[awesomenessofme1]

I spent some time trying to think of a more clever name, but sometimes simple works best.

This thread is an idea spawned from a random flash of inspiration I had during a discussion on the GURPS Discord server (shameless plug). The idea goes thus: What if you took the Marvel universe, brought down the power level across the board, and gave everything a bit more grounding in reality? I shouldn’t go any further without mentioning Phantasm’s Marvel Reboot thread, which has given me both inspiration and a useful cross-reference for my builds, as well as my own Malice setting, which you can see as a kind of precursor to this thread. Now, onto the juicy details!

Nerfed Marvel (I’ll just call it NMU from now on, to save time) is set in 2004. The age of superheroes began five years ago, when the Fantastic Four were empowered by cosmic radiation after a successful orbit of the planet Mars. In the years since, many heroes and villains have surfaced (or resurfaced). Further details will be included in various biographies and lore posts.

From a meta standpoint, these are some of the parameters I’m working with for the setting (subject to be added to, unlikely to change):
No magic.
No explicit supernatural or mystical entities.
No aliens, gods, Atlanteans, vampires, etc. At least, none on Earth. Just humans and mutants. ("Human" here meaning humans, mutates, altered humans, and whatever term I haven't heard of that's still basically human.)
As mentioned, an across-the-board drop in power levels. I’m trying to keep relative power rankings similar (i.e. a character that’s much stronger than another should still be much stronger), but relative power levels will likely change significantly.

It’s worth noting what Marvel content I’ll be working from in this setting. My actual direct comic book knowledge is limited. I’ll be basing my builds (and to a lesser extent lore) primarily on the movies (MCU, X-Men, 2000s FF, Raimi Spider-Man, and a few others), TV shows (especially the X-Men animated series), sources like the marvel.com biographies, and pop-cultural osmosis. I may start reading comics more in the future, but I can't guarantee it. Combined with the whole conceit of the setting, this means many characters will be drastically different from any particular version of them. I hope you understand.

The first set of characters I’ll be posting are the Avengers (Ant-Man, Wasp, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America), followed by Loki. I have the stats done for all of them, and I’ll start posting them as I finish the full write-ups.