Friday Night Videos: Supers Edition

Welcome back to Friday Night Videos! Supers Edition.

I have been thinking a lot about supers this last week or so. I have a big "deep dive" I want to do this summer with supers and of course the Summer movie season starts tonight with The Avengers.

This got me thinking about 2003-2005 (well that and a post at Age of Ravens that I will get too later) when I was working on a big Supers/Supernatural crossover.  Not Supernatural the show, but rather a world, or two worlds, that were "light" and "dark".  The dark world was my regular WitchCraft/Buffy/Ghosts of Albion game.  The light world was a world populated by Super Heroes.  Characters in one world had a counterpart in the other.

It is from this effort that I began working up a number of different versions of Willow and Tara and it gave birth to Justice.  Of course I had a soundtrack.

"Heroes" was not just the centerpiece of this time period, it became the name of the first adventure.  Honestly, there is very, very little about David Bowie's singing and song writing that doesn't inspire me.




Heroes always reminds me of the 1977 movie "Heroes" that starred Henry Winkler, Sally Field and Harrison Ford.  The movie was not about supers, but about a soldier from Vietnam and the loss of his dream.  I remember seeing this movie dozens of times.  But what always, always got me in the end was when the credits closed in on a broken Henry Winkler (he came to the reality that his friend was dead) and a crying Sally Field was "Carry on Wayward Son" by Kansas from their prog-rock classic Leftoverture.   I put this in my top 20 of all time favorite songs.   Like the movie I always felt that this song was what the characters and situations I were working on were about; Noble, but deeply flawed heroes.  The fact that it is use every year for Supernatural only cements it's credibility for my games.




What I wanted to say about my next song was "Fuck you P!nk is my jam!" but you all deserve much better and more than that.  P!nk is freaking fantastic.  I bought Missundaztood for my wife and I promptly left it in my car where I listened to it everyday.  "Just Like A Pill" is not about supers. But it did give me an idea on an old comic/cartoon trope, the drug-addiction episode.  Plus if I am going to mix supernaturals with supers then drugs seem like a no brainer.




What became something of a theme song to my later Buffy games, this also captured something I wanted to capture in my own games.  These characters, these supers are as removed from humanity as the monsters they fight.  I wanted to capture what is was to be human.
Rob Zombie may not have the answer, but in "More Human than Human" from White Zombie's Astro-Creep: 2000 he knows what question to ask.




It's a wicked world we live in. It's cruel and unforgiving. No one raps it better than The Transplants in "Diamonds and Guns".



If you need a theme song for an end of the world Armageddon event then you can do worse than Disturbed and their cover of Genesis' "Land of Confusion" from Ten Thousand Fists.  The video was animated by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, so it also has "street cred".   If I need to write an adventure about destroying the world I put Disturbed on first.




Mixing Supers and Supernaturals is the Reese's Peanut Buttercup of campaigns for me; mixing two different things together to get something that is better than either on their own. Or at least something new and exciting.
EXACTLY like "Bring the Noise" by Public Enemy and Anthrax.  Rap meets speed metal.  This gets me pumped.  Just like Chuck D says "these lines are dope".



In truth I could do an entire night of rock/rap crossovers and talk about how they influenced my horror writing.