Seeing as I was gonna throw this into a PDF of its own, I wrote up some bits about how I plan to run the game in terms of tone and style...
A Note on Setting
Superhero universes can be big and difficult to pin down. They are like the world we live in, until they aren't. The Big Two have always had different approaches to this; Marvel focused on "
The World Outside Your Window", where heroes operated out of New York City and could find themselves fighting actual real-world "bad guys", whereas DC was always more of a "secondary world" approach - things were different, and always had been. The heroes were based out of two separate "capital cities" - Metropolis was New York by day, while Gotham was New York by night.
In saying that, Marvel has massive changes like the Savage Land existing in the Antarctic, while DC has real-world geopolitical tensions being reflected in their fictional countries (look up the history of Qurac, for instance), so there is a decent amount of overlap between the two styles.
But, writers will have these constructed worlds behave just like our own, even as reality-warping heroes have been around for generations; Gods are provably real and can be spoken to, yet Republicans still run on a Christian ticket. Science hasn't cured cancer, when there are scientists who can turn people into dinosaurs on the fly. Cosmic-scale catastrophes threaten the fabric of reality roughly once a decade, but everyone just keeps on truckin' without collapsing into existential dread.
Similarly, the "world outside your window" approach has become... somewhat more difficult of late. Frankly, the world today is just too fucking depressing as it is to be much fun to play in. So, in my opinion, choosing a point in the past gives the best of both worlds. For me, the ideal point for a Task Force X game is the mid-80s.
In world terms, the 80s was the perfect time for villains. Greed was good, the world was suddenly a lot darker than it had been - the future focus of the fifties, the free love of the 60s, and the anti-establishment tone of the 70s were replaced with unchecked capitalism, racial tensions and an increasingly complex geopolitical situation.
The US was in a strange place - while the glitz and glamour only increased year by year, the Republican Party was advocating "trickle down economics". Regan tried to portray the US as the "good guys" of the world stage, just a few scant years after the debacle in Vietnam. The darker side of the US government had come to the front; a perfect backdrop for a game about playing government-sponsored black ops supervillains.
The world was also much more "global" - as telecommunication became more and more widespread, people could communicate around the world, leading to the world feeling smaller and the cultural footprint of America becoming all-consuming. Simultaneously, Eastern cultures like China and Japan were becoming world powers in their own right, and the 80s began the boom of Asian influence in media as a direct response to the US's cultural grandstanding.
From a style point of view, the 80s was the decade of the ridiculous, big-budget action movie - exactly the tone you should be aiming for. Especially the ones with the harder edges - Heat, Predator, The Running Man, Scarface. Even the more ridiculous ones, like Commando, Bloodsport, shit even Road House can make for excellent inspiration fodder.
And finally, from the point of view of the source material, the 80s was the transitional period between the Bronze Age and Modern Age of comics. Comics were more serious, willing to explore darker adult themes and more social issues. Villains like The Suicide Squad could become headliners of their own books; The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen changed what comics could be about. Hell, Swamp Thing showed you could make the absolute weirdest shit, and people would love it.
The 90s would take this edge and make it edgy - everyone was covered in spikes, new heroes could only be anti-heroic, and the prevailing method of drama was stuffing women into fridges or having a once-silly supervillain become a serial killer, a drug addict or a rapist.
The 80s held that awkward blend of bright, garish costumes with serious subject matter in just the right way for a Suicide Squad game; you can have murder, mayhem, hijinks and political commentary all in one session.
And I don't want to hear any of this "modern comics are too political" bullshit either - Suicide Squad missions from the 80s included tackling domestic and foreign terrorism, race relations, US intervention in the Middle East and fighting Russian supers. Shit has been political since the very start, and politics
should play a role in your games.
Last edited September 9, 2023 10:21 pm
