Nighthawks

I have a bit of a history with Super Hero themed Savage Worlds campaigns.  After running a quick and dirty Necessary Evil-based scenario a number of years back, I became enchanted with the idea of trying to create a Supers setting using Savage Worlds mechanics that would allow players to climb the power scale all the way up to, like, galactic level powers.  Ultimately that quest failed and I found myself paring my aspirations back to something that was purely street-level: hence Nighthawks was born.  Truth be told, I prefer street-level Super Heroes to the Super Team Demigod variety anyway.

Incidentally, I will be brushing off my old “High Powered Supes” campaign here in a few weeks and posting it.  It’s not totally done, but I want to at least put it out there as a warning to others, Ozymandias-style.

“Nighthawks” is the fanciful name I came up with for “costumed vigilante”.  In my Gothamesque alternate reality of King City, all sorts of costumed loons run around either committing crimes or preventing them (or perhaps mixing in a bit of both).  This was a pretty straightforward endeavor for me and I recall finishing this one quickly over the course of a couple of weekends.  The featured mechanic here is the “Super Edge”, a new class of Edge that defines a “Super Power” that a character has above and beyond the usual sorts of Edges you can accumulate in Savage Worlds.  I put “Super Power” in quotes because the Super Edges in Nighthawks are deliberately urbane.  Even the more out-there stuff, like mind reading and illusions, are dialed back to be more subtle than flashy, the sort of stuff that even if you saw it you wouldn’t be sure it wasn’t just some elaborate, albeit explainable, trick.  In a sense, the Super Edges are like classes that define a character’s role: Scrappers & Bricks fight, Masterminds manipulate flunkies, and Gadgeteers can whip something up on the spot for just about any occasion.

I’m generally really happy with the result.  I find myself flipping through this one from time to time because I like the little Rogue’s Gallery of characters that I came up with and could see myself returning to this setting at some point.