Our Red Shadows playtest campaign has been delivering exactly what we hoped for—and teaching us valuable lessons about collaborative storytelling in the process.
The standout discovery? Our players create the most engaging scenarios when they help build them. The campaign’s opening “dodge ball incident” came from the group working together to establish how Hope’s power incontinence accidentally created an illusory fire, drawing unwanted government attention. That collaborative energy was so effective we’ve now built it into the game.
The Mad Lib Session Opener
We’re adding a structured collaborative opener to the GM section—a “Mad Lib” style tool that gets everyone invested immediately:
“It all started during _______ at _______ when _______’s quirk caused their power to _______…”
The beauty is in the details players add. When they choose whose character caused the problem, what went wrong, and who witnessed it, they’re automatically invested in dealing with the consequences.
Real Playtest Impact
Three sessions in, and we’ve seen:
- Raven’s signature “hair-cutting punishment” for defeated enemies
- Jimmy accidentally killing an opponent, forcing moral choices about lethal force
- Complex relationships between WWII-era parahumans and modern teens
- Memory manipulation proving potentially game-breaking (balance notes taken!)
These discoveries led to major revisions this past week—rebalancing the entire system and massively expanding the Perks descriptions with detailed progressions and useful GM guidance. When players show you what works (and what breaks), you listen.
The system handles teenage superhero drama beautifully, but the real magic happens when players help create the world they’re exploring.
FREAKS is shaping up to be exactly what we envisioned: coming-of-age superhero stories where the hardest choices aren’t about saving the world, but figuring out who you are when you’re fundamentally different from everyone around you.
More playtest updates coming soon. The Cold War paranoia is just getting started.
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