Regioncrawl

I've been playing Dark Elf lately, an older online kingdom management game, and it has a beautiful map with little regions that you war over. It would be perfect for region-crawling. So I've taken the liberty of keying all the regions, though only with names so far. Hopefully they can serve as hooks in and of themselves. Many places are named in Low Elvish (see the dictionary below), because why not, and some are loosely inspired by their in-game names.

>KEYED MAP<

>CLEAN MAP<

Each region can be handled as a hex or point on a more traditional map, with your favourite rules for overland movement. Any shared border means the regions are adjacent "hexes" and each region takes the same time to traverse - the smaller regions have rougher terrain while the larger ones have nice roads. Rivers and mountains on region borders are impassable unless the PCs find a ferry/mountain guide, while rivers and mountains within a region have bridges or trails.

There are several portals, which can speed up your travels a lot if you know the rune-code of your destination.

 

As far as starting locations go, I'd suggest Crown-by-the-Sea in the lower left corner, the Refugee Camp in the upper left, one of the settlements around the Undertide Lake, or perhaps the Little Big Burgh in the lower right. (Pro tip: You can Ctrl+F any location on the map.) I'm personally a fan of starting the players in a relatively normal place and then having them delve deeper into the weird, and all of these locations can serve as the grounded base of operations while having something worth exploring only a hex or two away. I'd probably just show the players the named map to give them some idea about what they can expect and aim for.

You can also start some trouble brewing for the players to fix or flee from.

Have I missed any regions on the map? Any suggestions or corrections?

Super Duper Heroics

I ran a superhero* one-shot using the Super: Brains & Brawn one-page ruleset. The rules are quite solid for a short, free-form game, and offer a simple resolution for nearly any power you could think of. Unfortunately, they also allow the players to choose their own powers, which can lead to many flying bricks or other stock superpowers.

I wanted to try something different. The players could still choose between three powers or two powers and a sidekick, but then we went over to the Superpower Wiki, which has a

>HANDY BUTTON<

that can be used to give any aspiring cape a nice random power loadout. Of course, some deliberation is needed how to interpret or limit some powers, and stuff like Omnipotence or Author Authority should be rerolled outright, but generally it worked out well.

Case in point, Paper Princess rolled three powers:

High-tech Alien Exoskeleton: The power to own a high-tech extraterrestrial armour.
Paper Bullet Projection: The power to fire bullets of paper.
Illusion Manipulation: The power to create illusions.

She was a university student who happened upon a misplaced, mysterious book in the library. When she attempted to open the book, it exploded into a storm of loose papers that encased her in an armour of paper. She quickly learned that the armour transforms back into a book when doffed, gives her a little bit of strength and protection, and that she can shoot the surprisingly sharp sheets as blades or form various distractions by shaping the paper into objects and barriers.

She went on to become a hero, except that her decisions in the course of play were ultimately informed more by her huge student debt than by heroism.

 
Of course, not everyone ended up so consistent. Another player decided for the sidekick option and rolled Black Lips:

Shadow-metal Breath: The ability to release metal and shadow from one's mouth.
Indexing: The power to encode and preserve any and all sources or information, history, data, etc.

He was a teenage emo with perfect memory and pretty scary breath weapon. His mother forced him to take on Little Bugger, his younger brother, as a sidekick.

Awesome City child protective services failed hard here, as L.B. (not to be confused with B.L.) ended up as every rpg companion inevitably will, that is he was constantly sent to dangerous situations to "scout them out". Miraculously, he survived, unlike Black Lips.

From Astro City.

 
All in all, everyone seemed to have fun playing with an unorthodox powerset, and you could use randomized powers to inspire a build even in much more rules-heavy game. So, who would your villain or vigilante be?

*) More like professed superheros, really.