Design Drabbles: Your Own Personal Batman

2026-04-19T17:37:26Z

Actually nvm this feels like a perfect place for ttrpg design thoughts that are too long to post on masto.

Here goes: Designing Superhero TTRPGs is hard.

It’s not entirely their fault, it’s just that they’re forever the second-best at what they do. Cut any tabletop game of significant depth and complexity focused around a party of characters and their distinctive combat abilities, and a supers game bleeds.

The distinctive innate ‘heroic abilities’ of a D&D 5e class makes every level 1 character a street level superhero, but it goes deeper and permeates the more genre-focused indie sphere of the tabletop landscape.

Do you want to play as the brooding investigator solving mysteries? You’ve got Gumshoe and Call of Cthulhu and Brindlewood Bay. Do you want to play a power and responsibility kind of Marvel hero in the Daredevil or Spider-Man mold (or, like, a good Batman story) stalking the rooftops, balancing their public and private lives and forever at the risk of losing themselves and becoming just as bad as the monsters they fight? Vampire: The Masquerade will never admit it, but that’s your game. Do you want to play in a bitter AU story where you can explore different sides of beloved characters? There’s nothing stopping you from putting Wolverine in Apocalypse World and calling it a day.

This leaves the honest-to-god superhero games about doing daring superheroics in a difficult spot, because they need to focus on what makes superhero comics innately their own: a sort of four-colour action that has only ever existed in the minds of comic book fans, flipping through old issues without context or consequence, of bright colors and faded pages and out of context panels posted on social media or forums to try and prove that, yes, Squirrel Girl beat up Thanos one time or whatever.

Superhero comics have built up their own visual and narrative language, but ultimately: they’re at their best when they're drawing from other mediums. So what you kind of have to focus on is emulating the specific melodrama and character relations, I think. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying got it; a Cortex-flavored system evoking the Bendis era of Superheroes-Talking-In-Kitchens that existed long enough to adapt Civil War, the biggest and action-figure-smashiest of Mark Millar’s sordid big-two career, but it was killed before its time and only focuses on that specifically 2008 era so hard that its a difficult sell now if you weren't there and don't particularly want to play, like, Phyla-Vell as written by Abnett/Lanning when they still spoke to each other.

Or. Like. Bucky-Cap. God, remember Bucky-Cap?

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book draft final (1).odt

2026-04-19T17:15:39Z

idk what to post here, so here's a lil excerpt from the pop history book i've been working on for a lil bit Never Did Want To Live Forever: Rock Stars, Robots, and the Fall of Sunbow Entertainment that feels hilarious given that Hasbro is trying to do another ill-fated attempt at sucking the remaining life out of their nostalgia brands:

The television business wasn’t dying in 1998, but it was changing.

Children’s television, long held as largely disposable content and keenly aware of the growing power of moral censors within the United States, felt this sea change more acutely than most. Stricter implementation of the 1990 Children’s Television Act introduced in 1996 following widespread support for the Parents Television Council in congress, alongside the increasing cost of outsourcing and broader cultural changes both within and outside the United States, effectively led to the protracted death of the 1980s ‘Saturday Morning’ Cartoon on network television, ensuring that cartoon programming would primarily be the purview of the cable networks and afternoon blocks, and the era of the ‘thirty minute toy commercial’ gave way to an animation landscape that had to convince viewers of their merits as educational or dramatic programming more than their casts’ marketability as toys.

With the benefit of hindsight, we (the enlightened people of the future) know that these shifts in regulations led to some of the most broadly acclaimed animation work in decades, as the younger talent fostered within the Toy Commercial Era looked to break from its worst conventions and, as a result, produce medium-defining work like Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series. A chance gift from Polly Platt to James L. Brooks led to The Simpsons in 1989, and the subsequent wave of Bartsploitation opened the door for a thriving audience for adult animation on cable and terrestrial television through the nineties to… basically the present day. Domestic productions from studios like Toei following their withdrawal from outsourcing work hit American television, leading to the sustained success of Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon and kickstarting a wave of interest in Japanese animation as a whole.

But to the studios that thrived during the Toy Commercial Era, a changing medium looked like an existential threat to their business model. Many of the animation companies who cut their teeth in the 1960s, weathered the storm of the 1970s, before booming again during the loosening of restrictions on advertising to children during the Reagan administration, found themselves unwilling or financially unable to go through this boom-and-bust cycle for a third time once Bush Sr., and later Clinton, turned their attention towards ‘cleaning up’ the content presented to children on television. Filmation, who cut their teeth on DC and Archie adaptations in the sixties before sticking around long enough to hit paydirt producing She-Ra and Masters of the Universe for Mattel, precipitated the sea change the nineties would bring to animation by torching the studio and running in 1989, promptly selling the film library to L’Oreal and shuttering the company. Hanna-Barbera, having wound down their domestic animation production in favor of outsourcing to smaller international studios as a means of naked union-busting and aspiring to replicate the cross-platform success that Disney had achieved with multiple theme parks, sold to Turner in 1991.

Sunbow Entertainment was surviving, but just barely.

Arguably the biggest beneficiary of the ‘thirty minute toy commercial’ era, Sunbow Entertainment had been established by the advertising firm Griffin Bacal to commission and distribute cartoons as an extension of their already extant television advertising business. Sunbow relied on a partnership with Marvel Productions, which ended with the cancellation of Transformers, GI Joe, My Little Pony and Jem between 1987-1988 and the absorption of Marvel into New World Entertainment who, having the resources to commission animation studios in-house, no longer required Hasbro or Sunbow to co-produce syndicated cartoons.

By then, the writing was on the wall for all of the Hasbro/Sunbow toy lines. Inhumanoids and other Sunbow non-starters, like Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines and Visionaries and Robotix, were long-dead by the time Alan Hassenfield took over the company following his brother Stephen’s death from AIDS in 1989. The other Hasbro/Sunbow properties were either naturally winding down after their moment of meeting the cultural zeitgeist was fading or in positions where radical reinvention of the toyline was required for the brand to survive, and the lack of intervention or innovation from the notoriously risk-averse and acquisition-focused Alan Hassenfield led to a stagnation and decline in Hasbro’s overall toy sales from 1990-1995, resulting in an increased reliance on movie product tie-ins to keep the company afloat.

Transformers had been built on toys produced as an offshoot as Microman and designed to evoke the futurism of the seventies, selected and translated to evoke the aspirational consumption and Star Wars-era military interventionism of the eighties, creating an increasingly disparate mishmash of different toy lines forced into a cohesive vision of ‘good guy robots fighting bad guy robots’ that would limp through a couple of years of ‘Pretenders’ and ‘Micromasters’ and a cobbled-together CGI-led relaunch as ‘Generation 2’ before returning as the more cohesive Beast Wars in 1996, abandoning toys that transformed into aspirational objects and military hardware in favor of the more evergreen premise of robots that transformed into animals.

My Little Pony… I mean, fuck, you’ve been on the internet at some point during the last fifteen years. You know what happened to My Little Pony.

Hasbro’s other franchises were less successful in surviving the new decade. GI Joe evoked a kind of A-Team, Sylvester Stallone vision of American militarism that was about to become painfully dated when Die Hard redefined what an action hero would look like for the next decade and the fall of the Soviet Union codified that the nineties would bring a murkier geopolitics than the Red Lasers vs. Blue Lasers simplicity of the Star Wars era. It survived as a brand through a partnership with Street Fighter, its ideological successor, before ultimately undergoing a disastrously edgy nineties relaunch as GI Joe Extreme in 1994.

Jem was a series steeped in fascination with the music video era of MTV, always fighting from behind as the insurgent brand in a doll market controlled by Barbie, in which the market leaders could always just put a plastic guitar in Barbie’s hands, call it ‘Barbie and the Rockers’, and beat their opponents to market. A devotion to replicating the cutting edge of fashion in the characters’ outfits (seriously, there are entire accounts dedicated to showing the exact Yves St Laurent collection that Roxy is wearing episode to episode and it’s awesome) made the show visually distinct and immediately appealing compared to the retro-kitsch fashion sensibilities of other doll lines but tethered the show to a fashion style that became instantly dated by the time episodes made it to air. But lagging sales of the dolls, apocryphally attributed to the ‘bad girl dolls’ of The Misfits being seen by parents as ‘too scary,’ and concerns over the continuing viability of the Music Video premise led to the cancellation of future dolls in February 1987, before the finale of the first season had aired.

A surge of interest surrounding Jem dolls after the second season hit television led to the revival of doll production in July of 1987 in the hopes that the introduction of a third band, The Stingers, could revive interest in the toys. Despite a ten episode third season of the show commissioned for the sole purpose of promoting The Stingers dolls and hitting the 65-episode mark to ensure continued syndication, their attempts to revitalize the toyline failed to win back any of the toy retailers who were already struggling to sell their older Jem stock, and The Stingers (alongside the other planned 1988 dolls) went unreleased. An attempted re-brand casting Jem as a Hollywood actress rather than a musician failed to drum up internal support, the dolls were canceled, and the molds repurposed for Hasbro’s recently-acquired Maxie line of dolls. With the death of Stephen Hassenfield, who prioritized the ‘beating Mattel at their own game’ approach of competition between the companies that led to the greenlighting of Jem and the cold war between Mattel and Hasbro over their respective doll brands, and the death of Jem co-creator Bill D. Sanders in 1990, it's difficult to imagine that Jem ever held much of a future within the Hasbro of the early 90s.

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kera @ 2026-04-19T17:58:00

2026-04-19T16:58:26Z

EMAIL CONFIRMED

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