Only Heroes

How to tell if you are a hero in one easy step: Are you motivated by self-interest in your actions? If yes, you are a supervillain. If no, you may be a super hero. (Stanley Milgram, 1956, in the letters page of American Psychiatric Quarterly)

They have been among us since the 1950s, heroes and villains larger than life with powers and abilities to match, able to fly or survive impossible situations, destroy entire meteors or create wondrous artifacts of the world to come. And yet for every hero, a dozen or more villains would emerge whose goals were less kind, whose motivations were darker and whose desires were as wild and mad as the heroes were gallant and brave. Explanations ranged from 'the War' to human nature, religious convictions, nature vs. nurture and most everything else under the sun. The truth is that, like why superhumans exist, no one knows what motivates people to take the paths they take in life. Great men, as Lord Acton pointed out, are almost always bad men, but there were somehow always enough heroes to hold back the shadows.

The world has changed much since the days of the second great wold war: we not only have our defenders and our villains, but there are computers whose power could scarcely have been imaged in that era and the world has become both utopic and orwellian somehow at the same time. There are companies with their own private superhero, the children of superhumans with powers that put even their parents to shame and seven known alien species that have had contact with humanity in this brave new world we find ourselves living in. It is not our parents world and it is far better for it.

Or is was, until recently: a flash of indigo light filled the entire world visible to the naked eye as far away as the crab nebula, and when it cleared most of the superheroes and all the truly powerful villains were simply gone. Where, and why? No one knows. Best guess is some supervillains weapon worked better than expected [by which we mean it worked at all...] and took them all Elsewhere. Even the hero known as Walker, who could move between time and space, has not returned. They may be dead, or lost, or trapped. No one knows.

But the villains that remain are attacking banks, Walmart, Home Depot and anywhere else they can garner supplies from. There have always been more villains, but the heroes were more powerful. This is no longer the case, and for the first time people are feeling scared of superhumans, worried about the world in ways they never really were before. Oh, there have been Death Rays and Planet Bombs, but nothing ever came from them: it was as if the villains needed to be stopped, or it had all become a kind of private game for everyone to enjoy and suddenly the balance has shifted.

The only problem is the police are outgunned and undermanned and the heroes left are the ones who never ended up on teams or made the news, the ones who aren't much more than regular themselves and now the only ones left to somehow work together and keep the world from falling apart until the real heroes make it back. If they ever do at all....

Game Concept: The PCs are very much underdogs who need to work together in order to defeat the supervillains left in the city of Darwin Bay. Unlike most games, you're not as powerful as your enemies and will need a lot of luck and skill to survive.

PC Creation: BESM3, 150 points to build your PC with. You can take only ~10 points in defects. After this, you have 20 points to spend in just skills.

Your PCs will be at the upper limit of the human level in BESM bencharks, to whit: Attributes cannot be higher than 3, Combat Value maxes out at 7, Health at 90, your damage multiplier at 5.

Note: Up to 5 bonus points can be gained from creating NPCs and teams for the world: what major teams used to exist? What villains were terrifying? What ones still exist who are the new Terror? Completely statted NPCs and the like are not necessary as much as fun blurbs to explain them all to everyone else.

Note #2: Dynamic powers will not be allowed. Magic will be very limited, as this is intended to be a magic-lite setting for the most part. Companion is actively discouraged unless it is flat-out necessary for a PC concept.

Tone: This game isn't intended to be 4-colour, but neither is it grim & gritty. The superheroes and villains have an unspoken code about not killing [many] civilians. And each other, by and large, but this owes more to practicality than anything else: the death of The Atomic in 1971 left a good chunk of the Sudan radioactive. Likewise, prisons exist for superhumans than do manage to contain them, laws are observed and sentences served out for crimes.

The world: Superhumans have existed for over 60 years. This is known to most everyone and understood as such: the kid who skips too many classes is as likely to have questions about having powers as for people to wonder about drugs. A fair number of superhumans keep their identities secret, mostly due to the paparazzi and for issues of privacy. Super-tech does exist, but is mostly insanely expensive to make, operate and run.

While the government keeps no official register of superhumans, the local police are generally going to react unfavourably to unknowns: visiting the police station to introduce yourself and what you can do is generally an asset. The police do have advanced tech of their own, but it is often inferior to what villains can devise and they have a lot of red tape to go through to use it.

Terms:
Metahuman/Superhuman: any human who manifests abilities and skills beyond the ordinary. Not all become heroes or villains, after all.

Superhero: anyone who uses said ability for the good of others, by and large.

Supervillain: not a superhero. Often motivated by self-interest, and many are technically insane (though the courts refuse to accept 'supervillain' as a psychiatric condition to avoid a prison sentence).  

Vigilante: humans who get tech, armour and what have you and face down supervillains themselves. The police tend to dislike them and most don't survive all that long.

Mutant: a term for any superhuman (and alien) whose appearance doesn't fit with human norms. You can still be a hero or villain just fine, but will be received with a bit more suspicion in some corners of the world. The world has long since moved on from 'mutations are evil' and the like of the 70s but one can expect double-takes and wariness. That most mutants tend to the hero side of the spectrum helps.

MetaMax: the prisons designed to hold criminal superhumans. Built to withstand wars, said prisoners could dampen and destroy any metahuman power though the technology that made them is apparently both very, very expensive and stationary.