Tag Archive for: Mutants & Masterminds

The M&M PDF Mega-Bundle

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Mega-Bundle for Mutants & Masterminds!

Where do I begin to tell you about how awesome the new M&M PDF Mega-Bundle offer from Green Ronin is…?

Ah, yes—at the beginning!

That’s certainly fitting, since the Mega-Bundle goes all the way back to the beginning of Mutants & Masterminds: with its first edition in 2002. (Have we mentioned this is the 20th anniversary of Mutants & Masterminds?) This was before Green Ronin was even selling PDFs of most of its products, so many of the first edition products included in the bundle are being released electronically for the first time ever. That includes both the first edition of the Mutants & Masterminds RPG and the Freedom City setting, the books that launched it all.

How many first edition books? Well, all seven of them, including classics like Noir and Gimmick’s Guide to Gadgets. Pretty great, huh?

But then we get to the second edition.

Because the M&M PDF Mega-Bundle also includes 45 second edition M&M products: virtually everything Green Ronin published for the second edition of the game. Not just the core rulebook and sourcebooks like Ultimate Power or the second edition of Freedom City, but also PDF-only products like Archetype Archives, Freedom City Atlas, and much more!

With fifty-two different products (editor’s note: oh there’s more than 52!) and a bundle price of $29.99, each is only a little more than fifty cents! That’s a fraction of the cost of a digital comic book these days, much less a digital game product. Honestly, even if you already have 45 out of the 52 PDFs in this bundle, it would still be a bargain for the remaining seven.

With Mega-Bundle Comes Mega-Opportunity

So, if you’re a third edition Mutants & Masterminds player or GM, how useful is this Mega-Bundle to you? Very!

Take a look at the free Mutants & Masterminds Second Edition to Third Edition Conversion notes. With these simple guidelines, you can make use of any of the second edition source material in your third edition games. Since most of the numerical values (ability modifiers, power ranks, etc.) remain the same, it’s easy to use many stats on-the-fly without converting them over in detail.

In addition, these sourcebooks contain a wealth of setting information, adventure material, and Gamemaster advice independent of game system updates and all useful in any M&M game.

The products in this bundle are the entirety of Mutants & Masterminds history: Want to set your Freedom City campaign in the era before the Silver Storm changed Emerald City, or even before Bowman graduated from high school and joined the Freedom League? You can, with these references at-hand. You can explore classic adventures like Time of Crisis and Time of Vengeance, either running them as-is or updating them to the present day for your game.

Of course, the earlier edition material is also still perfectly usable as-is. Do you want to run a first or second edition Mutants & Masterminds game? This bundle gives you everything you need, and then some! Do you have some gaps in your M&M collection? The Mega-Bundle is the ideal opportunity to fill them in and get some products that haven’t been available in print for several years, or have never been available electronically prior to this.

What About the Third Edition?

While most third edition Mutants & Masterminds products are still in-print and not included in the Mega-Bundle, don’t think we’ve forgotten them! We also have an M&M Reprint Extravaganza to bring some of those rare and hard-to-find third edition books back into print, while offering you the opportunity to get them at the previous cover price before rising costs for printing, shipping, and distribution require us to raise prices. Be sure to sign up to be notified when the Reprint Extravaganza crowd-funder goes live so you don’t miss out on this opportunity.

This incredible Mega-Bundle Collection is also available on DrivethruRPG!

Last Chance Warehouse Sale

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Last Chance Warehouse Sale: 75% off select print books, while supplies last!

 

After 22 years in business, the Green Ronin warehouse is looking a little crowded. With reprints and new products incoming, it’s time to make more space! These deals are for print products only. With limited stock and priced to clear some pallets, this is a screaming deal (75% off!) you don’t want to miss. With that, we offer you the LAST CHANCE WAREHOUSE SALE!

Please note the sale does not extend to shipping, and shipping fees are determined by the carrier.

75% off on select titles

 

Gen Con Indy 2022

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The Green Ronin Convention Crew reports from Indianapolis that Gen Con is going well! Alex and Jonesy are running sold-out games, and some products are already sold out as well. Here is a view, care of Disembodied Troy, of what’s for sale at Booth 101.

Here’s a view from inside the dealer hall at Gen Con 2022 in Indianapolis, Indiana, showing off all of the goodness available for sale this weekend at booth 101, right inside the hall entrance next to Paizo. If you’re at the show, stop by and see us!

New at Gen Con are Cyberpunk Slice and Five and Infinity for Modern AGE RPG, Danger Zones and Starhaven for Mutants & Masterminds, Six of Cups for the Blue Rose RPG, the 5e adventure A Shadow in the Downs for The Lost Citadel, and a novel for The Lost Citadel, A Song of Eagles! And, as you can see in the video, we have tons of other great game products, like Sentinels of Earth-Prime, The Expanse RPG, Freeport, and more. Plus, we are running awesome bundle deals at the show. Booth 101!

We’ve since sold out of some things, necessitating some revised bundle deals, which look like this:

A Haven in the Stars

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The Guide to Starhaven for Mutants & MastermindsIt’s all Alex Thomas’s fault. We said so on Mutants & Masterminds Monday. Alex wanted to run a streaming game for Team M&M and asked “so what else do we know about this Starhaven place mentioned in The Cosmic Handbook?” To which Crystal Fraiser and I said, “Nothing.” The paragraph or so of info about the alien settlement on Jupiter’s moon Europa was just that, a kind of throwaway description intended to inspire Gamemasters.

I guess it worked, because Alex took it upon himself to spin out a whole adventure which he ran on-stream for us. It certainly got Mutants & Masterminds fans wondering, too, and asking “So when do we get to find out more about Starhaven?” If you are a part of the Mutants & Masterminds Patreon you already know the answer to that (and, if you’re not, honestly, you’re missing out). Last summer, we launched a “Summer of Starhaven!” series to design more material about the setting and how to use it in an M&M game.

Now, this summer, we can announce that The Guide to Starhaven is now available for purchase! The 76-page, full-color product goes into detail about the alien settlement of Starhaven, repurposing an ancient, ruined city located on the Jovian moon Europa. Built by the mysterious and powerful Preservers, the domed city has lain abandoned for millennia. Now, a mix of alien refugees fleeing the fall of the Lor Republic and the rise of the Stellar Imperium have been resettled there by Earth’s superheroes.

The Guide to Starhaven looks at the city and all of its various districts, the Green Zone “nature preserve” surrounding it (including all manner of prehistoric Earth animals brought here as specimens) and the unexplored areas of the ruins and what they contain. It also details the inhabitants of Starhaven, their newly established government (voted on by our patrons!), political and social factions, and three main antagonists Starhaven heroes might face.

It goes beyond the bounds of Starhaven to look at survival on the icy surface of Europa and other locations on the frozen moon such as the fascinating Facetwild, with its random energy storms and crystalline creatures. It even dives beneath the surface, into the endless dark ocean under Europa’s ice, and the mysterious life dwelling there, which even the people of Starhaven aren’t aware of … yet.

The Guide also looks at creating your own Starhaven heroes, adventures, and campaigns, including four campaign concepts and nearly a dozen different adventure ideas. All of this, plus a developed, full-length version of “Seige of Starhaven,” Alex’s exciting adventure, where a team of power level 10 heroes take on smugglers, alien cultists, a murder mystery, the dangers of the Facetwild, and an all-out invasion of the city! It’s a great inspiration for a Starhaven series of your own. (As the Untold Stories Project demonstrates with Guardians of Haven.)

The Guide to Starhaven is available now on the Green Ronin Store and DriveThruRPG as a downloadable PDF, and now print-on-demand via DriveThruRPG. For those who will be at Gen Con this August, we hope to have a limited number of print copies there for sale!

If you do decide to reach for the stars and visit the alien frontier of Starhaven, remember to thank Alex. After all, he started it!

Gen Con Events!

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Gen Con ®

Hello heroes! We are running some events at Gen Con this year! We are so excited for the chance to play with all of you. To help you find us, I have compiled this rough schedule of our events so you can come play with us at the con. I know our events are sold out, but you can still add them to your wishlist in case of cancellations, and I usually keep a secret seventh slot for my events if you show up with generics. I’ve laid our schedule out chronologically and have included event descriptions/GM as well. We hope to see you there!

Wednesday

8pm

  • Event Title: Freedom League: All in the Family
    • Synopsis: All isn’t as it seems when Zeus requests the Freedom League’s assistance in foiling his brother’s latest scheme to take over Earth-Prime.
    • System: Mutants & Masterminds
    • GM: Alex

Thursday

8am

  • Event Title: A Familiar Quest
    • Synopsis: After years of planning, the foul sorcerer Soulban has returned, springing his trap, & capturing the brave heroes of Crestwall. Now it is up to their animal allies to save them & all of Crestwall.
    • System: Fantasy AGE
    • GM: Jonesy
  • Event Title: The Mummy: The Lost Library
    • Synopsis: Rick O’Connell & crew dive into danger seeking the ruins of the Great Library of Alexandria.
    • System: Mutants & Masterminds
    • GM: Alex

Friday

9am and 4pm

  • Event Title: Secrets of Renwick Manor
    • Synopsis: As members of Beckmen & Hall’s “special handling” department, you are trusted to complete jobs of a more esoteric nature. The job: recover some dangerous items from the estate of August Renwick.
    • System: Modern AGE
    • GM: Jonesy

7pm

  • Event Title: The Siege of Starhaven
    • Synopsis: Eyes from across the galaxy are focused on Starhaven, eager to make use of its citizens, its ancient Preserver technology, and its close proximity to Earth. It is a city in need of heroes…
    • System: Mutants & Masterminds
    • GM: Alex

Saturday

9am

  • Event Title: Secrets of Renwick Manor
    • Synopsis: As members of Beckmen & Hall’s “special handling” department, you are trusted to complete jobs of a more esoteric nature. The job: recover some dangerous items from the estate of August Renwick.
    • System: Modern AGE
    • GM: Jonesy

2pm

  • Event Title: Titan City Chronicles: Blood Run
    • Synopsis: Vampires are roaring through 1920s Titan City, and it’s up to a ragtag band of noir heroes to stop them.
    • System: Mutants & Masterminds
    • GM: Alex

Sunday

10am

  • Event Title: A Familiar Quest
    • Synopsis: After years of planning, the foul sorcerer Soulban has returned, springing his trap, & capturing the brave heroes of Crestwall. Now it is up to their animal allies to save them & all of Crestwall.
    • System: Fantasy AGE
    • GM: Jonesy

And don’t forget to drop by Booth 101, and come check out all the new things Green Ronin has available for Gen Con this year!

 

Visit Green Ronin at Booth 101, Gen Con Indy 2022

Location, Location, Location

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Danger Zones: Tons of locations for M&M adventures!

Available to Pre-Order now!

Add at least two dozen “locations” to that and you start to get the concept and usefulness of Danger Zones for the Mutants & Masterminds Superhero RPG. The sourcebook, a compilation and expansion of our long-running series of PDF products, takes a look at an oft-neglected element of superhero adventure creation. You guessed it: location.

Superhero adventures are often about the “who” (villains and their schemes) and the “what” (whatever the villains are after) and even the “how” (mainly various super-powers, gadgets, or magical weirdness) and not that often about the “where.” Danger Zones addresses that by offering a whole series of locales both common and not-so-common as backdrops and settings for your adventures. Each Danger Zone comes with an overview map, descriptions of the locations’ common features in game terms (including things to break, lift, and throw), sample characters you might encounter there, and adventure hooks featuring that location.

You can use Danger Zones for quick sources of what we might refer to as “backdrops,” locations that aren’t especially essential to the adventure but add color and detail. Does your adventure start out at a nightclub (like Green Thumb, Black Heart for Astonishing Adventures)? Grab the Nightclub write-up and map from the book and make use of them to detail that location without any extra work on your part. Are high school heroes hanging out at a local coffee shop or fast food place when villains attack? Take and use those locations from Danger Zones and you have ready-made maps to show your players and details on what happens when, say, a hero throws an espresso machine or somebody gets knocked into a fryalator.

You can also use Danger Zones to inspire and create adventures focusing on particular locations. Each one comes with 2–3 adventure hooks, multiplied by over 30 locations, making Danger Zones a sourcebook for a hundred or more different adventure ideas for your Mutants & Masterminds games! They may, for example, inspire you to throw a parade for the heroes (or have them participate in an event like your city’s long-standing Pride parade. In fact Danger Zones: Parade Route is free as a fantastic sample PDF download!), run into trouble at City Hall, get involved in politics, stage a daring high-speed chase scene on the local highways, or delve into the city’s history, possibly complete with literal ghosts from the past!

Because the locations in Danger Zones are sufficiently “generic” you can use them with any modern urban or suburban setting, real or imagined, and re-use them over and over. You’ll quickly find Danger Zones an indispensable Gamemaster resource you’ll turn to again and again. The sourcebook pairs especially well with the Emerald City and Freedom City setting sourcebooks, providing the street- and building-level detail to go with the sourcebooks’ broader overview of those cities, helping to bring them to life in your game.

Danger Zones is available to Pre-Order now in the Green Ronin Online Store, with the $5 PDF add-on (which is also available at your friendly local participating retail game store!) as well as on DrivethruRPG!

If you haven’t checked out Danger Zones before, be sure to take a look at the brand new Historic District for free! And if you’ve already purchased a few of the individual Danger Zones locations, you’re sure to find even more new surprises if you choose to pick up this collected version in print or PDF.

Join us for the Green Ronin Livestream, Mutants & Masterminds Monday #MuMaMo on Monday, July 11th on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and Facebook Live for the Developer’s review of Dangers Zones, 2p Pacific/5p Eastern (The #MuMaMo team is off on July 4th!)

Play M&M with One of the Developers at Origins!

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Origins Game FairHello heroes! Origins event registration is currently open and I am deep in final preparation for my events at the con. I wanted to share my schedule here in case any members of our Green Ronin community wanted to share a table with me in June. I’m running a ton of M&M events spanning Earth-Prime, Titan City, both DC and Marvel, as well as dipping my toes into Star Wars and the classic 1999 film The Mummy. If you’re looking for other Mutants & Masterminds games at the convention I highly recommend checking out the offerings of the Untold Stories Project and Matinee Adventures, two gaming troupes that I have worked with in the past. They run amazing games!

I hope I’ll get the chance to GM for you, but even if you don’t sign up for one of my games, please feel free to come up and say hi! See you all in a couple weeks and happy gaming!

Wednesday

7pm

  • Event Title: Gotham City Misfits
    • Synopsis: Killer Moth has brought together the ultimate crew of Gotham villains to pull off the heist of the century…

Thursday

2pm

  • Event Title: Freedom League: All in the Family
    • Synopsis: All isn’t as it seems when Zeus requests the Freedom League’s assistance in foiling his brother’s latest scheme to take over Earth-Prime.

7pm

  • Event Title: The Mummy: The Mumkey Returns
    • Synopsis: Rick O’Connell and crew are called to help when mummified animals run amok at Al Azhar University in Cairo.

Friday

2pm

  • Event Title: Titan City Chronicles: Blood Run
    • Synopsis: Vampires are roaring through 1920s Titan City, and it’s up to a ragtag band of heroes to stop them.

7pm

  • Event Title: The Siege of Starhaven
    • Synopsis: Eyes from across the galaxy are focused on Starhaven, eager to make use of its citizens, its ancient Preserver technology, and its close proximity to Earth. It is a city in need of heroes…

Saturday

2pm

  • Event Title: Guardians of the Galaxy: The Thoocury Smew
    • Synopsis: The Collector hires the Guardians to recover a priceless bird statue from the wreck of a Kree warship.

7pm

  • Event Title: Star Wars: The Most Dangerous Game
    • Synopsis: Emperor Palpatine has put out a call across the Outer Rim for bounty hunters willing to hunt down a dangerous Jedi in hiding.

 

And be sure to stop by the Green Ronin booth while you’re there, and check out what we have for sale! We’re in booth 316!
Visit Green Roinin at Origins Game Fair 2022, booth 316!

Building Better Benefits

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Advantages like Benefit are in the Deluxe Hero's Handbook!Hello heroes! I hope you’re having a great day out there in gamer land. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite advantages in Mutants & Masterminds. It’s an advantage that doesn’t immediately pop off the page during character creation, but it is perhaps the most flexible advantage. One that I find offers players a way to give their character that personal flair that separates the PCs from the NPCs. I’m talking about the Benefit advantage as seen on page 134 of the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook.

Benefit is defined as a “significant perquisite or fringe benefit.” We include some sample options such as alternate identities, ambidexterity, status, and wealth, but there is no reason to stick to just those options. I enjoy Benefit so much because it gives you and your players a wide open space to play around with the mechanics. It can also inform you as to what your players are interested in seeing in the campaign.

Character creation in Mutants & Masterminds has always been characterized by its flexibility. We empower you to experiment with the system to create your perfect superhero, but we can’t account for every possibility. Options like the Benefit advantage and the Feature effect can be applied liberally to fill in gaps as needed. I encourage my players to come up with custom Benefits that provide minor mechanical perks. Things such as swapping the primary ability associated with skills—Athletics based on Agility or Intimidation based on Strength for example—allow players to add a dash of personal flavor to their characters. I also use custom advantages to modify how other advantages work. For example, I have a player in my regular games who loves the Assessment advantage. (We have a space on our Untold Stories Project bingo card for when he does it.) However, he wanted to be able to use Assessment on multiple characters in a turn, similar to Multiattack on a Damage effect. We worked together and came up with a Benefit called Battlefield Assessment which allows him to assess the strength and weaknesses of an amount of characters equal to his Awareness, plus one per rank in the advantage, once per scene. It’s not a game breaking addition, and it allows him to play his character as the tactical heart of the team. Look for ways to help your players express their ideas through small tweaks like this.

Benefit also gives you a sneak peak into the interest part of your players’ brains. If they spend the points on something like Status: Star Knight, Wealth, or Alternate Identity you can tell that those ideas are important to your player. They want the opportunity within the story to say something like, “Star Knight business. Go back to your drinks.” The wealthy character wants scenes that can be resolved through ludicrous amounts of money. At the very least, they want conflicts to arise centered around their bank account. Alternate Identity Lass has a reason to hide her original identity. These are plot shout-outs directly from the players. Listen and incorporate them into your story. Your players will feel heard and will engage that much more with your adventure hooks.

Thank you for taking the time to let me ramble about this excellent advantage. I hope it enriches your Mutants & Masterminds campaigns as much as its enriched mine. Have a great day and I’ll see you in the next one, heroes!

Running a Shared Universe: Road Maps and Sandboxes

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The Atlas of Earth-Prime is a great sandbox to play games in!Hello heroes! I hope the multiverse is treating you well today. As some of you may know, in addition to working on Mutants & Masterminds here at Green Ronin, I run my own streaming network The Untold Stories Project. USP is something I started a couple of years ago with some friends of mine who were interested in showcasing games and voices that don’t get as much attention as something like Fire Lizards and Renovated Caves. Since 2020 we have played a ton of interesting games but one of our main stays is M&M. Shocking, I know.

In February of 2021 we began our playthrough of the Netherwar story arc which is coming to an exciting conclusion in the next few weeks. (I know it only has six modules but somehow, I overwrote that into a year’s worth of mayhem and mischief.) This was meant to be a stand-alone foray into the Earth-Prime universe, but we decided to try something bold. One of our other games wrapped up and one of our GMs said he wanted to run Emerald City Knights on the channel. We decided it would be interesting to pull a MCU and run Emerald City Knights in the same continuity as our Netherwar game. Hence the USP Earth-Prime Tabletop Universe—USPEPTTU for not as short as it should be— was born. We have had one mega crossover event with 10 PCs and 1 GM and are gearing up to release a Starhaven game in the same continuity later this year.

It’s been an interesting experiment to say the least, and not unique to USP. The Freedom City Discord server has another Earth-Prime shared experience. It makes sense that this happens in superhero gaming groups. The superhero genre is rife with team ups and shared consequences, so it’s natural that it should reflect in the gaming sphere. This got me thinking about some advice that I can give to anyone else looking to collaborate with another GM. I call this technique the Road Maps and Sandboxes method.

the Netherwar campaign is a great opportunity for a shared universe

Road Maps

I am firm believer that the MCU works as well as it does because they had a strong central vision guiding where the story was going to go. They built a timeline of events and for the most part have stuck to that timeline. If you want to work with other creators in a shared space, you need to outline heavily. This came up in our USPEPTTU planning when I decided to do Starhaven after Netherwar, because there is a crucial plot point in Emerald City Knights that leads to the reason Starhaven is needed at all. The other GM and I sat down and worked out the plot points that needed to be modified to make Starhaven’s creation make sense. We also use our interconnected stories to help one another. A new player is joining our Emerald City Knights campaign and that character’s backstory is tied into what is happening right now in the climax of Netherwar. It’s pretty cool!

We have a couple of resources in play that help us build our stories and decide when those stories are going to intersect. We have a shared Google Sheet with all of the canon Earth-Prime villains. This Sheet lists if they’ve appeared in other games, their current status—at large, incarcerated, dead—and their home base. Our GMs update it as needed. I also try to keep the other GMs apprised of the story arcs I have planned. Finally, we write up synopses of our various story arcs for easy reference, rather than forcing anyone to rewatch 300 hours of video for precious context. Those documents are available to the public (www.untoldstoriesproject.com) on our website for similar reasons.

Sandboxes

There’s an unspoken statement in the USPEPTTU that we try to stay in our lanes. As the Netherwar and Starhaven GM, I do my level best to keep my action out of Emerald City. The Other GM as such sticks to the City of Destiny and the surrounding environs. We started doing this after our first crossover episode when I had the following Netherwar story take place in Emerald City. I felt like I was walking on eggshells trying to ensure nothing too devastating happened in town while our Freedom League Dark was there. I still wound up blowing up a penthouse, but you know what they say about eggs and omelets. After that episode I made sure not to set a story in that GM’s sandbox if I could avoid it. Partitioning out the setting goes a long way to establishing freedom for the GMs involved in your project, and ensures people aren’t scrambling to patch things up in each game from week to week. If one person is telling a story of the Furion resistance to Omega in the Terminus, try not to set adventures in the Terminus for the other groups of heroes.

Sit down with the other GMs you’re working with and share your ideas with one another. You can divide the universe in whatever way makes sense. This can be as large as whole alternate dimension down to a neighborhood of Freedom City. Say one GM wants to do a street-level vigilante game in Freedom City’s Southside, another GM working with the Freedom League should make sure the Freedom League is dealing with other parts of the city—or even other parts of the galaxy. Anytime you want to cross the partition, speak with the other GMs, and see if you can work together to do a crossover or find a way to spread the action between the two games.

I’ll leave you to chew on that for now. I’m going to share some more insights of running a shared universe in the coming months. As it stands, I’m still learning as I go, but I do believe it is a worthwhile experience for you and your friends. If you want to see the USPEPTTU in action, you can catch us live On Twitch Mondays and Tuesdays from 7pm EST-10pm EST. Thank you for reading and talk to you soon!

Synopsis Based One Shot Design

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A great resource for an adventure synopsisHello heroes! Hope you’re having a great day out there in gamer land. As you may know, event submission is open for a few major conventions happening later this year, so I imagine quite a few of you are starting to put together the wonderful games you’re going to run this summer. I got my start in this business running games at Origins Game Fair in Columbus, so this time of year is near and dear to my heart. All year long I compile a list of characters or topics I want to write an adventure about. I love the excitement of narrowing down those ideas to create the perfect playlist. I enjoy coming up with a punchy title, deciding how many players I want to run for, and coming up with that sweet 1-2 sentence synopsis about the game. This synopsis is required at most conventions. It’s the snippet they’ll use to describe the scenario to the public in the hopes of getting people to buy tickets to your game. What you might not know, is that it is also a valuable tool you can use in adventure design.

I might be weird in this instance—as opposed to all the other times I’ve been weird—but I usually create my synopsis long before I put together the adventure. Sometimes, it’s all the adventure creation I manage to get to before the convention arrives, but we’re not here to talk about my procrastination habits. This synopsis is my favorite place to begin because it forces me to ignore any extra information and cut to the heart of the story I want to present. I tend to think of it as starting small and building out. Sort of like designing a village in your game world before moving on to building the epic history of your cosmos.

Knowing the core action of the story gives you as the writer a perfect place to begin your planning. You should have an idea of who the major players are going to be, what the driving action is going to be, and what research you’ll have to do to plan your scenes. The synopsis doesn’t have to give away the whole story, in fact I find less is more when it comes to pulling inspiration from it. I try to limit myself to 30 words or less.

Hades can be found in Freedom City 3rd edition

I’ll give you an example of what this process looks like to me. My most recent actual play for Green Ronin—link here in case you missed it— was titled Freedom League: All in the Family. I knew before I wrote the synopsis that I wanted to tell an unconventional story with the Greek gods set in Earth-Prime, so I started thinking of who the main NPCs were going to be. I decided to go sort of stereotypical. The synopsis for this wound up being: “All isn’t as it seems when Zeus requests the Freedom League’s assistance in foiling his brother’s latest scheme to take over Earth-Prime.” I kept it short and sweet, knowing that it would be the springboard to a larger outline process.

Hades is a known villain in Earth-Prime, and this pantheon is known for their family melodrama so I figured it would be a knockout story. I kept the synopsis simple, sharing to the players that Hades was going to be the villain and Zeus was going to be their insertion point to the story. With the synopsis in hand, I set about researching various Greek myths. They were going to be the “antagonists” for the story, not necessarily villains but the thing standing between the heroes and a saved Freedom City. I looked at Zeus and Hades’ immediate circles and started brainstorming where some of them would be lurking in the modern world. I built a through line from Zeus to Hera to Hephaestus to Hera to Charon to Hades, and then built scenes around those characters.

Starting with the synopsis narrowed the range of possibilities to make selection easier. It helps you find the beginning of a story, especially in a genre of infinite possibilities like superhero stories. I hope the next time you sit down to design a new adventure that you consider starting with a synopsis or a title. Happy writing!