Slumbering Heroes – A Super-Powered Campaign Setting

The heroes are trapped in our dreams...

Every gamer faces the same dilemma at some point: What game should I run next?

Well, this article proposes that you take two genres and slam them together to create something new. I took a light and frothy super hero adventure story, stirred in some gritty detective drama and created Slumbering Heroes, a campaign that lets you have your cake and eat it too. The Savage Worlds system is ideal for this sort of thing: it’s so flexible that you can use it to run practically anything. Not only is this handy for gaming groups that like to change the setting without changing the rules, it also means that you can easily create a mashup of two settings together to create something new.

Slumbering Heroes is a campaign setting that fuses the genres by using the weirdness of one to enhance the grittiness of the other. Though investigation and detective work are a typical part of most superhero games, and heroic action does feature in detective games, the idea here is to start the game with the two elements at odds with each other. Then, slowly, introduce them into the campaign. In Slumbering Heroes we do this by splitting the game into two sections: The Waking World and The Dream Zone.

For this campaign, the players are invited to create two characters, one for each section. The Waking World character should be a normal human adult, with a normal job, life and motivation. The only rule is that each of the characters need to be childhood friends, and ideally roughly the same age as each other.

The other character is a superhero. Ideally, the hero should be one that the first character dreams of being. Idealised versions of themselves are fine, but feel free to let the players go nuts. If someone wants to play a very small woman who sometimes wishes they were a big green giant monster, all the better.

The campaign begins in The Waking World. It is a world much like ours, but less interesting. Crime is rife and bravery is rare. Most people keep their heads down. They don’t so much live in fear as have lowered expectations. Another oddity is that they are no super-hero movies. The major comic book producers went bust sometime during the characters childhood. It really is a world without heroes.

The campaign begins at a school reunion, wedding or similar gathering perhaps. We want to give the players time to introduce their characters to each other, and this also gives the storyteller a chance to introduce other NPC’s, perhaps one of the character’s bosses is also at the party, maybe friends and family of the characters happen to be at the gathering as well.  It’s possible that the characters haven’t seen each other in years; childhood friends grow apart after all. As the celebration ends, the characters  head to their hotel rooms; by coincidence, all the characters are sleeping in the same building that night.

As the characters fall asleep, they find themselves in The Dream Zone. This is the magical land of the character’s childhood, a world that they have all completely forgotten about. A world where they are all superheroes. In this land, a strange magical creature welcomes them back (it can be a frog, a gnome, a wise wizard, anything really). The creature tells them that it has missed them, and that the strange magical land is under attack by terrible monsters (the more pulpy the better), and are asked to deal with one of the horrors on behalf of their strange guide. Once they’ve beaten up their first monster, they wake up.

As the characters start to get their bearings and get on with their daily routine, one of them becomes the victim of crime. They are rescued, however, by a heavily armed vilgilante who swoops off into the night.

This should be the basic structure for the game; every time the player’s succeed in a mission in The Dream Zone, more and more heroes appear in The Waking World.  The day time adventures focus on uncovering the mysterious appearance of these heroes, whilst the heroes fight evil forces in their dreams.

The reason for this can be as complex as you like. For example: Sometime during the character’s childhood, all the villains teamed up and made the supernatural magic in the world vanish- including all the Heroes. Somehow, though, they missed the player characters, who where only ever heroes on another dimension whilst they slept. Each act of heroism undoes the spell, bit by bit. The reason the world is so dull and tawdry is because villains rule the world, and only they heroic actions of the player characters in both lands can save reality itself.

What do you think?