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A whole campaign or set of stories occurred to me in the course of defending bad guy of the week campaigns, where there is no overarching evil bad guy...by giving me an overarching evil bad guy.
For now, let's call it Intro City. Better names are possible, but I'm scrambling to get this down before I forget (and before I have to rake the lawn). Intro City is a small city with a university and the main employer is the tech sector. The second-highest employer is probably the university itself. For some reason, I think Ithaca, New York, but that might be totally false because I know very little about Ithaca except that there's a university there.
Two heroes in mind that tie into this setting: Generic Hero and Bubblegumshoe. We'll start with Bubblegumshoe first.
She's at the university, though she's fifteen. Smart. Thinks of herself primarily as a detective because she was heavily influenced by Nancy Drew books of the 1930s (not the revised versions since then). Why did she have access to them? Her dad is high up in the city and her mom in the university. From a supers persepective, she's probably a gadgeteer of some kind. Less Adam Strange and more Tom Swift (also perferred the 1930s version of Stratemeyer Syndicate books).
Intro City has a superhero, the self-deprecatingly named Generic Hero. He's handsome, he's a flying brick, he's secretly six months old. He's a test tube child, produced by secret labs of...oh, we don't want to call them CADMUS but that's clearly the inspiration. Call it Myrmidon, Inc, a company that is transforming illegal clones into super-powered individuals. The process is not without its problems...
Now, I don't want to recapitulate the Superboy/Young Justice storyline, so we're not going to make Generic Hero a clone of somebody. (We'll call him Jason something or other, just to give us a bit more of a tie-in to Cadmus and the dragon's teeth.) No, he's his own person, but he has escaped from the secret labs of Myrmidon...or has he?
That will be one of his Qualities: that he doesn't actually know if he's doing things of his own free will or that he's been programmed to do them.
Our first adventure starts with Generic Hero already accepted by the citizens of Intro City; maybe at this point he's still working for Myrmidon, and it's his association with Bubblegumshoe (she's not particularly girly in civilian life, so she has gone all out on the pink bubblegum themes as a superhero, to divert attention) that makes him split from the organization. Maybe the first couple of adventures are him being sent out to recapture the latest mistake, and because there are superheroes, the citizens of the city take it in stride.
Bubblegumshoe's dad is actually working hard to secure benefits and bonuses for Myrmidon, because they're a major employer in town. "Do you know how many people would be out of work if they pulled up stakes?" Her mom is helping Myrmidon in another way, because they give people a place to work after graduation.
And eventually you can get into Generic Hero's liberation, and a big showdown where they have to deal with Myrmidon in a more definitive way.
So that gives you an arc that grows out of the concepts of the first adventure, and an excuse for a number of initial bad guys.
- Look, they've got to have some kind of mental-implanting thing to put the fake memories in. Let's say it's a machine—and it's essentially a telepathy/mind control machine. What if one of the techs has gotten in too deep in gambling? Convincing a bunch of bank tellers or bookies to transfer him money might seem like a way out, until Bubblegumshoe figures out what's being done and tries to stop it, with Generic Hero's help.
- At some point, they must have tried giving an adult superpowers. Did it work? Did it work but appear to fail because the powers don't actually show up until the next generation of cell replication? So someone cut loose from experimental programs at Myrmidon — maybe a student who volunteered for the “experiment” as a way of getting cash — starts to develop powers. Maybe they're good powers, maybe they're not...maybe the powers do out of control, or they have a tendency to flame out...but it's been months, so there's no obvious connection to Myrmidon.
- The current subject was in the creche with Jason; maybe they have a relationship. But the problem is that the power mimicry ability that showed up actually mimics the ability to give powers from the equipment. It's not really good to have an artificial life form that can give powers wandering around. Of course they locked her up, but something has gone wrong, and she's free....and everyone she touches gets powers briefly.
Just some ideas.
