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Gadg8eer
K.i.D Player 10
2019-Present: Connectivity War (also Zombies)
The aesthetic(s) of the current era has yet to truly be defined, although unfortunately Corporate Memphis is a strong candidate.
In 2019 a remarkably intelligent zombie virus emerged from contaminated meat at a butcher market in China. Causing a disease known as ZOVID-19 (short for Zombie Virus Disease 2019), victims brains fall into a coma and the quasi-sentient virus takes control of the body, seeking to spread itself by biting, scratching, sneezing, coughing, spitting, vomiting, leaving human waste in heavily-trafficked areas (ew), sharing needles with hard drug users (for some reason), romancing or seducing people (well, drunk people and/or people with no common sense; also, no, intercourse CANNOT be described in a backstory or during play), and in rare cases - mainly those of dying individuals in possession of organ donor cards - committing suicide.
The virus was never fully contained. A worldwide lockdown slowed the virus' spread for the next two years until it could later be vaccinated in 2021, but 6.6 million people worldwide were eaten by zombies, and 633 million have been permanently afflicted with organ damage and neuropathy following infection, even after eventually recovering from the virus' control.
As expected, superheroes and Geniuses proved critical to saving the world from the zombie plague, with heroes globally providing food via rooftops or windows to ordinary people trapped indoors by the hordes of zombies. For Geniuses and everyone else, including heroes who were either too vulnerable to the zombies or simply off-duty, the world went fully online. Everything, and I mean everything, was done in the Metaverse. While the experience proved that despite advances in VR, nobody wants to live in a world where everything smells like your house and abandoned children's playgrounds would become archaeological dig sites in 2000 years, the changes this made to the workplace were already self-evident. Before ZOVID, nobody was allowed to work at home because it supposedly couldn't be done effectively. After, it became clear the only reason people with office jobs still drove to work was because middle management realized Cyberspace would make their high-paying and mostly effortless jobs obsolete.
By late 2022, ZOVID is well under control, but the world seems teetering on the edge of all-out collapse. Rumors persist among astronomy fans that the space colonies found ways to survive, and the Martian colonies are claimed to even be building a huge warship for purposes unknown.
The world has been in tough times before. WWII, the Cyberpunk 80s, the Dark Age of Metapowers, 9/11, the Great Regression. None match the danger faced by the world in the New 20s, but then, none were brought together by the threat of a common enemy like ZOVID and King Card have done, and none have had the decades of historical experience in the role of metapowers in protecting the world. Perhaps in time, a new generation of heroes can lead the world into a brighter future.
The aesthetic(s) of the current era has yet to truly be defined, although unfortunately Corporate Memphis is a strong candidate.
In 2019 a remarkably intelligent zombie virus emerged from contaminated meat at a butcher market in China. Causing a disease known as ZOVID-19 (short for Zombie Virus Disease 2019), victims brains fall into a coma and the quasi-sentient virus takes control of the body, seeking to spread itself by biting, scratching, sneezing, coughing, spitting, vomiting, leaving human waste in heavily-trafficked areas (ew), sharing needles with hard drug users (for some reason), romancing or seducing people (well, drunk people and/or people with no common sense; also, no, intercourse CANNOT be described in a backstory or during play), and in rare cases - mainly those of dying individuals in possession of organ donor cards - committing suicide.
The virus was never fully contained. A worldwide lockdown slowed the virus' spread for the next two years until it could later be vaccinated in 2021, but 6.6 million people worldwide were eaten by zombies, and 633 million have been permanently afflicted with organ damage and neuropathy following infection, even after eventually recovering from the virus' control.
As expected, superheroes and Geniuses proved critical to saving the world from the zombie plague, with heroes globally providing food via rooftops or windows to ordinary people trapped indoors by the hordes of zombies. For Geniuses and everyone else, including heroes who were either too vulnerable to the zombies or simply off-duty, the world went fully online. Everything, and I mean everything, was done in the Metaverse. While the experience proved that despite advances in VR, nobody wants to live in a world where everything smells like your house and abandoned children's playgrounds would become archaeological dig sites in 2000 years, the changes this made to the workplace were already self-evident. Before ZOVID, nobody was allowed to work at home because it supposedly couldn't be done effectively. After, it became clear the only reason people with office jobs still drove to work was because middle management realized Cyberspace would make their high-paying and mostly effortless jobs obsolete.
By late 2022, ZOVID is well under control, but the world seems teetering on the edge of all-out collapse. Rumors persist among astronomy fans that the space colonies found ways to survive, and the Martian colonies are claimed to even be building a huge warship for purposes unknown.
The world has been in tough times before. WWII, the Cyberpunk 80s, the Dark Age of Metapowers, 9/11, the Great Regression. None match the danger faced by the world in the New 20s, but then, none were brought together by the threat of a common enemy like ZOVID and King Card have done, and none have had the decades of historical experience in the role of metapowers in protecting the world. Perhaps in time, a new generation of heroes can lead the world into a brighter future.
Hi! This is an idea known either as Metapowers or the Novel Comics Multiverse. The complete list of "primary layer" inspirations are Marvel Comics and the MCU, DC Comics, Sentinel Comics (which is actually a fictional comic book company that doubles as the setting for the Sentinels of the Multiverse TCG and the Sentinel Comics RPG), The Powerpuff Girls, the Big Hero 6 movie, Kid Cosmic and the Sonic Courage, Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, Soon I Will Be Invincible, Narbonic and P.S. 238, but the "secondary layer" inspirations are divided by the time period in the setting's fictional history and the retro-futurism those periods saw in real life.
This is half an "Interest Check", half an actual signup. If you can't think of a character yet, just post that you're interested and I'll wait until you've put something together to start the RP.
Like Sentinel Comics, Novel Comics is a fictional (and extradimensional) comic book publisher who records the story of the RP in its comics. In the last 15 years they've rebooted their entire multiverse with the Novel Comics Cinematic Universe, which does have an accompanying comic book shared universe but bases the majority of its revenue on self-contained movies about singular events in the Novel Comics canon.
I spent several days fleshing out the setting to an insane degree, and MisterEightySix has spent another several days editing it. The setting now has an extensive history going back to the 19th century (earlier if you count proto-superheroes, Geniuses, various magic users and mythological entities), but - other than a few token NPC superheroes and supervillains - I've left out actual characters so that you (yes, YOU!) can populate it with characters that have backstories going back as far back as you want. Just keep in mind that this setting's immortality-induced "comic book aging" only goes back to the 1800s unless your character is a demigod or vampire or something. (Information on Ambrose, the substance that causes this phenomenon, can be found in the lore thread in the description of the Brass Age, as well as in the profiles of Dr. Eternity and Desmond Bates in the character thread.)
First, a word of warning: Superheroes have always been political in one way or another depending on the era, so it's okay for your characters to have political opinions and even political motivations, but if in-character banter turns into player-on-player bickering, you're going too far and I'll be leaving the response to that disruptive behavior up to the moderators. My personal views (and the views of my co-GM) lie in the middle of a lot of extremes, with some degree of liberal bias, but... let's just say there's a reason the list of antagonists in this RP includes both white supremacists like Mr. Whittier or the Preacher and misandrist self-proclaimed "feminists" like Lioness or Ashen Witch.
Aside from Laika (the Soviet space dog, who is sort of a legacy character from an earlier incarnation of Metapowers), all characters in the setting must be fictional. That means nobody can use a real historical figure (though obscure historical figures can be given lazy name changes like "Henry Dreyfuss" --> "Dreyfus Henryson"), and nobody is allowed to use a fictional character that they don't own the copyright to. While you can create characters based on people you know IRL (including self-inserts), it's probably a bad idea to have your characters live where you currently live, and giving them the names of the real people they're based on is also not allowed. On the other hand, all locations must use real names - no Gotham City or Angel Grove here.
Here's what you need to know to create a contemporary rookie superhero/supervillain without reading the full history of the NCCU (Timeline One):
1. Superheroes and military forces can travel long distances very quickly by using computers and the internet (or rather, Cyberspace and the Metaverse) as teleporters. This is to give the RP a global scale.
2. Space colonies on the Moon, Venus and Mars have existed since the 1970s. However, the world lost contact with them in December of 2008 when global financial collapse and the subsequent in-universe "Great Regression" made the world's governments completely unable to provide them with any funding or resources. The colonies are considered lost for now, but the truth is less grim and a lot more entertaining. You'll have to wait and see.
3. Spectator sports are treated very differently. See "Sports and Supers" in the lore thread if you intend to mention them.
4. Gods are known to exist, so the word atheist instead means people who don't believe in afterlives or astral planes.
5. The world runs on "Comic Book Time", where characters don't age to keep the stories modern. The existence of Ambrose and other methods of gaining immortality (both biological and absolute) mean that this also includes characters who otherwise have no powers.
6. The RP always takes place in the current year, even when that doesn't sync with the characters' perceived passage of time, and yes, even when some of the characters have traveled to a different time period. Technology and world events may progress faster in the story as a result.
7. You are required to read "Current Events of the NCCU: 2019-2022" (see the beginning of this post, or in the lore thread), which describes the present day in the setting, but don't worry, it's short.
8. Player characters who become superheroes/supervillains must have a reasonable "power level"; see levels 0 through 4 of the TV Tropes Super Weight scale, and also make sure to read how the Super Weight scale works because there's a reason "Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?" is a thing.
Keep in mind that, although people in the setting have died in the past, and though there have been some very dark time periods based on either real life events or trends in fiction at the time (including the Ages of Comic Books in particular), the setting is supposed to be optimistic from the start of the RP onwards. Not every battle has to have a happy ending, but there should be no meaningless death of innocents (especially kids - I am very firm on this!) and any Big Damn Crisis War Crossover Events should end with the world being saved (and not just as a Pyrrhic victory). Obviously, as one of the GMs, I play a big part in enforcing that, but please don't try to defy it to the point that a retcon has to be made. To be fair, multiple afterlives (called astral planes) exist as the homes of the departed, at least one for each continent and one for the oceans, but these are undetectable by scientific instruments (including those made by Geniuses, with the sole exception of a few long since scrapped devices the Preacher made) and thus considered myth by most modern humans.
Characters with tragic backstories are allowed, but characters whose personality or actions can be summed up as "edgy for the sake of edgy" are not allowed, and will result in you being kicked out. That means things like:
-Teleporting behind other people's characters to kill them before they get an opportunity to respond,
-Redirecting a space laser from a big city to their own hometown because "nobody there loved me",
-Sacrificing innocent people to save their love interest without even considering trying to find another way, or
-Otherwise doing something to another person's character or a non-powered NPC which is blatantly unfair, permanently debilitating, and/or needlessly cruel.
Aside from that, while you can't use a copyrighted character you don't own, you can create a character that is clearly based on your favorite fictional character or whatever character or historical figure has caught your imagination. As long as the resulting character complies with everything above, go wild!
If you need help thinking of a character concept that isn't just your favorite hero under another name, try inverting the details of some of that character's key traits or backstory events. See the character thread for examples.
Last thing: You can create up to two main characters (two heroes, or a hero and sidekick, or anything you can think of), three secondary characters (friends, their boss, a love interest... or two... ...etc.), and as many members of your main characters' Rogues Gallery (list of arch-nemeses and arch-rivals) as you can think of. However, both main characters must have backstories, and you can only control one member of their combined Rogues Galleries per story arc.
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