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It began as a joke.

One day, while swimming and thinking about bad pro-wrestling gimmicks, a stupid idea came to my head. The idea was of a supervillain calling himself "The Villain Formerly Known As Dr. Destroyer" (or something to that effect) accompanied by a scantily clad young woman. A day later, I had three players in a superhero role-playing campaign. The idea was that the players were very amateur superheroes who had decided to form a team and take on super-powered crime.

Campaign Tone

The campaign is essentially designed to be a comedic one, with clumsy, amateurish and unprofessional superheroes fighting over the top supervillains armed with lethal world domination agendas. The tone was to be somewhere around the "silly" mark; serious things still happened, but they were tempered with the outrageously stupid. Think the now-defunct Gen 13 Bootleg (or regular Gen 13 nowadays) or Adam Warren's Dirty Pair series, but with occasional leanings to the downright silly and farcical like Deadpool, The Tick and the long-dead Sensational She-Hulk.

Continuity is somewhat variable. Villains carry over between issues, but most issues... er... adventures were entirely self-contained. On the other hand, if half the city blew up by accident, it probably would take a few issues (or some clumsy Marvel retcons) to bring it back to normal.

The outlook of the campaign is pretty light-hearted. In the end, good triumphs over evil... somehow. In some cases, the heroes can win and not even know it until well after the fact. Likewise the morality is pretty clear. Good guys are good, bad guys are evil, and silly. There are a few "good bad guys" and "bad good guys", but it's pretty clear who wears what colour hats. What isn't clear is my mixed metaphors.

Setting

The world in which the campaign is set is similar to our own, but with a few differences. The main difference is, of course, the existence of superhumans. The first superhumans appeared in the United States in the 1930s, mainly fighting normal criminals. The first battles between superhuman were in the 1940s, when superhumans fought on both sides of World War II. Since then, superheroes and villains have been considered a part of everyday life.

Superhumans come from any number of sources. Some people are born with superpowers. Some acquire powers through bizarre accidents or experiments. Some were trained in mystic arts. And others use super-technology equipment, power suits and mystic artifacts.

Advanced technology exists in a variety of ways. Special Forces soldiers use flexible lightweight armour and laser rifles. Cyborgs, battlesuits, artificial intelligence and robots are all considered normal technology, and have been in use for many years. Strangely enough, normal life is pretty much the same. Society and technology is pretty much the same as in the real world. Advanced technology is rarely seen outside of certain organisations.

Character Creation

The characters were created using the Fuzion (ack bleah) rules. Each player was given 60 atttibute points, 50 power points and 50 skill points, which are considered to be "normal" for Gnu Millenium player characters. This translates to roughly 350 (!) 4th edition character points. Which means that a "typical" PC is the equivalent of a high-powered 4th edition character. Makes you mad, doesn't it? The Defensive and Offensive X ratings were set at 24. Of course, the rule of X is stupid, so it was promptly ignored.

Rant mode off.

Aaaanyway, there were no real powers that were disallowed, not recommended or the like. Of course, given another good think, I can think of a few things I would have changed buuuuuut...

The end result was three player character superheroes, plus an NPC under the GM's control (Kate Tank). The PCs had an... amusing range of powers, skills and abilities that made for a small (if diversified) team. Hypothetically they are all of equal initial power. Of course, since the Rule of X doesn't distinguish between a 12D6 No Range Double END 12+ Activation Focus Grabable Energy Blast and a 12D6 Armour-Piercing Autofire Area Of Effect No END Ranged Killing Attack, the rule of aX is not really a valid comparison.

Where was I? Oh yeah, putting my thoughts into HTML.

At present the campaign is still open to new members joining in, so there's the possibility of adding extra PCs. Of course, the might or might not have the benefit of revised character creation rules. Or I could just jump for joy when 5th edition finally appears and truck everything over into that. Or whatever. Or just finish this damned paragraph.

Defenders: Bootleg

Defenders: Bootleg was an interesting idea put forward by one of the players to make the campaign a little more varied and interesting. The idea was that one of the players writes a one-shot, self-contained adventure and GMs it. The PC of that player becomes an NPC, and the GM joins the campaign as a player (and using Kate as his PC). After the adventure, any new NPCs used can be put into general circulation.

It's quite fun, actually.