I’m a fan of the Smallville series (so much so that the collected series is on my Amazon wishlist for October when it’s released). I’ve not watched all of it – only about 20 or so episodes across all of the series. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a “no tights, no capes” story of Superman before he became Superman. They link most “supernatural” phenomena to the Kryptonite meteor rocks but other than that it’s an episodic relationship drama (where people don’t tell people all the facts in order to prolong confusion).
But even better than the series, is the RPG. It’s got a really nice way to build characters and it’s fun watching people build them, as you can see from this “Gotham” thread and, more recently, from this “MARVELS” thread.
The former thread explores the Batman story in the years while Bruce Wayne was in college and when he started to form into the person he would become. The story in the thread explores the relationships that he would have made, his contemporaries and the reasons behind some of the stories. It’s excellently written and provides a great backstory to even the movies.
The latter thread does much the same but the lead characters are the Fantastic Four, with the addition of Tony Stark and Victor von Doom. Relationships between these ‘science heroes’ are fraught even in the beginning and it’s fun to speculate on the individuals who they would have met during their early life. Who would know that two of them would spend considerable amounts of their life wearing armoured suits?
