I’ve been trying to think of good ways to represent natural and unnatural disasters in Marvel, things that aren’t that well covered in the main book. The obvious solution is to write them up the same way as one does a large-scale threat. The difference being that this is not an entity (or a mob) being described but, rather a dangerous event or sprawling disaster that needs to be dealt with.
Disasters are statted up as though they were large scale threats, using Doom Pool calculations as a basis for working out how powerful they are. They can have dice removed from their pool by getting an effect higher than their value and can also be defeated by accumulating enough stress against the disaster (event stress) to ‘kill’ it by giving it stress and trauma. Stress has no effect on the power of the disaster and cannot be tapped as a resource, trauma can.
The disaster is mitigated when it is ‘killed’. Its pool cannot be reduced to less than one dice.
One last factor with a disaster is a Doom Clock. This represents how much time (abstractly) that the heroes have to deal with the disaster. The disaster ‘completes’ when it gets enough Doom Clock and that’s done by upgrading dice from the Doom Pool past d12. They fail if they don’t defeat it before the Doom Clock ticks up.
Disaster Scale
Local 2d
Regional 3d
National 4d
International 5d
Global 6d
Standard xd6
High Stakes xd8
Catastrophic xd10
Worldbreaking xd12
Example 1: Flight 32
High Stakes Disaster – Local Scale
Dice 2d8
Distinctions:
Free Fall
Frantic Passengers
Shaking to Pieces
Disaster Traits:
Dizzying d8
Little Time d8
Doom Clock: OO
Example 2: San Andreas Megaquake
Catastrophic Disaster – National Scale
Dice 4d10
Distinctions:
Ground-Shaking
It’s Just too Big
No Communications
Disaster Traits:
Shattered Ruins d10
Secondary Fires d8
Doom Clock: OOOO
I’ll be running it on Sunday nights from around 8pm. The great thing about the superhero genre for this is that anyone can just ‘drop in’ and it makes sense for superhero team ups. The MH system is good because it allows balance between the likes of, say, Batman and Superman so that nobody feels useless and the Doom Pool somewhat automatically balances the difficulty for the size of the group and how many dice they throw at you.
Postmortem Studios 