Iron Age Design Journal #4: Iron Age Characters

Characters from the Iron Age have much in common with heroes from typical Mutants & Masterminds campaigns. They have access to the same powers, they’re of similar power levels, and they want to stop the bad guys. It’s the differences, however, that make an Iron Age character stand out. Powers typically have darker, deadlier, or more demonic effects. In addition, when an Iron Age hero stops the bad guys, they stay stopped.

Starting Power Levels
Iron Age comic books featured characters of many different levels of power, from “street-level” vigilantes with modern weaponry and years of combat experience to powerful demons and mutants tapping into forces beyond their ability to fully control.

Realistic Street-Level Characters
Using the word “realistic” to describe any super-powered characters is tricky, but this type of game pushes powers to the margins and concentrates on vigilantes with guns, gadgets, and hand-to-hand fighting skills. These campaigns focus on non-powered, often non-costumed (in the traditional sense), ex-military types who have gone through an experience that changed them psychologically, if not physically as well.

These characters benefit from years of combat experience that they now apply against gangs, the mob, terrorists, and other “mundane” villains threatening society. Unlike the two-fisted heroes of the pulp era, these characters are deeply flawed, with harsh, pragmatic worldviews that nearly make them anti-heroes.

While these characters may encounter psychics, mystics, or other super-powered foes, they rarely have those powers themselves, instead relying on their ability to outgun, outthink, and outfight their opponents. This can result in characters that closely resemble each other on paper, but such a campaign offers players the challenge of further defining their hero (or anti-hero) through specializing in an area of expertise and through roleplaying.

Campaigns featuring such characters start at PL 6 with 90 power points to spend. Some players and GMs may want to begin with more power points, but still maintain the “realistic” feel of this sort of game. If that’s the preference of your group, PL 8 may be a better choice for you, but everyone should be careful that the characters remain rooted in “the real world.”

The Agents of Freedom sourcebook is a useful additional resource for this type of campaign, which combines agent-level characters with an Iron Age ethos. The sourcebook provides considerable information on running campaigns with “agent” characters that have no powers apart from their training and equipment.

Cinematic Street-Level Characters
Cinematic games cover a wide range of character possibilities, from normal humans with an incredible ability to endure punishment to martial arts masters able to use their chi to amazing effect. At its upper range, it even includes characters on the verge of being “real” superheroes.

Characters in these games often appear to lack powers, but can nevertheless dish out and handle extreme amounts of damage. In addition, they have access to specialized equipment just beyond what’s available in the real world. Depending on the setting, these characters may have low-level or inconspicuous powers, or ones that make them just a little more powerful than a “normal” person has any right to be. Heroes may be costumed or not, depending on the game’s setting and the character’s background.

Given the looser restrictions on powers, it’s easier to differentiate the roles of the heroes. Like the characters in street-level games, thugs and agents are still a threat to cinematic characters, but not nearly as much of one. Campaigns with cinematic street-level characters start at PL 8 with 120 power points. It’s possible to start at a higher power level, but that may make the characters too strong to be threatened by the mooks they’d often face in a street-level game. For more capable characters, give the players more power points (from 125 to 150 or more), while keeping the power level at 8. This allows players to diversify their characters’ abilities while keeping them within the limits of a cinematic game.

Classic Iron Age Characters
This is the standard power level for Iron Age (and Mutants & Masterminds) characters. While it may seem like lower power levels are more appropriate for Iron Age games, such limits are best for games featuring skilled normals as player characters. The Iron Age was loaded with heroes with fantastic powers that could be threatened only by other superbeings, and that’s the norm for this book. Characters at this power level aren’t limited to being “mostly human”; players can create demons, cyborgs, time-travelers, and more. The differences between standard superheroes and Iron Age characters are in attitude and focus, not power level.

Classic Iron Age heroes may look completely mundane, but it’s just as likely they’re flaming-skulled demons or inhuman were-creatures. Importantly, as opposed to heroes from other ages, the Iron Age heroes’ powers are often regarded as curses, barely controlled or understood. Other characters, whose powers come from mundane sources, like training or specialized knowledge, have access to any powers available to standard M&M heroes, but the manner in which the character employs them differs.

The setting of a Mutants & Masterminds game informs many of the decisions players will make during character creation, but this is even more true in classic Iron Age games because the range of potential character types, powers, and backgrounds is so wide. A gadgeteer whose family was killed by the mob may be hard to fit into the same game as a mage tasked with hunting down supernatural evil and a man from the future trying to prevent World War III. It’s easy to make unique characters, but it means the GM must work with the players to ensure the characters will function as a group.

Classic Iron Age games are PL 10 with 150 starting power points.

Over-the-Top Iron Age Characters
The comics that inaugurated the Iron Age centered on two types of characters: those mostly human and those truly superhuman. They ask, “What does it mean to the rest of humanity when gods exist alongside us?” It’s appropriate, then, to use Iron Age for those players and GMs that want a game with similar characters and themes.

Characters in this range tend to be inhuman in some way, whether actually alien or just with a sense of “the other” about them. It’s important that these godlike beings feel separate from the rest of humanity. Their powers are beyond the scope of others in the same setting, at least in terms of pure offensive capability if not intelligence or cunning. Their only weakness, if it can be called such, is these beings want to be human, so they often hold their powers in check or ignore the effect they could have on the world if they applied themselves.

These super-powerful entities often work best as non-player characters, because their abilities overshadow those of the players’ characters. But a GM comfortable with a mix of power levels and a story that offers challenges to all involved could have a very memorable game, so this option is open. The important thing to remember in this type of campaign is to give everyone a chance to shine, not just the players of characters who could crack the Earth in half if they wished to.

In Realistic or Cinematic Street Level games, godlike beings could act as adversaries for less powerful heroes. Player characters unable to defeat the adversary head-on could, with some investigation and planning, figure out a way to negotiate with or neutralize the threat this sort of character poses to them and the world.

Over-the-top characters are also well suited for post-modern adventures where larger-than-life superhumans combine the powers and capabilities of classic superheroes with the style and often body-count of the Iron Age, for heroes punching minions’ heads clean off and smashing armadas of invading enemies in spectacular action-movie style.

Over-the-top characters start at PL 12 with 180 power points, but can go much higher.