business superman 4 by Piotr Bizior

business superman 4 by FreeImages.com / Piotr Bizior

Heroism is part and parcel of most fantasy campaigns and certainly central to Pulp and Superheroic Campaigns.

In fact, most campaigns, driven by the need for drama, will incorporate heroism in some fashion, whether that be from greed / opportunity, enlightened self-interest, or the real deal.

How can heroism stem from greed/opportunity?

Heroism is doing the right thing despite the risks and dangers that you are exposed to in the process. So the question is whether or not there is any reason why greed might lead a character to do the right thing despite danger – and there is an obvious yes answer to that question.

It might be as simple as playing the hero as camouflage, or to eliminate potential rivals, or because you need to stop a mutual enemy. The Shards Of Divinity campaign was all about characters being forced to do “the right thing” because at every step, they were compelled to do so for their own benefit or advantage.

Heroism can only exist where there is opportunity for it, and those opportunities come in three distinct varieties. There’s local heroism, also sometimes referred to as “street” heroism; there’s migratory or “passing” heroism; and there’s uber-heroism, which deals with international and cosmic-level threats. A good campaign will contain a balanced mixture of all three – but everyone has a different balance point.

Today I’m going to take a look at the three brands of heroism and the whole question of balance – and, if all goes well, I will blur the boundaries between them quite a bit. Which is, of course, the opposite of what most people try and do when analyzing anything – but bear with me, and it should all make sense in the end.

But we start with the bedrock…

Primal Heroism – Us Vs. Them

When you’re defending yourself, can it be counted as Heroism? Sure it can – all you have to do is expose yourself to greater risk than the average citizen, and that happens automatically as soon as you actually do fight. This is Heroism at its most primal, because it bypasses so much social and moral baggage that is normally associated with the term.

Overview

As soon as a character determines that he and his cronies are “the best people for the job”, i.e. those most likely to succeed, even if it puts them at temporarily greater risk, you’re into a primal heroism situation. Now, that’s normally not a good enough reason for non-altruistic individuals to actually put themselves at risk – but there can be all sorts of motivational variations that plug that gap. It might be that if the characters don’t take advantage of this opportunity to act, they will have no opportunity to escape the danger if the mission fails – which means that they are actually minimizing their long-term risk by accepting a greater share of it in the short-term. Or it might simply be that they are control freaks and can’t abide critical decisions that affect them being taken without their input. Or maybe they think that the potential gains are greater than the risks – others will risk less but gain nothing – and greed is the decisive factor. Or it might be greed for authority, or respect, or fame. Or any one of those might be a stepping stone to something that the characters want to achieve.

Regardless of the reasons, this sort of conflict is the bedrock of RPGs. Only the furniture changes.

Plots

As such, it’s very easy to integrate this type of heroism into a plot – it’s often their without being recognized as Heroism, per se. All it takes is a gunslinger from out of town who starts shooting at anyone who gets in their way, or the cultural equivalent.

Even if players are not initially inclined to put themselves at risk, it can be relatively easy for the GM to apply psychological manipulation to the situation. “So are you really willing to risk your life to someone else’s attempts to deal with [the emergency]?” “Do you really trust them not to turn the rewards of success into an additional handicap for you to overcome?” Heck, even a simple “Are you really sure you want to do that?” can be enough to get players second-guessing a decision not to get involved.

Any time a situation can be described as “Us vs [x]” with the characters at risk due to that conflict – and GMs try very hard to put the PCs at risk in any in-game conflict, because it gets pretty dull otherwise – you have a situation in which the PCs are forced to behave heroically.

Tone

That said, there are a myriad of different tones that can be adopted. The tone depends on a combination of factors: How the players really feel about getting involved, how they seek to actually portray their involvement, how the enemy are perceived, how the enemy respond and react – and what happens. Anything from desperation to outrage is possible.

There’s a great danger in the ubiquity of this form of conflict, and that is that it can feel meaningless and empty at the game table – just another ho-hum combat encounter. To avoid that, you need the tone of the conflict to not only be strong and clear, but interesting and richly complex – and extremely distinctive from other such encounters that may have been experienced recently. You have to make the PCs care about what happens in some way.

Roleplay Opportunities

Players don’t often spend five minutes having their characters psychoanalyze themselves at any point in a combat encounter. At best, the player might articulate a broad general summary of what their character is thinking and/or feeling, so as to justify a decision and have NPCs react appropriately – especially if a decision might seem out-of-character.

The same is true of any story which is not told in the first person, to at least some extent.

As a general rule of thumb, our primary conduit to what a character thinks and feels is to see it demonstrated to us through their interactions with others. In an RPG, that happens through roleplay.

Opportunities to roleplay before, during, or after a conflict encounter don’t happen by accident. The GM has to create them intentionally. In particular, many GMs (myself included) find it hard to integrate natural in-game dialogue with combat – so much so that I have a strong preference for employing cinematic combat techniques whenever I think dialogue will be important within the encounter.

It’s part of your job as GM to make it happen when interaction – verbal or non-verbal – is called for by the situation.

Picture Framing

The GM articulates the tone by the manner and content in everything he says that is not being stated in character. The terminology that he uses, his tone of voice, his body language, the other senses that he engages or represents to the players – these are his tools. Context is also important; the context has to match up with the other tonal elements or the GM is sending mixed messages to the players.

If you are threatening the PCs with an enemy who has been victorious in every encounter it has had (at least until now), doom and gloom are the order of the day. Cracking jokes, even out-of-character, means that the tone does not match the context. If the PCs are motivated by greed, then the GM’s descriptions of anything indicating wealth should be fulsome, while descriptions of anything suggestive of poverty should be scant. Even poverty itself should be treated as “the absence of a display of wealth”.

In Primal-heroism encounters, the GM has the widest possible latitude in terms of the choices that he can make with respect to his language; but that diversity comes with the necessity to be clear and focused or the encounter will seem dull and trivial. Once you select a narrative theme or style, you have to stick with it.

Social Conscience vs The Profit Motive

There are those who feel that actions cannot be heroic if they are motivated by profit, or even primarily by self-defense; that true heroism is both altruistic and in defense or rescue of others. To a certain extent, I even agree; but reality is more complicated than that. Certainly, those qualities describe the most noble and pure form of Heroism; but that does not mean that characters cannot be heroic in their absence.

One of the debates that has ranged in comics circles since the 1960s is the question of whether or not Green Lantern, a man without fear, can ever have his actions deemed courageous; the argument is that courage lies in the overcoming of fear. Indeed, there are those who questioned whether or not a man who did not feel fear could plausibly achieve his “civilian” career as a test-pilot; surely he would have been grounded long before as a danger to himself and others? Test a new jet aircraft? You shouldn’t even let such a man get behind the wheel!

The solution to that particular argument is relevant to our question. First, the outward perception of an inability to feel fear – a calm head at all times, a methodical, dispassionate, and almost clinical appraisal of every situation in which the character finds himself – is exhibited by test pilots and astronauts all the time, and was almost certainly the inspiration for the Hal Jordan character. That perception was then fattened into hyperbole by the editors and writers, trying to get things across to the reader in the most direct and abbreviated manner possible so that they could get on with the story. You can feel fear all you want to – but if it doesn’t cause you to hesitate in a crisis, and never interferes with your clarity of thought, then you can be said to be “without fear”. And that makes any assumption of personal risk to benefit or protect others just as courageous – just because you’re willing to accept the consequences (whatever they might be) doesn’t mean that you aren’t aware of the risks. Courage is therefore something broader than simply overcoming fear.

In exactly the same way, Heroism is something broader than that noble ideal; it can be tarnished and tainted and still be heroic. Heroism for venal reasons – “I’m getting paid very well to rescue you” – is still heroism. It might be a different kind of heroism – a more pragmatic, dispassionate kind – but it’s still Heroism.

Just thought I ought to clear that up.

Local Heroism

As soon as you take direct self-protection out of the equation, you’re talking about something more complex in terms of the form of Heroism. There are many different varieties of this more universal Heroism, but the dominant factor, as I implied earlier, is scale of threat. Things get a little more interesting when you examine the characteristics of these different forms of Heroism.

The simplest of them is “Local Heroism” or “Street Heroism”. It gets that name because that’s where it manifests.

Overview

A bully is pushing some local around, and our PC decides to do something about it because he simply doesn’t like bullies. That’s street heroism. A gang is forcing the local businesses to pay protection money, and one or all of the PCs decides to do something about it before they attract unwanted attention to the district – that’s also Heroism, though it may be tainted by the benefit that the PCs expect to gain. Both are examples of Street Heroism, and they both highlight the dominant characteristic of this form of Heroism: the motive.

In the first case, the PC might be Heroic, and this is one aspect of his personality; he might be villainous, and this is a redeeming quality. Or he might be neutral, and this is one aspect of the character that is more altruistic – but it’s balanced by others of a darker nature, such as opportunism. In an “Us Vs. Them” situation, motivation doesn’t matter, though it may color the events; in Local Heroism, it does, and needs to be taken into account as a primary influence by the GM in the way he handles the encounter.

Plots

The Hero System makes it easy – any regular deviation from enlightened self-interest is described by a Psychological Limitation which specifies its nature, its scope, and its intensity of influence over the character. There is, in effect, a “button” that the GM can push, and there is a quantified degree of influence over the PCs or NPCs behavior.

Things are more open in other RPGs, more subject to the definitions of personality employed by whoever is running the character. As a general rule of thumb, players and GMs can be guided by alignment, but this is an abstracted and simplified expression of a far more complex phenomenon. The most Lawful Evil can have a redeeming quality; the most Anarchic Chaotic can decide to help a stranger on a whim. Or not. So alignment is only the start of the story, defining whether or not the behavior of the character in this specific case is part of a pattern, or is an exception to that pattern.

In games without predefined “buttons”, all the GM can do is put a potential encounter in front of the PCs and let them decide how to react. So plot-wise, these also tend to be relatively small and simple.

That’s not to say that they are necessarily quick. One of the first problems to be tackled by Zenith-3 was the local Capo, Johnny Luca – who had total control over the local and state courts, had several members of the Police Force and even a few FBI agents under his wing, was the biggest single contributor to the Mayor’s and Governor’s most recent election campaigns (and had his thugs ‘fix’ the results, to boot, because that meant that his donation only had to make the outcome seem plausible to lull the public). It took a year of gaming and gathering evidence and allies before they succeeded in ousting Luca and cleaning up the city in which they were based, Boston. (It took another 5 years of gaming to achieve the same thing nationally. Even that didn’t completely erase the apparatus that organized crime had set up; it simply forced those who they had corrupted to resign, following the capture of incontrovertible proof against them).

Nor do these plots have to be free of broader ramifications. If the problem is contained within a single locality, its’ Local Heroism if the PCs act against the problem despite a risk.

Tone

The tone of these adventures/encounters is far less unrestricted than was the case for Primal Heroism. That’s because motivation is a player-supplied factor, and it dominates all the other criteria that dictate tone. At best, the GM might have a limited palette to draw upon; at worst, that palette will contain only a single shade, and the tone of the encounter was fixed by the context, circumstances, and participants, from the moment it was conceived.

Roleplay Opportunities

There’s a big difference between paying lip service to a motivation, effectively using it as nothing more than a justification, and actually making that motivation a demonstrated trait of the individual; the first feels tacked on, skin deep, and rings more than a little hollow; the second uses the motivation as a spotlight to illuminate the personality. But demonstrating a trait requires more than simply acting in accordance with the motivation; it requires the player to manifest the trait in a roleplaying context, to give it substance within the game.

The more strongly removed from the norm for the character, the more it needs to be roleplayed because it is an exception. The more symbolic of the entire personality it might be, on the other hand, the more it needs to be roleplayed for that reason. Only if the motivation or action is neither highly unusual nor representative of a broader personality does it not need to be roleplayed – leaving the character free to interact with others who have stronger motivations, in the form of roleplay.

In fact, many conspicuous examples of local heroism do not require combat at all, and are handled entirely within an in-personality in-game context. Take that bully example once again; while the PC could initiate combat, he could also simply intimidate the bully, or bribe him, or summon the authorities, or organize a street coalition against the bully. Only one of those options calls for full combat mechanics; the others can be handled either by roleplay or by a more cinematic combat resolution technique.

Picture Framing

Greater restriction in one aspect of the encounter leads to reduced capacity for variety in the tone and language that are used to describe the encounter. With the player taking the lead, via his character, in terms of how this type of encounter will be perceived, you need to follow that lead; this makes this one of the more difficult types of encounter to handle well (it is so ubiquitous that practice leaves it relatively easy to actually handle).

A safe default is often to use almost intimate tones and language, though it might be unclear to what part of the experience the character is relating. Specifics will need to be resolved in terms of the context of this encounter and recent history, however. “It feels good to be able to stretch yourself, to exert yourself in a cause you know is worthy with no doubts or hesitation to cloud the issues.” “You exult inside as your foe quails before your remorseless fury.”

An alternative that also works on most occasions if prepared properly, and not over-used, is to cast everything in terms of a metaphor. One of the most common (and hence the hardest to excel at – the bar is higher) is Dance. “Your foe shuffles to one side.” “Staccato footsteps leave your target uncertain of the direction from which your next attack will come; he steps nimbly back, and sweeps low in a grand gesture, trusting in the knowledge that you have to be somewhere.” “You whirl to face your new ‘dance partner'”.

Any activity that occurs in a patterned manner can be used in this way, though some may be more work than others. Weather metaphors often prove easier than you expect. I once used the construction of a building as the central metaphor for a combat – ironically, one that took place in a crumbling ruin.

Requiring the most prep work, and the greatest knowledge of the PC, is to use his or her life as the metaphor. “He presents as large a target as Fat Willy.” “He lumbers like Big Jim Deakon, and hits as hard as the ox on Jim’s farm”. You can sometimes approximate this by generalizing – if the PC was reared on a farm, a generic “farm boy” perspective might be close enough to get you to a narrative touchdown.

Also, while all the examples offered above are taken from combat, the same metaphor should extend into the pre- and post- combat narrative as well.

Finally, it is very easy to overuse the simile in these cases. I make it a rule of thumb to avoid them except in the case of the PCs life experience as the metaphor. A simile uses comparisons as descriptive technique – “Blood gushes as red as a rose”, “He might as well be in the neighboring village for all the chance he has of hitting you”, “His armor is polished like a prized trophy”. Save these for when nothing else will do, or when you get extra mileage from them – that’s why I employ them in the most personal of the metaphors, because its a way of making the characters’ background more accessible to the players at the game table.

One final technique for advanced GMs that is rarely useful, but can be incredibly effective when it is relevant, is the inverted role. When most GMs first start out, they use loaded terminology in their descriptions – positive/light for the heroic PCs and their actions, negative/dark for the evil NPCs. The inverted role simply reverses these – describe PC actions in grim and menacing terms, and use lighter, more positive and enthusiastic language for the NPCs. This is especially effective when the crowd aren’t sure who they should be barracking for, or are supporting “the wrong side” from the perspective of the PCs, because it employs the perspective of an onlooker. You can even embed dynamic shifts in the narrative as a subtext, for example the crowd getting swept up in the sport of the battle, and losing partisan perspective in favor of simple blood-lust, or starting off supporting one side and slowly transferring their allegiance to the other by virtue of the gallantry and other qualities shown on the battlefield. Villains can reveal their true natures to the crowd by low blows and other forms of “cheating”, for example. Do this right, and you never actually have to announce that the crowd are now supporting the other side to their initial loyalties; it becomes self-evident from the narrative language you are employing.

Sidebar: How Small is Too Small?

There can be a very fine line between battles that are too small and trivial to qualify as heroic and those that are a microcosm of a much larger or more significant contest. The question of “how small is too small” is one that varies with a great many other factors.

Nevertheless, the odds have to be either strongly against the character, or the numbers alone have to be overwhelming, or the conflict has to be extraordinarily epic in some other fashion, before an action can be considered Heroic.

A small group against a dragon, or an army? Those are heroic. Make it a kitten, or an army of geriatric old men, and suddenly it presents a different impression. If anything, the scale of the danger posed by these latter examples undercuts the drama of the conflict to become almost comedic.

Passing Heroism – the hero as wanderer

It’s a tale as old as the concept of heroism – wanderer comes into town, vanquishes the evil that is lurking there, and wanders off in search of the next adventure. This is certainly part of the conceptual bedrock of fantasy gaming.

And yet, due to its simplicity and elegance, it is often forgotten in the modern rush to create greater, more layered, more complex, more textural experiences and stories. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for your campaign is to reset the bar of complexity with just such a simple, elegant, situation. Think for a moment of all the things that such a plotline can do for you: it gives the PCs a breather from complex and difficult moral decisions; it gives them a chance to be heroic; it gives them a holiday from complicated and often interlinked problems, permitting them to recharge their batteries; and it permits a clear and resounding victory with none of the strings that a broader campaign-orientation attaches.

Overview

In every way except that of scale, this can be considered the opposite side of the coin to “Local Heroism”. By definition, the situation is not local to the Hero. But, where there were questions over what can be considered heroic at the local scale, there are none at all with this form of heroism because the characters can simply keep going and not get involved; it follows that any risk at all is a risk they do not have to take, and by definition, is therefore heroic to at least some degree. Even the risk of delaying something more important is enough to justify this as an example of Heroism.

Plots

The recipe for this type of plotline is simplicity itself – PCs arrive somewhere, discover that there is a problem, and decide to solve it rather than standing idly by, or moving on. The problem is self-contained, small enough to be purely local (though it may be symptomatic of a wider problem), but involvement poses some risk to the PCs. The degree of heroism depends on two factors: how great the quantifiable risks are, and how much of the risk is unquantifiable and unknown. The final ingredient is that the problem has to be large enough that the locals cannot overcome it of their own accord, even should they band together to do so.

Almost any menace can work effectively as the antagonist in this type of plot – accidents, extremes of weather, natural disasters, misguided intentions, or outright malice. I find it good policy, in general, to make the problem as different to the established normal as possible, for one simple reason: the normal plotlines, with their campaign-level complexities and over-arching narratives, all look like this sort of situation until the PCs discover the complications.

Favorite examples include officiating at a difficult wedding, reuniting two star-crossed lovers, resolving a property dispute, and so on – all simple, small problems. I don’t care, as a general rule of thumb, if dice are never picked up in such a game session, and everything is solved by talking; that in itself can be a change-of-pace. I then throw in sufficient challenge to keep everyone in the PCs party involved, even if that requires an unrelated problem to coincide with the first – though I will always look to connect the two. Take that difficult wedding between two families who don’t like each other very much – a Hatfields-and-McCoys who have finally established a truce and are looking at this wedding as a way to bind all parties to that truce – all you need is someone bent on stirring up trouble for their own benefit, or an assassin who has confused one of the parties for someone he has been contracted to hunt down (and who had escaped a previous encounter with the assassin through good fortune), or something along those lines, and you have plenty to make for an interesting diversion from the routine.

I look upon this sort of plot as a “palette cleanser” for the campaign, and it is this application that I alluded to as a way of “resetting the bar of complexity” in a campaign. You can grow over-familiar with anything, given enough exposure to it; when players stop seeing the richness of detail within a complex plotline and begin to find the convoluted layers of significance and interlocking of plotlines tiresome, you are overdue for such a “campaign cleanser”.

There are other applications that are worth considering. Such simple plotlines are a great way to give the PCs a “health report” on the game world – what are the locals concerned about? How have they been affected by recent events? How does the big picture translate to the small scale? It’s a reality check, and a form of R&R for the players, at the same time.

Tone

Simplicity and clarity are paramount to this style of adventure. Beyond that, you want a contrast with your normal campaign style, the better to balance the overall campaign; so, if “grim and serious” is the normal tone, I might go for “romantic” or “slapstick”, or even both.

Roleplay Opportunities

This type of adventure typically explores entirely different aspects of a characters’ personality from the norm. That means that roleplaying opportunities abound.

I once had a combat junkie as one of my players; he was never completely satisfied unless he got to flex his character’s muscles in the course of an adventure. He was a good roleplayer, but was never happy unless this itch was scratched routinely. When the time came for a “Passing Heroism” holiday in that campaign, I thought long and hard about how meet this need within the context of the adventure. The answer: a county fair, with a rigged strength-testing machine and an unscrupulous carnival barker. The player absolutely loved it, and got into the spirit of the whole thing, first despairing at “the wasting away of his manliness” and the “withering of flesh” that would inevitably follow his strength deserting him; a near-total collapse of confidence and creeping apathy and despair; then an accidental encounter with a runaway bull, which showed that his “virtue” was undiminished; and then roping the party cleric into a scheme as a fellow conspirator in a private quest to prove the game was rigged, and punish the unscrupulous Carnie. None of which had anything at all to do with the main plot of the adventure (gophers attacking the town cemetery), but which entertained not only the participants but the entire table.

And the heroism? It turned out that the gopher tunnels were a means of accessing a mass necromantic ritual which would raise the entire population of the cemetery as a new form of undead, one which only had to touch another dead body to also raise it as undead. “Viral undead” as it was. Of course, it wasn’t the creepy old recluse who was responsible, it was a young shepherd boy who had stumbled over a vile shrine while tending his master’s flock…

Picture Framing

Contrast with the norm is also the guiding principle when it comes to narrative. Complex and rich descriptive passages should give way to elegant and simple, for example.

It would be nice if this were also a break for the GM, but alas, this sort of adventure often needs more game prep than normal, simply because most of it is a one-off. But it is a different type of adventure, and a change is often almost as good as a holiday, as the saying goes. In particular, simple and elegant can be a lot harder to prepare and make effective and interesting than more flowery alternatives.

Some of the most fiendish writing exercises I’ve encountered stem from this challenge. “A man sits at a table. Now, make it interesting. 50 words.” “A woman walks through a doorway. Now make it emotional. 100 words.” Things of that nature.

I knew as soon as I quoted those challenges that someone would want me to include my responses to those writing exercises. In fact, the idea was that you would repeat the challenge for twenty days in a row (with weekends off) and could never utilize the same plot device a second time. The first time tends to be easy. The tenth time is tough. The twentieth time is sheer hell, because all the easy answers have been taken; so there’s not a lot of value in presenting my answers to the challenges. Besides that, I’m not 100% confident of getting this article finished in time as it is.

Passing Heroism II – something wicked this way comes

The third side of the coin – to get all existential on you – is where the opportunity for heroism comes to the character, and not the other way around.

Overview

Once again, this is an opportunity to contrast the usual fair with something different.

One of the greater challenges to this mode of heroic adventure is distinguishing it from Local Heroism and Primal heroism. The trick is to confine the threat to the individual PC or PCs affected while making the situation an indirect threat, so that self-defense is not invoked. That is best achieved by having a concurrent plotline in which the quality being threatened in the first is essential to a successful resolution of the second. For example, the threat might be to the character’s reputation, just as he has to use that reputation as leverage to a tricky negotiation of some sort, or to offer a character reference to someone in court.

Because the plot is coming to the PCs, this can actually be an opportunity to develop one or more of the main plotlines of the campaign, as you can see from those examples. The opportunity for Passing Heroism becomes the challenge that has to be overcome in order to achieve the larger campaign goal, even though the only commonality is the PC or PCs.

Plots

My favorite use for this type of adventure is a heavily supernatural or horror-based plotline, but there are times when “the fastest gun” is a viable alternative. “My uncle thinks I’m a wastrel, and won’t let me inherit the mill until I beat one of you at something, fair and square. So, [PC name], I challenge you to…” and the day after, it will be something else, and the day after that, something else again, and so on. At first, these challenges will be simple, and things that the NPC is used to, but he will make poor choices of opponent; but, like the writing exercise earlier, by the time he begins choosing opponents more cleverly, all the simple challenges will be used up. (This idea came from the first season of Survivor, which gives you some idea of the nature of the challenges).

Tone

Tone is dependent on the nature of the adventure. For a horror/supernatural plotline, I will go full-creepy on the players; for the fastest gun, it might be tragic, or a light-hearted romp, or (something very alien to my usual milieu) Western.

Roleplay Opportunities

While there are some of these inherent in the basic concept, this type of Heroism doesn’t lend itself to more intensive roleplay than usual.

Picture Framing

In terms of narrative, the style of the plot and the overall tone of the adventure are dominant, and leave little scope for alternatives.

You can occasionally get creative; I once ran the entire adventure as though it were a tale being told around a campfire, from the perspective of an NPC, making the players both participants and audience, and filling the narrative with Noir-ish first-person asides to them. Only at the end of the story, when the (unidentified) listeners had departed, did the tale-teller arise and reveal himself to be someone else completely to the person the players thought they were dealing with. Only then did it become clear that the NPC was warning another (who would shortly become a major threat) against continuing in a course of action that would bring him into conflict with the PCs. Of course, the warning was not heeded – but this had the metagame effect of telling the players of this threat on the horizon without the characters knowing about it. They spent most of the next adventure jumping at shadows and waiting for the other shoe to drop… It worked well at the time, but it was very stressful to GM in that fashion, because the game system wasn’t really geared to interactive retro-active storytelling by the players; it was difficult to integrate the past-tense of the storyteller with the present-tense of the PCs. So I haven’t been in any hurry to repeat the exercise; this is definitely an advanced technique.

Uber-Heroism – the national/international threat/crisis

Most campaigns will, most of the time, consist of the preceding types of opportunity for Heroism, and exceptions tend to be confined to specific genres and sub-genres. This category represents a clear escalation in scope, and as such, is often reserved for the grand climax of a campaign. In the Adventurer’s Club campaign, few adventures take place at this scale, though many have the potential to escalate to this scope if villainous plots are not stopped in time, and there have been more exceptions than would be normal in a typical Fantasy campaign. This level of threat is more common in the Zenith-3 campaign, but even there, many adventures are smaller in scope – though with global ramifications.

Overview

Opportunities for Heroism clearly rise with the increase in threat level posed by this class of adventure. In terms of structure, the defining characteristic lies in how advanced the nefarious plot is when the PCs are able to do something about it (they may have known it was coming for quite some time).

In truth, confining threats this large to a single adventure is difficult unless they are treated as being “just part of the furniture”. More commonly, an entire campaign is devoted to the purpose, or – at the very least – a campaign phase (refer to Definitions and the Quest For Meaning in Structure if you aren’t clear on what I mean by the term). The threat is accepted as too large for the PCs to solve except from time to time in a more localized way.

That’s certainly how the Nazi apparatus is viewed in the Adventurer’s Club. When that campaign started, while the Nazis were dominant in Germany, and were admired for the economic progress the nation had made, few saw them as a threat. Over time, the awareness has slowly crept in that eventually there will be another European War, and various efforts have been made to defuse or allay that threat; but, by and large, the PCs have dealt with individuals and individual operations. Fascism itself is too broad a problem to fall within the purview of the Adventurer’s Club. As our plans currently stand for the campaign, World War II will be about to start just as the campaign ends – several PCs are from Commonwealth Nations, who will expect to get called up almost immediately War is declared, effectively tearing the Club (and the campaign) apart. I’m not even sure, off the top of my head, whether or not Austria has been annexed yet (but I don’t think so).

Plots

In general, these adventures either start small and escalate as the scale of the threat becomes apparent, or start with a bang when the villainous plan is already well advanced.

Tone

These adventures lend themselves to drama; they tend to be bigger than life, over-the-top in one or more respects. Whatever tone is to be adopted is necessarily an overtone within that range.

Roleplay Opportunities

Heroism tends to imply action – there’s not a lot of passive resistance in RPGs. Action tends to drown out roleplay, unless the GM makes special efforts. Quite often, roleplay exists only to deliver context and background to the PCs in this type of adventure; they tend to be far more about going somewhere and doing something. However, it’s always possible for the players to throw a surprise in your direction; for example: when, in 2015, we ran Amazon Nazis On The Moon (in the Adventurer’s Club campaign, of course), the players decided to disguise themselves as Nazis to get as far into the Amazon City as possible before making their move. The result was that we had to invent additional Amazonian society and infrastructure on the spot, and quite a lot of what might have been combat encounters were, in fact, roleplayed.

As a general rule of thumb, though, that choice is out of the GM’s hands. The plot is a boulder rushing downhill; once it starts rolling, all the GM can do is get out of the way and wait to see how the players will respond.

Picture Framing

The other truism that will be noted is that as GMing options decline in terms of plot control, so the choices of tone and narrative style also shrink. At this scale, the dominant factors are the plotline and its context and the response of the players.

Uber-heroism II – the global/cosmic threat

Top of the tree when it comes to threat, and therefore, to opportunities for Heroism, is the threat to all existence, or so it might seem at first glance. But these threats are so colossal that the specter of actions taken in self-defense again rear up before us. That doesn’t mean that there’s no scope for heroism in this adventures, just that they are more of a minefield than it might initially appear.

At the primal level, the questions were whether or not a threat was of sufficient scope to make heroism possible; at this end of the scale, they are whether or not anything is, or can be, achieved with heroic action.

If there is a cosmic threat that the PCs can successfully oppose at little personal risk, incurring a high level of collateral damage, or can oppose more uncertainly with far greater personal risk and the potential for a much lower level of collateral damage, the latter course is heroic.

Overview

Despite the scope of the threat, it is a common characteristic of all cosmic-level threats that they have some PC-scale focal point, enabling the PCs to act effectively against them. Quite often, the general plotline is one of “investigate, survive, and take opportunities as they present themselves” until that focal point can be identified. It is frequently not direct action that ultimately resolves Cosmic threats, but a targeted indirect action that starts a string of progressively larger dominoes falling. “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world” to quote Archimedes; these adventures are all about fulfilling those requirements.

In the meantime, characters tend to deal with second-order effects – consequences – and with localized manifestations of the bigger problem. If there’s an army of demons invading, you fight them one demon or small group at a time, to buy yourself (or others who must number at least one PC amongst them) the time to solve the larger problem – and that holds plenty of scope for heroism.

It’s not a Deus-ex-machina if it only happens at PC instigation.

Plots

If it’s rare for a national crisis or international threat to be resolved in one adventure, it is even more rare for a cosmic-level threat to be so isolated. It does happen – my players will remember the World of strange lines, and the adventure set there, “Reflections Of Strange Lines” – I discuss the meaning and relevance of the title in Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames: Naming Adventures (Part 2). In brief, the PCs stumble across a cosmic-level threat that is poised to escape the prison in which it has been bottled up, and re-lock the prison gate. It’s not a permanent solution – the threat is still out there – but all the immediacy has been taken out of the situation.

But that’s an exception, not the general rule. On almost all other occasions that come to mind, cosmic-level adventures that are resolved in the scope of the one adventure were unsatisfying because there wasn’t enough scope to make them as epic as they should have been.

Tone

Cosmic almost demands melodrama; Cosmic-level threats are always over-the-top in at least one respect. There is some scope for nuance, but for the most part your focus has to be tickling an increasingly-jaded sense of awe and wonder.

Roleplay Opportunities

Surprisingly, there can be quite a large capacity for roleplay in cosmic-level plots, because for the most part, characters can’t deal with the whole, only a small segment of the bigger picture. Even resolving the primary threat means reducing it to character-sized chunks – and that, in turn, makes it small enough for character interaction.

Picture Framing

One of the other problems that will be faced is that cosmic-level threats tend to be complicated and technical. Clarity in description has to be your primary goal, and what little scope remains for descriptive tone is more than consumed by the mandatory tonal requirements – awe and melodrama. What little tonal differentiation is possible must be achieved within the scope of those requirements.

That represents a special challenge for the GM to overcome, and can lead to the impression that all Cosmic-level threats are tonally identical.

The solution to this problem is to ensure that there is a consistent tonal quality when the action focuses on the smaller scale sub-problems, where you have greater latitude to pick and choose. The dominant tonal themes in such passages of “Reflections Of Strange Lines”, for example, were curiosity and reflection (in the emotional sense).

Comparing the opportunities

When I first began planning this article, I expected a relatively orderly progression in the characteristics of each type of Opportunity for Heroism. In some respects – tonal freedom, for example – that was what I found. But in others, such as roleplaying opportunities, and even whether or not actions could qualify as Heroism, a far more complicated picture emerged. Cosmic level threats exhibit some of the same problems in this respect as primal Us-Vs-Them situations, for example. There are similarities across all the examples at a given scale of Heroic Challenge – but there are differences as well. Each classification has at least one parameter in common with another. Taken as a whole, there is very little consistency and yet there is a general cohesiveness to the overall picture that emerges.

Conclusion: Heroism Is As Heroes Do

GMs are always looking to confront the PCs with challenges. Unless each and every decision is taken on purely self-interested grounds, that automatically manifests in opportunities for Heroism; alignment doesn’t matter, nobility is irrelevant, altruism or its lack makes no difference, except to the scale and “purity” of the Heroism; and even when all decisions are based in pure self-interest, there is still scope for reluctant heroism.

The opposite of Heroism is villainy (not cowardice) – and, since an opportunity for Heroism is also an opportunity for Villainy, thinking about your adventures in terms of the opportunities for Heroism that they provide is a very useful tool. The next time you are doing campaign or adventure planning, give it some thought. In particular, contemplate the significance of any absence of such opportunities, and make sure that your PCs aren’t in the adventure purely to plod from A to B, in plot terms.

Heroes are characters who make a difference. Villains are characters who take advantage of opportunities to be Heroic for their own gain. You want the PCs in your games to be one or the other – a mealymouthed wishy-washy character, somewhere in-between, benefits no-one.


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