Project Nemesis is a fan driven website for games that use the One-Roll Engine (like Nemesis, Wild Talents, Reign and Monsters) or Chaosium's Basic Roleplay System (BRP) (like Call of Cthulhu) and the Delta Green setting.
The premise is: Sorcerers have always been around. They gain power
through pacts with otherworldly intelligences, and have lived in secret
for most of human history. Enchantment is a learned skill, like pottery
or cartography, but it remained covert. The powerful sorcerers wanted
to monopolize their influence. The weaker ones who couldn't keep it in
their pants got burned at the stake.
This all changed after World War One. The informational basis of magic
was beginning to flow easier (thanks, Gutenberg!), more people knew it
and decided that there was enough demand for contact with the dead that
they could emerge from the shadows, practice the Art openly, and be
accepted and respected by their communities.
It would have worked, were it not for the first overtly occult
government organization, a German group with the innocuous name
"National Socialism."
Mutants, like sorcerers, have also been around for forever. But due to
a confluence of factors, they almost never became active. To develop a
mutant power, you need to (1) have the gene, (2) survive puberty, (3)
be well fed enough, for long enough, to fuel the transformation and (4)
be placed in a situation, as an adult, where you would accept your
ability to do the impossible.
Historically, most mutants were either god-king types or horrible
monsters. But just as the increasing affluence of Western societies
meant more people were hitting requirements (2) and (3), along came
World War Two to take care of (4).
The US had the most mutants, simply because it was the best-fed nation.
Thanks, Iowa. The Allies discovered that you could hang a lot of weight
on stories of everyday soldier Joes becoming mutant war heroes -- just
like you could get a lot of mileage out of scare stories about Nazi
sorcerers experimenting with That Which Man Was Not Meant to Know.
Of course, everyone was chasing magic in secret, and after the war
(which was influenced perhaps 5-10% by the presence of metahumans, if
that) the race was on to get the scraps of the Nazis' occult program.
This secret conflict, which settled into a harsh stalemate, was called
"The Grim War" instead of the Cold War of our history.
The USSR kicked America's butt when it came to gathering secret
knowledge, and it helped them not one bit against the US' ravenous free
market. It collapsed on schedule, bringing us to where we are today.
More and more people are becoming active mutants, because it's
psychologically acceptable now. But troublingly, more are transforming
earlier and earlier, before they're emotionally prepared for powers
that would disturb even the most staid of adults.
At the same time, interest in sorcery is greater than ever, and access
to information on it -- genuine stuff, and crap, and dangerous
half-and-half -- is easier than ever. Thanks, Xerox, Al Gore and Google!
ORE Superheroes 
