Cyberpunk Superheroes Campaign

[Major_Eclectic]

So I sat down with my gaming group and, after much discussion, we settled on trying out a mash-up game; the players will be superheroes living in a dystopian cyberpunk future. Of course this means that we are trying to leave the 4-color thinking behind and casts things in shades of grey a la Watchmen or some of the more depressing Marvel stuff.

The reason I'm making this thread is that I was never really into comics as a kid and I haven't really picked it up as a man-child either. I was hoping to troll the hivemind for plot/adventure ideas, cool enemies, and ideas for player characters.

I've already run the first session and it went fairly well, but most of it was just introducing them to the world without a lot of plot development. I ended up with 5 players and I gave them 250pts to make a decently poweful "street-level" super.

1. Tactile Telekinesis: This player is a big fan of Superboy so he went in for DR w/Force Field, Flight with Enhanced Move, and A decent amount of Striking and Lifting Strength.

2. Photonic Control: This guy is going to be our stealth/assassin. He's got high levels of Nightvision, super stealth, create and control light, Illusions, and an innate laser attack.

3. Memory Manipulation: This player wanted to be able to mess with peoples memories, changing the way they recollect things etc. He got Mind Control with the conditioning limitation and a decent Mental Stun Affliction attack.

4. Thermodynamic Control: This player is the main blaster. He got fireball and ice dagger innate attacks, DR against heat and cold with the absorption enhancement so he can stand on a burning car to power his attacks.

5. The last player figured we'd need a techie-type in a cyberpunk world so he got telesend with radio, control metal, and quick gadgeteering.

[Major_Eclectic]

So the story so-far.

The players wake up in the back of some kind of armored semi-truck that's been turned on its side. After a few minutes of fumbling around they manage to open the only door to find that they are stranded on the side of a bridge in the middle of a heated gunfight between some government thugs and someone else that they never really got a good look at. This was basically a set-piece that ended with the truck getting flipped off the bridge and being hung up by the suspension cable. They crawled out and jumped across to the support girders underneath the bridge. From their they climbed down the pillar and jumped into the river as the government stooges chased after them. They all managed to struggle out of the water together about a mile downstream. While this is happening they are getting weird hints about their new found abilities (the characters didn't start out knowing anything). I made them roll for everything, they guy that can fly failed his DX roll to jump to the girders, but he felt a rush of air and made it anyway. The Fire/Ice guy failed his swimming roll and washed up onshore resting on a three foot wide piece of ice (this is in late summer). Anyways, the tromp through the woods for a bit (They are about 30 miles outside NYC) before they find an old abandoned cabin with a jeep clunker. The tech-guy gives it a once over and they take the jeep in towards the city as far as they can without going through a checkpoint. They ditched the jeep in the slums on the outskirts of the city and decide to continue on foot to avoid the authorities. The go for a while and decide to hole up for the night in a condemned industrial park. Unfortunately the stealthy guy discovered that he can create light at will and they draw the attention of some street punks looking for an easy score. During the fight with the gangers they discover most of their powers and this causes no small amount of consternation.

We had a short session because we spent so much time on characters, but hopefully this Friday we'll have a full session.

[Major_Eclectic]

The behind-the-scenes stuff

I didn't have a lot of time to put anything really elaborate together, but basically what I have right now is this: The players we're all arrested for one reason or another, some of them did decide that they were criminals before the game started, but it doesn't take much in this world to get arrested so maybe they were just law-abiding citizens in the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead of going to prison, their medical tests indicated that they were prime candidates for a new super-soldier program (of course). So they were tagged as officially deceased, and sent over to the lab to be experimented on by the sinister Professor Von Somethingoranother. Little does the evil Professor know, but his assistant, Doctor Whateverfield is actually a secret rebel sympathizer. The change takes over two years, but the players don't realize it because their memories have been wiped. All this time though, the good doctor is adjusting the mental indoctrination program to make the players heroes instead of merciless unthinking killers. Then, when all is said and done and they get shipped off to go attack the rebels, he tips off the resistance and they ambush the convoy and the players escape.

[The Benj]

Sounds fun. Have they been amnesia memory wiped, or just wiped of their time "in treatment"?

[dataweaver]

Are you willing to let your fledgeling supers improv with their powers? I'm thinking along the lines of Temporary Enhancements and Using Abilities At Default (Powers pages 172-174, which Psionic Powers used as the basis for its Psionic Techniques): in short, if they pay a small FP fee and roll at a penalty, they can manifest capabilities over and above what they have on their character sheet.

As an example, your friend who's a Superboy fan: has his character realized the nature of his powers yet? Or does he just think that he's strong and tough? In the 90s comics where Superboy was first introduced, he started out thinking that he had Superman's powers. Powers that he hadn't manifested (like enhanced senses), he assumed would appear in time. But then some little things started cropping up that didn't make sense: fire burned him and lasers hurt him, since Tactile Telekinesis is of no use against energy. OTOH, he also discovered — quite by accident — that if he touched mechanical devices (ranging in complexity from shackles to intricate explosive devices) and concentrated, he could make them fall apart. As he got more skilled, he learned that he could project his telekinesis through anything he touched in order to affect anything else touching it: with that, he could do such things as rooting people in place or launching them into the air. I think your friend would get a kick out of going through a similar process of his character discovering that his powers are completely different from what he starts out thinking they were — assuming that ship hasn't already sailed, of course.

The "DR with Force Field" that your friend took: did he include any limitations on it? Say, "Limited, Physical Attacks, -20%"? If he didn't take it, suggest to him that he probably should, and let him beef up his DR by 20% to bring the point total back up to the same level.

Meanwhile, make the other things available as Power Techniques:

For 3 FP, he can replace his Striking and Lifting ST with actual Telekinesis, with an Accessibility limitation (only affects people touching the same surface he's touching). Per Powers, this would require a Will roll at between a -2 and -8 penalty, depending on how much strength he's trying to exert (-2 for TK that costs a quarter of what his Striking and Lifting ST costs, and -8 for TK that costs the same as what his Striking and Lifting ST costs).

For 2 FP, he can extend his DR to protect others, as long as they're nearby and touching the same surface he is: treat this as a Temporary Enhancement (Area Effect, 2 yards; but only for others touching the same surface) — depending on how much of a limitation you judge that latter bit to be, the Superboy expy is going to have to make a Will roll at -4 or -5 to extend his protective field in this way.

Think of similar stunts for the other players; and depending on how much you trust them, encourage them to work out a few on their own — between sessions, and with you retaining veto power over their choices. Superheroics is big on the heroes being versatile with their powers, though you don't have to take it to the same ludicrous levels that comics sometimes reach (an extreme example was when Aquaman leveraged his infamous "Speak with Animals (Fish Only)" ability to act as an Affliction against Martians: something about telling the part of their brain that evolved from an aquatic ancestor to go to sleep). The idea here is to get them to think of what their powers should and shouldn't be able to do conceptually, and then use Temporary Enhancements and/or Using Abilities at Default to fill in any gaps that their actual character sheet write-ups don't cover.

More generally, read the "Super-Powers" section on page 178 of Powers.

More thoughts in a moment.

[Aneirin]

You should go and watch Batman Beyond (or Batman of the Future depending on which country you are in)

It does exactly what you are looking for. Cyberpunk type setting with superheroes.

Bad guys with powers and mad science that typically works out quite bad for them.

Very good episodes to watch are:-

April Moon (detective noir cyberpunk involving people blackmailing a man to make killer prosthetics for them or they will hurt his love)
Earth Mover (freaky...watch this one!)
Mind games (psychic girl is kidnapped and calls out for help)
Sneak Peek (a reporter uses stolen technology to find out secrets he shouldn't find)
Splicers (mainly good for how it ends...a lot of the bad guys wind up with interesting endings)

Oh, and absolutely any episode with Mad Stan in it...you should have a Mad Stan as a recurring NPC see if anyoe catches on.

[dataweaver]

What's the nature of these super-powers? I'm guessing that it's some sort of "meta-gene"; Professor Somethingoranother has the ability to manufacture powers. And if he can do it once, he can do it twice: in this way, you can introduce a second team of superhumans to act as foils for your group: a second set of test subjects that Doctor Whateverfield either couldn't reach or didn't know about. Are all powers engineered, or is there something going on that's causing (rare) spontaneous outbreaks of powers — possibly with dangerous side-effects? How long has the potential for superhuman powers been a known quantity, and how long have superhumans been active? Are there any conspiracies at work here?

So far, all of the powers you've described are "controller" types: everything is control and/or manipulation of something around them. Nobody has any "morphic" powers (e.g., healing factor, armored skin, elastic form, shapeshifting abilities, body of liquid or energy, etc.): everyone's composed of ordinary flesh and bone. It's possible that "super powers" in your setting simply don't include physical mutations, and that everything verges on being an exotic form of psionic powers that go well beyond the traditional definition of psionic powers. Or it could be that all physical mutations are NPCs, and the players simply haven't encountered them yet.

On the cyberpunk front, how far are you going in terms of the transhumanist elements of cyberpunk? Put another way, what does technology permit in terms of "upgrades"? Cybernetic implants? Bionic limbs and/or replacement parts? Are there any AIs or robots, or battlesuits? What TL is biotech at? Are there parahumans or bioroids in the setting? Uplifted animals? etc. Have any superhuman inventors come up with future-tech innovations beyond the setting's baseline tech? In short, how superhuman can you be without actually having powers?

[Major_Eclectic]

Originally Posted by The Benj

Sounds fun. Have they been amnesia memory wiped, or just wiped of their time "in treatment"?

They still remember their lives up to when they got arrested, just the last 2+ years of captivity were removed. I was kind of thinking of having a big reveal based on this. They already know they've lost some time, I was thinking if and when they try to make contact with the resistance guys it is revealed that they did some work for the bad guys while they were indoctrinated, leading to some understandable friction and trust issues with the freedom fighters.

[Major_Eclectic]

Originally Posted by Aneirin

You should go and watch Batman Beyond (or Batman of the Future depending on which country you are in)

It does exactly what you are looking for. Cyberpunk type setting with superheroes.

Bad guys with powers and mad science that typically works out quite bad for them.

Will do!

In fact, this whole idea sprang from a vague memory I have of something like this. I only owned like four comic books when I was a kid, but one of them was a spin-off of spider-man set in the future. I don't remember much of the story, but I remember the image of one of the first splash pages was neo-spiderman chasing after a hovercar with a punch of be-mohawked cyberpunks.

[dataweaver]

Spider-Man 2099.