Superhero Bus Stop

I've said before that I've played a number of superhero games - from Marvel FASERIP, Champions 4th Edition, Silver Age Sentinels, Mutants & Masterminds, Savage Worlds, and a few random others - all of them (well, most of them) good games.

I received a copy of Silver Age Sentinels today. It's a game I originally bought 19 years ago when it came out from a company called Guardians of Order, a Canadian gaming company that made their bacon back in the day with Big Eyes Small Mouth, a generic anime role-playing game using their Tri-Stat system. 

Now, as I recall, the original Tri-Stat System was d6-based, but they upped it to d10's for SAS (Silver Age Sentinels). It was originally published in 2002 during the d20 boom. There was a d20 version, too, but I wasn't interested in a d20 supers game with class-based superheroes. It felt too restrictive to me and superheroes needed to have some serious customization options available, especially for me and my players.

I do remember the d20 system had a better cover. The Tri-Stat version was once described to me as a bunch of superheroes looking like they were waiting for the bus, while other superhero games had more dynamic artwork both inside and out. For what it was, this was a huge step in the right direction with art direction that would ultimately be perfected in Mutants & Masterminds a short time later.

It was a good system and it worked well, but when Mutants & Masterminds came out, this went by the wayside. In some ways, I regret giving up on it. They did some supplements for it, but nothing ground-breaking. M&M came out in the same year and kind of stole it's thunder. I seem to recall SAS was out at Gen Con that year, but M&M just missed it or had a very limited run therein, so SAS was the choice for those of us with ready money at the con that year.

SAS had a pretty robust superpower system, with pseudo-guidelines in there for converting from, say, Champions or something else. Wile BESM (Big Eyes Small Mouth) never really interested me (I'm not much of an anime guy), this was very much on my list of must-haves at Gen Con that year.

I got the book and got right to work making characters and creating a universe I'd call "Superpowered."

I remember driving to my then-girlfriend's workplace, a Dunkin' Donuts and getting struck by a weird burst of inspiration when I thought of a city name that just opened the floodgates of my imagination in such a way that I'm hard-pressed to think of another time where writing just flowed out of me so freely.

I was thinking about a superhero campaign, and a universe to run it in. SAS had a setting in it, but I was at a point in my 22-year-old life where I wanted to create my own thing, my own universe. So I'm driving to Dunkin' Donuts and I'm thinking about a superhero universe and the names of cities. While Marvel is a universe where cities are real, grounded places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc., DC is a place where you have imaginary places like Metropolis, Gotham City, National City, and others, and that was never as appealing to me.

It got me thinking, though. What if, due to superhero popularity, a city like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. changed its name as part of this sudden wave of superhero popularity. There were some places that already had cool, superhero-sounding names associated with them, like Century City in Los Angeles. I remember thinking about this and then mulling over that word, Century and how it sounded just like Sentry, more or less, and a place named Sentry City sounded pretty superheroic.

I then got to thinking about how to adapt our universe to a superhero universe, and I borrowed a page from the Deadlands playbook and decided that there could be a defining event that creates superheroes globally - something cosmic that changes the face of the world.

What came next was like someone threw gasoline on a fire. I got to Dunkin' and grabbed a yellow legal pad and a pen that were both in my backpack, and started writing. I wrote furiously, trying to keep up with the flow of creativity that was spewing forth from my unbridled right-hemisphere. I went inside Dunkin' Donuts and sat at the counter (it was an old-style Dunkin Donuts that had seats at a counter and all that) and just wrote and wrote and wrote.

It was a steady stream-of-consciousness of creation.

I wrote down names of cities, which lead to names of superheroes, which lead to names of superhero teams, which lead to supervillains, and so forth. I developed a classification system of "Superpowered," what these new beings would be called. I liked the play on words - "Superpowered" could be used in a variety of ways. I pictured, "This game is Superpowered," reading across three columns of a comic book. It was literal and descriptive at the same time. I loved it, so I ran with it.

I treated it like a book of my very own, something I hadn't done in years. I just clicked that night and exhausted myself with hours of writing down this setting and its inhabitants, the rules of the world, and everything just fit. It was glorious.

I attribute much of that to SAS, and I've chased that dragon ever since.

I realize that in all fairness, what I did was highly subjective and important to me and me alone, and when I try to explain the intricacies of writing all this stuff down, a lot is lost in translation, but believe me, it was like a possession. I had to write all this stuff down. I pulled up scientific information on the internet to make things fit into a remotely meaningful universe - a universe where I could BS just enough to make these extraordinary things that are impossible seem possible given the right justification.

I was was, and still am, very proud of what I created that night, and it's served as the basis of my superhero games ever since. I love the universe I created - meshing it with the M&M universe and folding in other concepts and settings as time went on.

SAS lent itself well to it, and I ran three campaigns in it over the next few years When second-edition M&M came out, I left SAS behind for greener pastures. As time has gone on, I realize a bit that I had gone backwards in my superhero game system journey without realizing it.

I had left FASERIP for the complexity and customization available in Champions. When that started to prove itself taxing, I moved on to SAS, which was not nearly as crunchy and felt more fluid than Champions had been. I moved on from SAS to Mutants & Masterminds second edition (the first edition didn't really click with me much, though I did like it) and followed along with that, thinking that this was the end-all-be-all of superhero tabletop games. It scratched the customization itch and we weren't rolling cups of dice to make things work.

I remember thinking that the M&M system was simple and elegant. Now, looking back, especially after the third edition came out, I realize that, while M&M was a great game, and still is, as I've gotten older, it's become too complex ... too abusable.

Don't get me wrong. M&M is a good game, and I'll sing its praises. To this day, it has some of the best source material and splat books for the superhero genre in general that you'll ever find (check out their Golden Age and Mecha & Manga books, those two in particular are some of the best books on the superhero genre you'll ever find).

I'm at a point where I want a system to support the story, not the other way around, and M&M can be manipulated into unbalance and awkwardness when in front of a GM that doesn't have the energy or will to fight against such things. It's not the fault of the system, it's the fault of me, the GM, for letting the system overpower me.

I look back and feel that, just maybe, SAS didn't do that to me. It did what it did, and didn't get in its own way. Now that I have a copy again, maybe I'll read it through once more, and see what comes out as a result of reacquainting myself with this old friend.

Guardians of Order died in 2006, it's properties going to ArtHaus Games, a subsidiary of White Wolf, and they never did anything else with the line, instead focusing only on Big Eyes Small Mouth. BESM Kickstarted a new edition last year from Dyskami Publishing and Japanime Games, but there's no sign of anything SAS-related.

What with the popularity of superheroes, it's a wonder why SAS never made a comeback, but maybe, just maybe, Dyskami Publishing has something up their sleeves, but it seems they're currently focused on bringing anime back to the gaming table, whether in a new BESM Edition, or using the D&D 5E system.

One can hope. After all, superheroes encourage hope, right?

P.S. GOO also did a d20 and Tri-Stat version of the anime, Slayers. If they were to bring that back in RPG and/or board game form, I'd be on that like ugly on an ape. Just sayin'.