And...Portal City

Superhero RPG

I was working on Strange City, which has its own rationale, but it is a somewhat complicated environment for someone who doesn't care about the other stuff and just wants to test out the system (I've used it for Mutants & Masterminds but I'll probably also use it for other systems.)

Anyway, I use Portal City. This is a small city on the Great Lakes (I play it as Canadian, but, hey, I'm Canadian). It had mystery men back in the 1940s and occasionally has visiting supers, but the PCs are really the first heroes who have stayed in town. (There's a certain flavour of “If you were really good, you'd go off to New York or even Toronto.”)

Here's what I've established for it so far:

• Lack of supers doesn't mean lack of superpowers. There are people with powers in town, but for various reasons they don't want to be spandex-clad supers.
• There's a certain amount of anti-mutant sentiment, so the twelve-step group dealing with “living with your mutant power” goes to a certain amount of trouble to keep the members' identities hidden, from the world and from each other.
• There is a university or college.