It occurred to me recently that the best, most classic RPG adventures come from a small handful of genres. Fantasy has a dozens of classics, horror has even more, and even science fiction has some fantastic ones, especially if you count the Traveller and Star Wars D6 ones.
One genre that clearly does worse than the others is superheroes. I literally couldn’t think of a superhero adventure that I would think of as being “classic”, one where if you mentioned it to most other TTRPG fans, they’d go “oh yeah, THAT one is great!”
At first I figured that I must be wrong, that surely I was forgetting some classic Champions or TSR Marvel Super Heroes adventures (which is still quite possible). But then I spent a few hours searching reddit and dedicated RPG fan sites… but came up empty. When it came to superhero adventures, I found very little fans were strongly recommending. And then I recalled that years ago, when I ran a long-ish Mutants & Masterminds campaign, I also struggled finding good premade adventures, and mostly relied on my own adventures, with mixed results.
Is the genre cursed? Or, is it just hard to create an amazing superhero adventure, even in an age where we are surrounded by of 30+ Marvel films, a soon-to-be-rebooted DCU, and dozens of high-quality superhero tv shows?
Here’s the answer: creating great superhero adventures is a wicked hard problem. Why?
- Player Characters Are Wildly Different. Most superhero RPGs let players create characters with wildly different powers and abilities. This makes PCs really hard to challenge unless you know the exact composition of their abilities and weaknesses. The wrong villain can turn an entire adventure into a bloody meat grinder… or be defeated in seconds by heroes with certain power combinations. In one game I ran, a thug with a bazooka instantly annihilated someone’s gritty Bucky Barnes character concept, and the next turn the hero with mind control made a plaything out of that same thug. And I knew about these concepts in advance!
- Supervillains Need to Come Back. Key to the superhero genre is that villains are omnipresent. They are around to give villainous speeches, they square off against the heroes, and then they almost always win the first act, forcing heroes to reassemble, regroup, and win against the odds in the end. This is a really difficult narrative to pull off in an RPG. Players either go down fighting, or are too smart to give the villains a convenient escape. No player will make the mistake of not going for Thanos head! You can mitigate this a bit with plate spinning — giving the PCs so many other important objectives that they can’t prioritize the main villain — but you can only do this so many times before the players realize what’s going on.
- Super Action Set Pieces Are Complex. If you think about a typical action scene in a superhero movie, there’s a lot going on. Look at the last two Spider-Man movies — one has several Spider-Men facing off against multiple villains, a collapsing multiverse, several macguffins, and NPCs. The other one has thousands of drones, an illusion-casting villain in Mysterio, a big bridge, and more NPCs to save. That’s a lot for an adventure to set up, not mention very hard for most GMs to run.
When you read this list you start to realize that superhero adventures start to look like those epic, 20th level D&D adventures… which are also exceedingly rare for a reason.
A Bombshell of Tomorrow
This month’s adventure, A Bombshell of Tomorrow, is my first real attempt at a superhero adventure on this site. (I’m not going to count Minutes Not Hours since that mostly played out as a modern action game with some superpowered PCs.)
Nominally set in the DC universe, the heroes are charged with stopped the chronal duplicate of a time travelling Nazi scientist, who may have found the secret to triggering World War III. From a temporal invasion in the city part, to a secret Siberian prison, and then to a hidden base in the Pacific Northwest, A Bombshell of Tomorrow embraces most of those tropes I mentioned above, while trying to ease some of the issues with two philosophies:
Linked Sandboxes
Each encounter in the adventure is set up as a sandbox, which means that there are challenges, obstacles, enemies, and complications, but the PCs get to choose how to handle each one. In act one, for example, the PCs must stop a temporal invasion, with time traveling Nazis swarming the city park. There are tanks, bombers, infantry, etc., but the PCs only have to hold their own to win the day. When I played this, my weaker heroes were doing crowd control, saving civilians, and tracking all the German bombers, while the heavy hitters went toe-to-toe with some tanks. There was enough for everyone to do, that it worked. I took a similar approach on the next two acts — infiltrating a hidden Russian prison, and sneaking on to an island to rescue someone before the villain knew what was going on. Each scenario had multiple paths to winning — and I think this is critical to a good superhero adventure.
The Villain Has Duplicates
Okay, this one is a cheat. But I purposely chose a villain who had chronal duplicates running up and down the timestream. This guaranteed that my PCs would encounter him in each act. The first one where he is guaranteed to escape (only because the adventure starts with him mostly off the board), but leaves behind his trail of minions, the second one where the PCs have the rescue a version of him from a Russian prison, and the third one where finally confront him. This guarantees that the supervillain will always be on the player’s minds, and be (likely) impossible for them to defeat early on.
Keeping it Simpler
To make it easier to run, I kept the adventure medium power level — i.e., it’s not really designed for superheroes that can toss buildings. I figured if GMs want to run that kind of adventure, they are probably confident enough in their own ability to scale up the adventure by adding more challenges and supervillains.
Because I enjoy third-rate villains in my one-shots, the GURPS version also includes more Suicide Squad characters, including Killer Moth, Madame Crow, and Zebra-Man. Everybody always fights over Zebra-Man.
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You can download A Bombshell of Tomorrow for free here.
- A Bombshell of Tomorrow (GURPS Supers)
- A Bombshell of Tomorrow (GURPS Supers) – Printer Friendly
- A Bombshell of Tomorrow (Mutants & Masterminds)
- A Bombshell of Tomorrow (Mutants & Masterminds) – Printer Friendly
- A Bombshell of Tomorrow – VTT Assets & Tokens
Also, if you think I missed any classic superhero adventures, let me know in the comments below. I would love to check them out.
Related: A supervillain adventure
Maybe not classic yet, but Steve Kenson’s Murder of Crowes is a great intro adventure for teen superheroes. Any rural or x-burb town will do, but I always set it in Forks, WA so I and the PCs can riff off the Twilight references, as the sctusl town does. The scenario has homage to season one Smallville, but it is a spooky horror scenario. Written for Icons, I have run it multiple times in different systems. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/85202
Thanks for the suggestion! I’m a big fan of Kenson’s work, so I’ll check this one out. Love that you moved it to Forks.
Classic requires broad recognition, but I think Come On Down for DC Heroes is just fantastic.
I’m not familiar with this one at all… will definitely try to track it down since I’m obviously a big DC fan too.
As you point out, there’s definitely a tough balance to be had in superhero games, and you definitely need to let your players know if the game will be more street-level or more epic in scope to make sure they have an appropriate power level for the one-shot or campaign.
I played a lot of Villains & Vigilantes in my youth, as a friend had everything released for it. Their adventure modules were definitely a mixed bag, but Death Duel with the Destroyers and The Island of Dr. Apocalypse were both quite memorable for our group.
In our adulthood, we haven’t really revisited superhero games, sadly, although I own a whole bunch of Mutants and Masterminds that I’ve never gotten to the table. I also haven’t played some of the excellent newer games like Icons and Wild Talents, and I definitely want to check out Marvel Multiverse.
I recommend Emerald City Knights and Time of Vengeance. Both are multipart and have great challenges and characters to interact with. My players really were invested in the world by the time the got to the end of ECK. Tiem of Vengeance had they in a moral crisis because they started feeling sorry for the main villain after figuring out the real story.
While maybe not a classic, and it’s definitely of its time, but I think it’s a great introduction scenario, designed to set up a super hero group for a campaign, if they succeed they get their own HQ.
I didn’t leave the actual scenario.
Legacy of Eagles for Golden Heroes
I’ve been playing A Bombshell of Tomorrow solo using the Invincible Superhero Roleplaying Core Rulebook, with ChatGPT acting as my GM, and I’m genuinely surprised by just how much I’m enjoying it.
Rather than using established superheroes, I created my own street-level team, The Night Shift, consisting of three original characters: Strix, Shard and Rampart. Keeping them at street level has been one of the best parts of the game. They’re capable superheroes, but they aren’t so powerful that every problem can simply be solved by overwhelming force. Situations can genuinely feel dangerous, and deciding when to fight, when to use their abilities creatively and when to find another solution actually matters.
Playing three characters solo has also worked far better than I expected. Each member of the Night Shift feels different enough that I naturally find myself thinking about what that character would do rather than simply making the most mechanically advantageous decision. It feels like controlling a superhero team rather than controlling three sets of statistics.
The Invincible RPG system has been a particularly good fit. I’m still learning the rules, but playing this way is actually helping me understand them. I make the decisions and roll the dice myself, while ChatGPT handles the GM side: describing scenes, controlling NPCs and enemies, judging situations and explaining the rules when something comes up.
One thing I particularly appreciate is that ChatGPT isn’t simply letting my characters succeed at everything. If I suggest something that should be difficult, there can be penalties or consequences. At the same time, if I come up with a clever use of a character’s powers, the game allows me to try it rather than forcing me down a predetermined route.
That has produced some great moments already. Shard using his unusual crystal abilities, Strix relying on his street-level skills, and Rampart attempting things like taking control of an aircraft have created situations that feel as though they belong in a superhero comic rather than just being encounters from an adventure book.
Using A Bombshell of Tomorrow as the adventure gives the campaign structure, while ChatGPT makes it feel much less scripted. I don’t know exactly how a scene is going to develop because my decisions can take events in directions the published adventure may not have anticipated. ChatGPT can adapt the scenario around those choices while still keeping the main adventure moving.
I also really like rolling the physical dice myself and giving ChatGPT the results. It keeps an important part of tabletop roleplaying in my hands. I’m not just reading an AI-generated story — I’m actually playing an RPG. My choices and dice rolls determine what happens, while ChatGPT takes on the role that would normally require another person sitting behind the GM screen.
For anyone who owns the Invincible RPG but doesn’t always have a group available, I think this is a really interesting way of playing. It obviously isn’t identical to sitting around a table with a human GM and other players, but I don’t think it needs to be. It offers a different experience: part solo RPG, part traditional tabletop game and part interactive superhero story.
Most importantly, I’m having a lot of fun with it. I started out wanting to see whether ChatGPT could actually GM the system effectively. Instead, I’ve ended up invested in the Night Shift and genuinely looking forward to seeing what happens to Strix, Shard and Rampart next.
A Bombshell of Tomorrow, three home-grown street-level superheroes, the Invincible RPG rules and ChatGPT behind the GM screen have turned out to be a surprisingly excellent combination.
Very cool! I’ve seen a few folks use AI to enhance their solo gaming experience, and it’s great to see how it’s actually starting to work here.