“Everyone knows what supers are. They’re those guys in the comics that dress up in fancy costumes and wield fancy powers.”
Not quite. You know better, for you are one of them yourself. And you don’t wear a stupid costume or fly around in the sky. You remember a couple of guys who did that. First came up the villain. Threatened to destroy the world. It didn’t take long for the compulsory hero to appear. It never went down to the “epic battle”. The villain was taken down by a single police unit, composed of ordinary people. Although you think it was lead by a more subtle super. After that, the “hero” got harassed by the press, fans, and just about everyone else. The publicity was too much, and he committed suicide. As far as you know. Those two fates were enough of a warning for you to stay hidden.
You also know that you aren’t the only one of your kind. Every now and then, when you see some certain people, you just… know that they have powers too. You don’t know them, you don’t know their powers… You only know that you aren’t alone, and that you know others of your kind when you see them.
Maybe you haven’t been forced to use your powers yet. You hope you never will. But you fear that your hope is in vain. And when you do have to use those powers, instead of a cool costume you just pull a cloth over your face and hope no one recognises you. Until that, you’ll just live the life of an ordinary man. If you can.
The above is a short intro story to a supers world of my very own devising I wrote up one boring day at work. That world was formed in my mind long before I had even heard of Watchmen, which would be closest of more known works to the power level of my setting, or when Heroes , which is closest in themes to what I had in mind, was still just a bunch of paper.
I’ve run a game in that very setting, but it stopped short after two or three sessions. I’d like to run more, but I don’t think I know of people who quite share my interests in that. I mean, yeah, I have a few friends who love to roleplay in almost any setting. But I like to throw in some references to the source materials in my games. And what fun would that be if no one got the references? And, well, low-power “super”heroes aren’t exactly what most people look for in the supers genre.
Hmm, yeah, the power level. I said earlier that Watchmen would be the closest representative of that. Well, closest, but still not quite what I had in mind, what with Dr. Manhattan and possibly Ozymandias. I’m thinking of a world where a “speedster” mignt be a guy who runs 100 metres in four seconds, not someone who breaks the sound barrier. Or a regenerating power can grow back missing digits or close wounds much faster than normal, but it still takes time and leaves scars. And maybe hurts like hell. And a Master of Magnetism would be just that, a guy who can control magnetic forces in some degree, but not stop bullets or crush cars.
On the other hand, Heroes actually captures the theme quite well. The PCs are just ordinary people, who happen to be able to do something nearly no one else can. The problems they encounter might well be something on the scale with more four-colour supers (or Heroes) but the solutions would be more mundane. No rewriting a villain’s psyche to make him good again, no time-hopping to tell someone to save the cheerleader, no blasting one’s way through a military compound (unless you somehow got your hands on a tank).
And now that I’ve said it all, I’m even more annoyed that I haven’t been able to GM more in that world.
Tags: RPGs
