My Diceology buddy MadJay Brown is running a Zinequest project for the next couple-or-so weeks: a superhero setting he calls Lifted: Vault 01. It’s pretty rad! The zine will be the setting notes, plus notes on how to run it in Champions Now!, Forge co-founder Ron Edwards’ take on the old Champions RPG and how to make it more narrative/story-driven. Building out a setting has always been rough for a game like Champions, so this will be a hot way to just start playing.
Anyway! I’m the project’s first stretch goal. I’ll be designing an Apocalypse World hackbook in the style of Burned Over: that is, you’ll need Apocalypse World to run it and the hackbook will sit on top of it, providing special playbooks and such. It’s raising such interesting questions for me about PbtA orthodoxy, where and how to keep and discard elements, whether AW can be treated like “a system” in a fruitful way. The aspiration is that if we can deliver a minimum viable product, we’ll swing around and do a more freestanding version in the future.
If you love superhero roleplaying and want to see a different take on supers from Magpie’s (very excellent) Masks, please visit Kickstarter and consider backing!
