Grailknight

I initially thought Side Effect but those are supposed to always go off. But I'd do it with a Linked XDM Power with an Activation Roll and a Limitation on the Shrinking that locks it on for that Xd6 weeks.

Yes, with Aaron Taylor Johnson as Kraven. Not close to the first person I would have thought of to play the part, but we'll see.
 
But that's another beef I have with Sony: Taking characters who are outright villains, or at best anti-heroes, and making them the protagonists of superhero movies, mainly because they have the rights to the character. They don't understand what the genre is about and why it was popular for so long. To be fair, most creators of comics today seem to suffer the same deficiency.

To me that's part of an attitude that's become an unspoken, maybe even unrecognized, but fundamental element of some capitalist societies, particularly America: People with money have it because they deserve it. People with a lot of money are fundamentally better than those who don't have it. Work that pays more is better than work that pays less. Because people with money are better, they should derive more benefits from society than poor people. They should be at the head of the line, or jump the line altogether. Money has become the measure of a person's quality.
 
During the pandemic I was struck by the people who were deemed "essential service" and required to keep going to work and interacting with the public even though it was dangerous. How many bankers were on that list? How many lawyers? Professional athletes? No, it was truckers and bus drivers. Railroad workers. Utility service people. Grocery clerks. These were the people society would break down without, yet they're paid like peasants. I was hoping the pandemic would make more people see the injustice in that, but no such luck.

There you go attacking the real root of the problem.
 
It's not totally that simple though but if you spread that to all executive pay then we're coming closer. If the average worker at company X makes $60,000 and he mean makes $40,000 then the CEO making $6 million may make sense. But making $30 million? That's probably out of line with their contribution to the company.

Yeah its like nukes or guns or porn or whatever.  The cat is out of the bag, you cannot put it back.  Superman could grab all the nuclear weapons in a net and throw them into the sun, and nations would just build more and keep them in lead silos or disguise them as something Superman ignored.  You can't unlearn tech, unless there is a horrendous catastrophe that resets civilization.  You just have to learn how to use things responsibly and how to respond when people do not.
 
Approximately 1.2 million people die each year as a result of auto collisions.  That's a price we have come to accept as being worth having cars; how many are saved as a result of automobiles?  Ten times that, if not more.  New tech requires new responses, moral judgement, and law.  It takes time, and study, and analysis and cultural change.

We're in the process now of getting used to the idea of instant communication on the internet.  We're trying to learn socially how to handle that, legally how to approach it, and it takes time, philosophical thought, theology, legal study etc.  Every new wave of tech makes that necessary, and people adapt.  The problem we're facing right now is that tech is happening so fast and is so potent in terms of cultural impact that its rough trying to get it all straight.  Making matters worse is that our culture has removed nearly all consequence to certain kinds of behavior, so a lot of corrosive things are consequence-free, or consequence-light, at least.
 
It will all get worked out to at least a functional level, but not perfectly, in time.  Until then its a rough ride, like when the Model T drove through town and scared all the horses and womenfolk.

The last truly grandiose plan I dreamed up was a riff on the follow up to Age of Ultron. There's a giant vibranium spike sitting under that lake in Sokovia, along with the wreckage of several antigravity engines.
 
My villain wanted to collude with the Sokovian government and repair enough to make a floating orbital platform the size of a large stadium and from there begin an elevator, orbital ring and asteroid mining. Naturally, world governments would not agree but once launched it would have missile defense arrays and kinetic bombardment capability and it's own team of supers on hand.
 
A very grandiose Thunderbolts plot and for the kicker the villain offers to allow all heroes to join him and share in the leadership of the platform. He really does want to lead mankind to a brighter future but feels we needs a strong guiding hand to steer us there. He'd even be willing to step down for a Superman or captain America type to take over if that would build trust.

The last truly grandiose plan I dreamed up was a riff on the follow up to Age of Ultron. There's a giant vibranium spike sitting under that lake in Sokovia, along with the wreckage of several antigravity engines.
 
My villain wanted to collude with the Sokovian government and repair enough to make a floating orbital platform the size of a large stadium and from there begin an elevator, orbital ring and asteroid mining. Naturally, world governments would not agree but once launched it would have missile defense arrays and kinetic bombardment capability and it's own team of supers on hand.
 
A very grandiose Thunderbolts plot and for the kicker the villain offers to allow all heroes to join him and share in the leadership of the platform. He really does want to lead mankind to a brighter future but feels we needs a strong guiding hand to steer us there. He'd even be willing to step down for a Superman or captain America type to take over if that would build trust.

Yes, this idea can work and work well. Giving everyone a common origin, makes it simpler to weave plots together. And it makes less work for the GM on organizations.  Plus, single can still be pretty broad in scope.
 
It can also give some justification to fear by the population because these supers are different from the norm. All mages? They're after our souls! All cyborgs? They're going to turn us into spare parts! All mutants? We'll be replaced! Aliens? They'll enslave us and then eat us! It's much easier to fuel one strong conspiracy than lots of small ones.

If my premise were wrong, organizations (military, police, gangs) wouldn't have to train the reluctance to kill out of people. You'd be far harder pressed to find any credible stats indicating that "most people" are inclined to kill each other. The global murder rate (2019) is 6.2/100,000. So is 6.2 "most" or is 99,993.8 "most"?
 

Yes, this idea can work and work well. Giving everyone a common origin, makes it simpler to weave plots together. And it makes less work for the GM on organizations.  Plus, single can still be pretty broad in scope.
 
It can also give some justification to fear by the population because these supers are different from the norm. All mages? They're after our souls! All cyborgs? They're going to turn us into spare parts! All mutants? We'll be replaced! Aliens? They'll enslave us and then eat us! It's much easier to fuel one strong conspiracy than lots of small ones.

The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion

Any number of places this could be posted here, but here's AI making an opportunity for all of us.
 

I had heard of this, but my idea of the problem was off by an order of magnitude. I had thought that the major issue was special grades of sand for computer chips. Knowing that it's for construction, make the problem much more serious. And it's insidiously mundane, who pays attention to sand trucks? And I can easily see a Bond movie based around this. They didn't really play up the water plot in Quantum of Solace.

From the February 2024 issue of Scientific American: The world uses enormous quantities of sand, construction to silicon chips. This makes illegal sand mining one of the biggest rackets in the world, far exceeding other forms of illegal mining. Since this is Scientific American, much of the concern is about the resulting environmental damage -- but the big money in sand mining can corrupt governments at every level and fund other unsavory activities. Googling "sand mafia" turns up many other articles for further research.
 
Illegal sand mining might be difficult to work into the usual urban vigilante Dark Champions game, but you might fit it into an international espionage game. Imagine a James Bond-style mastermind who uses sand mining to fund his terrorist scheme, coup plot or diabolical weapon. The death trap for captured agents should be obvious.
 
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sand-mafias-are-plundering-the-earth/
 
Dean Shomshak

This gets back to something that we've discussed before, a unified standard for the Hero Universe.
 
It would require all official Hero products to be examined and modified by a common editorial standard. There can and will be variation but there would need to be a consensus on levels of play like High and Low Fantasy, Heroic Adventuring (Westerns, Espionage, Black Ops, etc.), Beginning, Standard, High Power and Galactic Supers/ Magic campaigns and the spectrum of Martial Arts. And these editors would need real control over the ranges of what is allowed to be labelled as each.
 
Not a change of the game per se but a change in editorial direction. You can still have Dr. Destroyer and the Geodesics in the same universe, but they would not appear in the same product.

Not so much Social Justice but Wokeness. As an example, inherently evil monster races have been pretty much removed from Pathfinder 2. Especially glaring was the goblins , who were despicable little rapists and torturers, were added as a PC race. You are supposed to believe that X years of lore was accomplished by "bad" goblins but any new PC's and NPC's were good acceptable citizens. 

Darkness does not require a way to turn it off.  UAA is what requires a reasonable way to turn it off.  So, the first instance would require some way to avoid the attack, but the second one does not.  The second instance does not have UAA it has Useable simultaneously by 16 people.  That means the targets have to be willing.  The price is also wrong for that one it should be + 1 ½ for 16 people.  The second instance has personal immunity, so I am assuming it was designed as a defense and does not affect the target. 
 
It’s possible the power does have a reasonably common way to avoid it but is just not listed.  When I construct the power in Hero Designer it does not list the defense for the UAA, the comment section is commonly used for this, but nothing prompts you for it.
 
The power is fairly strong but there are plenty of ways to get around it.  As Grailknight pointed out combat sense will negate this. 

You cannot have darkness that covers the unusual sense group as a whole.  Each unusual sense is considered a completely different sense group.  So, you can have darkness to detect souls (in the unusual sense group), but that does not block another sense in the unusual sense group. You would have to buy each unusual sense as a separate sense.  This does mean when you build your enhanced sense you don’t get any sense groups modifiers for free.  Just build a sense from the ground up to counter this darkness.  It will probably be fairly expensive and if you want to use it to attack you will need at least ranged and targeting and probably sense.  
 
Naked Advantage will not even work. All a Naked Advantage does is allow you to buy an advantage or adder for a power or group of powers.  It does not allow you to create a power you could not create with the normal rules.  If you can build the power with naked advantage, you can build it without it.  
 
 
Something like this would work.  Detect Souls (unusual) Discriminatory, Ranged, Sense, Targeting for 27 Points.

Combat Sense is a thing.

This gets back to something that we've discussed before, a unified standard for the Hero Universe.
 
It would require all official Hero products to be examined and modified by a common editorial standard. There can and will be variation but there would need to be a consensus on levels of play like High and Low Fantasy, Heroic Adventuring (Westerns, Espionage, Black Ops, etc.), Beginning, Standard, High Power and Galactic Supers/ Magic campaigns and the spectrum of Martial Arts. And these editors would need real control over the ranges of what is allowed to be labelled as each.
 
Not a change of the game per se but a change in editorial direction. You can still have Dr. Destroyer and the Geodesics in the same universe, but they would not appear in the same product.

Reed housed the gate to the Negative Zone prison in the Baxter Building but he really, really should have known better.

So have the two villains come to Earth in a loose alliance and let one of the NPC cops be after both of them. They could normally handle them individually but need help against both. or beef up one of the villains with the adventure's plot hook and have the detective and cyborg/spaceship be partners tracking them down.