The Watch, vol. 2

The Premise

The Source Material

I first decided I wanted to run a DC Heroes campaign in the summer of 1997. At that time, the game had been out of print for a few years, but I had only recently gotten around to looking at it. Through various local game stores, in addition to Internet resources like Titan Games and, of course eBay, I was able to quickly assemble a fairly comprehensive DC Heroes library in short order.

It is not insignificant that my renewed interest in superhero gaming coincided with my renewed interest in superhero comics. Reading Who's Who in the DC Universe had me haunting back-issue bins (and, again, eBay), seeking out titles like Black Lightning, Suicide Squad, Shade the Changing Man, Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, Sandman Mystery Theatre, and other things I'd missed out on in the ten or so years since I'd been reading comics regularly. These titles had an obvious effect on the tone and content of The Watch, vol. 2, some more obvious than others. Since I was in the comic store anyway, I started looking at the new books ("Hey, Grant Morrison's writing JLA"), so elements from current comics cropped up from time to time as well.

Brainstorming

So I knew that I wanted to run a campaign, but had no real idea what the campaign would be about. I knew I wanted to set the campaign in the DC Universe, but I didn't want to have to pay minute attention to "official" continuity. Therefore, I declared that the campaign would be set "more or less" in the DC Universe. Meaning that I'd be using the major, iconic features of the DC Universe (Superman, the Justice League, Gotham City, etc.), without worrying overmuch about reconciling their presentation in the game with their current status in the comics (Electric Superman, the Gotham Quake, etc.).

That got me thinking about the big summer crossover events that DC does every year, and how they fit into the Offical Ten-Year Timeline, which got me thinking about what a bad idea that Timeline is in the first place, which led to the first (rejected) idea, which I called, for want of a better name, "The 60-Year Timeline".

Basically, the idea was to build my own timeline, in a sort of alternate Post-Zero-Hour universe where the major characters (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc.) all started their crimefighting careers at the same time as their first comic book appearance. The advantages to this approach would include the fact that all of the Golden Age characters and most of the Silver Age ones would probably have retired from crimefighting, thus reducing the perceived competition between the player characters and the "big guns" of the DC Universe. The drawbacks were that it would take a lot of work to make such a timeline, and that the resulting world would be very different from the familiar DC Universe, thus removing a major benefit of using the DC Universe in the first place. (Later, on the DC Heroes mailing list, I read about a campaign with a very similar premise.)

Eventually, I decided to use two simple concepts that I personally had seen quite a bit in superhero and adventure fiction, but not very often in gaming. The first concept was that of a former team reuniting after several years.

The fact that the PCs were all former teammates meant that I didn't have to come up with a "team-up" adventure where the characters all meet and decide to form a team and fight crime, thus avoiding at least one of the cliches of superhero games.

The second idea was that one of the player characters would be a traitor who was responsible for whatever caused the group to break up in the first place. As I say, neither of these was a particularly novel conceipt. There was really only one twist I wanted to put on the set-up: nobody knew who the traitor was.

Troubleshooting

This presented a couple of logistical problems. First, it requires an act of treachery severe enough to disband the team and leave them with bad feelings toward each other years later, but subtle enough that nobody knew who was responsible. The second was how to pick a player to be the traitor.

My initial idea for the cause of the breakup was one of the team ratting them out to some sort of HUAC-like anti-superhero government tribunal. Like most initial ideas, this wasn't very strong. I discussed it with some of the players and we came to the conclusion that this was not only overused (Watchmen, The Golden Age, and the Wild Cards books, among many others, covered this ground; and in the latter two it really was HUAC.) but not very consistent with my stated desire to set the campaign "more or less" in the DC Universe, where the government generally supports and even encourages superheroes.

So we shelved that and went with the next obvious idea: somebody killed the team's leader. Or set him up to be killed. We'd fill it the details later, like how he died and why everybody knows that one of the PCs killed him but nobody except the killer knows who.

With that stumbling block removed, I moved on to the next. Obviously, the traitor (the murderer, now) is a fairly pivotal character. I didn't want to just assign the character to somebody, since that would look like playing favorites. (Not that I thought then or think now that anybody but me would have been bothered by my doing so.) And since, in this particular case, I didn't want the players to know any more than their characters did, I couldn't just throw it open to general discussion.

I kicked around some ideas on the newsgroup rec.games.frp.advocacy, and got some helpful input. Finally, I decided not to decide. I told the players the basic setup and that if they wanted to they could give their characters some sort of motive to betray the team and/or the leader. As the campaign started, I had no more idea than anyone else who the killer was.

Running the Game

This style of running the game was another experiment. Over the years, I've run a lot more Call of Cthulhu than anything else, and I find myself falling into a sort of "GM presents a problem, players solve it" mode. This game was much looser, almost improvisational at times. I'd introduce story elements without necessarily having a clear idea of exactly how they fit into the overall scheme of things. For the most part this worked better than I'd have thought, although in retrospect there are one or two points where the story breaks down and I don't know exactly what happened. (But that's okay. Legend has it that even Raymond Chandler couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep.)

One final note about the tone of the campaign. I tried to capture the "feel" of a comic book; I tried to run a comic-book style superhero game, not just a role-playing game with superheroes in it. Pretty early on in the process I was describing it as "like a '90s revival of a '70s or '80s comic book." Before each session, I'd describe the "cover of the current issue," which helped set the mood of the session and allowed me to do some really blatant foreshadowing as well. I think this worked particularly well, and highly recommend it to anyone running a superhero campaign. This technique impressed the players enough that one of them later used it in his own superhero campaign and another got an artist friend to draw the cover I'd described for the first issue and gave it to me for my birthday.