How would you go about building a setting for a superhero campaign?

>>53838505

Police actually try to enforce laws against vigilantism.

>>53838505
Look into terrorist organizations, now replace them with superheroes.

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>>53838505
Start with your favorite era. I drafted a campaign (unfortunately DOA) based on the Golden Age, with the US just entering WWII. Some heroes are sent over for special ops while others are screened out specifically to defend the homefront.

There are powerful players both for and against the "mystery men" that have sprung up in the last decade or so, and the media, namely radio and newspaper, would play a major part in both agendas. The man on the street is generally in favor of the heroes with a vocal minority fearing them as subversives, freaks or signs of the end days.

>>53839511

Well super powered individuals would certainly get the "terrorist" treatment by quite a few groups. especially if they're working outside of the government to apprehend criminals.

Any working within the system would be highly monitored, highly classified, and probably not even in the view of the general public.

Probably a lot of debates like super-person registration acts or the like.

>>53838505
Some people (a.k.a. Capitalists/Big business) will want to exploit it. Not-Apple and not-Google start coming out with their very own Superhero 'faces.'

Like anon said, the government, specially individual states/cities will have their panties in a bunch about whether these superpeople should be arrested as vigilantes or not.

Oh don't forget--not all the idiots who get powers are 'heroes'. That douchebag who bullied you in school, yep he's got powers now. That really annoying teen reaction youtuber, he's showing off his powers on his channel yelling your setting's equivalent of yolo or whatever. Also, fear the SJW who will accost you of 'appropriating his culture' when you come to school/work wearing a shirt with a Batman logo at the chest.

But where it gets really interesting is that the Binderberg Group or Illuminati or whatever you call the cabal of 1%-ers that (secretly) really run the world, does this throw a wrench in their carefully laid plans or is this just as planned?

I'd ripoff The 4400 wholesale

>>53838505
Like the normal world.

>>53838505
The world building section in Wild Talents has some useful world building tips even if you don't want to use the system.

The comic strip Zenith has an interesting set up. There are only a handful of active supers and none of them are interested in confirming to standard cape stereotypes

>>53839776
>Imagining that picture speaking with the voice of Orson Wells
I shouldn't be this erect.

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>>53840229
Dr. Mrs. The Monarch made me see the light of deep-voiced beauties years ago

>>53838505
Start at the top, make NPCs to fill the "best at" spots so the players don't get caught up in dick measuring. No, you can't be the strongest/smartest/fastest, that's this guy. If they want to surpass them, that can come later.

>>53838505
Try literally any of the superhero films that have come out in the last ten years.

>>53838505
ok, start with theme and aesthetics, and find the system that best suits that.

for example, I wanted to make a street level game where super powers caused society to collapse, and I found wild talents suited that.

from there I decided on scope. Are you gonna stay street level? Nation wide or one city?

I put my game in a quarantined city, cause I wanted to hard set the scope. And that basically gave me enough points to start fleshing things out.

And then once I had a very basic idea of what the city was like, I started just coming up with stupid amounts of powers to populate it.

I then took the powers I could power game the hardest, made them leaders of the major factions, and I coupled them with powers that either synergized or fit a theme.

and then I just kept fleshing things out. asked questions like "how did this group form?", "where the fuck is funding coming from?", "what were major events that shaped the setting?", and other stuff like that.

There's more, but basically as long as its cohesive and actually reacts to the players actions, it'll work

>>53838505
I thought the whole point of superheroes was to be an exceptional individual in an ordinary world?

>>53840044
Was that show any good? Seemed from the few commercials I saw to be another boilerplate pseudo-scifi mystery thing like Lost.

>>53840638
>Wild Talents

Which one? Was the system any good? I liked the stories, but they were so character-driven with plot-convenient powers that I didn't know if it would translate well to tabletop.

>>53840801
core book, just rules. made an entire setting from scratch

>>53840801
Also, the characters named in those books would basically just be characters your players would be aware of, you should still make a lot of stuff yourself.