Mini-Campaign: Marvel’s Civil War
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Having just seen Iron Man 2 yesterday, (Spoiler-free review: better than Iron Man, and doesn’t ever feel like it’s dragging. It incorporates a ton of greater Marvel universe stuff, and you NEED to stick around after the credits) I’ve been thinking about running a mini-campaign in the Marvel universe once I move.
I’m a big fan of the Civil War, and have about a dozen different graphic novels of that whole saga, from Iron Man and Spider-Man to the Fantastic Four and Wolverine. It also is the perfect place for supervillains and superheroes to work together for a larger purpose, and makes a great adventure.
For those who don’t know, here’s the overall plot:
A group of inexperienced superheroes decide to take down a group of high-powered super villains, leading to one of the supervillains blowing up an elementary school. This leads congress to enact the Superhuman Registration Act, an act that would require all superheroes to register with the government, led by Iron Man. A group of heroes oppose this, led by Captain America. Over the course of a few weeks, things get pretty intense, with Spider-Man switching from the Pro-Registration to the Anti-Registration side, and heroes getting rounded up and arrested. In the end, there is a huge battle in Times Square, where Captain America surrenders as he sees the destruction around him.
This seems to me like the perfect adventure synopsis.
You would begin the mini-campaign by finding out which side the heroes would be on, then just running with it.
If pro-registration, they would spend their time rounding up heroes and imprisoning them, leading up to the final conflict in New York. If they were anti-registration, they would spend their time keeping themselves out of prison, and busting other heroes out, again, leading up to the Times Square rumble.
It would be a great opportunity for players to meet different famous superheroes (even fight some of them) and explore the moral issues surrounding the whole idea of an entire sector of our population being required to register themselves or be deemed criminals.
If the game was successful enough, you could keep running the game through the Skrull Secret Invasion, and even the Dark Reign.
Let me know what you think!
I’m not the biggest fan of Civil War, though I thought the core writing was superb over what was done with the regular titles — Fantastic Four was meh, Spider-Man was great — but yes, it makes for a great campaign premise. I think it’s even worth transposing into the fantasy universe. (i.e. “No adventuring, EVER! So sayeth the Emperor!”)
It would be nice to run this with an actual licensed Marvel RPG, but we all know how GRREEEAAATT Marvel has been at keeping one in action post-TSR. As it is, we’ll have to settle for other systems, and GMs will cry while players scream “Are you SURE you measured Captain America’s stats correctly? No way he’s this hard to take down!”
.-= Matthew Arcilla´s last blog ..Inspired by Ink: Bringing tattoos into your game =-.
Hey, this sounds a lot like a campaign that lasted like, two weeks that you ran a few years ago…hmm…I don’t know if I can go through that heartbreak again, Mark. Last time was too much.