Spectaculars: It's Spectacular

     I mentioned in my Sentinel Comics Review that I should probably check out Spectaculars at some point. Well, I did, and let me tell you all, this game has the motherfucking JUICE. So now I'm going to spend the next however many words talking about why this game rocks and you should buy it. 

The art is what I would call Generic Modern Comic, and it looks really nice and classy.

What's in the Box?

    Spectaculars comes from Scratchpad Publishing, and while it's initial $75 price tag might seem steep, it's because you're getting a whole bunch of goodies as a part of it. The game is split into multiple component parts: a basic rulebook, a book for developing the setting (more on that later), and then power cards, identity cards, Random Complication Cards, character sheets, and premade adventures for four different campaign frames, ranging from gritty street-level heroics to Guardians of the Galaxy style space heroics. 

I don't have a physical copy yet, but fortunately the Scratchpad folks have an official mod for Tabletop Simulator! 

    This means that even in my own digital space, play has a very tactile element that I greatly enjoy. I never really got card-based initiative systems, but getting to lay down stuff is nice. It also means that we have phygital records of the progress we've made throughout the game: there's only so many Superpower Cards, so Lady Liberty picking up a Super Strength card mans there's less to go around. I'm still a little unsure on if this applies to villains or not, but even just among heroes it helps ensure everyone's different. It's a great use of curated randomness to create a collage of what everyone at the table wants.

I do wish the PDFs had hyperlinks, though.

A closeup of my girlfriend's sheet for her character Killerwatt. My one complaint with the tabletop simulator version is it has no native support for writing on an object, so it's a bitch and a half process involving a secondary mod.

Nothing To Take Away

    While I enjoy mechanics-heavy games a lot when I'm a player, I'm also a fan of the "Just enough" school. Not necessarily the bare essentials for when word picture play fails, but rather a sense of quick resolution with high possibility for reinterpretation. This is especially true as a GM-if I have to run another combat where I control six mechanically-involved enemies again I'll probably hurtle myself into the Mississippi. Spectacular's basic resolution solves this by just giving you a handful of percentages to keep track of-one per enemy type on the GM side, and varying ones on the player side. If you're attacking, the result you roll is even your damage, to make things even easier! Add in Edge of the Empire style Boon and Drawback dice, and you have a simple but easily-interpretable matrix for most rolls.

    The "More or Less Superpowers" dichotomy is settled via Hero Points and diminishing returns. Your first power is going to be more reliable than your second, and especially your third, as their success chances go down. In addition, the more powers you have, the fewer Hero Points you refresh up to at the start of a fight (a la Evil Hat's Dresden Files Game), so a hero with fewer powers has more options to push themselves, help others, and affect the story. 

    On the other hand, each superpower has a powerful ability that comes with it, such as making attempts to overcome a Complication (more on that in a second) more effective. However, invoking those puts the power on cooldown, so you can't use it at all for a little while. This means that spamming your Laser Feet just isn't an option, helping avoid the "Why don't I just do my best thing all the time?" problem.

    

    Speaking of Complications, one of the key parts of a given Scenario Design is that there is always going to be Penelope Pitstop on the train tracks or a fire at the Mother Theresa Orphanage for Underprivileged Kittens. Stopping those isn't just a great way to help even out the action economy, it makes players feel heroic (one of my key takeaways from Superman 2025 was how most of the fights were the stakes of Superman trying to both win and save someone at the same time. Even the most cold-hearted munchkin will still want to help save people and stuff because

1. If you don't there might be damage to the team's reputation.
2. It's your main source of Hero Points, so especially if you have more superpowers you want to be running around saving squirrels and the like.

Probably should've done something about that.

    Finally, teamwork is both easy and fun! There are multiple ways to assist someone (giving them extra Boon dice) and it follows the kind of math that I first noticed in Blades in the Dark, where it was mechanically more efficient to help another person instead of pushing yourself (you can spend a boon to boost someone else, potentially giving them the opportunity to earn two boons). The Rain City Cinema club spent their last session swapping bonuses like so much spit, which made them way more effective than they had been prior. Both my players reported feeling like a team of superheroes, rather than a bunch of individuals who happened to be working together. 

Simples Setups for the Working Game Master

    Spectaculars advertises itself as being Easy To Prep, being able to neatly slot stuff together and have a good session with a minimum of prep time. While I haven't tested things to their logical extremes, I found that the premade scenarios (consisting of two setpieces with an interlude) nicely follow the same kind of Anal Bead structure that I've written about before. They also succeed very well in presenting information rather than plot, acknowledging that the capabilities and nature of the heroes and setting could be drastically different depending on the table.

    In terms of actually running things at the table, I've found the minimum of mechanics helped keep things flowing, even in busier combats where I had six villains at a time. Also notable is that the game has some really solid, workmanlike GM advice throughout the book, particularly when advising you on making your own stuff, whether that be villains or minions or sessions. You also, thanks to the structure of the book, have fifty examples of what a good session looks like in the minds of the designers, so you can always copy bits from there. It's not life-changing or anything, but having seen games that are absolutely terrible at telling you the kind of play they support and why their games are designed the way they are, it's much appreciated.

Perhaps my favorite passage is this one. I as a GM am always bad at handing out metacurrency because I worry I'll fuck things up, and this really did feel like the designers looking at me and saying "Go hog wild." So I did, and it was awesome.

    All of this is amazing so far, and enough to earn the game a hearty recommend, but none of these are the best part of Spectaculars. Far from it.

Glad Libs or: Constructing a Universe

    I'm not really a fan of blorb. It absolutely has its places, and its fans, but that has never really been for me. I'm a much looser, more freewheeling type of gal. I love coming up with stuff on the fly, incorporating running jokes into the canon, things like that. Something I've struggled with is helping other folks at my table, particularly those who are bad at coming up with stuff on the spot, feel able to participate in that. 

    Spectaculars fixes this by turning world creation into Mad Libs. Within the Setting Booklet is a series of entries centered on the nature of the city itself, key NPCs (like your Media Luminaries and Hateful Authority Figures) and setting elements like The Powerful Artifact and The Bad Part of Town. As those things get introduced, play pauses as the group collectively decides the nature of the Relevant Thing. Now on the one hand, this can be a major pace-killer for some players, and I can respect that. But for me, this is the best kind of play. I'm the sicko that only listens to the character/world creation episodes of Friends at the Table because I like hearing them talk about stuff more than them actually playing the game. What makes it better is these things show up again and again in different contexts in different campaigns, which allows for the kinds of natural callbacks that make these things feel so ruch. 

Part of Setting Element One: The Powerful Artifact from my home game.

    

    The game is in love with this kind of ongoing narrative/universe building. Most of your major Narrative Rewards aren't "Add an extra skill" but instead things like changing your Archetype or Identity, turning out to have been replaced by a duplicate at some point in the past, faking your own death, or getting a toy deal in the real world and having that stuff show up in your comics. 

Get low and let's go!

    While I'm only three sessions into my Spectaculars game, I've fallen in love with the world of Spectacle Comics: the Rain City Municipal Center that's constantly getting attacked by supervillains, the fact that our setting's Nick Fury and Lex Luthor are the same person, the fact that two sessions in my girlfriend has decided to switch who she's playing as for a while because her first character took a bomb to the face and fell from cruising altitude so she's in traction. 

    This game is wonderful. I cannot recommend it enough. You can buy it digitally on drivethrurpg or go to their website to get notifications for the next print run. It is, in a word, spectacular.