While tinkering with the 4th Edition Player’s Handbook and putting together a few characters to get a feel for things, I had a startling realization. More than any previous edition of Dungeon & Dragons, 4e is really built around the concept of shemping and flair.

Back in first edition there wasn’t really a lot that differentiated, say, one 5th level fighter from another. Strength bonus, if any, and hit points. Your 7th level magic used varied from my 7th level magic user only in which spells and how many they could cast, and hit points. You get the idea. The differences were minute. They were shemps. The flair came from the personalities we gave them, and from the magic items they carried.

In 2nd edition, I played a lot of clerics because they were the most varied characters in terms of ability options. A priest of this god was wildly different from a priest of that god. The “Complete” books (Complete Ranger, Complete Paladin, Complete Psionicist, etc) gave more options within each class. Characters stopped being shemps, differentiated by flair.

3rd edition was more skill-based, which allowed customization, and had prestige classes. Add in multi-classing and the metric crap-ton of third-party material and you go nuts. There was no excuse to have a shemp player character.

With 4e, it feels like we’re back to the beginning. Truncated skill list. No multiclassing. Specific Paragon Paths. My 13th level elf fighter looks an awful lot like your 13th level elf fighter. They’re shemps, and the flair is the personality you give them and the magic items they get. They really did go back to the well of OD&D in that respect.

Now, this might seem like I’m griping, but I’m not. I’m seeing this as an opportunity. It means I really don’t need to put a lot of effort into building my character. I’ve never been a munchkin, I’ve never been a powergamer, so I’m good with a shemp, because while it doesn’t let me built a mechanically-great character, it makes it hard for me to build a character that sucks, either. For new players, that’s an edge. For people like me, it frees me from having to make system choices and allows me to make character choices — what do I do with these skills and powers that are essentially foisted upon me based on race, class, and level. How am I going to roleplay this person, who isn’t that different from the people around him? That’s an idea I dig. I want to play 4e.

The following is a system-independent method for creating a setting. It was developed with tabletop roleplaying in mind, but can be used for fiction writing projects and similar endeavors. The object is to keep it simple and fill in detail as needed. Note that every step is entirely optional, and the process should be modified to suit your particular needs.

The Movie Pitch
The movie pitch is a one-line description of the setting, comparing it to two or more things people are already familiar with. “It’s like Lord of the Rings, but with more dinosaurs”, or “It’s a mashup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Ocean’s 11″ are two examples. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it provides the gist of the setting without drilling down to specific details.

The Elevator Speech
An elevator speech is a short summary of the setting with a bit more detail than the Movie Pitch, but not too much. You should be able to rattle it off to someone in about 30 to 60 seconds, the time it takes to move between floors in an elevator (hence the name). Written, it should be no longer than 2 or 3 paragraphs.

“It’s a GENRE thing that takes place in TIME LOCATION ETC. The METAPLOT THEME CONCEPT. The player characters are CHARACTER TYPES who WHAT THEY DO. They get to use MAGIC POWERS GADGETS STUFF. The main bad guys are BAD GUYS. And there’s INTERESTING FEATURE OF THE WORLD.

If you have a captive audience for a minute or less, the Elevator Speech should get them psyched to play in your game. Think of it as a good movie trailer that shows you enough of the good parts to leave you wanting more.

Core Mechanic Synopsis
Most game systems can be boiled down to a single-lie description. The rest is extra crunch. D20, for example, is summed up as “roll a d20, add modifiers, and beat a target number”. The idea is to provide the reader/listener with some comfort level around the game mechanics without overwhelming them with minutiae. This is especially important if you’re trying to recruit newbees, and why this step come after you’ve sold them on the cool fluff. Yes, Your Favorite System has a lot of flavor and nuance and awesome crunchy bits, but save that for later. Let folks new to the system get their head around the one basic concept first.

Player Character Roles
A couple of lines describing what characters do within the game can be helpful. In many cases it’s obvious, but if you’re in a rich, multifaceted setting like a superhero world where many things are possible, or are doing something off-beat and atypical with a familiar setting, this will help clarify. This may already be covered in your Elevator Speech or Movie Pitch, but some things can’t be repeated enough and clarifying appropriate character types is one of them.

This is also the best place to expand upon templates, archetypes, classes, races, and so forth. You can detail the place of these character types, suggest new types, and advise players of any character types explicitly not allowed.

Adversaries and Roles
Who are the bad guys? This can be fairly generic (”monsters!”) all the way up to a very specific “big bad” (Count Orkoff, Chaos Vampire!). A note of who the standard cannonfodder bad guys (Orc! Nazis! Ninjas!) should be included.

As a player, I have always found it useful to know who the bad guys are prior to character creation. You don’t waste effort or points on abilities that aren’t going to be used, and can focus on what’s going to come into play.

Allies and Roles
What, if any, supporting characters should the players know about in advance? Player characters will frequently need outside help. Healers, equipment suppliers, information brokers, backup firepower, and transportation specialists are a few common examples. It’s helpful for the gamemaster to know who these NPCs are, and it’s useful for players to know who these folks are and what established relationships the NPC has with the party. It can aid in roleplaying, and save time in the thick of an adventure.

Bystanders and Roles
In addition to cannon fodder villains, there may be unnamed ally or neutral character types aplenty. Soldiers, police officers, pedestrians, merchants, and so on.

Mooks and Shemps
To save yourself time create a couple of generic stat blocks, at different power levels, to be used for one-the-fly characters. In my experience, having stats for an average person, a player character-level person, and more-powerful-than-PCs ready at hand is a lifesaver when players do the unexpected and carry a story in a direction you haven’t planned for. You can get more specific as you go along, adding new types, the basic three give you a good start.

Locations
Like a supporting cast, it’s good to have a few stock locations set up ahead of time. You can figure out what you need from the supporting cast you develop - a clinic or temple where the healer can be found, the dark alley where the information broker likes to meet, the tavern where the player characters hang out. The locations become characters over time, will open up story options, and should be constructed with the same care as a player character.

Organizations
The player characters are, hopefully, not the only organized group of people pursuing a goal. Having organizations in the setting provides a respawning source of allies and enemies; you can kill an individual, but the organization lives on. I start with five basic “flavors” of organizations: religious, political, military/law enforcement, business, and criminal. Start with one of each — and they don’t have to be the largest or most powerful in the setting, just the most prominent in your campaign — and see how they interact. You can switch it up, based on the nature of the setting, with multiple churches, multiple government parties, rival crime syndicates, and at new types of organizations such as schools, hobby clubs, and so on. Knowing each group’s goals and their relationships to one another will flesh out the world and generate ideas for stories and character backgrounds quickly.

Rewards and Recognition
Within the setting there should be intrinsic rewards, motivations for the characters to do things. Treasure. Fame. Doing good deeds. Titles and promotions. Favors. Think about what best suits the needs of your campaign and the desires of the players. Then make sure you have the infrastructure - supporting cast, locations, organizations — to provide those rewards.

Summing Up
This is just the foundation, the starting point for building a world. You will of course add to it as you go along, incorporating things not mentioned here and ignoring some of the above advice. As well you should, because the object of world building is making it your own unique thing.

Before you jump directly to the comments to leave me a thousand word essay on why Your Favorite Setting doesn’t suck, take a minute and hear me out. I’ve been kicking around ideas to use in the shared fantasy world project, and looking at existing published settings, and I’ve realized that one’s world building creativity is limited when using D&D as the system of choice.

D&D has a default setting. It’s implied, but it’s there. The basic assumption is that whatever setting is used will have the core player character races, the core player character classes, the same monsters out there, and magic (including items) will work a certain way. Certain elements may be more or less prominent, there may be add-ons like additional player character races and classes, or world-specific magic items, but there is a central essence of D&D-ness that has to be there, or it stops being D&D.

And people want D&D. Try finding players with a pitch like “…and in my world, there are no elves”, or “…in my world there are no clerics”. Someone will want to play an elf cleric. You can’t get away with it. Unless, of course, you’re Wizards of the Coast, then you can tell people to take their gnome druids and half-orc bards and shove them where the sun don’t shine, but that’s a whole other rant. If you’re running D&D, you have to include the core races and classes listed in the core rulebook of the edition you’re using to keep the players happy and meet the unspoken expectations.

What you end up with is vanilla. No chocolate. No other flavors. Like ice cream, you can customize it with toppings, and like ice cream, toppings can make it unique and yummy. But underneath, it’s always gonna be vanilla.

Following up on a guest post I wrote for the Chatty DM while he was on vacation, I’ve come up with one more thing you, the RPG Blogger, should NOT do: Don’t blog while your readers are sleeping. But Berin, you say, that shouldn’t matter! The intarweb is always on! Your prose is immortal and will be there around the clock! Why does it matter when you post?

I used to think the same thing, grasshopper. I’m one of those annoying people that writes a bunch of articles posts all at once, then sets them to post a day apart over the course of the week. My pattern was to set them to post at midnight, local time. If you’re in North America, as the majority of my readers are, that’s between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. your time. My logic was that folks would get up in the morning and have a fresh, hot UncleBear blog post waiting for them.

What really happened was that the post would sit there for a few days, and then comments would start to trickle in. It was very weird, so I started asking some of the regulars what the deal was. I just thought people came to visit the site once in a while and didn’t check it every day. The truth is a lot more high-tech. Most of my readers get to the site in two ways: via the RSS feed, and via Twitter. I’ve got a Twitter widget for Wordpress that sends out a tweet whenever I post, and that flags people to check the site. Same with the RSS feed. Since I posted in the wee hours, by the time people got up to check their feed reeder and tweets I’d be way down the list, even a page or two back. It was easy to get lost in the noise. Folks would either get caught up eventually and see that there was a new post, or get around to visiting the actual site.

When I started setting posts to publish during daylight hours, when people were actively following Twitter and checking feeds, both traffic and comments went up. It makes sense, but it felt bizarre and it still seems a little weird. When you post matters as much as what you post.

Sunday Brunch is the one post per week where I talk about things other than gaming and geek stuff. Which usually ends up being tied in to gaming and geek stuff anyhow, because everything’s connected. It’s a geek world, I just live in it.

Yeah, so, you’re probably wondering what happened last week, based on the fact that I fell off the internet, then posted a few cryptic tweets, then fell off the internet again. Allow me to attempt to give you the Reader’s Digest version: I am Jack’s Bleeding Ulcer.

My health has been under control for the past month (for those of you just tuning in, I have celiac disease, as well as chronic asthma caused by a mass of scar tissue in my left lung the size of a golf ball. That’s not the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my war wounds, but those are the persistent complaints relevant to current events). However, my stress level has been through the roof. There was a funeral. My wife is in the process of being diagnosed with fibromyalgia and has missed a lot of work, which makes me worry about both her and our financial situation. There’s good stuff that’s caused me some stress as well: the launch of the RPG Bloggers Network, guest blogging for the Chatty DM, my involvement with SAGA. And of course there’s my day job, which I love but is frankly pretty stressful. Moreso, because I still feel like I’m learning this job and they’re already grooming me for the next one. This makes me feel a pressure to perform at a certain level.

I wouldn’t say that time management got away from me, because everything was, and is, under control. what got away from me was more like time perception. I lost the ability to be present. Somewhere along the line I stopped being able to focus on the task at hand. When I was working on the blog, I was thinking about the day job. At game days, I was thinking about the blog. At the day job, I was thinking about paying the bills. And at all times, I was thinking, and worrying, about my wife.

Friday night I woke up vomiting acid. And a little blood. Couldn’t keep anything down. I’ve had ulcers before. I’ve, well, I’ve been in situations that were a lot more stressful, but I was younger then and have different resources. So I switched to a bland diet, got myself a run of antibiotics, and made the decision to try and unplug for a while. More quiet time, less noise, more relaxation. Eliminate the distractions, spend more time in the garden and reading books and meditating, try to re-center. And it would have worked, except it was too little, too late.

Monday morning I went to work, the wife went to work, all was relatively okay. Neither of us felt great, but we were there. I felt shaky, but given that I wasn’t eating much and had a small amount of internal bleeding, I was doing well.

Tuesday morning I remember getting to work and feeling shaky. I remember walking to my desk and my boss staring at me. I remember him asking my how I was and replying “I don’t know”. Then I remember his boss, my manager, sitting there watching me, and my boss coming down the aisle with a wheelchair and the company nurse (yes, we have an on-site nurse). I was apparently very pale, and sweating, and not particularly coherent. I end up whisked await to get medical attention, wife at my side, placed on lorazepam and esomeprazole and subjected to a bunch of tests to see if the bleed is bad enough to warrant surgery. I end up ordered to get bed rest.

Wednesday morning, the wife goes to work. I have to go back to the lab for a test they couldn’t do the previous day. Then I get the call to come and get my wife, because her back is doing weird things. She threw her back out over the weekend doing yard work, and it didn’t seem like a big deal. Now she’s in freakish pain. And a migraine’s coming on again. And she had a low blood sugar crash, because one of the symptoms of fibromyalgia is hypoglycemia. The perfect storm of illnesses, so I end up out of bed, driving to work, and taking her to the urgent care.

The meds starting kicking in — for both of us — over the remainder of the week, but I remained unplugged and enjoyed some quiet time. I’m officially back now, with the ulcer and the stress (and my wife’s pain level) under control, ready to start a new week and move forward with life again.

Currently Reading: Throne of Jade and Black Powder War, Naomi Novik
Currently Watching: Nothing. I’ll be getting back to Burn Notice season 1 soon.

Due to the ulcer, all I’ve eaten in the past week and all I’ll be eating for the near future is plain brown rice, unseasoned scrambled eggs, plain unsalted rice cakes, steamed green beans, unsweetened apple sauce, an occasional banana, and Ensure. Yet I’m still posting recipes. Recipes I can’t eat.

This week’s recipe: Thinly slice Savoy or Napa cabbage. Toss with thinly sliced red onion, half a diced jalapeño and handfuls of chopped cilantro. Dress with olive oil, lime juice, white wine vinegar, salt and pepper.

Mythos Love is the touching story of a teenage hot-rodder named Johnny who just can’t help falling in love with the denizens of Lovecraft’s dark universe in spite of his friends’ objections. Think of it as Romeo and Juliet, but with more tentacles.

If you like Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, the Aquabats, or Subgenius “Doktor” bands, you can’t miss this one! It’s got a great beat, you can dance to it, and the reanimated corpse of Dick Clark gives it a 75! Fronted by Hypnoangel of The Dire Paladins, Soviet Sex School’s swinging new single Mythos Love actually debuted a while ago on The Dire Cafe, but it’s now available as a free MP3 exclusively from the UncleBear Downloads page.

It started when I got these two DVD boxed sets of old, bad movies. 50 Scifi flicks. 50 Horror flicks. 100 flicks total. Then I decided to review them all and mine them for roleplaying game ideas. Welcome to BADFILM Saturday.

This 1934 flick was originally titled “Sex Maniac”, and was released as an exploitation film. It’s got scantily-clad women (and even some brief nudity), bizarre depictions of insanity, reanimated corpses, and a lot of really, really hammy acting. It’s based incredibly loosely on the Edgar Allen Poe short story The Black Cat, but actually bears more of a resemblance to the story than the actual film version The Black Cat with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, released the same year as this piece of work.

An out of work vaudeville actor takes a job as assistant to a mad scientist. The scientist’s major project is bringing the dead back to life; from the example we see, they come back insane. The actor finds the scientist annoying, so he kills him. Or maybe I just found him annoying and wanted to kill him. In either case, the actor kills the scientist. Being a master impressionist, the actor changes his appearance (big beard and glasses, tough disguise to pull off), adopts a foreign accent, and takes over the mad scientist’s identity. He also resumes the scientist’s experiments, as only an unemployed vaudeville actor can.

Use in a Roleplaying Game
Maniac will obviously transfer easily to a Call of Cthulhu, with the Herbert West overtones and the madness and all. There’s a subplot where the vaudevillian inherits a fortune and no one can find him, because he’s impersonating the scientist; that’s a hook to get player characters in. That is, if you don’t want to go with the obvious hooks of bodies missing from the morgue and a man presumed to be dead running amok and ravaging young women. The actor-as-master-of-disguise bit would play well in pulp, supers, or espionage as well. In terms of what you can steal ideas for, this flick has some versatility.

The film is interesting to me because there are no heroes, just bad guys and worse guys. There is also the idea of the henchman assuming the identity of the master villain. We’ve seen plenty of stories where the bad guy assumes the throne of the good king, or where a henchman assumes leadership when a master villain is felled by a hero, but it’s unique in my experience that a lesser villain kills a major villain and takes that villain’s identity. It’s like some 3rd-string Spidey villain killing, and taking on the identity of, Doctor Doom. There are story ideas to be played with there. Taking out the master villain in the first act, only to have the henchman step up and take over to become just as big, if not bigger, a threat could be a little mind-bending to players. And mind-bending is always good.

The best supporting character here, who will be stolen for some future game of mine, is the creepy neighbor. He’s got this plan all worked out, see? Don’t you get it? He’s got about a thousand cats he’s raising. He’s also raising rats. Because rats breed faster than cats. So he feeds the rats to the cats, then skins the cats and feeds the carcasses to the rats. It’s a cat fur business. It’s the way the guy stands there and acts as if the who thing is perfectly normal and non-creepy that makes it freaky.

Links
* Internet Archive has it to download, for free.
* Google Video has it available for free online viewing.
* IMDB gives it 2.6 stars out of 10.
* Rotten Tomatoes calls it 83% fresh, which isn’t bad for a flick some call a competitor for worst film ever made.
* Wikipedia only has a stub article about it.

This is a rerun. It first appeared on November 26, 2007.

A couple of years ago I hit on the idea of beginning new campaigns in the middle of the action — in the middle of a fight scene — and it’s worked so well I’ve done it with every game I’ve run since. If I were going to run the Lord of the Rings as a game, for example, the very first scene would be the Fellowship running through the forest being chased by orcs.

“You figure there are roughly 30 of them. Aragon, you’re down 12 hit points. Legolas, your quiver is half empty. Gandalf, you’ve already used a 1st level spell and a 4th level spell. Everyone roll initiative”.

After the fight scene, I’d go back and roleplay flashback scene at the Council where everyone agrees to help the hobbit get to the volcano so he can throw in the ring. Then I’d snap back to “real time”, and any exposition would take place as they’re marching toward Mordor, in between other encounters.
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The first episode of BADFILM RPG Season 2 goes live tomorrow, with the 1934 classic Maniac. It’s the first of the “new format” Saturday BADFILM columns, and I hope everyone enjoys it. There will also be a brand new, action-packed Sunday Brunch on (duh) Sunday, explaining what’s been going on with my wife and I during this week-long white-knuckle stress festival.

You’ve likely noticed that the past two or three days have been filled with reruns. One reason is because GenCon is on, and I’m saving the “A” material for afterward. Folks either aren’t reading blogs right now, or are only reading stuff about GenCon, so I’m saving the new stuff for a time when it will actually be read and discussed. I know, not everyone is at GenCon, not everyone gives a crap about GenCon, and most of my Dire Paladins are hanging aroung waiting for me to say something interesting. Which leads into my next point.

The other reason is that I’m not really here. I’m still on my self-imposed electronics-free vacation, and I want to save the new stuff for when I’ll be around to discuss it. I wanna play, too. And on that note, tomorrow is Ides of Gaming, and I will be there, because I can’t think of a better way to kick back and relax than to get in several hours worth of gaming. I will be bringing Brimstone and Gall and Risus, and will play anything that looks interesting. I suspect a number of regulars will be at GenCon, but why should they get to have all the fun.

This is a rerun. It was originally posted on October 12, 2007.

A couple of years ago I put together TenFootWiki, an example of how GTDTiddlywiki could be hacked into a role playing campaign management tool. It’s a little dated now due to improvements that have been made to Tiddlywiki, and if I were doing it from scratch today I’d do it a little differently. It’s also, in retrospect, a classic case of “overthinking it”, full of all sorts of unnecessary detail not suited for the medium. I’d begin with a generic Tiddlywiki. I don’t remember why I picked GTDTiddlywiki back then, probably because I liked the look of it.

The current version of Tiddlywiki has a journal feature, which can be used for game session recaps and notes. It automatically starts a new tiddler with today’s date. I’d open it at the start of the game session (I can’t imagine game mastering without using my laptop these days) and keep notes there, cleaning them up post-session.

The thing I’d scrap from the original TenFootWiki would be detailed articles. This isn’t a wiki on a website for your players, or other gamers, to read. It’s not Wikipedia for for game world. It’s your notes. It doesn’t have to be polished. If you’ve got a setting tiddler, use if for noting things that come up on the fly. Any NPCs introduced, cultural things, subplots or character plot hooks that that could be expanded on and used later.

Thinks that I would definitely use it to track would be:

• Player contact information
• PC blockstats
• Recurring NPC blockstats and notes
• House rules that are made up on the fly

If I were running an existing, published setting I’d periodically compile house rules, story recaps and campaign-specific background information as a dead tree handout, save it as a PDF and distribute it electronically, or archive it on a website, whatever the group might be using. If it’s an original setting or using an original rules set, then I’d go with a full-blown Mediawiki or blog to publish game information. The Tiddlywiki would be purely for keeping notes from session to session.
And while it’s not exactly a Hipster PDA, I’ve used 3×5 cards with role playing games for a long time. I keep a file box on the table next to me. White cards are perfect for passing notes, and they can then be filed for later reference or to help recall details for a game journal. I use color cards for various other items — on color for NPCs, one for magic items and gadgets, and so on. Before a game, if I know magic items or gadgets are involved, I write them down to be handed to the player that finds them.

The only thing that goes on the cards, as opposed to the Tiddlywiki, is information that will get handed out of passed around. The exception is when I’m working on adventures and storylines and an idea pops into my head. Then I pull out my real Hipster PDA and put notes down on a card or two. These later get transcribed into the Tiddlywiki.

Anyone else use lifehacking tools for game preparation? Share your tips and ideas in the comments.

It’s the third Saturday of the month, which means the Ides of Gaming is upon us! The Ides of Gaming is a free monthly game day hosted by the Southern Arizona Gamers Association (SAGA) that takes place at the Espresso Art cafe (a block from the University of Arizona campus) in Tucson, Arizona.

There’s no way I’m going to miss this one. I’ll be bringing the usual suspects, ready to run, but I’m hoping to get in on some other stuff and be a player. I’ll see you there, right?

Score XP for handing out towels and cologne. Level up and you get a nicer stool to sit on.

This is a rerun. It was originally posted on September 21, 2007.

This is a rerun. It was originally posted on September 4, 2007. I thought it particularly appropriate given the new traffic being brought in the by the RPG Bloggers Network.

The site stats that WordPress provides are neat but a little weird to me. For example, I see that people have clicked through to the site from the Washington Post. Why is the Washington Post linking to me? Because I linked to an article about Doonebury in the Random News Table, and the Post has a Technorati widget that tracks and displays blogs that refer to the article. Continue Reading »

This is a rerun. It was originally posted on June 7, 2007.

Disclaimer: Although I am now the proud owner of the Pirates of the Spanish Main RPG, I have as of this writing done little more than browse through it. It is entirely possible that what I’m about to blather on about is contained within the rulebook, making this column redundant. Still, I’m willing to risk it.

Were I to run a Pirates RPG adventure, I’d stick to the tropes of the Pirates CSG. The player characters, collectively, have a ship and act as the crew. They have a home base on an island. They venture forth to explore other islands, locate and gather treasure, and bring it home. There are so many fun ways to dress up and vary that formula that I don’t know that I’d ever get bored. You could practically run this from some hastily-constructed random encounter tables.
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I love using these stupid tests to generate personalities and backgrounds for player characters and notable NPCs.

The Part of You That No One Sees

You are wise, insightful, and brilliant. Your wit is sharp and occasionally hurtful… Revealing your scorn for people with less intelligence. Underneath it all, you feel burdened by the stupidity of humanity. You know what’s right in the world, but it’s overshadowed by everything that’s wrong. People see you as arrogant. While this is partially true, you are also very sensitive.

This is a rerun. It was first posted on November 30, 2007.

I need to reread both Spirit of the Century and the Savage Worlds Explorer Edition, because I have an idea for adding Aspects to Savage Worlds as a “cap system”. Aspects would be purely background/character stuff in SW but it could be tapped and compelled, which could be great fun. It would likely replace the Bennies system and somehow tie into the Wild Die.

A phrase popped into my head unbidden: Doc Jekyll, Agent of H.Y.D.E. No idea what the acronym stands for. Classic monsters “reimagined” as 1930’s pulp heroes. Mad science turned to good, a la Doc Savage. Count Dracula skulking around like The Shadow. Frankenstein’s monster becomes The Man That Can’t Die (or be killed - they stitch him up, sew new parts onto him, and send him back out, it’s a type of healing power). Basically, give them the same sorts of Weird Origins but have them decide to Fight Crime instead of turning dark. I know similar things have been done already, but I’m wondering if this could be a good one-shot campaign game to run.