This is just a little idea I worked up for a thread over at RPG.net. I thought it was interesting so I’m going to share it here. Basically it’s a slightly tweaked format for a street level supers game.
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Seems like there’s one of us in every precinct these days. We don’t announce it, it’s not quite so you’d notice, but some of us are different. Just a little bit tough, or stronger, or faster. Me? I took a bullet that should have landed me in a grave. Three shots right to the chest with teflon coated bullets. As it was I was laid up for a good seven weeks and landed a desk job down here in records. But I lived.
I thought about what had happened long and hard as I was recovering. I should have been dead, but I wasn’t. Most of the guys on the force just told me I was too damn stubborn to die, but I knew the truth. I was just a little bit more than human, just that much tougher. Once I recovered I started checking all the incident reports and discovered something rather startling. In my town alone there were three other guys and two women that had survived unusual incidents. Reports of an officer dead lifting a car off a wreck victim which was officially cited as him pushing it off in a surge of adrenaline. Well, I talked to Lt. Williams and told him my suspicions. He then showed me that he could bend a 1 inch steel bar almost three inches. Nothing like you’d see in the comic books but he sure as hell had more strength than anyone else alive.
So Frank and I began our search for others like us. We managed to gather almost four hundred people from around the states with varying powers. One kid, only thirteen at the time, managed to create some sort of super cell phone for all of us. It could scan things, take pictures, do conference calls and do rudimentary chemical analysis. Granted none of us but that punk kid really understand how they work, but they’re still helpful.
To what end? Well, once I started working in records I started noticing a trend with a lot of these unsolved and cold cases. Strange evidence patterns, unusual suspects, just all manner of strange things. I suppose folks who watch too much TV would have claimed they were X-files or something. I didn’t, I knew the truth. Just as there are hundreds of us who have these special gifts and live normal lives, there are hundreds of criminals. Probably twice the number that we have, since power tends to corrupt. This isn’t great power, but it sure is good power. And it’s corrupting people pretty damn well.
Problem is, there’s no real evidence to close these cases. Trails have gone cold and killers, rapists, and worse have gone free because we simply don’t have the skills to put them behind bars. Well, that changes now. We’ve got our network of people all over the states and you’d be surprised just how many of us are in law enforcement, or the justice system, or the medical field. See, those of us with these powers who don’t become corrupted often have a draw to serve the public good. We’re never going to be funded or recognized by the police departments or the U.S. Government. So our job is to find these bastards, collect the evidence to link them to the crimes, then arrest them with that proof.
Every time someone like me somewhere in the U.S. finds a case that’s been shelved due to inconclusive evidence or strange circumstances we send out the call for heroes. We don’t wear tights. We don’t go in and beat up the bad guys and leave them in front of the police station. But we sure as hell put them behind bars. The old fashioned way; with a badge and good investigation work.
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Basically this is a low powered street game that follows the rules of the real world. You can’t go in and beat up the bad guys – you have to gather evidence and arrest them. Sure you might get shot at and sometimes you’ll have to make a citizen’s arrest (or a real arrest, if you’ve got a law officer in the team) but by and large you’re doing real investigative work. This is basically a weird mish-mash of a mystery game, Global Frequency, and low powered supers. It also owes a bit to Hunter: the Reckoning in that you might sometimes fight out and out supernatural things that aren’t human.
If I were to run this using Mutants and Masterminds I’d go a straight Power Level 6 but with about 100 points to build with. I’d limit everyone to about 1-3 powers in a very closely themed power set. The idea is that you’re not clearly above humanity, only at the very peak of human potential with a few extraordinary powers.
