Starting a new game with local friends tomorrow and I’d love to hear about your favorite adult heroes from your own games.
I have the Deck of Villany, but I could use some ideas for heroes of the previous generations. Preferably not just re-skinned Marvel and DC regulars, unless done really creatively.
You’re very welcome to use Penny Dreadnought, a monomaniacal vigilante obsessed with fighting penny-related crime. In my campaign, he’s a mentor to the Protégé Halfpenny.
plus.google.com – Here’s an NPC superhero folks are welcome to use. He’s a mentor to a PC (Half…
I don’t concern myself too much about whether or not a hero is a knock-off… players will be expecting reference points. But I do mix it up a bit. Players looking for a Batman knockoff can go with Shadowblade (batman/cloak hybrid) or Dark Eagle (Batman/Punisher hybrid).
The more unique one I like springing is Futurian. Futurian was part of a group I called the Paragons, the sole silver age group with remnants in the current era. Futurain has psychic powers and optimal genetic traits, so ages slowly. She appears as an infant in a physics lab that managed to open a wormhole to the future. Scientists knew nothing of the time she came from, but she was super intelligent and developed telekinesis and telepathy.
In my campaign, I have a trio of adults heroes. They are simply named the Marvels.
The first on is Captain Crab, an veteran soldier who wears a strong armor with a giant claw in his right hand. If he was a teenager he should be played with the brute book.
The second one is very classic, he’s a beautiful blond man with two iron wings.
He’s athletic and too much perfect 😉
His name is Justice Falcon.
The last one is the Jeeves a british servant who is a genius in engineering. Is the discret chief of the group and he built all the stuff of his teammates.
During a fight he use a group a drones to create magnetic fields, teleportation portals, laser beams or simply to fly around the ennemies.
guillaume jentey I love them, definitely going to make an appearance in my game
Colin Spears great ! You prove us that french can create super heroes too 😉
(I’m french…)
I never would have guessed, Guillaume 😉 lol
I’m most proud of my bad guy/anti hero super 90s group, Vengence Force!(Commonly shortened to V-Force)
Marshal Law, a disgraced cop that got access to alien cybernetics that pushed him over the edge
Torque, a Hell’s Angel biker that found am angelic unbreakable leather jacket and weilds a demonic chain with a mind of its own
The Wrangler, a cow girl armed with two magical 6-shooters that contain the souls of her mother and father
Two by Four, a construction worker who wields a 2×4 made from the Norse World Tree that grants him enormous strength and nigh immortality
Tomahawk, a Native American former navy seal who is perhaps the world’s best thrown weapons expert
Think of them all standing together in stereotypical costumes and you might be able to guess the ridiculous band I used for inspiration. The moment the players realized it was priceless
I recommend you do what our GM did. Ask the players to submit hero ideas; this gives them a chance to be more involved in the history of the city and world.
I personally looked back at other supers RPGs (Like M&M and Silver Age Sentinels) and minded them for cool characters to use.
What themes do you want the older heroes to express? That’s your starting point.
The ideal the young heroes want to live up to? Then make sure to include some dashing, colorful established heroes—and think about what secret struggles or shortcomings they might turn out to have.
The authority the free-spirited youngsters are rebelling against? Then include some hardass paragons of the city who will lay down the law—and think about how they can sometimes be shown to have a point when your PCs cross the line.
You can base the older heroes on the themes that emerge from your player characters. That way they won’t seem like genericized Avengers or Justice Leaguers, even if they have similar powers or personae to those classic archetypes. They’ll be the appropriate foils to your main characters, positioned to complicate and enliven the story whenever they get involved.
Say you’ve got a Legacy from a line of magical superheroes. Throw in a hi-tech, wisecracking hero named Glitch Lord who’s a professional rival of the Legacy’s parents. Then have him sometimes seem to understand the Legacy better than those parents, or offer him praise the parents won’t. Instant story hooks! And I bet you can come up with something like that for any playbook your players pick.
Personally in the first game that i shot i take a bunch of villains front the deck. Some of then aré now “regulars” but with a glimpse of my own and the party conversation. For example, ese hace Cygnus, converted in the GF of a PC, being the daughter of a ex hero-actual rock star named Ziggy Stardust.
In the Other hand, i create a bunch of AEGIS regular tren heros to be the “Rivals” of the PC team. Also we have “The publisher” a YouTuber being the archnemesis of the star playbook PC wich is a YouTuber Too.
I appreciate the thoughts of how to come up with heroes but that’s not what I was going for, I thought it’d be fun to share ideas from each other’s games.
Understood, but seriously, your players are the best source for ideas like these. The more they contribute to the world their characters live in, the more they’ll be invested in being a part of it. And that level of player agency is at the core of the game.
Nestor Rodriguez I get that, and believe me I will do so, I can make NPCs just fine, this was about sharing and community.