Night Shift

This site centers around a role-playing campaign featuring cops who keep a modicum of order in a city populated with "science heroes".  This campaign is set in the universe of the Top 10 comics created by Alan Moore, Gene Ha, and Zander Cannon, one of the best super-hero comics to be published in years. 

The first story arc ran in winter 2003/spring 2004, using the game mechanics from Guardians of Order's Tri-Stat System, as published in Silver Age Sentinels.  For logistic reasons, the game had to be tabled for a while, but I'd long wanted to restart it.  In 2006, I started a new story arc using the Mutants & Masterminds system (Volume 2); we finally switched to the Truth & Justice system in 2007 (Volume 3) – it keeps getting more streamlined and more cinematic!

We play in Seattle, on the first and third Saturday of the month.  In our campaign, the players create new, original characters (i.e., you can't play one of the characters from the comics, such as Smax or Irma Geddon), but they interact with many of the familiar faces from the series which are used as NPCs.  The story begins where the "season finale" left off (see the Story So Far for details).  This means that the events in the campaign take place more or less in parallel with the events of Smax the Barbarian, which begins in November 1999.  Much (though not all) of the action occurs, as the title indicates, during the night shift.

Like the original Top 10, this series is centered around characters who are police officers who happen to have special abilities and therefore are assigned to Neopolis, rather than with superheroes (or rather "science heroes") who happen to be police officers.  The distinction is well illustrated at the beginning of Smax the Barbarian #1; Jeff and Robyn clearly think like cops, not caped crusaders.  In other words, look more to "Hill Street Blues" and "NYPD Blues" for inspiration than to "JLA" or "X-Men".

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