We live in a bonanza of well-known superhero media—comic books, television shows, movies, videogames, and more. Whether you want something street level and gritty like Daredevil or Nightwing, noir investigation like Jessica Jones, threat-of-the-week villains like The Flash, or dealing with world-level threats like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there are plenty of examples to inspire superhero clashes.
Many superhero settings are just our own Earth in the modern day, with superheroes and supervillains added. This gives you an easy baseline—people are familiar with New York City, Europe, Antarctica, and other real-world locations, as well as common tropes like bank robbers, criminal empires, and evil corporations. To get started creating your own superhero game, just think about the following three topics and how they affect the setting. It’s okay if you only have ideas for some of these right away—the genre is filled with big dramatic reveals that change the heroes’ understanding of what’s really going on.
This is a fundamental question and probably the first thing you should answer. Assuming that superpowers exist and the PCs aren’t just skilled people who’ve decided to wear costumes and fight crime, how do people get their exceptional abilities? Here are a few examples of how supers got their powers—pick one, some, or all from this list, and your choices automatically start to define a lot about your setting.
The Watchmen series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is a great example of a “superhero” world where the heroes are just regular people without powers. (The exception is Dr. Manhattan, the one godlike being in the world who actually has powers.)
Aliens: Supers are people from another planet (such as Mars), part of the universe (Asgard), or dimension (Limbo or the Shadow Realm). Can the aliens pass as human, or do they use powers or technology to disguise themselves? Does every alien from the same place have the same suite of powers, or are they variable and unique? Are there multiple kinds of aliens? Is Earth their neutral ground or a war zone?
Augmented Humans: Something external—such as a weird virus, corporate serum, bizarre radiation, cosmic rays, symbiotic parasites, dark matter infusion, or chemical accident—gives regular people powers. Does this change work on everyone, or does only one in a million people have the right combination of stamina and potential to become a super? Does someone control access to the catalyst (perhaps for a price or to promote their ideology), or is it random? Is the power contagious, like infection by biting or blood transfusion?
Magic: Supers are people who can manipulate a supernatural force, whether obviously “magic” or something unexplained that doesn’t follow the rules of science. If magic is the only origin for supers, your game is technically …And There’s Magic, but with a superhero flavor. Does this power come from a character’s innate ability, dedicated training, or a connection to a specific source? Is more than one possible, and are there rivalries between each magical practice?
Monsters: Supers are associated with or derived from one or more kinds of classic monsters—werewolf, vampire, gargoyle, fairy, Mothman, and so on. Are these various lineages enemies or allies? Are they protecting humanity, hiding from it, or wanting to conquer it?
Mutants: Supers are people whose powers come from one or more genetic mutations. Are these hereditary? Is there something about the world that recently caused or triggered these mutations? Do mutants have a collective identity akin to a race, ethnicity, or species? Are they the next step in human evolution or a throwback to something else?
Psychics: Supers are humans with mental gifts, but otherwise they’re physically like regular people. Do individuals specialize in one kind of ability (such as telepathy, telekinesis, or illusion) or wield a suite of powers?
The power level of each superhero type varies by rank, and exactly which types (and ranks) you want in your game define a lot about the setting. For example, limiting PCs to rank 1 (Crimefighter or Vigilante types) means they’re competent, skilled, and resilient, easily able to deal with common thugs, armed guards, and corrupt police, but a nuclear-powered mutant or a platoon of tanks is probably too much for them to handle.
Limiting PCs to rank 4 or 5 (Powerhouse or Living God types) means they’re incredibly capable and durable, and their typical foes are alien invasions, giant space monsters, or cosmic-level threats. This puts the scope of the game on an entirely different level, with the expectation that NPC supers are dealing with drug dealers and muggings, leaving the big stuff to the powerful PCs.
If you allow PCs to be any rank, your group of characters might be a weird team-up of street-level acrobats and flying supers who wrestle alien champions for fun. The problem with this setup is that street-level threats are easily defeated by the more powerful heroes, and the top-level supervillains can easily kill the street-level heroes. You can avoid these power-level problems by increasing the abilities granted by the weaker type so the characters are the same rank.
Whether or not the common public knows about superheroes has a huge impact on your game.
Supers might be a long-established fact of the world, perhaps dating back to World War II or even earlier, and the PCs are just the latest generation of costumed crimefighters. Supers might be a brand-new thing, and the advent of the superhero age is a hot topic for journalists, podcasts, reactionary politicians, and conspiracy theorists. They may have been public a generation ago but then disappeared or went underground, perhaps because of government pressure against vigilantes, due to a cataclysmic event that drained their powers, or after the defeat of a once-in-a-generation threat. They could have been operating in secret for decades, with the general public none the wiser. They may be celebrities, using media tours, agents, and social media to promote their causes as well as fighting crime, wary of younger and sexier upstarts taking the spotlight. Do heroes get sponsorships and endorsements to help pay the bills, or does that make them capitalist sellouts?
Do superheroes and supervillains have code names and secret identities? How does the public view heroes who won’t reveal their real names? If their real names are known (perhaps due to internet sleuthing or a government registration program), how do they keep their privacy or protect their loved ones from harassment and threats? Is there a secret industry for creating fake civilian identities for supers?
The following are common criminal actions that supervillains take. The motivation is usually profit (ransom), blackmail, causing a distraction, or acquiring a specific item they want.
Giant Monsters: Whether it’s from space, another dimension, or a lost continent of dinosaurs, an enormous carnivorous creature is a significant threat to any population, especially if sent or lured there by a supervillain.
Kidnapping: The villain takes one or more people hostage until their demands are met. Suitable targets are millionaires, celebrities, diplomats, politicians, and other superheroes. If the villain wants to prove they know a hero’s secret identity, they could kidnap a spouse or best friend. Kidnapping includes imprisoning someone in a secret room, shoving them into a microdimension, or trapping them in a deadly amusement park.
Murder: A tale as old as crime. Serial killers and spree killers. Vengeance against a hero who defeated you. Destroying the “cursed surface dwellers.” Exterminating an island, continent, or planet so you can colonize and exploit it. Sometimes the villain provides clues or riddles to taunt the heroes trying to stop them.
Terrorism: The villain threatens to destroy something valuable, such as the Mona Lisa, Hoover Dam, Brooklyn Bridge, or Liberty Bell. Greater-scope villains might threaten to destroy a nuclear power plant or the Grand Canyon. Some villains are ecoterrorists, bombing oil rigs and high-pollution factories or giving whales superpowers to fight back against hunters.
Theft: The second most basic crime (after murder) is taking stuff that doesn’t belong to you. If you’re entering a place to steal from there, it’s burglary. If you’re using force or violence to steal, it’s robbery. Most supervillains go through a thieving phase before moving on to other crimes.
Running a superhero game is its own unique thing. It’s fulfilling a power fantasy where a handful of people can defeat modern-era foes with violence. A typical person in the real world can’t do much to stop climate change or pollution, but their superhero character can punch out invaders from the death dimension and toxic waste monsters, and that feels like it helps.
Superhero types in the game are the most powerful characters available, and there are additional game mechanics that bolster this role. For example, supers can rally faster than characters from most other genres, and superheroes are the only genre where characters can rally major wounds.
When running a superhero game, keep the following advice in mind.
Use Comic Book Structure: Think about your game not in terms of stories and adventures, but in terms of issues. A typical modern comic book has twenty or so pages of actual story. In that amount of time, you can get a couple of conversation scenes, a big fight (or some other action scene), and probably a smaller scene like an investigation or some minor action. That’s a good parallel to a typical three- to four-hour RPG session, so it’s easy to plan for each session to have as much story as one issue of a comic book. Obviously individual groups vary, so your players might accomplish less if they spend more time talking, or you could have an intense “issue” that’s just one long combat with many epic “splash page” scenes.
Each issue is a journey the characters go on. They don’t end up in the same places they started—they discover new information, have a conflict, make or execute a plan, and so on. When planning a session, think of the events and discoveries you expect will happen, whether this is part of a larger story arc, and what the title of this issue or story would be (and feel free to be overdramatic with these names).
Likewise, it can help to describe events in the story, whether in or out of combat, in terms of panels on a page. When a villain makes a big monologue, describe their pose and how they’re framed. When a hero takes down a powerful foe, describe a series of panels showing their attack in slow motion or the aftermath of the attack.
You can use this concept to skip over unimportant details like travel time, searching, and exploration. A comic book probably wouldn’t spend a page’s worth of panels showing the heroes quietly riding in a car, searching the internet, or scoping out the exterior of a villain’s fortress. Skip over those sorts of descriptions, tell the players what they need to know, and avoid anything that would be boring or tedious in real life.
Finally, don’t forget a good cliffhanger. Not every issue has to end with one, but when properly used they set up what happens in the next session and have the players itching to start it as soon as possible. Story arcs in comics are the sorts of things that get collected as graphic novels. Classic examples include X-Men: Days of Future Past, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Daredevil: Born Again. Aim high with your stories, superhero GMs!
Start With Action: Unlike many fantasy or sci-fi games, you don’t want to start a session by asking the players, “What do your characters want to do today?” The premise of a world with superheroes is that there are problems happening that require their intervention. Superheroes are usually reactive rather than proactive—they respond to unexpected problems. If there are no violent crimes, natural disasters, or alien invasions clamoring for their attention, superheroes don’t have much to do except public relations events. Give the characters something to act on—a bank robbery, terrorist attack, new supervillain in town, or raid from the Negative Dimension immediately lets the heroes know it’s time to step up.
Of course, it can be fun to have an occasional episode/issue (game session) where the superheroes get to do normal life stuff like going on a date, taking a vacation, or shopping, but most stories should be about them using their powers to solve problems that only they can take care of. It’s cute to see Omegaflex and Powerflame rescuing cats from trees and talking to high schoolers about the dangers of drugs, but is that really the best use of their time (and your game time)?
Think Like a Supervillain: Build adventure scenarios based on the powers of the supervillains in your world, putting their skills and abilities to the best use. Unless a villain is stupid, they’re going to commit crimes where their powers make the job easier. A villain who can bust through concrete and ignore bullets will target fortified areas with armed guards, like banks, vaults, and military research stations, knowing there’s little risk of them being harmed. A villain with mind-control powers will manipulate their way into secret areas and use enthralled human shields to prevent heroes from using indiscriminate violence. Most real-world buildings aren’t designed to stop people who can teleport, phase, fly, or turn invisible, so even a low-powered villain with such an ability can easily start a crime spree. A speedster villain doesn’t need a getaway vehicle, especially if they can run up walls to evade the police (a talent that flying villains also have). Tech-oriented villains frequently modify or upgrade their equipment, so look to the cyphers lists for new abilities to add to their arsenal.
Use the Scenery: Superhero fights are notorious for using—and destroying—the local scenery. Characters throw cars at each other, get slammed across the street, get knocked into (or through) walls, collapse structures, start fires by damaging power lines and gas pipes, break through the street into storm drains and subway tunnels, and so on. If a hero and villain are just standing in place punching each other, that’s a boring combat. Have one or two attacks per round cause some incidental motion, action, or damage, and use the end of the round to insert some mayhem if the actions of the PCs and NPCs haven’t already done so.
Think of these things as a minor GM intrusion every round that you don’t give out XP for. It makes the encounter more interesting, without necessarily making it more complicated. In terms of game mechanics, there’s no difference between a superstrong villain punching a hero for a moderate wound and using a parked car as an improvised weapon to inflict a moderate wound, but the second option feels more like a superhero scenario. If a hero uses their laser eyes to zap a villain, give the hero a freebie and push the villain back a short distance; this gives another character the option to charge at the villain or for the villain to charge back at the hero. Let the villain’s attack also knock over a street pole (before or after hitting the hero), causing a dangling power line. Then, to escalate the encounter, use an actual GM intrusion based on the recent events. Someone was inside the thrown car and is now trapped inside. The laser-pushed villain is in a better tactical position against a different hero. The loose power line is an obstacle for fleeing bystanders, or a villain uses the pole and electricity as a weapon. Smart or considerate superheroes will try to minimize this sort of damage because it makes all superheroes look bad. Or perhaps your city businesses pay for superbattle insurance.
Villain Team-Ups: Many supervillains are one-trick ponies; they have a specific gimmick or theme and only one significant power, such as strength, teleportation, speed, or energy blasts. Even if they have secondary abilities like flight or durability, there’s usually only one thing the villain can do on their turn, which means battles can get pretty boring (unless you use the scenery, as described above). Also, a general bit of RPG advice is to not pit a solitary foe against multiple PCs; the PCs get so many actions each turn that unless their enemy is very powerful, the fight is over very quickly. The solution is to use multiple foes, usually a main villain plus a bunch of minions, or a duo or a team of supervillains (often with powers similar or contrary to each of the PCs).
Typical minions are basic thugs or soldiers, robots (especially robot lookalikes of the main foe), beasts, or entities that are thematically similar to the main foe, such as a gang of magma monsters who serve the Magma Lord, or a bunch of weaker brute villains under a powerful one. Minions can cause incidental damage to the PCs, affect the environment with hazards and distractions, aid the main villain’s attacks or defenses, give weaker heroes opponents they can be effective against, activate doomsday devices, help cover their boss’s escape, and spill important plot points if they get captured.
Using multiple villains allows you to build encounters with multiple strategies and complementary powers. For example, team up a slow brute villain with a speedster, a flying villain, or someone with good ranged attacks. This gives you additional actions in each combat round, additional options for monologuing and scenery mayhem, and combo attacks (like the “fastball special” used by Colossus and Wolverine) and allows you to switch up who attacks who as the circumstances shift.
Even more dynamic than a duo is a whole team of supervillains, each with their own niche and special abilities. If one or more of them is a direct counterpart to one of the PCs (such as two speedsters), that sets them up as rivals and perhaps nemeses as the villain seeks to prove they’re better than the corresponding hero. Alternatively, each villain could have a primary or secondary power that’s good at countering a specific PC ability, such as an ice villain against the fire PC, a psychic villain against the brute PC, and a pavement-liquifying villain against the speedster PC. And if this supervillain team loses, it gives them all the more reason to break out of prison, improve their powers somehow, and try again.
Supers Are Powerful: Supers are the most powerful kinds of characters in the game. Now and then, pit them against foes and scenarios that let the players feel how powerful they are. Sure, Batman and Spider-Man face off against costumed weirdos with special abilities, but they also spend time wiping the floor with regular crooks. Let the superheroes feel super.
Unlike the example adventures in the other genre chapters in this book, these sample adventures delve deeper into the specifics and even stats, mostly to demonstrate how challenges are built using the subsystems within the rules for the genre.
Big Bull in the Bank: A supervillain named Big Bull—notable for his large size, low intelligence, and steer-themed costume—puts on a trench coat as a “disguise” and walks into a bank with the intent of robbing it. After punching a guard, he grabs a customer or bank teller as a hostage and orders the manager to fill a big bag with cash. If the manager complies, Big Bull crashes his way out, injuring some bystanders to distract emergency responders and any supers heading his way. Unfortunately, he’s not fast and can’t fit in a taxi, so he has to find a good hiding spot, escape into a park or subway tunnel, or find a crowded place where his size doesn’t make him easy to spot.
Big Bull: level 5, dodge as level 4 due to size, Might sdefense as level 7, strength tasks as level 8; health 40; Armor 4; two punches each inflict a moderate wound, or one gore attack inflicts a major wound.
Big Bull has three power shifts in strength and two in resilience. These shifts are already figured into his modifications and other stats.
Complications to this situation can include:
Common Criminal Upgrade: Some nonpowered felons have been equipped with a limited number of specialized devices, such as armor-piercing bullets and stunning bullets that are a threat even to superheroes, a military-level combat drug called bulldog, and unstable ablative force fields that can shrug off a couple of powerful hits. A tech-savvy villain has been selling these items to escalate conflicts against police and superheroes, but the criminals can’t identify the seller because the goods came through a middleman. The villain is using these criminals as expendable equipment-testers before upgrading their own skilled minions with these devices for a big plot that’s sure to attract the PCs’ attention.
Complications to this situation can include:
Fall From Grace: A well-known and popular superhero who disappeared for a while (perhaps after an emotional setback such as the death of a loved one or a public failure) has reappeared with a new, villainous persona. Their crime spree is undoing years of good works and public goodwill, as if they’re deliberately trying to sabotage their own legacy. The fallen hero knows the weaknesses and secrets of their former allies and isn’t afraid to use this information directly in combat or by bargaining with other supervillains. The public is starting to become suspicious of every do-gooder. Community chatter is that more than one hero team plans to capture him before he crosses a line that can’t be undone.
Complications to this situation can include:
Godly Grift: A supervillain named HypnoChad has been using his mind-influencing powers to befriend wealthy people and convince them to donate money to a trendy “religion” he runs (through a shell company that legally protects him from litigation). After living large for months off these successes, he ends up rubbing elbows with famous actors and can’t help but use the same tricks on them, causing a flurry in the tabloids about the new “religious wellness craze” among Hollywood’s elite. The PCs recognize HypnoChad in a photo at a movie premiere and realize that this isn’t your regular money-laundering celebrity cult. It’s up to the PCs to find and confront HypnoChad and get him to confess and return whatever money he hasn’t already spent.
HypnoChad: level 4, Intellect defense as level 6, hypnosis as level 7; health 20; long-range hypnosis makes the target his good friend for hours, inclined to help him in any way that’s not a significant burden, and susceptible to having their memories slightly altered by his commands
HypnoChad has three power shifts in Single Attack (hypnosis). These shifts are already figured into his modifications and other stats.
Complications to this situation can include: