Roman Supers campaign

Signal boosting for another blogger I recently stumbled across. The Mephit James blog is starting up a series of posts about using the SCRPG to run an historical supers game set in the Roman Empire, which sounds like it could be a pretty neat campaign framework that moves beyond traditional cape stories. If that’s of interest, you can see the first post in the series here, with more to come in the future.

Worth a look, IMO.

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New update with more campaign setting ideas and a couple of custom villains.

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Kenneth Hite did a capsule campaign description of a setting where the heroes were all Marvel stars in ancient Rome.

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Haven’t seen that one, sounds rather like a What If? plot. Hite being Hite I’m sure it was decent.

It was a Suppressed Transmission with alternate supers settings, with another during the Crusades and a third in the Italian Renaissance with DC analogs. His most recent home campaign used Sentinels in the Nedor Comics universe.

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Sounds like a good fit. The SCRPG works well for Golden Age heroes, and the public domain stuff from Nedor/Standard/Pine is a bit more coherent than most publishers in the era managed.

I’ve only gotten to play a single one-shot in a homebrew Golden Age setting, and that was back when the game first dropped. Had a good time as Mer-Man, an aquatic hero who got his powers after being rescued by Atlantean mermaids from a sinking liner torpedoed by a Nazi super-sub. They were nice enough to share their transformation formula after extracting a promise not to tell anyone they existed.

And yet, you just told us… oh, how quickly a hero falls.

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It was a one-shot, and in the Golden Age no less. The mermaids ceased to exist one panel after they sent Mer-Man to fight Nazi u-boats and will never be seen again or mentioned outside of the occasional one-panel infodump explaining his origin. And even that assumes he someday gets another story, which is by no means a given in that era.

We can’t all be sexy, sexy Namor, you know. :slight_smile:

On topic, I feel like aquatic heroes might get more respect in a Roman campaign thanks to the whole Neptune thing. OTOH, they were never as comfortable at sea as they were at land, and you might see more seagoing villainous types out of those dastardly foreigners. Carthage was more of a sea power, after all.