Review of a Game That Never Happened - Ghosts of Churchill

I've only ever done a tiny amount of superheroes roleplaying. Which is a little odd - on the face of it, something like the Avengers or the X-Men seems ideal for an RPG, what with the team dynamic. (It doesn't, however, make sense for these to exist concurrently in the same universe... but that's not an RPG issue.) However, the key issue with superhero seems to be one of scope. Because the range of powers that are possible is massive (indeed, limitless), the game must necessarily be very wide-ranging, which almost inherently means it's for campaign-play only... and very few people seem to like superheroes that much!

Anyway, about 18 months ago, I had this idea for a game, which became "The Ghosts of Churchill". The concept was that the game would take place in an alternate timeline in which the Nazis had won the Second not-quite-World War.

In the parallel timeline, rather than give his "fight them on the beaches" speech, Churchill had suffered a fatal heart attack. His successor had proceeded to sue for peace, with the net result that Germany had occupied the UK more or less without a fight. The US never entered the war, choosing instead to remain isolated. (I never did decide what happened on the Russian front.) What resistance to Nazi occupation was conducted by various cells of superheroes, covertly aided with funding and materiel from the US.

The adventure was to take place in an alternate 1960's, then, when that resistance had gradually been whittled down to a single superhero team, the Ghosts of Churchill. And, at the outset of the adventure they were making their way to the London docks to meet an agent from the US who was bringing some secret weapon to "change all our fates". The party were fated to arrive at the docks just in time to see their ally being arrested and driven away, and the chase was on!

Anyway, the game never happened.

The intention was that the PCs (being superheroes and all) would rescue their ally. His invention, it would turn out, was a device capable of opening a window 20 years into the past, allowing our heroes to step through and take action. Specifically, it would be revealed that Churchill had in fact been poisoned by his cabinet, out of fear that his speech would lead the UK to annihilation (better, they thought, that it be occupied and subjugated).

So, the PCs would have their opportunity to go through, prevent the assassination, and so 'fix' the timeline.

But...

Of course, that's all too simple. The key conceit of the game was that over the course of the session the various PCs would each learn their fate in the alternate reality - and that that fate wouldn't be pretty. One simply wouldn't exist, another (who prided himself on his morality) would be a monster without other monsters to fight, a third (who prided himself on his celebrity) would be a nobody, and so on...

And so comes the fundamental question: do you change the past, knowing that it will destroy you, or do you stick with things as-is and continue the good fight against impossible odds?

Of course, it might well not have worked. But I figured it would be interesting to at least try.

(Alas, the game just didn't attract sufficient interest. And it seems that the concept just didn't grab the attention - there's a little interest in superhero roleplay around these parts, but really not much... and not enough. So I'm cancelling this game rather than rescheduling (which is why I'm posting here!). This also means I'm removing "Mutants & Masterminds" from my list of games to run, as if there's no great interest in a one-shot then I can't see there being interest in a full campaign. Which is fine - I have three (maybe four) other games that I am keep to run in campaign mode, and that I'm confident of getting players for, and that really should be enough.)