Campaign Timeline

The original DC Heroes campaigns followed a timeline based roughly on the one established at the end of the Zero Hour crisis. This was a 10-year timeline for the modern DC universe, where Year 1 was the year Superman made his first public appearance and Year 10 was the year that Zero Hour took place in. I felt that was a little too short a span of time, so in my campaign world the events of Zero Hour took place in Year 12 of the Modern Heroic Age, not Year 10. I had already been running the campaign for more than a year by the time the Zero Hour comics came out, so the official starting point of my first game fell in the tail end of Year 11, a few months (game time) before Zero Hour.

All of this was actually established a few years after the Zero Hour comics had come out, when I went through an exercise to try and straighten out recent comics continuity to help firm up the setting. Working from some reference points in the comics was able to make a loose estimate of how much "in-universe time" had passed for the characters in my game, and therefore for my version of the DC Universe. It wound up working out to roughly one year of time in game for every three years in real time that the game had been running. By the time I wrapped up the last of my DC Heroes games I reckoned that nearly four years had passed for the campaign universe since the start of the original game. This would make it Year 15 of the Modern Heroic Age, so characters like Superman and Batman had been active for around fourteen years by this point.

Which brings things to the new DC Heroes Rebirth campaign. While I could have set the game immediately after the end of the last DC Heroes campaign, I wanted some time to have passed. Given the amount of time that has passed since that game ended, using the three-to-one ratio of for in-game passage of time that would mean around six years would have passed for the characters had the campaign not ended. This felt like a good number so I decided to go with it; the new game would start in Year 21 of the Modern Heroic Age, twenty years after the debut of Superman. Of those six years, roughly the first half would stick with DC Comics continuity up to Flashpoint while the second half would be my own timeline.