One of the hardest wires to walk in RPG writing is designing a “genre setting.” Pure genre books (GURPS Horror, Fantasy Hero) are relatively easy; pure setting books (Ptolus, Delta Green) somewhat harder. But hardest of all are setting books intended to enforce a specific genre, be it four-color comics, Gothic horror, or post-holocaust robot-fighting. Sometimes (Champions, Ravenloft, GURPS Reign of Steel), it works. Sometimes (as in Forgotten Realms or the World of Darkness), you create a setting that accidentally creates a whole subgenre on its own. But often, you fall between the chairs; the setting is incomplete, and the genre is imperfectly modeled. We ran into this problem at Last Unicorn with the Star Trek roleplaying games: Our vision was that the Original Series books would cover swashbuckling adventure, the DS9 books would cover grim espionage-military stories, and the TNG books would give us scientifictional sense-of-wonder adventures. I think the end result, whatever its other virtues as Star Trek roleplaying, got about two-thirds of the way to genre emulation.
With the original Freedom City setting in Mutants & Masterminds, Steve Kenson built a respectable four-color universe. With Paragons (255-page full-color hardback, $39.95), Kenson and 13 other writers attempt the harder task of modeling the “superheroes in a ‘realistic’ world” subgenre. Often, this subgenre simply becomes another genre with superheroes: Heroes is family soap opera, The Authority is agitprop, Godlike is war story. Kenson’s approach is to offer all of those as possibilities; to create a book of options, a smorgasbord rather than a fixed menu. As with any smorgasbord, you’ll love some things, and like others rather less. The trouble, of course, is that if you pick all the options on offer – from geopolitics to postmodern fairy tales to extreme sports – you wind up back in a four-color universe again, but without the nobility and mythic resonance. Thus, to use the book “correctly” requires ignoring about 85% of it, which may seem wasteful to thrifty gamers. That said, some or all of the material on offer would work pretty well in a four-color campaign, especially a “muted” four-color world like Checkmate or the Ultimates. (Especially the Mass Combat rules, for single supers vs. battalions of normals.) Another possibility would be using Paragons for a series of short three- or four-session mini-campaigns, each in a different “real world with superheroes” variant. This, actually, could be a lot of fun, and the book offers ten such “series frameworks” to support you, one of which (“The Imaginauts”) could serve as the over-arching frame story for just such a serial reality exploration meta-campaign. In the final analysis, Paragons isn’t a genre setting book, or a subgenre setting book; it’s a subgenre setting cookbook, complete with ingredients. Bring your own fire.
Tags: green ronin, mutants and masterminds, paragons, steve kenson, supers, supplement
