STUFF HAPPENS - RANDOM ENCOUNTERS

Comics are full of deep plots, interweaving plots, metaplots and ongoing stories but there are also a massive number of seemingly random, short-term, or even one-off encounters that occur in nearly every title. While this tends to be the province of solo heroes like Spider Man or the Incredible Hulk, just about every hero and team of heroes has had encounters with enemies outside their usual cast of characters. 

To a great degree, these sorts of randomly encountered characters serve to allow comics creators to experiment with new ideas play around, and have fun. They are often less defined, sometimes less well thought out and sometimes very silly. Quite often these character are introduced with the intention of having them become recurring characters should they prove popular enough but in many cases, they come, go and are never heard of again, that is until another creator decides they want a crack at the character.

This is one of the greatest benefits of these characters for GMs. GMs are notoriously creative, constantly coming up wth new NPCs and characters. With many games it can be tricky to find a believable, useful place for all this creativity but superheroes games have it written int othe very fabric of the genre. Leaning into this will only serve to make your games feel more like the comics they are based on. If you have an idea, jot it down, scribble together some quick stats and file it away in you folder of random encounters to use when you and/or your players need a break. That woodchuck-themed villain may only show up for one ill-fated fight with your players' heroes but he will be remembered. 

Random encounters need not stay random though. As I have pointed out in several previous posts, these characters are right for creating questions, rectonning, seeeding. A seemingly random hero may develop over time, returning as a lost relative, an alternate self, connected to a character's origins. Random encounters can spin off into new player characters even much in the same way that Peter Parker's styslistc costume change in Secret Wars became the pehenomenon that is Venom and then all the symbiote maness that came out of that. the key is that they never have to though, allowing  GM to create and use them freely. 

MAKE $&!# UP - WORLDBUILDING THE WAY THE COMICS GUYS DID

 

Alien invasions often come out of nowhere in comics, needing little to no up-front explanation.

Comic book universes do not com into existence full cloth. Rather they are the result of years, sometimes decade and pushing a century of consecutive layering of ideas and design. Much of this design work was done with a lot of intention and thought but, because comics have evolved overtime both in terms of art, writing, and even editorial attention, they have developed in a very piecemeal often haphazard and sometimes outright random manner. 

For every planned and tightly scripted story arc or metaplot there are countless clumsy insertions, random encounters and blatent market inclusions into any univers's long history. Doing so is often a necessity to fill the pages of books and to keep things moving. Deadlines must be met, delays happen, creative teams change and the ever-pressing need to try to develop new characters and concepts keeps comic under an endless push. What results are sometimes seemingly random or ill-thought events in comics, characters out of nowhere and a seemingly endless parade of new places, worlds, and realms. 

This is all great for superhero TTRPGs. 

Once again, the imperfect nature of superhero comics serves GMs and players of games set in those unvierses perfectly. Because the source material is built off these crazy developments, so to can your games. You can spend lots of time developing metaplots and story arcs, digging deep into the depths of characters and NPCs and their backstories but you are also perfectly fine not doing so. You can toil away trying to build you LEGO plot or, you can just make stuff up. More than likely nobody will know andif they do, it is unlikely that anyone who knows the genre will even care.

A follower said, in a comment...

"...The hero realm has always been crazy diverse where you could pivot a storyline from ultra serious and workd saving to beer and pretzel quirky and humorous. One day your ultra powerful and then suddenly your in a dimension where you feel 6 inches tall and barely qualify as a mouse. How you get in or out is 3 parts super simple and 2 parts complex. A day in the life of your character could involve talking to the guy at the deli counter, a character straight out of Mother Goose and an intergalactic superbeing all in the same hour and the reason could simply be Tuesday. Few other game realms offer as many possibilities without massive justification."

This comment really encapsulates what I am talking about here. Your tabletop game could easily be this random. Unless your characters are caught up in a serious, no wiggle room sort of plot, you could easily have the PCs go about their daily business, have a random encounter with a villain and then suddenly fnd themselves introduced to a previously unknown alien race or dimension invading the Earth for "reasons". 

The key is to remember that, as the GM for your superhero setting, you are filling the roll of most of the bullpen. You are artist (imagination-wise), writer, editor. your players also fill some of those roles but mostly just in the writing and aritstry behind their charcters. All you have to do is to have an idea, write the minimal stuff you need for it and then just wait to spring it on the players. If you are playing in an established universe and have lots of prewritten stuff it becomes even easier. 

Bat Mite and Mr. Mxyzptlk were agents of chaos and seemed to exist in comics purely as a way to introduce whatever craziness writers wanted.

You needn't look far to find comic books using the most random reasons to throw characters together into situations. It is often the case that super battles spill over on top of the heroes as they are out and about. An entire organization may randomly and suddenly appear, hunting the PCs for some half-baked reasoning. Maybe somebody reported one of the heroes doing something illegal (especially good for heroes with low popularity). 

This is particularly perfect if game night comes around and you don't have time to prep anything amazing. Pull out a random character, alien race, deminsenional invader, or organization  and just throw them at the players. You can even do this with other heroes. Comic books are full of heroes who should have no real business fighting, actually fighting each other. It takes very little work to come up with a comics-appropriate reason to do so.

The last thing to remember is that, when it comes to the random occurences and encounters that you throw into your games, is that you don't hve to explain it and it doesn't have to make sense. You can give reasons and explanations but not doing so leaves things wide open for questions and answers (something I'll discuss another time) which can later be exploited or explained.