Chrome City Crime-Fighters

[nemarsde]

After we finished the D&D Essentials Kit, Biter suggested we play a supers game. Him, his wife Rollergirl and kids, Splat and Catbro, would be playing. Even though Biter hates that genre, his kids love it so my challenge was putting a twist on the typical supers tropes, such that Biter would enjoy it too. Since they'd purchased their own 7 poly dice sets, the game had to use those too.

Index Card RPG (ICRPG) is a red hot mess of rules, settings and spurious ideas. Despite having a player's guide section, the Master Edition is a book for the GM to unpack and organise with coloured index tabs. In fact it should've been renamed "Index Tab RPG" and many reviewers have generously called it a toolkit.

Beneath it all though is an elegant core mechanic using a 7 poly dice set, and if the GM is building pre-gens anyway that it makes for an excellent one shot.

The smörgåsbord of settings in ICRPG, all blendable, reminded me of Palladium Books' Rifts that me and Biter played as kids. We had fond memories of that game, even if its system was a quagmire. I imagined a game that started out as supers in the city but became more Rifts-like.

I asked Splat and Catbro what super heroes they wanted to play. Catbro said Spider-man and Splat showed me the teleporting, mind-controlling teddy bear she'd created in Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2. She explained quite clearly that her bear was an antihero and it reminded me of a nightmarish Care Bear.

I knew Biter was a fan of Lobo, Conan and the Warhammer 40K Space Wolves, so I worked with that. Rollergirl was a fan of Lara Croft and had some Batman graphic novels, and those two characters overlap quite nicely.

Cromwulf
Last surviving clone warrior of the Jovian Wars, turned interplanetary bounty hunter and hellraiser

Lara Bryce Wayne
Ruined aristocrat, globetrotter and avenging angel, out for justice against those who murdered her father

Nightmare Bear
Popular cuddly toy possessed by a dark entity, who’s seeking those responsible for summoning it from beyond

Spider-Vex
Diego Domingo was a normal schoolkid until bitten by a Martian spider. Then he vowed to fight street crime

[nemarsde]

"Chrome City" was invented by me, Catbro and Splat on the way home from a slot car festival in 2021, with Biter driving. We hashed out a story between us of the city's premier crime-fighters, Mr Adrenaline and his trusty sidekick, Psi-Spear, thwarting the plots of Dr Death:Kill and his brutish henchman, Brick Fistor. We had such fun with it, I wrote it up into a short story for them called Hallowe'en To Hell.

The centre of the city was very futuristic but run down and crime-ridden outside. It reminded me of Delta City and Old Detroit from RoboCop. I wanted to revisit Chrome City and make our supers campaign completely bespoke.

Biter and Rollergirl were fans of The Expanse TV series and I wanted to Chrome City to set on an alternate Earth. So I combined these two concepts, setting the game in the future of the Solar System. Mankind has colonised the planets and discovered Second Earth, a counter-Earth, on the far side of the Sun.

Technology is near-future like The Expanse but there's also alien tech hidden on Second Earth and of course, Mars. Finally, an unknowable Cthulhu-style dark magic "from beyond the stars" exists.

Chrome City is the capital of this mysterious Second Earth, with many of the city centre buildings made from the high-tech materials of massive colony ships. The planet is governed by the Second Earth Consortium, a group of private companies, giving us some room for anti-authoritarian antics.

As soon as we started playing we started generating names and places.

Glossary

• Aunt Marina. Diego's guardian. Hard-working TV weathergirl and metreologist.
• "Barracks". Len van de Ven, war veteran and leader of the Rogue Sharks mercenary company. South African.
• Broadcast Centre. Building in the city centre that is the satellite broadcasting hub for the whole planet.
• Chrome City. The capital of Second Earth, its gleaming, high-tech centre constructed from the hulls of massive colony ships from Earth.
• CJ Anderson. Diego's childhood sweatheart.
• Dewey. Diego's disasterously clumsy best friend.
• Eugene Pumpr. Nicknamed "Pump-and-Dump" by the press, a greedy, despicable stockbroker. Emails implicate him as the inspiration behind the Rogue Shark's Sindium heist. He bet millions that the price of Sindium would fall after the heist because so much would hit the black market at cut price. Instead the heist was foiled and the price shot up because of panic buying. He then disappeared, perhaps hiding from whoever financed the criminal enterprise.
• Flaming Mongrel. Cromwulf's old war buddy, an Aussie dog soldier. Humanoid body, dog's head, and has the same fire powers as the Fantastic Four's Human Torch.
• Sundae Goggins. A dark but loving little girl that owns Nightmare Bear.
• Giga-Stadium. Located just outside the city centre, able to seat 100,000 spectators. Hosted the spazzball grand final.
• Grimes. Lara's butler and expert programmer/hacker.
• Jerry Jansingh. Loutish news producer always fishing for the next scandal and shouting at his PA, Walter.
• Killer Krew. A team of super villains/terrorists who supposedly took the Giga-Stadium hostage during the spazzball grand final. Their costumes were cheaply put together, inspired by DC's Suicide Squad, and they were revealed to be tramps, hired by a mysterious stranger to masquerade as super villains. Whilst they were gathered in the stadium lobby, Cromwulf carbonised them with a slag grenade in front of the world's media.
• Knife Point. The promontory and district that divides the flow of Shark River into a harbour one side and canals the other. Run-down and crime ridden, where Diego lives with his Aunt Marina.
• Mildred Wong. Old, grumpy Cantonese lady with a devastating handbag swing.
• Rogue Sharks. Mercenary company from the Jovian Wars, infamous for their custom-built battle mechs and led by Barracks. They tried to rob 1.5 tonnes of sindium bars from Central Bank but were foiled by the Chrome City Crime-fighters.
• Scalar. Pharmaceuticals corporation and governing member of the Second Earth Consortium.
• Second Earth. A Counter-Earth, in synchronous orbit on the far side of the Sun. Colonised by Earth about 100 years ago but remnants of ancient Primordial civilisation have been found, researched by Lara's father.
• SEC. Second Earth Consortium, the group of Earth corporations that financed the colonisation of Second Earth and now govern it.
• Sindium. Precious metal more valuable than gold, used in solar panels and flatscreens.
• Spazzball. A violent, semi-contact ball sport rather like Australian rules football with ludicrously overblown celebrations. The Cup Final is held in the Giga-Stadium.
• "The Turd". A dangerous, superpowered monster discovered in the sewers under Knife Point. Able to remotely control and manipulate poo, tearing it out of people's bodies. Revealed to be Wendell Rhodes, a research scientist working on a secret project for Scalar. They were using Promordial technology to boost the neural network in humans, focusing on the neurons in the digestive system. He stole activated material from the lab by swallowing it and was later found sat on the toilet in his apartment, only his two feet remaining. The rest of his body had disolved and been flushed down the toilet where he became The Turd, terrorising the neighbourhood until he washed out to sea by Lara and team.

[nemarsde]

Our four sessions of ICRPG were spread across eight weeks because of various summer activities. It struck me how unsuitable summer days are to sitting around a dining room table for a couple of hours. For grown-ups it'd be better to play at night when it's cooler, and then you're not disrupting your weekend so much either.

ICRPG did its job well enough and The Expanse-like setting inspired a trip to the National Space Centre for the family. Overall though the modern world is far more complex than D&D and I found it difficult to tell a family-friendly superhero story. Our game featured guns, drugs, crime, terrorism and ecomonics, innocent bystanders and city infrastructure. All staples of the comic books and movies but constantly skirting the boundary of age-appropriateness!

ICRPG is also a bit of a dead-end for newbies. I want to teach the family the rules of a game and coach one of them into GMing. It needs to be a more cohesive game with plenty of published support. So after flushing The Turd, we decided that next time we'll go back to a traditional fantasy RPG.