It’s hard to be a saint in the city.
— Bruce Springsteen
Those who have read Play Dirty are familiar with my old Champions campaign. See, I was “The Guy Running Call of Cthulhu” in the college gaming club and I already had the reputation as “The Guy Who Killed Characters.” I didn’t like that nom de guerre and I wanted to change it. Thus, when I was told “You just can’t kill a Champions character,” I took up the challenge of running the game.
Now, the thing is, I didn’t kill characters. I massacred them.
The players were costumed heroes in an organization with law enforcement powers. They acted like cops–with certain limitations–trying to bring peace, justice and harmony to a broken city.
(For more info on the game and how I ran it, you can check it out in the first few chapters of Play Dirty.)
For a long time, I’ve been thinking out writing out my old campaign as a sourcebook of some kind. A Champions sourcebook or something like that. But I never got the juice to do it. Champions wasn’t really the system to do the setting in. Yeah, that’s the game that spawned the campaign, but the rules really weren’t right for what I wanted.
(I started fiddling with my own supers system: something driven by motivations rather than powers. In other words, Batman’s Motivation is Revenge (no, it’s not Justice) while Superman’s Motivation is Justice and Wonder Woman’s Motivation is Peace. It don’t matter how big and powerful Supes or Batman are: the number of dice you roll is based on Motivation. If you are acting outside your Motivation, you get less dice. That’s why Batman can beat up Superman from time to time. Not all the time, but only when he’s acting on his Motivation.)
I gave up on that–not enough of a mechanic for a game. So, I put my mind toward other things…
Then, I started reading Jared’s DarkPages.
I now have a game system that really fits my old campaign. And it’s all because of one little word.
Pain.
Keep an eye out for Dangerous Saints: a new imprint for DarkPages.