I thought I was going to struggle with todays theme. But it was a lot easier than I had anticipated. Especially after yesterdays toughie.

Today’s belated #RPGaDAY2020 theme is…

I thought what can I write about vision? It’s going to be boring writing about dark vision etc in D&D. Then it clicked this is not just D&D. It can be any RPG.

I then thought about Vision the character from the Marvel comics.

I’ve been a Marvel fan since I could read. In fact the UK Marvel comics are the earliest memories I have of reading. The reprints I read had stories from Spider-man, Hulk and Fantastic Four in them. I loved them. I don’t think it would be inaccurate to say Stan Lee and his creations gave me a love of reading, and helped me to improve my reading skills at a young age.

I think I am right in saying that there is currently no official RPG out for the Marvel Universe. So if I wanted to set a campaign in that universe and have Vision appear as an NPC I would have to home brew it using one of the many generic systems out there, such as FATE, WOIN, Genesys, etc.

Back in the 80’s, of which I was a teenager for. TSR produced a Marvel Superheroes RPG. Naturally I had a copy of the base set for it. And you would be right in guessing that I never got to play it.

However in the Avengers Assembled module there were amongst others, stats for Vision.

This is a useful jumping off point, especially the powers for creating Vision as an NPC in a modern system.

My early gut feeling is that I’d try and create Vision as a Nemesis adversary in the Genesys RPG system using the expanded adversary creation rules in the Expanded Players Guide. These make creating an adversary a fairly quick process.

Whilst the Flying and Ghostly special abilities map nicely across to the Flight and Phasing powers (with maybe minor tweaks/restrictions to make them act like the powers they are being mapped to). The other powers do not.

The Solar Beams power I’m tempted to treat like an activated Arcane Bolt Rune from the Realms of Terrinoth source book. So it would be basically a weapon/equipment. However I would like to put a restriction on it’s use. After all this drains his energy. I’m thinking that when vision uses his Solar Beams he incurs some strain.

I’m not sure what Talents I’d give Vision. My current thinking would be Density Control and Attack would be new talents. Ideally there might be something close to how they work already. If not then they would have to be created from scratch. But like the Solar Beam their use would have a strain cost as well.

I think Power Source would be a passive talent that heals strain. I like the idea of using strain to track Visions power. It acts just like we need it to for the power side of things.

Finally I would use the Super Characteristics rule from the Superheroes Tone section of the Core Rulebook. This allows for the choosing of two characteristics that become super powers. I’m not sure how this would effect the Adversary Power Levels, if at all.

The above have been some early thoughts for how I would create a Vision NPC for a Marvel Superheroes based campaign. What system would you use to run such a campaign and why?