New superhero roleplaying game Teamup enters public beta

Johnny Wilson, the lead designer and Game Director at Lilypad Productions, has officially moved his superhero roleplaying game, Teamup, into its public beta phase. The project, which includes a digital manual and a dedicated actual play podcast, aims to deconstruct the “billion-dollar blockbuster” tropes currently saturating the genre.

Operating out of Colorado Springs, Wilson and his creative team are positioning Teamup not merely as a ruleset, but as a creative engine for modern mythology. The game eschews rigid power lists in favour of a flexible system that allows for everything from traditional caped crusaders to surrealist constructs like an animate egg-painter. The manual and further details are currently available through the official Teamup website.

The core philosophy of the game draws a sharp line between commercialised content and the human-centric storytelling found in ancient myth. By focusing on the City of Bones, a fictional, decaying metropolis known as New Babel, the developers are testing whether roleplaying game immersion can provide a more profound experience than the cinematic “superhero fatigue” currently felt by many fans.

Investigating the Mythology: A Q&A with Johnny Wilson

To understand how Teamup differentiates itself from titans like the Marvel Multiverse RPG, Geek Native spoke with Johnny Wilson about the mechanics of heroism and the transition from make-believe to a structured system.

You mentioned that many people are feeling superhero fatigue from commercialised stories. How does Teamup specifically combat that?

Superhero fatigue is real. People are feeling it. They are tired of going to the movies to see the same story with a different skin. It is starting to feel overcooked. Teamup combats that by allowing you to tell your own story. Teamup is just an engine. It has superhero inspired mechanics, certainly, but at its core, it is just an engine for your creative superhero characters and stories. The game does not tell you how to act… It gives you the mechanical structure to be free in your own stories.”

You described superheroes as an important part of our modern mythology. How does the system help players establish that mythic feeling?

The thing that interests me about mythology is the humanity of the gods and heroes… Spider-man is a wonderful modern example. On all accounts a god among men. Strength, speed, power. Before he gets those things his main problems are that he doesn’t know how to talk to girls… After he gets powers, those remain his greatest problems. The humanity doesn’t change, only the scale of his problems does. When we use our imaginations to create our own heroes, our own mythologies, we can practice acting heroically in a safe and creative space.”

The early episodes of your podcast are set in the City of Bones. What makes this the perfect sandbox?

The City of Bones is a nickname given to the fictional city of New Babel. New Babel was used as a launch pad to send mighty space craft to find more verdant homes in the stars. It worked. Two billion people fled a dying and dusty earth, but then New Babel was left. Its purpose was fulfilled and the world stopped investing its resources. The city still moves due to its millions of remaining inhabitants, but it is dead. This grim landscape is a perfect place for the awakening of Heroes.”

You’ve promised a system driven by creativity rather than preset powers. How do players create a power set without getting bogged down in math?

I think the exciting part about Teamup is I could never have come up with all of those ideas and put them as options in a book for people to chose from. My creative friends and family brought the ingenious ideas and Teamup catches and uses them… My father played a character who could control the elements you would need to wrap Christmas presents i.e. scissors, tape, etc. My mother played a character that could control all the pigeons in the city of Chicago. If the pages of a superhero roleplaying game manual were as many as the biggest Webster’s dictionary, it could never hope to hold the infinite creativity of the human imagination.”

Thanks, Johnny!

The Teamup beta manual can be accessed directly via their website, providing the framework for players to test the New Babel setting or construct their own worlds from scratch.

Quick Links

• Patreon: Teamup