Here's a writeup of the WT game I'm doing, grafting REIGN companies on as the PCs start to challenge and interact with the various factions. 

I started my new WT campaign on Sunday. It wasn't the most auspicious start -- out of four players, one was down with the stomach flu. Another was going to be late, but wound up stuck in traffic so unbelievably slow that he was delayed THREE HOURS. Normally, I wouldn't run a game with 50% absence, but since I thought #3 was on his way, I figured I'd focus on the other two until he got there and rope them in together. Oops.

However, even without two players, it went pretty well.

THE SETTING: GRIM WAR

The premise for my WT setting is that both mutants and sorcerers have always been around. Maybe Alexander the Great had Heavy Armor or Hyperbody. Maybe Ben Franklin conjured daemons to protect his business interests. But by and large, they just weren't relevant to the course of history. Sorcerous knowledge was difficult to acquire, had to apply, and often hazardous to practice. Mutant genes are rare, and the powers don't flick on until a sort of second puberty -- and, just like normal puberty, it's unlikely to happen on schedule to malnourished or sickly people. Furthermore, many historical mutants who DID live to develop powers either failed to control them, or failed to accept them, or just never bothered trying to waste anybody with their heat vision. (When was the last time YOU tried to waste someone with your heat vision?)

World War I started the deviation between Grim War history and our own. A few people demonstrated mutant powers during the conflict -- the unexpected experience of modern combat was likely to shock people out of their standard beliefs about the way things worked -- but the big change came after, and after the Spanish Flu epidemic. A globally decimated population shook people's faith and left them longing for a way to contact their lost relatives.

In this climate, the Theosophical Society felt it was finally time to throw aside their cloak of secrecy and reveal their powers to the world. Soon, they had established that, yes, sorcery worked and, yes, it could contact the dead and, yes, they could prove this to the satisfaction of science. A golden age of occult research ensued, slowed only slightly by the sort of disaster any thinking person expects when the underprepared start fiddling around with conjuration. It culminated in the creation of the very first fully-supernaturally-oriented government: National Socialism.

Enter World War II.

The Nazis had a leg up on the sorcerous front (though, of course, all their enemies had enchanters on their side as well -- a factor that was conveniently forgotten after VE day), but when America got involved, mutant soldiers and sailors began developing powers on the battlefront. This was due, in some small part, to the American dedication to 'frontier spirit' and rugged individualism, but far more to America's vast, well-defended grain belt. Americans were simply better fed. American fighters had the calories needed to fuel their transformations, while the Russians starved and the British rationed.

The war generated the propaganda that still informs modern attitudes, still continues in the 21st century. Its central message is that mutants are generally GOOD. They're everyday folks just like you and me, only with superpowers, and they act right, just like you would if you had superpowers. Right? You would, wouldn't you? Sure you would. Sorcerers, on the other hand, are presented as unrelievedly BAD. They're creepy, isolated perverts mucking about with unholy forces in pursuit of power and wealth they can't attain honestly. They conspire in secret, trying to control you and your life!

There are strict anti-magic laws through most of the developed world. Every civilized culture denies using magic. Their governments all do.

After the war, there was a great scramble to gather up the fruits of the Nazis' occult research: This was called the Grim War, in a pun on the standard name for magical tomes. It has never really ended, even with the fall of the Soviet Union. But while the powers that be have always attempted to suppress magical knowledge, they're finding it harder and harder in the face of modern information technology -- the same technology that can analyze a dozen medieval spells and build a faster, easier, more powerful version of ALL of them.

There are more mutants around, too -- something to do, perhaps, with the factors that have created a nationwide epidemic of childhood obesity in the USA.

In WT terms, Grim War is Red 4 (but primed to slide downhill), Gold 3, Blue 4 and Black 3.


THE CHARACTERS: 250 POINTS EACH OF RAGING HORMONAL JUSTICE!

LUCIEN KNIGHT, aka "Bolt" formerly aka "Surge"
Lucien had a pro football future ahead of him, until a career ending knee injury. Physical therapy was tough, and he was tough on himself. He pushed -- too far. In the middle of a physical therapy session doing leg weights, the pain became so severe that his mutant powers kicked in, transporting him across the nation from the PT facility in Cincinnati to his brother's apartment in San Francisco. Since then, he hasn't been able to teleport anywhere near as far, and but he can (with some concentration) make the jump between that apartment and that PT weight machine. He can also teleport short distances, shoot lightning from his hands, and (with intense concentration) call down truly a truly abysmal thunderbolt from the sky. He's very hard to injure, and when he pushes himself he can force brief bursts of inhuman strength. That bummy knee still gives him trouble, though.

Lucien's backstory as a masked vigilante starts in San Francisco, where he cultivated street contacts but didn't make his big breakthrough until a mysterious homeless man directed him onto a train just as a terrorist managed to accidentally release his sarin gas prematurely. Lucien stopped the train, cleared the car and found that the man with the nerve gas in his briefcase also had maps of the Transamerica pyramid and schematics of its ventilation system. There were five marks on the schematic, only one with particular notes.

Despite dizziness and blurred vision, Surge got to the pyramid at top speed and killed or apprehended the other four poisoners. Unfortunately, in the process he also mistakenly electrocuted a prominent lawyer named Lawrence Munk. Munk survived, but thanks to his pull the SF cops are pursuing Surge 'for questioning'. So far, no one seems to have connected Surge to Lucien Knight, who is just one of the dozens of people treated for sarin gas exposure. Ever since that episode, he's had some weird visual effects, but he's hoping it goes away in time.

In the course of his treatment, he met a young nurse named Bahrira. (Haven't decided yet if she's first or second generation.) He's got feelings for her, but has decided to move back to Cinci and start over with a new persona -- at least for now.

LEO CRICK
Leo's older brother was trouble. He was noisy, he was rebellious, he was a disciplinary problem and, as the frosting on top, he was murdered and dismembered in a ritual fashion at the age of 14. If that wasn't creepy enough (and by any reasonable standard it should be), the family had long been plagued by poltergeist activity even before the killing. No one was ever apprehended.

Leo went off to stay with his uncle Tracy Bridge in Cincinnati for a while, and it was there that he privately learned the extent of his mutant powers. He kept them a tightly guarded secret and went off to UW Madison, where events forced his hand. He had a mid-grade crush on a flamboyant, beautiful girl named Heather Scudieri, until she revealed HERSELF as a mutant. Then it became a seething obsession. Unfortunately, Heather's powers manifested in a spectacularly dangerous fashion. During a party out on the frozen lake, something happened to set her off (something involving rohypnol, though Leo doesn't know this yet) and she started shooting whips of fire out of her body, breaking up the ice under the reveler's feet. Leo had no choice. He invoked his Alter.

Leo's Alter looks like a larger, slightly puffier, slightly transparent version of him. It doesn't speak and has no independent will, and is immensely strong. (Essentially, it's a projected focus for strong Telekinesis. Leo can climb inside it and wear it like a suit, however.) The Alter saved the partygoers, both he and Heather were hauled off to the police station, where he was questioned for hours and eventually released.

SETH MURPHY
Seth was the all-American boy -- smart, well liked, good manners, only missed playing on Lucien's high school football team by one year (Murphy graduated before Lucien's freshman year). When he developed inhuman strength, durability, flight, a sort of unfocussed shock blast and preternatural speed, it only seemed like the natural extension of his trajectory. He became a licensed municipal defender for Cincinnati, got a nice girlfriend, and foiled an attempt by an unnamed group of sorcerers to summon a spirit called "The Duke of Shadows." No one was ever apprehended, but Seth basked in the glory of his heroism. In fact, he was busy basking with a few appreciative ladies when his girlfriend Amanda vanished.

Only her head was recovered.

While Amanda's parents can no longer stand to see him, her little sister Annette still idolizes him, as she did all along. Annette has reacted to her sister's death by becoming secretive and shaving her head. (Seth's player has a thing for bald girls, as long as they aren't wearing hats.)

As if that wasn't enough, he's also been recruited as a under-the-table Homeland Security asset (he thinks) by a woman named Chlotilde Giroux.

CICELY ____________
(This is the character who didn't get as fully developed and, since her player got stuck in traffic, still isn't.) At my request, the player agreed to have Cicely be the token sorceress. Cinci is a natural place for sorcery, since the college there is an international center for the "legitimate" study of the paranormal. Cicely, however, is unlicensed, though fairly powerful. Her ex-boyfriend Trey IS licensed and pulled strings to help her bypass the waiting lists for the pre-sorcery undergrad courses (which are only providing a theoretical background to some of the spells she already knows). Unfortunately, he's a prick and she dumped him. He isn't taking it well.

I'm thinking Cicely knows Annette. Oh, also, she's haunted by the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, and only she can see him. No, really.

TRACY BRIDGE
(Okay, Tracy's not a PC. He's a GMPC/major NPC type. I'm bending over backwards to non-Elminster him -- I'm only half-joking when I say I'm planning to have him be wrong about everything. If a PC dies, Tracy's there. He also has the boring healing powers, though hopefully I can make them interesting to his friends.)

Tracy is 63, substantially older than the others, and he went to Viet Nam when he was a freshly-married 19. Though he was in the motor pool, 'Nam was his introduction to bloodshed. Also reefer. And a combination of the two fueled a turning point in his life. One day he emerged from a particularly strong marijuana haze to discover that under heavy fire he'd rescued a fellow soldier, getting injured in the process. He got a medal, got sent home, and found out his wife had been unfaithful while he was away.

Tracy could have divorced her. Or he could have stayed married, periodically hitting her with the "You cheated on a WAR HERO!" hammer. But, hard though it was, he forgave her and, with the help of an empathetic pastor named Cody Wright, their fragile trust was restored and his wife provided him with years and years of married contentment, even during the bad times when his nephew mysteriously died and he had to take in his brother's son for a spell. With no children of his own, he'd always been close to them.

Unusually for a mutant, Tracy's power didn't reveal itself until late in his life. After his wife's death, plagued by bad hips, sore knees and glaucoma, he wound up being reintroduced to his old 'Nam flame Mary Jane. Blazing up to treat his glaucoma, Tracy discovered that he had access to a powerful reservoir of what he calls "life force." He can sense the living instinctively, he's hard to injure, he's recovered some measure of his youthful strength and -- most remarkably -- he can heal the ills and wounds of others and himself, if he's in a tranquil frame of mind. Unfortunately, it's hard for him to attain that tranquility because Reverend Wright, Tracy's longtime friend, pastor and spiritual confidante, has long believed that mutancy (like sorcery) is one of Satan's subtle snares.

Unsure of the source and meaning of his powers, Tracy has kept them hidden as well as he can, but there's a gradually growing circle of people who've heard the rumors. Though Tracy doesn't know it, this helps explain why he's dating a woman half his age...