Superhero General

We had an awesome superhero general last week filled with some cool ideas and great discussion. Let's try to keep it up!

Talk about your plots, get help with designing characters, and discuss potential systems here!

>System repository
pastebin.com/bU7vZFAN

> Superhero thread
I'm really tempted to post the story of Jackal.

Just spit it out already, faggot.

So yesterday I had my inaugural session of a new campaign. We're trying out the Masks system for the first time, and it went pretty well. We burned through character creation, then did a short and sweet prologue that helped establish everyone's 'normal' routines, and then a bit of interaction between them. The session ended on them starting to plan for their next adventure.

Which leaves me with planning on what that adventure's gonna turn out to be! I figured I might as well talk about it in a thread, see what people think, and if they have any suggestions.

I won't bore everyone with unnecessary details. Here's the essentials:

The backstory of one of the heroes, Venn, is that he was hired to steal a device from a corporation, "SPNS" (Syndicate of Personal Nanosecurity). When he returned to give it to his employer, he found them dead. Desperate, he activated the device to escape, and discovered it was a teleportation device.

Over the past week, the journalism teacher of two of the heroes, Skull and AO (they're teenage heroes) has been hinting heavily that he has a big scoop for his blog. They both independently looked into it, though one of them called Venn in to help, since his hints made it sound dangerous, and they found he'd broken into SPNS and been detained. They broke him out of his cell, helped him home, and hoped that'd be that.

The guy, though, wrote an article about "the punks" who saved him from SPNS on his blog, and it went viral. So now they've kinda been forced into being a team. They exchange contact info, decide to work together since everyone seems to want them to, and nothing happens... until the next time Skull and AO go to class, and find their teacher is gone, replaced by a substitute.

Worried, Skull ditches class and texts everyone to look into the whereabouts of the teacher. They meet up, get to planning, and that's the end of the session.

(Cont in next post)

> Join a group online, playing Mutants and Masterminds.
> All players are new, DM is extremely hands off, tells me to create whatever I want.
> So I create Jackal.
> Jackal lacks any superpowers beyond offscreen teleportation through the air ducts.
> Otherwise, he's a pretty generic cowl-type hero - he's got a stun gun, smoke bombs, a baton, C4. He's a stealther with some supertech to distantly jam guns, and he's got a grappling hook.
> His defining characteristics are that he's kinda a dick. Not some sort of grand douche, just generally arrogant, impolite, doesn't think much of authority figures.
> That's basically it.
> Another player creates a flying brick - superfast, superstrong, flies. He's essentially Iron Man, except his armor is magic.
> Our token girl creates a fey with telepathic abilities and some magic.
> The fourth player creates some irish guy with a golden magic spear, but he barely shows up to sessions.
> While this game had some memorable - mainly bad - moments, I'll focus on Jackal's misadventures in particular.
> From the beginning, he has it pretty rough - our first session is an entrance exam to the local version of Justice League. It's some sort of VR with alien enemies.
> Flying Brick decides to establish himself as the leader from the start and formulates a plan - Jackal decides that the plan is stupid and goes his own way, sabotaging virtual aliens' engines.
> When we're done, the simulation ends - three of the heroes are accepted into the league, but Jackal isn't - as he's told, he's too independent, too reckless.
> Jackal shrugs, it's not the end of the world - he'll just continue being a vigilante.
> Despite him not being a member of the league, he's still a party member - just unoficially. However, after a few adventures I begin noticing something.

> Flying Brick, Fey and Spearman seem to not like him. Understandable - even kinda what I was going for.
> The League, cops, politicians, even villains - everybody except for his robot waifu that DM inserted to throw him a bone - seem to hate his guts. Absolutely despise him.
> Huh.
> At the time, I've thought that it's because, well, he's a dick.
> It wasn't until nearly the end of the campaign when I've learned the truth.
> So, after we're done fighting nazis, aliens, zombies, weird crystal dudes, aliens again, terrorists and other villains, DM throws demonic ninjas at us.
> Each of us does his thing - Brick punches, Fey shoots magic blasts, I shoot people.
> After we're done, I decide to interrogate one of them about their leader - so I grab him by the throat and scream into his face.
> DM says that he doesn't react. Because he's dead.
> I ask him if it's some sort of cyanide pill, but he says no.
> "You've killed him."
> Ask him how it happened.
> "Well, you shot him in the face. With a gun. You said so yourself."
> Suddenly, everything becomes clear.
> This whole time the DM and the whole party thought that Jackal was murdering his way through encounters, shooting everyone dead and leaving a river of blood behind the party.
> My character sheet clearly says "stun gun".
> Wait.
> Ask the DM if he ever actually looked at my character sheet.
> "Well, not really, I've thought you can handle chargen. Why?"
> mfw

Topkek

They've given me a lot of hooks to work with, even besides the plot, so now I get the joy of making something interesting out of it all.

The Punks have all assumed SPNS - "Spoons" - are evil, and that the journalism teacher is in danger, possibly dead, because of that big scoop he was investigating. Their evidence in favor of this hypothesis is that Venn's employers died after he was hired to steal the teleporter, and that SPNS seems to have serious security and gadgetry for a company none of them have ever heard of.

I think I want to punish them for just leaping to a conclusion, here. It was well within the right of this SPNS corporation to detain the teacher - he broke in, after all! - and there's no evidence that the death of Venn's employer was caused by SPNS at all.

I'm thinking SPNS is a paragovernmental agency, masquerading as a corporation, that investigates how to 'create' superheroes with advanced technology. Rather than hope and pray that heroes are born that happen to want to help our their government, the government can just give powers to people they've already recruited. Much more efficient.

This means SPNS is dangerous - since they want to stay secret, and are rightfully suspicious of anyone looking into them - but they aren't necessarily villainous. I like that angle.

The people who killed Venn's employers, then, could be supervillains looking to interfere with SPNS. Whether this means corporate espionage, reverse-engineering their devices, or political purposes - such as the prevention of a hand-picked governmental superhero team, for example - I'm not sure about.

Any ideas on what angle sounds most interesting? So far this campaign seems to be leaning towards being more adventurous and light-hearted, though with grounded real-life elements - kinda like Spider-Man. That leads me to lean away from political and morally gray stuff, at least for the first adventure.

Bahaha! That's gold. How did that never come up during play, though!?

Exactly.
How many sessions went on that you never tried to interrogate someone before?