It's 1942, and all the able-bodied men are going off to fight the Axis, so only the female pulp heroes remain to protect LA (and the nation) from Nazis, Commies, crazed occultists, the movie industry, and other pulp villains.
The power level we agreed on (at least, those of us who weren't pushing Eve Online to students) was somewhere around high-end pulp or low-end superheroics. (In Champions terms, something like 75+75 and 30-40 active points.) GMing duties will be strictly rotated, so that Earl doesn't end up running all the time. I didn't duck fast enough, so I get to be first GM. I arbitrarily declare the rotation order to be: Trip (cultists) Adam (Nazis) Chrisber (Mafia) Christy (???) Dave (???) Earl (The Movie Industry) Jeremy (Commies) Besides being easy to remember, this has the virtue of maximizing the time until Jeremy has to run, and also puts off Earl's first session until almost everyone else has had a chance, thus reducing the likelihood that he will inadvertantly seize all power. As first GM, I get to propose background stuff, but as merely one among seven, I have to give you all the chance to shoot it down. So here goes. I see five sorts of "superpowers": * Hyperskills, like muscle reading, secret Oriental fighting arts that let you take down the biggest of bruisers with a tap on a pressure point, or being able to consistently crease people's skulls with your .45. These have been around forever, pretty much. * Psychic powers, such as aura reading, clouding men's minds, or getting glimpses of your impending doom. The line between psychic powers and hyperskills is awfully fuzzy: do you really cloud men's minds, or do you just project "I'm not important" with your body language? Again, psychic powers (or con artists faking psychic powers) have been around for a long time. * Occult powers; not so much actual spell-casting as specific powers gained through occult means (ancient gem your grandfather looted from darkest Africa that gives you superhuman strength, special meditations that clear your mind so you can get advice directly from On High), or perhaps single "spells" learned from (or inflicted upon you by) crazed magicians. If anyone really understands sorcery from his basic principles, they are no doubt completely mad; any occultist with any degree of understanding is at least highly eccentric and probably paranoid. Conmen abound, and sometimes the two categories overlap. The line between psychic powers and "real magic" is also very fuzzy. People with true occult powers usually have some sort of sign by which they may be known (first finger as long as middle finger, glowing gem embedded in forehead, curdles milk by mere presence) but not always. All the best magic dates from the dawn of history or before, of course. * Mad science. This is probably actually a subset of hyperskills, although there's no reason a bizarre invention couldn't use psychic energies or occult principles. Again, anyone who has a thorough understanding of scientific or engineering principles beyond those commonly known in 1942 is probably bonkers; having stumbled upon just one strange but useful phenomenon is more usual. Such devices are usually not usable by anyone except the inventor, but then, this is an age in which cars have manual chokes because even something as simple as a carburator can't be trusted to Just Work. Mad science really got going in the late Victorian era, but was practiced at least as far back as Newton. * Actual superpowers! You know: flight, superstrength, invulnerability, beams from the eyes. These usually have a superficial physical explanation, and are accompanied by biological changes, like new magnetodynamic organs for flight or glands that secrete flammable oils for a firey damage shield. How obvious the changes are depends on how desperate you are for points; x-ray machines are quite primitive and things like NMR are decades in the future, so purely internal changes could be completely undetected until the autopsy. The physical changes make superpowers sort of like involuntary mad science, but they could also be like psychic or magical abilities. These have only shown up in the past twenty years or so, and seem to be linked to cities: not everyone monsters out while living in a city, but if they're in the countryside, they were born or at least conceived in a city. This means superheroes very preferentially occur in white^H^H^H^H^H modern, industrialized countries. At this stage of biological knowledge, the phrase "next step in human evolution" can be used freely. Feel free to mix and match, or lurk in the shady regions between categories. In any case, being hard to kill is encouraged; even people who just know a few tricks should have extra hit points or heal fast or something. The consensus was that LA should be our setting, so make characters accordingly. If you don't start out already thumping heads as a team, I can probably arrange for the first adventure to get you together, but it's up to you guys to stick together.
So far, the characters we have are:
Their adventures:
This file was last modified at 1320 on 27Feb04 by trip@idiom.com.