I'd like to run a game set in the Marvel universe just after the Fantastic Four return from their first mission, though likely bumping the timeline so that happens in 2016.

The twist: The players do not and will not have superpowers. Well, probably not. They're just normal people in the setting, witnesses to all the dangerous and bizarre happenings of the Age of Heroes.

You're not Daredevil. You're not Spider-Man. You're not even Rick Jones. You're Foggy Nelson, you're Ben Ulrich, you're a normal person living in a world suddenly inhabited by gods.

But you're not a sidekick. You've got your own problems. Your own plot. Your own life that is sometimes interrupted by Thor dropping an ocean liner into the middle of your morning commute, or an alien invasion making you miss your kid's birthday.

Superheroes exist. But they're incidental. Maybe.

I can see this going two ways.

1. The players are grad students with some focus on superhumans when everything goes down. What a time to be alive! Prepare for your thesis by investigating the aftermath of superhero battles, researching previous records of Atlantis, and interviewing survivors. Publish or perish, and hope that your interest doesn't attract the wrong attention.

2. A sandbox campaign set in New York. You bring your own drive and plot with you. Doesn't have to do anything with superhumans. Maybe you want to save your marriage, or get out from the shadow of your mobster father, or become the Daily Bugle's Ace Reporter. Maybe you want to BECOME a superhero! That's fine, but if that's the case, the game is about your attempts to make that happen, not about actually being a superhero.

Thoughts?

Sounds like a lot of fun.

I don't have a strong preference between option one and two. The first is more work for a gm I suspect.
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 02:18, Tue 31 May 2016.

I would be pretty keen on that second one!
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was against the forum rules, at 02:19, Tue 31 May 2016.

This sounds totally intriguing. I would be into playing this. No, I want to play this. Any idea how I can get into this game? (I am building a character in my head now as I type this.)
I've been into the Marvel Universe since I was little. (Unfortunately not very impressed with the direction it has gone...but I'll wait for it to come around again) This sounds Great!!

It's a pretty intriguing concept to be sure. Very out of the box. I might be interested, although I think that number 1 would be a little better since it will keep the group a bit more focused and you don't have to manage one cop storyline, one romance storyline, two completely different crime storylines, and a superhero fanboy storyline.

Variant on the 'want to be a superhero'. Could be like one of those costumed hero's we have in this world now. Got a theme, a name, a costume. No powers to speak of, but want to help out. This is the hero on the street type. Batman wanna be (if they had that kind of money they would BE Batman, or maybe Oliver Quin (Green Arrow)), but they don't. So they do what they can with what they got.

I think I'll go with #2 with a dash of #1. You're grad students in a class, but you also have personal drives and goals and whatever that you bring to the table.

Preliminary blurb:

For your whole life, superheroes have been stories. History. A thing that happened back during World War 2 with Captain America and the Invaders, during the Cold War. You've seen the biographical comics published by Timely, you've seen the grainy footage of the giant monster and alien invasions of the sixties, you've seen Effigy and Gadfly hosting old 80s-era Saturday Night Live, but that's it. Your whole life, hell, the last 30 years, there's been nothing. Just corporate greed and terrorism and a declining economy. And the mutants, of course, but nobody talks about them.

When you signed up for SUP337, Superhero Anthropology Graduate Studies, you never expected it to be about anything but history, about visiting museums, about research, about reading old comic books. Maybe you were going to major in it, maybe it was an elective, but you never expected... this.

You never expected the Fantastic Four's press conference, their story about going into space and coming back different. Changed.

They weren't the only ones that changed. You can smell it in the air. Taste it. Everything's different now. The air feels charged with electricity. Potential.

Class just got a whole lot more interesting.
This message was last edited by the user at 18:16, Tue 31 May 2016.

I like this idea. Were you planning on making it just freeform, or based in a RPG system?

A light system that's unobtrusive and easy for new players to pick up and run with.

Something like Fate, PDQ, Heroquest, Warp, Gumshoe, ORE/Wild Talents/Nemesis. Suggestions and opinions are welcome.

FASERIP - the original Marvel Hero's system (I have the books, so that's why it gets my vote).

FASERIP is kinda crunchy and not great for a campaign centered on normal people as far as I can recall.

Yeah, I think that a system based around superpowers wouldn't be the best given that, in all likelihood, nobody will have any. The closest thing that one could expect would be for a character to be one of the (technically the majority of) mutants who only have a strange appearance or a pretty much useless power like changing their hair color.

Game is up. Game is in Fate.

link to another game