JAGS Supers - Holiday City
The JAGS Supers Book takes place in the fictional Holiday City--a Midwestern, mid-sized metropolis with an unusually high number of Luminaries (superheroes). In most cases where we make a world-book its because we have "something to say" that we haven't "said before" (or hasn't been done as well or, more likely, better than we could do it). The point of having a world-book set in a fictional city isn't just to produce a big list of characters--no, it's more than that.
We have upgrades to JAGS Revised Archetypes. We've been keeping track of stuff we didn't like or didn't work so well. We have now powers, corrections to old ones, just-plain-editing. The Archetype rules were designed from the standpoint of "I'm running a super hero game--what powers do I need?"
We have an actually "new" idea. At least I think we do. For the JAGS Supers world-book you start making a character by rolling four power-categories. You can then spend your APs on any powers within those categories and/or buy up to 3 levels of Fast Company (Fast Co L4 if you ditch all the powers). This creates some wonderfully weird characters and has a kind of Iron Chef feeling to it. We've seen roll-your-powers games. We've seen point-buy-power games. We've never seen roll-THEN-buy. We think it's pretty cool (and, to be fair, perhaps someone has done it--or something functionally similar--that's fine--it was new to us).
We have good characters. The idea behind the world-book is to have two books: the first is the general overview and all the general public might know about the characters (no stats). The second is the secrets. The secrets about the world, the secrets about the characters (and their stats). This means players can read through the first book entirely and know the players and have a decent idea as to abilities, power level, personality, etc. They don't need to forcibly skip learning the secrets. We think that's a cool idea.
We have some other ideas. We have some thoughts about how to make characters that have a bunch of interesting plot-hooks--for the PCs. We have some rules that will help drive (we hope) action in game. We have several venues (including a bunch of high-school-aged super-characters for a high school game) that players can fit into.
We thought this would be a quick project--we'd run (several) games as playtests and to flesh things out. We had a bunch of characters that were pretty well desgined. We thought: we'll slap it together and then get back to the really-hard space and fantasy books we're working on.
But of course it turned out to be a much, much bigger project than we were counting on. So . . . again (as always) who knows what'll happen!
