Supers!

Ever since man has been capable of hitting other man with a rock, the world has been divided with power, between those who have it and those who do not. On this world, perhaps even more than ours, this division is more important than any other. Some secure power with the right mechanical gadgets and the years of study necessary to build them. Others seek out power at the bottom of a chemical vat, with the handshake of some otherworldly evil, or in the bite of a genetically unstable exotic pet. A few with enough money or federal funding simply strap six tons of bulletproof power over their chest and call it a day. All of these people, designated by their power, are known as Supers. Some are heroes. Some are villains. Universally, they're all pretty dramatic.
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The powers that be reigning in these powerful persons are known as the United States Department of Hero Regulation and the Villain's International League of Evildoing -- they are the respective equivalents of a high-ranking government agency and an international labor union working in tandem to ensure the other side follows roughly the same rules. The fleshbound VILE Codex of Cruelty, for instance, shares no less than 500 identical pages to the official DHR Federal Mandates & Regulations Handbook, and this is no strange coincidence. Both sides have inscrutable teams of lawyers and investigative sub-agencies, and both sides are just about as scary as the IRS when you're on their bad side. Every ten years, they hold a summit to review and revise the rules, and the 2020 summit is to be held only seven days from our story's inception.
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Supers!, which I am already regretting stylizing with an exclamation point, is to be a semi-sandbox story -- that means I am giving you a fair amount of freedom with your individual stories and themes -- with two overarching subplots going on for Heroes and Villains. I expect probably two people to apply to this, so accordingly, there are a bunch of rules (not in the annoying "i'm the GM i reserve the right to shit down your chimney" way) in order to ensure that these two people have sheets that demonstrate an understanding of this difficult-to-understand world. With that, I'll drop my GM voice and get down to it.

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The Department of Hero Regulation is a government agency for the management of heroes, founded in 1944 after the infamous Mighty Man Incident, wherein Sam J. Reynolds, the aforementioned Mighty Man, was found guilty of Destruction of Property in the form of a damaged barn when Mighty Man collided into it during an altercation with Brainfreeze. After breaking the handcuffs he was placed in, Mighty Man incinerated the courthouse with his heat-vision and flew to Nicaragua, where he remains in hiding to this day. The proceeding national outcry lead to the DHR's establishment, and federal funding for devices and training to handle Supers.
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Due to the passive role heroes take defending themselves from villains, the DHR has significantly fewer rules than their counterpart organization, though this is not to say that the rules are not as strictly enforced as the League's. Most of the DHR’S rules focus on acceptable levels of force and permitted scenarios for the escalation of conflict -- As an organization, the DHR is more focused on capturing unregistered heroes and villains and threats to global safety. They typically only involve themselves in the affairs of higher level villains, such as those capable of purchasing nuclear weapons or summoning world-devouring creatures. They are also in charge of assigning appropriate “Units”, which are essentially sets of pre-approved dynamics such as “Lone Hero”, “Hero Family” or “Hero/Sidekick”. When a single man in a cave applies for a young, spandex-wrapped male sidekick, it is the DHR's screenings they have to pass. When Super families routinely risk their child's safety crawling into tombs to press secret buttons, it is the DHR who investigates. When a hero breaks the rules, it is the DHR who hunts them down.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe Villain's International League of Evildoing

The Villain's International League of Evildoing, more commonly abbreviated to VILE, was founded in 1953 as The Brotherhood of Evildoing, though this was changed to "The League of Evildoing" in 1967 in the infamous "Electricia v. Brotherhood of Evildoing" case, and once more to the current name in 1981 as part of a rebranding effort. It is essentially a global union for villains, serving as the authority over every facet of supervillainy, be it dealing with a villain’s legal recourse, supplying henchmen, screening offensive alter-egos and gimmicks, creating suitable nemesis pairings for heroes, and so on.

VILE’s rulebook is bound in human flesh, and is extensive, strict, and notoriously bulletproof -- There are no loopholes to be exploited, or any matter it does not cover in great detail. VILE’s legal team is one of the best in the world, and when matters can no longer be settled in courtrooms, they rely on their equally-skilled assassins. VILE is lead by its aging founder, one Frederick Verhullen, the villain known as Black Mask. He has been bedbound for the last four years, and is hanging on to his mortal coil by the grace of God and a skilled team of doctors who provide him round-the-clock care. With elections for the new chairman to proceed almost immediately after Black Mask's eventual death, would-be leaders of villainy are prematurely beginning to throw their hats in the ring.
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Finding its start in Salem, Massachusetts in 1933 as the Society for Paranormal Inquiry, the Magicians' Order (formally renamed in 1948) is the single largest collective of arcane academics and their ilk in the world. Overseen by the current Archmagician, Dr. Abra Cadaver, the Order is something of an enigma to all those outside of it -- both heroes and villains fill the Order's membership, and they maintain working relations, if cool, with both the VILE and the DHR. Ostensibly, the Order serves as a neutral ground where Magicians can come together to share and discuss their supernatural findings amongst their peers, though only those within their hallowed halls know just how the Order goes about its business.

The most notable experiment conducted by the Order was the Abraxus Ritual of 1947, a djinn-summoning ceremony combined with tomes of stolen Nazi research into the paranormal. This resulted in the discovery of the Veil, the very force returned to the world by Trent Hark nearly twenty years prior which connects the Earth to countless planes of existence. The two planes accessible by mankind are the Seelie Court, a realm of pure magical energy and the home of the faeries, and the Phantom Wastes, a grey and expansive world home to eldritch horrors who seek to end all life throughout the plans of existence -- There are hundreds, if not thousands of planes past the Phantom Wastes and Seelie Court, though they are outside of the material realm and inconceivable to the minds of men. These matters, and many even more complicated and Tolkienesque, are the Order's bread and butter.
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