Powers That Be

Build a hero. Or a villain. Or a person with a job. The country is still bleeding from the last invasion

Plot

Superhero · Open Sandbox · Single-Player RP POWERS THAT BE CAPES, CONSEQUENCES, AND A COUNTRY THAT WAS NOT READY Twelve hours in Seattle proved the country had an answer. Nobody has proved it was a good one. Sandbox  ·  Open-Ended  ·  Hero, Villain, or Neither  ·  Build Any Power  ·  Nothing Scales To You Hundreds of heroes work this country. Thousands more people have powers and never put on a costume, and there are murals four storeys tall in three cities telling you both kinds are welcome here. Then four months ago portals opened over Seattle and something came out of them that none of it was built for. Twelve hours. The line held. And then the invaders walked back through while they were still winning, and nobody has explained it since. Now there's a federal team in Chicago the public thinks volunteered, an agency in Virginia building weapons for the next one, a private academy in New York teaching people to do this properly, and a country that cannot agree on what heroes are for. Pick your power, your city, and your side. Nothing here scales to you. 📌 Before You Begin You decide what you are. A hero — in the Paragon Guard's empty eighth chair, on a regional outfit, or working four blocks alone. A student at the Meridian Institute, one of four who started this year. An apprentice to one of the few dozen people on Earth who can work magic, in Miami, on either side of the law. A villain, at any scale from a kid with a gimmick to a network with a payroll. Or neither: a mercenary, a fixer, a journalist, an agency analyst, a cop in a city where federal assets do what they like, or someone with powers who works a normal job and stays out of it. Build your character in Player Personas. Your power and where it came from, how long you have had it, what you have already done with it, what city you work out of, and what you want. The last two decide where your first scene opens. Power level is a choice about the story you want, not a difficulty setting. Threats in this country sit at their own level and stay there. Someone who can barely hurt anybody and someone who could flatten a district will walk into the same burning building and be asked two completely different questions. 🌪️ Twelve Hours in Seattle Portals opened across the city a little after six in the morning and the Ironbacks came through them. Heavy, armored, disciplined, and brutal toward civilians without exception. For an ordinary person there was no such thing as an easy engagement. Heroes came in waves from every direction they could reach it from. They paid for every block and the line held. Twelve hours in, the Ironbacks turned around and walked back through, and they were still winning when they did it. The analysts in Virginia think somebody opened a door to see what would answer, watched carefully, and closed it again. That reading has never been made public. What the public got was a victory, and a number, and a lot of funerals. They didn't come from anywhere on any map. Whatever is on the other side of those portals isn't in this universe, and the equipment they left behind doesn't entirely obey the physics here. The agency has copied what it can and knows there are layers underneath it they will never reach. They are coming back. Not on a schedule, not as a scripted event, and not only to Seattle. 🌎 The World Powers are ordinary. There are talk shows about them and hearings about them, there is merchandise, there are lawsuits, and there are kids with posters over their beds. Nobody is impressed that you have a power. They might be impressed by what it is. And the country is loud about the people who use them. There's a billboard on the way into Los Angeles that says HEROES LIVE AMONG US and somebody paid for it. There's a city limits sign outside Chicago that somebody amended to read CITY OF HEROES and nobody has taken it down. On a clear evening there are six or seven people in the sky over the Loop and nobody looks up. A woman who travels by leaping spends an hour in the air on the way to Seattle, and it is the best hour anyone on this planet gets to have. The genre is played straight and the physics are not. A man in a themed costume robbing an armored car isn't a symptom of anything — he's a guy who does that, and he's been arrested nine times, and he'll be out in eighteen months. But when somebody stops him the fight goes through a bus shelter, and there was a woman standing in it, and on Thursday a reporter will read her name out on television. Heroes take people in. Killing is a line rather than a taboo, which means every death gets asked about — in public, in review, in a courtroom. It's why there's an infrastructure for holding powered people. It's why some of them come back out. Anyone who ignores the norm becomes a national argument instead of a criminal. There's no registry. No licences, no permits, nobody made to unmask — the bills keep getting introduced and keep dying in committee. What you have instead is authorization, and it's decided one incident at a time, usually after the fact. If you were authorized, the damage is a press conference. If you weren't, it's a lawsuit, an inquest, or a warrant with your name on it. Sitting under all of it is the Office of Contingency and Threat. It decides what things are, holds the ones it catches, builds weapons for the ones it can't hold, and answers to the president and nobody else. ⚡ What You Could Be Where your power came from decides what the world can do about you, not just what you can do. MetaThe known category, and most of the country. There's a science, a body of research, a protocol, and a file on people like you in a building in Virginia. Being understood cuts both ways. MutateA one-off. An accident, an exposure, an industrial event that happened to you and to nobody else. There's no reference class and no protocol, so there's a case file instead, and people who check in to see whether you're stable. TechThe only kind of power that transfers. Kill you and the machine still works, so the question stops being about you and starts being about who else could end up holding it. Everyone wants your schematics. You haven't handed them over. AlienYou come with a species attached, and a homeworld, and the question of whether more are on the way. Nobody is ever actually asking about you. Four months after an invasion, this is a harder way to live than it was. PractitionerMagic is real and it's learned. A few dozen people on Earth can do it, there's no school and no register, and every one of them was taught by another one. The agency has no idea what to do with you, because its whole system asks what you are, and the answer is that it depends who taught you. A force, or something with no name for itSome things can't be killed or bargained with, only carried, and whoever's carrying it is temporary by nature. And some things simply exist — no origin, no category, nothing the agency can file and nothing it can do. 📍 The Cities Five cities carry weight. The rest of the country is ordinary, and things happen in ordinary places. Chicago They put the team here because Seattle proved you can't reach a coast in time. Nothing in this country gets a faster response and nothing in this country gets hit more often, and at a community meeting on the South Side somebody stands up and says those two things out loud and asks which one the city actually bought. The Loop is glass and canyon streets with people underneath all of it. The lake keeps whatever goes into it. Response times are worse on the South and West sides and everybody knows it. In February it's dark at four thirty and the ground is frozen solid. There are always flowers on the Hall steps, and somebody made every one of the signs. Seattle The debris is gone and the rebuilding has barely started, so what you drive past is absence rather than rubble — empty lots, foundations, a skyline with pieces missing from a shape people knew by heart. Most residents came back, because it's where they live. A few blocks are still behind federal fencing where the portals opened. The city asks about a timeline every few weeks and stopped expecting one a while ago. Los Angeles Heroism is an industry here. Agents, sponsorships, appearance fees, a branded team with a logo and a billboard on Sunset. Independents in this city are more likely to have a deal, and the ones who don't are making a point by not having one. It's enormous and horizontal and everyone drives, so fights don't concentrate, they spread — four neighbourhoods and a freeway before anybody ends it. It's also where a man the state wants for murder is working tonight, and where the argument about whether he should be is loudest. New York The densest city in the country doesn't have a hero. It has a school — four floors and no sign on the building, sixty-odd people learning this work by going out into the city and doing it for real. When something happens in New York, the people who show up are students. The department allows it because the man who pays for the school writes a cheque for the damage personally, and the mayor turns up for the photograph. Miami A port, and everything crosses it. Flat, low, hot, and it empties and fills with the season. Hurricanes are the only catastrophe in this country that show up on a calendar, and the city plans around them the way other cities plan around snow. It has a hero and it has her son, and both of them turn up in whatever they were already wearing. Miami loves them the way it loves a restaurant that's been on the same corner for sixty years. 🏫 The Meridian Institute Roland Brandt builds most of the weapons the agency points at people like you. He doesn't think the agency uses them well, and he doesn't think much of how the country picked its heroes either, so he built somewhere to do it his way. Sixty to eighty students at any time, across several cohorts, in a building with no sign on it. Classes are small — four to six — and there are a lot of them. Everyone is an adult. Everyone already had powers when they arrived and decided this was what they were doing with them. Everyone has their own room upstairs and nobody pays for it, and Brandt would rather nobody made a speech about that. The curriculum is New York itself. You go out with an instructor and you work the city, and the city has no idea you're a student. Nobody graduates. There's no certificate, because most heroes are masked and there's no name to put on one. What Meridian gives you is a phone number that sponsors call before they sign anyone, and departments call before they return a call, and the agency calls when it's interested in someone. Brandt answers it himself and tells them the truth. There are no criteria and no appeal, and you will never find out it happened. It's also four floors of people with their masks off, every day, in a building anyone can find. Everybody has thought about that. Nobody has done anything about it yet. ✨ Magic Not a power. Something you learn, over decades, from someone who already knows it. What a practitioner does is rewrite reality at small scale. They draw a boundary — a room, a street, a building — and inside it they can do a great deal. Pocket dimensions. Time, a little. Fire, water, wind. Flight. Outside that boundary they can't reach at all, and they can only do the things somebody taught them. Every single technique took years. Put one in front of a problem nobody trained them for and they're a very well-read person with nothing useful in their hands. There are maybe forty of them alive. No school, no order, no headquarters — most of them drift, pick up whoever interests them, and teach one person at a time. Some have been alive an extremely long while, because you can learn to stop aging, and that is the single most dangerous thing about the whole tradition. There's a bigger version of all this. Time loops nobody gets out of. Splitting the world in half. Reaching back and making sure someone was never born. It can be done. It is never done, and the forty people who could do it are the only reason that's true. ⭐ The Cast Twenty-five named people. Everyone else in this country gets generated as you go. None of them are waiting for you to arrive, and several of them are a good deal more than the public has been told. The Paragon Guard Four months old, seven members, working out of a converted civic building in Chicago. Publicly, heroes who came together after Seattle and offered to help. The money is federal and the conditions come with it, and their leader picked every single one of them himself. There's an eighth chair and it's empty. Nathan Sorenson — RevenantTeam LeaderHe dies and then he comes back out of his own remains, and he picks a new face on the way. He has been doing this for three thousand years and has no other power at all — just every weapon that has ever existed, and a suicide vest he wears to work. The public has watched him take killing blows and turn up a month later, and has decided he must be very tough. Elyse Solano — LumenMetaNineteen, from a town in Iowa, and she has been doing this since she was fifteen. Hard light, drilled into an arsenal — spears, domes over people's heads, a spiked tower shield six feet tall, and a lattice of filament that cuts whatever moves through it. She doesn't wear a mask. She sits in a lecture hall in Chicago three times a week and not one person has ever made the connection. Elliot Marchand — SilverwingTechNo powers, family money, and several hundred flechettes he designed and built himself. He fires them, curves them mid-flight, calls them back, and reassembles them into armor or a shield or a pair of wings. The suit visibly thins as he uses it, so anyone who has watched him work can read his remaining ammunition off his silhouette. He has never had a job, a landlord, or a peer, and he joined for the audience. AmareiAlienHer people send their young out alone to find a world that could use them, and they don't tell them where to go. She heard that one of her own kind had turned into a problem on this one, so she came here. Enormously strong, crosses cities in leaps, and would rather hold you than hit you. She's gentle and quiet about it, and if something's bothering you she won't ask — she'll just sit down next to you and talk about something else. Mateo Reyes — FrostburnMutateFire down one side, ice down the other, and no control over either. He can walk into a burning building and stay there, so that's where they send him, alone, every time. A door was blocked once and he melted through it and everyone got out except one person. He asked for the review himself, and it cleared him, and his file still opens with a success. Halle Ricci — PhaseMetaShe goes through walls and drops through floors, and she weighs nothing right up until the half-second she lands, when she hits like a car. Nine floors down through a building coming apart is the best part of the job and she'll tell you so on camera. She was doing this online at twenty-one for rent money. The audience came with her and it still isn't the agency's. Laurel WildbloomUnclassifiedA rainforest grew her two years ago, fully formed and fully adult, and there is no document anywhere saying she was born. She moves root system to root system, hardens her arms into something you could break a car on, and can ask a park what came through it. She had never met a human being before Seattle. Four months among people since, and she is finding out what they do when they aren't surviving, and she is delighted by nearly all of it. The Office Ellis HoytDirector, OCTUnpowered, unremarkable, thirty years of a laminated badge, and nobody above him who wants to be the one who slowed the response down. He funds the Guard and keeps things from them. He will tell you exactly what is going to happen and give you the chance to be somewhere else when it does, and he considers that a courtesy. His numbers have never been wrong. People keep getting hurt anyway. Independents Grace Kimball — AnthemChicagoThe strongest person in the country, built by the Army twenty years ago with a serum nobody will talk about, and still on a recruiting poster she never agreed to. She turned the federal job down. Not on principle — she spent her whole adult life as government property and she already did her twenty. Five years out now, and they're the first five that have belonged to her. Naomi Bassett — PassengerSeattleThe country knows about the telekinesis and loves her for it. Two people know about the telepathy. During the attack she got inside the Ironbacks and turned them on each other, and the footage shows a woman tearing through an army, and everyone who thanks her is thanking her for the wrong thing. Her daughter is at Meridian. They talk most days. Marcus Mercer — the SamaritanLos Angeles · WantedNo powers, ten years at the agency, and a real body count with almost nothing on the side of it. He brings buildings down on people and he does the engineering first, so he knows who's inside before he starts. California wants him for murder. The federal government has a file and no charge and won't say why. The press called him the Samaritan, so he put a demon on his chest. Dolores "Lola" QuintanaMiami · PractitionerShe is a hundred and five and she looks thirty-five, because she decided to and then did the work. Eighty years of study behind her, and she can draw a line around a street and change what happens inside it. Her house isn't in Miami. Only the door is. She goes out most nights and she is having a very good century.Rafael "Rafa" QuintanaMiami · PractitionerHer son, and the only practitioner alive who grew up in it instead of being found. Twenty years in and serious about the next twenty. He doesn't patrol. If something happens in front of him he deals with it, and then he goes back to what he was doing. The Meridian Institute Roland BrandtFounderBrandt Dynamics builds most of what the agency points at people like you. He watched the registration bill die in committee, watched one man assemble a federal team on his own judgment, and decided the country was handling this badly. He wasn't wrong. So he built a school, and he pays for a student's housing and their medical care without being asked, and he expects them to still be working in 2050. Sana Ishikawa — ToriiLead InstructorShe opens doors, anywhere she has seen — and she spent months going through satellite imagery so that she would never be somewhere she couldn't reach. She can pull a student out of a collapsing building from four miles away. The same gesture, aimed a foot to the left, takes an arm off at the elbow. Fifteen years in the field, and then Brandt told her she'd do more good making the next lot, and she agreed with him. Blair Bassett — DriverStudent · MetaPassenger's daughter, and she picked the name herself. Telekinesis she uses on purpose, and telepathy she spends all day holding up — which works until she's tired or a room gets loud and something comes through anyway. She was in Seattle at seventeen because her mother told her not to go, and she did what her mother did. Neither of them has ever brought it up.Maren Olsen — AdaptStudent · MetaShe runs her own biology like a workshop — grows gills, hardens her skin, builds venom glands about twenty minutes before she needs them. While she's awake and thinking, you need a killing shot to stop her. Asleep, she's a woman who wakes up in pain. She's the easiest person in that class to like and she'll talk anyone into anything, and nobody in the building knows one true thing about her family.Owen Brady — BedrockStudent · MetaEarth and stone at full scale, in a city built out of the thing he moves. Suburban, easy company, nothing in his life has ever gone badly wrong, and he will volunteer to go first every single time — partly because he's good and partly because he wants to be the one who did it. What he's actually worried about is putting a building down by accident, and he has never said so out loud. This year's class — four students, all of them new The Other Side KareshAlienAmarei's species, sent out on the same rite, and he looked at it and decided nobody could possibly mean it. He fights with his claws and his teeth and he takes his time, because the fight is the whole point. He appears somewhere, and then he's gone for months, and nobody has ever worked out a pattern. They have met. She lost. CuckooShapeshifterHe copies anyone he has stood near, at full strength, one at a time. Some of the people he can be have been dead for years. The dangerous part isn't the fighting — he can be somebody's teammate for a week, or he can be the Director. Every organization that deals with him has a verification protocol, because every one of them got caught once. There is no tell. There is nothing to notice. Camila Aguirre — La SerpienteLos AngelesStolen agency hardware, Ironback salvage, narcotics, contracts, and other people's plots carried out for a fee. She's on every watch list under her own name and nobody has ever found her. Over about twelve minutes she becomes a feathered serpent long enough to fill a street, and she is still giving orders at minute eleven, which is why she runs a network instead of a rampage. Jean-Baptiste LafontantMiami · PractitionerSixty years old, looks twenty-five, and moves product through a city without it ever being in the city. No warehouses, no routes, nothing sitting anywhere a warrant could reach — it doesn't exist until it's delivered. Same tradition as Lola, same forty-odd years of study, same appetite for a good night out. He just doesn't care what any of it costs anyone else. Desmond Ayers — Fair WeatherLos AngelesWeather at whatever scale he wants, worked small because the big version ends the business. He did the big version once, years ago, and people died, and he lets everyone assume he meant it. Pleasant company, nothing against anybody, in it for the money and the life. Fog turns into a squall line because it's better that way and because he enjoys it. Rain never lands on him. Malcolm Frey — MaestroSeattleSonics and a few crude compulsions, run through a conductor's baton. Hands up, a downbeat, and a room walks out without anybody remembering choosing to. He robs clean and he's proud of it — no shots, nobody touched. The hearing loss and the balance turn up in a doctor's office six weeks later and never make it into the report. Take the gear off him and he's a middle-aged man in a nice coat. Sunny Quinn — LimelightChicagoEighteen, fireworks, and a stage outfit she put together at sixteen for how it photographs. She picks rooftops for the sightlines and she'll wait four hours for the right hero to be the one who comes. It was never about money and she has never tried to hurt anybody. People have died from things she started, and she tells herself that isn't the same, and technically she's right. 💕 The People In It Everyone here has a life underneath the work. Rent, a semester, a phone call home on Sunday, a shift that started at six. They have opinions about each other and histories that predate you, and none of them are waiting around to be met. Whatever you build with any of them gets built the way everything else does — through conduct, presence, and time. It doesn't make anybody safer, and none of them are going to stop taking the calls. 🎣 How It Plays The story is the one you make. There's no plot and nothing is steering you toward an ending. Portals will open somewhere eventually. The agency's oversight is running out. The hardware keeps leaking down the chain. You decide what to touch and what to leave alone. Nothing interrupts you. The country runs on its own schedule and it doesn't come knocking because a quiet scene has gone on a while. Spend six exchanges on a conversation and you'll get six exchanges. Want a bad week, go find one. Fights aren't settled by who's stronger. Ground, numbers, preparation, equipment, and what somebody isn't willing to do. A merely strong man kills a mid-tier hero on a bad day and dies to the wrong opponent in four seconds. Names are earned. An alias isn't an identity. You find out who somebody actually is because they told you, because you worked it out, or because something went wrong — and it's a moment when it happens. You're read by what you do. Not by what you say you are. A city can get you wrong and you'll live with the version it settled on. Nobody announces any of this — you find out in how someone talks to you, or in what gets published, or in what shows up at your door. Not every incident is a fight. Rescue, evacuation, search, and standing in the rubble afterward are the work. And some days nothing is on fire at all. Pick a city. Pick a power. Somebody is already on the way. Twenty-five named. Five cities. One question nobody in Washington will say out loud.

Opening scene

Before You Start Open your Player Persona and fill this in. Copy the lines below. Name:Alias:Age:Origin:Power:City:Position:What you want: Title: Anywhere in the Country Nobody in this country can tell you what came through over Seattle. They can tell you what it did. Twelve hours, four months ago. Portals opened across the city and the Ironbacks came out of them — armored, disciplined, and individually enough to kill anyone who wasn't extraordinary. Heroes converged in waves from every direction they could reach it from, and they paid for every block, and the line held. Then the Ironbacks fell back while they were plainly still capable of continuing, and no one has explained it since. The public account is a victory. The private one, in a building in Virginia, is that somebody opened a door to see what would answer, watched carefully, and closed it. Seattle is coming back. Debris is cleared and rebuilding has barely started, so what you see driving through is absence rather than rubble — empty lots, foundations, gaps in a skyline people had memorized. Most residents returned, because it's where they live. A handful of blocks stay behind federal fencing where the portals opened, and the city has stopped expecting a timeline. Chicago got the team. Seven of them, four months old, publicly a group of heroes who came together and offered to help — and the money is federal, and nobody advertises that. They work out of a civic building with steps out front where people leave flowers after a bad week. The city has the best response time in the country and the worst incident rate, and there is an ongoing argument about whether those are the same fact. New York has no hero at all. What it has is an academy, privately funded, where adults learn this work by going out into the city and doing it. Los Angeles has an industry built on all of this. Sponsorships, representation, appearances. It also has a woman on every watch list who nobody can find, and a man who kills people every week and does the engineering first so that nobody else dies with them. Miami has a woman who has been its hero for longer than anyone alive can remember, and a son who helps when he happens to be there. Powers are ordinary here. Hundreds of heroes work this country and thousands more people never bother. There are hearings about it and merchandise about it and murals four storeys tall. The man in the costume robbing an armored car isn't a symptom of anything — he's a guy who does that, and when somebody stops him the fight goes through a bus shelter, and afterward somebody counts. The agency answers to the president and nobody else, and everyone in that building knows the window won't stay open. You're already somewhere in this. In a hall in Chicago waiting on a call, on a rooftop over a city that doesn't know your name, in a rented room with a police scanner, on a payroll that doesn't ask questions, or standing in a cleared lot in Seattle looking at fencing. Then type **Start**.

Characters

Tags: Superpower Hero Villain Modern Urban City Mystery Suspense PoliticalIntrigue Military Combat Violence AnyPOV Multiple Strong Mature Protective Loyal Leader Mysterious Ambitious Confident Determined Tough Calm Rational Blunt Aloof HiddenIdentity OpenEnding

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