r/shadowofthedemonlord • u/Velenne • 11d ago
Weird Wizard Hacking for Supers?
I'm not deeply versed in the system, just an intro and a couple free PDF's, but I can't shake the idea in reading them that with a fresh coat of paint this would be a great system for a supers game.
Has anyone considered this before?
Here's my general outline of the campaign:
- The Earth was peppered with some kind of cosmic energy. Random people get very low level powers (street level heroes; 1st level characters). Some use them for good, some for bad. Society will need to change.
- As time goes on, the empowered folks grow in power (level up) and their ability to shape the world grows with it. Society continues to change; the good get heroic, the evil get truly villainous. Society strains. Leaders emerge. The world transforms.
- The inciting event of cosmic energy turns out not to have been random, but some threat from beyond. The high-leveled beings need to band together against this new cosmic-level threat and save the Earth itself.
So it's a modern Earth story with fresh superheroes. If I wanted to be really different I could do a revisionist history version of this and set it during the start of a world war in the 20th century, or during the cold war espionage era to really heighten tension.
Part of what draws me most to the system is that I envision this kind of game to have a lot of tactical fighting, and I love the idea of emerging power sets as characters level up. So the iterative steps in power map nicely to the sorts of supers stories you can have without them getting stale.
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u/CrossPlanes 11d ago
On the discord Rob talked about eventually making a supers version of the engine.
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u/No-Map-6073 11d ago
Peraonally, i think the rules and character-building of Shadow of the Weird Wizard may be even better for a Super Hero conversion!
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u/Velenne 10d ago
How so?
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u/No-Map-6073 10d ago
It's the same mechanics skeleton but the focus is on heroic action (so players do more damage and have more "robustness" in their capabilities when it comes to the numbers)
there's also more focus on flexible character building, not just by the layered Paths but also within Paths. So a Lvl1 fighter who wants to be a unarmed brawler vs. a lvl 1 archer can both pick different Fighter features to represent their focus, for instance.
A big reason for me personally is that SotWW does away with quite the same granular dungeon crawl aspects of a grib-bases board game for ranges and movement. Superhero fiction should not include measuring 30 ft of movement; that'd tactical mapping not heroic crime fighting. The creator of SotDL released an optional supplement to update SotDL to use the SotWW spell progression which boils down to Magic Power Lvl being tied to character lvl, not path features so it leads to more nuanced "superpower" options. For instance, the Unarmed Brawler Fighter example takes a Martial Artist expert path, but at lvl 7 takes a Master path bases on telekinetic magic. In original SotDL, that character has traded more melee power or utility for a LvL 0 starting mage version of Telekinesis magic with some class features. In SotWW, they would have lvl 7 Telekinesis (just missing out on all the earlier spells and traits so they just have a narrow amount but at least it's Master power lvl i.e. Power Level 5). Again, Occult Arcana (i believe) provides an update on magic if one wants to stick to SotDL.
On that note, SotWW magic traditions are, in my opinion, more streamlined (telepathy and telekinesis are baked into Pschomancy, for instance) making it more enjoyable to specialize, but also more creative in some ways (there's a Skullduggery tradition which is spells that can turn a pure mage into a magical thief. Create portable holes, magically sense ambushes, break the laws of physics <meaning the mechanical rules> with a master lvl spell. Real comic book stuff.)
The class festures in some cases are nore abstract in a way that goes back to the gridlocked world. There's a trapper master path. They make traps. But rather than you have to real-world place X trap on square Y and hope an enemy moves onto that space, they work on sytem triggers. When an enemy moves within a certain of range of you, you can use a triggered action to reveal the trap and they roll to avoid the effect. When an enemy attacks you, you can trigger an effect of your "personal-trap" hurting them and flinging them away, or similar.
Another example; There's a Marksman type path who literally declares themself gone from the game world because they went to hide on overwatch as a sniper. The other party proceeds as normal, and when that character wants to enter the fight, they have a table to roll on to see how effective their ambush shot is (or possibly got found and killed offscreen while in their sniper nest - it is a SotDL descendant game, after all).
The abstractions "feel" like superhero tales. Batman never pre-stocks his utility belt. It's revealed during the action that he had a stun grenade ready for this sort of eventuality. That's an achievable fiction in SotWW without the player being a pure improvisation master or real-world tactical strategist to buy the grenade in the last town visit. (Also a technomancy spell tradition with chainswords, a lvl 0 permanent laser pistol, rocket boots, etc.)
Now i want to do a SotWW Supers too!
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u/jayhad69 10d ago
SotWW would be a good system for supers, especially with the new magic system that gives more ongoing powers that would fit supers.
Thought I'd also share that my friend and I have a supers game we are finalizing and testing that is inspired by the SotDL character advancement system [base Origin and Role like race and base in SotDL and Power Sets for the SotDL expert and master classes] and style of gameplay. Feel free to check out it.
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u/No-Map-6073 11d ago
Godless transplants the setting to post-apocalypse modern Earth so that gets you closer to the super hero feel instead of pure dark fantasy