Posted: Tue Jul 30, 2013 8:23 pm
Well for instance in the US there's a massive political panic over the emergence of superpowered beings. The first supers begin appearing in late 2011 so the issue quickly becomes politicized, with Left and Right taking sides on the issue of supers rights versus super regulation. Before a real movement for superhuman rights takes place, however, the government's primary response is to a) try and cover things up and b) try to protect people from superhumans by putting them in camps to protect the general public.
My campaign is very much deconstructivist Iron Age superheroes/champions, so Watchmen is a major influence. I.e. when Spiderman doesn't know how to pull his punches yet, and is still learning, sometimes he winds up accidentally gibbing some poor mugger into a hundred million gory pieces. One of the NPC heroes/villains (most supers are undecided yet) was a pro-football player, and when his powers as a speedster/brick "switched on" he was returning a kick at an NFL game. Suddenly, he was running at the speed of sound with the force of a bullet train and no idea how to control those powers, and wound up turning the guys trying to tackle him into a fine red mist and then crashing straight through the end zone and through the bleachers and through the stadium walls, vaporizing dozens of fans caught in the way. But that kind of stuff's just about applying the real life rules of PHYSICS to super powers in a way that is not classically four color comic-booky.
Recently, PCs, some NPC supers, and their patron/organizer got their asses handed to them big time by JSOC commandos (essentially SEAL Team 6) re-tasked to the operational control of the Defense Intelligence Agency for domestic operations on American Soil in response to the massive chaos that resulted from the sudden, unexplained appearance of superhuman beings (and other things, that might best be described as not human at all).
The supers might have fantastic superhuman powers, but the Joint Special Operations Command spec-ops teams have vastly superior skills, training, organization, and equipment, and so far that has won the day pretty decisively, at least until the "metahumans" learn to cooperate (although the chances of that are slim). The raid some of the PCs made on the camp outside of Detroit others were interred in went disastrously, their patron, the Oracle (whose powers include total precognitive clairsentience, and nothing else, and who serves as an organizational and inspirational role, but who never should have been a front-line combatant) took an armor piercing sniper's bullet to the brain and died for their proverbial sins, and the escaped prisoners and the rest of the PCs barely managed to teleport out with their lives.
Of course, the appearance of the first US Gov't sponsored superhuman helped turn the battle between the superheroes/villains and the JSOC commandoes even further against the more-than-human side.
Currently the PCs are attempting to kidnap President Obama from the White House to negotiate for some basic rights and protections for human beings. This is an extremely desperate maneuver and it shows. The campaign has been frozen in the middle of that combat for months and months, since a couple players have moved away/become too busy to game. Which sucks, I really want to see how it turns out. First time in my history at a GM that one of the entries on an initiative chart was "Barack Obama" LOL.
My campaign is very much deconstructivist Iron Age superheroes/champions, so Watchmen is a major influence. I.e. when Spiderman doesn't know how to pull his punches yet, and is still learning, sometimes he winds up accidentally gibbing some poor mugger into a hundred million gory pieces. One of the NPC heroes/villains (most supers are undecided yet) was a pro-football player, and when his powers as a speedster/brick "switched on" he was returning a kick at an NFL game. Suddenly, he was running at the speed of sound with the force of a bullet train and no idea how to control those powers, and wound up turning the guys trying to tackle him into a fine red mist and then crashing straight through the end zone and through the bleachers and through the stadium walls, vaporizing dozens of fans caught in the way. But that kind of stuff's just about applying the real life rules of PHYSICS to super powers in a way that is not classically four color comic-booky.
Recently, PCs, some NPC supers, and their patron/organizer got their asses handed to them big time by JSOC commandos (essentially SEAL Team 6) re-tasked to the operational control of the Defense Intelligence Agency for domestic operations on American Soil in response to the massive chaos that resulted from the sudden, unexplained appearance of superhuman beings (and other things, that might best be described as not human at all).
The supers might have fantastic superhuman powers, but the Joint Special Operations Command spec-ops teams have vastly superior skills, training, organization, and equipment, and so far that has won the day pretty decisively, at least until the "metahumans" learn to cooperate (although the chances of that are slim). The raid some of the PCs made on the camp outside of Detroit others were interred in went disastrously, their patron, the Oracle (whose powers include total precognitive clairsentience, and nothing else, and who serves as an organizational and inspirational role, but who never should have been a front-line combatant) took an armor piercing sniper's bullet to the brain and died for their proverbial sins, and the escaped prisoners and the rest of the PCs barely managed to teleport out with their lives.
Of course, the appearance of the first US Gov't sponsored superhuman helped turn the battle between the superheroes/villains and the JSOC commandoes even further against the more-than-human side.
Currently the PCs are attempting to kidnap President Obama from the White House to negotiate for some basic rights and protections for human beings. This is an extremely desperate maneuver and it shows. The campaign has been frozen in the middle of that combat for months and months, since a couple players have moved away/become too busy to game. Which sucks, I really want to see how it turns out. First time in my history at a GM that one of the entries on an initiative chart was "Barack Obama" LOL.