Thinking Out Loud: Supers and Systems

What's this? What madness has been wrought? A combination of two of my ongoing article series in the one place? Well, yes. I realise I've been neglecting Supers and Systems a bit; it was meant to be a series of articles on playing Superheroes with games other than my usual SuperSystem and Ultimate Alliance, basically "sneaking in" Superheroes where someone wouldn't expect them to get your fix. Personally, I do this fairly often, using the Guardians of the Galaxy in Frostgrave or having MI-13 and David Lo Pan based factions for Empire of the Dead or having a Latverian army for Secrets of the Third Reich. Despite having been a member of my wargames club for around twenty years, I still have trouble getting too many people interested in a game of SuperSustem, but facing my Supers-based teams in a game of Frostgrave or EotD? Much easier. As well as gaming supers as much as I can, I like to watch as much supers television and film as i can; essentially I live steeped in superheroes where I can, it's my favorite genre. In order to not create a massive backlog of "Superhero Media" posts, I've had to cut back and expand my horizons a little, though you'd be surprised what Superheroes can find their way into; Kaiju, Wuxia and even Spy-Fi can spawn ideas for those men and women in tights I admire so much. 

So what, if anything, is my, belabored, point in all this? Well, I take my supers where I can get them. If I can get the Guardians of the Galaxy on the table in the frozen city, then that's better than the minis collecting dust in a box under the bed, plus I can post about it here, which is always fun. As 2017 goes on, I'm hoping to play more games of SuperSystem, but also get in some games of Super Mission Force, the TSR Marvel Superheroes RPG, Batman Miniatures Game and Judge Dredd Miniatures Game; that's a lot of capes to pull on in a single year. Way back when, I started to work out a custom scenario for EotD based on the included stat lines for characters like Alan Quartermain and Jack the Ripper, I'll hopefully go back to it at some stage, but for now JDMG and This is Not a Test have caught my attention for the moment. Sure, JDMG already has "Supers" like Dredd, Hershey and the Dark Judges, but why stick to just that? Why not run the Royal Flush Gang and Batman Beyond through a few heists? 

But what does this all boil down to? Yes, if I could play more SuperSystem, I would, but with all the armies in my collection and other games (Firefight, Frostgrave, TNT, EotD, SoTR, Lion Rampant, Dragon Rampant, JDMG, BMG, Spearhead and Black Ops) I'd never get to play anything else. So if sneaking the Guardians into Frostgrave or Doom into SoTR or maybe Wakanda into Lion Rampant down the line enables me to play games with a nod to the characters I like, all the better. I know a few people, though this blog, the Lead Adventure Forum and at various events that just can't seem to get a game of supers in their local groups, but maybe they can get a game of something else right? Maybe the people resistant to SuperSystem would be more comfortable with JDMG and maybe they get curios when you decide to run Spiderman 2099 or Batman Beyond and soon they're reading comics and wanting to play some supers. Who knows, anything could happen, right?