An RPG using the Fate rule system created by Ross Payton of Roleplaying Public Radio, Base Raiders has a simple premise: A few years ago, all the world's superheroes and villains suddenly disappeared, now people search out their secret bases and loot their stuff to get superpowers of their own.
Tropes:
- Adventure-Friendly World: It basically started out as an excuse for dungeon crawling in a superheroes world.
- Alien Invasion: There's been three since WWII:
- The Greys invaded Roswell in 1957, but failed hilariously due to their complete misunderstanding of human behavior and tactics.
- The Luyteins, would-be conquistadors, invaded in 1978. Retreating after the Ideal brought down their main battle carrier over Brazil, vaporizing a two-mile square area of the Amazon.
- The Biologicals came to Earth in a crashed asteroid in 1984. They were hive-minded, eight-feet-tall, and breathed napalm. The Ideal managed to kill their queens but workers and warriors reappear from time-to-time.
- Alternate History: The timeline diverges significantly around 1937, when superpowered Chinese resistance fighters made international news. It was followed by superhumans ending WWII in 1944, multiple alien invasions, etc.
- Ambition Is Evil: The Ideal barred superpowered members from holding public office and purposefully trying to gain powers is illegal everywhere. Though ambition is kind of a prerequisite for Base Raiding and players are free to decide what they do with the stuff they acquire. The Forward by Caleb Strokes notes the frequency of this trope in superhero comics and paraphrases it as "Superheroes are allergic to Nietzsche".
- Cast from Sanity: Most magic users are obsessed with magic, and they can take Composure stress, or mental consequences, to boost their spells.
- Disposable Superhero Maker: Generally the most valuable class of loot.
- Equipment-Based Progression: Characters gain new powers by applying looted materials to themselves, and improve their existing powers by fencing the loot.
- Fantastic Drug: Two variants of "Peak Performer" are specifically noted to have been adapted into street drugs. "Harmony" boosts emotional stability but is spiked with powerful antidepressants that cause a serious bounce-back effect when they wear off, encouraging users to buy more doses. While "Boost" permanently increases intelligence but dealers either trick the buyers into believing its' temporary and sell them (often addictive) placebos after the initial real dose, or blackmail them.
- Functional Magic: There are a variety of different styles of magic, but few teachers left after Ragnarok.
- Genius Serum: "Boost" is a Super Serum that increases intelligence and has been adapted into a street drug, which dealers often claim is temporary to keep users buying it. However, it's actually permanent, further doses are either placebos or a more mundane drug like cocaine that was mixed in with the first dose.
- Point Build System: The first +1 in Unique and Strange skills, most notably superpowers, costs an additional number of skill points depending on which properties and drawbacks they have. There's a chart.
- Scavenger World: Not the whole thing, but there's super bases waiting to be cracked open and looted.
- Self-Made Superpowers: DIY'ers attempt to replicate the circumstances that led to past supers developing their powers, when they're not simply using super-soldier drugs.
- Superhero Prevalence Stages: The setting reached very Late stage before "Ragnarok" happened, making all supers disappear.
- Supernatural Martial Arts: Atlantean martial arts.
- Super Registration Act: During WWII superhumans were often drafted, up until the Super Soldier programs were underway and Avalon liberated the Death Camps. The Accord gave the Ideal policing powers over superhumans worldwide and they registered all supers (but kept their files confidential).
- Super Serum: Super-soldier drugs are some of the most common sources of powers, ranging from simple "Peak Performers" to shapeshifting alien cell extracts mixed with animal DNA, a Soviet compound that turns you into an armored juggernaut, and "Philosopher's Stones".
- Super-Soldier: From WWII to Ragnarok most countries had super soldier programs, though they went undercover when the Ideal went legit.
- 20 Minutes into the Future: When Ragnarok happened exactly is left open, but the 21st century is recommended as the fall of the Soviet Union created a lot of supervillains and the Ideal took some time to round them up, after they'd built bases.
- Twilight of the Supers: All the major superhumans simply vanished in an event called "Ragnarok", leaving their stuff behind.
- Unspecified Apocalypse: It must have been something incredibly nasty to make all superhumans in the world (heroes and villains) disappear all of a sudden, but the specifics of the event are not known to the general audience (read: players and their characters).
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Most governments don't treat nonhumans as people. Including humans from other universes.
