The Defenders of Cleveland!*
Minor-league heroes fight major-league threats in a 3rd-tier US city! A personalized 4-5 session adventure featuring randomized character creation.
TYPE
SYSTEM
LANGUAGE
EXPERIENCE
AGE
$22.00
/ Session
Details
Weekly / Thursday - 3:00 AM UTC
Session Duration / 2.5 hours
Campaign Length / 4–5 Sessions
5 / 6 Seats Filled
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Schedule
Meet your party members
5/6
About the adventure
**Schedule: 9/10, 9/17, 9/24, 10/1, and perhaps 10/8** This is a world of heroes. See them now! as they fly through the air, performing wondrous feats, defeating scheming villains at ever-intensifying levels of grandiosity. While some operate independently, the best of the best—the fastest, the strongest, the smartest, the most supernaturally gifted—work for the world’s governments, improving their nations’ lot while perfecting their PR campaigns and running vast media/ merchandizing enterprises. You are not those heroes. No, you’re the mid-rank almost-somebodies—too weird, too unphotogenic, too underpowered or with too obvious weaknesses—whom major nation-states passed over when creating their rosters. In lieu of such a cush and prestigious job, you’ve taken a mediocre contract at a crumbling Heroes’ HQ in Cleveland*, which you protect to the best of your ability from its dubious foes. Still, a gig is a gig, right? These people need protecting as much as anybody else. And maybe, just maybe, you can make a name for yourself here, in this benighted city, and one day claim your place in the big leagues. *Game may not actually take place in Cleveland. We’ll choose a third-tier US city as our home base as part of character creation. ************** One of my favorite things about superhero stories is that they’re almost always *personal* to the characters involved. There is no ‘generic’ superhero adventure: it’s about the hero, their connections, their strengths and weaknesses, their allies and nemeses, their journey through their fantastical world. That’s the spirit I want to capture in this game, so I haven’t written any plot for this yet. We’ll do character creation in session 1 (semi-randomized; see below), and then I’ll write a scenario tailor-made for the heroes we’ve discovered through that process. As always, I won’t know the ending as we start to tell our story: that’s for YOU to determine through your actions over the course of the remaining 3-4 sessions as circumstances unfold. Join us for this tongue-in-cheek but character-driven adventure!
Game style
Rule of Cool (RoC)
Theater of the Mind
Meet the Game Master
5.0
(29)
4 years on StartPlaying
153 games hosted
Highly rated for: Creativity, Storytelling, Inclusive
About me
Hello! I'm Sam Tillis, proprietor of stillis.gaming. Thanks for reading my profile! I'm going to let you in on a secret right off the bat: I believe that roleplaying games are the greatest form of storytelling. I've been an actor, a director, a writer, and a teacher, so I've told a lot of stories in a lot of different ways, but RPGs come out on top every time. This is because, unlike in movies and plays and novels, we are our own audience in RPGs. We're not creating the story for mass appeal or to reach for some high literary standard, but for our own fun and fulfillment. What we create at the table is collaborative—every player influences the story, often in directions that surprise even the GM!—unique, ephemeral, and fiercely our own, like a shared dream. When a good RPG wraps up, everyone involved has memories that will last them a lifetime. I have been playing roleplaying games since the age of twelve and GMing almost as long. My players have explored kingdoms of legend and lore, galaxies filled with scum and villainy, mutant-filled metropoles, and much more, defeating villains as grandiose as gods or as personal as their own demons. I've done games with elementary school students and elders, soldiers and coders, teachers and therapists and authors and actors. Each has been totally different, unique to those people in that time and place. Feel free to reach out to me at any time at stillis.gaming (at) gmail (dot) com. I look forward to the stories we will create together. Let the games begin. :)
View Profile →Character creation
Creating your character
Our game system for this adventure will be Stalwart, billed as “the World’s Niftiest Superhero RPG.” And it is, indeed, pretty nifty! It’s rules-light, zany-heavy, and you might get the chance to roll a d16! Character creation is semi-randomized—part of the fun is rolling up a wide-ranging set of powers and trying to tie them together with a theme—so we’ll play through that process together as part of our first session. There are mechanisms in place to ensure that no character is that much more powerful than the others, and ways to tweak your character so you can get something fun to play even if you don’t love what you rolled. You can find a PWYW version of the rules here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/492943/stalwart-85-core-rules
What to expect
Preparing for the session
Visit your local comic book store and thumb through an issue of an unfamiliar comic! Watch a superhero movie you’ve never seen before—or an old favorite! (…all of which is to say, no preparation necessary.)
What Sam brings to the table
I will provide a bespoke story built around the characters we’ll have created together and a welcoming environment to tell that story in. Sprinkle in thrills, chills, and thematic background music to taste.
Equipment needed to play
Internet
Computer
Microphone
Webcam
Platforms used
Safety
How Sam creates a safe table
I expect this game to be pretty light-hearted and PG-13 (comic violence), but we will go over any explicit lines (“do NOT include this content in the game”) and veils (“include this content off-screen only”) during our first session. We will also go over the X-card as an in-session safety tool. I will ask that players keep cameras on to the best of their ability during the game, so we can all respond to nonverbal cues.
Content warnings
Safety tools used