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Old 02-17-2019, 10:50 AM   #935
Astromancer
 
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
Default Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

Basically, this setting takes inspiration from Kingdom Come and Aberrant as well as the grotesque depiction of the USA in the game Aeon.

In this world, superheroes show up in the eastern USA and Canada in the late 1930s and are prominent in the 1940s. After a fallow period in the early 1950s, there was a second period of stronger more versatile supers in the 1960s. This time supers were from the whole of the North American Continent and Western Europe, The 1970s were a less active period for supers, but the 1980s had more supers and of a wider variety than before. This time they were found throughout the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and maritime Northeast Asia. The period from 1990 to 2020 was relatively less active but starting in 2020 there were about twenty times more supers than ever before and they were far more widely spread. Supers come from everywhere on the Earth, although they are more common from those areas from which they have come from for the longest time.

The behavior of the large numbers of powerful supers in the 2020s was generally a disaster. Militias of poor farmers from Latin America, fed on decades of Anti-American propaganda, raided the US regularly. Bandits from throughout the third world caused Chaos. Routine super fights reduced Israel to rubble and cost millions of lives. Ulster Unionists attempted to wipeout all Catholics in the North and the whole Republic of Ireland. With hellish results. Terrorists empowered finally crushed democracy and rejoiced in the vast slaughter. This led to the reaction.

A small group of the most powerful supers allied with the surviving governments planned and achieved a crackdown. Many supers died, and the guilty weren't alone. Supers who had acted honorably and many nonsupers who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time or inconvenient to the powerful also died. Many supers fled to the stars.

Many of the older supers still active, the Otherworldly Champion, the Warrior Woman, the Ringwielder and his Children, the God Blessed and Empowered Twins, the Super Soldier, the Speedster, the Stormwielder, and her alliance, the Thunder God, the Stage Magician with Real Powers, and the Sorcerer Supreme, formed an alliance with others to preserve Justice, Fairness, Freedom, and Democracy. They were betrayed by the Dark Detective and the British Street Wizard. Crushing all opposition to the new elites. Only the magicians, with the aid of the Sea King, escaped.

It is now 2120, the Sino-Western Hegemony rules the world. Most people are Third Class citizens, they are regulated and trained to serve. Second Class citizens they are the middle managers they are regulated tightly and trained to run the Third Class citizens for the Elites. The First Class citizens are enfranchised, one vote for every ten-thousand credits in taxes. Corporations are very much people in this world and have votes on the same system. Elites are drawn from the 1st Class Citizens. Like the Mandarins they see themselves as proven worthy and superior.

This world is very careful to detect as many supers as possible in the womb or early childhood to have them raised by and as members of the elites. Those detected as older children or teenagers are drafted into the defense forces and tamed to serve the elites. Those that gain superpowers later are like other disruptive elements simply imprisoned in labor camps or executed.

But the wizards that escaped with the alliance of the few surviving Atlanteans and other similar hidden peoples had settled distant worlds. Some of those supers and others that fled to the stars joined them to build a just, fair and free world. Others, the arrogant, the bigoted, those with incompatible visions went elsewhere.

The World that the Wizards and their allies built soon became lovely and had many comfortable cities but few people. The Stage Magician with real powers had become the Sorceress Supreme and wed the Ward of the Sea King, a mighty wizard in his own right. With her increased powers and the aide of her husband and her children, she has started to search the Earth and find people who would make good citizens of her world. With her powers, it isn't hard to bring them to her world.

She has been doing this for decades. She now has built an underground of supers and others opposed to the Hegemony and its tyranny. They are constantly hunted by the Order of Harmony (the secret police). The elites are slowly realizing that new powers that could challenge the Hegemony are growing out among the stars.

The PCs in this campaign are either freedom fighters against a World dominating fascist Cyberpunk-style Corporate state with Superpowered agents. Or those agents desperate to prevent the return of chaos and terror.
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Last edited by Astromancer; 02-18-2019 at 01:23 PM.
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