My friend Wally is a huge Super Sentai fan, and he’s always been the one stuck DMing tabletop games. He really wants to be a player for once, and we were both having fun theorizing on a Super Sentai-themed campaign, with players picking what kind of sentai fighters or kaiju they might want to play, and engage in some good fun tokusatsu adventure. In short, I am going to run this game for him and a group of players.
My question is: I’d like to pick one or two series to really act as the source material for this campaign. Something fun and weird, that I can stick to as a core concept. Any suggestions?
Here's series I've seen that I can maybe draw from.
The first Power Rangers series and the O.G. Power Rangers Movie
Japanese Spider-Man
Zone Fighter
SSSS Gridman and bits of the original.
CW’s Arrow
Love After World Domination
Random bits and pieces of stuff like Kamen Rider, Ultraman.
If Godzilla Singular Point and The Green Slime counts than those too.
As far as ideas:
Some ideas I have currently.
Off-duty segments either at some kind of base or a high school, a la Hill Valley. Maybe something like Magiranger’s Hogwarts-ass “school” or Turbo’s garage?
Unique melee weapons in the style of the Power Rangers. The team can combine to shoot a laser.
Rita Repulsa, and probably the Moon, or something similarly outlandish.
Putties and similar disposable enemies.
Motocycles
Mysterious masked allies / villains. Maybe some insane Redman-type kaiju serial killer that is either friend or foe based on how the party interacts with him.
Battles in a rock quarry.
Old Dr. Light/Zordon-type mentor.
Kaiju allies and enemies. “Kaiju culture” in the spirit of SSSS Gridman.
Yelling out attacks and stuff like “BEST MATCH!!” all the time.
One important note: The ultimate goal is to delight this massive tokusatsu dork and give him a space to play in this space.
Do I need to add a page of rules to my super robot RPG to feature the part of the episode before they get into the robot? It’d probably work for that.
I mean, I don’t actually know if I actually think that game is good I just felt a page of new rules for it pop into my brain when I thought about it for a second.
I always wanted to run a Mekton Z campaign in this style (because surprise surprise, I had/still have no reference point for giant mech anime). And I probably still have an old notebook where I was using the mech creation rules to make a couple monsters. I never figured out how to make playing a combining robot compelling for a group of players though.
I’m not much of a table top player but an involved roleplay idea is to have a pocket player make a character that is a recurring rival but whenever the decide to join the hero side reveal the player and play the rest of the campaign out as normal. A good heel turned face moment is some of the best sentai beats.
This a great idea, and definitely a pretty easy one to implement. This will also be with a group that will vary from week to week, so this’ll give people some pregens to jump into.
i thought i’d heard of every american toku show but somehow i never heard of this weird lego show from the creator of alex mack which is apparently the last fox kids show. the kids name is Nick Bluetooth
I def remember watching that as it was airing. I remember playing some online flash game where you played an kid safe version of a CRPG where you just walk around and talk and run skill checks. Your stats were determined by the limbs you had but you could grind. There was a player lobby like area where other players characters hanged out and you could challenge the characters at some kind of game but I remember gaming it where I won against a players character and took one of their legs that had crazy high numbers and I just breezed through the early sections.
The main hook of the show was it being some crazy space world where anyone could swamp arms, legs, heds etc. but the Main Character’s gimmick was he didn’t have to swap. He could just megaman it and manifest any limb he wanted without swapping so long as he saw it or knows of it. Don’t remember how it ended but I remember it going fast after 5 or so episodes.
the opening of Shin Ultraman is a modern remake of Ultra Q scenes, more directly tying them into an Ultraman canon all the way down to Gomess reusing the Shin Godzilla 3d model like the original used the old Godzilla suit. Anno is ever the extraordinary fanficsman
interested in What To Do With The Dead Kaiju/Giant Monster Cleanup which seems to be about the biological hazard of the unreleased gases in a monster corpse
i mean there were some in the genre before shin godzilla but maybe shin godzilla is kicking off a new wave of giant monster bureaucracy flicks
God the idea of an Ultraman canon gets so confused really early in the show. Ultraseven is supposed to be a completely separate universe from Ultraman, but gets reconned into being the same universe later, for example.
Seven himself is a very different character than Ultraman. Whereas Ultraman and the later versions all are sorta symbiotes, where the Ultra beings use the humans as a host, and so the humans can transform into them when needed, Seven is…not that at all. Seven is the main character, and he transforms himself into Dan Moroboshi to blend in with the humans. The first episode is hilarious for this because he is NOT GOOD at that, and just acts very strangely around the Terran Defense Force Ultra Guard (this series’ SSSP) people he meets. When asked for his name, he says “Oh, I’ll go with Dan Moroboshi” which of course nobody questions but is deeply hilarious. He helps them out, so they just make him a TDF UG right away because why not. This also means he can totally just talk when he is in full Ultraseven form, which is a big change from Ultraman’s grunts and SHUWAHT! when he jumped (my kid loves making that sound).
Seven himself has some weird powers, like he can be normal human size for things, which Ultraman did not do. His monsters have been weird as well, often not being Kaiju at all. He has no color timer either. This size stuff seems mostly left out when he comes up in later shows, but it’s weird to see it here.
Also his transformation sequence is so good:
Add onto this that there was a relatively recent Ultraseven series that pretended that no other Ultraman stuff existed, and it’s all complicated. This also makes the Ultraman manga/Netflix anime make sorta sense, as it also pretends nothing other than original Ultraman existed, but then constantly makes references to the other shows in its characters (for instance, the guy in the Ultraman ver. 7 suit is…Dan Moroboshi, and they never explain where he gets his powers from (because gonna bet he is just an alien)). This seems to be a common move in the whol franchise because trying to wrestle with 50 years of canon that was so clearly improvised at the time would be impossible, and I kinda respect how they just roll with it.
