Ever since man has been capable of hitting other man with a rock, the world has been divided with power, between those who have it and those who do not. On this world, perhaps even more than ours, this division is more important than any other. Some secure power with the right mechanical gadgets and the years of study necessary to build them. Others seek out power at the bottom of a chemical vat, with the handshake of some otherworldly evil, or in the bite of a genetically unstable exotic pet. A few with enough money or federal funding simply strap six tons of bulletproof power over their chest and call it a day. All of these people, designated by their power, are known as Supers. Some are heroes. Some are villains. Universally, they're all pretty dramatic.

The powers that be reigning in these powerful persons are known as the United States Department of Hero Regulation and the Villain's International League of Evildoing -- they are the respective equivalents of a high-ranking government agency and an international labor union working in tandem to ensure the other side follows roughly the same rules. The fleshbound VILE Codex of Cruelty, for instance, shares no less than 500 identical pages to the official DHR Federal Mandates & Regulations Handbook, and this is no strange coincidence. Both sides have inscrutable teams of lawyers and investigative sub-agencies, and both sides are just about as scary as the IRS when you're on their bad side. Every ten years, they hold a summit to review and revise the rules, and the 2020 summit is to be held only seven days from our story's inception.

Supers!, which I am already regretting stylizing with an exclamation point, is to be a semi-sandbox story -- that means I am giving you a fair amount of freedom with your individual stories and themes -- with two overarching subplots going on for Heroes and Villains. I expect probably two people to apply to this, so accordingly, there are a bunch of rules (not in the annoying "i'm the GM i reserve the right to shit down your chimney" way) in order to ensure that these two people have sheets that demonstrate an understanding of this difficult-to-understand world. With that, I'll drop my GM voice and get down to it.