Sign Ups Paragon

[Heroic Sociopath]

On May 11, 2016, an illegal operation was taking place in Freedom City. The local organized crime organization, The Syndicate, were transporting a highly illegal drug, known as Elixir. Elixir is known for having been experimented on by the soviets in an attempt to build a supersoldier. The Syndicate was using it to their own ends.

A firefight broke out.

A barrel was shot.

An explosion could be seen for miles.

Hundreds of people died. Those who didn't but were near the explosion have begun developing strange powers. Some can shoot fire, others have become capable of feats of incredible strength.

Power corrupts, however. Many of the people, dubbed Paragons, have begun using their powers for their own gain. The government is asking for the assistance of any Paragons in tracking down the criminal ones. Meanwhile, The Syndicate is quite eager to recoup their losses.

Overview
This is a fairly freeform superhero RPG. I do have events that will occur, and something of a plot, but whether you follow that or not is entirely up to you. You could very well come up with your own evil scheme for heroes to try and thwart. Make any sort of character you like. You could be an idealistic hero from the Golden Age, set on saving everyone. Or a cynical 90s antihero who angsts 24/7 while killing as many people as he saves. Be a silly villain whose schemes are really just elaborate and illegal pranks, or a complete monster bent on obliterating all life. It's all up to you.

Freedom City

Spoiler

Freedom City is a bustling metropolis of a bit under 20 million people. It's main legitimate businesses are international shipping and textile manufacture. It's illegitimate businesses are myriad. It's divided into five districts.

North Loreto: North Loreto is the main shipping area of Freedom City. It's where trains stop and ships leave. It also contains much of the lower income housing of the city. Crime is fairly high here, and the Syndicate does much of it's dirty work in the area.
Roman Park: The main entertainment district of Freedom City. It contains malls, bars, nightclubs, arcades, and movie theaters. Ferries go from here to Jeffry Isle. The boardwalk is a popular tourist attraction.
Harveysburg: North Loreto is sometimes known as the "business district" for Syndicate members, but most legal business is done in Harveysburg. This area is dotted in large business towers.
New Convent is a middle-class residential area. It's a nice place to raise your kids, with nearby schools and parks. Most of the people here live in houses.
Jeffry Isle: This island is mostly for high-income housing. You can take a ferry out here, and there are stores and entertainment, but it's all very expensive.


Rules
-No godmodding
-Violence is fine.
-PM me if you want your villain to try and find some ancient artifact to become more powerful. I'd love to hear it.


Sign-Ups
Name: What's your character's real name?
Alias: What name does your character take on when the act as a paragon?
Gender: What does your character view themselves as?
Age: How old is your character?
Alignment: Good, evil, or somewhere in between?
Appearance: Make sure to include what they wear in their persona as a Paragon.
Background: Optional. It's here if you want it.
Powers: What superpowers do they have? This can be anything from invisibility to cryokinesis. Just don't be too powerful. There are some superheros that existed before the Elixir explosion, so if you want it to come from a magical tome or something, go for it. Just make sure it has limits. Your characters are superhumans, but even superhumans have chinks in their armor.
Abilities: What mundane abilities does your character have? Again, you don't necessarily need to have gotten what makes you above regular people from the explosion. You could just be a really smart guy with neat gadgets. Anything that doesn't come from a superpower, basically.
Equipment: Does your character wield katanas in battle? Or perhaps they have a pair of custom handguns?

 

[Majin Mew]

All your RPs follow the same simple plot don't they? Big accident, normal people now got some special shit. Good ones must kill bad ones.

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

You just described quite a bit of fiction, like The Stand and the Fallout video games, in addition to many of my ROs. So should I consider that a reserve, then?

 

[Majin Mew]

Maybe, looking to start RPing again, most recent one I joined died within a week.

 

[Flaze]

Reserved a spot man.

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

Reserved, @Flaze and @Majin Mew.

Also, here's an example character.

Name: Alan Young
Alias: Mr. Grin
Gender: Male
Age: 25
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Appearance: Mr. Grin is not named after the crocodile from Peter Pan. He is named for the scars left after he botched the shipment of Elixir. He has a pair of scars, stretching from the sides of his mouth to his ears, making it so that, by default, he wears a toothy grin. Being so near the explosion also altered his appearance: His once olive skin is bleached completely white. Combined with his jet black hair and dark eyes, he looks like he stepped out of an old black-and-white film.
He lacks a persona as a paragon. He really couldn't care less about what happens to what little family he has. Further, it's a bit difficult for him to hide his rather distinctive appearance. So these days he has one of his lackeys go out and get food for him. When he does go out, usually for a mission, he tends to wear nice suits. If he has to go out and act like a civillian, he uses a lot of makeup and forces himself to stop smiling. His face gets sore after a while, though, so he doesn't get out much.
Background: Mr. Grin was a typical mobster: He started out running drugs, and worked his way up to becoming a lesser officer. His big break was being chosen to help escort the Elixir shipment. He managed to botch it, and his boss was going to make him regret it. After his face was sliced open, he was startled to find it had mended himself in about twenty minutes. The board of directors decided to give him a chance to redeem himself. He would become their superpowered hitman.
Powers: Mr. Grin was very near the explosion. He only survived because he gained a potent healing factor from it. Most wounds heal very quickly: Small cuts like from scraping his knee take seconds, larger wounds like from a bullet or being stabbed take a minute or so. And if he was inflicted with a life-threatening wound, like having his arm sliced off, he could heal in about an hour, and probably live that long if he just laid back and rested. His wounds won't heal if he's actively being hurt, however. So if his stomach was sliced open and he was on fire, he'd need to put the fire out before he could let his stomach heal.
Mr. Grin's healing factor also lets him exercise for long periods without getting tired. And his muscles grow at an abnormal rate. In the week since the explosion at the docks, Mr. Grin has trained himself so that he can outrun most Olympic athletes, and bend a streetlight in half.
Abilities: Mr. Grin is proficient with submachine guns, his weapon of choice. He's also quite skilled using knives.
Equipment: Mr. Grin usually wields a submachine gun in battle. He's actually more deadly with his knives, but he saves them for fighting other supers.


And the OP has been updated with info on Freedom City.

 

[AlphaMouse]

Name: Mark Burrows
Alias: Cloud
Gender: Male
Age: 19
Alignment: Wherever the Money's going, so good for now.
Appearance: Tall and lanky, at 6'1", Mark looks like the kinda guy that you could mess with. Not particularly muscular he has long legs. He has frizzy brown hair and a shaven chin, with deep hazel eyes. He usually wears something simple, jeans and T-shirt, which doesn't change much when he's on an assignment.
Background: Mark was raised in Harveysburg, and encouraged to lead a good life. He was intelligent and could become a Lawyer if he wanted to. But he had always wanted a different life. He hung about the poorer kids at school, went back to theirs, eventually to the Nightclubs. He was out with his girlfriend when the explosion happened, and when she realised that she had abilities, she fled the city, unable to face them. Since then he discovered that he was able to turn himself gaseous, and has used that to his advantage, gasifying himself after a drink so that he can cope with the effects, getting into the more strict Nightclubs and even the odd burglary. He was approached by the Governement to help with the paragons and they offered him a large contract as well as an amnesty, as he found out that they knew about his activities, so he joined.
Powers: Mark can turn his body gaseous at any moment. He can turn parts partially into this state, like just a hand of his torso and he can control himself while fully gaseous. He is also mostly invisible while in this state.
Abilities: He can handle his drink well and is also skilled at breaking into places.
Equipment: He carries a set of knives on assignments 'for security'

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

Accepted, so long as you specify what kind of gas it is. Also, some way of hurting him while he's in gas form would be good. Otherwise he'd be invincible.

 

[Godzillawolf]

So, how many characters are we allowed?

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

As many as you like, although if you make a whole team of bad guys and have them team up to level a block or something, that's bad. But yeah, barring that, as many as you can handle.

 

[SquishyFace]

I feel bad for making a character based on my actual appearance, but I'm too lazy to come up with a new one off the top of my head.

Name: Linnea (Linn) Arnborgh

Alias: Blackout

Gender: Female

Age: 13

Alignment: Neutral, really only looks out for herself unless she gains just a little too much sympathy for the person she left hanging.

Appearance: Linn looks kind of like your typical background character, she’s very pale (to the point where it’s almost reflective in the sunlight), has dark brown eyes (which are covered by black glasses) and copper colored hair that ends just above the middle of her back. She would wear plain solid-color T shirts with jeans along with tennis shoes. Linn stands at about 5’7” and her shoulders are slightly, but noticeably, broader than most girls her age.
In her Paragon persona outfit, everything she wears is black (in order to match up with her Alias). She wears a black hoodie, black running shoes, black jeans, and black gloves. The only thing that breaks up the color scheme is a simple white mask which looks like its smiling; she wears it in order to stay anonymous. Her glasses are also worn over the mask.

Background: Linn came from a very overachieving family, who would often put her in difficult and challenging academies even though she had no intellectual or artistic gifts. No, she didn’t want to be a “normal girl”; she wanted to be a “simple girl”. She didn’t want a normal family; she just wanted no family at all to have the slightest bit of control over her actions. So as a start, Linn started leading a double life at the boarding academy she was enrolled in. In the daytime, she was the Anti-Social student who was always surfing the internet after classes, and at nighttime, she would wander about the streets doing whatever she pleased. This had almost gone for a whole year until her family finally discovered this, but Linn had finally snapped under the pressure of the scolding and strict rules, and so she basically said “screw you” to her parents and ran off. Not even a full 24 hours later, the explosion happened and she saw the smoke from quite a distance. While most of the police force are trying to help out with that event, so far very few police officers are still trying to track her down and take her back home.

Powers: I guess you could call Linn a Technopath. She has the ability to make machines work in her favor, like making ATMs give her money without any IDs, Vending Machines give out free drinks, and she has the ability to hack into most computers without even touching a keyboard. She also has the ability to cause power shortages and create viruses (which can infect any kind of electrical powered object, as long as there aren’t too many firewalls). When she doesn’t have to do any superhero-ish work, Linn most of the time just uses this power to cheat on arcade games and mess around with other people’s facebook accounts.

Abilities: Linn doesn’t really have any abilities whatsoever. She’s not a super athlete, a charismatic charmer, or a ridiculously smart engineer. She does have a slight obsession with history though, and remembers a lot of historic events and names. Other than that, all she can really do is sing the ABCs backwards.

Equipment: A cell phone. That’s it, a cell phone. When she can’t touch technology in order to start a virus, she starts the virus on her phone and sends it to enemies and people who just really annoy her. So whenever she needs to use her power on something that is probably a mile away, she uses the phone to hack into the machinery since she cannot physically touch it at the moment.

 

[Lyrebird]

Name: Elizabeth 'Betty' Price

Alias: Swiftlet

Gender: Female

Age: 23

Alignment: Good

Appearance: Honey blonde wavy long hair and blue eyes. Betty standing at 5'11", is a pretty woman. Her body build shows that is she also pretty fit as well. She is thin but lean because of her occupation and activities. She does have a decent build, chest and hips wise but all in all, Betty is pretty beautiful. Her other (Paragon) form is pretty straight forward. Her hair grows longer, a lot longer down to her buttocks. She has goggles to help her protect herself when she uses her power and she wears a strong flexible red one piece suit, red glittering skirt that stays in place regardless of her speed and black boots specially made for Betty's power.

Background: Born into a simple family with workaholic parents, Betty had a lot to live up to. She was a hard worker, a strong athlete and a very independent intelligent thinker. She studied very hard and went into a top ranked college due to her scores and extracurricular activities. Her parents after Betty finished college decided to groom her into taking over their company so they can retire earlier. That basically followed suit and Betty became the CEO of her family's financial business. Knowing that she had her powers and knowing that there is only so much her company can do to help people, Betty decided to suit up and help the good guys, the community and defeat (not kill) the bad guys from hurting people

Powers: Super-Super Speed. Well she can go about 1/2 of the speed of light and can run non-stop for 5 days however she needs to eat a lot because it takes a lot out of her. Sometimes though she can 'hit the wall' and then her speed cuts by a half and causes her a lot of pain. Basically in short a lesser version of The Flash.

Abilities: Experience in leading a company, smart, workaholic, knows how to lead a team and fashionable.

Equipment: None


I want to create a character that is previously a superhero without powers just to give Betty a friend and a love interest in the future. If it is not okay, just tell

Name: Brad Walker

Alias: Blue Bird

Gender: Male

Age: 24

Alignment: Good

Appearance: Brad is the upmost pretty boy. Well built with raven black spiky hair and brown eyes, standing at 6'2", Brad shows that he is fit, strong and his looks can attract the women. There isn't much else to say but his costume is dark blue with with a tinge of black. He made his costume to invoke fear into people but also made to with strong flexible armor. He wears a domino mask to protect his identity and dark blue boots to go with the black flexible armor that he wears.

Background: Brad's family traveled around the world when he was younger because his dad was a journalist. His mother though lived back in the States and decided it was better after the divorce to go with his father. During that period, he studied a few forms of martial arts, learnt several languages and learnt from Russia gymnasts. Basically acquiring skills whenever he went because he wanted to help the world. Eventually he went to college to get a degree and work in a top business that his uncle owned. This is where he met Betty and they started to hit it off. Then he decided to become a policeman instead because it would work with his superhero activities. Betty and Brad became allies and teammates to help stop crime.

Powers: None. Was out of town when the explosion happened.

Abilities: Has neat gadgets, great team leader, knows several languages, top notch gymnast, stronger than average human because of high-peak training, knows a few martial arts from around the world

Equipment: A staff and a few blunt throwing discs.

I mean I can get rid of him if you want.

 

[AlphaMouse]

As it's his body turning gaseous it's mainly a steam cloud, with a few cells floating about in it too. Obviously any Group 1 metals (lithium, sodium etc) are a problem while he's gaseous, but also wind is also a problem as well as silver.

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

@Bad Apple, looks good to me. Accepted.

@Lyrebird, you can make two characters, and they can be friends, just avoid having them fight together too much. It wouldn't exactly be fair if someone could make a million sign-ups and then just kill everything with the superhero army. Don't worry, most players are more than happy to have their characters form alliances. I would like you to be a bit more thorough with what Betty's super speed's limits are. Like how fast can she go, and how long does it take her to get tired?

As it's his body turning gaseous it's mainly a steam cloud, with a few cells floating about in it too. Obviously any Group 1 metals (lithium, sodium etc) are a problem while he's gaseous, but also wind is also a problem as well as silver.

By weakness I mean something that will actually hinder your character to some extent. Most bad guys don't carry pure group 1 metals, and even if they did, they wouldn't usually know to use it. And most won't be able to control the wind. Maybe something like it takes him a few seconds to transform his entire body, and a little less than a second to transform parts? That way he could probably evade a dude with a knife, and so long as he got the drop on them, he could take down some guys with guns. He'd be in trouble if a guy with a shotgun caught him in human form, but then, if a guy with a shotgun catches you unawares, you're pretty screwed no matter what.

 

[Swordie]

Name: Cadence Adams
Alias: Orpheus
Gender: Female
Age: 28
Alignment: Good... Mostly
Appearance: Cadence is a fairly tall woman, though, admittedly, as flat as a washboard, which often gets her down. In a futile attempt to distract from this, she grew her hair quite long, and often has it loose, which, though a nightmare on windy days, at least looks nice. Ordinarily, Cadence will wear a pair of jeans, usually splattered with some kind of paint, dye or ink. With this, she'll where whatever one of her decidedly baggy t-shirts is closest when she crawls out of bed, and her only jacket - A scruffy leather affair, with one of the sleeves beginning to pull loose at the shoulder. As a paragon, her clothing is somewhat different - She has her arms bound with bandages, up to her elbows, and wears a sort of blackish-grey sleeveless top. As for her legs, she often wears a pair of black jeans - Possibly her only pair that she hasn't gotten paint on. She doesn't dare to, in all honesty.
Background: Cadence was a freelance sculpture artist, who specialised in creating massive installations, usually featuring string of some kind. Unfortunately, the interest began to wane in this sort of thing. Heck, there wasn't even a lot of interest to begin with! In any case, Cadence soon began frustrated with her lot in life, and soon began breaking the things she made, then building them again, and then breaking them, over and over, in a vicious circle of bitterness and misery. When the explosion happened, Cadence was tangled in a load of wire and cable from her smashed up work. The glass from her window smashed, and a large lump knocked her unconscious, as well as giving her a rather nasty gash to her head. When she eventually woke up, in hospital, she assumed that they had gotten her untangled. This was not the case. Once she discovered this (by accidentally strangling a doctor half to death when he made her jump), she decided to become a hero, under the alias of 'Orpheus'. This... Well, perhaps it was a bad decision - Several times, she attempted to save someone with her string, and ended up slicing them into little bits, because she'd used the wrong type. She's still practising with this although she's somewhat better at it now...
Powers: Cadence can manipulate the various lengths of wire and cable within her body. There's quite a lot of it, and the thinner stuff is quite capable of slicing through flesh with the right kind of force applied. mostly, Cadence is more comfortable with producing it from her hands and arms, however, it can force its way out of anywhere with enough lack of bone to allow it, however, since she's not used to it, it's rather painful when that happens. Using her power for anything over an hour tires Candence at an alarmong rate - Carrying anything heavy reduces this time significantly, too, though the exact amount depends son what she is carrying. The upper limit to what she can heft is a fully grown man, though this is rather pushing it. Anything over that places undue stress on her, meaning that something, somewhere is bound to snap... Theoretically, the wire and cable in her body could probably be extracted by some sort of magnetic field, if it were strong enough, though this would almost certainly kill Cadence.
Abilities: She doesn't really have anything she's particularly good at, other than making giant useless installations...
Equipment: She doesn't tend to carry too much on her - Usually it's just a mobile phone and whatever money she has.

 

[Lyrebird]

@Bad Apple, looks good to me. Accepted.

@Lyrebird, you can make two characters, and they can be friends, just avoid having them fight together too much. It wouldn't exactly be fair if someone could make a million sign-ups and then just kill everything with the superhero army. Don't worry, most players are more than happy to have their characters form alliances. I would like you to be a bit more thorough with what Betty's super speed's limits are. Like how fast can she go, and how long does it take her to get tired?.

Well she can go about 1/2 of the speed of light and can run non-stop for 5 days however she needs to eat a lot because it takes a lot out of her. Sometimes though she can 'hit the wall' and then her speed cuts by a half and causes her a lot of pain. Basically in short a lesser version of The Flash.

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

Alright, that sounds pretty okay to me. Just edit it into your powers list and you're good to go.

 

[Godzillawolf]

Hope I didn't go overboard, but I was kind of going for a fairly dangerous enemy.

Name: Kyo Takeshi
Alias: Doragon
Gender: Male
Age: 30
Alignment: Evil.
Appearance: His normal appearance is that of a Japanese man with black hair, well muscled. He typically wears a black jacket with a red shirt and black pants. His transformed state is a red, western dragon-like humanoid with wings wearing samurai like armor with a large dragon symbol on his chest.
Background: Kyo was a Yakuza enforcer present for much the same reason as Mr. Grin was, as his bosses were interested in the Elixir shipment, desiring to see if the Syndicate would be willing to part with some. When the blast happened, Kyo found his body sucking in the flames surrounding him to heal himself. With his newfound power, he quickly took over his Yakuza group and now seeks to take advantage of Paragons to further his criminal activities.
Powers: Kyo's body has become able to manipulate and feed off of the energy and heat of fire, both to accelerate his own healing and for attacks. This naturally renders him immune to fire, and attempting to attack him with it would more likely feed him than anything else. He has considerable control over fire and is capable of generating it at will, as well as bending it into solid constructs, though he is limited by how much energy he has and can only form constructs from the flames he produces, but can manipulate preexisting fire into blasts or to suck it into his own body. His transformed state is merely a shell of condensed flame around his body. This increases his strength and durability, as well as gives him the ability to fly with wings, however it also slows him down somewhat. However, like any fire, his constructs are vulnerable to water, though it takes considerable amounts to extinguish them completely and his transformed state can take more due to the amount of control he has over it. And, due to being condensed, the constructs are can be 'killed' or destroyed by physical means, though his transformed state can stand up to small arms fire. Also, he can 'burn himself out' if he over exerts himself and expends all his energy, and if he expends too much it could kill him, so even if he's winning a fight, he has no choice but to flee if he begins running low on fire. The inverse of this is naturally that he can increase in strength from absorbing more fire.

He prefers to stay behind the scenes and hire others to do his dirty work or use construct puppets to carry out his plans. This includes occasionally sending significantly weaker puppets of himself

Also of note is Kyo no longer requires water or normal food, instead eating fire and he tends to drink alcoholic beverages, as his body can process it and use the alcohol as fuel. In fact, drinking water, while no lethal, is poisonous to him.
Abilities: Being a Yakuza enforcer, Kyo is a skilled martial artist and capable swordsman. He's also a skilled planner, often trying to cover his tracks in the early stages 'like a fire slowly growing' before moving forwards. However, he's also got a temper problem and likely the most effective means of fighting him would be to provoke him until he goes berserk he expends too much energy.
Equipment: Kyo occasionally uses katana or duel sais in battle, but prefers to use weapons created from his fire constructs.

I tried to give him enough weaknesses to balance out his power so, while dangerous, he's still not OP.

But I also didn't want his water weakness to be a Weaksauce Weakness.

 

[Heroic Sociopath]

Looks balanced to me. Good job. Accepted.

 

[Godzillawolf]

Thanks. I should point out, he will be a Slade type villain who, 90% of the time, uses 'Doom Bots' instead of coming in person and there is a considerable difficulty spike between fighting a Doragon Construct and the real deal for obvious reasons.

Also, I should point out he CAN overload himself if he absorbs too much fire into himself, but would likely only do one for a Last Villain Stand to go One Winged Angel, as overloading himself destablizes his body and he risks destroying himself in the process. So thus, he'd only do that if he was cornered and at high risk of being killed or captured.

Hope that's alright.