Superhero Gaming finally going Full Steam Ahead

 

Almost a full year ago, I posted about my long and fruitless efforts to find a way to run my old supers setting Haven on Roll20. You can see links there about old posts about my Supers campaigns of yore, or just search the blog for "Haven" or "Superheroes" or whatever. But in a nutshell, I ran this setting, based on the Ancient Superhero 2044 Island nation of Inguria, since I was a teen, through a variety of systems. Superhero 2044 briefly, (you can read about my somewhat unhappy experience with early Supers rpg Supergame here ) then Villains and Vigilantes, then into Champions. 

In that post last year, I mentioned that after 3 years or so of looking for a game that would be doable on Roll20, I had found out about the Marvel Mutliverse RPG. 

Though I of course overthought the rules as usual, it turned out to be not at all as complicated as I first thought. But it was supported and linked though Demiplane into your Roll20, so it seemed my best chance at getting my Haven setting going again. So first step would be to study it so I could run it effectively. Then learn to use the Demiplane connectivity (which included paying for a Demiplane subscription). Maybe be a player in some sessions. Then get my own group going for it. 

All easier said than done. Like I said I overthought the rules. But eventually I figured out that the basic task resolution was fairly simple, if not a little wonky. But the various powers and abilities weren't something I needed to memorize at all. I just needed to know the basics of how they tied into play. So much like spells in DnD, I leave it up to the players to know how it works and then tell me. Done and Done. 

I then played in some games. I played in a couple of sessions by a guy called Morganwolf, who has tons of live plays on Youtube. He runs it at conventions and such, and overall promotes the system, which I think is not exactly popular yet as far as I can tell. Morgan uses published adventures, and you have to play existing Marvel characters. He is good at it, but I am not a fan of using pregens. And I was late in signing up, so got stuck with Black Widow. But I had some fun with it. These sessions don't exactly give a lot of leeway for role-play, but the little I got to do was having Black Widow at Avengers Mansion drinking Vodka and smoking Russian cigarettes.  

Then sometime later, I found a little group through the Marvel RPG Discord. They were gaming very infrequently, and it was set in the Marvel Universe circa 1980. But we got to create our own characters, so the opportunity was there to better learn the system through character generation. My character was a version of my old gaming days Champions character Manx McCallister. He was a human cat hybrid, who got stuck in a teleporter pod his Quantum Scientist parents were working on and got spliced with his pet cat, much like Jeff Goldblum and his not pet fly. 

OK, I at first was going to use Fritz the Cat for his image, but settled on a more human version.

Manx is a Physics student in college, so has science stuff
in addition to feline agility and some knowledge of "Cat Fu"

These handful of sessions were fun, though our characters seemed to be secondary to the goings on of various existing Marvel heroes. But here I met the guys who would make up half of my group. More on that in a bit. 

So I knew the system a lot better, was now versed in character creation through Demiplane, and just needed players. So I started reaching out in the Marvel RPG discord, with less than satisfactory results. Since most advertises sessions there where for one shots with existing Marvel characters, somebody looking to do actual campaign play with original characters got a lot of attention. But honestly, a lot of the dudes (and yes, the members of the Discord were almost all dudes) raised red flags for me. 

For example, one guy seemed OK with some good ideas, but eventually told me he would have to use his phone to play, because he lived in a tent. Another guy wanted to run a Star Wars Stormtrooper who was dancing all the time. Ugh. 

My setting is sort of a kitchen sink pastiche
but this was going a bit too off the rails

 

Month in and month out, I was having trouble finding good fits for me. The guys from some of the games I played Manx in were up for it, based mostly on how much fun I think the role play of Manx was in those sessions. But I would need more. And ones who did not seem like lunatics were few and far between. But slowly it came together. Here and there I found somebody who might work. A guy who had streamed tons of his Marvel games on Youtube. And eventually a girl, who was super rare on the forums (and she has been in my Saturday DnD games for a few weeks as well and injected some new energy into that). 

So holy mother of fuck, it was off to the races. As of last week (had to be off this last Sunday), we are three sessions in. 

OK, so here is what I decided to run. In my old Champions campaigns, I would have two different groups. One was The Protectors, a government sponsored superteam that for years of play was the main situation. Supers fighting super stuff in the streets of New America City. But also as an occasional side thing I did Justice Incorporated, which was a kind of heroes for hire that was more street level. So like a cowboy, and field hacker cyberpunk, a ninja, a depowered genie called Blue Jinn. Things like that. I figured Justice Inc would be a good start. 

And I had used my Inkarnate account, which had been sitting idle (and getting paid for annually) for around four years, to recreate and update my old Haven setting map. 

Inkarnate doesn't have great futuristic
city and town tools, so I just used images

Justice Incorporated of old was a sort of side hobby of rich Japanese/Irish industrialist Patricia Elizabeth Kyono, who in my old games served as the "good" corporate CEO to counterpoint the evil ones. She was a good bit older, but still hot as hell. 

I actually may still have my mini for her 
somewhere. A female in corporate garb. 
But this one I made with AI captures her. 

So since it has been over a decade since I did anything with the Haven setting, I have had it be that there has been almost nothing in the way of supergroups or supertypes in general, things have been quiet and the world plugging away in the decades following WW3. I still have the Science Police (inspired by such from Superhero 2044) who try to handle meta human and science gone awry situations these days. 

So after a couple weeks of letting the players do up their characters, we were about set. Again, this was a long time in the coming, so I was pretty jazzed. And a little nervous about a few things. The oddball way I would start the campaign, that these would be more powerful than basic street level dudes Justice Incorporated had in the old days, etc. But I wanted them to be Rank 3, which in this system was sort of mid-level supers (Rank 4 would be heading into Thor and Iron Man territory), and just in general trying to manage expectations. 

Well, my expectations were by far exceeded. I can only say that these three sessions so far have brought me great joy, and the players are enthusiastic as I could ever hope. I have a DnD campaign going on, and its OK, but this is just bringing back old feels from the Old Haven campaigns. 

I want to talk about the actual sessions, but this would be a gigantic post, so I will save that for the next one. But for now, here are the great characters:

Igneous. He is a descendant of Titans, 
and has walked the earth for centuries. 
He has great strength and some rock powers.

Ghost is blind since birth, but has Daredevil
type sensed and almost supernatural ability to 
sense things down to almost the molecular level. 
His mentor is actually a now in this 70's Matt Murdoch.

Paladin is a descendant of an ancient order
of fighters against the supernatural going 
back to biblical days. 

Crash is a wealthy, partially cybernetic
cyberpunk who has almost mental powers
to use to tap into technology and the web

What can I say about Ra-Ta? He is a small grey alien who flies around
in a small UFO while studying earth. His players often works late, so only
shows up for the last half of some sessions. But it is pretty funny. An absurd
character that actually works with what I am doing. He comes and goes. It works 
for this character. His player is hilarious and the character cannot speak English
so he does a sort of high pitch gibberish (that Igneous can understand for some reason)

Seraph. She is a member of an ancient
winged race. She is just a loner who 
lives kind of homeless on old warehouse
rooftops. Loves fresh fish. 

Finally found my Supers RPG to run online?

 

I have posted in the past about my deep background with Supers RPG's (also here), going all the way back to childhood starting with the very first superhero game Superhero 2044. Then Supergame, then Villains and Vigilantes, and finally Champions/Hero System. That was my favorite, and using my futuristic hero setting Haven (based in part on Superhero 2044's Inguria Island) I turned many of my DnD groups on to it as an alternative. There would be resistance (most were not comic book fans) but they would eventually be requesting it. They loved it, despite the crunch of Champs. It was probably my favorite genre, in large part having grown up a comic book kid.

Now several years since the last time I ran a supers session, and also now that I essentially run all games online, I have been hankering to give it a go on Roll20. But the crunch of Champs would make it very hard. I considered Mutants and Masterminds which was fairly popular online, but it has its own high crunch it seems. I don't want to have to learn nor run another crunchy ruleset. 

Interesting note: when I first looked into this about
a year ago, the deluxe book (the most recommended 
as far as character creation choices) was out of print
and going for around 300 bucks where you could find 
it. But it is now apparently around 50 bucks and easily found. 

Last year for a couple session I played online in Kickstarted supers system I can't even remember what it was called. It was based on 5th ed DnD. It was kind of fun, but the guy kind of lost it mid-session and decided the system was no good for what he was doing. He declared he was probably going to try another system, but I passed. Put my search for a system on hold. 

But now in recent weeks I discovered Marvel Multiverse RPG, a fairly new system. I always rejected a licensed supers game, especially based on Marvel or DC, but the attractions of this was it was fairly rules light, and had excellent Roll20 support it seems. I immediately ordered the book off Amazon, and started watching Youtube videos about it. 

It has an odd, what I think is kind of clunky dice rolling system, but it is indeed simple. I can work with it I think. And it based around Marvel is OK. My Haven setting is more or less an alternate future version of the Mavel Universe (I always had it 20 years in the future of whenever I ran it) as a base, though having grown up on comics I was very familiar with Multiverses. I had Haven be a kitchen sink of genres, and other comic universe stuff could enter into it. Sci Fi in general really. I even had a Jedi show up in some old session. 

MM RPG has a rank system to determine your supers level, from street level like Daredevil all the way up to Galactus, and how that all works with the powers is something I need to research more of. Also it is all a little bit of an investment. The physical book was almost 40 bucks, and for Roll20 I will need to buy the in-platform version. For full functionality (sharing rules with players, a character sheet builder, etc) I think I need a subscription to something called Demiplane. But money is not really an object if I could get this off the ground with some decent players. 

I have plenty going on with my DnD right now. But I am around 30 sessions into the campaign and already past the point where I get a wander lust for other genres and systems. So as always it is sort of life raft building time. My research shall continue, but I am hopeful for supers action!

Cheers

Do I like Champions more than D&D?

D&D is my first and always will be my best love. I think.

I’ve been running my 1st ed. (started out as OD&D) game world for over 30 years, and it would be hard not to look at it as a favorite son. And jeez, I can run it in my sleep. I practically phone my games in a third of the time, and the players still love it. It’s easy peasy, and satisfying.

But see, I have these other two games I love. Call of Cthulhu has been a fave since before I ever read Lovecraft. At around 14 years old I played in some games at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, and although I found those to be lacking in the fun department (I have to be honest, most of my worst gaming experiences happened in the 4-5 years I spend time at Aero), I fell in love with the feel of the game and the system, and was soon running my own games of it. In the 90’s, I did long running campaigns. My D&D players would hem and haw when I suggested it (not one of them then was a Lovecraft fan), but after a game or two they were often preferring to do it over the D&D. It was great, but unlike my D&D it was a world I didn’t create, just one that I presented (I’d like to say I invented the 1920’s, but that would take Al Gore balls).

So the only thing that came close to my D&D game world love was my Champions campaigns. I started early on in the late 70’s with Superhero 2044. Most people to this day find it a perplexing set of rules to use, but my young mind didn’t seem to have much trouble working around the lightness of the rules. I have spoken elsewhere about my experiences helping playtest, then running Supergame in the early 80’s, so I won’t waste more breath on that here. Soon my friends and I were on to Villains and Vigilantes, but by the mid-80’s it was Champions that had captured my comic book loving heart.

I created my own futuristic game world for it. Heavily influenced by Superhero 2044’s “Inguria,” I made my “New Haven” a pacific island metropolis. America and a lot of the rest of the world was blasted by nuclear war, and New Haven was a place that accommodated many refugees – the majority of whom were rich and or/scientific people. Always exactly 20 years in the future, this setting has grown since the 80’s and the world has become a thing of my own. The 90’s were my heyday with New Haven, and much like CoC my D&D players fell in love with it after giving it a try.

The open nature of what you could create with Champions/Hero System (and in the 90’s I focused on the Hero System 4th edition book) appealed to what I was trying to do with New Haven. That is, create a setting where you could have not just superheroes, but anything that you can imagine from science fiction could be worked in. Aliens, interdimensional beings, things out of fantasy, whatever. Of course, seeing as I was setting my game world in a futuristic version of the Marvel Universe, combined with my weaning on Marvel growing up, many Marvel elements entered into it (I even had a futurist version of the X-Men as a campaign long ago). But my inspirations came from many other, more alternative sources, such as The Watchmen, Marshal Law, and Judge Dredd. Things that turned the superhero myth on it’s ear.

I loved the world, and the open nature of being able to have anything you can envision, and during the 90’s some of my greatest memories are of that game. Close to the year 2000, I pretty much ended my last campaign with a several game long assault on earth by an alien empire. After that, my game group and my gaming in general sort of petered out. And I was well into my 30’s and sort of just figured I had outgrown gaming for other things.

When I started my current group the other year after several years off, it was put together for AD&D 1st edition. But in my mind I knew I would be doing Call of Cthulhu or Champions as an alternative. Well, it is Champs that has come up as the alternative (finally). Regular players Dan and Ben have to take June off (Dan the big South African is getting married, Ben is going to his hometown in Vegas for a few weeks), so I sat down Wed night with Terry, Andy, and Paul for some Champs.
Right before the holidays I had gotten together with Paul and Andy to work up a couple of characters, and even did an encounter with them. They came up with some pretty good dudes. What I was going for was a version of my old Justice Incorporated campaigns (more or less a Dark Champions cross between the A-Team and the X-files).

Andy came up with a cool, Jackie Chan type Hong Kong cop who is in hiding from enemies in New Haven. Paul, still pretty new to gaming generally, came up with a French chemist who, besides having a bit of Savate kick boxing skill, carries chemical compounds that have various affects (gas, smoke, knock out).

Terry, whose characters featured prominently in my 90’s campaigns, came up with “Jane Doe,” a female Bourne Identity type who is a government assassin with amnesia.

I can’t tell you how jazzed I was to be doing a Champions game, especially with Terry, again after ten or more years. This is how gaming is supposed to feel! Terry, who is often a bit slow with her turns and such in D&D, took back to Champions like a duck to water, pouring through the Hero System book to work up her characters. She remembered the rules better than I did!

In that first short session with Paul and Andy, I had their characters hanging out near the theater district near downtown. A mysterious nun in black, wearing white chainmail, and bearing a broadsword showed up to each of them, and guided them into the back alleys where a yuppie couple was being mugged by several gang members. Sister Mary Alice, or “Malice,” was one of my old NPC’s in the game, and was the ghost of a nun who had been murdered. Both the characters, Ken and Jacques, beat up the muggers and saved the couple.

So in this week’s session, the couple thanked them (and unknown to the players Sister Mary will later possess the young woman to have a flesh and blood vehicle for her murderous vengeance on rapists and murderers) and they took off. But Sister Mary guided the two to another assault down the alleyway (comic book alleyways are just chock full of evil doing). They came upon a girl in a hospital gown being menaced by almost a dozen more gang members. The girl was “Jane Doe,” and she had woken up in a hospital with a head wound, hypothermia, and no memory. She woke up with doctors and nurses around her, and thinking she was being tortured she struck out, knocked them away (luckily not killing anyone with one of her heavy killing strikes), and took off to end up woozy in the ally. She came to in time to help Ken and Jacques beat the hell out of the mugger gang.

Successful in the combat, the three strangers were approached by Tawny, a girl who it turned out worked for industrialist Elizabeth Patricia Kyono, a billionaire of Irish and Japanese decent (I’ve always had a great mini for Kyono, and luckily found it). Kyono also ran the hero for hire office Justice Incorporated as a hobby from time to time, and she had Tawny out at night looking for possible employees. As comic book fate would have it, she found three at the same time.

Long and short of it, after meeting with Elizabeth Kyono and agreeing to work for her, the three new members of the new Justice Incorporated took a job protecting some merchants in the bad part of town from a martial arts Dojo turned criminal, and managed to top the night off with them beating up some vandalizing members of the gang. Nice high kicking and karate chopping combat session!

It was great fun, and these being basically martial arts characters very easy to run. They really seem to like their characters, and next week we are hopefully finishing up this adventure.

So right now Champs is my game of choice. When Ben and Dan get back in July, they might not be into it but that is fine. We’ll get back to the D&D, and Champions is best with two or three players anyway. When we are missing a couple D&D players, it’ll be Justice Incorporated, my friends.

p.s. –and oh what a joy to only have to use D6!

Three Decades of Comic Book Gaming

My history of running/playing Superhero games began pretty much at their inception. In the late 70’s I was a kid hanging around Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, California on the weekends, and I had access to every cool new game that came out.

Superhero 2044, the first Superhero RPG, just fascinated me. My 14 year-old brain had some difficulty wrapping itself around some of the rules, and that may have been because they are rather sparse. Most of the crunch seemed to have gone into the rather unique (at the time) patrolling rules, which in a weird way seemed to be a replacement for role-play. When running campaigns for friends (who had previously only played D&D), I quickly ditched the patrolling rules (although they still seemed to be pretty good for solo or one-on-one play), and focused on making sense of the rest of the rules. Talk about rules-light, you barely knew what to do as far as coming up with powers. I cut my “winging it” teeth on this game.

In my Superhero 2044 days, I came up with my own game world for it, called “New Haven,” a last vestige American state that was the only U.S. area to survive nuclear Armageddon. It was my own version of 2044’s Shanter Island. I considered it sort of an all-encompassing Sci Fi setting, and often encouraged players to not just think of running a typical comic book hero, but feel free to come with any kind of Sci Fi character that can be hammered into a world where superheroes exist. My players came up with some incredible PC’s for this milieu over the years, and characters that might seem more in place in a D&D, Rifts, or Cyberpunk game were common. I think New Haven was the most open setting I ever ran, and I used it as my superhero game world over three decades and spanning 3 game rulesbooks (all that I mention here minus Supergame).

As the 70’s were coming to a close, I had the opportunity to play a couple of games at Aero that some folk were playtesting for future publication. I have bittersweet memories of these sessions. It was a young couple, Jay and Aimee, who had created the game. While Jay was gregarious and supportive of younger people in the play process, Aimee was kind of a wicked witch, arguing with him the whole way about this or that rule, and denying players this or that action. A couple of years later I had my own disastrous attempt to run this game at Aero for some of the older assholes, a group of condescending, smelly weirdoes who should not have been hanging around a store populated with kids. Although that experience (and Jay’s lack of support of my attempt, despite his presence), helped sour me on Supergame. I think I was so crushed by that experience that I threw the book in the trash that night. I have to admit that I wasn’t much of a fan of the crunch anyway, based unnecessarily on square roots. In all honesty, it was cool at that young age to know people who created a game. It did have the distinction of being the first game to offer a power-buy system.

I was contacted by Jay earlier this year. Obviously, after 30 years of his game being out of print, he was still watching for Supergame references online (how else would he have found my little blog? You can count Supergame references on the internet on one hand). I had written negatively about the game, and he was a bit upset at my calling his game a Superhero 2044 rip-off. That was probably a bit harsh, but he and Aimee’s efforts may have been better placed as a supplement to 2044’s sparse power rules, rather than force people to whip out a calculator for every little action. Aimee’s very amateurish “art” style did not help. I remember one of her friends seeing my scribble of my character and saying “You have nothing to worry about Aimee”. What a thing to say to a 15 year old kid. That gives you a good idea of the caliber of older people who populated that scene. Very discouraging to younger folk. Well, no artist other than me had to worry about Aimee’s laughable superhero work.

Not long after my Supergame experience, I tried my hand at a series of Villains and Vigilantes games for my friends (away from the negative older pricks of Aero), and we had big fun with these. V&V had random character power generation, which when combined with the suggestion that players play themselves with superpower was the source of gigantic hilarity.

But by the mid-80’s I had found Champions, and I never looked back. All the way up to the late 90’s, it was my game of choice, and I ran many awesome campaigns. Despite the big rules crunch (which I usually hate – at least no square rooting was involved), I managed to get many of my D&D regulars into the game, most of whom didn’t even read comic books! I think the sheer customizability of the game appealed to them in the same way it did to my math-challenged brain.

Around 1999 I ended my final campaign with a huge battle against an alien invasion, followed by a presidential election that involved characters in a variety of ways. The election ended with a black, female president getting elected.

I took several years off from gaming until late last year, but now that I am in the swing again, I sort of hanker to put some more effort into Champions and a new campaign in New Haven. As I ran it more or less in real time, it would be interesting to revisit that world after almost 10 years. I just need to convince my non-comic book reading D&D players that comic book settings are a gaming no-brainer.

SUPERHERO 2044:My first non-D&D campaign

Hell yeah it was over 30 years ago that I first ran Superhero 2044. I had discovered D&D sometime around 1976 or 77 (maybe even a little earlier), and was in the process of building my little fantasy world “Ardor,” my AD&D game world that I use to this very day. I loved comics, and being able to have superhero types running around instead of fantasy arch-types sounded like a no-brainer to my young no-brain.

I think within a year or so of discovering Superhero 2044, Villains & Vigilantes came out, and I’m pretty sure I ran consecutive campaigns at some point: 2044 was set in the future, and V&V was the current real world, with my players playing themselves as heroes (like that book suggested you do). It would be a few years before I had a disastrous session with a blatant 2044 rip-off called Supergame, an RPG I would actually help playtest for the creators not long after my little 2044 campaign. I didn’t start a Champions campaign until the early 80’s, so besides the aforementioned Villains and Vigilantes, 2044 was my comic book RPG.

A rather cheaply put-together product, it was the cover, front and back, that was the main eye-catcher of 2044. The sheer number of gaudy costumes, especially the few that were obviously inspired by classic Marvel characters, just made my young gamer heart soar with the gaming possibilities.

I used the setting as presented in the book. It was an independent democratic island nation, Shanter Island (we mispronounced it “Shatner” on purpose), but with all the trappings (language, customs, race) of the U.S. A world wide nuclear war had previously devastated much of society, creating the need for The Science Police. Sci Pol existed to put the brakes on nuclear power and other technology that could be used for evil – or another World War. The futuristic independent island nation concept, and the Science Police, were two things that I would carry over to my long running Champions campaign setting.

Your main island map of Shanter shows the city, the air and space port, and industrial locations. A large part of that map is made up of the “Outback,” miles and miles of forest and mountain areas. This area is not uninhabited – thanks to the pro-superhero government of Shanter Island, a law has been passed letting hero-types make “land grabs” for caves and hilltops to build secret HQ’s on. Nice! This combined with the 1970’s “futurisms” (moving sidewalks downtown, monorails in the city, aliens walking amongst us, etc.) gave the proceedings a really nice cheesy feel, even back then.

I had three or four players for those first few games, but I only really remember two characters from the game that were played – both of them “Doc” Winslow’s. One was a man in super strong, super invincible power armor, based on a figure from the old Gamma World line. Seeing as the rules didn’t give you much information on what kind of powers you could have, or even what those powers might do, the players were pretty much free to get whatever they wanted outside of points assigned to stats. You could probably read about how the rules worked in more detail in some online review, but suffice it to say that the rules on superpowers were obscure enough that a player could totally take advantage. This power armored guy was just devastating to most of his surroundings, and he would smash his way down the street, crushing bank robbers and costumed villains in droves.

Although a lot of the world’s framework is left up to the GM, some background is provided in the way of descriptions of previous superhero events, and a couple of characters. The Freedom League, a former superhero team, was mostly destroyed in recent years by Dr. Ruby, the premier super villain. The only hero to survive was “Mr. Banta,” but only his brain lives on housed in a cyborg shell. Mr. B runs a major superhero equipment/costume shop. This shop is made up of all the leftover gear from the deceased League members and their personal trophies from defeated enemies, so this is one of the things in the book that makes your imagination go wild. This is pretty much the place the character can buy anything that he wasn’t able to put together with points or choice of super powers. The GM can use this shop as the source of all kinds of plot devices and McGuffins. Although assumed by the general public to be dead, there are a series of somewhat humorous drawings in the margins of the book detailing various ways that Doc Ruby might have survived.

Probably the most interesting (and frustrating) feature of the rules was the strict patrolling procedures that each character had to follow. Sheets were given so the player and GM could plot out the characters movements throughout the city, his hours spent patrolling and what part of the island he did the patrolling in. The GM would then suss-out how many crimes were stopped, and how many criminals apprehended. The GM would also have to “handicap” the characters performance parameters occasionally, so as to be able to figure out how many points to give for the time spent patrolling. That meant at least running an actual encounter and fighting on the game table, rather than working out the statistics of this police department style patrolling system. It even included rules for all the lawsuits that get filed against the hero for damage caused during patrol. These rules only really worked for solo play, and although we used the patrolling rules for awhile, we soon abandoned them in order to get some actual role play and important encounters going on more consistently.

In my earliest days of hanging out at the local game shop, I got the chance to help playtest a new superhero RPG called Supergame around the time I was still running 2044. It was created by friends of the shop owner, and that is the main reason it eventually saw a published form. Because I was there for some of the original playtesting of that system, and because of my own disastrous attempts to run a session of it at the shop, I think I’ll save that tale for another post. Suffice to say that, outside of the system itself, The creators of Supergame had blatantly drawn more than just inspiration from Superhero 2044, and I would go so far as to call many of it’s elements a rip-off. But then again, 2044 had a lot of unique qualities, especially the setting, that inspired me to eventually create a superhero game world of my own, strongly based on that little independent island nation called Shatner. Uh, I mean “Shanter.”