Gestalt: An Interview with Scott Bennie

Thanks for joining us, Scott. First, what's Gestalt?

SB: It's a 400 page worldbook, designed for use with the HERO System, specifically Champions. It's a big, original campaign world.

There is a lot of campaign material already out there for supers. What makes Gestalt so special?

SB: Gestalt's premise is that we've got a world where (back in 1989) archetypes from the collective unconscious — which we call the Gestalt of humanity — came to life and took the guise of superheroes and supervillains. Sometimes it created original superhumans, sometimes it gave powers to humans whose psychology was compatible with their archetypes.

Why archetypes?

SB: Comics are rich in archetypes. What is Superman if he's not a compilation of archetypes like the Immigrant and the Farmboy? What's Batman if he isn't the personification of Justice? Or Spiderman if he isn't a Trickster and a Swashbuckler?

So these archetypes came to life and put on tights?

SB: The in-game reason was that it was easier for the general public to understand "comic books have come to life" than "the planet's suffering from a collective madness." The out-of-game reason is that comic books are fun. We make no apologies for the capes and tights (though a few supers do refuse to wear them).

And once you become used to certain fashions, you come to accept then. Look at some of the things that people have wore over the centuries. Is a guy wearing Renaissance hose really that much more ridiculous — or offensive to the modern aesthetic — than a 1960s flower child?

Tell me more about the world. Is it an Iron Age book?

SB: It’s an "every age" book. There are recesses of the campaign world that are incredibly horrific and vile, and then there are characters and situations that are humorous (or at least campy). You should find every tone imaginable in the world. One of my players called it "smudged four color"; I think if you were to call Gestalt a blend of Bronze Age and early Vertigo, you wouldn't stray too far from the tone.

We're a little more political than many settings. Gestalt is a little more simulation-heavy than many superhero worlds. Historical details matter. We talk about politics and administrations and we don't shy away from controversial or painful topics.

Like 9/11?

SB: Well, 9/11 never happened. Back in one of our campaigns, during the 1990s, I mentioned that Marine Corps supers captured Bin Laden and many of the future Al Qaeda leaders in a raid in Afghanistan. Superhero teams, especially trained military supers, are frighteningly good at special ops. I decided to keep that in the timeline, so as a result, 9/11 never took place.

There is a Department of Homeland Security, but that's a reaction to supervillains, not terrorists. The political situation on Gestalt-Earth is similar to that on our world, but it stems from different causes and events.

Do superheroes have an adversarial relationship with the government?

SB: It’s complicated. At the moment, things aren't going well. In the real world, the current administration tends to react strongly to criticism and independent power blocs who aren't their close allies. Few administrations are very tolerant about such things.

So the government are the villains?

SB: No, the government is the government. They may have an adversarial relationship with independent heroes at times, but ultimately their goals are the same. I'm not interested in political hectoring, but I won't pretend that everything's sweet, or there aren't conflicts. However I'm not a big fan of government conspiracies and the book's not a political tract.

Is the book focused on the United States?

SB: Yes, but the rest of the world isn't ignored, either. We have about 30 pages devoted to the rest of the world, and there's an African superheroine in the Heroes section.

What sort of organization can players belong to?

SB: We don’t really have splatworthy divisions (apologies to my friends at White Wolf). There are in-game organizations, of course, the Gestalt Club campaign set-up, where players are freelance troubleshooters working out of a San Francisco night club, is one prominent example. Superhero teams come with their own organization, of course. If a player wants a sense of belonging, he should embrace the ties to his archetype and see where it leads him.

Let's take the example of the venerable Champions brick (or the Powerhourse as it'ss known in M&M). The Gestalt version of this archetype is the Strength Gestalt, In a conventional supers game, that brick's just someone with big muscles who lifts heavy objects. In a Gestalt game, however, the Strength Gestalt is forced to ask deeper questions.

If someone is the personification of Strength, how driven is he to show off his strength to the public? How does he encourage others to be strong? How does he feel toward weaklings? Is he a rival or a comrade to other Strength gestalts? What's it like to have that urgent need to be strong running through the back of your mind all the time?

Sometimes you can use the archetype for comedy: the Strength Gestalt may be chasing a villain, and passes a bar where someone's bellowing a challenge to an arm wrestling contest and he has to decide what's more important, the villain or the Gestalt? Of course, tragedy is often simply comedy where someone gets hurt more seriously than they deserve. When the Strength gestalt pushes aside a rival who's holding up a collapsing building so he can do it himself, that's comedy. When a building collapses on everyone because an overly proud Strength gestalt couldn't stand someone else getting the glory for holding it up, it's tragedy.

The drive of one's archetype produces a lot of conflict and dramatic tension, of a sort that makes Gestalt a unique game.

In a way, Gestalt is the ultimate geek setting. Geeks are all about drawing strength from their passions and obsessions. And those passions fuel geek culture, but they're a double-edged sword: the things we love the most are also the things that do us the most harm. The Gestalt phenomenon is a metaphor for that.

Do you have big heroes, analogs to some of the major league published heroes?

SB: Every one of them is totally original! And therefore, completely unfathomable!

Nah, there are a few. I love comics, and there have been a few tributes I've never been able to include (until now), so they're in here.

We have America Man, a Captain America-type who's the personification of the search for an American identity. There's an analog of "Big Blue", but his background is very different. He's deliberately the inverse of the "guy with the S": a Plains States farmboy who's destined to go out into the stars.

A number of players don't like single-origin campaigns. Yet Gestalt comes across as the mother of all single origin superhero settings. Do you worry that you're going to frustrate the player base?

SB: Yes, though we include a lot of campaign advice on how to get around the single-origin issue. However, I think of the focus on "psionically empowered archetype from the human subconscious" is a strength, not a weakness. Focus is a good thing. And if Gestalt was exactly like most other superhero settings, it wouldn't be worth publishing.

Although we do have a few more origins than "I'm a gestalt." And even gestalts have three different varieties.

Are there aliens in Gestalt?

SB: Yes. I wanted to provide wiggle-room for players who really didn't want to feel trapped by a single origin campaign, so there is a race of human-like aliens called the Ar with their own culture and mysteries. And, for a big enemy coming down the road, there are the Eiko.

How about powered armor types?

SB: That's more problematic. PCs can take battlesuits (and there are a few in the setting), however they come with a built-in problem: The Tyranny League — they're our Fatal Five/Masters of Evil-style ultimate villain team — believes that if anyone can cheaply mass produce power armor, they'll be able to overwhelm the League by sheer numbers, so they're trying to stop their development by any means necessary. If the PCs take a battlesuit as an origin, they're either going to have to hide what they're doing or draw the attention of one of the nastiest enemies in the setting.

Is this a reaction to Iron Man's actions in Marvel's Civil War?

SB: Nah. That’s just an amazing convergence.

How long has Gestalt been in the works?

SB: Too long! I started my first Gestalt campaign back in 1993, and almost immediately came to believe it'd make a great campaign supplement. Over the years, I tried to sell Hero on the project: it nearly became a reality twice, once during the last days of the original Hero gang - before Cybergames went bust - and once during Steve Long's tenure as a PDF-only product (before Steve scaled down his PDF plans due to disappointing sales).

Why BlackWyrm?

SB: Dave Mattingly and I have been friends for a long time. I talked with him about 5-6 years ago about forming a company with Mike Surbrook. That fell, through, but Dave went ahead with BlackWyrm. They had already established a good reputation with The Algernon Files, and I felt that the company was a great fit. Plus they are well-known in the Superlink community who are probably unfamiliar with my work.

You're doing a HERO System and a Superlink version. Why?

SB: Double the fun! The original Gestalt campaigns used Champions, so HERO was a given. Anyone who knows me knows how big a fan I am of the HERO System and its fanbase. However, I've never been a believer in only one approach to gaming; I like M&M a lot too, so I'm really happy to be supporting it. Both systems have enormous strengths: the HERO System has great character generation and tactical play, while M&M's play has a wonderfully quick pace to it. I hope each version will take advantage of their systems' strong points.

And frankly, Gestalt's been a tremendously costly and time-consuming project for me, so if I can get some extra sales from a Superlink version, well, I'm not such a pure artist that I'll turn my nose up at the commercial possibilities, particularly when I like the system. I am doing my best to make sure the M&M port is not some half-assed version.

Are any other versions planned?

SB: It'd be interesting to do a Truth and Justice version. But I haven't spoken to Chad about it, nor do I have enough expertise with PDQ to attempt one. And given the online buzz, I'm sure someone will suggest Spirit of Gestalt or Dogs in the Gestalt if it attains any sort of popularity.

Would you object to fans adapting the game to other systems?

SB: As long as fans abide by reasonable principles of fair use, that'd be fine.

If you've got a Superman analog, you have to have some real heavy-hittiing NPCs. How do you keep players from getting an inferiority complex to the uber-NPCs?

SB: I don't buy the whole "don't include uber-NPCs" premise. If that were the case in comics, then Daredevil would have been cancelled a long time ago. He's be irrelevant superheroing in the same city as the Avengers, the FF, or Spider-Man.

Player characters make their own relevance by the strength of their characterization and the quality of their stories, not by being able to bench press more than anyone else in the world.

As long as the GM doesn't shove the PCs' faces in the discrepancy, power level doesn't matter. Not that there's anything wrong with playing at a high (or low) power level, but too often players view it as a game quality feature, not a game flavor feature. Even so, a Gestalt GM can start off the characters at a higher power level if the players really want to play an Avengers or JLA style team.

Do they get higher starting points?

SB: Yes, but it's more comprehensive than that. The power guidelines are based on a system that my friend Steve Sloane developed back in the 1980s; the active points in attack and defense are a trade-off with SPD; the lower your SPD, the higher your other values can be.

What other specific changes do you make in the venerable HERO System for Gestalt?

SB: We added systems for encouraging player goals and sub-plots, additional rules for Luck, and a form of dramatic editing that can be invoked when your archetype comes into play. Other than that, it's pretty much your daddy's Champions game.

Some people have noted similarities between Gestalt and Green Ronin's new setting, Paragons.

SB: Well, there are a few places where Steve Kenson and I had similar ideas. However, Gestalt isn't an emerging supers setting, whereas "brand-new supers" is very much Paragon's raison d'ętre. I think the two books will be complementary, not competing. So buy them both!

Does the world really need another superhero setting?

SB: I hear that question a lot. Do you mean "the world" or "the woefully-flooded superhero RPG game market"?

The market will answer that question for itself. As for the world, I look at it from a very broad perspective. On a basic level, we don't need any new creative works at all. We could survive by watching old movies, old television programs, reading old novels, old essays, enjoying old art, and old comics and game settings. There are a lot of beautiful things in the past that have been forgotten, things we could rediscover if we looked for them. However, we've had plenty of examples of cultures that look only to the past, enough to tell us that a culture that doesn't create isn't a very healthy one. So yes, we need another superhero setting, for nothing else than keeping our tiny subset of culture — the RPG hobby — creative.

Gestalt's essentially my answer to the challenge that I've heard from a lot of gamers; whenever a thread on a forum came up asking what the best supplements were. You'd inevitably get someone who pounded their chests and boasted how they never soiled their fingers on a published supplement. And you know, given the toolkit nature of the HERO System, it's understandable. And yet, on an objective level, it doesn't make sense.

I'm a good enough writer to be able to write my own fiction — does this mean I don't need to read anyone else's fiction? I don't think anyone would argue that any author is so good that he doesn't need to read other people's work, but I hear that statement made all the time about Gamemasters. And I don't buy it. I know a lot of incredibly talented Gamemasters. I don't know one Gamemaster or game designer who doesn't benefit from looking at other approaches and seeing how they tick. Especially the great supplements, like Aaron Allston's Strike Force or Green Ronin's Freedom City. This isn't to say there hasn't been a lot of dross produced over the years, or that even great supplements might have limited utility for GMs who don't buy into certain basic assumptions about campaign power levels, origin types, the role of heroes, or acceptable operating procedures for a hero. Even so, a good idea is still a good idea, and quality work deserves more than the back of someone's hand and upturned nose.

So when I started writing Gestalt I set out to do the impossible: to turn people's heads, to challenge long-held assumptions, and change their minds.

Did you succeed?

SB: That's for individuals to decide. If I end up on the reverse side of Sturgeon's Law, that is, if 90% of the people who look at Gestalt don't think it's crap, I'll be happy.

What are you most proud of?

SB: I think finishing the project is the big thing! I've tried to include a lot of little touches to flesh out the world, like boxed text for "Great Battles in Superhuman History," various Top Ten lists and Demographics. There are several pages of slang, things that I hope brings the world alive. When superhumans emerged, how did scientists study and categorize it? I think those kind of details lend it a realistic feel. I'm proud of the unusual supers list: how does a world handle a guy who can teach someone anything he knows with perfect clarity, regardless of the aptitude of the student? What about Gestalts who can grow acres and acres of crops on barren rock? How about conciliators who can settle any dispute? Or Commerce Gestalts who can become so prosperous that they threaten to destabilize the world economy?

There's a section on how a campaign was planned and executed which is probably the best GMing advice I've ever written. I try to address points of disbelief; we've got some very powerful villains in the world; why haven't they conquered the world yet? What's the campaign setting likely to look like in fifteen to twenty years? Plus there are a couple of adventures, and a lot of nice art.

Tell us more about the art for Gestalt.

SB: It's color art, though the main printer will be in black and white now, with the PDF and specialty orders in color. I'd hoped for a complete color run, but recent increases in the price of paper overseas has made that unfeasible.

There are two ways to succeed in game publishing: you can either be as frugal as possible, but include good content for a loyal niche audience, or you can go for the best possible production values and hope you reach a broad audience. Both are legitimate approaches, however the latter is more financially risky. Even so, that's the way I decided to go.

I think I've produced a book that I can be proud of. It's one that Superlink fans, who are used to very high production values, can place next to their M&M books with (I hope) an equal measure of pride.

Do you have any favorite pieces?

SB: There are many. Chris Stevens' montage of the Blood Red King. He's our signature villain, and that character needed to be perfect; and Chris just nailed him. Storn Cook's picture of Liberator also comes to mind: he's one of the most prominent heroes, and Storn's depiction of the character is better than he looked in my mind's eye.

Both Jason Reeves and Adam Gillespie did wonderful work. I really owe Jason a debt of gratitude; he was the first artist who came aboard the project. Art on Gestalt had been floundering for about a year, and Rob Heinsoo, a friend of mine from WOTC, finally recommended Jason to me at the last GenCon Indy. That started the ball rolling. Jason brought Adam aboard, and Adam did some spectacular work. He had the job of drawing a couple of player characters for a pair of players in our Hollywood Knights game who passed away some years back, and he did them beautifully.

Every artist brought some strong work to the project. Keith Curtis's maps are great. I've always loved Keith's cartography in his Hero Games work, but we've never had a chance to see it in color until now.

You started out Gestalt with a piece of fiction? What's that about?

SB: Fiction is very immersive — unless you're writing bad fiction, it should bring people into the setting more easily. In Mourning, which was written many years ago, is the story of a woman who bonds with a Grief Gestalt. She gives birth to a baby boy, the boy dies, and she literally can't get the moment of his death out of her mind. So she becomes the personification of mourning and has to learn how to deal with overwhelming grief at every moment. It goes badly, she learns how to use her powers to share her pain, has a brief (but disastrous) career as a supervillain, and then settles down. Although she still feels a certain pull toward the public eye at the end.

I know I'm going against the grain for a lot of folks for whom game fiction is a dirty word. Some people are going to skip the story, I'm sure. However I wanted a good intro, one which would teach people about the setting as they read, and the story worked for me.

It's also a bit of a metaphor for a few setbacks I suffered in the 90s, so the story has personal meaning.

Why not a comic intro?

SB: I'd have loved one, but it's too expensive. Although we did include some comic panels that I hope capture the gist of the setting (and make it easier for people who don't care for fiction to read the story).

So after The Hero Within, what's next for Gestalt?

SB: Gestalt: The Hero Within Superlink is next. If the first book sells really really well (that is, far better than I'm expecting) I hope to do a sequel: Gestalt: Hate and Harm, which would be a book of additional heroes, villains, archetype packages, and storyline info to advance the major plots (the Eiko invasion of Earth, the Tyranny League's campaign to prevent the development of superhuman technology, Dr. Power's quest to resurrect her father) as well as new major plots to throw at your PCs.

If the second book were to sell really really well, what I'd like to do is a Gestalt Adventures book. Hire the best writers I can find, pay them a good wage and give them a license to be as creative and weird as possible. I'd like to produce an adventure anthology that'd put the PCs through the wringer, but not necessarily make huge changes to the world.

Then, after three books, that'd be it. If there was a heavy demand, I wouldn’t be adverse to fiction anthologies or occasional PDFs of characters to flesh out the world, but nothing that'd significantly interfere with a GM who's trying to put his or her own spin on the setting. Gestalt is about dedication and obsession, its power and price, but there's got to be a time when an author lets go of his work. Even a geek has to put aside his obsessions sometime.

The strength of game settings is in the playing. An author who grabs on too hard to his creation can strangle it, so it's best to know when to let go.

Before we go, what do you see as the future of gaming?

SB: We're seeing a widening schism between tactical RPGs, such as D&D and HERO, and story RPGs, such as many of the IPR games. I think we're going to see an increasing fusion of tactical RPGs and high-end boardgames, particularly in D&D 4th edition. I think there's something of a glut of IPR games; they've either got to broaden their market or contract. They are, however, an extraordinarily creative community, if sometimes a little arrogant. I think — for gamers — gaming's in a good place at the moment, but I wish it was easier to make a living in it.

Thank you.

Click to go back to the Gestalt page.