Young Justice S1-01 Independence Day

Analysis from a RPG Perspective: Most super-hero campaigns start with a getting the team together. My experience has mostly been adult super-heroes, but the Teen Super Team is a well-loved supers concept. The two main concepts for teen teams I've seen are: the young heroes put together by common cause, origins or foe (the original X-Men, New Mutants, Gen 13, the current incarnation of Teen Titans) or the sidekick team (previous versions of the Teen Titans, Young Avengers and, of course, Young Justice).

From a RPG perspective, the Sidekick Team provides interesting opportunities and obstacles. The opportunity is that players get to make their mentor heroes, but the obstacle is "why aren't the mentors around helping out?" The previous incarnation of the Teen Titans had the team as a sort of
"weekend getaway" for Robin, Superboy, et al. YJ is going with the "sidekick team" as a training opportunity / missions the elder heroes can't get involved in.

But I get ahead of myself. This episode starts off with each of Kid Flash, Speedy, Robin and Aqualad having a short mission with their mentors. From a tabletop perspective, it's possible the GM ran it all simultaneously, with each teen character playing both their primary character and their mentor. Or, the group could run them in sequence, with each player handing their mentor to the player on their left. 

Then we get to the scene at the Hall of Justice, where Our Heroes learn that they aren't getting the all-access experience they were expecting. Then Speedy quits. Maybe Speedy was an NPC all along, and his speech was prepared to seed the idea with the PCs that the teens have reason to rebel against their mentors. Or maybe the GM was encouraging a troupe-style game, and said that Speedy/Red Arrow didn't have to join the team so long as the player came up with more of a team player PC. With Red Arrow's story arc, I'd lean towards Speedy being an NPC. But when we get further along in the story arc, I'll talk more about the Speedy is a PC vs NPC. 

So anyway, the GM pretty much waved the "why don't you go investigate the fire at Cadmus?" plot under the PC's' collective noses. From there, it's a pretty standard "investigate the evil mad science lair" until the reveal of Superboy. But more about him in next episode's info. 

And now the bonus material. Over the next few days, I'll be posting writeups of the characters in the episode using the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying rules. 

This episode's writeups will be:

Player Character Datafiles 
Aqualad
Kid Flash
Robin

Watcher Datafiles
Aquaman
Batman
Captain Cold
Dubbliex
Flash
Green Arrow 
Guardian
Icicle Jr. 
Killer Frost
Mister Freeze 
Project Cadmus (as a setting)
     G-Elves
     G-Nomes
     G-Trolls