"New York City,
Center of the Universe.
Times are shitty,
But I'm pretty sure they can't get worse."
'Superheroes.' Vigilantes and mutants and alien gods, jumping across rooftops and cracking skulls in the name of the greater good. Sure, it was dangerous, but it was all in good fun, right? They were our friendly neighborhood watchmen, pulling cats out of trees and keeping the bad guys in check. You might get some broken windows, maybe lose a building here or there, but unless it was a full-blown alien invasion or cosmic demigod or something along those lines, your Iron Men and Thors and Spideys always made sure nobody really got hurt. That's how we saw it-- cops and robbers on a bigger scale. It was all just a game to us.
Until last year, anyway.
It looked like your average showdown between Spider-Man and his arch-rival, the Green Goblin, on the George Washington Bridge. People were recording it on their phones, streaming it on YouTube and sharing the fight on Facebook. Millions watched and reacted when the Goblin was unmasked and revealed to be OsCorp CEO Norman Osborn. Social media lit up as a crowd-favorite hero grabbed his nemesis and impaled them both upon the Goblin's glider. The whole world saw the age of the harmless, fun-and-games heroes come to an end with the murder of an innocent 19-year-old girl named Gwen Stacy.
People had died in the action before, but never that deliberately, never in front of so many eyes and cameras. The shock of it all turned the City against the costumed heroes, and the Feds began to crack down.
SHIELD stepped up its surveillance, and now you can't walk a block without hearing one of their drones buzzing overhead. After anti-cape protests broke out into full-blown riots in front of the Avengers Mansion, the team closed up shop and moved to a secluded compound far away from the city. Reed Richards and his team have started finding more and more excuses to be on other planets, other dimensions, anywhere but the often-vandalized Baxter Building. Charles Xavier's kids can't set foot in the Big Apple without setting off a fight, either with SHIELD operatives or just your average disaffected New Yorkers. No one even knows what happened to Spider-Man-- given how badly he was injured that night on the Bridge, most people assume he died later that night, but others claim he's still out there. Either way, he hasn't been seen in over a year.
Even if the major players are gone for one reason or another, though, that doesn't mean there's nobody left in the game. Spider-Man had been New York's most active defender, and without him, other men and women have started braving the SHIELD crackdown to fill the void he left. Norman Osborn had left a major power vacuum behind-- both in the corporate world and the criminal underworld-- and there's no shortage of stuffed-suits and crime bosses looking to grab their share of the Goblin's empire. Neighborhoods are being carved up into territories, Hell's Kitchen and Harlem and Soho being claimed as the domain of one hero or villain or another, like the knights of feudal Europe.
And New Yorkers, like the serfs and peasants of olden times, are feeling more and more powerless, keeping our heads down and quietly wondering when the rules stopped applying to everyone. A knight might protect you and your family, but they might also chop your head off if they're in a bad mood. No one ever had to worry about Captain America doing something like that, but who can say the same about the Punisher, or the Ghost Rider, or any of the so-called 'Defenders' now?
Things are dangerous now, sure. Everything's up in the air. The city feels like a pressure cooker, ready to blow. Walking around the city, it doesn't take long before you get the feeling that we're all holding our breaths, waiting for the spark that sets it all off. When that happens, if these new capes really are the new knights of New York, it won't be long before we see if they're worthy of it.
-Ned Leeds, Daily Bugle
Center of the Universe.
Times are shitty,
But I'm pretty sure they can't get worse."
'Superheroes.' Vigilantes and mutants and alien gods, jumping across rooftops and cracking skulls in the name of the greater good. Sure, it was dangerous, but it was all in good fun, right? They were our friendly neighborhood watchmen, pulling cats out of trees and keeping the bad guys in check. You might get some broken windows, maybe lose a building here or there, but unless it was a full-blown alien invasion or cosmic demigod or something along those lines, your Iron Men and Thors and Spideys always made sure nobody really got hurt. That's how we saw it-- cops and robbers on a bigger scale. It was all just a game to us.
Until last year, anyway.
It looked like your average showdown between Spider-Man and his arch-rival, the Green Goblin, on the George Washington Bridge. People were recording it on their phones, streaming it on YouTube and sharing the fight on Facebook. Millions watched and reacted when the Goblin was unmasked and revealed to be OsCorp CEO Norman Osborn. Social media lit up as a crowd-favorite hero grabbed his nemesis and impaled them both upon the Goblin's glider. The whole world saw the age of the harmless, fun-and-games heroes come to an end with the murder of an innocent 19-year-old girl named Gwen Stacy.
People had died in the action before, but never that deliberately, never in front of so many eyes and cameras. The shock of it all turned the City against the costumed heroes, and the Feds began to crack down.
SHIELD stepped up its surveillance, and now you can't walk a block without hearing one of their drones buzzing overhead. After anti-cape protests broke out into full-blown riots in front of the Avengers Mansion, the team closed up shop and moved to a secluded compound far away from the city. Reed Richards and his team have started finding more and more excuses to be on other planets, other dimensions, anywhere but the often-vandalized Baxter Building. Charles Xavier's kids can't set foot in the Big Apple without setting off a fight, either with SHIELD operatives or just your average disaffected New Yorkers. No one even knows what happened to Spider-Man-- given how badly he was injured that night on the Bridge, most people assume he died later that night, but others claim he's still out there. Either way, he hasn't been seen in over a year.
Even if the major players are gone for one reason or another, though, that doesn't mean there's nobody left in the game. Spider-Man had been New York's most active defender, and without him, other men and women have started braving the SHIELD crackdown to fill the void he left. Norman Osborn had left a major power vacuum behind-- both in the corporate world and the criminal underworld-- and there's no shortage of stuffed-suits and crime bosses looking to grab their share of the Goblin's empire. Neighborhoods are being carved up into territories, Hell's Kitchen and Harlem and Soho being claimed as the domain of one hero or villain or another, like the knights of feudal Europe.
And New Yorkers, like the serfs and peasants of olden times, are feeling more and more powerless, keeping our heads down and quietly wondering when the rules stopped applying to everyone. A knight might protect you and your family, but they might also chop your head off if they're in a bad mood. No one ever had to worry about Captain America doing something like that, but who can say the same about the Punisher, or the Ghost Rider, or any of the so-called 'Defenders' now?
Things are dangerous now, sure. Everything's up in the air. The city feels like a pressure cooker, ready to blow. Walking around the city, it doesn't take long before you get the feeling that we're all holding our breaths, waiting for the spark that sets it all off. When that happens, if these new capes really are the new knights of New York, it won't be long before we see if they're worthy of it.
-Ned Leeds, Daily Bugle
Premise:
Marvel: Knights of New York is a city-scale roleplaying game, centered around various heroes and villains from the Marvel Universe. Taking cues from Marvel's Netflix series, the Marvel MAX line of comics, and the titular Marvel Knights imprint, this game is meant to have a more mature and/or dramatic tone and an emphasis on 'street-level' action, with the stories confined to the boroughs of New York City.
Legendary video game designer Phil Spector once said that his dream game would be a "city-block simulator," where the play-area is limited to a single city block, but everything within said block is fully realized and interactive. With that design ethos in mind, the reason behind keeping everything within the Big Apple is to encourage players to flesh out the city as much as possible. Whereas in larger-scale superhero games where each player may get their own corner of the universe to play with by themselves and solo-roleplay forever if they want, putting everyone in the same place will encourage (if not outright force) players to interact with each other, to keep up with what's going on in everyone else's stories and react accordingly. What one person does with Daredevil, for instance, might immediately affect what another person does with Moon Knight, whereas otherwise the two might never have a reason to acknowledge each other's existence.
While my hope is that Knights can become a long-term ongoing game, the current plan is to run it short-term as a single 'season,' with everyone's individual story arcs tying in one way or another to a single overarching plot-- in this case, the aftermath of the George Washington Bridge incident and the disappearance/presumed death of Spider-Man. If the game is a success, then upon completion of this central arc, a new one will be proposed and voted on by the players to start the next 'season.'
Information:
Discord Server (Coming Soon)
Gamemaster: @AndyC
Expected Release Date: November 27th
Game Admission: Public; applications will be accepted or declined based on quality
Posting Guidelines: Standard Guild rules apply; Advanced Section standards are expected. Activity can be adjustable and negotiable, but barring real-world difficulties, one post per week is the general minimum expectation.
"Canonical" Standards: While Knights of New York is not based in any particular incarnation of the Marvel Universe, it is expected that players draw influence from existing incarnations. One may mix-and-match between 616 Marvel, Ultimate Marvel, Marvel MAX, the MCU, the various animated series, etc., but radically different reinterpretations or completely original characters are not permitted.
Explicit Content: While this is meant to be a darker game dealing with more mature material than the MCU, it is not an Adult/18+ game. Sex, violence, drug use, etc. are not taboo in this game, but blatantly over-the-top or 'pornographic' displays of such will not be permitted. Assume somewhere between a "Hard PG-13/Soft R" rating, or the extent on what you could get away with on a Netflix show. When in doubt, it's better to be implicit rather than explicit.
Any and all feedback is welcome.
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