Developer Blog: The Field Guide to Superheroes

The first draft of the Field Guide was begun about fifteen years ago, when I was attending courses at UNLV as a “student at large”, while my good friend Darren Miguez — now a young adult librarian in New York state — was pursuing a degree in Fine Art. Darren and I had been tinkering with a diceless superhero game, but I much prefer system implementation to system design, and I started thinking about superhero archetypes as a character creation tool, espcially for players that were perhaps too conditioned to think in terms like “brick” “energy projector” and “martial artist”. It was, and remains, my opinion that many players tend to focus a bit too much on what powers a character has instead of on that character’s story role. This is especially true for players who come to superheroes from another genre, which is the norm rather than the exception. Far more people play League of Legends than read any given comic, even a huge hit like Watchmen, and this leads to players who don’t really know how to make a superhero, and instead run home to mom, resulting in a lot of PCs who are elves, demons, vampires, or otherwise imports from other genres.

I started with a list of about thirty archetypes, jotted down some notes in outline format and ran it past Darren, who read a lot more current comics than I did at the time. It was quickly clear that some characters could be read as multiple archetypes, an idea I embraced as “archetypal drift” and which allowed me to dodge fan quarrels over whether Spider-Man was an Animal Hero, Young Hero, or something so influential and distinctive that he was essentially his own archetype, the Creepy Hero. When I started to layout the draft and illustrate it with con art drawn by my favorite artists and collected via the Internet, the project became really fun.

I showed the draft to more people, and by this time it had fleshed out to forty archetypes and I had decided I had to stop somewhere. I got some flak for leaving out archetypes that were common in other games, especially Speedster. But I stuck to my guns because, to me, this was the old way of thinking, one which put powers over story. By this time M&M had been published and I was thinking of the Field Guide as a handout and campaign aid for future M&M campaigns, and I didn’t want to duplicate the archetype model that was already in that book. Aside from the fact that they go super fast, Quicksilver, Barry Allen and Waid’s new take on Wally West Flash all seemed pretty different to me, in terms of the stories they were in. I didn’t need a Speedster archetype for them all, I needed an Ex-Con, Focused Hero and Descendant, respectively.

Time passed and I used the Field Guide the way it was intended. Bound into a notebook and well illustrated by everyone from Mignola to Perez to Hughes, it was passed around during character creation sessions to get players thinking. Then I got involved with a massive online M&M MUSH called Crucible City, which had hundreds of players over its lifespan of a few years and was very active and rewarding. We put the Field Guide up on the game so new players could read it, we let players decide which archetype fit their character the best, and this allowed new players to see which archetypes were under or over represented. In a game that ran 24 hours a day and would have dozens logged in at any given hour, this was a powerful tool that helped players coming from World of Darkness or 3.5 find a niche.

Eventually I decided to publish some M&M material myself, encouraged by the Superlink license and all the world building I had done for Crucible. I wanted to publish the Field Guide but it seemed a poor first choice. What M&M really needed was villains and adventures, not another archetype product, which at the time numbered in the dozens and each cost a buck or two. So I did an adventure and villain sourcebook instead, Escape from Alcatraz, which was well received and taught me a lot. Mostly it taught me that I didn’t really want to be a publisher. I loved seeing my work in print, and I had wonderful creative partners, but it was all such a hassle. Gaming was fun, not profitable. If it wasn’t fun, I didn’t want to do it. I made a half hearted effort at readying the Field Guide for publication, but I had no idea how I was going to get 40 pieces of art in a timely manner. And, besides, I had a dissertation to write. The project, and my TPK Publications imprint, was shelved.

Fast forward to Vigilance Press and Chuck Rice, who had taken a chance with me on Arthur Lives, my RPG of modern Arthurian myth, cinematic action, and occult conspiracy. AL had been put to bed, and Vigilance was building a line of ICONS products; Chuck asked me if I had anything for this new game. It took me until the next day to realize “Hell yes.” I shared the project outline and scope with him and he was supportive, but it was not until I sent him the first ten archetypes and told him to expect three more books just like it that he realized how big the whole thing was. Back in the TPK era I had written up M&M heroes to illustrate all the archetypes, in the process creating the Worlds of Wonder setting, dubbed WoWo by its players. These characters, even translated into ICONS simple system, made the book quite big by self-publishing standards. The fact that I am an academic, and tend to go on at length, just made it worse.

It sounds like, when making characters, I just went down the archetype list one at a time, but it didn’t work that way. I would get a character concept, like the Veil or the Champ, and  write up that character with a few archetypes in mind. Often I started with a name, as I have a very particular aesthetic when it comes to superhero names, especially for WoWo. The best names, to me, are ones that sound like people we already know; they are phases or terms which already exist in English and have meaning. This is why the Field Guide is filled with names like Rushmore, Giza, and Mona Lisa instead of, say, Granite Man, Super-Pharoah and Madame Mystic. In this way, I make a world that feels familiar, doing the work of seventy years of continuity I don’t really have. So I kept a list of good names (still do, actually) and made the characters, and then one weekend I made a big chart with archetypes along the top, characters on the left side, and figured out how to slot them all so that every archetype was covered. A few weren’t, so I made new characters just for that archetype. But most of them started from a name rather than, say, “It’s time to make my Master of the Elements.”

Chuck knew Dan, who was the go-to guy for ICONS art. I was so flattered just to see my characters illustrated that, whenever Dan and Chuck sent me art to review, I inevitably responded with some variation of “looks great”, but by the second volume Dan was really getting strong with shadows and color, and I was happy to tell him so. Dan also added original character designs that put a lot of my more somber and realistic characters to shame. I figured he must be tired of drawing guys in trench coats and jeans, but he insisted that he wasn’t because those guys were all fast and easy to draw. Fair enough, but I couldn’t help feeling that my WoWo aesthetic — which was very broad, and included plenty of four color heroes as well as the trenchcoat brigade — was a less than ideal fit for the Silver Age feel of ICONS.

Reviews started to come in and were mostly positive. We got in a little trouble because Naga was wearing a see-through neglige. One critic suggested my heroes were not suitably diverse. This last really puzzled me, because this was the book that made Speed Racer Hispanic, that included a Jaime Hernandez speedster, a Mohammed Ali homage, and an Egyptian Pharoah, where the Batman of this world was a Yemen refugee based on a famous National Geographic cover and the Fabulous Frog Girl was South American, where I had iHero for the manga fans and Naga from India and Spectrum, the half-black half-Arab from the future. I think if you compare the World of Wonder to the roster of the Justice League, I win on racial diversity.

We were three quarters of the way through when Chuck stepped down and James stepped up. He was committed to finishing the project and he brought an artist’s eye to layout and art. He also wanted to go print. As a result, the last volume took longer than all the others, looks completely different, but fits on your bookshelf. That’s a win in my book.  However, the project is not without flaw. By design, I had never written up a “history of the World of Wonder”. I felt such world histories were of dubious use and were often very repetitive, especially as they aped the various Ages of comic book culture and mapped them onto real history. I never need to read another history of the 1950s in which superheroes are called to a Senate subcommittee and forced to disband or retire. I mean, I’ve read that a few times already and I just don’t think I need to add to the stack. What I really wanted to do with Worlds of Wonder was emphasize the imaginative, the creative, which I believe is not incompatible with sympathetic characters you can relate to. This led to the Worlds of Wonder glossary in volume one, but no history or intro to the world. It’s not the best way to learn about the setting, and even comes off as a bit lazy. Like I should have made a narrative of some kind, something more reader friendly.

By the fourth volume, general dis-satisfaction with the way I had introduced the World of Wonder (not with the content itself, which I have used in more than one campaign) led me to simply leave it out of the last volume. After all, I figured, no one will miss it. No one is reading it anyway. Of course I was wrong, because I usually am, but if we get the chance to revise the Field Guide, I would like to repackage the Worlds of Wonder material to make it more accessible, to tell a clearer story, and to make it more useful to players and Narrators.

Speaking of the future, there have always been a lot of directions we could take. The first might be an M&M version of the book. After all, the characters all began in 2nd edition anyway. But a Field Guide to Super Villains would be far more useful, as it would include 40 bad guys and over a hundred adventure seeds.

Since I’m finally reaching the end of this, let me thank Chuck, Dan, and James, without whom this project would still be just a folder on my game shelf illustrated with con art. You all made this possible, and you let me write it how I wanted to write it, and I am deep in your debt.

And if you, the reader, are having fun with this book, well, that is another pleasure altogether. Because a book is no good unless it is read, and a game no good unless it is played, and wittout you, the Veil would be forever hidden and the Champ would be a loser. The Road Scholar wouldn’t even be in the race, and Moonshot would be grounded. We’d be nothing without you. Gracias.