Ex-Heroes

SYSTEM: ICONS

Rogue Genius Games does a series of heroes called Iconic Legends, where each hero strongly resembles a hero in the comics, so you could even (if you wanted) file off the serial number and give it a new paint job, and voila, there's that iconic hero for you. (And you should check them out; they're awesome. I've seen versions for Mutants & Masterminds and ICONS, and I think there are Supers! versions as well.)

Except that I kept running into the problem that I often have with iconic heroes from the comic books--they take the spotlight away from my guys. So I was thinking, what if they're all fallen legends, legends who have stopped fighting for one reason or another. It would be twice as much work, but you'd present them in their current state, and at their prime, so if someone wants to play with Batman (RGG has done no DC heroes yet), they can have the seriously overpowered version, or they get the bitter guy in a wheelchair who's still obsessed with fighting crime, so he's passing info on to the players. They can play Superman, or they can play the investigative reporter who knows lots of stuff but gold kryptonite took away his powers. They can play Wonder Woman or they can play the Amazonian ambassador who has the public eye on her too much to go in the field any more.

Time to go to work; a sample of this later.

Edited to add: So I'm tentatively calling this "Fallen Icons" and I'll do at least DC's big three. I'm using DC Adventures to guide my character choices: if they made it into the Hero's Handbook, they're possibilities.