
And should you care to combine superheroics with the ethical dilemmas of changing history, try the Champions adventure "Wings of the Valkyrie," infamous for putting the PCs in the position of trying not to stop the holocaust. Stephen Fry tackled the issue of what would happen if Hitler was eliminated in his novel "Making History," which is superb reading. Since our world is the starting point it also means you can answer the "why the silly tights?" question: superhero comics exist, so the guy who just received amazing powers chooses to wear spandex because that's what superheroes should do as far as he's concerned. It's quite a bold approach, since the resulting campaign will be dramatically different from group to group. Regarding superhero settings, I've been reading Greg Porter's Eschaton recently () which takes the real world as its setting, then throws in superpowers to see what happens. But I'm always more interested in new settings than in new rules.Īnother thoroughly enjoyable show, gentlemen. I've played ORE with Michael (specifically Reign) and I didn't have enough time to work up a probability analysis of it, without which frankly I tend to feel a bit lost. I might well take a look at Wild Cards, especially since there was a GURPS 3e conversion for it which could probably be brought into 4e with only moderate screaming (assuming nobody's done it already).

Both the Wild Talents and Progenitor worlds put limits on what super powers are capable of (pretty high limits, but limits) without clearly defining what they are, though - some people can empower themselves through sheer will in Wild Talents, and one woman was mysteriously imbued with a poorly-understood power source that's occasionally contagious in Progenitor.

(Although it glosses over the idea that a delusional, emotionally-traumatized super may have subconsciously created an alien invasion - and possibly interstellar life as a whole.) I also have the Progenitor setting for Wild Talents, which is explicitly about the PCs and their peers having the power to change the world. There's a lot of good advice (some of it by Ken Hite!) on world-building, the system is very technical if not terribly granular or intuitive, and the world in the core book (an extension of the timeline from the WWII supers game Godlike, which I think I've heard you mention) is pretty well fleshed out and explores the implications of the setting. Ignore the fact that it's technically a d20 System game unless you like that sort of thing, in which case you should probably play first edition.Īnother option for both might be the One Roll Engine supers game Wild Talennts. I find the current, third, edition to be right on the edge of being too narrativist, so Michael might prefer second edition. Michael might want to take a look at Mutants & Masterminds for a system that straddles the line between overly complicated and simulationist quite nicely - although the game gets increasingly less simulationist and more hand-wavey from edition to edition. Superheroics are kind of a thing but not the only way for supers to go, with a few exceptions all powers have a common source (and most of those exceptions eventually turn out not to be), and the world is very much impacted by the presence of supers and their actions. Roger might want to consider Wild Cards for a superheroic setting. But yes, that sort of thing is definitely another option. We talked about that back in episode 1, but I've still not actually read it. (Making sure Futuristic Hitler isn't born?) Or ensure some event happens/doesn't happen. Or go make sure some invention is invented. They receive snippets of info from the future and have to go and suppress patents/destroy inventions which may cause the Downfall of Civilisation As We Know it.

Whether or not they are utopian/dystopian depends on you own personal view of Planet of the Uploaded Minds in Machine Bodies or Planet of Historical Re-enactment as Performance Art, etc etc. There are a bunch of Civilisations which are ultra-uber-high tech and can do, have or make anything. A game which sort of does the utopia thing is Sufficiently Advanced, which I have read (1st edition) but never played.
