‘League of Extraordinary Cartoon Characters’ Campaign Creation – Part 1

‘League of Extraordinary Cartoon Characters’ Campaign – System: Fate Accelerated by Evil Hat Productions

When a dangerous artefact is stolen by a shadowy creature, a mismatched group of heroes is summoned to re-form the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and defend mankind! (Featuring your favourite cartoon characters from the 80’s and 90s.)

Brainstorming and campaign creation

A few weeks after the conclusion of our Henchmen campaign, we sat down to plan our next adventure. Now that we had wrapped our heads around most of the Fate Accelerated rules, we decided to stick with the same system, but we wanted a change of setting. For my part, I had decided that I wanted our next game to feature ‘good guy’ heroes, to encourage my players to think beyond killing their enemies as the only solution to their problems. To that end, I suggested a Golden Age Superhero game, explaining that this game would feature heroes who were moderately more powerful than human beings, who were unflinchingly good and heroic, and who would work as something of a Justice League of superfolk. The idea was somewhat popular, except for a few players who preferred not to play ‘traditional’ superheroes.

As an alternative, a suggestion was thrown around to play a ‘magical portal’ type game, where players could travel through some device to visit many different worlds. This is a common sci-fi trope and is seen in TV shows such as Sliders and Stargate SG-1 but since I wanted to stick to the format of The Three Game Plot, I decided that it would be very difficult to run a world/dimension hopping game in just 3 weeks. Having to create a range of worlds for the players to explore sounded like too much work for a short campaign, so I voted against the idea.

Another option that I suggested was playing characters that were already established. I was very impressed with a ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – 1988’ podcast episode that I had listened to recently, which featured iconic heroes of the 80’s fighting against iconic villains. I suggested something similar to the players, but as with the original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories, we needed a timeframe in which to firmly root the player characters. Although the characters would be drawn from disparate fictional properties, they needed to exist in the same time period in order to be brought together to form the League. After some discussion we settled on ‘Childhood cartoons’ as the source for our characters, which for our group meant the characters would be from the 80’s and 90’s.

So it was agreed that our League of Extraordinary 80s/90s Cartoon Characters (abbreviated to ‘League’ from now on) would be assembled. Which characters would our players decide to be? Which character would you choose to play? Leave your answer in the comments, and come back to find out which characters were chosen in ‘League’ Campaign Creation – Part 2.