Champions: One Earth (Broad Strokes)

Now that I've gotten a weekly rhythm going with my Champions: One Earth campaign, I wanted to share my initial document(s) in creating the campaign -- the ones that helped me define the starting point of the campaign and moved me past the hurdle of "enough world-building" to actually running games.

BACKGROUND

On this blog, I've been posting -- on and off over the years -- about a gaming universe for superheroes that would incorporate core elements from the DC & Marvel Universes. And I've finally done it, with a kind of vague, hand-wavey implementation on the setting history. Enough to allow the players to get a handle on their characters (and me to get a handle on the adventures and campaign) before I fill out the many corners of the multiverses.

Campaign Hook: Knight Watch Red

The PCs start off as plainclothes super-heroes tasked to investigate incidents (involving locations, individuals, and artifacts) of a potentially multiversal nature. If there's potential danger, they are to secure the location, individuals, and artifacts involved, contain multiversal incidents, and protect sentients and the dominant reality.

Borrowing from SlyFlourish's Six Truths approach to fantasy rpg campaigns, and applying it to my own (just enough for my players to jump onboard without having to read pages and pages of background), I came up with the following for my super-heroic campaign:

1. The world of Knight Watch Red has a single timeline from WWII to the present involving different ages of super-heroes (from Marvel & DC).
2. Super-heroes and super-villains tend to age normally from their first appearances, and have seen multi-generational legacies across heroic ages.
3. Nations, corporations, and organizations recognize the threats of metahumanity based on battles of super-heroes and super-villains across history.
4. Nations, corporations, and organizations also recognize the value of metahumanity in conflicts against attempts to conquer or destroy the Earth.
5. Organizations like the Justice Society and Checkmate evolved from fighting crime to monitoring, regulating, and cultivating the super-human societies of Earth. (edit)
6. Recent anomalous incidents suggest that multiversal incursions are weakening the fabric of reality, and must be contained to safeguard the timeline.

The combination of these Six Truths helped me establish a familiar combined universe, yet one that was also different from the ones in the current comics -- where some heroic and villainous mantles are already on their second or third generations, while others are eternally frozen in time and still hold on to their places despite their aging compatriots. It also allowed me to briefly expound on new elements of a status quo that place Earth in a universe with aliens, but have somehow placed it in a semi-static status quo that does not have an incredibly fertile mutant population with Omega-level threats around each corner, that does not have yet another alien race invading this week / month / year, that does not have hyper-advanced technology in the hands of common folk. But more on this in another post.

Of course, I added a Seventh Truth to this set, which was related to the creation of the characters themselves:

7. Each PC must be a legacy character. Whether they are related by blood to another hero or villain in the DC or Marvel universe, or they are inspired by one of them, or they have inherited artifacts, knowledge, abilities through various means, they must be tied to an existing character in these universes.

The reasons for this last one were: (a) to provide me with a handle on the types of adventures that these created characters would like to engage in; and (b) to allow me to quickly and easily grasp the backstories of these characters -- including whatever time-/science-/space-bending implications their histories and powers might have. It reduced the need for long (and potentially contentious) discussions about histories, NPCs, powers, abilities, enemies and allies through broadstrokes mentions of key figures in the DC/Marvel setting (filtered through the rough timeline and current status quo in my head). Oddly enough, it also curtailed a tendency for my Champions players to come up with the wildest character concepts executed in the most-game breaking way possible -- by giving them a chance to go through favorite character concepts and legacies and an opportunity to put their own stamp on this legacy character.