Paul "Gridshock 20XX" Vermeren used to talk about running Operation Unfathomable as a superhero thing. I don't know exactly what he had in mind, but I think it would be most interesting to do something with weird powers bizarre deaths underground that combines superheroes with an old school D&D mentality.
Marvel published a comic in the 80s by Peter Gillis and Brent Anderson called Strikeforce: Morituri about a group of individuals given powers to fight an alien invasion. The catch is that they will die within a year as a side effect of the process that empowered them.
With something like my modern Operation: Unfathomable idea where a group of volunteers (or maybe a suicide squad of "volunteered" criminals) get exposed to chaos and mutated into something more than human in order to complete a mission in the Unfathomable. I'm sure there's some old school based superhero system that could provide powers. Perhaps just a random table of spell or monster trait inspired powers would do.
Can't top Villains & Vigilantes for random-ass superpowers. We sued to make a drinking game out of rolling a random power set and then trying to tell an origin story about why you had (say) cosmic awareness, power armor, and marsupial powers, taking a shot every time someone called BS.
ReplyDeleteStrikeforce was a good series, and a little like the old THUNDER Agents, whose powers come from devices whose use was eventually fatal.
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