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.
