Questionable Campaign Backgrounds

[Armitage]

Does anyone have good/bad experiences with campaign backgrounds that caused major changes to the world before play began?
I'm talking about changes extreme enough that overly sensitive people might be offended.
I'm in the process of updating an old campaign. Originally superhumans were created in 1985 and the campaign began in 1995. Now it's 1992/2002 so I just shifted events ahead seven years in most cases. I've lost thing like Desert Storm and the Soviet Union's collapse, but I've made do.
In August 1997 a superhuman with flame powers (Human Torch clone) went on a PCP rampage through downtown Miami. Turns out he had a version of Nova Flame. Construction of New Miami was pretty much complete at the end of 2001.

But this is the one that potentially worries me:
I asked myself "What if a member of a violently oppressed minority gained access to immense power that they couldn't control nearly as well as they thought they could?"
December 1996, a national capital vanished in a green fireball.
A week later, inhabitants of the country started dying of a mysterious disease that didn't spread beyond the country's borders and only affected natives of that country.
Four months later, 24 million fatalities and the nation has officially ceased to exist. The international community authorized massive airstrikes with incendiary and energy weapons because there was no way to properly dispose of all the corpses before normal disease became a crisis issue.
Given current events, I'll only mention that the minority in question started with "K" and rhymed with "bird".

[Acroyear]

The only issue I have with things like, say, a terrible genocide of an existing people is...

What if the game is still going strong 2 years from now... and two years from now they are the dominant people in the region? Or have some other significant impact? (just saying for argument's sake).

In these instances, since you are altering history, anyway... why not make up a people and small chunk of some places to be their country? It's not uncommon in comics and you don't lose anything.

Some might claim "oh, but that's so unrealistic" but that doesn't stop Dr. Doom fandom... and, let's face it, you're playing a game with people who can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes and stuff.

[Armitage]

Originally posted by Acroyear
The only issue I have with things like, say, a terrible genocide of an existing people is...

What if the game is still going strong 2 years from now... and two years from now they are the dominant people in the region? Or have some other significant impact? (just saying for argument's sake).

The entire country was wiped out, the minority and the majority. That's where the "not as much control as he thought" came from. The person in question tried to strike at his people's oppressors and ended up killing everyone instead.

In these instances, since you are altering history, anyway... why not make up a people and small chunk of some places to be their country? It's not uncommon in comics and you don't lose anything.

The entire point of the campaign is that it's "Our World" until the alien invasion in 1992 that created superhumans. I don't want to create countries out of thin air.
For example, on May 18, 2000 an Army officer named Lino Oviedo attempted a coup in Paraguay and failed. In the campaign he was a superhuman and is the current dictator of Paraguay.
On February 9, 1998, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze survived an assassination attempt when gunmen attacked his motorcade. In the campaign he died because the assassin was a member of Homicide, an international group of super-assassins.

[Agent X]

I personally wouldn't be offended. Still, if events get too depressing, I believe I would move on. I like fairly upbeat games. If I wanted to be depressed I would watch the news (Oh wait, I do watch the news. ) Anyway...

[Armitage]

Originally posted by Agent X
I personally wouldn't be offended. Still, if events get too depressing, I believe I would move on. I like fairly upbeat games. If I wanted to be depressed I would watch the news (Oh wait, I do watch the news. ) Anyway...

The campaign's not intended to be depressing.
I've scattered mysteries throughout the background as plot hooks. This was meant to be a big one.
Who did it? How did they do it? Are they still around?

A less depressing event: the visions of several precognitive superhumans resulted in a large number of arrests on September 10, 2001.

[Acroyear]

Originally posted by Armitage
The entire point of the campaign is that it's "Our World" until the alien invasion in 1992 that created superhumans. I don't want to create countries out of thin air.

&

The campaign's not intended to be depressing.

Yet you're destroying cities and tossing genocide around with people with super powers and space aliens.

With a timeline of super powers it's already not "our world" to be impacted by the introduction of supers... it's already happened. It's happened over a decade ago. It's no longer the introduction of a strange element into our world, it's now a fantasy world.

Again, I ask, what do you do if these people you're wiping out become important in the future (assuming your game lasts that long)? Then you have to make up even more fiction and further and further detach the game world from the "real world." In the end, it's just another fantasy setting.

A less depressing event: the visions of several precognitive superhumans resulted in a large number of arrests on September 10, 2001.

Just to point out.. some people would this not only disturbing (arresting people for things they haven't done) but downright insulting to those who were victims at that time Odd to think that for some... and yet it happens.

All in all, if you're comfortable with it... go for it.

[ProfessorM@ss]

Originally posted by Armitage
A less depressing event: the visions of several precognitive superhumans resulted in a large number of arrests on September 10, 2001.

Acroyear has a point -- the further you get from our reality in your setting, the less the players will be able to suspend disbelief.

That said, my setting is quite similar to yours, insofar as it rapidly deviated from real world continuity around 1940. In my campaign, the Soviet Union still exists, China has annexed most of Southeast Asia, and there's a huge new country in northern South America. Technology at 2003 is borderline cyberpunk, etc.

How I've kept versimilitude is simple: I've kept a detailed, user-friendly timeline of this world, with explanations of deviations. e.g.: 1946: A group of Soviet metahumans assassinates Stalin. The Soviet Union is pushed more to a more socialist, rather than communist, leaning.

I've also used touchstones with well-known fantastic genres. My world has superheroes (we all know them), cyberpunk (we all know that), and early space technology (we all can relate). Keeping those touchstones is key; if I had introduced a subterranean kingdom of dwarves who joined the United Nations, it would have been a lot harder to relate to. This continuity of genre expectations is why a lot of really way out fantasy doesn't sell -- people can't identify with it.

Shadowrun, for example, worked because it had all the familiar elements of a D&D game, as well as familiar cyberpunk elements. The "reality touchstone" was only two hops away from reality: reality->cyberpunk->fantasy/cyberpunk. We see this as an ongoing theme in modern fantasy; stories about elves in Los Angeles (Mercedes Lackey), stories about fictional characters meeting each other (the Wold Newton settings), etc.

Anyhow, that's my two cents.

--->M@ss

[Big Willy]

Originally posted by Armitage
The entire point of the campaign is that it's "Our World" until the alien invasion in 1992 that created superhumans.

I assume this was either a covert invasion, or one that was subsequently defeated by those same superheroes.

Given the other divergences you mention (snipped here for brevity), I think you're already far enough removed from the "real world" that current events in I**q don't need to figure in your thinking at all. If you simply want to add topicality by having the USA at war with somebody, then go ahead.

You prevented September 11; but was Osama bin Laden one of the people you arrested? Did Operation Enduring Freedom take place, or do the Taliban still rule Afghanistan? If still free, in one country or another, there's no reason he couldn't try something else - remember all the comparisons to Fu Manchu that were flying around in the press eighteen months ago: Osama is a textbook arch-villain. If you've already captured or killed him, who's to say it's not just a lookalike? Or that someone else won't emerge to lead his organisation?

As long as your players are familiar with the setting as it evolves, you're on fairly safe ground, I would have thought; but I can see it becoming a problem if you're running successive short campaigns in the same universe with different groups. In this case, you may want to consider some sort of parallel universe and/or time travel option to acclimatise the newbies or reboot the world.