (Mekton Zeta and other games), Cortex’s pathways system (first scene Smallville and also in the Cortex Prime Game Handbook), and perhaps the originator of it all, Traveller. In this system, the players list some core archetypes of their characters to establish their heroic and secret identities alongside some vague ideas of their powers and talents. Then, they go through several collaborative rounds naming NPCs, locations, and sometimes events or objects that exist in the campaign setting. Effectively, this creates a web of relationships connecting the heroes to the campaign world, while at the same time populating it with stuff the GM can use almost immediately; just add stats!
The players developed characters connected to Boston, MA and specifically both Boston University and some activist groups. Among their enemies were a crooked District Attorney, a criminal kingpin, and a few minion-level criminals that they’ve already put away, establishing their cred as heroes in the city. After finishing up their specific trait ranks, it was in my hands to do something with this information.
My next tool was something I’d been perusing for months just out of sheer curiosity: the Public Domain Super Heroes wiki. Armed with those two things — a web of NPC names and archetypes alongside some cool locations within Boston, plus a wiki of hundreds of fully developed but semi-obscure heroes and villains — I could feel that this campaign setting was going to come together quickly if I was smart about it.
An Aside: Alternative Settings
We also considered a few other possible settings for this campaign before deciding to go with something that was “all new” (at least, to the players). I polled them to see if they wanted to set the game in the Marvel universe, a cross-over/Battleworld-style universe that might included characters from lots of disparate comic universes (DC, Marvel, Valiant, IDW, etc.), and a previous campaign setting I’d created, called SUPERMAX!, which I built for Cortex. We decided we wanted to forge the destiny of these characters and not be tied down to legacy characters or teams. At the same time, SUPERMAX! proved to be a little too dark and large-scale for what we wanted to explore: local stories and characters, without Earth- or universe-shattering stakes.
But the work I’d already done for SUPERMAX! meant that I had about two dozen NPCs already developed that weren’t in any other (existing, popular) universe, and that these particular players weren’t familiar with. Incidentally, some of these NPCs were literally existing comic book characters who I just renamed and used different art for, but others had more unique traits or identities that come about in playing that campaign. That left with me at least a half dozen that I could easily drop into Boston with their own stories and artwork, and I’d just need stats.
Rising Tide campaign background
The Setting
Since the players already chose Boston, I knew I had to get up to speed on the city fast, be able to reference landmarks at the drop of a hat, and maybe find some interesting bits of history or whatever to inspire some gaming material. Here’s what I did to flesh it out!
Since I grew up in CT, had visited Boston a couple times, and knew many folks that went to college there, I had a working knowledge of the city. But I knew that doesn’t mean a lot for running a campaign: you want the feel, you want specific sites, and you want to have a sense of what it’s like actually moving around the city. So I picked up a great map for using wet or dry erase markers and sticking post-it notes on: the Laminated Boston Map by Borch. I also picked up the DK Eyewitness Boston Travel Guide, because it not only gives you a tourist’s view of the city, but it also has stellar cutaway maps of important sites: I’d have the layout of important local hotspots, museums, and even things like important cultural or political buildings. This is a superhero game, so knowing what the heroes see as they crash through the walls of a building is always nice! Being able to track their movements on the fold-out map would give me a sense of scale, travel times, and what districts and sites they’d be traveling through.
I did two more things to complete my game-friendly knowledge of the city. Normally, I’d just do the first thing: pick up a history reference of the location, in case there were significant historical events I could use to inform my general knowledge, potential scenario plots, or NPC stories. But I did the second thing because I just knew there was going to be existing RPGs that had visited and built out material for Boston. I was right!
The first thing I did after ordering the map and travel guide was to pick up the e-book version of The Atlas of Boston History, and just skimmed it. I’ll read it more thoroughly later, but I wanted to be able to pick out a couple threads that might be interesting. This book made it easy: I actually really enjoyed the visuals of the volcanic pre-Ice Age look at the region, as well as the visual of how a glacier sat on the area for a bunch of time afterward. Cool nature-stuff might come in handy, so I filed that away for a later scenario idea. Then, there was of course the Salem Witch Trials. One of my players already chose a magic item as the source of one of their character’s powers, so magic’s definitely going to feature prominently. I made sure to read that section and jot some notes down on anything that sounded scenario-friendly.
The second thing I did was skim some Boston-set roleplaying game resources from other game lines. I picked up used copies of Boston Unveiled (for Mage: The Awakening) and Boston: the Broken Cradle of Liberty (for the Savage Worlds cyberpunk setting Interface Zero).
Boston Unveiled was great because it gave me more on Boston’s “mystical history” which I can use to inform later plot points. It also provided something approaching 50 NPCs, all of which have their “mage” identity and their mundane one, which is so very comic-booky that I couldn’t pass up using some in my campaign.
Boston: the Broken Cradle of Liberty had some neat plot points regarding climate change, leading to the creation of the “Boston Sea Wall” to protect the city from rising sea levels, as well as turning Logan Airport partially into a military base. I loved those ideas, but envisioned them as a work in progress: the military is overseeing the creation of a sea wall to protect the city from future climate change. That’s not only a very hopeful message in this day and age (which is very much in the spirit of comic book universes), but also a potential source of drama! Think of all the corruption and problems surrounding Boston’s Big Dig, then add military and supervillain terrorists to the mix and you’ve got 20 scenarios that practically write themselves! The book also had some cool stuff on how to develop a cyberpunk gang, so I tagged that info for potential future inspiration. Boston’s got plenty of Irish and Italian mafia stories, after all.
The NPCs
By this point, I’ve already got about a half-dozen NPCs that the players have built-in ties with, another half-dozen from my previous campaign (SUPERMAX!), a bunch of inspiring characters from the Mage: The Awakening book, and around a hundred entries I’ve already read from the Public Domain Super Heroes. I poked around Pinterest for some inspirational art to go with these characters, and found artist Phil Cho, whose work is incredibly prodigious! Since he often does alternate costume or even “variant Earth” versions of popular supers, a ton of his stuff is relevant and easy to use for different characters. After I tagged some images I liked, I realized I could work on that forever (and would enjoy doing so), but what I needed was to know what NPCs would show up in the first scenario, so I knew who I needed to spend time creating stats for. (I’d also focus on getting images for them, since we play online and I use images extensively as a way to keep the players focused on their screens.)
Based on the characters and themes the players came up with, I had a revelation: the players wanted to run a group that wasn’t just clobbering villains, but also making the city a less corrupt, cleaner place for the average working class citizen. Ideas of political accountability, charity, and climate were all part of what we initially talked about, and with a corrupt District Attorney among the NPCs they named, it made sense to have the first scenario center on corruption.
Plus, with so much magical stuff on my reading list, it also made sense to incorporate a few of the NPCs I picked out of the Public Domain Super Heroes wiki who had magical powers. These characters should populate or inform the backstory of the scenario. So many of those heroes and villains from the wiki are Golden and Silver Age (due in part to how long copyright claims last), so it’d be easy to cast them as the heroes from those respective eras and have the players deal with their legacy, rather than with them as actual people. Imagine a campaign setting where Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the X-Men, and everyone like that has long since died, retired, or disappeared. That thought stuck with me.
So…I wanted to get an NPC list, but I felt like the scenario had to come first to narrow my selection down. Mote it be!
The Scenario
So how do you pull a scenario out of all this and decide on the NPCs to feature? Easy: randomly determine it!
I was already thinking of shows like Leverage (Leverage: Redemption is out now and is great!) and the short-lived Vengeance Unlimited based on what my players were talking about in terms of themes, so I turned to Leverage: The Roleplaying Game, which has a really cool “Situation Generator” to develop heist-style missions. I figured this would be perfect for the characters: they are heroes called in by activists and wronged parties to help hold those in power accountable when they abuse their station. After a little over a half-dozen dice rolls, here’s what I had (the dice roll results are the numbers in parentheses, in case anyone who owns Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is following along on page 138):
- Client: (2) Scientist/engineer
- Problem: (9) Framed
- Pressure: (7) Knows one of the crew
- Mark: (8) Attorney
- Mark’s Angle: (9) Greedy
- Mark’s Power: (3) Powerful
- Mark’s Weakness: (1) Arrogant
- Mark’s Vulnerability: (7) Enemies
- Who Else Is In Play? (2) Guilty conscience
- The Twist: (2) It’s personal
I won’t spoil the story; check out the campaign journals I’m posting and see if you can spot how these rolls influenced the plot! Once I’m done running the scenario, I’ll revisit this and clarify things. But until then, here’s all you need to know:
This scenario outline immediately helped me flag which of the NPCs the players had already created through their origin stories would play a big role, so I narrowed that list down to about 3 or 4. One of them had a name that was highly reminiscent of one of the characters on the Public Domain Super Heroes wiki, so I simply made that an alias for the person; now I’ve got their super powers nailed down!
The outline also gave me a couple ideas of character archetypes I would need to fill, so once again I looked at some of the Public Domain wiki entries I’d already read that fit those, and made some tweaks to the characters. Some of them I simply used the wiki entry as their back story, and envisioned how they might be as a retired hero (old Bruce Wayne from Batman Beyond was a regular source of inspiration!). For others, I simply re-envisioned them as a modern version of the same character; in a couple cases I would use the wiki entry as the original character and have some who “picked up the mantle”, and in others I just pretended they didn’t appear until modern day. This way, the players couldn’t just read those wiki entries and know what to expect in my campaign, but they’d likely be able to see the through-lines, at least.
Finally, I needed a couple superpowered mooks, so I just took some of the characters from the Mage: The Awakening book and used their name and magical abilities as inspiration, then recast them as more run-of-the-mill costumed villains. At this stage, they are such minor characters that I feel comfortable simply making them stoic and silent when it comes to backstory questions, or just ad-libbing something. If I need anything more later, I can read their Mage entry in more detail and jot down some notes.
Notably, I use Google Slides to create an “NPC card” for each of my NPCs I’m going to use. This is handy because I can keep them all in an easily scrollable file with links and whatever else I need, and can download the individual slides as image files, or the whole thing as a PDF. On top of that, I can jot down the NPCs’ stats in the “speaker’s notes” area of each slide, so if I ever show off the images to the players (i.e if I use the presentation features of Slides), the stats are hidden from them and only I can see them.
Boom! Scenario written in about 1-2 pages of notes (using Google Docs), and a cast of about a dozen NPCs fleshed out in varying degrees. It took me about an hour to stat out the ones I knew I’d need for the very first session, and that’s a wrap!
(Quick tip: you can ignore Talents for most NPCs by simply raising between one and three of their Primary Abilities by a rank or two. NPCs also don’t need their own list of contacts/affiliations, and you can usually greatly simplify their power write-ups without worrying about SFX and Weaknesses, except in the cases where it’ll be a plot point.)
Some NPC cards for the Rising Tide campaign
Process & Tools
Looking back, the process was simply:
- Ask the players where they want the campaign set.
- Ask the players what cool allies, contacts, rivals, and enemies their characters have already dealt with.
- Pull together whatever resources that might (1) help me emphasize those things, (2) simplify or streamline my workload by giving me stuff that’s partially or entirely useful as-is.
Which leads me to the final checklist of what I used:
- Real-world Boston: Laminated Boston Map by Borch, DK Eyewitness Boston Travel Guide, and The Atlas of Boston History
- Character and setting inspiration: Public Domain Super Heroes wiki, Boston Unveiled (for Mage: The Awakening) and Boston: the Broken Cradle of Liberty (for the Savage Worlds cyberpunk setting Interface Zero)
- Scenario creation: The Situation Generator from Leverage: The Roleplaying Game
What Do YOU Need?
Chances are, you’re not running a campaign in Boston. Well, as it turns out, that probably means you can rely on an even smaller list of resources, especially if you’re going to go with whatever’s handy. You might already own a superhero campaign setting like Atlas City (which is built for Astonishing Super Heroes!), in which case the location and NPCs are already done for you; just tell the players they are starting there! If they aren’t familiar with the setting, create a very brief introduction: 2-3 paragraphs on places and people of note, or better yet a 3-5 slide presentation showing that stuff is even more impactful. Then ask them some questions, stressing that they should keep the answers vague (think in terms of archetypes rather than specific individuals or sites) so you can help fill in the answers with existing characters or sites from the campaign setting. Good questions are:
- Who is your parent, guardian, mentor, or mysterious patron?
- Do you have a friend in the city willing to show you the ropes, or that you worked with in the past?
- Have you made any rivals?
- Who’s someone you defeated, put in jail, or seek revenge on for some slight against you?
You might have enough knowledge of a cool place that you don’t need to seek out travel guides. Or you can save money and just hit Wikipedia and Google Maps and probably develop enough setting material after just an hour or two of research. (Using Google Maps, you can create a saved list of important places in the location of your choice, and during a game session just pull up the map and at a glance see all those pinned spots!) Again, think in terms of the players interests and also try to look at places and people as they might appear in a movie. Is there a cool location just begging for a climactic battle scene, like the Space Needle in Seattle, or some ancient ruins in South America or the Middle East? Is there a historical figure that might have interesting connections to modern societies, like an order of mages, or maybe a figure that’s somehow still active, like Rasputin or a mummy?
Or maybe you like the idea of using my template, and love the idea of a deep-dive before setting up a campaign. In that case, arm yourself with a map (or use Google Maps and create a saved list of important places in the location of your choice), pick up a travel guide and/or history book about the area, and snoop around the internet to see if there are any other RPGs that have already done something with that location. And if you need scenario inspiration, check out things like the Superheroic Adventure Generator (they have ones for almost every other genre, too) or Inkwell Ideas’ Sidequest Decks (they also have ones for a myriad of genres and settings). My use of Leverage was one of my most inspired moments, but there are literally hundreds of other, similar resources online. Just look for keywords like scenario, adventure, campaign, setting, and generator.
Regardless, being able to pull from existing character backstories is a huge time-saver, and the Public Domain Super Heroes wiki was awesome for that. If you’re using an existing universe, there’s invariably a wiki for it (or you can start one); use it and make your life easier. But if you’re building your own, don’t hesitate to use wikis and just reskin and rename as needed (there are name generators everywhere, too). You can also check out books like The Super Villains Handbook Deluxe Edition (for Icons, and notably also using some public domain characters) for loads of pregenerated villains, many of whom do not have deep ties to an assumed campaign setting. Even if you don’t understand the rules mechanics of these books, the write-ups talk about the characters’ powers in plain terms, so it should be easy to extract what you need for their Astonishing Super Heroes stats.
Your Turn
How did you create your superhero campaign setting? What resources did you find useful in this article, or what’s missing? Hit the comments and tell us your origin stories!
All art copyright the respective artists; these images are used as inspiration for the characters depicted in our homebrew campaign.
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