Nova City Heroes · The campaign
Requiem
Six issues. One grieving city. If remembering hurts, what are you willing to forget?
Three months ago, in October, the light over Nova City turned violet, and every hero in the world was gone. No bodies. No funerals. No one to blame and no one to bury.
It’s January now, and it’s cold. Someone has to keep the lights on.
Requiem is the campaign for Nova City Heroes: six linked adventures, played over six months of game time, from deep winter to the first warm light of summer. The city is grieving its heroes, and a calm, capable man is offering it order in their place. Your heroes’ own community changes at the end of every issue because of what they chose. And each hero will, before the end, be offered the person they lost, at a price.
It’s a superhero book first. Every session has a fight worth having, and the heroes save people in every issue. But it isn’t Saturday morning: it’s raw, grown-up and emotional, and the cost of saving people is the thing it cares about.
The campaign at a glance
Six issues, January to June
| Issue | Month | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| #3 The Authority | January | The Vanishing Hearings crown a new Emergency Authority, and Mirror attacks three places at once. |
| #4 Every Door Remembers | February | Painted doors appear across the city, and a vanished hero walks back through one. |
| #5 Mirror Test | March | Mirror makes the whole city vote, live, on who gets saved. |
| #6 The Mercy Programme | April | A treatment that takes grief away opens its doors, and the city lines up for it. |
| #7 Nobody You Knew | May | The city forgets the heroes ever existed. |
| #8 The City That Chose to Remember | June | The commemoration at Daybreak’s statue, and the Reading of the Ledger. |
Between each pair of issues comes a Month Between: a lighter session for subplots, ordinary life and grief. The full run is somewhere between seventeen and twenty-three sessions.
Three ways to play it
Built for a GM’s first campaign
The full campaign
All six issues in order, with the Months Between. This is what the book is built for, and where the finale pays off hardest.
The short route
Can’t commit to the whole run? Play four issues for a shorter, sharper campaign of about fourteen sessions. The book tells you what to fold in.
A single issue
With the ready-to-play heroes in the back of the book, any issue works as a one-shot or a convention game.
If you’ve run an adventure from First Light, you can run this. Everything new is explained where you first meet it, every issue tells you what it’s trying to teach you, and nothing asks you to improvise a plot from scratch.
Look inside
Sample pages
Questions
Before you buy
Do I need First Light?
It helps, but Requiem includes an eight-page Quickstart that’s enough to play this book on its own. Making your own heroes, the full power catalogue and the complete Rising Deck are in First Light.
Do we need to have played Issues #1 and #2?
No. Requiem’s adventures are Issues #3 to #8 in the running Nova City Heroes series, but everything it needs is in this book. If you have played them, your heroes, your community and its Clocks carry straight over.
Who reads it?
It’s written for the Game Master. Players don’t need to read it, and most of it is better if they don’t.
Someone has to keep the lights on.
Requiem is available on DriveThruRPG. New to Nova City Heroes? Start with First Light, or try the free QuickStart.
