Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

My wife got me Invincible: The Ultimate Collection Volume 4 for my birthday, and of course I’ve already read through the whole thing.  I love this comic, though I say that as someone who doesn’t really have a regular comic reading habit.  (Mainly I read stuff in collections, often gifted or borrowed from a friend. This has the upside of getting lots of story in big coherent swaths, but it also has the effect of mainlining the entire season of a TV show in two days. You’re simultaneously full up of the good stuff, and empty because there isn’t a similar volume waiting for you on day three.)

Invincible has me from the word go. I know a few folks I’ve recommended the series to found it to come off a little flat, though several others have seemed really jazzed by it. I flippantly described it on Twitter the other day as “what Smallville wanted to be before it succumbed to a fatal case of kryptonite poisoning”, though I suppose that does more to tarnish the appeal of Invincible than elucidate it. (Ah, Smallville, what an acid-trip of a show you were before I took my leave of you.)  At its core, Invincible is the story of an alt-Superman’s kid, run through a heavy Peter Parker’s Life Sucks filter.  And boy, does it make my I-want-to-play-in-some-supers-genre-games itch flare right the hell up.

But I’m also not sure that I would want to play a straight up “adaptation” of Invincible at my gaming table.  So I need to deconstruct this thing, figure out what its basic working parts are, and which of those parts speak to me as a gamer. If only so my friends can get a little closer to running the game I want to play in! (That said, the analysis will not go that deep in the interests of keeping things spoiler-free.)

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

So, common gaming question: if we had superheroes in the actual world, what government agency would regulate them?  If you’re from the United States like me, your first answer is probably The Department of Homeland Security.  But that’s too pat and too boring of an answer for me.

So I’m looking to head in another direction, one based on something that I think Rob Donoghue cooked up for a supers game once (though it might have been Matt Gandy).  I don’t remember much about it, other than the idea that the folks with superpowers were regulated by (and in several cases, employed by) the Food & Drug Administration.  Now that’s something that has legs, because the FDA is a weird choice, and it forces you to sit and think about what that choice means for the nature and origin of superpowers in your setting as well as the politics of regulation and oversight that got things stashed there in the first place.

So let’s go back to my original question, and turn it on its ear: starting with a particular government agency as the body of regulation, what’s the reason superpowers exist in the world, and what form do they take?

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