My players are all visibly non-human, so attending a normal school is problematic. The group consists of a marble skinned mutant, a vampire, and a scaled dragon-man.
Has anyone used a “hero high” in their game? A school for super teens?
My players are all visibly non-human, so attending a normal school is problematic.
My players are all visibly non-human, so attending a normal school is problematic.
Oh dear. Sky High comes immediately to mind, and I am already over my monthly quota for twisted ideas…
I had an education facility for superheroes, but it ended up being a place where the government assessed young heroes, put mind control chips in them, and kept the ones that were suitably dangerous in there indefinitely. So, bad example!
I was thinking more like Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters
Derek Ehlmann That’s a neat twist though
Yep. Mars Magnasapian Academy.
Yeah, sort of. Satoshi Himura (the Human Tank, from Nano’s backstory in the Deck of Villainy) had a school for gifted youngsters sort of place. But it was destroyed as part of the “when we first met” sequence. But Satoshi sent the heroes to infiltrate the Rook Academy, an institution set up by rook to indoctrinate Rook-friendly supers.
We have The AEGIS academy to convert young powered in useful citizens for tomorrow. Also there is a super teens group of task working for AEGIS from that academy. In the Halcyon city herald supplement tell about Winter’s Academy too.
We had a school for powered teenagers in a game I played in – New Heights Academy (a boarding prep school). All the other students had powers, as did the teachers. You lose the aspects of keeping a secret identity, if that appealed to your players, but if they can’t disguise themselves with a pair of glasses, you’ve already lost that anyway.
There was an alien shark-headed kid who had been a gladiator on some alien world, and some blue-skinned aliens who did some weird glowing “resonating” thing that wasn’t sexual despite the innuendos that flew at the table. We started a martial arts club to train other kids how to not suck if someone disabled their powers, or if their powers sucked to begin with. And we organized a student protest against they way society treated “Hazards” – people with potentially dangerous powers, like self-detonation.
But remember, Halcyon City is a place where there have been supers for nearly a century now. Just because your PCs are all visibly high on the freak meter doesn’t mean they can’t go to a normal school!
Kids would bully them for looking freakish, because kids suck. There would be lots of pushing their Freak up and their Mundane down.
And other kids would stand up for them, because this is a world of super-heroes and villains, so those types exist.
I can see the school PSA ads about not treating fellow students wrong because of race, religion, stellar origin, or mineral composition.
You can also just not deal with them at school
Joe Zantek Well that’s no fun! 😛
There’s an awesome comicbook series, “Sidekicks”, that has a high school established for super-powered teens to help educate them on regular subjects and how to use their powers responsibly.
The school was founded after a well-publicized incident where a poorly-trained sidekick was killed “in the line of duty”.
The series is classic Masks with a stronger focus on high school issues than superhero combat.
It would not be hard at all to picture an institution like that existing in Halcyon City.
I’m gonna be the weird voice here and say “So why CAN’T they go to a normal school?” This is a world that has had Superheroes for like 80 years or something. I think it’d be fun to send them to “normal” school.
Mike Pureka Maybe not “can’t”, but “can’t if they want to keep their hero life and school life separate”. For at least two, they are very unique looking and recognizable.
Well, if the PCs have a gadget monkey (or a gadget-monkey benefactor), maybe she can throw together a set of “mimic fields” that give the PCs human-looking personas. If that’s what seems fun or expedient for the campaign.
(Of course, that doesn’t play well with the dramatic thrust of the Transformed playbook.)
Colin Spears If they are that distinctive looking, how can they have a “normal” life at all? That is, after all, sortof the point of the Transformed, I think?
Mike Pureka That’s why I said “school life” not normal life.
AD Kohler But then why couldn’t they use them all the time? And yes the marble guy is a Transformed, so I don’t want an easy out.
Colin Spears That was sort of my point for the follow up post… maybe there’s reasons you don’t want to use them. That being said, you are in charge of how powers work. In Mutants & Masterminds, many heroes have some morph ability tucked under their arrays, meaning that if they actually ever got in a fight, they’d lose the disguise if they wanted to fight at full capacity. No reason you couldn’t do something similar in Masks if it suited your purposes.
We are getting way off track with my original question, which is just “Has anyone used a special school in their games?” With a sorta of implicit “And how did that mesh with the intended spirit of Masks?”
We have two schools. Titan Academy for the wealthier out bigger profile supers, and IMU (institute for the morphological unique) for the less wealthy or very different. There are a lot of social considerations in our game.
I love that terminology “morphologically unique”
I have the TEAM UP school, a joint education/training program that The Exemplars and AEGIS have created. In addition to the regular classes there are super-related classes. Both The Exemplars and AEGIS recruit from the graduates (and occasionally the drop outs). Consequently, it is seen as the place to be if you want to have a solid support structure and eventually be able to make a living at the whole hero thing.
To more directly answer the second half of what you ask: I find that if I’m going to directly play up the school day I need to tell them ahead of the session start. Basically, if I try to weave plot into the school day it tends to be too much for me to handle, too many npcs, and the last thing anyone at my table wants is me explaining how my npcs are reacting to one-another as the worlds collide.
In our campaign, there is a rather large alien presence plus embassies in the city, mostly not “super” by earth standards. The school serves the alien kids as well as locals with connections and some on a stipend. It is run by… well the players never asked.
It’s called the Taylor Hebert Academy, although as far as I know, world shattering threats are not a subject.