Reconceptualizing D&D 5e as Supers

I’ve been thinking about this since watching Unsleeping City (which is more modern occult than supers, but a lot of the concepts carry over). The idea is basically to just use D&D 5e with as little conversion as possible to run a modern-day supers game. D&D characters are already fairly superheroic, especially at high level.

My initial inclination was to do a ton of work with custom classes and abilities to fully turn it into a supers game, but, honestly, I think you can get most of the way there changing very little. You just have to reimagine a lot of the mechanics from medieval fantasy to modern pulp. And, this way, it’s probably a lot easier of a sell to your players who are familiar with D&D.

Note that this isn’t really meant to model existing supers franchises, though the examples indicate that it can get closer than you’d think. You probably can’t use it to model any given hero’s powers closely enough to replicate them as a PC (though you can get a lot closer as the DM making an arbitrary NPC stat block).

Ability Scores

• 10 is the true human level of basic competence. Most individuals have all of their scores at 10 or lower.
• 12 is well above average. Many people that excel at their careers and pursuits have no scores higher than a 12.
• 14 is exceptional competence. Few people have a 14, and extremely few have more than one ability score at a 14 or higher. Assume that IQ/10 basically equals Intelligence, so Int 14 is a genius IQ, and other scores are similar outliers.
• 16 is the practical maximum for most humans. Paragons of various disciplines might have a 16. These are olympic athletes (Str, Dex, or Con), top-of-field geniuses (Int or Wis), or enduring global celebrities (Cha).
• 18 is the technical maximum for true outliers. The strongest unaugmented powerlifter in the world has an 18 strength. Stephen Hawking likely had an 18 intelligence.
• 20 is beyond human. Scores this high and above are only available to those that are augmented.

Player characters generate their ability scores normally for D&D, just use these as guidelines for how omnicompetent they are compared to baseline humans. And when creating unaugmented human NPCs, try to keep their ability scores within this frame.

It is up to the DM to decide whether to create a dramatic ramp on the lifting chart for strength to treat 20 as much more superhuman than normal. At the very least, you should allow more dramatic lifting stunts than you otherwise would, even if the practical carrying capacity isn’t increased that much from the normal chart (it’s not like supers tend to carry a ton of gear like fantasy characters anyway). At the very least, as noted in the Equipment and Improvised Weapons section, I think Str 18 can probably throw a motorcycle and Str 20 can hit an enemy with a car (though they might not be able to carry them around indefinitely).

Races

In general, most players should use the Custom Lineage rules (from Tasha’s), or just play Variant Humans. If you want some minor superpowers that don’t make sense with your class, work with the DM to make a custom race that seems balanced.

For example, rather than build Superman as a high-level Eldritch Knight to get flight, heat vision, and cold breath, Kryptonians may simply be built as a race with a fly speed, the fire bolt cantrip, and a 1/day burning hands (which does cold instead of fire). See Classes and Spells, below.

Equipment and Improvised Weapons

The armor from your starting equipment and either one weapon or one weapon and shield from this package become “phantom gear.” Unless you are suffering some kind of power suppression, you are always considered to be wielding them. Unless it makes sense for your power set, these don’t actually manifest as spectral arms and armor, but simply represent your basic enhanced toughess (armor), punching ability (melee weapon), or reusable energy blast (ranged weapon). Feats and abilities affect the phantom weapon as they would a normal weapon of the type (e.g., great weapon master works if you’re wielding a phantom greatsword).

For example, a fighter with the basic gear might have AC 18 and a 1d8 punch (as if using a longsword and shield) or AC 16 and a 2d6 punch (as if using a greatsword).

Phantom gear may improve at story moments where your powers are enhanced (at roughly the same schedule the DM would dole out better gear in a regular campaign). For example, the fighter’s AC may improve by +2 when they go from phantom chain to phantom plate in some event that increases their durability.

Since you can only choose one weapon, you will need to use improvised weapons for whichever of melee or ranged your phantom weapon doesn’t cover. In general, at Str up to 14, you can lift things that count as d6 damage weapons (and might have finesse), at Str 16 you can lift 2d6 weapons (objects up to a couple hundred pounds), at Str 18 you can lift 3d6 weapons (objects up to half a ton), and at Str 20 you can lift 4d6 weapons (objects up to a ton or more). It’s up to the DM whether cars to throw at people are readily available and/or reusable, so even high-strength characters may be limited to lesser improvised weapons depending on the environment. And picking up such a weapon uses up your bonus action in most cases (possibly also your move to get to it). Finally, improvised weapons don’t count for feats and abilities that affect specific weapons.

Tech-based characters (or your modern fantasy characters that actually wear armor and wield swords) may choose to forego phantom equipment, and represent their capabilities with physical gear. In this case, they should probably treat all their equipment as +1 enhancement higher than it would otherwise be, as a bonus for being able to disarm them without power suppression.

In general, replace physical weapons with their closest modern equivalent. This mostly means that guns just swap in for bows without any practical changes. Yes, a modern firearm should be way more deadly than a shortbow in a true simulation, but for pulp games, it doesn’t really matter that much.

Classes and Spells

Think of classes as your main powerset, and do your best to make the concept for your powers fit. A speedster might be a barbarian or monk (or rogue that just uses cunning action to dash). Most strength-based characters represent various types of brick, dexterity-based characters are your ninjas and acrobats, and casters are blasters.

If the character concept really doesn’t support a particular class ability, the DM should allow the player to swap to something equivalently powerful that makes more sense. But try to do this as little as possible, since the whole draw of this is to avoid having to make a ton of houseruled classes.

While prepared casters usually represent your true Dr. Strange types, and warlocks may be witches, spontaneous casters and most half-casters use spells to represent various energy projection powers and miscellaneous utility powers. At minimum, allow spells that represent powers to switch to the character’s primary energy type (e.g., for a sorcerer that’s a fire blaster, all of their damage spells should be switched to do fire damage). Most “spells” also don’t really have components, though you can still impose a monetary cost on the ones with expensive material components as part of their balance. In general, try to limit your character to spells that make sense, and the DM should be generous in allowing you to describe the effects of a spell in a way that makes more sense for your concept (e.g., the charm and suggestion spells as mind-control or super-Charisma).

For some characters, the wide raft of spells don’t make a lot of sense, because they’re really just trying to pick up a particular power (e.g., flight). As noted above, this might work better as a custom race. But if you really just want to have one trick, the DM can experiment with giving you more spell slots but fewer known spells (though try this gradually and be careful of balance; there are probably certain spells that could make this too good).

Also think heavily about spells per day as having some level of narrative implication. Maybe your Cypher-esque omniglot can’t technically run tongues all day for 100% linguistic comprehension as you conceived, but should be able to get it running most of the time when it matters. If there are still aliens to interpret for after running out of spell slots, maybe you just have a stress headache or need to do something else for a while.

Skills, Tools, and Languages

Not all of the standard skills make sense for a modern supers campaign. However, standard sheets don’t make it easy to remove and add skills, so I’ve endeavored to make the transfer below as simple as possible. You may just have to make a note somewhere to remember that Arcana is actually Science.

• Science replaces Arcana, and represents most hard sciences (biology is still Medicine and Nature).
• Academics replaces History, expanding it to a broad knowledge of liberal arts education topics.
• Nature remains the same, but takes on more of Survival’s ability to forage in the wilderness.
• Occult replaces Religion, and covers Religion, Arcana, and other esoteric, mystical concepts.
• Streetwise replaces Survival, and focuses more on navigation and tracking in an urban environment (allowing Nature to carry more of the rare out-of-city adventure tropes).

Computers are a new tool proficiency. You may also want to create separate tool proficiencies for things like Electronics. Driving a car is Land Vehicles. You might also add Air Vehicles for planes. PCs should have a broad ability to swap out existing tool proficiencies for the modern technology ones.

Common is replaced by the dominant language of the country in which you’re setting your game. Allow players to swap other fantasy languages for Earth languages. If you want to play a true polyglot, consider getting the tongues spell, as mentioned above, rather than chasing down adding every possible language to your sheet.

Knockback

This is an optional rule to have more cinematic fights like in the comics.

Whenever you take damage from a kinetic or explosive source that could presumably send you flying, you may reduce the damage to half and move away a number of feet equal to the damage ultimately taken (e.g., if you take 20 damage and halve it for knockback, you suffer 10 damage and fly back 10 feet). This is a free action that stacks with reactions such as Uncanny Dodge; it’s fair for characters in supers fights to be twice as durable if they’re willing to get smashed through walls.

If this knocks you off a ledge, you suffer falling damage normally. If you would hit a wall, you go through the wall if the damage you took would also be enough to break it. This does not generally do additional damage to you, but is just cinematic.

If the damage you took is higher than your Dexterity score, you fall prone at the end of the knockback. If it is equal or lower, you can keep your feet (unless you are also knocked off a ledge).

Enemies

In general, it’s pretty easy to convert standard monsters to supers threats. Swapping their type to Construct for robots or Monstrosity for science mutants goes a long way. Tweak resistances and immunities to make sense, and change how you describe the creature and you can get away with reusing stats.

For human threats, keep the rules about ability scores in mind, if only for verisimilitude. In general, unaugmented humans should probably be limited to CR 1 or less. Anything higher, and you’re looking at standard-issue power armor and laser weapons, or explaining why they have low-level powers.

In general, you have the same problem as in regular D&D justifying why high-CR intelligent NPCs are working as mooks for an even bigger villain rather than setting up their own enterprise in another town where they’re less likely to get punched.

Serial Numbers Filed Off: The Parasol Culmination

Four decades ago, the sky fell. That’s the poetic way of putting it. The factual way to describe it is that rocky space debris totaling a significant fraction of Earth’s mass cascaded across the planet over the course of two days. Hardly a square mile of the world was spared from some kind of meteor strike, from rocks the size of bullets up to ones the size of airplanes.

Approximately half a billion people died from the impacts and their immediate collateral damage. The same number died in the next few days from the massively destroyed infrastructure, fires, and tidal waves. Even more would die over the next few years, from the famine caused by the green haze diminishing the light of the sun and from cancer caused by the massive influx of radioactive particles. By the mid-1980s, humanity had been reduced by nearly half what it was before the catastrophe.

Much of the debris was a strange, green crystalline rock, which came to be called Viridian. Safe to hold briefly, it became apparent that it was nonetheless highly radioactive. The large shards were quickly collected from craters by local governments, but the small fragments and dust were what led to the steep rise in cancer throughout the world’s population. The years of haze also created immense static across the radio waves, and new age nuts swore that it had similarly silenced the world’s magic.

But, humanity will overcome. Far less destructive than global thermonuclear war (and fortunate neither superpower had viewed the impacts as an attack), Viridian proved far safer and more useful than plutonium. Within a few years, the worst of the haze had been denatured by weather and sunlight, diminishing to a slightly-elevated background radiation. The vast stores of crystals could be harnessed for much-safer nuclear power to try to bootstrap global technology back from its nadir. And the massive crisis, shared tragedy, and loss of competing mouths to feed had united the world in a way that nothing else could. Scientists worked across national lines to solve the problems of rebuilding infrastructure, curing cancer, harnessing the new material, and looking to the skies to prevent such a disaster from ever happening again.

It did not take long for the world’s astronomers to realize that this was not some random strike. The trail had followed the path of a small, recovered spacecraft that crashed ahead of the tide of rock, somehow guided through space. If not for the fortunate timing of an alignment with Mars, scraping off the bulk of the debris cloud to impact the red planet, Humanity might have gone extinct. Earth had been saved by a matter of hours in celestial alignment.

But if there was some great enemy on the other side of the galaxy that had tried to remotely bombard Earth into an apocalypse, they would find humanity ready. In addition to great strides in technology, the planet had an unexpected resource: individuals with inexplicable powers. Shocking numbers of children born after the skyfall began to demonstrate these abilities, believed to be mutation from the Viridian’s radiation. The vast majority could do little more than parlor tricks, but there were others that could do more. Some few turned their abilities to crime and war, but the greatest of them became protectors.

You are the world’s premier super group: some of the strongest of the Viridian Children, coupled with some of the brightest engineers to harness the crystal for powered gear. When the world is threatened from within, you leap into action. But everyone knows that you are really preparing for what might happen if the aliens that launched the attack try again.

At least you were.

Years of research has finally been verified. The “attack” may have been a cosmic accident. The “missile” could have been an intergalactic escape pod for a single refugee, accidentally sweeping part of an exploding planet in its wake. All the astrophysics backs it up, tracing the path of the Viridian to a distant solar system where a shattered planet orbits a red giant sun in its habitable zone. If this doomed planet had exploded mere hours later, Earth would have received the full blast. But the real tragedy is, a day earlier, and a passing sweep of Jupiter might have collected the majority of the debris safely, leaving both Earth and Mars barely scathed. A sad and immutable fact of history, certainly.

Except that the particle physicists at Star Laboratories have begun to talk of some kind of “speed force” that might make faster-than-light travel possible… developed with the idea of space travel and defense, some are murmuring that it could be used for time travel.

And there would be many people interested in going back forty years to try to give the Earth a second chance…

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This idea is largely inspired by Umbrella Academy and Avengers: Endgame. What if the greatest heroes from a recovering post-apocalyptic timeline washed up in a version of history where they’d be inevitably viewed as villains? In the recovering world they came from, the PCs are basically the Justice League. But in the prime DC timeline, they’re a bunch of meteor mutants or using Kryptonite-powered tech, and Superman takes a keen interest in those. Even should they convince this world’s heroes they’re not villains, they still have every incentive to try to restore the timeline that contains everyone they’ve ever loved, and the new powers that be can’t have that.

Incidentally, for the scenario above, I think the inciting incident is a few surviving White Martians infiltrating Star Labs and trying to change the timing of Krypton exploding enough that Earth takes the full brunt rather than Mars. But the heroes intervene, somehow speed up the process (possibly because Braniac notes their presence), and wind up leaving both Earth and Mars intact, giving rise to the standard DC timeline of your choice.

Setting Up a DC Fictional City

One of the things that’s most distinctive between the Marvel and DC comics universes is that Marvel mostly uses real-world cities, particularly New York City, while DC tends to invent their own. Gotham is basically New York City in all ways that count. Metropolis is probably Chicago, since it’s usually not that far from Kansas. Star City is almost certainly Seattle and Central City is pretty much St. Louis. There’s some argument about exactly which city some of them are modeled on (with the argument that Metropolis is NYC in the day and Gotham is NYC at night), but, superficially, it’s unclear why not just use a fictionalized version of the real city to make it easy to map the events onto knowledge of the real world.

Meanwhile, I’ve always been much more of a Marvel reader, so when I was working on a licensed supers video game and we were talking to one of our licensing reps, I didn’t get why he was so adamant about suggesting things like making sure someone mentions Big Belly Burger if they’re going to be talking about food. I hadn’t actually been aware that DC had its own whole consistent, cross-comic infrastructure of invented businesses, other than the obvious ones like Lexcorp and Wayne Enterprises.

As I work on my own campaign set in the DC-verse, it’s suddenly apparent why all these things are such a good idea (and as true for the comics as for RPGs). Even a fictionalized version of New York City is going to be full of preconceptions. People that know a lot about the city will wonder why things were wrong, or resources were not used that would have helped with the current situation. Just think about every time a TV show or movie has been set in your home town and you’re completely baffled by how they’ve screwed up the geography. But Gotham isn’t anyone’s actual hometown. If Batman can get from the opera house to the stock market in a few panels of roof jumping, nobody can insist that it’s impossible since they’re nearly five miles apart, even as the bat flies. In Gotham, they may not be.

More important for a publishing company that can get sued for libel than for your own game, but still a consideration if you want to post your stuff online or eventually release it as a setting book: completely replacing places, companies, and people with analogues gives you a lot more freedom to use them however you need to for your work. McDonalds’ lawyers might have something to say about a storyline where a villain has been putting addictive substances in the special sauce, but O’Shaughnessy’s doesn’t have corporate representation. There’s still probably a legal curtain where it’s too obvious who or what you’re referencing, but it’s a lot easier to get away with than when you’re absolutely using real world names.

For your game, my suggestions include:

• Figure out what the most notable things are about the city you’re converting, and convert those first. When your players are like, “we should go to X location,” it’s good to have already come up with an analogue than having to scramble and decide on the fly whether that’s different in your fictional city.
• This is also a good time to take a page from the Fate Dresden Files game and give those location Faces, people that represent them. This can be a way into fictionalizing notable people for the real city that you want to use. Rather than just having a list of city notables, tie them into the locations that they own or influence. This gives them context and a potential location to find them if the players want to deal.
• Think of how each location can have a plot hook into the kind of campaign you’re running. Your players are more likely to be interested in doing something with the information you’ve presented if there’s a rumor of something they can accomplish there.
• Don’t be afraid to drastically change something to show how your city isn’t a 1:1 rename of the real world city. The goal is to keep the players from being totally complacent about geography and resources: this is your city, and things exist as they’re useful for your game, not because the players know it’s available in the real world. For example, DC seems to always add a docks area for smuggling crime, even for conversions of land-locked cities.

For example, the city of Terminus is definitely not Atlanta (it’s totally Atlanta):

The (Assault and) Battery

A few years back, the Terminus Warchanters were about to get a new baseball stadium in an inconvenient part of town, wrung from taxpayer expenses and designed to further destroy traffic at the north end of the city. A group of villains that were in town at the time decided to do something about it, and managed to completely disintegrate the nearly-finished structure. The Warchanters are still playing at the still-relatively-new Cash Field downtown. Not being able to get the money to do anything with the now-gaping-hole in the earth, but with several other buildings and parking garages near completion and still intact, the area became a fairly low-key entertainment venue around a large artificial pond. The uneasy origins and government embarrassment have, however, made it slightly dangerous rather than the theme park it was designed to be. It currently exists in an uneasy detente between upscale entertainment venue and criminal hangout, with just enough of a police presence to keep it from completely sliding into a haven of villainy.

The Big Chik ‘N’

National chicken restaurant brand Chik ‘N’ Go has its origin in one of the Terminus’ suburbs. The Catie family still privately owns the restaurant, which has a profoundly religious bent to its hours of operation and philanthropy. This has made the restaurant and its owning family the enemy of many progressives, particularly those that feel marginalized by its attitudes. Having bought out the franchise that erected the giant chicken-decorated building in northern Terminus, they use the easily-identifiable landmark as their flagship store. Many a rogue has tried to bring the place down, if only for the easily-scored notoriety, but somehow the family has enough savvy to fend off such attacks. Some worry they’re playing the long game, which includes planting addictive chemicals in their secret brining recipes.

CCN Center

The Cash family is Terminus old money, but managed to eclipse most of the other families with antebellum roots by investing heavily in media in the latter half of the 20th century, led by current family patriarch Cedric “Ced” Cash and his Hollywood-royalty bride Jen. Cash Communications is one of the dominant cable and internet providers in the region, and the family owns both the Terminus Broadcasting System and Cash Cable News cable channels. In the recent days of 24-hour-news, CCN has become the crown jewel of the family’s holdings, becoming the place most centrists get their news. Ced and Jen have several grown children that have various roles in the business, and his extremely elderly and wealthy mother still sometimes shows up to high society functions.

Crystal Plaza

Crystal Cola has been the dominant soft drink in the world for over a century, and it got its start right in Terminus. Currently the Sampson family profits most from the brand in their role as Terminus nobility, with their patriarch the international corporation’s CEO. They’d long had a museum to the history of the brand in the crime-ridden Underground Terminus, and a few years ago picked up digs and funded a much more elaborate tourist trap next to the Olympic park, the other end of the plaza anchored by a large aquarium that is a frequent villainous target for fish-based schemes (and the local rogues are tired of Aquaman being the most frequent JLA member associated with the city).

High’s Depot Stadium

One of the most popular big-box stores in the nation is headquartered in Terminus, and two of their founders, Aurelius High and August Null, have made their families rich off of the business and stayed local. The High family are noted philanthropists, supporting a diverse series of causes including various Jewish foundations and their own art museum. The Null family are more interested in extreme capitalism, and are known for their ownership of the Terminus Steelwings football team, which currently plays out of the stadium funded by the company he founded.

The Pentacle

Looming near the middle of town, this too-trendy artsy neighborhood has grown up around an ill-advised five-way arrangement of streets. In addition to the traffic implications, complicating drives from all over the area, the mystic consequences are also poorly understood. Once a haven for a particularly off-putting wizard “hero,” Zachary Carstairs, who allowed the culture to grow up around his below-ground sanctum, he eventually went mad with power and had to be put down by a surprising teamup of the local crimefighters and rogues. Since then, the mystical hasn’t really flourished in Terminus, and the area has become increasingly touristy, but the core of mystic alignment theoretically still buzzes in the area, waiting for someone else to make a bid.

The Snarl

Another nationally-famous traffic pattern, this junction of interstates and major surface streets has long contributed heavily to the infamously poor Terminus commute. There’s a running bounty of respect and cash that’s been accumulating for decades to go to the rogue who can manage to smash it so thoroughly that the city has to start from scratch and maybe replace it with something less horrifying. Don Moreland, who also had a mysterious hand in one of the avenues that runs through the Pentacle, is the DoT official responsible for the traffic pattern, and even in his advanced age wields influence to keep it from being replaced. They say that his family has a long and poorly understood stranglehold on the city’s infrastructure planning.

Stagcrest Neighborhood

Terminus’ most infamous party zone, this area features most of the bars and clubs most popular with the celebrity set, including globally-known performers that live full time in the city. Because the city’s celebrities have long been focused on hip hop (with a recent influx of film), the area is famous for violent shootings as performers escalate their “beefs.” Rogues know they’ve reached a certain level of notoriety when they’re invited to go clubbing with rappers who want to associate with them for the street cred, or film stars that want to up their bad boy/girl personas for the tabloids by being seen with a villain in public.

Wolfheart-Holbrook International Airport

One of the busiest in the world, Terminus’ airport is a centerpoint of all kinds of smuggling, with most savvy rogues figuring out a way to get some leverage on the operation. Lambda Airlines owns a whole terminal, and uses the city as their international hub. The Dean family currently profits most from the airline business, with their patriarch the brand’s CEO. While the MARTHA (Metro Area Rail Transit and Helicopter Authority) subways don’t reach as many places in the area as most would like, they do conveniently start at the airport, making it easy for travelers willing to brave the trains to get to most of Terminus. The odd addition of helicopter-transit to the agency’s remit is a historical legacy of a brief villainous fad to abuse private helicopters in the 70s, resulting in the city moving them to public control.

Rogues: Making a Villainous Character

This is an exercise I put together for coming up with a street-level supervillain PC, on par with the Gotham rogues for power level. After outputting the character summaries, you can then use those as a guide for building the character in your system of choice.

Character Creation

• What is your gimmick/theme? Start thinking about your brand as a villain, and how it will inform your skill choices below.
• Skills:
  • What is your primary skillset? Suggestions include: Intellectual/Scientist, Ninja/Martial Artist, Brute/Wrestler, Thief/Catburglar, Con Artist/Actor, Daredevil/Provocateur, Ex-Police/Lawyer, Soldier/Mercenary, Industrialist/Mobster.
  • Pick two narrowly defined skills from within your primary skillset (e.g., a particular academia, science, weapon, style, type of criminal skill, role, etc.). Write them down for later.
  • What is your “power”? This can be either a low-level meta power or a particular physical or mental competency that is a maximum or slightly-beyond-human norm. If the latter, it should be directly relevant to your primary skillset (e.g., Acrobat works for Ninja, Thief, or Daredevil but not for Intellectual or Brute).
  • What is your hobby? This should be something useful that you devote a lot of time to, but not directly relevant to your primary skillset.
  • What is your primary social interaction method? Examples include charming, sexy, scary, witty, psychiatrist, threatening, cool, terse, etc.
• Take the six skills you defined above (skillset, sub-skill 1, sub-skill 2, power, hobby, and social) and rank them from best to worst. If your sub-skills are worse than your skillset, they represent particular weaknesses in your technique, and if they’re higher, they’re areas in which you excel. Your second-lowest skill will be something that you’re barely trained in, and your lowest skill will be something in which you’re amusingly incompetent.
• Why are you stuck in a life of crime instead of using your skills for honest work? This is often a mental illness (like most of Batman’s rogues), but could be something else you can use that would keep you from going straight without a huge reason.
• What’s your main weakness that the “heroes” have used to defeat you in the past? This can be the same reason you’re stuck in a life of crime.
• Optional, but could have story perks: Pick an established DC character that you have a personal connection to (e.g., villain you used to hench for and know how to use their gadgets, hero you have some level of foil-rivalry with such that your relationship is frenemies, etc.).
• Come up with a name (real and costumed) and a rough description of your costume.
• Rank the following criminal motivations for how they matter to you personally, from most important to least:
  • Wealth: Just in it for the life of luxury
  • Competence: Reputation for accomplishing what was intended
  • Fear: Reputation for causing death and pain
  • Notoriety: Reputation among civilians for being a villain
  • Honor: Reputation for keeping one’s word and avoiding universal taboos (like harming children)
  • Respect: Reputation among other criminals/villains

Example Rogues

Thomas West

A local threat that peaked a few decades ago, the Dieselpunk was all about vehicle-based mayhem. A tatted-up rocker with a penchant for leather and goggles, most of his crimes involved elaborate cars and trains that he’d built himself into essentially tanks (but do NOT call him Thomas the Tank Engine, he hates that). It was unclear at the time why such a competent individual didn’t leverage his skills as a mechanic or driver for legitimate means, but he admits that it was mostly being brought up by criminals and having too-deeply embraced the anarcho-socialist mentality of his preferred music scene. Unfortunately, basing all your crimes on large vehicles that need roads or tracks makes it easy for more mobile crimefighters to head you off (especially in Terminus rush hour), so the Dieselpunk was successful less often than hoped, and spent a lot of years in jail.

After his last long stint in the pen, he finally did what most aging anarchists do and embraced wealth and the respect of his peers, going more or less legit. He wound up inheriting a gentrifying old train depot from former local villain King Plow, and opened the Terminus West nightclub and concert venue. He still affects a cleaned-up punk vibe and keeps painfully thin, so despite going gray he maintains an aura of cool that serves him well as a rock venue owner. The complex also has an unadvertised underground lounge that admits local criminals, and features numerous escape tunnels in case of crimefighter raids. This serves as one of the primary networking spots for local rogues, and the only real drawback is that Mr. West (“Call me Tommy”) will often show off the latest jams he’s been working on (he always was more enthusiastic than competent as a musician). He’s generally willing to give advice and help on mechanical engineering to the good tippers at his lounge.

Skills: Driving, Mechanic (Power), Vehicle Daredevil, Cool, Piloting, Music
Aspirations: Wealth, Respect, Notoriety, Competence, Honor, Fear

Companion Cube

Terminus villains have an answer to the Bat-family’s Oracle in the mysterious hacker Companion Cube. Believed to be a protege of the Calculator, the almost-certainly-a-she presents to her clients as simply an icon of a cube with a heart on it taken from a relatively-recent video game and a digitally-masked voice. Excellent in most computer-based disciplines (though with a slight problem managing to pilot drones effectively when she “comes along” on a job), she especially excels at handling security systems (and keeping an eye out for incoming crimefighters). Most of the local rogues with any kind of computer expertise assume she must be a low-level technopath to accomplish some of the things she manages. She clearly wants to make her social persona a terse, no-nonsense type, but she frequently gets excited or too-comfortable with her clients and talks way too much. This is how everyone found out about her deep investment in cosplay, and there’s a running game at the Terminus West lounge to try to figure out which of the heavily-costumed groupies is Companion Cube in her latest disguise. She has a sideline producing costumes for many of the city’s villains (and possibly some of the heroes).

She seems to largely be turned to a life of crime out of disgust at trying to live the straight life. Many suspect that she must have hit the glass ceiling for female programmers, and bounced off of it hard and angrily. However, since she mostly oversees jobs for the cred, trying to be a L33T H4X0R, her biggest weakness is that she’s probably still holding on to her day job, and isn’t available a lot of the time. Crimefighters with money have managed to sideline her in the past by various attempts to investigate local technology firms, which gets her to slow down her nighttime activities for a while to not look suspicious.

Skills: Security, Hacker, Cosplay, Drones, Technopath, Terse
Aspirations: Respect, Competence, Honor, Wealth, Fear, Notoriety

Trailblazer

Perhaps the quirkiest rogue in Terminus is Frank Torres, the Trailblazer. A fairly-powerful meta with super-strength and invulnerability, he isn’t particularly fast or agile, and is too heavy to be easily transported by most consumer vehicles. So he is an avowed pedestrian and explorer, and has an unparalleled on-the-ground understanding of Terminus’ map (he’s an enthusiastic geocacher). The mountain of a man doesn’t bother with a costume very often, because he’s over seven-feet tall and thick enough to compensate for the square-cube law, so he doesn’t exactly blend, but he sometimes goes with an ironic British explorer motif complete with pith helmet, khakis, and mustache (he can grow an excellent mustache). Surprisingly quick-witted for those that expect your typical dumb brute, he unfortunately isn’t that great of a hand-to-hand fighter and is absolutely terrible at situational awareness (most rogues want their brutes to pay attention to where the crimefighters are, and not accidentally take out load-bearing walls).

The quirkiness of Trailblazer is that he’s not really a criminal. He will sometimes sign onto jobs to get a paycheck (the man has to eat a ridiculous number of calories), but his real claim to crime is that his pet peeve is people that cut off pedestrian access. He has hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage from stomping cars blocking crosswalks and construction vehicles that park on the sidewalk, because he’s walking here. Because of the magnitude of his powers, there aren’t many crimefighters in town that can do much about one of his sprees, and they’re largely at a loss about what to try. He mostly goes to jail when Superman happens to be in town anyway.

Skills: Unstoppable, Geocaching, Brute, Witty, Fighting, Situational Awareness
Aspirations: Notoriety, Wealth, Honor, Fear, Competence, Respect

Rogues: What Villains Want

I watched the new Harley Quinn cartoon at about the same time recently that I finally got around to reading the now-venerable Cat Tales fanfic. Meanwhile, I am Pagliacci is an excellent ongoing fanfic that started up recently. All of that got me thinking about why there aren’t more games that focus on the villain side of things, rather than the heroes.

One of my assertions about gaming is that Superheroes and Horror are the hardest genres to run, by virtue of their protagonists generally being entirely reactive. The classic mode of tabletop games is the self-directed D&D adventuring party, and even modern module-based fantasy games generally give the PCs a lot of control over the timing of what they attempt. Running a dungeon is much more akin to committing a crime than foiling one. Similarly, Shadowrun, from a mile-high perspective, is a very similar play cadence to D&D, concerned with getting into the stronghold and acquiring the rewards from the most defended central point.

Meanwhile, games with PCs that are superheroes tend to have a much harder time not making everything a total railroad. Batman is on Joker’s timetable, most of the time. So why not just play Joker?

This post is mostly my brainstorming on the kinds of rewards and jobs that villainous PCs can pursue. With enough time and production value, the GM could make up essentially quest cards with various crime opportunities that are are upcoming, and allow research to plan the job and find out more of the particulars.

Villains Want

• Wealth: Cash money
• Leverage: Information or resources that can be used to extract things from others (usually through blackmail)
• Favors: Pending payback for undertakings previously done on behalf of others
• Brand: Success at forwarding a personal theme
• Competence: Reputation for accomplishing what was intended
• Fear: Reputation for causing death and pain
• Notoriety: Reputation among civilians for being a villain
• Honor: Reputation for keeping one’s word and avoiding universal taboos (like harming children)
• Respect: Reputation among other criminals/villains

Potential Crimes/Undertakings Have

• Payoff: Value of the score itself (Wealth, Leverage, or resources that can be used for a further undertaking)
• Danger: Base danger to the villain on attempting it (from on-site defenders)
• Emergency: Speed of response from law enforcement/super heroes
• Collateral: Risk of harm to bystanders or unrelated infrastructure (potential loss of Honor, but increase of Fear)
• Branding: Being on theme for one or more villains

Example Undertakings

• Rob a bank/museum (night): High Payoff, usually moderate Danger, potentially reduced Emergency depending on how it’s handled, low Collateral
• Rob a bank/museum (daylight): As night, except higher Emergency and very high Collateral; increased chance of gaining Notoriety and potentially lowered security measures (because things aren’t locked up for the night)
• Rob a secure facility: Usually high Payoff and Danger, variable Emergency depending on whether the facility is legit and calls for help, usually low Collateral
• Rob a vehicle in transit: High Payoff and often lower difficulty and Danger than robbing a building, potentially high Collateral and Emergency depending on where the vehicle is attacked
• Rob a party: High Payoff (often easier to rob socialites wearing jewelry than hit safes), usually low Danger depending on the party, but very high chance of Collateral and Emergency in most cases
• Break out another criminal: Low Payoff except in Favors, high Danger and Emergency, usually low Collateral; good way to increase Respect
• Extortion: Variable Payoff depending on the target, usually low Danger but high Emergency (or vice versa if it’s the kind of person that won’t go to the law), low Collateral but good way to increase Fear
• Kidnapping: High Payoff but extremely high Emergency and Collateral; this can go very wrong if all the variables aren’t accounted for
• Hostages (People): This differs from Kidnapping in that the hostages are usually taken in a particular location; extremely high Emergency and Collateral, and this is rarely successful except as a delaying tactic for some other plan, as people don’t like to pay for this; can be a way to increase Honor or Fear
• Hostages (Infrastructure): This usually involves using explosives or similar to threaten to destroy an important inanimate object/structure; often safer than taking people as hostages, as governments will often pay for this, oddly; Collateral may be lower depending on what’s rigged to blow
• Destroy Infrastructure: Sometimes the plan is simply to destroy infrastructure for some other ongoing purpose; there’s usually no immediate Payoff (unless as part of some kind of real estate or stock shorting scheme in which case this is probably Insider Trading), high Collateral and Emergency, and various reputations can increase drastically
• Trafficking: Gain ownership in the distribution tree for illegal goods (drugs, weapons, prostitutes, etc.); this is usually a high recurring Payoff but involves a lot of Danger to set up (or a series of other undertakings) and an ongoing chance of Emergency as the law and heroes try to break up the business
• Smuggling: High Payoff, low Danger, variable Emergency, low Collateral; unless the smuggling is very high profile, this is often a pretty safe crime to do to build money, but doesn’t involve a lot of reputation increases because of that
• Suborn Institution: Use blackmail, mind control, disguise, etc. to control a person or otherwise infiltrate an organization; this can have a very high Payoff, and other things are highly variable based on what’s being suborned and what methods are used
• Assassination: Potentially high Payoff if contracted, and usually commensurately high Danger and Emergency but low Collateral in most cases; good chance of raising different reputations depending on the target
• Insider Trading: Do a crime that will inflate the value of something already possessed; high Payoff and variable other risks depending on what’s being done
• Crusade: Do something that only has value in forwarding a personal agenda; high Branding but low Payoff, with variable amounts of other risks

Troupe-Style Secret Identity Supers

One of my favorite parts of comics and long-form supers stories (e.g., TV series) is the ability to spend a lot of time focused on the personal lives of superheroes, particularly out of costume. This tends to be completely lost in video games, and is hard to include in tabletop RPGs. It’s difficult to lavish a lot of spotlight on the detailed NPC interactions of one member of the team.

I think that a lot of the latest crop of supers media, particularly the Defenders-verse, points at a way to dig into this style of play a little more. You just need your players to be comfortable:

• Having multiple PCs, most of whom are supporting cast for other players’ superhero PCs
• Switching characters frequently between scenes (in the style of Fiasco or similar story games)

The possible benefits of this style include:

• The GM can include plotlines where PCs aren’t just reactive to the problem of the week: investigations and personal life can be much more player-directed
• Players are much more likely to have a PC they can bring into a scene, even if it’s not their main
• There’s a much finer-grained level of risk than normal supers plots: it’s much easier to threaten and even kill supporting cast PCs without taking the player out of the game

Practically, this style of play means:

• Each player has a main (superhero) PC with a full character sheet, and at least one secondary PC for each other player. The secondary characters likely have slimmed down character sheets (either just by virtue of not having powers, or actually stripped down to just their most salient traits for ease of reference; for speed of play, they might even start with just a few salient traits and gradually build to full sheets as they’re played).
• The secondary PCs are fixtures in their associated main PC’s life. Some of them may know about the character’s heroics. Some may have reasons to be in her life due to strong secret identity ties. All of them are important enough to the main PC to want them around in many circumstances, but who should not just be totally on board with all the hero’s decisions (i.e., there should be tensions to play for conflict, but the secondary PCs will almost always stand by their main PC when it’s important).
• The GM should switch viewpoints between main PCs living their lives apart from the other main PCs. Each switch to another main PC should be aggressively framed to draw in secondary PCs (e.g., “you’re just getting home from the fight and your wife is waiting up…”). The overall scene framing should probably try to balance out player screen time (e.g., if the first scene is Hero A and her wife, the next scene should be some combination of the players that weren’t playing Hero A or her wife).
• As in most round-robin style play, I suggest having a strong social contract about metagaming, but allowing everyone to be present to watch scenes where none of their PCs are present (with an eye to letting them jump in if suddenly one of their PCs is relevant).
• A session’s plots should probably be thematically linked to one another even when they don’t connect, and often should serve to draw the main PCs together (e.g., Hero A and Hero B were working the same case all along). Sessions, or at least story arcs, build up to team-ups of the full super group. Even when just a pair of heroes meet, they could include members of their supporting cast played by the other players.

For character generation:

• Create a bunch of cards with common relationship tropes (suggestions below).
• While making characters, have each player take turns to claim a relationship card from the pile for a type of relationship that makes sense for that hero PC (e.g., “I want my hero to have a sibling, a significant other, a police contact, and a mentor”).
• Put the hero’s name on the card, and slightly customize the role (e.g., Player A takes the “SO” card and labels it “Hero A’s Girlfriend”).
• Haggle with the other players to see who’s interested in playing which of your roles. Ultimately, each other player should have at least one of your supporting characters. (If you have a strong gender imbalance at your table, try not to force the one guy/girl to play everyone else’s SOs: that’s not cool.)
• Work out some high level details about the secondary character between the hero player and the holding player so both players are happy with the potential interactions.
• If it makes sense to all players involved, a player might combine two secondary character cards into one PC (e.g., Player B decides Hero A’s girlfriend doesn’t know about her lover’s alter ego, but is actually Hero C’s spy contact, and it will be a surprise to everyone once those connections and secret jobs come out).
• Once all relationships are settled, come up with stats for the secondary PCs using whatever method the GM has set up.

Suggested relationship types include:

• Parental Figure: A parent or guardian makes an excellent foil/support.
• Dependent: If you have a child or ward, it’s likely a teen old enough to actually be meaningfully onscreen.
• Sibling: Your brothers and sisters are going to find out you’re a superhero.
• Crush: This is not someone that doesn’t even know you exist, probably, because the tension is hanging out with feelings left unspoken.
• SO: Many heroes have the tension of whether they can ever have a committed relationship in the business.
• Spouse: You’re married, but does your spouse know you’re a hero?
• Ex-SO: You still interact regularly, so why did you break up and why are you still on good enough terms for screen time?
• Best Friend: Have you told your best friend? If not, is she really your best friend?
• Confidant: This may not actually be a good friend, but it’s someone who knows your secret and is, thus, involved.
• Enabler: This is someone who knows your secret enough to cover for you while you’re heroing.
• Work Partner: This is either a business partner, police partner, or someone that’s otherwise so close to you at work that your absences definitely affect her.
• Employee: This may be your personal assistant who’s totally clued in, or one of your many employees that’s closest to you and may know your secret.
• Boss: Your boss should probably have a little more relevance in your life than work, unless most of your secondary characters and secret identity plots are work-related.
• The Help: Are you rich enough to have a butler or man/girl Friday? Is that nice?
• Sidekick: You can certainly have a sidekick, as long as the relationship is such that she doesn’t come along on your big team-up missions for some reason.
• Mentor: This is likely the retired hero that got you into the business, but may be a more mundane mentor figure that’s not a boss or parent.
• Friendly Rival: This town may be big enough for another super that you encounter frequently, who you’re grudgingly friendly with and team up with sometimes, but who has no interest in participating in your big team-ups.
• Tech/Gear Provider: Do you have a costume guy? Do you have a gadget lady? You should get at least one of those. They’re great.
• Hacker/Operator: For many heroes, it’s useful to have a computer-savvy person in the chair/van that can hack things, research for you, and otherwise provide remote tech support.
• Handler: If you’re heroing for a (quasi-)government agency or mega-corp, you probably have a handler/liaison.
• Spy Contact: This friend probably shouldn’t be operating on domestic soil… unless at least one of you isn’t on domestic soil, and you’re friends anyway.
• Law Enforcement Contact: Every good hero has a friend in the police/FBI to go to for procedural help and the occasional backup.
• Criminal Contact: Some heroes cultivate a CI or are just bent enough to not mind the small crimes, and that kind of contact can get you useful illicit information, substances, or documentation.
• Lawyer: Particularly on the street level and/or with a public identity, it’s important to be on good terms with your lawyer.
• Medical Worker: You really want to be friends with some kind of plucky EMT or doctor that makes house calls and can fight a ninja or two in a pinch.
• Investigator: If your own skills don’t bend toward investigation, a friendly gumshoe is a great help in finding information.

D&D 5e: Mutant (Rogue Subclass)

This is primarily intended to provide a Charisma alternate for Arcane Trickster. It’s probably also fairly easy to convert to an alternate Eldritch Knight.

Many individuals with the blood of supernatural creatures in their family trees or who were invested with a surge of chaotic energy become sorcerers, able to unleash titanic magics. Others are less robust in their expression of these powers. They gain a few useful tricks from their magic-infused blood, but not enough to see them through life. They tend to express signs of their powers, either obviously in their appearance or in the inexplicable accidents that happen around them as they grow up. They, in short, are frequently forced out and must turn to a life of crime, or at least an upbringing on the fringes. Adventuring is often the only way they can be accepted in society, for as accepted as adventurers are.

Spellcasting

When you reach 3rd level, you gain the ability to cast spells.

Cantrips. You learn three cantrips based upon your mutations (see below). You learn another cantrip at 9th level when you gain your latent mutation (see below).

Spell Slots. You gain spell slots as an Arcane Trickster.

Spells Known of 1st-Level and Higher. You know three 1st-level spells. The Spells Known column of the Arcane Trickster Spellcasting table shows when you learn more spells of 1st level or higher. Each of these spells must be drawn from your personal spell list based upon your mutations (see below) or the spells available to all mutants because they are Hated and Feared (see below).

Whenever you gain a level in this class, you can replace one of the mutant spells you know with another spell of your choice from your personal spell list. The new spell must be of a level for which you have spell slots.

Spellcasting Ability. Charisma is your spellcasting ability for your mutant spells, since they are produced from your innate magical energy. You use your Charisma whenever a spell refers to your spellcasting ability. In addition, you use your Charisma modifier when setting the saving throw DC for a mutant spell you cast and when making an attack roll with one.

Spell save DC = 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Charisma modifier

Spell attack modifier = your proficiency bonus + your Charisma modifier

Primary Mutations

Starting at 3rd level, you gain three mutations. Each mutation grants you a permanent special ability, a cantrip, and a list of spells that you may add to your personal spell list when selecting spells known.

Mutation	Special Ability	Cantrip	Spells (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th)
Ceraunokinitic	Resist Thunder	Thunderclap (XGE)	Thunderwave, Shatter, Thunder Step (XGE), Storm Sphere (XGE)
Clairvoyant	Gain Expertise in Investigation, Perception, or Stealth	True Strike	Detect Magic, Darkvision, Clairvoyance, Locate Creature
Communicative	Gain Expertise in Insight or Perception	Message	Comprehend Languages, Detect Thoughts, Tongues, Divination
Constructive	Gain Expertise in all tools with which you are proficient	Mending	Mage Armor, Enhance Ability, Protection from Energy, Fabricate
Cryokinetic	Resist Cold	Ray of Frost	Ice Knife (XGE), Shatter*, Sleet Storm, Ice Storm
Dimensional	Gain Expertise in Deception, Performance, or Sleight of Hand	Prestidigitation	Feather Fall, Blur, Blink, Banishment
Dominant	Gain Expertise in Deception, Intimidate, or Persuasion	Friends	Charm Person, Suggestion, Enemies Abound (XGE), Charm Monster (XGE)
Electrokinetic	Resist Lightning	Shocking Grasp	Witch Bolt, Misty Step*, Lightning Bolt, Dimension Door*
Entropic	Resist Acid	Acid Splash	Chromatic Orb, Knock, Dispel Magic, Polymorph
Illusory	Gain Expertise in Intimidation, Performance, or Stealth	Minor Illusion	Silent Image, Invisibility, Major Image, Greater Invisibility
Immune	Resist Force	Blade Ward	Shield, Mirror Image, Counterspell, Stoneskin
Luminous	Resist Radiant	Light	Magic Missile, See Invisibility, Daylight, Sickening Radiance (XGE)
Mesmeric	Resist Psychic	Dancing Lights	Color Spray, Hold Person, Hypnotic Pattern, Confusion
Nightmarish	Resist Necrotic	Chill Touch	Ray of Sickness, Blindness/Deafness, Fear, Blight
Pyrokinetic	Resist Fire	Fire Bolt	Burning Hands, Scorching Ray, Fireball, Wall of Fire
Telekinetic	Gain Expertise in Athletics or Acrobatics	Mage Hand	Jump, Levitate, Fly, Freedom of Movement
Turbulent	Resist Poison	Poison Spray	Fog Cloud, Gust of Wind, Stinking Cloud, Vitriolic Sphere (XGE)

* Change the energy type and trappings of these spells to match the overall energy type of the mutation (e.g., Misty Step has you teleport on a line of electricity).

It is highly suggested that you pick a suite of mutations that point to a particular origin. For example:

• Aberrant: Communicative, Dominant, Mesmeric, Turbulent
• Celestial: Communicative, Constructive, Dimensional, Luminous
• Draconic: Dominant, Immune, Telekinetic, (Cryokinetic, Electrokinetic, Entropic, Pyrokinetic, or Turbulent based on dragon color)
• Elemental: Ceraunokinetic, Dimensional, Luminous (Constructive, Cryokinetic, Pyrokinetic, or Turbulent based on elemental type)
• Fey: Constructive, Dimensional, Illusory, Mesmeric
• Fiendish: Cryokinetic, Electrokinetic, Pyrokinetic, Turbulent
• Undead: Dimensional, Entropic, Immune, Nightmarish

If your race or other source already grants you a resistance you’d gain from one of these mutation types, work with your DM to replace it with an appropriate expertise.

Hated and Feared

Starting at 3rd level, elements of your mystical heritage become readily apparent. Work with your DM to develop a particular mystical signature or physical stigma that calls attention to you in civilized lands. You have disadvantage on Charisma (Persuasion) checks to interact with the superstitious unless you go to great pains to hide your heritage, but you gain advantage on Charisma (Intimidation) checks against the same kind of individuals.

You may also add the following 1st-level spells to your personal spell list from which you can choose Spells Known. They are general magics that all mutants seem to have access to, in order to hide and protect themselves from a world that hates and fears them: Absorb Elements (XGE), Chaos Bolt (XGE), Disguise Self, Expeditious Retreat, False Life.

Latent Mutation

Starting at 9th level, you gain a fourth mutation. You immediately gain the cantrip and special ability of that mutation, and may add its spells to your personal spell list.

Emissary

At 13th level, your mutation has progressed to the point that your progenitors recognize you as one of them, and you also have standing among the mutant community. You have advantage on Charisma checks when dealing with other mutants, and when dealing with the creature type of your origin. Creature types of your origin will tend to treat you as a peer or relative rather than a threat upon first encounter.

Omega Class

At 17th level, you may use the Empowered Spell and Heightened Spell metamagic abilities of the Sorcerer class. You have sorcery points equal to your Charisma modifier, and you recover to full sorcery points upon taking a long rest.

Outcasts, Part 1: Alien Superheroes

I’m a big fan of the Supergirl TV show, and I’m particularly intrigued by the fact that its particular licensing limitation* implies a world where most of the superpowers are possessed by alien refugees. What follows is a setting take on how to justify this, followed by some design musings. The next part adds on an additional option for this type of campaign.

* Most of the non-alien DC characters were already in use on other shows or otherwise not available to the TV shows.

In God’s Image

A strange truism of sapient life throughout the known universe is that it seems bound to very similar forms. Through countless channels on countless worlds, evolution eventually settles on a bipedal hominid form for its pinnacle. Many look nearly identical to humans with minor cosmetic variations, the vast majority of the remainder are superficially different but structurally the same, and only the smallest fraction are truly alien in form. Nearly all of them drink water, breathe oxygen, are comfortable in a single G of gravity, and can derive nourishment from the same kind of foods.

Many religions throughout inhabited space seek to explain this truism, and the cutting edge of xenoscience can only postulate some constants of physics and chemistry that cause life to converge in this way.

Perhaps stranger, mental acuity is similarly constrained. Few sapients are much smarter than humanity, and nearly all have understandable emotions and drives. This is also true of their machine creations. There is no such thing as a true general artificial intelligence that any sapient will admit, though many races have come up with quite sophisticated virtual intelligences that lack their own motives and creativity.

All these factors mean that cosmic society plateaus technologically and culturally. The development void between 21st century humans and any given alien species is much smaller than many scientists would expect, even for civilizations much older than those on Earth. Bright humans exposed to starfaring technology can often figure out how to work it, and even partially reverse engineer it: it turns out that very little technology is sufficiently advanced to become magic. While this technological wall is no doubt depressing to futurists, it means that humanity is poised to enter intergalactic society at far less of a deficit than might otherwise be expected.

Of course, scientific competence and cosmopolitan leanings are very different things. Exposure to the vast profusion of alien culture just waiting to embrace earthling neighbors may set off many of the worst isolationist tendencies of humanity…

Design

This uses Savage Worlds as a basis, but you could easily use your supers engine of choice (though the follow up post explains in more detail why I went with Savage Worlds).

• Use the science fiction companion to build basic alien race traits (with humans keeping the free edge as their racial advantage).
• Each race also gets a handful of power permissions from the super powers companion, and are built as supers (i.e., they don’t have to take the arcane background edge).
• Characters receive a variable number of points to purchase these powers.

All characters, even the weakest NPCs, should typically get around 10 points for buying powers, to allow certain powers to be standard for the alien race (e.g., you can always assume Kryptonians can fly a little, and are stronger and tougher than humans, but they might not all be as powerful as Supergirl). Wild Cards and other important characters should receive more, at the power band you want for your game. They’re, for whatever reason, the exemplars of their race’s powers.

In general, unless you’re using an established setting, players can essentially make superheroes as they would for any other supers game, then reverse-justify their power picks to a race of which they’re an exemplar.

Example Races

Kryptonian:

• Kryptonians have the Gimmick hindrance (require regular access to sunlight from a yellow sun) and the Power Negation hindrance (Kryptonite). They gain six additional Power Points to buy super powers beyond what is standard for the campaign.
• Kryptonians are incredibly strong, and can buy Super Attribute (Strength).
• Kryptonians are incredibly hard to hurt, and can buy Toughness.
• Kryptonians have preternatural flight with no apparent means of locomotion, and can buy Flight.
• Kryptonians can fly into space and survive for short periods, so may purchase the Resistance package required to survive in space and Doesn’t Breathe (with the minor Limitation of a finite duration).
• Kryptonians can use heat vision and cold breath as expressions of Attack, Ranged.
• Kryptonians have enhanced vision and hearing, and can buy Heightened Senses.

Green Martian:

• Martians have the Weakness (Major) hindrance (Fire) and the Racial Enemy (White Martian) racial drawback. They gain +2 ranks of Strength and +1 Toughness.
• Martians are psychic, and can buy Mind Reading and Telepathy.
• Martians are shapeshifters, and can buy Chameleon.
• Martians have preternatural flight with no apparent means of locomotion, and can buy Flight.
• Martians can alter their densities to pass through solid matter, and can buy Intangibility.

Human:

• Humans gain a bonus Edge (per the normal Savage Worlds rules).
• Humans are stubborn, and can buy Resistance (Mental). With the lack of psychics on the planet, few even realize they are so gifted. As a whole, Earth goes mostly unknown on the galactic stage because long-range psychic probes for sapience are so globally resisted.
• Humans breed faster than most other races, and form strong groups, such that many humans functionally have the Minions power. Aliens are often overwhelmed by human numbers and tendency to coordinate.
• Humans are sociable, resistant to fear, and quick to overcome hardship and shock. They can buy Super Attribute (Spirit).
• Humans tend to have an outsized share of prodigies, and can buy Super Skill (any).

Design Note: Humans needed to be designed to account for their stats being the Savage Worlds baseline, so power choices were made around things that the majority of humans could plausibly have to some extent without it being strange/noticeable.

Savage Angels, Conversion Rules

I’ve been running the No Soul Left Behind campaign for Better Angels for several months now. While the campaign is great and the setting of the core RPG is awesome, we couldn’t really wrap our heads around using the trait system effectively. I’ll probably get around to doing a system review one of these days, but the upshot is that the translation of abstract vices and virtues into concrete rolls to accomplish something never gelled, and my players finally asked me to convert to a system with a more traditional trait system.

I wound up choosing Savage Worlds, for a few reasons: it seems pretty resilient to hacking, I already have the Super Powers Companion for a game that never wound up happening, and it’s pretty easy to grok (plus one of the players already has a lot of Deadlands experience and was one of my review playtesters when I originally tried Savage Worlds).

My goal was to keep the central struggle of Better Angels, which is that the more powerful you become, the closer you are to getting dragged to hell. So the main change to Savage Worlds supers proper is the bolting on of a translation of Better Angels‘ vices and how they relate to powers, sinning, and damnation. This conversion also takes a lot of inspiration from Smallville, insofar as the vice you pick to roll is based on your agenda for the conflict.

The below assumes familiarity with Better Angels and Savage Worlds (and its Super Powers Companion).

Vices

Your wild die (a d6 in standard Savage Worlds) is replaced by a die for whatever vice is your primary motivation for the conflict/scene (e.g., if you have Greed d8, Espionage d10, and Breaking and Entering d6, you’d roll d8+d6 if you’re trying to break into a building to steal something but d10+d6 if you’re trying to break into a building to get information).

• Greed: Your motivation in the conflict is to gain something for yourself (typically of permanent value): this is generally something that you feel will be useful to you, particularly in the long term (short-term gains may actually be another motivation). If no other value seems appropriate, Greed can also be used for crime- and economics-related challenges.
• Espionage (with elements of Gluttony): Your motivation in the conflict is to sate your physical needs (anything that makes you feel good physically, including getting into a fight not because you’re angry, but just because you enjoy the thrill) or to discover something secret. If no other value seems appropriate, Espionage can also be used for academics- and perception-related challenges.
• Cruelty (with elements of Wrath): Your motivation in the conflict is anger: you are pissed off in general and that’s driving your behavior or you specifically hate the opponent. If no other value seems appropriate, Cruelty can also be used for violence-related challenges.
• Cowardice (with elements of Sloth): Your motivation in the conflict is to not be involved in the conflict: you have no other agenda beyond not submitting to the opponent’s agenda or not being bothered in the first place. If no other value seems appropriate, Cowardice can also be used for athletics-related challenges.
• Corruption (with elements of Lust): Your motivation in the conflict is to sate your psychological needs: generally this is an urge to be loved or otherwise appreciated, but it may involve going after something that will make you feel good emotionally in the short term. If no other value seems appropriate, Corruption can also be used for seduction- and impression-related challenges.
• Deceit (with elements of Envy): Your motivation in the conflict is to try to exceed the qualities of someone you feel is better then you, to spite someone who has something you don’t have, or to pull one over on a sucker. If no other value seems appropriate, Deceit can also be used for stealth- and deception-related challenges.
• Pride (Special, See Below): Your motivation in the conflict is to prove your superiority over someone else and prove that you’re the better person (or villain); since this could theoretically apply to almost anything for prideful characters, any other appropriate value should be considered as motivation first before pure pride is the dominant value. If no other value seems appropriate, Pride can also be used for diplomacy- and leadership-related challenges.

Raising Vices

In any scene in which you used a vice (or a power keyed to a vice) and your demon is active, the rating of your vice can go up by one die step. You must have both used the vice and accomplished one of the following things (as argued by the Screwtape):

• Greed: Stole something you didn’t need (double bump for something priceless you didn’t even want)
• Espionage: Gloated in victory or consumed something bigger than your head (double bump for totally suborning someone with illicit knowledge or consuming something so big you shouldn’t be able to do so)
• Cruelty: Killed or permanently maimed a person/lovable animal or destroyed something of real value (double bump for a massacre or mass property damage)
• Cowardice: Humiliated someone or sat by idly while something awful happened that you could have easily stopped (double bump for killing someone with a death trap or permanently maiming someone through torture)
• Corruption: Made someone your minion or seduced someone that should know better (double bump for getting lots of minions all at once or completely suborning a hero’s ally through your charm and wiles)
• Deceit: Betrayed and mocked someone that trusted you or seriously hurt someone because you were jealous of them (double bump for killing an ally or ruining someone out of jealousy)
• Pride: Claimed that you were invincible and proved to your enemies that you were right; also special:
  • Whenever a vice would be raised over d12, it resets to d8 and your Pride goes up by one die step. (If you get a double bump while at d12, your Pride goes up by one die step and your vice resets to d10.)
  • If your Pride would exceed d12, this begins the process of dragging you to hell (it goeth before a fall… needless to say, don’t claim you’re invincible unless you’re planning to job it and get beaten).

Repenting

In order to lower a vice, you must forego a wild die for the whole scene (rather than using a vice-based wild die), succeed on at least one test where the outcome matters, and accomplish something opposed to the vice you want to lower:

• Greed: Help someone with no expected gain or give away something of high value to yourself
• Espionage: Learn something new and important through above-board means or deny yourself something physical you really want but you know is bad for you
• Cruelty: Demonstrate mercy when it would be much safer and more expedient not to or protect someone at actual risk to yourself
• Cowardice: Lose a conflict that costs you substantially (rather than running away) or go out of your way to accomplish something the right way when there was a much easier way to do it wrong
• Corruption: Admit that you did something wrong and work to make up for it or deny yourself something emotional you really want but you know is bad for you
• Deceit: Tell a truth that is injurious to you or your interests or help out someone you hate at cost to yourself because you know your hatred is irrational

In order to lower Pride by one step:

• You must lower a vice below d4 (it resets to d8).
• You must simultaneously humiliate yourself in a lasting way that will have huge consequences for your reputation.
• If Pride would go below d4, instead reduce another vice by one step (the dominant vice still resets to d8).
• If all of your vices are d4, you can attempt Exorcism.

Skills

The normal Savage Worlds skills are replaced with:

• Pretending to Be What You Ain’t (Acting/Deception)*
• Playing Sports and Shit (Athletics)
• Hacking, Cracking, and Social Media (Computers)
• Grand Theft Auto (Driving/Piloting/Boating)
• The Old Ultraviolence (Fighting)
• Taking Slugs Out of Your Buddy (Healing)
• Scaring the Hell out of Someone (Intimidation)*
• Digging up Dirt, Looking for Clues (Investigation/Tracking)
• That Shit You Learned in School (Knowledge)**
• Breaking and Entering (Lockpicking/Security)
• Good Looking Out (Notice)
• Getting People to Do What You Want (Persuasion)*
• Making Shit and Fixing It (Repair/Crafts)
• Downrange Violence (Shooting/Throwing)
• Lurking, Prowling, and Generally Skulking (Stealth)
• Being Down With the Street (Streetwise/Gambling)*
• Camping and Outdoorsy Shit (Survival/Riding)
• Being a Mean Girl (Taunt)*

* Uses Charisma bonus
** Not required to be bought as individual skills (unlike normal Savage Worlds)

Powers and Aspects

Powers and Aspects are rebuilt using the rules from the Super Powers Companion as a guideline. In general:

• Powers scale in effect pegged to the associated vice die (roughly equal to the value of the die; e.g., at a d6, it’s got 6 power points worth of effect, and at d12 it’s got 12 points worth of effect).
• Aspects scale in effect pegged the higher of the two associated vice dice (roughly equal to twice the value of the die; e.g., Darkness-Shrouded was Devious, so it’s now pegged to Corruption + Deceit, and if your Deceit is d10, it’s got 20 points worth of effect).
• I’ll give you little summary blocks to show where the power is at at each rating.

For how they work:

• You can always use powers, but if you use them your demon is active and raising the associated vice is on the table for the scene (even if you didn’t roll that sin’s die at all).
• To turn on an aspect, roll the dice for the two vices associated with the aspect:
  • If the demon is activating it, on a failure it doesn’t turn on (and you step down the higher of the two vices), on a success it turns on (and you step down the higher of the two vices), and on a raise it turns on (without having to step down the value of the vice).
  • If the mortal is activating it, on a failure it doesn’t turn on (and you step up the lower of the two vices), on a success it turns on (and you step up the lower of the two vices), and on a raise it turns on (without having to step up the value of the vice).

Example Power, That Hideous Strength (Cruelty):

• d4: Super Strength (p. 43) +2
• d6: Super Strength (p. 43) +2, Attack, Melee (p. 22) rank 1
• d8: Super Strength (p. 43) +3, Attack, Melee (p. 22) rank 1
• d10: Super Strength (p. 43) +3, Attack, Melee (p. 22) rank 1 (Stackable upgrade)
• d12: Super Strength (p. 43) +4, Attack, Melee (p. 22) rank 1 (Stackable upgrade)

(For example, if your Cruelty is currently rated d8, you have the Super Strength power from page 43 of the SPC at +3 steps, and the Attack, Melee power from page 22 at the first rank.)

Other Demonic Abilities

• Sinful Perfection: Step down the vice the player is rolling before the roll is made, but add +4 to the roll’s result.
• Demonic Endurance: Death is not usually on the table for a hellbinder when Incapacitated. If there’s an easy way for you to escape, when Incapacitated you escape (possibly in a no-body, no-kill kind of way). If your opponents have you in a situation where that’s impossible, they’ll find themselves compelled to arrest/capture you rather than killing you. You’re only in danger of dying past Incapacitated when dark magic is on the table in the hands of someone at the end of her rope (i.e., usually, only other hellbinders can actually kill you, or a mortal that’s been pushed way too far).
• Devilish Creativity: Use the system in the book and replace the virtue costs with Resource units. You can break one big money unit from crimes into 4 Resources. You also accumulate 1 Resource each per scenario to represent your legitimate income. When you want to make a device/improve the lair, spend Resources equal to the book’s costs (in Generosity and Knowledge) and step up a meaningfully related Vice by one. Boom, you have the device.

Advantages

Secrets and surprises from Better Angels work as special-use Bennies: you can expend them to reroll a test for which they’re specifically relevant.

Character Conversion

• Make characters normally for Savage Worlds. You don’t have to take an arcane background to get your powers (as per SPC). Edges that don’t make sense may be off the table (most of the supernatural ones, anything that makes you rich, etc.).
• Award Savage Worlds XP based on how far you are into the campaign.
• Convert your current Generosity to spare Resources, and your various vice ratings to the new vice rating (1 dot is a d4 up to 5 dots is a d12; if you’ve zeroed out a vice, it’s at an X and no powers associated with it function).

Pathfinder: Ability Point-Based Supers

Points

Two unrelated things that became related in my brain:

• It would be reasonable to model Captain America’s superpowers (from certain eras and writers) as just “human max attributes.” In D&D/Pathfinder, that’s 18s (or maybe 20s) in all six ability scores.
• While I have my misgivings about the fungibility of the race features in the Advanced Race Guide*, I couldn’t help but notice that the point scales involved in race building seemed fairly similar to the points used to buy ability scores. In particular, I wondered if it would be fair to do something like allow a player to be an aasimar (a 15 point race) in a party of players handbook races (9-10 point races) in exchange for the aasimar PC having 5 fewer points for ability scores.

Those ideas gelling in my head, I did do some additional math and found out that, indeed, the race point balancing is relatively close to ability point balancing. To wit, if you made a PC with all 18s it would cost around 90 ability or race points (not counting the first 15 points that normal characters get); for race points, it’s using the +2 ability score bonus with no strings that increases in cost for each cumulative +2. The price is likewise similar (around 130) for all 20s. Since the math is close enough, let’s move on to the system below.

* In that my intuition and experience is that it leads to players ditching rarely used but interesting features for boring features they think they’ll use more

Point-Based Supers

You can turn Pathfinder into a supers system by just giving out bonus points that can be spent on ability scores or racial features. A character of around Captain America’s power level gets 100 or so points. Notably, these characters will be hella awesome for first level characters, but scale normally through character level (and mythic tiers, if you’re feeling particularly gonzo).

Character points can be spent in three major ways: enhanced ability scores, racial features, or spell-like abilities.

Ability Scores

While the normal point buy rules stop players from buying over 18, it’s easy to extend the costs indefinitely upward: the cost for each ability score increase is equal to the modifier for that score (e.g., it costs 5 points beyond the cost of 19 to get to 20, because 20 grants +5).

The extended chart is below:

Score	Total CP Cost	Score	Total CP Cost
7	-4	22	37
8	-2	23	43
9	-1	24	50
10	0	25	57
11	1	26	65
12	2	27	73
13	3	28	82
14	5	29	91
15	7	30	101
16	10	31	111
17	13	32	122
18	17	33	133
19	21	34	145
20	26	35	157
21	31	36	170

So someone that had 100 points and went all in on an ability score could start with a 30 or better.

Racial Features

Most of the racial features from creating new races (p. 215 of the ARG or here) are probably viable for building heroic abilities. Hell, you need a pile of superhero points to afford to be a robot (sorry, “construct”).

Specifically, leave out the racial features that modify ability scores (use the point costs above) or grant one-off spell-like abilities (see below). Otherwise, anything the GM and player agree works for the character’s power concept should be fair game for the prices listed.

Spell-Like Abilities

The real bread-and-butter of making supers is the freedom to pick spells to use as spell-like abilities. Want to be a blaster? You can do worse than Scorching Ray. A teleporter? Dimension Door.

The costs in the ARG seem relatively cheap for this purpose, though: it makes more sense to sell players a second level spell per day for 2 points when they’re going to have less than a dozen points, but that’s a LOT of scorching rays if you have 100 points to spend.

So I suggest for this purpose you cost spell-likes as their level squared. So:

Spell Level	CP Cost
1	1
2	4
3	9
4	16
5	25
6	36
7	49
8	64
9	81

You can also work out with the player how many uses are required for something to become an At Will spell-like ability, or an always-on supernatural ability. For attacks and other primarily-in-combat powers, I’d work out how many times I genuinely expect the player to use it in a day, and make it At Will once that many uses are purchased. For utility abilities, particularly long-duration ones, it may only take a few per day to become a self-only, always-on supernatural ability. Healing and other things that become really good out of combat with unlimited time should probably never become At Will.

Like racial spell likes, the caster level for these abilities is equal to total character level/hit dice, and the save DC is equal to 10 + spell level + the most relevant ability score modifier (but don’t let the player browbeat you into setting the save DC to the ability score he’s raised to a crazy high level if that doesn’t actually make sense).

And with all of that, you’ve hacked in superheroes. Either turn them loose on the normal fantasy classes and setting, or strip down the core classes to run something more traditional for supers.