To be frank, I never read Wild Talents myself, tough i’m quite interested in the second edition of the book. I just love the one roll engine. I just want to propose a setting variation that might add some punch to your chronicle. If I had the joy to have a regular group, I would definitely propose this kind of scenario. This proposition is qui simply a cross idea between the Battlestar Galactica and Heroes tv shows. Interested? Come along.

Twenty to thirty years prior to the first manifestation of superpower in your game (i think you call that “Talents”) an influential government (ok, use US if you want) came in contact with extra-terrestrial life. The contact is nebulous, either they found a crash site, they found it during space exploration or they shot down a UFO straight from the sky. Bottom line is: a living sack was found in the form of a biological “egg-thing”.

After some analysis the scientists discovered two things:

1. The egg was alive and able to sustain itself
2. It contains ovules.
   

The compatibility with human sperm was 100%, and the fecundation process was even easier than with normal ovules. We know that over a hundred of those ovules were fecund at first. The government authorities place the offspring into willing or unwilling mothers and keep the offspring under observation. The scientists discovered that the “space egg” regenerate all of the ovules after a time span, which lead to even more questions. Every child looks absolutely normal, even healthier than their human counterpart… Until one day. The day that the "super” were born (or the “Talents” mind you).

“Super” are important PCs and NPCs, they are generally stubborn and troublesome (did I say they were PCs?). They have all kind of superpower you can give them using regular creation rules. At first, the government agent may try to go aggressively after the “super” only to take a beating. Various PCs and NPCs super can do anything: try to track their origin, join the government in the attempt to confine the “super” menace, battle other supers, take over a town or a city, etc.

The surprise(s) and variation(s): Here’s are my take and extra variation on this setting. The first idea i had was that the alien place the “egg” deliberately because they knew that “human nature” would inevitably lead the species to destroy itself in a war between “super” and human. After the conflict, the extra terrestrial can come back and harvest or rule or whatever. The thing they didn’t expect was the capacity of humans to side along against a common enemy… Another development would be that a rival super power steals the “egg” during it’s regeneration phase and also bread a generation of super. You could reproduce some cold war conflict with super along the line to eventually lead to a union between super faction vs government vs other factions.

My last take: The extra-terrestrial race, after millennium of evolution, lost touch with it’s passion and instinct. They only use cold logic and feel like they are missing something. Along the way, they spawn an AI that turn against them and produce a robotic army of unstoppable robots/creatures. The extra-terrestrial would fight, but logic tells them they are doomed and logic also forbid suicidal attack. The only hope of the universe is a combination of the evolutionary power of the extra-terrestrial + some passion an instinct. Crossbreeding with human seem perfect but the extra-terrestrial are spread too thin to risk war with human so they introduce the egg and hope human will respond well. You could even pretend they came to present the egg in peace and were shot down by the navy! So have the PCs trash NPC, take over government, make war, detonate a nuclear blast, only to realise that their “creators” need them in a more important war and that they are expected to be soldiers. Heck, even a long term “super” nemesis could became an important asset in a war against the AI. You can also introduce other variations as well…

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preacher95   | Registered | 2008-09-26 10:16:51 really interesting très belle idée !! merci

GameOpsDir   | Registered | 2008-10-01 16:04:03 I agree, very cool.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.