Well, the ideas i'm toying with for a Worm RPG campaign boil down to:
1 don't set it in Brockton Bay.
2: No Canon Characters as PCs, and canon characters showing up is relatively rare unless it's an Endbringer fight and the Triumverate shows up or similar.
3: Sometime before Canon, either a year or two, or more.
4: I'd probably have the PRT and other Law Enforcement being somewhat more harsh than in Canon. Characters acting like Murderhobos means the PRT teams start packing Lethal Ammo and well, if you're known as homicidal it's not exactly hard to believe a hero or some containment squads had to kill you in self defense.
4.5: Just because you're a cape doesn't mean you're immune to bullets (unless that's your power), so on the flipside with Heroic PCs, the more ruthless villains and normal criminals would be much more likely to just shoot you in the head than in canon. Depending on context of course.
5: I'd probably let Tinker Tech be slightly more common/require less maintenance. Not enough to make it common, but enough that it's a bit more plausible that a Tinker could provide the rest of his team with gear, it could be bought on the black market, and elite PRT teams could have some of it and thus be somewhat relevant in a high level cape fight.
1-4) Not bad, I've run stories with this before, just make sure that that you've got enough parahumans, their alignment, the gang/underworld dynamic, etc. well before you start. I made the mistake to not and it was very chaotic as I had to keep making/finding capes just as they ran into them.
No, it doesn't really make sense.
This sounds pretty daft. The Undersiders are a minor gang of dodgers, whose Coil-orchestrated formation isn't considered suspicious in the least, and they get by with four members. The Merchants have four adult members, and they're a coherent gang. ABB has three capes, Faultline's crew effectively has three at the story's start. Why can't Hookwolf's gang of three streetfighter parahumans survive distinct from Kaiser's crew of six white supremacist parahumans (and the intern, Rune) and Purity's gang of four vicious vigilantes?
You seriously think you need to be a Nazi to be racist in America? Hell, if you want to talk about people in masks who attack non-whites to "protect their community", the KKK were good ol' Catholic murrikans, and they're still around
and more of a emotional issue for anyone who's not white. You don't even need either of those to have a good crew of racist supervillains - just employ the usual rhetoric used to defend murderous cops.
No it doesn't.
If you're removing a power she'll "never use", then all you're doing is defusing an obnoxious timebomb and preventing players from stealing or coercing or mind-controlling her into using that power for them - which is a perfectly sane decision as a GM.
She's effectively capable of doing whatever she wants so long as the author vaguely justifies it by putting "bio" at the front, which is stupid. If she's the Slaughterhouse 9's combat medic and torture artist, that works perfectly fine - but if she's a walking bioweapon WMD who pals around with nihilistic serial killers, there's no excuse for not just carpeting her general location with high-yield explosives until you're convinced she's no longer capable of producing The Satan Bug using the contents of a spice-rack.
Ok, so read your other post and I've got a few things to say.
ABB: Well, I don't think you paid enough attention to the backstory. Lung killed all the Asian parahumans that didn't work for him. You're not wrong about what they'd try to do, but it doesn't work well enough. The reason why Lung managed to unite them was simple, work for him or you, your loved ones, and you community literally burn down around you. The other gangs don't so much 'hold him off' as much as run away. Even the full E88 could barely hold him off, and that was including Purity, Night, Fog, and Crusader in addition to the other main heavy hitters, and even then it was only hold him off. It isn't that he can't be beaten, but Skitter managed to think around the issue, one time attacking before he was ramped up at all (one of the main ways to beat him) by injecting tons of venom, and the second time was getting Newter's fluids in his eye (remember that Newter was taken down by [I believe Oni Lee] so that he couldn't take down lung) which no other parahuman there could easily do, in fact, I can't think of any in the Bay who could do it as easily as she did. Without that single attack, Lung would have won the gang war most likely (and definitely that fight, since he won several others), especially with Bakuda and Oni Lee on his side.
Would there be smaller splinter gangs, yes, there are a few as far as I know, but as you said they're tiny which is why the ABB is the major Asian gang. As to why Lung couldn't take over the gangs, well Lung would probably allow you to kill other Asians, but only as the last resort. I also remember him taking protection money from people who weren't in his gang but were in his territory, so if he really needed to he'd just attack you at home. Sure, some Asians aren't in his gang or pay money, and some most likely would leave, but with how poor the people in the docks are I don't think all of them could afford to move. In addition, he protects them from the E88 who would happily kill all of them, and as I said earlier he can deal with the E88, so technically the E88 increases the number of recruits in the ABB.
E88: I'll agree, you don't need to have that many parahumans to be a gang, but to hold territory, collect protection money, to deal with Lung, or fend off any of the heroes (who otherwise would outnumber every gang)? They'd at best be tiny groups that held a few blocks. The Merchants manage to hold ground (barely I might add) because of the hordes of members they have. With 3 Nazi groups then each one would have only a third of the members, probably less since some join for money and protection (plus arrests would be harder to break out of since they'd have less firepower to save them plus they'd be more likely to all get arrested in one fell swoop, hell, all of New Wave could take any of the groups on and win, instantly removing a gang) which would be heavily reduced with so many less people. In addition, Geselleschaft wouldn't sponsor any of them, meaning Night, Fog, and possibly others throughout the years wouldn't have been there, and the E88 wouldn't be a known group, meaning many others wouldn't have come across the east coast to team up (suspected: Cricket, Hookwolf, Stormtiger, possibly others that aren't around anymore), in other words they would have far less power or members.
Sure, this doesn't stop their racism, but without a strong backer, it's just some white guys mumbling in a back alley who get beaten up by Glory Girl a week later.
Amy: Without her saving capes every Endbringer attack then likely at least one or two from Brockton would be dead, removing heroes, and with fewer heroes overall then the world would be in a worse place. Also, Brockton Bay would lose one of its main attractions (someone who can heal anything), meaning less economic power (and that's saying something), meaning an even worse state of the Bay. As to mind controlling her, what you're supposed to do as a GM is allow players to make mistakes. If they Master her then make some High-end capes come after her (Narwhal maybe, or a Guild squad to hunt them down) maybe even a kill order since she'd be and S-class threat. Don't baby-proof the world, punish mistakes.
Bonesaw: She entirely is capable of doing that, but the S9's (specifically Jack's) modus operandi does not allow for doing that. Killing is only to be done directly, so she could, but won't. She only uses WMD's as a 'you can't kill me even though you want to' thing. I think Brockton Bay was the furthest she went (or at least in confirmed) in the WMD category, and only after they broke the 'rules' of the fight. Basically, Jack (who is Mastering Bonesaw, actually confirmed
WoG) won't let her even if she wanted to. This is also likely why she began becoming normal after Jack wasn't awake for years, he couldn't affect her during that time.
