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Dungeons & Dragonsis known for it’s high fantasy settings, but what if you want to change it up? An Adventuring Party isn’t that different from a team of superheroes after all, and really, is a Path of the Totem Warrior Barbarian all that different from a person bitten by a radioactive bear?
You can do whatever you want in D&D, and a superhero campaign lets you spice things up while having your players be directly involved with the setting, meet a bunch of interesting NPCs, and have failures that matter. Here are some things to consider to get you started.
Make Your City A Character
While a traditional D&D campaign might have your heroes visiting many towns and kingdoms in an entire globetrotting adventure, superhero stories, and by extension, superhero-inspired campaigns, areusually defined by the city they’re set in.
Whether it’s a fictional crime-ridden hellhole like Gotham or a real life city like New York,you’ll want to have your city be a character in its own right.What are the major locations in the city? Is the government overwhelmed, corrupt, inept, or something else? How long have superheroes been present in the setting? There are tons of possibilities, and really digging into what your city is like will help you in the long run.
Know The Public’s Stance On Superheroes
In JLA/Avengers, there’s a scene where the Justice League visits the Marvel Universe and is appalled by how much the public hates its heroes, while the Avengers visit the DC Universe and are suspicious at just how much the people love their heroes. It’s funny and indicative of how public opinion affects a superhero setting.
The public’s stance towards heroes can inform a lot of the plotand how random NPCs will treat your players and may affect whether they opt to have a secret identity or not.
You can reinforce this mechanically by giving players advantage or disadvantage on certain rolls depending on public perception, and you can make improving perception with various groups a long term goal over the course of the campaign.
Related is the public’s stance on people with powers who are otherwise civilians. Looking at the Marvel Universe again, some heroes that go out of their way to protect people are fine, but random mutants are treated with general distrust.
It’s also good todivide up your NPCs into groups to decide their general stances on heroes.Maybe civilians like your players, but the police don’t. Maybe they’re on good terms with some politicians but not others and there’s a major election coming up with. There are a lot of ways to make interactions with NPCs complex.
Tie NPCs To Your Characters
A superhero isonly as good as their supporting cast, and since you’ll largely be sticking to one setting, having NPCs with a direct connection to your players and their storyline can give them a good personal connection and show who they’re trying to save.
Something fun to do if your players opt to maintain a secret identity is to have NPCs with opposite opinions on your players identities. So they hate their superhero persona but like them as a civilian or vice versa.
This can also go for villains! Bad guys your players are personally invested in stopping (or even saving) are a great way to drive the plot.You shouldn’t do this for every villain,as having some who only exist to cause problems makes the ones with personal connections stand out more.
Make Your Players Multi-Task
Once you’ve got your setting and NPCs established, you may start mashing them together as need be! Just because your players are working on stopping one evil plandoesn’t mean someone else isn’t going to do a crime.
This also makes a superhero campaignvery useful for when you’re missing a player, you can just have them deal with some one-off issue then return to the main problem when you have a full party. Furthermore, by necessity, you’ll have a lot of characters to interact with, so it’s a good idea tohave all of them doing something that your players can involve themselves with. Superheroes are always busy after all!
Best of all, if you have several things going on,it’s easier to allow your players to failwithout completely screwing them over. It might affect their relationships with certain characters or make certain things harder, but if they’re spread out there’s more room for failure that doesn’t feel devastating.
