| Rule System/Engine | Unleashed Engine |
A supervillain seeking revenge, an experiment sabotaged, your heroes caught in the middle.
Simple Superheroes #1: The Experiment is a adventure module including setting information for the city of New Carthage and 9 detailed adventure Events that Game Masters can leverage to run the scenario in many different ways.
The adventure released November 5th 2022.
The Setting: New Carthage
Welcome to New Carthage—the city where superpowers were born, the city where new superhumans emerge to this day. Though New Carthage has been ravaged by superpowered battles, its residents and heroes remain unyielding in their hope. The only certainty is change, and getting super-powers sure would come in handy, right?
Superheroes emerged about 5 years ago in New Carthage, but your heroes are still expected to take a central role. One way to do that is to connect your characters to the key NPCs, like so:
A full character web of all the important NPCs for issue #1 is in the module.
The Adventure: DR. NEWTON’S EXPERIMENT
The adventure is designed with a flexible characters, some of whom can replace or be replaced by your own characters relations. It offers a series of detailed events, that can occur in different sequences or permutations.
Adventure Module Synopsis
Gravitor, injured by one of Dr.Newton’s prior experiments, is seeking vengeance. She has convinced her new lover, Peter—who just so happens to be Dr. Newton’s assistant—to help her.
A recent spate of robberies has targeted supplies meant for Dr. Newton’s lab and projects Newton has been sending to other organizations. The heroes will help foil one or more of these robberies. Dr. Newton then asks for the heroes to join him during a critical phase of Project Chronos to insure no interference.
The experiment goes awry and Newton’s assistant, Peter Pojistic, is enhanced but requires help to control his powers. The heroes must stop a thorium reactor meltdown and investigate the saboteurs. Peter’s injuries in the Experiment grant him speed powers and he becomes Timelost.
Eventually, the heroes discover that the saboteurs are led by Gravitor (Halley Nicols). Halley is a former astronaut candidate, and spent months in a coma after a zero-g device created by Newton malfunctioned. She recruited Mirror promising him wealth, deceived a young hacker named Cindy Lyons (CL4W), and even “fell in love” with Peter, bringing him around to her cause.
Your heroes must decide who is to blame, and put a stop to the conflict between Newton and Gravitor before New Carthage’s ability to contain metahuman threats (both villainous and accidental) is completely compromised.
Game Engine
Simple Superheroes #0 is the core rulebook, it pioneered the Unleashed Engine and is packed with examples and supervillains (two of whom feature in Issue #1). An overview of the rules is available in the free Heart of Simple Superheroes PDF.
The engine is a framework to brainstorm your own powers, with meaningful constraints. It has a traditional Game Master role, where the Judge is meant to make rulings and control the world and NPCs.