Welcome to the campaign diary of what’s been codenamed Fantasy Avengers. A campaign idea of superheroes in a fantasy setting has percolated within my brain for aeons. I occasionally pretend I’m going to run it, which no doubt gets eye rolls at best or engenders much disappointment at worst when I never get around to it.
This campaign diary will work through how the campaign gets to the table and then, with hope and a prayer, morph into actual play reports.
The ideas in this post were consolidated around 1st January 2023.
The featured image is the city of Sharn from Eberron; maybe that’s a spoiler of a future basket of influences.
Why the campaign diary?
I guess I’m delusional enough to think people will find it interesting. I’m probably wrong, and there will be a load of material no one will ever read.
This brings me to the second reason. I like personal experiments for my benefit. I admit I have a selfish approach to what I create; it’s seldom purely for the benefit of others. I’m curious how the build-to-play and the actual play material pans out as an overall series.
Finally, like a log of blogs or vlogs, it’s an attempt to hold me to account and get me to commit to this happening!
What is Fantasy Avengers?
At this point, it’s probably two things. The degree to which it becomes either is part of our journey.
It’s a full-on superhero role-playing campaign. It just happens to be set in a fantasy world rather than a contemporary one. I call it Fantasy Avengers because I see the main protagonists being like a superhero team facing up to their own personal and relationship issues as much as the threats they may face.
Since it is a superhero campaign, the main protagonists aren’t just highly powered fantasy heroes, as you might get in a fantasy role-playing game – they are superheroes. As you’d see in a comic, but their milieu is different. This means they work by superhero rules in that they’ll have iconic looks, and gear will primarily be just how their powers manifest.
It’s my take on the Exalted role-playing game. Possibly. I say maybe because this used to be primarily what it was, but over the years, it has shifted to being more Fantasy Avengers, which happens to have some shared space with the Exalted role-playing game. We’ll see how much my version of Exalted remains as we travel along this journey. I suspect some of the items will stay, as I like some of the distilled principles of the setting.
If it does end up being my version of the Exalted role-playing game, it’ll be the second time I’ve done my take on a White Wolf classic, as my last campaign was a distilled version of Werewolf: The Apocalypse using Fate Accelerated.
This will take time
This is going to take time. How visible this long gestation period will depend on how the posts are released as a cadence and also because they may have to be released out of order to when the thoughts occurred and to account for spoilers.
I went ages without running anything for years, and now I do it when an idea grabs me, and it takes a while for me to get to that point. The weird thing is this isn’t because I’m generating tonnes of material. After mulling things over for months, if not years, anyone looking at what I went into the campaign with would wonder what I’d been doing all that time. It just takes me that long to get comfortable with the idea and excited about running.
The early influences
The list of influences will grow, and a key part of the campaign going from mulling the idea over to hitting the table is the key influence on it landing in my brain. At the moment, I only have two.
The comic Battlechasers. I like the comic’s visuals; it presents the main protagonists more like superheroes than fantasy heroes. I also like the fantasy and technology mix and how it presents magic as hi-tech with little need to explain how that’s possible or how it all makes sense.
The role-playing game Exalted. What can I say about Exalted? If there was one role-playing game I was looking forward to, but when it hit the shelves, it didn’t represent what I wanted to see, it’s Exalted. I like parts of it. Like how the world is constructed. Some of the mythology. The rules drive me nuts.
If my journey to running Werewolf: Accelerated is anything to go by, these won’t be the only influences by the time the idea cements. They may not even end up on the final list, but they are the ones going in.
And, Finally…
That’s it for the moment. The opening post. The starting gun. I have no idea how long these posts will run or how they’ll be released. If you’re reading this, the endeavour got far enough along (because more than this post will exist at different levels of completion) that I thought releasing some of the journey was worthwhile.