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I guess everything started many years ago. Stan Lee created Earth's Mightiest Heroes, one of my favorite groups of super heroes. A few decades later, Keith Baker created Eberron, my favorite campaign setting ever. A few years ago, my players turned their characters into their own version of the Avengers. And now, having watched the movie four times already, I think it was a perfect time to write this.

How would the Avengers look like if they were instead Eberron's Mightiest Heroes? The idea is to "re-create" the famous superheroes as D&D 4e characters, of course, with a little eberronian feeling. I must warn this is not an optimized version of the character, but a flavorful one which main intent is to find evocative details which reminds us of the superhero when playing it.

Let's start

A heavy-intrigue pre-war campaign loosely based on Game of Thrones

It's more than a decade ago that I read for the first time "A Game of Thrones", but the HBO's adaptation made me relive it in exquisite detail. All my players watched the show, and they asked me to run a heavy-intrigue in the brink of a war campaign. And, as an Eberron fan, I designed "Sede Vacante". Here I'll share the highlights for you to inspire your own home campaigns.

Of course, for such a campaign to run smoothly, you have to make the players select the province they want to come from (one of the five nations-to-be). The campaign starts just before King Jarot's death. For intrigue-enhancing purposes, I established a few changes in the canon:

First, I killed Jarot's first wife (whoever she was) and re-married him

Until now, there are three generations of slivers in Magic: the Gathering. The originals appeared in the Stronghold/Exodus expansions, and new versions debuted in the Legions set and the Time Spiral block. His visual resemblance to insectoid reptiles, his hivemind at the service of their queen (or overlord) and above all their amazing evolutionary ability have won the hearts of thousands of players around the world, including myself. Besides the (much or little) strategy that requires playing a deck full of these creatures, I have always wanted to transform them into the realm of Dungeons & Dragons RPG, with varying degrees of success. This is a new attempt, this time for Fourth Edition. 

The first thing to consider is obviously the basic sliver.

Few things can be so complicated at the same time in reality and RPGs, as time travel is.

To start where we must, let's establish exactly our purpose at allowing time-traveling in our campaign: It's not enough to want our players to experience first person a history lesson on our favorite setting (in this case, Eberron), since to do that we just have to frame our campaign in such a time (could it be the War of Elven Independence, the birth of the Silver Flame, or even the military conquests of Karn I). Time travel adds a level of inescapable alienation that must be part of the campaign's "feeling" and "mood". Characters realizing immediately that they have traveled in time (or soon will), and establishing the reasons why they did so (or why it happened if not intentionally, of course)

How do you manage to make the players have as much fear as their characters?

At this point, it is rare for anyone to be scared by a horror movie. Yes, they are full of special effects, dramatic screaming and incidental music, but the cliches battle against the suspension for the incredible that is required for viewer's immersion. Nontheless, within the narrower world of RPGs, which depend exclusively on imagination, we can find some useful tools when making players feel even a fraction of the fear that their characters suffer. Let's take a step back, see what we have been taught by horror/thriller novels/movies and analyze how can we get these details into our little great DM toy-box. To have our heroes facing villains who want to conquer the world, we must clearly establish the tone of