As a bonafide grownup for more than a decade after finishing law school, I’ve had the good fortune of a weekly gaming group that entire time. It’s membership evolved, but at its core its friends that have known each other for more than two decades. Between careers, kids, and spouses we have all experienced our own periods of lean attendance, but the unit as a whole has persevered.
That is, until the Coronavirus. We stopped meeting immediately, but it took us weeks to finally admit that we all wanted an online alternative to our in-person meetings. As part of that, our DM decided to scale back to bi-weekly game sessions. Into this void, I volunteered my services to run a game.
When I look back at my nascent days of GMing, I always cringe about how my metaplot was often force fed to players. One of the biggest changes (which is hardly original) is to dedicate a whole session to system, setting, and characters. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll only be able to play/run campaigns in approximately 10% of the games that I’d like too, so I value player buy-in and interest over my favorite system and setting. So before I ran anything I chased everyone down electronically for feedback on what they wanted to play.
System: Sentinels Comics Role Playing Game
A spiritual successor to Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, designed by good friends. I held out as long as I could for the actual physical book, but the timing was just too perfect to ignore any longer. The system impressed me (as I expected it would), the book wowed me, and I decided to run it. After discussing it with the players, and based on their own positive experience with Marvel, they were excited to play.
Setting
Never content with making things easy on myself, and valuing buy-in, I proposed revisiting an old setting… that wasn’t Supers. The Players would take the role as new heroes returning to a near-future Earth system after decades of voluntary exile. They would have developed their own powers and examine the place of humanity’s brith for clues to the precious substance, Veredium, the key to their homeland’s super science and nascent superpowers. The pitch settled into Cowboy Bebop meets Guardians of the Galaxy.
Key Hooks
We agreed on a few key points on the setting:
- Science Fiction over Cosmic: The characters could not fly around punching spaceships. Flight, teleportation, etc. were all fair game – but the scope meant there was an understanding that their characters were not substitutes for Ships of the Line. This is Guardians of the Galaxy, not Green Lantern.
- Artificial Intelligence: The singularity occurred – over and over again. The results were eccentric – complex programs with their own proclivities and idiosyncrasies as varied and mystifying as humanity itself jockeying in an overlapping world. However, instead of humanity typically existing in the virtual realm, AI created their own physical avatars to interact with humanity.
- Veredium: The settings deviation from hard science fiction originates with a mysterious substance that was used to accelerate the capacity of artificial intelligence and ultimately build a unique FTL drive. Superhuman weirdness seemingly derives from the mysterious crystalline substance and the aftermath of that FTL event.
The Characters
The character creation process is much more unwieldy virtually than in person, but thanks to a friendly stop-in by the system co-creator it went pretty smoothly (aside from him uploading an out of date version of some rules, d’oh!). We ended up with a roster of heroes that looks like this:
- Jon: Veredium-Obsessed and Compelled to Explore. (Rasallon)
- Ben: A Sentient Space Transport to haul the party through the Sol System. (Bussy)
- Karl: Highly trained medical genius able to adapt to any situation. (Doctor Weird)
- Chris: A Power Suited Space Janitor. (Bobbie Sue)
- Isaac: A Druid Space Detective. (507)
- Justin: Loinclothed Space He-Man with a cursed Veredium sword. (Gronk)
Sentinels Comics RPG’s evocative process helped kickstart ideas and concepts for all the players. I love playing games more than planning them, but I have come around to an “Adventure 0” being a necessary part of successful long term play as an adult. Hopefully, reading about Adventure 0 helps set the stage for some interesting and insightful campaign play next post.
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