On the other hand, it's somewhat relieving that nobody, including Mind-Controlling STD Lady, is able to propose or implement the idea of trying to take down Amanda the same way people 'joked' about Ant-Man taking out Thanos.
Either you have a D, U Sizemorph (in which case the defense dodges since you're tiny, and useful makes you tiny) in which case, growing large while inside someone else simply doesn't work. Either you phase through them or your growth just stops once it causes an issue (so, like, you could become the size of a blood vessel, but no larger, while in a vein.)
OR
you have an attack quality for your Sizemorph.
Which means Amanda can either use her immunity or her D.E defense to block it.
You'd need to burn base will or have no upward limit on your attack to blast through her defenses.
Though, one can argue that you can use sizemorph to work as a stealth check to set up an ambush! Which means it's down to your sneakiness versus Amanda's hypersense.
So, like, it's not impossible! It's just not as easy as it seems.
Either you have a D, U Sizemorph (in which case the defense dodges since you're tiny, and useful makes you tiny) in which case, growing large while inside someone else simply doesn't work. Either you phase through them or your growth just stops once it causes an issue (so, like, you could become the size of a blood vessel, but no larger, while in a vein.)
OR
you have an attack quality for your Sizemorph.
Which means Amanda can either use her immunity or her D.E defense to block it.
You'd need to burn base will or have no upward limit on your attack to blast through her defenses.
Though, one can argue that you can use sizemorph to work as a stealth check to set up an ambush! Which means it's down to your sneakiness versus Amanda's hypersense.
So, like, it's not impossible! It's just not as easy as it seems.
I mean, I didn't think it would, I just meant it's got more thought involved than 'Hey, guy whose power is 'can turn into that one KH2 Heartless,' go punch the next best thing to God in the face, this'll definitely work out' did.
For reference on the Heartless in question: Hot Rod
The horrible idea of trying the antman trick only to pulp yourself from human sizing in a human intestine shaped cave that doesn't budge because you're using Dark Energy to fight a Dark Energy immune Amanda is horrible.
But you could argue that her suddenly filling up with a human's worth of bone and flesh is a mundane cause for emergency that could hypothetically kill her; just not in the way Expandoman envisioned.
The three kinds of aliens in Termination Shock (who, in that setting, arrived to basically air-lift poor humans off Mars during a robot apocalypse while the rich humans on Earth were all snooty and...sniffing their own farts) that are statted and described are the Preds, the Sleeves and the Scavs, pictured here...bein all cute...
The Preds (tiny guy with three eyes) are predatory frog-cats who have an extra brain that purely exists to operate their forelimb, which is a stabber. Monogendered, they find human sexuality fascinating and frustrating in equal measures - often "shipping" humans of entirely incompatible natures together because, to the pred, they just seem right for one another. So, they'd fit in great on SV! HEYOOOOOO! Their favorite snack food is a hilariously adorable living hamster critter that they love to hear scream as they eat it alive, horrifying human children across known space and leading to many terrible situations when clueless humans bought the adorable, soft, and well mannered "cutiefoods" as pets. Oops!
The image here is broken. You're linking to an image on Discord, and Discord recently(-ish) changed how they host images because everyone was using Discord to host images. Now, if you link to an image on Discord from elsewhere, after being viewed a set number of times, Discord stops letting anyone outside Discord see the image. And I don't remember that set number, but it's not a lot.
Point is, if there's an image you want to share outside Discord, you can't really use Discord to do so.
On to Tier 4! Please stop talking about shrinkers expanding inside of people to kill them, it's gross! The best thing that the Invincible TV show did was change it so that SHrinking Ray survived that, because otherwise...eesh.
HOWARD "REDDY" MARCH
Honestly, I think he's a real weak character in terms of his writing because, as @ProfessorB said, Greg kinda has a one track mind. Å and his followers are basically the only thing that save Progenitor from being completely cringe visa vi African Americans - instead, it is merely mostly cringe. It does really underline the big problem with having a singular vision: Blind spots exist with just one guy, especially when the one guy is a middle aged white guy.
TYLER FORD
I like him as part of the overreaching Progenitor vibe of "supervillains are piss useless" - there are lots of characters that 100% fit the superhero vibe, straight down to code names and costumes, some of whom stay successful for decades before time or luck catches up to them, but there is not a single supervillain in the entire book that comes close to a comic book's run of successes.
MLK
Honestly, MLK has a lot the same vibes (if slightly better) as March for me.
JUDITH WEISSMAN
The super-addictive hypercharmer, Judith actually keeps her promise to Abe Sykes when he asks her to please, please, please stop addicting people to her body. Her destiny actually goes the furthest into the future, stating that in 2006 her accomplice in the crime that got her infected with superpowers (she was scanned by Hoover, as a reminder) tracked her down, waited till she was a sleep, then shot her a bunch. He was arrested and went on a big rant about how HE should have had her powers, and with them he'd have ruled the world. Whatta jerk!
ALYSSA VERONE
The co-dependent supergirlfriend! She, sadly, dies in WW3 - but she dies a hero, pushing her power to protect her current host from a gang of mind controlling metahumans. He never forgets her.
JAMES CLOSTERMAN
The high powered telekinetic (and another Hoover power child), James survives to the end of the timeline - being rich, well liked and popular for the use of his powers to generally protect people and save kittens from trees. He's another actually quite good PC pick, because he's got a really easy to understand set of powers that's still FAIRLY flexible (telekinesis doesn't change the rules like V.E, but it lets you do a lot of things) and his basic upshot of 'rogue with a heart of gold' is easy to grasp.
PAIGE RAMPLING
She manages to be the one who actually knocks out Amanda Sykes (along with, like, ten other people hitting her at once with rocket launchers), which is pretty impressive. She survives doing this! Weirdly, there's not a lot of detail on Paige's relationship with Lin Wen nor Barbara French, despite all three being partners in superheroism, nor the fact that both of the other women die in the line of service.
With that, we have the Tier 4s down! Less than you'd think, considering it's should be an order of magnitude more populous than Tier 3, but...well, I get it.
On to Tier 5!
WINSTON KOETKE
Also known as Å, I have mixed feelings on Winston. I think his weird space religion is neat, and I really like his riff on the progress cadre. But I also feel no interest in actually doing any stories with them. It's a very odd feeling, going, 'huh, that's cool! ...anyway!" and I think it's entirely a me thing. You probably have some more inspiration than me. Still, in his destiny, we learn that Å and Jason Weeks...uh...don't exactly get along. Jason Weeks seems to like him, but Å finds Jason Weeks' refusal to join Åism mildly annoying but 100% disagrees with Jason Weeks stating that "global solutions always go out of control, in the long run." In 1983, with the advent of WW3, Å switches away from total pacifism to merely mostly pacificism, and uses his new country of Åia to work on liberating African nations of tyranny and building...THE MOTHER ARC, a massive spaceship to spread humanity among the stars.
He also manages to short circuit the Rwandan genocide into a merely "low scale Rwandan civil war" and, like, since this timeline has no idea that it could have gotten so bad, the fact it's merely a low level civil war that only kills a few thousand people rather than, like, a million people is missed and instead, Å sees this as a massive failure of his efforts.
The continuing collapse of Atlantis pushes a ton of space-traveling metahumans (since Atlantis had a space program, run almost entirely by metahumans) into Åism. Å is happy about this, and is giving a speech about it when a fundamentalist muslim metahuman assassinates him. Man, my whole "assassination proof" joke seems to have aged poorly.
TERRANCE O'SHAY
I'm still not entirely sure what to make of this guy - he's a good villain, but he's also kinda one note and...really feels like he'd have been killed a lot sooner considering how many people he pisses off. I know he has the support structure of Glóir (who, even before they start going really off the deep end in the Metapocalypse, still saw him as a useful deterrent to more force being used against them, since he could cause so much damage) but, like, he has a 10d defense power, that's good, but not great, anyone with a few hard dice or wiggle dice can blow through that!
RILEY BOETJE!
...who the fuck is Riley?
OH HEY!
We've made it to the FIRST (and soon to be far more common) shout out of a metahuman character who isn't mentioned in the timeline.
Ahem!
RILEY BOETJE - "PEACEMAKER"
SUM UP
Proggers said:
Riley was an excitable boy, the second youngest of six males, in a home where rough housing was the most common form of entertainment. As a child, his voice ranged from loud to painfully loud. He played rugby, soccer and football, he wrestled. He roared at sporting events and got in shoving matches in taverns and joined the Marines. He served a tour in Vietnam before coming home with half his left hand gone.
In 1969 he stumbled into a demonstration that was getting ugly. Without really contemplating any long-term consequences, he picked up a cinder block and readied himself to hurtle it at the protesters who offended him. But then he suddenly didn't want to.
He suddenly felt calm.
Suddenly, he was more tranquil than he'd ever been in his life.
It took Riley a while to realize someone must have used dark energy on him, and then only after he'd discovered his own powers.
Riley is a chill, laid back dude - but what's fun is he can still be a boistrious, hard hitting marine. It's just he's always exactly the level of boisterous that you're comfortable with, because...
POWERS
Riley has a 5hd+5d power called Total Grasp of Motive and it's very simple: Whatever you're going through? Riley gets it. He understands. He genuinely understands. This is the useful effect (which has the Subtle extra, so people don't even notice that he's doing it unless they succeed in an opposed perception check) and also, he has the Defensive Quality with the If/Then of "must hear him speak" - if he has the chance to explain to you why you shouldn't hit him, he has a pretty good shot of convincing you to do it.
Then he has 10wd hyperpersuade, 10wd of hyperempathy (to cover everything that TGOM doesn't cover) and, finally, "Scalable Grasp of the Emotional Gestalt" what a power name. SGOTEG is able to get a grasp on everyone's average emotional state in a scalable rate from a few guys in a pub to everyone in six million miles. Because Progenitor! This isn't mind reading, he doesn't get specific details, he just gathers up the broad strokes, making him one hell of a political analyst.
Which, by the way, is what happens: He uses his powers to try and improve his local communities until a Federal metahuman detects him, slaps him with a threatened lawsuit from the Federal Cognitive Security Act as the stick to the carrot of "hey, come work with the white house" - which Riley does so, having little other choice. He serves several political administrations as a bellwether system, but soon he realizes that he actually has a fairly potent political tool.
Lying!
This is why the US government is so blindsided by Michigan's secession. During the confusion of that, Riley slips away and begins traveling across the country, a wiser and more paranoid man. He dies of a heart attack in 1989. That's rough buddy.
Still, Riley is an tough character because...like...what do you do with him exactly? He's an interesting guy to meet for a scene, but what stories does he drive? Then it hit me: He's a great mission hook for a low tier party. He has an informational input engine that's powerful, but not as globe-shattering as, say, Jason Weeks, and he's still highly ranked enough in the US government to have some sense of authority. So, if you're a team of lower tier characters, trying to have a more "local" style game, Riley is a good hearted guy to give you heads up on incipient swings towards protofascism within your home town. He's also a hook to get the PCs involved with the Michiganian secession crisis.
Also, like. It might help to get him and Amanda in the same room after she shuts off her D.E immunity, just a thought.
CASSANDRA COWPER
We love the Energy! She's the best! I have a big foam finger with I <3 ENERGY on it. When Amanda's powers drop out and bring everyone else's powers down, Cass reverts to her normal self...which is still sixteen years old. So, in 1999, she's a 47 year old set of memories in a sixteen year old's body which has to lead to a few VERY AWKWARD dates.
CHANDRA DESANI - A WOMAN AGAINST ENTROPY
SUM UP
Proggers said:
Chandra has no idea where her power came from, which is not uncommon for those afflicted by mind-clouding. She saw a picture of Tyler Ford in the post office, then saw him at a grocery store. As she watched him pick up a package of toilet paper and walk out without paying, she forgot about the wanted poster. As soon as he was out of her sight, she forgot she'd ever seen him. But his power would not forget her.
She was four months pregnant and just starting to be comfortable talking with phone solicitors and gas-station clerks when she forgot Tyler Ford. It was not long after that that things started to improve. Literally.
Her kitchen knives became sharper and sharper without the touch of a whetstone. Vegetables looked fuller and plumper after three days in her home than they had on the shelf. Instead of tearing and dimming, her clothes got brighter and more vivid. She never cleaned, but her house was spotless and, more, furniture in it seemed to regenerate until everything appeared brand new.
Pandit made jokes about how his female patients all seemed depressed and broken after delivery, while Chandra got prettier and prettier. Their son was two years old before she finally figured it out.
Honestly? For someone who saw Tyler Ford, Chandra got off INCREDIBLY LIGHT. That dude is a telefragging sex criminal who likes two things, murder and sex crimes.
Still, Chandra is an Indian (as in, from the Indian subcontinent) immigrant and, personality wise, she's...uh, another "aggrandizing, arrogant" metahumans that Greg likes throwing into the game. I do get that I think superpowers would go to lots of people's heads, but it just rubs me the wrong way when its contrasted with the fact that Chandra also goes hard into (i think it'd be second wave?) feminism. I dunno. It just kinda bugs me, even if there's nothing...like...exactly wrong with it (and it's not like there aren't plenty of men who immediately get huge egoes when they get superpowers, like Dieonne Bright.)
...oh, but, also, and this doesn't matter since I've already mentioned several times in the thread proper that Progenitor's weakest point is its art! This remains true. However, Chandra has, by far, the FUNNIEST PICTURE IN THE BOOK.
POWERS
Anyway, Chandra has 2d in "better now", which is an attack, defend, useful power which has the Augment extra (which means it adds bonus dice to rolls with related qualities, but doesn't change the fundamental power beyond adding dice), with the if/then requirement of "must involve a tool, device or component that has belonged to her for 24 hours" and "only for augment" - basically, things she owns gets "de-entropized" and are better after she buys it than before, giving her +2d whenever she uses anything she's owned for a bit.
Next, she has +1d to every stat, then +1d to every stat with an if/then of "only available two years after her transformation" and then finally, +1wd to every stat with an if/then of "only available after four years" - so, basically, as time goes on, she goes from human norm (2d) to above average (3d) to nearly perfect (4d) in every single stat, with the added bonus of always succeeding her rolls. She may not be super-strong, but she's basically peak in everything for human levels. What's funny is if she starts working out (I.E, spending XP to bump her stats up), she could, eventually, have 8d in each stat, making her QUITE superhuman in every single stat, including the ability to make Syntergenes.
Now, doing so would take, like, 90 XP. Which is 30 sessions worth.
Still.
What else are you doing with your XP, huh? Buying base will?
Anyway, Chandra also has 10d in MOlecular Restoration (exactly like Abe Sykes), save it lacks the Defend ability.
Oh, and +40 Base Will. So, the answer is no, no, you will not be buying base will as Chandra, lol.
Proggers said:
Chandra's marriage isn't set up to handle the power differential. Or at least, it's not set up to handle an imbalance that favors the woman, any more than Pandit's equipped to manage being a single father. Chandra gets custody and finds that even solo parenthood cannot triumph over her powers against chaos.
Hmm. Can't think of where I got the vibe that Amanda and Abe's marriage was under similar stresses from. Still, Chandra uses her powers fairly subtly at first, healing people in the hospital she works at until she gets sick of people taking credit for what she's doing, so she makes a big publicity announcement about it and then gets swamped by demands she heal people. Which she does!
She rakes in a cool million doing this, and then gets hit with a lawsuit for "practicing medicine without a license", which she beats through a massive publicity stunt that forces the judge to hastily drop the case (she marches every single person she heals past the law office, with local news there) then she swings into pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment, and gets her face on Time Magazine when the ERA passes in 1982. While Wisconsin isn't hit hard by WW3, she keeps things ticking along with her powers and hypercharm to shame people looting and not helping to maintain civic order. When shame fails, she has her TWIN COLT .45s! PEW PEW PEW!
...well, BANG BANG BANG!
Chandra is a fun character, either as a PC (honestly, she has a very PC style powers, imo) or as an ally to meet. My hot take is I think Greg's way too mean to her in her write up, it sounds less like she's arrogant and more like she's entirely correct about her abilities and actions. Like oh no, she wants credit for curing all those kids with cancer. Ohh, what a bitch. Ahhh! Ohh, she's too strident in pushing for the fucking Equal Rights Amendment. Ah! She's one of those dang Women's Libbers! Ohh! Fuck off, lol. Chandra is great and deserves whatever she wants.
JOAO PERDOMO - "SEEKER"
SUM UP
Proggers said:
Joao came from a moneyed Honduran family and transitioned their business from shipping into waste management and hospital support services. He was smart enough, but more importantly he was willing to work twelve- and fourteen-hour days as a matter of course. A little bit of a tyrant, he still managed to impress his employees, mostly because he never demanded that they work harder than him. Just harder than his competitors.
He was a bit of a playboy, too, parlaying his eligible bachelor status, good looks and money into a string of brief dalliances. He never lied to the ladies. He never said he was looking for love or marriage. Most of them just thought they could change him, and they never could.
One of Judith Weissman's husbands, addicts, and power children, Joao got cured by Abe Sykes and helped him track Judith down - and here we learn something. One of the reasons why Judith stopped addicting people? Well, while Abe was asking her politely...Joao did so less politely. He said that if she did it again, he'd find her and kill her. (Abe was not aware of this.)
POWERS
Joao has a very simple, but useful, power. He has 2hd in Find, which lets him find any particular thing he's looking for. It has a planetary range thanks to 8 boosters (so, uh, 2,000,000,000 meters, if you want to do the math on that) and while it CAN be blocked by anyone with powers, it's pretty damn hard for someone who isn't a metahuman to shake it off. It is a telepathic signal, though, and it is only 2x10, so if you know that Joao is hunting for you and try and roll a Command+Stability check, you can shake him off before he isolates your location, it's not impossible. Just...really hard.
And he can keep doing it as much as he wants.
Then he has 2hd in Invulnerable - so he's tough, but not immune to anti-tank weapons, will never age, need to sleep, or drink - and he has 10d in Endurance if that wasn't enough, and +8d in hypersense, for when he gets to the area you're in and needs to narrow it down. Finally, he has +40 Base Will, to keep him trucking.
Joao is, in short, the ultimate bounty hunter and, honestly, I see him as mostly someone that PCs contact when their clue trial has gone dry and they want an NPC to help them find someone, so, you have them hire Joao. Personality wise, it says "he's neither a supervillain nor a superhero, but rather, the secret third thing" and that third thing is supervillain.
Proggers said:
He considers himself a bounty hunter. If someone pays him enough, he finds their target.
He's only a supervillain to abused wives fleeing from controlling husbands who can afford his fees, or to outed ex-gangsters in Witness Protection, or to the political opposition leaders he digs out for dictators.
This work makes him wealthy, but he was already wealthy. He considers his work valuable—and if you're one of the runaways or kidnap victims he finds, if your rapist gets arrested because Joao's feeling bored and generous, you probably agree with him.
My man, uh, if you're already wealthy, DON'T GET HIRED BY ABUSIVE SPOUSES, YOU HAVE HYPERSENSE, YOU CAN FUCKING TELL, DUDE!
He keeps doing this until he annoys Jean Davis, the telepathic STD lady. He decides he's going to try and kill her because he hates meddlesome women (like, yeah, i think Jean Davis is evil, but there's this definite edge of callous sexism in Joao's personality write up that I think it's less "mind controlling STD" and more "a bitch tries and tell men what to do" in his urge to take her down) and she has him shot by one of her many, many, many cohorts. Rest in pepperoni.
And that wraps up the 5th Tiers!
Remarkably, we're not in the "low tier" yet - that is called out as being SPECIFICALLY Tier Eight, Nine and Ten. So, that makes Tiers five, six and seven more of a...mid tier!
But, honestly, I think most of these new characters are fun ones to meet, even if they (individually) suck as people. Them sucking as people is half the fun of interacting with them!
The image here is broken. You're linking to an image on Discord, and Discord recently(-ish) changed how they host images because everyone was using Discord to host images. Now, if you link to an image on Discord from elsewhere, after being viewed a set number of times, Discord stops letting anyone outside Discord see the image. And I don't remember that set number, but it's not a lot.
Point is, if there's an image you want to share outside Discord, you can't really use Discord to do so.
That's because if you're successful enough (and sane enough to be successful), the readers will simp for you and forget that you've taken over multiple countries via military invasion and/or mass mind control.
I say this with complete sympathy. She's such a cool character that I also forgot she was Doctor Doom until I saw your quest in your signature and remembered that she's also fairly supervillainous.
I say this with complete sympathy. She's such a cool character that I also forgot she was Doctor Doom until I saw your quest in your signature and remembered that she's also fairly supervillainous.
To be fair, there's "Supervillain" as in trying to conquer the world buhuhuhu and then there's "Supervillain" as in "does some new evil scheme/kills a lot of people/robs a bank"
I guess I should specify supercriminal.
Like, the reason why Cam is so successful is most of what she's doing is...pretty much just what nation states already do, just better. America has propaganda, America has classes and legal structures to keep people in those classes, America even has music that tries to lubricate the tension between those classes - Cam is just better at it.
Like, the reason why Cam is so successful is most of what she's doing is...pretty much just what nation states already do, just better. America has propaganda, America has classes and legal structures to keep people in those classes, America even has music that tries to lubricate the tension between those classes - Cam is just better at it.
This story has multiple american presidents as superpowered "supervillains", who do the kind of stuff Cam does. I think Greg Stolze quite openly thinks giving national leaders superpowers produces mass mind control, various horrible crimes, and not much improvement to the world as a whole.
I would call Cam a supervillain and I would call LBJ a supervillain too. Cam is just cooler and has goals I like more than LBJ's
The book is actually extremely vague about how the Vietnam War in Progenitor, with its high powered metahumans on both sides, plays out. I think there's plenty of support for the idea that it goes full Golden Age for a while with power armor and earthquake machines and weather control satellites and evil clones and what-have-you. I mentioned upthread that the bit with Cam kidnapping and brainwashing Abe is fully a Silver Age comic plot. It's also a reference to the Manchurian Candidate and other brainwashing tropes, but it's very much a comic book plot.
The book is actually extremely vague about how the Vietnam War in Progenitor, with its high powered metahumans on both sides, plays out. I think there's plenty of support for the idea that it goes full Golden Age for a while with power armor and earthquake machines and weather control satellites and evil clones and what-have-you. I mentioned upthread that the bit with Cam kidnapping and brainwashing Abe is fully a Silver Age comic plot. It's also a reference to the Manchurian Candidate and other brainwashing tropes, but it's very much a comic book plot.
It does say it gets "surreal" - and, also, it gets a lot more even, with both sides being more evenly matched than in our timeline, where it was a first world nation smashing a third world nation with hundreds of thousands of bombs. That doesn't change the morality of the invasion (cause, like, it's bad to invade a country to try and support the shitty government that is your friend, even if that country is a peer threat to you) but it does change the tenor, and how people in America probably saw the conflict.
Okay, we had to skip some minor bits over the last bit of the timeline, but I do wanna emphasize this bit from May 1993:
Progenitor said:
[Amanda's] look is markedly different from her last public appearance. Although clearly the same woman, her body and features have shifted to an almost unbearable loveliness. One Polish hyperbrain hypothesizes she must have created "some sort of meta-consciousness psychic probe to amlagamate the world's beauty standards and mimic them." One of his colleagues in Ecuador suggests it might have been simpler for her to just implant the idea in every human mind that "Amanda Sykes is the world's most beautiful woman".
So yeah, on top of all her war crimes, we possibly have "Amanda's narcissism led her to brainwash every person on the planet" on Amanda's evilness.
On the other hand, it's pretty hilarious to imagine that mom haircuts and dime store make-up suddenly become the cutting edge of fashion and no one questions it.
I still don't really like this plot point, it just feels...kinda weird and regressive to have one of the "signs" that Amanda has gone around the bend is her deciding to be pretty - it's so irrelevant next to, like, her pitch hitting for the IDF.
EDIT: I think what my feelings are are either Amanda isn't evil (thanks to PC interventions) in which case, it's fine to use your superpowers to look hot (not with mind control, obviously ), or Amanda is evil, in which case...like, who the fuck cares what she looks like, she's helping the IDF! Focus on that!
"Amanda is evil and we can tell because she makes everyone think she's the prettiest woman in the world", "Everything about Chandra" and "Everything about Joao" combine to be... not the greatest look.
If there's one worldbuilding element I would definitely ignore if I ran this, it's everybody's powers being dependent on Amanda's continuing existence. Nobody's powers went out when a Tier 2 or 3 died, so this feels inconsistent.
I'm surprised that Judith Weissman is said to die in 2006. I sort of expected that Stolze would leave everything post-December 1999 a mystery.
"Amanda is evil and we can tell because she makes everyone think she's the prettiest woman in the world", "Everything about Chandra" and "Everything about Joao" combine to be... not the greatest look.
Joao is positioned as a villain, though, to be completely fair. Like, 'millionaire hunts down abused spouses to return them to their abusers for money' is 100% not supposed to be making you think he's a good guy, no matter how much incidental good he might accidentally achieve by taking jobs to make himself look better.
Joao is positioned as a villain, though, to be completely fair. Like, 'millionaire hunts down abused spouses to return them to their abusers for money' is 100% not supposed to be making you think he's a good guy, no matter how much incidental good he might accidentally achieve by taking jobs to make himself look better.
Joao actually hits a pretty good middle ground of villainy where he's the exact right level of slimey and useful that I can totally see PCs needing to work with him and hating every second of it. Which is a great bit of moral and intercharacter tension.
Godlike has the same system and assumes PCs have 25 points IIRC, though I think they can grow in that system. It's set in WW2 with the PCs as soldiers, so it assumes more non-powered action, but it really does show how crazy the high Tier metahumans in Progenitor are.
Godlike Talents have very specific, harsh restrictions on their abilities - in particular Gadgeteering - which are deliberately engineered to make it difficult to make big world-shaking changes so your WW2 looks more like Wolfenstein 3D than Wolfenstein The New Order.
There is a sequel timeline where you start getting Wild Talents - Talents who do not follow these restrictions - and it is significantly more hard takeoff than Progenitor.
Like, when Amanda Sykes is fucking up in Vietnam the average GI or Red Army soldier is now running around in power armor hopped up on cyberpunk combat drugs with a fractional kiloton worth of anti-everything missiles on their back and AI cybertanks are dueling in the Lebanon DMZ.
There is a canon sequel timeline where you start getting Wild Talents - Talents who do not follow these restrictions - and it is significantly more hard takeoff than Progenitor.
Yup! It comes with Wild Talent's core rulebook for free. I never liked it as much, since the timeline and characters attached just didn't quite have the complexity of Proggers, but it does have neat bits. I liked the weird aliens who just liked dismantling planets and building megastructures. They weren't really hostile, just...dangerous.
), or Amanda is evil, in which case...like, who the fuck cares what she looks like, she's helping the IDF! Focus on that!
