Steve

Actually, that's correct.  The typo is that his Kick/Rear attack is supposed to be HA +334,043d6.  Them Centaurs are scrappy!    

Immunity to (Insert Genre You Don't Like)
 
Not sure it would be accepted in a tabletop game. Or rather, instead of actually building it into the sheet, I suspect most people are going to prefer it if you just ask ahead of a campaign that it not feature X, Y, or Z. If it was built in Hero, it would be basically a very powerful version of Transform as an area around you, big enough to cover any part of the setting you can be percieving. 
 
But, funnily enough, it does exist in DC. There is, or *was* at least, a paranormal investigator who looked into all sorts of the supernatural goings on, amd always was able to debunk them and shame the con artists behind it. In his original stories that was because his universe was a normal one. But, as the DC universe became more connected, and he was gradually sharing a world with *actual* Greek Gods and ghosts and ghouls, it was retconned into him being a metahuman who was reality warping, so the things he investigated really were real all along... until he was in range of them, at which point they turned into normal human con artistry, with all the signs of having existed as that the whole time, only to flip back to being supernatural once he'd left.
 
Personally, I'd like to try using it to make sure the campaign world was always some light-hearted family friendly adventure, not a grim, dark iron age game, or anything.
 

A series of t-shirts worn by him and his dates.
   When you go cold- you’ll be sold!
   Honey, I may be frigid, but you won’t be!
   Buffy was right!   Boink the undead!  
   Ladies!  Rigor Mortis can be a good thing!
   A corpse will never lie to you about where he was last night.
   I prefer the term “Formerly Incarnated”.
   Imagine what he can do since he doesn’t have to breathe.
 
All mine, and I rattled these off in about five minutes.      Pray for me.

I’ve got a plot line for her....she discovers that the young stud who inflames her ancient soul and brings her joy is the descendant of a long lost love and is either his reincarnation OR is descended from the child they had together long ago.
    So the Network execs can choose from either hot romance or borderline incest.  Whichever way they go it’ll be good for the ratings.
     So to whoever was annoyed at the lack of participation.....    “It’s Shake & Bake mama!”  “And I helped.”

Matt Colville in his Running the Game gives the same advice. Do it and have fun but remember that most of the players won’t care. Also he had a nice sheet made that asked several basic questions before your first game, it dealt with the local area. And even THAT he suggested that you don’t need to fill out every detail. But it was nice to get a few detail down. Things like town name and name 3 villages. What is the forest called? What do the locals think of Elves? Or Dwarves? whose the local big bad? That sort of thing.

In a web serial I've been reading, there's a running joke that in game sessions, someone will inevitably stop the GM in mid-description with "Blah blah blah, politics."  It would seem to me that one could write that in one's world notes and save a lot of typing.  😂😂😂

Precisely.  Ideally, this is the thrust of the adventure; this is why the characters are here: they are taking part in th e change, and their actions will affect the resolution of that change.
 
 
 
This is another source of adventure: peaceful doesn't mean without strife, or without conflict completely.  Highway men, thieves, con artists, cattle rustlers, organized crime- these all exist even,in times of peace.  There are social ills as well: prior to the Civil War, the slave states in the South were remarkably peaceful.  That doesn't mean there wasnt a serious wrong that needed righting.
 
 
 
Precisely:  Player-class characters assisit them with their overwhelming problems, stumble into something resembling a larger plot, and the game is underway.
 
 
 
Getting back to generations of history built into a world book and why it just doesn't matter:
 
Millions- billions, hundreds od billions, maybe- of people throughout history has known and understood history and knew it all the way back to Creation-   some said their God did it; others said _their_ God did it; others still said it was the work of a pantheon.   Some said it was all spontaneous: put enough dry corn in enough flannel shirts in enough hayfields, and mice will spontaneously burst into existence.  Others will tell you that it doesn't matter if a pond is manmade: leave it to sit long enough, and it "just naturally" have fish in it.  A host of other folks will tell you that everything that ever would exist in all the universe was pressed  tightly in it own unique singularity until the compression got so incredibly powerful that it threw up and the universe was born.
 
This goes on with shorter spans of history, too.  According to the textbooks, North Korea's last leader birthed himself from a grizzly bear or some such nonsense.  I think the current one walked out od the mountains as an infant or something equally ridiculous.
 
Paul Bunyan single-handedly created every famous feature of the American landscape, and Cher thinks Mount Rushmore is a natural phenomenon.
 
The simple fact is, no matter which person or group got it right, that means that the majority of the himans ever to exist had absolutely no clue what the history of their world really was.  In some cultures, they still don't.  I may be wrong, but I am betting a number of indeginous Amazonian tribes are basing most of their universe on $hi7 their great-great grandparents totally made up, and Google Earth has yet to reveal any significant telescopes on the Sentinel Islands.
 
_All_ of these people share a common history, at least to a point, and damned few of them know the actual "correct" one, and even the most scientific one is still being filled in even today.
 
Yet none of this has in way affected their adventures in any way.  The Sentinelese know only "outlanders bring death," so they defend themselves by delivering it themselves.  How many slaves in the American South do you suppose were taught any sort of in-depth history?  Of what culture?  Of what continent?  Realistically, they were likely taught by ther elders "we are slaves and if we act this way or that, our lives are a tiny bit less awful," and a few stories of past events to help reinforce those lessons.
 
But it didnt stop them from fighting as hard as they could when given the chance- some for freedom; some for the status who (I cant imagine why, but I wasnt there).  Others risked everything to run away for freedom, and others helped hunt them down.
 
They had adventures (no; I am,not romanticising a horrible situation, but "they voluntarily went up against great odds in the face of horrible and mortal danger for a sliver of a chance to change their lot in life or that of someone else" is absolutely nothing if it isnt an adventure.
 
The Crusades- or, as I tend to think of that period: yet another reason I dont suffer from any sort of "white pride"- were adventures almost identical to many a D and D game.
 
The river Brioq (which probably means "river" in the local tongue) was created when the continental shelf of this land lifted the neighboring landmass, a collision that raised a seven-thousand mile long mountain range nearly two months hard rising from this point, and brought from the crust of the land a massive subterainean glacier, exposing it to the sun foe the first time almost a million years.
 
The run off from these mountains filled what was once dry arid plains at their base, creating the inland sea around which seven city states have wasted and waged a quiet struggle of political and economic leverage.  Unbeknownst To any of the folks living in that land, the center of the inland sea lies over the caldera of a massive volcano, and the sandstone crust that seals it will, in seven hundred years, give way, draining sea and drying this river.  The icy water pouring onto the hot mantle below will create an explosion that will wipe life from this entire half of the continent.
 
Today, though, the Brioq gives way to hundreds of marshes and swaps along its path to this point, where the rocky granite lands create multiole series of rapids and broad slow shoals before meandering down the the fishing villages above the largest delta in this hemisphere.  Evaporation from this delta keeps the humidty high, but the cool coastal breezes in the delta (about dive hundred mikes south of you) condense the moisture, and even in the warmest seasons--
 
Dammit, Tommy; they are chasing us!  Do we see a way across or not?  Is it wide?  Is it slow enough foe the horses?  Will they freeze?  Hurry up, Tommy!   As soon as we clear the county, we need to head east to the seaport.  Is ther any cover, in case we have to make a stand?
 
And That, Sir, is _all_ the crap your Players will give a out the history of the Brioq River valley, its ecosystem, and its impact on trade and development during the last two centuries.
 
I absolutely gaurantee it.
 
Like I said: I enjoy a lot of it myself, as do others.  But when one sets out To write such a detqiled sourcebbok, one needs to understand that he is writing it for _himself_, for no one else will enjoy it as much as he does, even if it is delightful, and he shoukd approach the project knowing full well that what he is doing is unnecessary and for the most part, completely wasted.
 

Spence, that is a very thorough, very practical analysis. For the priority of just getting a group together when possible to have a fun gaming session, your requirements are completely appropriate. From the perspective of publishing games in order to sell them for people to play, that makes a great deal of sense.
 
My priorities are probably in the minority, but I enjoy a reading about a game world as a world. I eat the detail up with a spoon. I love seeing how all the bits fit together, their similarities and their differences. I love rich history because I derive satisfaction from understanding how a world grew to be the way it is at the default start date for a campaign. And I love playing with those details, tweaking them to suit my preferences, "what if-ing" certain things in my imagination to get them to a state that pleases me more.
 
One reason I enjoy the Turakian Age so much is that I've spent literal years thinking about and modifying it like that. It's kind of a hobby. The process is still ongoing, in fact. Mind you, I never would have bothered if I didn't have such a detailed coherent setting to start with.

For me the problem is that those kinds of large sweeping setting are useless to me.  Except to weigh down a shelf and collect dust.
 
Adventures do no happen at that scale.  A smaller setting book that actually has smaller focused information is far far more useful.  The Sword Coast is what?  The map is around 1200 miles north/south and maybe 600 miles east/west not including the ocean.  The islands are in an area around 300 miles N/S and 100-150 miles E/W?  And even then the SC is an immense area where most of it will never be actually used.  And yet so many settings seems to think mapping out and entire world in even broader wide strokes is "better"??
 
While not perfect, Sword Coast is the best modern setting of it's type.  A broad high level overview of area.  And then individual supplements that combine setting and adventure information for specific locations.  But even then the setting info is suitably imprecise allowing the individual GM to tinker or ignore easily. 
 
Speaking of Hero products, and this is my personal opinion, they suffer from the "Far Far Far Too Much" syndrome.  Too much detail. Too much density.  Far too intertwined.  Too much in on book to effectively use.  If you decide that "blah blah" is not right for you campaign and decide to remove it, the removal is far more effort than you can expend for a weekend game because instances and influences of "blah blah" are throughout the product and you begin to drown in removal and replacement "fixes".   And even if you decide to run it as is, the details and density of text mandates the expenditure of more effort than was required for your most daunting real world professional requirement.   I was able to read/skim the Sword Coast plus an adventure in a single afternoon and ran session zero the next day.  I spent an entire weekend with Narosia, which I had to READ, and after getting through the 2nd culture, took a look and realized there were a bazillion to go.  So it went on the shelf and I was all "D&D it is". 
 
In the games that you actually play, Medieval Stasis isn't really relevant.  If you are slogging down the muddy track between villages on the frontier of the Kingdom Blah Blah, the fact that there is a ruin from the Ancient Ones really doesn't matter.  Even if the GM has turned the ruin into a dungeon.  But to the PC's and the current regular NPC's the exact history is irrelevant.  Oh the GM could easily make up myths and legends for entertainment.  But unless it is to set up a quest, none of the players will care about the "history".  Heck they will not care about any of the surrounding kingdoms/nations/tribes unless their PC's actually need to do something there or counter something here.   The only purpose for extensive timelines or deep histories satisfy the author and provided casual reading for the GM's.  Since reading the complete setting/adventure book by the players should never be done since it would spoil the game, just what value to the weekly session is knowing that 45,000 years before your adventure that the High King Blah Blah rules the Kingdom of Who Cares?
 
As an intellectual exercise Medieval Stasis exists.  But what practical or impractical value does that 1000 pages of minutia have for tomorrows afternoon game session.   Especially when the participants of that afternoon games session are only able to scrape up four hours every two weeks to game and the GM will only be able to dedicate maybe an hour to prep.   That is the market.  
One hour prep for a four hour session every two weeks. 
 
People will spend a couple weeks to read through a RPG's rules.  Not sit down and study them, but to read a few pages here and there over a period of a couple weeks.  Once they believe they know enough they will see if they can get their friends to make PC's.  And if the session zero takes more time than their normal session or the PC's do not intrigue the players enough during that session zero they will not play it. 
 
IF the GM manages to lead the players successfully out the other side of session zero, then he must be able to run the four hour session with one hour of prep for the campaign.  
 
That is why D&D 5th is dominating.  The average GM can prep for today's session with an hour of prep.  Each Adventure book may have six to ten individual encounters, but the DM only needs to read the one they are playing today.  For League night it was common for each tables DM to arrive about an hour early and prep right at the table before the players get there. 
 
Does D&D's world have a long and detailed history?  Yes, after all the game has been around since the 70's and carries all the baggage and detail that comes with it.  Did WotC immediately inject all of the history into their 5th product?  No.  The selected a tiny slice of part of it, boiled it down to just what a DM and players might need and published that.  Medieval Stasis?  I don't know because the info I am using today doesn't really talk about enough that it would come up.
 

It is also a little of the "chicken or the egg" situation in a lot of cases. 
 
In Fiction, do the long lasting empires exist because there are no major technological or social advancements, or are their no major technological and social advancements because the empires are so long lasting and resist/fear change? They sort of feed into and onto each other.
 
Like in physics, objects in motion will stay that way until something else interrupts its motion or direction. 
 
What would the USA (and the rest of the world) be like if we had never invented the train, automobile or plane? If everyone still had to get around by horse, boat or on foot? There would be no internet, not gps, no satellites, all long distance communication would still be by letter and take months to reach the person it was sent to. If that was the case, there would still be large areas of the planet we wouldn't know about or only have legends and rumors of. The population would be way smaller, medical breakthroughs would be rare and take decades to spread around the globe. Most people would still be farmers as there would be no quick way to move food large distances before it rotted away. Almost definitely no electricity or power grids in any town or city. 
 
We would still be living in a pre-industrial era society, as all those advancements came from easy travel, steam engines, mass production and movement of large amounts materials, resources, and people, etc... and more importantly quickly moving ideas, information and technology from one end of society to another. Someone invents the telegraph and within a few years everyone in the USA can communicate with each other in minutes or hours instead of months. That was only because the trainlines were already in place and allowed the quick building of the telegraph poles and infrastructure along those routes and they could send all the materials needed to the places that didn't have them (metal mining, copper wires, correct tools. None of those were mined or available in most parts of the USA, so all had to be premade/mined and shipped by train to the town and cities along the routes. If they had to send all that by horse-drawn wagon it would have taken decades to build, and probably wouldn't have been done at all. (Of course, without trains and the materials they provided it would be highly unlikely anyone could build a telegraph in the first place as very few places would have all the things needed in one location (metal tooling machines, copper, electricity, education, etc...) for someone to figure it all out.)
 
So it is not impossible to believe that in a world without mass transit, engines, motors, electricity, rapid communication and dissemination of ideas and technology, combined with magic, monsters, wizards, long-lived races reluctant to change, and lets not forget "Gods" that directly interact with the people of the world (at a minimum via spells, divinations, etc... but also potentially direct involvement) that kingdoms and empires would last a lot longer then they do in our world. 
 
Plus, "big numbers" are epic and fantasy, even realistic fantasy, should still be larger then life in some regards. 
 

Silly from a realistic historical and sociological perspective, probably.  From a gaming and publishing perspective, what would the benefit of filling several pages up with the details of 1,700 years of rulership changes, naming each successive ruler in the Royal Family, and discussing changes to those Royal Families every few generations, with a rapid succession of rulers in times of turbulence, going from 2,000 years before the game begins to a mere 300 years past?  Recall that, 300 years ago, there were no United States.  Would you purchase a setting book that went through details of the leadership equivalent to summarizing the leadership in each US state (plus Federal and maybe some of the larger municipalities), before and after becoming a state, and any and all conflicts and border changes and the Federal level, from 1721 to 2021?  There's a sourcebook that would just FLY off the shelves!
 
 

One of the things I really enjoy about Hero's Turakian age setting is that it includes a detailed time line with major historical events specified for every realm and region in the known world. Not all of these have permanent effects, but many reflect the world's evolving geopolitical profile. One outstanding example IMHO is the kingdom of Umbr. The following is from TA pp. 72-73:
 
The lands now known as Umbr were once a part of the great kingdom of Carshalt. After King Hrorgel the Golden fell to the evil power of the necromancer Thronek, a succession of petty kings and dukes created their own realms throughout the Carshaltan Lands. As the years passed, some prospered, while others did not; borders and fiefdoms shifted with great frequency.

In the 2400s and 2500s, one of those petty kingdoms was Umbr, which occupied the south bank of the central run of the Dragonsmoke River. Selvaine Aliere, the king of Umber from 2443-2470 FE, was a man of ambition and pride. Determined to expand the size and power of his realm, he did so partly through deft political maneuvering, partly with a few minor wars. More importantly, he passed his desires on to his sons, who slowly but surely pushed the borders of Umbr outward, conquering Jevrain and Derathon to the west, and several principalities and duchies to the east. By 2584, Umbr was a large and prosperous realm stretching from the Greyward Mountains to the shores of Lake Beralka.

The House of Aliere ruled Umber for the next 1,700 years, surviving periodic raids by the Gorthunda, the Trusca, and various tribes of Orcs, Ogres, and Trolls, a war with Keldravia in 3222 SE that cost Umbr its territories east of the Whitburn River, and a secret takeover of the royal family by the quixotic sorcerer Algashar in 3477-3481 SE. But the Aliere dynasty at long last came to an end in 4267 SE. The king died with only a sickly boy as his heir, and within a year the boy was dead as well. The powerful nobles of the Regency Council began to fight one another for the throne, leaving naught but destroyed villages and ravaged wheat fields in the wake of their bloody battles.

After a season of warfare, one of the nobles, Duke Gestren Sendres, won the victory by making an alliance with the powerful lords of the fiefdoms of Mezendria and Mircasea. He promised to end their vassalage and grant them their lands outright as kings themselves. Both preferring to accept half a loaf rather than chance taking the whole, they brought their armies to reinforce his. King Gestren married a distant cousin of the Alieres to legitimize his rule. Since then the House of Sendres have been kings in Umbr, and if their realm be smaller than that ruled by the Alieres, it is still every bit as prosperous.
 
In a number of cases those past events include things both natural and un- which led to permanent changes in the landscape. Again with the example of Umbr:
The capital of Umbr sits on the Dragonsmoke River, across from Voitaigne but separated from it by such a broad stretch of river that only ferries, not bridges, connect the two. In the 3100s, after a fire destroyed much of the city as it existed at that time despite the frantic efforts of two water-wizards to stop the conflagration, King Serril ordered a grand rebuilding. The result was a city more orderly than most in Ambrethel. It consists of a grid of public squares (designed, in part, to represent the black-and-gold checks of the Aliere coat of arms), each connected to the others by a broad road. Dorrel Droguine, the royal palace, occupies the center of the city and is surrounded by its own wall (in addition to the larger wall around Dyvnar as a whole).
 
Another thing I appreciate in TA is that practically every realm and location, even the most apparently serene and stable, contains some plot-inspiring feature, either within or without, described in the main text or included in the "GM's Vault" section. Continuing with Umbr, this is from TA p. 73: Several years ago, King Laudrec granted leave to a large group of Gnomes to take up residence in the hilly Mnoos Forest, where they claimed their ancestors had once dwelt, provided they paid annual taxes and tribute. They did so for two years, but then the payments ceased, and all efforts to resolve the situation have met with little more than clever words and delaying tactics on the part of the Gnomes. The king fears he may soon have to roust them out of the forest with soldiers, and does not look forward to the prospect.
 
And elaborating on that detail in the GM's Vault on p. 283:
 
 

Civilization depends on making sure all major threats to ordinary people are removed where the bulk of the people live,  You cannot have a thriving culture with farms and art and architecture and so on if there are horrible things living in the cellar and monsters lurking nearby.  That's why in the oldest settled areas there are no major predators around any longer (and, off topic, why its idiotic to reintroduce them); that's how civilizations become settled and last.  If the kingdom of Plaznstein has been in this area for 3000 years without war or trouble in its borders, there's not going to be anything in those borders to cause trouble any longer.  Adventurers already went into all those caves and cellars and wiped out the bad guys. Other than evil people who abuse their position of power, etc.
 
That's not to say some new thing cannot arise, just that the history precludes any constant presence of menace and adventure.  Its the difference between walking through the worst part of a big city and walking through the ritzy, high-end district.

The only published Fantasy setting I can ever imagine using is Exalted, because the setting of Creation is so tied to everything else in the game. But Creation has seen significant changes over the centuries. The history that matters starts with the Primordial War, when the Exalted were given power so they could overthrow the world's creators. Then came the millennia of the Old Realm, also called the High First Age. That ended with the Usurpation, when two kinds of Exalted overthrew two of the others, establishing the Shogunate of the Low First Age. The Shogunate sort of limped along for several centuries until the plague called the Great Contagion killed 90% of the world's population. It was not a natural disaster: It was created by the ghosts of some of the Exalted murdered in the Usurpation, who had gained new power from the ghosts of some of the world's slain creators. Then things got even worse when the Fair Folk invaded from the primal chaos outside the world in an attempt to unmake it all. Their literally infinite hordes were stopped only when a young officer somehow found a way to activate the ultimate weapon of the Old Realm. She then founded a new Scarlet Empire with herself as its Empress, beginning the Second Age. She has ruled most of the world, to varying degrees, for more than 700 years since then. Five years ago, she vanished. All the conflicts she kept in check are starting up again -- and the power of the Exalted slain long ago now seeks new mortal hosts. Though some of these new Exalted are different in ominous ways. The Time of Tumult is at hand.
 
That's the history of the world as a whole. Every country has its own history too, in some cases reaching back to the Old Realm.
 
The way to keep a setting from seeming static is to begin with the premise that things will change, and some of those changes and events will matter for current people. A lot.
 
Dean Shomshak
(Full disclosure: Though I was not part of the initial design for Exalted and Creation, I did a lot of work on the Second Edition. A few things, I even think I did well.)
 

I figure if you are going to play Champions half the fun is setting it in the Champions Universe!

This is a sort of "Sequel" game to an old Champions Campaign that ran for over 25 years.  All my current players played in that game and actually interacted with the "by the book" version of Ravenswood so in this game I advanced the Timeline for the new characters to keep it contemporary. 

Ms. Crone's 5E writeup mentioned that she knew she would be Headmistress and I knew there was going to be a lot of time shennanigans in my PC's future so why not stick to the Canon & reap the rewards?   (everyone keeps going on about to teenagers about how they are choosing their future, so I'm having several different futures show up with opinions.  I like that Headmistress Timmons has insight into what will be but comes by it differently than "conventional" time travelers.  It makes her a great Mentor figure in that she can help but can't solve the problems directly.)

As the old PCs had met the students statted out in Teen Champions and they have now graduated I also had to repopulate the school with "nontraditional" students of my own making.  But that is half the fun!

The high school parts were challenging in part because my own high school experience was trying to avoid any contact with my classmates, as this was rarely pleasant. Not a milieu for which I have a natural feel. I solved this in part by taking a cue from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game and saying that the campaign was emulating a TV series, a la Buffy, Vampire Diaries, etc. So I only had to get in the head of TV versions of teens instead of actual teens.
 
It was still challenging to give each PC their own ongoing subplot, and to tie everything back to high school activities.Like, dating across rival cliques? Jaeda Magdalena, bad girl scion of the Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl, gets involved with Gary/Geirrod Vetterson, football hero and frost giant from Crosstown High. Fortunate;ly, I have good players who were willing to carry some of the load.
 
Dean Shomshak

There is an actual Hero games for this
 
 

If you have or can get a copy of Bad Medicine for Dr Drugs the team in it are supposed to be high schoolers.

Incidentally: I never ran a Ravenswood campaign, but I sorta did Teen Supers with my "Scion High" campaign. White Wolf's Scion game uses the premise that gods of myth still have semi-mortal by-blows who are destined for lives of adventure. Influence of the "Percy Jackston" stories should be obvious. Though I hadn't read those stories at the time, I sort of went back to the source by having teenage children of the gods attending a modern American high school. They were asked to keep the Mythic World secret, as their divine parents preferred. Various troubles came looking for them. They had rivalries with the Titanspawn students at Crosstown High. Romantic troubles. Afterschool jobs. The challenge was to try interweaving the mortal and divine: the giant talking wolf crashes the Homecoming Dance to deliver its ultimatum, the plain girl who became a hottie over the summer doesn't know she was turned into a monster (but might be cured), etc. It was probably the hardest campaign I ever ran -- for the high school parts, not the mythic parts, or even for wrestling with the typically clunky WW game mechanics. But it turned out really well.
 
Dean Shomshak

I've been running a Ravenswood game for several years now.  
 
The way I've been dealing with it is by:
- Getting the kids off campus (Dates, Movies, visiting parks, Music Shows)
- Having adventures come to them (hunteds who know where they live, ex-students with an axe to grind, shennanigans in the science labs & library)
- School Events (Rival Schools, Secret ID drama at the Spring Formal, Field Trips)
- Family (One PC's father is hunted by Viper, another is the son of a Supervillain, several NPCs are the children of Heros)
 
I've found that you have to get out of the "Mayor calls the PCs on the Red Batphone" type of adventures with teenagers.  I lean into the drama of highschool.  Not only do you want to get the right date for Prom, but she is being wooed by a "nontraditional" student from Von Drotte Academy (aka a mutant from Viper's school for budding supervillains).
We have a whole ongoing plot about the future version of one PC's first girlfriend who keeps attacking the PCs to prevent them from doing all the evil she says they do in the future.
 
Also: One PC paid points for a fake ID that lets them use Rideshare services to get around town.  It won't help them get to a superfight, but it lets them get to interesting locations.

The closest comic-book parallel I can think of is the New Mutants, from Marvel. And no, their adventures did not involve responding to bank robberies or the like. A lot of times, the action came to them: Living in the X-Mansion, they were targets for all the X-Men's enemies.  (The Hellfire Club even had its own junior auxiliary, the Hellions, going to its own private school nearby.) Several characters had extensive baggage from their prior lives that came looking for them, or that they had to leave the school to deal with and the whole class came along.
 
Though it helped that this was late '80s/early '90s Marvel plotting, where no story could be completed in less than 4 issues, so in a year of comics there weren't actually that many stories. Especially given the teen angst for padding. Even still, you are quite right: Many of the situations were contrived, to put it mildly.
 
I presume a Ravenswood Academy campaign would operate similarly.
 
Dean Shomshak

I've done this several times. It has been fun watching the PCs look at this mook that not long ago they took out with one casual blow now not only can take that blow but can return it and dish out a rather impressive blow in return. 

That is one of the Agent Tricks that has been recommended by Choosy Hero GMs since the old email list.  If an agent does really well, or is really interesting and memorable, have them come back.  Possibly powered up (wearing special gear, etc).
 
Example: In my Golden Age Champions campaign there were generic tough guy mooks that could be hired.  They all had basically the same stats and powers with very few variations: Big, strong, tough.  One mook in particular was memorable and became part of the campaign.  The first fight they ran into him he rolled an 18 on an attack and tripped, crashing through a wall.  The second time he squared off with the wrestler tough guy in the group with lots of boasts and trash talking and got beat to a paste.  The third time he got stomped on by King Kong.  Then he showed up knocking on the door of the superhero base, asking if maybe he could work for them as a guard or something because clearly crime was not paying.

Yes.
 
All of villains-- to include agents and henchmen-- get experience.  Not always as quickly as the heroes, since the heroes are-- well, they are in every situation, whereas the villains sort of rotate in and out....
 
I always thought that this was the norm in the source material-- heroes with whacky goofy villains back in the sixties and seventies who are now facing world-shaking foes, and don't give two rips about Calendar Man anymore....
 
 
 

I dislike agents that make the PCs feel less super.

I dislike agents that require the PCs to be built on inflated points to be viable.
 
I accept that a few "agents" are actually low-powered superbeings, through equipment, training or both. Most shouldn't be.