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Old 06-18-2016, 05:37 AM   #7
patchwork
 
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Join Date: Oct 2011
Default Re: Capebusters -- brainstorming a single-setting game

Read Marshal Law, if you haven't already. "I hunt heroes. I haven't found any yet". All supers have a single origin in Marshal Law, a super-soldier serum that varies enough to grant many different types of powers, which, at the end of a war, leaves a lot of traumatized and badly-socialized young men (female supers, like soldiers, are significantly less than 50% of the total) with powers to be integrated back into society and it goes...badly.

The other one to look at is Aberrant. The games tend to focus on the "early stages", with the first supers appearing in 1997, but they had a future timeline mapped out that was not pretty at all. The rule of law become a society's weakness rather than a strength when super-intelligent people can use the legal system more effectively than any baseline; high level supers with water and earth control can and do rearrange the environment as they see fit, and ignore baseline scientists on the grounds that their power lets them perceive what is necessary directly (and perhaps they're even correct!). And those are the defensible ones - technokinetics controlling the Web, and spy satellites, and using them according to private whim. Perhaps you've heard of "SWATing"? Suppose an obnoxious young troll-boy can control machines enough to call in an airstrike on someone he doesn't like? Bringing back the dead (and Why We Don't Do That) is a viable supers adventure for certain types of super. Democracy fails when telepaths make legislators enact the laws they want; you can't vote the bastards out because the telepaths will shrug and control the next one too. And we're STILL dealing with the merely self-absorbed, not the genuinely malefic. And the genuinely malefic definitely exist. The world of Aberrant gets more and more terrifying until a world-changing event in 2060, and an Aberrant game set even halfway to that point, in 2030, makes most cyberpunk games look positively cheerful and optimistic. The Directorate is a secret organization of baselines trying to find a key, perhaps genetic or retroviral, to supers expression and "cure" it (and they have to be secret, because the supers and their puppet governments would crush them), but that leads to a lot of human medical experimentation without informed consent....just some ideas. Capebusters who believe in democracy and the rule of law, and really understand what supers are going to do to those ideas, can be scary, creepy fanatics and yet still be the lesser evil, depending.
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