GURPS Supers:
The world of meta-human roleplaying
Once I find out how, or if, Geocities will let me Cut and Paste, I'll put up my short article on Supers. For now, I'll just mention my favorite Supers background: Wild Cards!
Wild Cards is set in modern day Earth. After World War two, a distant planet, Takis, was developing a virus designed to affect the DNA patterns of the subject in hopes that it would change that person by giving enhanced powers specific to the rearranged DNA. Unfortunately, the virus killed off more than 10% of it's subjects and hideously deformed 80% of the others. Only 10% tended to become more powerful, which meant they could not use it on themselves (to help fight wars among themselves) and they couldn't use it on their enemies (it only killed 10% and made others more powerful). They didn't know exactly what to do, except test it some more, and volunteers were getting scarce. That's when they decovered Earth.
Humans were found to have the same genetic make-up as Takisians, making the world of Earth a very popular place to release a large amount of the virus to further studies. As the spaceship was sent off to drop the bomb, a single Takisian rebelled calling such measures unethical. No one headed him, though he was Prince Tisane. He boarded his own ship, burning out his "ghost drive" in an attempt to stop the deployed ship with the bomb. There was a fight in the earth's atmopshere which ended with Prince Tisane as the victor. But the ship crashed into a remote and very rural area of America.
One of the local yokels saw the ship crashed and investigated it as a UFO landing. There he found the bomb, which he knew nothing about, propped it up in his truck and started to drive off with it. He was confronted by some men who took the bomb. These men thought it was one of those new atomic bombs and decided to use it as a threat against New York for a chance at millions of dollars.
As they flew though the skies over Manhatten in blimps, various fighter jets were released to stop the men. One of these was "Jetboy," a famed, and very young, fighter piolet of World War 2. He crashed his jet into one of the blimps and began struggling with the head of the terrorist organization. Things went a little wrong and the blimp exploded with the crowd below cheering, but there was no sign of Jetboy. He had sacrificed himself to save New York. No one below noticed the strange blurry cloud released from the explosion, they were too busy looking at the falling debris of buring materials and the lack of a nuclear explosion.
That was when the virus was released.
Over 10,000 people died when the effects of the virus were activated. Some exploded, some melted, many were deformed beyond recognition of their former selves. And a few found they could do things they never dreamed possible.
Prince Tisane had previously alerted the American government of the presence of the virus, but they locked him up thinking him to either be a lunatic, a communist, or perhaps an alien like he had said. But, regardless, he was kept under tight security. When the virus was released, Prince Tisane, nicknamed Doctor Tachyon, was the only authority on the subject and was consiquently released.
He blamed himself for the horrors brought into this world and soon had makeshift hospitals set up to aid the victims of the newly termed "Wild Card Virus." It was named so, because those affected could become deformed into "Jokers" or draw the Black Queen and die. The few that became meta-humans were called "Aces." And there were actually a few known occurances of "Deuces," those who were not deformed, but the powers they received were usually worthless or trivial (like the ability to pull one's thumbs off and put them back on).
The World Book of GURPS Wild Cards takes place in this universe. It is based on the excellent series, in my opinion, Wild Cards, which spans from post WW2, to the 1990's. After that, I have not heard of any more in the series... but then, there's always GURPS!
GURPS Wild Cards has a supplementary adventure book out called, Wild Cards: Aces Abroad. It is out of print, but you might still find it lying around somewhere. In fact, GURPS Wild Cards is also out of print. I heard something about a Wild Cards movie, but that was years ago. <sigh>