Royal Rumble!
Long ago, humanity faced an ancient enemy which they could not defeat, so the gods in their infinite grace bestowed upon them powers and blessings, that their creations may continue to live on and prosper. Nowadays the ancient evil is almost much all gone, and the powers are mostly used for tournament arcs. Still, they never did come down to smite us for our iniquities so that's pretty good right?
The city of Rhea is currently the largest and most successful city in the world. In times gone by, it was one of the first cities to fund college education so the success came hand in hand, really. Over time, an equal emphasis came to be placed on all education, with a slight bias towards high-schoolers, because let's be real here. Tournament arcs are a lot more fun when all of your top contenders are still young and full of character development.
And the city of Rhea's other main attraction is their tournaments. Every person's power is combat oriented in some way, shape, or form because the reason they were bestowed upon the first humans to begin with was combat. Most major cities in any region of the world will have tournaments but none are as usually as grand as the city of Rhea's. Visitors from far and wide come to pit their might against the best the city has to offer.
Schools and Factions
There are two main schools which usually fill out the 'best' category. The first one is St. Laurel's School of Academic Excellence, and the other one is Mephisto's School for the Wickedly Inclined.
St. Laurel's as you might be able to tell from the lofty sounding name is quite a high class school. It has an extremely large campus with top class facilities for just about everything you can think of. There's even an engineering section for those who've been blessed by the God of Smithing and aren't well suited to direct combat, for example. The school has a very good standard of education, so even if one doesn't succeed in the sphere of combat there's always more study options.
Mephisto's School for the Wickedly Inclined always shows up in every tournament but no one is quite sure where they happen to be located. Their physical location changes in the records just about every year. To have your school's location inaccurately listed is supposed to incur a fine, but the principal doesn't seem to have a problem paying it every year. He does also seem to spend a lot of time being suspected of tax fraud, however. Hmmmm….
There's also been new faction that seems to have shown up recently. Tournament teams are usually school based, but there are various free tournaments in which all you have to do is form a team and register in order to fight. One such team has become very large within the two years it has been active, and that is the Vigilantes. They're not actual vigilantes, but amongst their members are various students from both St. Laurel's, and Mephisto's.
Their membership is now too large to be called just a normal group, and as such they are treated as an small organization of sorts. As long as they can pay the fee for entry, they can register in the larger school tournaments, like any other non-school organization. They do free-lance jobs for the money, stuff like finding stray cats, manual labour, exorcisms and the like. Besides that though, records of the group's membership and activities are scarce.
Most would dismiss such a group as nothing more than an oddity in the general order of the city, however they attracted much attention on their first entry into an official tournament because of their leader, King. He was strong enough to win every 1v1 battle the group had to fight by himself. Regardless of any complaints about how victory was achieved, they achieved victory and earned their rankings on Rhea's Ranking Board.
Ranking and Tournaments
The Ranking Board shows official rankings for any and all combatant citizens in Rhea. Throughout the year there are 4 major ranking tournaments, occurring once every three months or so, with the final tournament being especially important. To increase your rank on the ranking board, you can do extracurricular activities as part of a high school or middle school, or you can complete assigned jobs as a part of an organization.
Of course, the fastest way to gain ranking is by participating in the tournaments. Each tournament will give a certain amount of ranking depending on how you fare, both as an individual and as a group. The first three major ranking tournaments give larger amounts of ranking, but the final tournament is a bit special. It's an exclusive combat tournament in which defeating an opponent will allow you to swap ranks with them. Of course, you can challenge them directly to do the same thing, both within tournaments and outside of tournaments, but there are designated areas so you can't just do it anywhere.
Besides individual rankings, schools with the highest overall ranking are given various prizes by the city itself.
Mephisto's and St. Laurel's have been at a stalemate for a long time, Mephisto's being one of the only schools to be able to put a dent in their otherwise spotless record. But perhaps the addition of a group such as the Vigilantes, while not enough to break the status quo, might just tip the scales one way or another.
The first tournament of the year will start in about a month, but between then and now, all sorts of awful things could occur. Perhaps a certain factions top contenders will suddenly fall ill just before the tournament starts. Perhaps the Ancient Evil which had never quite gone extinct will make a resurgence. No matter how it goes, one thing is for sure. The one who's left standing after the dust settles will be the winner.
Wait, what did you say about the Ancient Evil?
Oh right, they were never quite vanquished completely because of their tricky habit of popping into their home dimension when things went sour. The entire host of gods in this dimension did band together against them, after all, no way they were natives. Nowadays they mostly hang out in the other dimension, and cross over from time to time to give people some grief.
They would mount a full scale invasion invade but, y'know, it's awfully hard to invade a world in which every single person in it is super-powered. They do try though. Typically they'll open portals deep underground, or somewhere out of the way all sneaky-like. It's rather important to destroy these however so they're typically discovered fairly quickly and closed almost as fast. There are exceptions, as always, but every so often you'll find them in places you normally shouldn't be but you just had a bad feeling about. When that happens, it's best to report to the authorities, but sometimes you just can't shake off the feeling that there's something inside. Then you do and then you die because you weren't expecting the ghosts.
There are usually demons in those kinds of places but sometimes you'll find ghosts and all kinds of things. Don't expect to run into it too often, though.
Rules(Largely unchanged)
- Don't be rude to other players.
- Metagaming will be fine in some cases, and I'll also be metagaming technically as the GM to bother people sometimes. The line for metagaming for me is when it's not about fun, and more about chasing an advantage you shouldn't have.
- Being overpowered won't matter so much in most cases, but in the tournaments of course they will. I can make some exceptions for something like a good character weakness, or at the very least you can keep some kryptonite in your back pocket. Just ask if you're not quite sure what to do.
- Auto-hitting is fine for pretty much anyone I'm controlling, but just to the point of confirming whether or not an attack has hit, and maybe some follow-up attacks. If I want something to live, then I'll find a way. No auto-hits against other players though, as always.
- Don't god mode, probably. You're all going to get plot armour, and there's no place I'd feasibly want to kill you in.
With that out of the way, let's get to character creation!
Character Sheets
I won't place too much restriction on the nature of your powers, but as a personal recommendation, I'd say that the simpler your powers are to use, the easier it'll be to play. Each character can start with 1 central power, and up to 3 other abilities. You get more as the RP goes along, but you might not so choose wisely.
Your central power is the one you should base your character's core combat potential, and your three other abilities should help to facilitate your core power in some way. You can choose to do whatever you really want, though.
Anyhow, here's the basic CS skeleton.
Basic CS skeleton:
Name:
Feel free to include any nicknames or titles your character would have.
Age:
If your character is a student, it'll be 18 years at the maximum. You can be a lot younger though, say if you were a child genius or something similar.
Grade:
Only applicable for students, St. Laurels and Mephisto's are high schools, but you can be from middle school or lower depending on circumstance. For this part of the character sheet, enter school (middle, high, and/or name of school), followed by 1st year, 2nd year, or 3rd year.
Biography:
Include some form of either personality or background here. It's optional, but there won't be much time to set up characters at the start of this RP, so having something is going to be better than having nothing.
Powers:
Put your powers here. Do remember, 1 core power and up to 3 other abilities. If you'd like a guideline as to how far you should or shouldn't go, I'll have some example sheets later on.
Relationships:
Rivals and nemeses, reputations preceding, perhaps even some special feelings for a special person. This section is optional, but it's nice.
Interest Check