Ripping off something current

DC Heroes

A couple of thoughts converged with some events today: A friend found his copy of DC Heroes 3rd edition; I have often thought that being in a super team in the DC universe is like being in a garage band; and I have been watching Stargirl.

With a suggestion from that same friend, here's the rip-off idea:

• Kids find a hidden supervillain lair with foci, and decide to become superheroes, but they are pretty obviously using supervillain gimmickry. So the villains get mad at them for stealing their tech and the heroes come to beat on them because they are obviously Villainy The Next Generation.

The first thought is that this should have a Millennium vs Boomer kind of vibe. I don't know how much that will come across because, uh, my friends are boomers. But we'll try.

Now, the Stargirl influence provides a couple of things: there aren't a lot of heroes in the area (it's the Ontario, Canada equivalent of Blue Valley), the age of the protagonists, and the legacy vs originals kind of conflict

The setting is easy; I ran a DC Heroes adventure in which the player characters where former teen heroes who had been given hero-ing jobs in a JobsOntario grant; fast forward that by forty years or so and make at least some of the kids children of the original heroes.

All of the heroes seem to be gimmick based, but it doesn't have to be so. I think you can get by with only some of the heroes being gimmick based. Try it this way:

For various reasons, Amber wishes she was a superhero, especially when she discovers that her dad put on a costume and fought crime for a couple of years. But (a) dad refuses to let her and (b) she has no powers. She's friends with Evelyn, who has the power to come back to life. (“Immortality like this isn't really a crime-fighting kind of power. It just means I keep returning, and that my folks are a lot more careless about their safety precautions.”) Evelyn probably has additional super powers, but she's not passionate about the crime-fighting thing like Amber is; she might go along, though.

And then they meet Christopher. Christopher is an alien (it's an exchange program with Saturn; we needn't go into the details) but he can phase through items. To impress Amber, whom he has a bit of a crush on, he points them to a lair filled with supervillain gadgets. In fact, someone stole all of these from the warehouse where they keep the belongings of incarcerated supervillains, and is planning to ransom them back to the supervillains when they get out, but the kids don't know that.

What Amber knows is that here's her chance to be a superhero.

Then we get into conflicts. The guy who stole the gimmicks is after them. The supervillains are after them. Heroes think they're obviously villains.

Now, that's a nice setup for a story or a comic series. What it has is an awful lot of arm-twisting in order for the players to create characters, so it's not a general setting.

I'll keep thinking about it.