Marion G. Harmon, A Writer in Vegas.

It’s done! Well, sort of; 1) despite best editing efforts, I fully expect to get a bunch of errata notes back from early readers, 2) the cover will be modified once a previous file is recovered (long boring story). The important thing is, after way too long, WtC: Barlow’s Guide to Superhumans has been submitted to DrivethruRPG, and should be approved aaaaaany minute now. (And of course I will follow up with a link when they do.) The second sourcebook, WtC: The B-Files, will be available soon. And then it’s on to the next Wearing the Cape book, operating title: Repercussions.

What is Barlow’s Guide to Superhumans?

Readers of my series will be familiar with the fictional BGS. It was modeled on the Jane’s Guide books, a series of annual publications identifying aircraft and ships of the world, both civilian and military. They were the pre-internet guide to the subject, and still are the definitive guide. I named it Barlow’s Guide in homage to an amazing book, Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (Wayne Barlowe provided the art and Ian Summers and Beth Meacham wrote the text). Published in 1979, it had quite the impact on my young imagination.

When I ran the Kickstarter campaign last year, I was aware that the Wearing the Cape: The Roleplaying Game gamebook had a problem; it only gave the reader cape-files for the Sentinels. And while their powers varied a bit they didn’t present anywhere near the full potential of the system. Also, the campaign background chapter only went into real detail about what happened to the United States in the Post-Event World. That left a lot of the world described only in passing.

So Wearing the Cape: Barlow’s Guide to Superhumans was planned to rectify that problem. It would cover the rest of the world much more extensively (although hardly completely, it’s a big world). It would give context to superhumans in other places and how their societies influenced the way other superheroes wear the cape. It would go into more detail about Post-Event organizations, and about other places (space, the past and future, and other realities). Additionally, it would provide at least 20 fully worked up cape-files of characters from the books, complete with their backgrounds, plus an unknown number of characters created by Kickstarter backers. Those new characters would be approved by me to be fully world-compliant, vetted by me to make sure their stories and powers fit the setting and made good use of the rules.

It was an ambitious project; almost as ambitious as the gamebook had been. And now it’s finished, with only one slight hiccup. I’d let myself forget just how long it took to write the world background sections for the gamebook.

Here’s the thing; I didn’t include the wider world in the gamebook background because I hadn’t really done a lot with it. Any writer will tell you that one of the keys to getting anything done is not writing up lots of details that aren’t going to affect the story. Not that the deep-detail approach doesn’t work; JRR Tolkien wrote whole languages, alphabets, and histories out before finally getting to writing the books that revolutionized fantasy. But I’m no Tolkien and he also took years and years to finish. In fact he never did finish, he just set it aside.

And now I’d committed to figuring out what happened to much of the rest of the world, Post-Event. And it couldn’t be off-the-cuff stuff, either; the Post-Event World, as I described it in the sourcebook, would henceforth be series canon. All this while writing the next book in the series, Recursion. So, no pressure.

And that’s the long explanation before the heartfelt apology for how long this has taken, and I hope it’s worth the wait! So, what’s in Barlow’s Guide to Superhumans?

Ooooohh, lots of goodness.

What’s In the Book?

There are 20 pages of geopolitical world background, detailing the post-Event fates Eastern and Western Europe, Southern Africa, the Americas, much of Asia and the Indian sub-continent, and the Middle East. It touches on events in specific nations, including Russia, Finland, China, India, Iran, Botswana, and Mexico among others, and lays out post-Event alliance structures. I love this map:

Moving beyond post-Event societies and geopolitics, there are another 15 pages covering organizations and the interesting “other places.” It covers known organizations like The Ascendancy, Heroes Without Borders, and the Undying Caliphate, and adds a new international criminal syndicate, Illyria as a worked example of potential enemy organizations. It demonstrates the potential of other realities with a worked up example, The Dreamlands, which ties into a new Power-Type: Dreamweavers.

Those 35 pages are almost entirely “rules-free.” They’re intended as pure background, real additions fleshing out the canonical Post-Event World beyond what has yet shown up in the books. Because they are canonical, they make up the section that took the longest to complete.

And yes, a bunch of the stuff that I “discovered” writing the additional background will have a real influence on future stories. BTW, special thanks is due to several Kickstarter backers who actually live in Europe and could give me feedback on the “political realism” of what I thought happened there; they changed more than a few details (events in Finland specifically are almost entirely due to the character backstory written by a Finnish fan).

And then there’s the expanded Power-Templates, and the cape-files. Soooo many cape-files. So many fans responded to the Kickstarter challenge to create their own characters who could be vetted for inclusion in the Post-Event World that I had to break it up; in addition to 20 author-created characters (Ozma, Grendel, Vulcan, etc.), WtC:BGS includes almost 30 fan-created original characters. A few of them (Ambrosius and The Lady of Doors, to name two) have already appeared in Recursion.

Ambrosius: a White-Hat from Texas.

Are you excited? ‘Cause I’m excited. Sometime this week DriveThruRPG will put the book online, I’ll email coupons to all the Kickstarter backers waiting for it, and one long-delayed project will be finished. I will spend the rest of October prepping the cape-files going into Wearing the Cape: The B-Files, launch on DriveThruRPG, and combine both sourcebooks for the printed edition of WtC:Barlow’s Guide and The B-Files. Close to 100 cape-files of superhuman heroes, villains, and civilians in the Post-Event World.

Won’t that be something?

MGH