Real World Plots

[BlackSword]

Hurricane Isabel recently hit the eastern seaboard. There are numerous military bases on the eastern coast, and many of them moved their assets to other bases further inland. In particular numerous aircraft were moved from bases on the middle part of the east coast to the midwest or the southern states. With the military protecting its assets, what a perfect time for the supervillain to attack, especially if he has someone in his employ who happens to control the hurricane. So a weather master parks the eye of the storm on the city of interest, say DC, and allows the villain in charge to take over the capital.

 

Any other ideas from real world occurences?

[JohnTaber]

Hi Blacksword,

 

I do this when I get writer's block. I open the newspaper and grab two or three completely random news headlines. I then combine them to work out an adventure. For example, I read an article about the Alaskian pipeline, an offshore oil rig, and a radical group. I made a Star Wars adventure where the PC try to stop a radical group of undersea people from drilling on an oil platform. Give it a try!

[Houston GM]

A few I've used.

 

My campaign is set in Houston, one year ago. I initially did this so I could run one Idiot King adventure set at the end of 2000. The Idiot King had created a "Millenium Virus" that would do everything the Y2K bug was supposed to ... just 1 year later.

 

Since then, I've run Tropical Storm Allison: the basement begins to flood, forcing the team to move everyone out of the base jail. Impromptu jailbreak time.

 

A couple years ago, a Japanese fishing trawler sunk after it collided with a U.S. submarine. In my campaign, the trawler was transporting some super-tech, and the "accidental" collision was merely plausible deniability. The U.S. grabbed the technology, and brought it back to the U.S. Japan sent a platoon of cyber-augmented special forces to get it back.

 

I did one based around 9/11. I changed up events slightly. One of the planes was headed for the Houston ship channel, with its miles of refineries, tank farms, and volitile pipelines. The plane had one metahuman terrorist, and a few normal terrorists. The team vehicle was slower than the plane, so the group had to think quick in order to win.

 

I saw a program on the Discovery Channel about mega-tsunamis, so I put together a Dr. Destroyer plot where he was trying to trigger a massive collapse of Cumbre Vieja in the Canary Islands in order to wipe out the eastern seaboard of the U.S. (This is something that might naturally occur in the next 1000 years, but Dr. D was speeding up the process.)

[winterhawk]

My campaign is set in Chicago, and I used the recent scandals involving Governor George Ryan (accusations of corruption and commuting death sentences of all prisoners on Death Row) as part of a byzantine plot by my master villain.

[zornwil]

Our game just hit 9/11, and at the same time the PCs' super-team has rapidly (over the course of a game-year of being together) become a world-renowned group. So some of that has come to play and will.

 

To that point, our game yesterday included a government-requested mission to go destroy WMDs in IraN (note the "n" - the US is a lot more powerful in my game and Iraq was taken care of already some years back, during Clinton's days) - however, to answer your question fully, my "real world" inspirations are more likely to be from World Weekly News' spins on events. So in this case, the WMDs were super-powerful dinosaurs being bred by your typical power-mongering colonel with his mad scientist in tow. Actually for a change the scientist wasn't mad, he was a perfectly normal guy doing his job, and very willing to comply with the heroes' demands when they took over this ersatz Jurassic Park. Well, especially as dinosaurs rampaged nearby and their lives were threatened if they were foolish enough to run off from or otherwise disobey the heroes, who disarmed them from their dinosaur-control mechanisms.

 

But the bummer is at gametime I couldn't find the issue of WWN with the cover photo, and I didn't want to take the time to go online to get it. Minor bummer, but still...I put that issue "someplace safe."

 

Part of the reason I like to spin it that way is it depoliticizes these things reasonably, plus I just like WWN.

["V"]

How many superheroes does it take to change a lightbulb?

 

My PCs have just survived the New York blackout... not just the traffic chaos naturally, but the alien invasion vanguard that was diverting power from all the major nearby powerstations into a communication device intended to broadcast vital data to the fleet and launch the invasion.

 

I may have a plotline coming up shortly where it's revealed that various world figureheads (President Bush, PM Blair etc) have been replaced by humans.

 

[Supreme Serpent]

I pull ideas from the real world from time to time. Especially if it's a big story in the campaign city, I feel the heroes should be involved, or at least it should be present in the background.

 

For example, way back right after the fall of Commie East Europe, I had heroes involved in some nefarious plots there by supervillains taking advantage of the chaos.

 

My LA based campaign has dealt with some California quakes, and recently is dealing with a plot to mind control various candidates for the California recall. They've managed to free Ahnold, and are on their way to deal with others.

[CrosshairCollie]

Almost never. Natural disaster type stuff, yeah, but touching on things that edge on political or religious grounds is something I avoid, as I figure I'm bound to offend someone along the way. Imagine if, say, I had some nefarious Dark Seraph plot built around the ... *ahem* indiscretions ... recently revealed about the Catholic Church?

 

It's a subject I feel is best left untouched, and even unaddressed (I haven't even mentioned if things like that, or 9/11, have occured in my gameworld ... I'm leaning towards 'no'.)