Samantha Patri's Blog

Superheroes We're a big fan of the superhero genre - the telling of stories not too dissimilar to the myths of the past. The idea of characters, larger than life, performing great deeds of heroism and villainy, of human pathos and hubris. Not so big a fan of the 'perpetually bound to the same, unchanging characters, for generations' thing -- a big part of this would be to allow the characters to age, hand off to the next generation, and keep going, but that's more an 'us problem'. Also not a fan of the 'no hero is allowed to be happy' thing that keeps going on, and the big glowing 'reset everything to zero' button. Anyway. The one thing we do find difficult is trying to find a good tabletop roleplaying game for playing heroes. The first one we ever encountered was the Classic Marvel Super Heroes RPG (or what we like to call the FASERIP system after the attributes for the game). The game is a relic of its times - everything is charts, and random d...

Renegade Studios  is releasing the Cobra supplement to their GI Joe setting, and the Cobra pitch is ... pretty spot on. It points out society is corrupt, the lazy and greedy hoard all the wealth, while the working class effectively slaves under them. And Cobra wants to change things! The thing I enjoy doing when I run games is have the villains be perfectly honest about things - it makes them sound reasonable, and makes the hero's job harder. But this means GI Joe isn't 'fighting for what's right', they're fighting to keep the status quo - they aren't effecting positive change. At the end of the day, the world is as it was, with little changed. And this is a problem with most super heroes - they're pushing to keep the status quo against anyone who would change it. There's this fascinating little story I saw on Tumblr, showing what happens when you have a superhero who tries to enact positive change. That story doesn't miss the mark, either. Imagi...