As I am wont to do, I was going through my Google Drive to clear out documents that I no longer needed the other night. I clicked into a document without a name to discover the beginning notes of a project that I had long ago stopped working on. I did so with every intention of going back to it, but as is often the case, life moved on and I just kind of forgot about the project. Allow me to set the scene for you with an artfully framed flashback.
*insert Wayne’s World sound effects here*
(Still with me? Good. *clears throat*)
The year was 2011.
Set two of the Dragon Age Box set had been released by Green Ronin Publishing, and they had also announced their intention of taking the engine the game ran on and using it as a generic game engine – the Adventure Game Engine. Fans of the game were excited about the prospect and many had already started to look at working on their own hacks to run the game in their preferred settings and genres. I looked at the game and I started thinking about different ways that it could be used and somehow my brain went to to the idea of superheroes.
I recently ended up purchasing the basic fantasy rules they released for the Adventure Game Engine and when I stumbled across this project collecting dust, decided that it was worth dusting off. The way the game runs precludes it from being as complex and as comprehensive of a game like Hero System, Wild Talents, or Mutants and Masterminds in terms of power creation and refinement, but there is a lot of promise that I feel can be drawn from it for a fast to play, easy to resolve superhero RPG with a lot of old school feel and action.
I think it was the idea of character origins that drew my mind there. They worked so well with the concept of superheroes as we know them. The heart and soul of character creation in Dragon Age was choosing your character’s origin. This decided a great number of things about your character: your race, what classes were open to you, and some basic advancements to your character’s abilities as well as some random choices from a small table unique to that origin. This ensured that while similar, no two characters from the same origins were exactly the same at character creation. The basic fantasy rules changed that up a little bit by allowing you to choose your race from the basic fantasy races which determined your starting abilities and focuses as if it were your origin. Furthermore it introduced the concept of backgrounds that give your character an additional choice of an ability focus.
With Heroes of the Silver AGE, the origin remains the heart and soul of character creation. Obviously instead of determining your race and your class choices, it determines the origins of your hero’s powers. Maybe you were caught in a lab accident and developed your powers in the resultant energy surge. Maybe you suffered what would have been a lethal dose of radiation or other cosmic energy that instead transformed your body into what you are now. Maybe you were simply born different, either as an alien being or as a mutant. Maybe you weren’t born at all, but instead were created – a robot or a cyborg. Or maybe you simply decided that enough was enough and took to the streets to save the little guy from things like organized crime. The point is that each of these origins we commonly see becomes a choice that you select that helps to determine your hero’s starting abilities
I had originally toyed with the idea of secondary origin that was keyed off of your character’s motivation. After all – why a hero chooses to fight is often times just as important as how he got his powers in the first place. Without Uncle Ben’s influence, we wouldn’t have Spider-Man. Without Steve Roger’s desire to do the right thing crossed with a healthy dose of survivor’s guilt, Captain America wouldn’t still be carrying the shield today. Bruce Wayne would not have become the hero that Gotham City needs if he didn’t endure the trauma of seeing his parents murdered in front of him. Motivation has a very strong place in this game, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that playing it as a secondary origin wasn’t a good fit. It shouldn’t be something that necessarily gives you more power, but something that should drive your character. Adapting the background mechanic from Fantasy AGE felt a lot more fitting in the end.
The three basic classes – the Warrior, Rogue, and Mage fit perfectly with the superhero archetypes of the Bruiser, Acrobat, and Blaster. These basic concepts fit any number of different super hero concepts. Captain America and Hulk are definitely Bruisers, Spider-Man and Batman define the Acrobat archetype, and Cyclops and Iron Man exemplify the Blaster character. The basic classes actually translate over pretty much punch for punch at every level. The Acrobat gets bonuses when he is able to outspeed or outwit his opponent. The Bruiser is really good at hurting people with their body. The Blaster gets a basic energy blast attack that functions just like the Mages’s arcane attack.
The rest of the game is basically updating the talent and focus list, removing what doesn’t make sense and adding new ones to fill the gap. Weapons did need a small overhaul – there isn’t as much of a need to starkly delineate the difference in damage between Deadpool’s katana and Mjolnir in a game like this. So instead of having a bunch of different weapons I opted to keep it simple and have broad weapon categories like “One Handed Melee” or “Two Handed Thrown” or “One Handed Ranged” that all had their own damage code associated with them. That way it doesn’t really matter when the gang of thugs armed with tire irons, chains, and crowbars attack the heroes – they can all use the same damage code.
Where things get really interesting is turning various broad superpowers into talents. Things like Superstrength, Superspeed, Elemental Affinity, and Gadgets all become talents along with a number of other powers that you generally see in comic books. With the way that talents are written and the way that the game is designed, it’s hard to be anything but broad in general power creation. However, my ace in the hole, and where I can really have fun is with the game’s stunt system. For those of you unfamiliar with the system, you roll 3d6 when making a test. One of these dice is known as your Stunt Die. When you roll doubles on a successful test, you generate a number of stunt points equal to the number shown on the Stunt Die. These stunts are used to modify your current action in a number of ways from dealing more damage on a successful attack to positioning yourself advantageously, to noticing key features about the scene. There are really any number of ways that this system can be used with regards to super powers. Designing power stunts that mimic more specific things about a hero’s powers like Spider-Man’s ability to immobilize people to the ground with his webbing or Sue Storm’s ability to remain intangible and invisible for a time with her power come to mind immediately.
About the only concept from the basic game that doesn’t transfer over quite so well from the basic game is that of character specializations. These are a prominent mechanic that gives the character access to a special talent based on a character archetype that gives them powerful abilities that allow the three basic classes to differentiate themselves at higher levels of play beyond talent and focus selection. Now, superpower talents might be enough to set individual heroes apart from each other, but I am toying with the idea of giving them access to “Champion Talents.” These would be powerful abilities drawn from the various superhero archetypes out there such as Captain America’s ability to be a leader on the battlefield, Wolverine’s berserker fury, or Batman’s utility belt of gadgets. This is still very much in the formative stages, but I am liking where it is going. It fits in line with the specialization idea without forcing me to create “character classes” for higher level super hero play.
Again, while this will never be as comprehensive of a game like Mutants and Masterminds or Wild Talents or Hero System, I do think that it could stand on it’s own as a fast to play, quick to resolve system to tell some comic book stories in. And now that it’s been rescued from the recesses of my Google Drive folder, maybe we can take it back out of it’s slip cover and give it another readthrough. We’ll be back later with a deeper look at some new talent designs and some more specific rules. So keep an eye out for that next special issue, true believers.
Ben Erickson
