IST 2020 - Ideas?

[classicdrogn]

Goddammit guys, now I've got a few hundred bucks worth of GURPs books (that I know I will never use to actually play and would have a bit of a job to even read, interesting though they are) on my want list. Thanks bunches

[M Fnord]

Sorry. (Not at all sorry).

Meanwhile, I fell down something of a hole this weekend and created this. Enjoy?
(cw: American politics, though hopefully nothing too terrible)
https://i.imgur.com/PN6frrt.png

[Mamorien]

Sorry. (Not at all sorry).

Meanwhile, I fell down something of a hole this weekend and created this. Enjoy?
(cw: American politics, though hopefully nothing too terrible)
https://i.imgur.com/PN6frrt.png

I'm enjoying. In the "About the Author" note to the original IST book, Bob said it was "his attempt to reconcile the real world with what he thinks it should be", and I'm seeing something a lot like that here.

[classicdrogn]

Sorry. (Not at all sorry).

Meanwhile, I fell down something of a hole this weekend and created this. Enjoy?
(cw: American politics, though hopefully nothing too terrible)
https://i.imgur.com/PN6frrt.png

EH, I'm not really mad (just in case it wasn't clear) - the nice thing about 4th edition is that pretty much everything is available in PDF format, which I can at least open in Firefox and get the text reader to stumble through if I highlight the text first. Quite a bit spottier on the wilder fringes of 3e/3eR, but at least it's something.

I can't comment much on your image for similar reasons, though just from the rainbow of parties shown in the House and the Senate I can only say if only we had that kind of spread for real, to force a more consensus based approach instead of two nearly all-or-nothing opposed blocs with just a few nominal independents in Congress passing wind to the contrary.

(Also, why does this thread only show up in the "most recent post" preview on the main forum page but not in the subforum? Is it supposed to be invitation only or something?)

edit: Oh, duh, because it's in a sub-subforum. Derp.

[M Fnord]

Progress is glacial and the scope has creeped, but submitted for general comment here's the first complete chapter of the IST2020 update/reboot project:

---

Good Morning, Campers!
Dateline: New York City NY, United States, 20 December 2023, 2:30 am
Marc Warner sailed up along the East River at a comfortable 200 feet above the waterline, enjoying the feel as the City’s lights rolled past. Winter patrols were something of a pain in the ass – it was always without fail too damn cold, especially if you got off the street and into the air – but things hadn’t been too crazy tonight. The winter holidays were generally quieter, and while New Years would be its own circus that was still a few days in the future.

As Marc banked east over Roosevelt Island and into Astoria, he ruefully reflected that less crazy was probably better for him than not. The hero business took a toll, and Captain Future wasn’t a young man anymore. Once upon a time he’d been a young punk chasing all the other punks out of East Flushing, but that was a long time ago. He’d come up in the world – top hero in the Five Boroughs, respected internationally, even a standing invite to join the IST – but the aches and pains he felt every time he got out of bed reminded Marc that the human body has its limits. Maybe it was time to rest, to hand the defense of New York over to some new blood and spend his time building all the little gizmos he never seemed to have time to finish.

But not just yet. Captain Future dropped down to fifty feet (staying out of LaGuardia’s approach lanes) and started scanning the streets for signs of trouble. Retirement was going to happen, but for now the patrol was still on and the City never truly stopped moving, even in the dead of winter. As he thought it, a twitch of movement caught his eye. Marc pivoted and spotted a knot of people moving as one in the general direction of the Xavier Academy on 76th. Cutting main power and going to silent suspensors, Marc drifted closer to see what was up. It could’ve been just a gaggle of drunks trying to get home, or maybe some homeless folk looking for a spot to get out of the cold.

The group was moving in far too quiet and measured a way to be drunks, and even in the sputtering streetlights they weren’t dressed like people with nowhere else to go. As Marc got close enough his goggles’ HUD started picking up the signature symbols and tattoos of the True Humans, the long-standing bigoted thorn in his (and everybody else’s) side. Marc wasn’t metahuman himself, and he’d heard all the rhetoric from their “respectable” anti-meta mouthpieces on the news, but it was like his father always said: the Klan is the Klan is the Klan, and a Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi. Marc never asked his pops about what he’d gotten up to in the Sixties – and Walt Warner never told – but once Marc got into the hero business he understood his father better than he ever expected to.

So, here he was, flying overhead of a bunch of bigoted clowns loitering around a school for meta kids in the middle of the damn night in December. There was only one way this was headed, and there was only one way that Captain Future could respond: he touched his backup alert beacon, lit his thrusters to their full attention-keeping power and swooped down on the True Human goons like a peregrine falcon hitting a pigeon.

The goons scattered in his passage, leaping and tumbling out of the way of Marc and his jetpack exhaust as he came to a perfect stop between them and their target. “School’s not in yet, boys!” Captain Future boomed cheerfully, inbuilt speakers in his costume waking the entire block. “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to come back later. Or never; never is good too.”

---

Today is Wednesday, the third of January in the year 2024, and it’s shaping up to be an extremely lovely day here on Earth-1. The average global temperature is a comfortable 14 degrees Celsius, and the weather everywhere is remarkably nice for this time of year. Even the North Atlantic is fairly calm. Some storms are expected to build up as the day progresses, but it’s nothing that demands attention from the International Weather Organization. Admittedly, since the most recent climate summit the IWO’s been taking a lighter hand than they used to back in the Nineties, so unless a cyclone develops and is aiming to hit somewhere heavily populated they’re not likely to step in anywhere.

As of this morning there are 8,091,734,930 humans, 253,129 exosolar aliens, 72,178 parachronic travelers (31,154 of those nonhuman), 1,279 digital intelligences and 14,231 artificial humanoids currently living on and around this little rock here in the scenic outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy. The newest arrival to our fair globe was just born in a regional medical center in the Jarkarta suburbs but don’t worry – he’s not the only one showing up today!

It’s a quiet winter morning in New York City, once and future headquarters of the United Nations and de facto world capital. There’s a bit of snow on the ground and the ever-present hum of the City That Never Sleeps wraps itself around the UN complex. The morning traffic rolls down First Avenue to the crunch of rubber on asphalt and the almost inaudible whirring of electric motors. Across the street from the modernist glass box of the UN building is the sleek chrome tower containing the headquarters of the greatest force for heroism on Earth-1 – the International Super Teams. If one looked up at just the right moment they might catch a glimpse of the world’s finest heroes coming and going through the upper-level entrances, or see one of the IST’s famous Quinjets taking off from the roof.

Elsewhere within the city: The overnight shift of the Five Boroughs Brigade swaps places with the morning patrol, to grab some food and then get some sleep. In Harlem, a man with elastic powers and enhanced strength puts on a hardhat as he slips into a construction site – the City is always building something and being able to lift heavy equipment three stories in one oversized hand is a valuable talent in his field of work. A school group enters the American Museum, the slightly harried teacher admonishing her students to not fly inside the building, no matter how big the main hall was. A pair of cat-faced tourists from another star eagerly set up a tent out in front of the Majestic, intent on being the first in line for that night’s showing of Phantom of the Opera and confusing the hell out of the beat cop who thought to roust them for vagrancy. Near the top of the World Trade Center, the richest man on Earth-1 reads financial reports and ponders what villainy he can transfer money to without being caught. And deep underneath the city, at the center of a web of century-old pneumatic tubes, the latest person to wear the Shadow’s cloak contemplates the evil within the hearts of men.

Just another ordinary day on Earth-1.

Superhumans Walk The Earth!
Dateline: Bloomington IL, United States, 2 July 2023, 11:20 am
The story started the way the way you might expect a story like this to start: with a small brown-and-white cat clinging to a branch way up near the top of a very tall tree.

“Patches! Come down!” the cat’s personal human called. Patches – that being the cat currently stuck in a tree – mewed somewhat pitifully as it regarded the amount of clear air between it and the ground. The cat’s human was a boy named Micah, not quite nine years old, and he was torn with indecision. Clearly Patches wasn’t interested in getting down for himself, and while Micah might be able to climb up and retrieve his cat it was still a long ways up and Micah wasn’t confident in his ability to get back down, either.

Patches mewed again, and Micah’s indecision turned frantic. Just as he was steeling himself up to start climbing or go call the fire department or do something, a reddish shape like a giant bird that was also a person dropped out of the sky and came to a halt at the top of the tree. Hands reached out and plucked the only somewhat unwilling Patches from his perch, then gently person and cat floated down to the ground right next to Micah.

“Delivery for one little boy!” the person said cheerfully, holding Patches out at respectable distance. Micah immediately snatched the cat from the hero and pulled him in close, lest he accidentally escape again.

“Thank you, Local Hero!” Micah cried. Local Hero was the biggest superhero in the general Bloomington area. Most other heroes tended to wander off to the big city, but Local Hero was a homebody who thought his town needed a hero more than Chicago or Indianapolis needed another warm body. His classic red outfit, black domino mask and “headline cape” – a cape printed with any number of “LOCAL HERO DOES THING” headlines from newspapers all around the country – made him popular with both the people of Bloomington (who thought him just nice to have around) and the Internet (who made him the greatest meme of the 2020s).

“No need to thank me,” Local Hero said with a shrug. “I was in the neighborhood and saw the trouble. Glad I was able to help.” The hero looked back at the tree. “Must’ve been some bird he was chasing to get so far up.”

Micah shifted, increasing his grip on Patches to the cat’s mild complaint. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“Not your fault, son,” Local Hero said, only for Micah to shift once again. “I mean, you didn’t scare him up the tree by throwing rocks or something, right?”

“No!” Micah yelled. He’d never do anything like that! “But, but...” Micah held out Patches in his arms and concentrated. Ever so slowly, the little cat began to float above his hands. For what it’s worth, Patches seemed to be completely unconcerned with his sudden weightlessness, stretching out luxuriously as he spun round the long axis.

Local Hero looked duly impressed. “Well now that’s a thing,” he said.

“Patches likes to fly a little,” Micah said. “Sometimes I take him flying when the weather’s nice.”

“And he got in the tree...?”

“I lifted him up really high this time, and I couldn’t reach all the way. Like standing on tiptoes. He got into the tree and I couldn’t lift him away.”

“I see.” Local Hero crouched down next to Micah. “Are your parents home?” he asked, face very serious. Micah gulped.

“W-well, my dads are home but they’re at work too,” he hedged. “Am I in trouble?”

The hero shook his head. “No kid, you’re not in trouble,” he said. “But I think that you and I ought to have a talk with your dads about some stuff. Like maybe finding a place where you and Patches can learn to fly better.”

Later, Micah and his fathers spent a lot of time talking to Local Hero about superpowers and where to train them, concluding with Local Hero giving Micah a special card for the Xavier school in Springfield where he could sign up for summer lessons in telekinetic training. And also a special card to get Patches a collar with a drone chip, so he didn’t “run afoul of FAA regulations” whatever that meant.

---

Of the 8.09 billion people currently shaking the earth this morning, approximately one in every ten thousand is an active carrier of the metagene, an interesting bit of DNA that – if expressed properly – carries the potential to develop superpowers. These powers can range between the trivial and the godlike; it’s just as possible for somebody to have a constant extrasensory perception of where they left their keys as it is to get the power to juggle skyscrapers. Of this pool of potentials around 700,000 people worldwide have “activated” their powers and become metahumans. Compared to the greater breadth of human experience this is still just a drop in the bucket, and (to be fair) the majority of metahumans are still in the range of key-locating as opposed to ultimate powerhouses. But the ones on the higher end, or the ones who’ve learned to leverage relatively weaker powers, are more than enough to make things interesting.

When metahumans started coming out of the woodwork in the late Twenties society seized on pulp narratives to try and make sense out of the new strangeness. Pulp fiction – first novels, then comics – spoke of a world defined by bright, shining heroes and dastardly villains, archetypes that the newly empowered found compelling in a world that seemed to be more and more like fiction with each passing day. In previous generations metahumans might’ve been seen as gods or mythic figures. In the fast-paced world of the Twenties and Thirties the metahuman instead became superheroes and supervillains.

By the end of World War II supers stopped being curiosities and by the Sixties they were an accepted part of the human condition. Nowadays every city above a certain size will have at least one person in a colorful costume wandering around using their powers to be helpful, and there will be at least one person in a costume running around robbing liquor stores. Sometimes they fight. For a while, especially after the war showed how dangerous properly-trained metahumans could be on the battlefield, supers were thought of as strategic assets on the same level as nuclear weapons. The Cold War posturing between the United States and the Soviet Union, using both their nuclear and metahuman arsenals, brought the world to the brink of annihilation several times during the Seventies.

In response, the world stood up and said no.

The New World Order
Dateline: Herat, Afghanistan, 7 October 2023, 3:15 pm
Sideslip swallowed nervously and adjusted their gauntlets. The relief mission to Herat had been going well enough at first. They’d been on plenty of relief and rescue operations throughout all of Central Asia ever since joining up with IST Islamabad, and while the quake had been bad it wasn’t an utter nightmare. Sideslip and the rest of Islamabad’s alpha squad had been on the Quinjet before the aftershocks had faded and met all three teams from IST Kabul who were already on the ground. More teams were coming in from Iran and the Sovereign Union, each heading up a longer column of unpowered relief workers and medical teams to help with the absolute wreck the city had become. Loss of life had been high, unacceptably high by Slipstream’s standards, but as more heroes showed up the situation looked like it was going to be properly under control by sundown.

And then the call came in, hot and frantic all the way from Kabul: Blue Demon sighted, en route to Herat.

Veterans liked to remind newcomers to IST that the only thing they really needed to fear was fear itself, or the Blue Demon, whichever came first. The monster had been a thorn in everyone’s side from the first time it appeared almost forty years prior. It would show up, wreak havoc and then depart if nobody stopped it. The Demon was different from your run of the mill supervillain. It was supposedly different from your run of the mill demon, even. They said it couldn’t be killed or banished. That no matter what anybody did, it would return, like it was stuck here, and that seemed to make it even angrier.

Now it was coming to Herat, to stoke more fear and despair in a city that already had more than enough.

Priorities shifted. The Kabul team and the city authorities started moving people out of the Demon’s expected landing zone as quickly as they could. Islamabad’s gamma squad accelerated search and rescue in the area – everybody who was trapped in the combat zone needed to get out now. The Tehran and Almaty teams broke off from their relief columns and raced ahead, hoping to get there before anything got worse. Calls were made to Command in America, who then made calls to Seoul, where the IST’s elite demon hunter squadron was stationed. Teleporters were awakened, dosed liberally with coffee and told the situation.

And Sideslip, along with the rest of their team, stood by and waited for the Demon to show itself. In fifteen years in IST, six of them as a field commander, they’d never seen the Demon up close and personal. It had an impressive body count behind it – well over three dozen heroes to its name.

The Herat street, already well-damaged from the quake, vanished in a mighty crashing sound and an explosion of dust as the Blue Demon made it’s arrival. IST Islamabad’s alpha and beta squads flinched at the burst of noise.

Sideslip’s eyes narrowed.

The Demon might be unkillable.

But unkillable didn’t mean unstoppable.

A bellow came from in front of them, and the dust cloud was dismissed by the beat of a monstrous wing. The Blue Demon stepped forth in all its terrible glory. Cobalt-blue skin rippled as it stalked forward, horns the color of bleached bone catching the afternoon light. It paused, regarding the IST strike force before dropping into a combat stance, wings flaring wide.

Sideslip clenched their hands so hard they could hear the metal and polykev groan in protest. This was it; at the minimum they needed to keep between the demon and the civilians still trying to evacuate behind them. With luck, they could kite the monster out of the city and pin it long enough for the demon hunters to show up and do... whatever it was they were meant to do with the (literally) damned thing. Sideslip honestly didn’t know or care if the hunters were going to kill, banish or capture it. All they really cared about was getting the monster outside Herat where it couldn’t hurt anybody.

The Blue Demon roared in challenge. Sideslip braced to launch themselves, and offered a challenge back.

“IST ISLAMABAD! TAKE IT DOWN!”

---

The United Nations was founded in the wake of World War II much in the same way that the League of Nations had been founded in the wake of the first world war. Nobody really wanted to go through that ever again, and so the nations of the world banded together in peace and harmony under the auspices of the UN.

That was what it was like on paper, anyway. The reality was something else entirely. The UN spent most of its first forty years as an organization that was at best a pawn of the Cold War superpowers, saddled with the responsibility of maintaining world peace while not really having the budget or even the authority to do much in that regard. All authorization for actual peacekeeping came from the UN Security Council, whose permanent members could veto anything they didn’t like, and were perfectly happy to exercise that veto whenever the interests of peace conflicted with their own interests. Despite this the UN muddled through as best it could, accomplishing some impressive feats via the soft power of the Economic and Social Council and it’s vast armada of international organizations dedicated to health, literacy and the environment.

In another timeline the United Nations might’ve continued to muddle on, an entity constrained by the limits imposed on it at birth and unable to accomplish nearly as much as it wanted – as it needed to. But on Earth-1 as the Cold War started to warm up and the threat of yet another world war loomed on the horizon, something inside the UN snapped. An unlikely coalition of diplomats, politicians, superheroes and others started talking, then they started working together. It wasn’t an easy process by any means, but by the Eighties they were ready.

2024 marks the 42nd anniversary of the 1982 Edicts, the landmark declaration by the UN that the people of the world, backed by some of the greatest heroes of the age, would no longer allow the great powers the right to blow the planet to hell for their own gratification. In a statement broadcast around the world the UN General Assembly decreed that hoarding nuclear weapons and stuffing armies full of metahumans was no longer allowed for any nation, and that to enforce this edict they unveiled the most ambitious super project in human history: the International Super Teams. Peacekeepers with capes and the authority to go into any UN member state to stop the worst of the worst.

To call this a seismic realignment of the status quo is an understatement. The governments of the world were more than a little shocked that the UN would go this far; they were even more surprised when the Security Council, for reasons never fully explained, went along with it. For a second it looked like the Edicts might break the UN, until the General Assembly showed the carrot that went along with the stick: scientists working under their auspices had developed a working utility-grade fusion reactor, and these reactors would be installed in every UN member country – so long as they accepted the Edicts.

The International Super Teams had a rough start, facing its first major crisis almost immediately in the Angola War against an expansionist South Africa. It would face more trials to come in the Four-Hour War, the Rwanda Crisis which would rewrite the rules on how UN peacekeeping worked, the Amerexit Crisis, the Millennial Crisis and more, all of which shaped how the UN faced the 21st century.

An Unlikely Crossroads
Dateline: Olympus Station, Earth Orbit, 16 August 2023 7:15 am
As a young girl Linda Ravenhair had loved the stars. Even beyond growing up watching Galaxy Quest like every other kid in the Seventies Linda had a fondness for space and astronomy that felt more like a calling. When her metagene activated and she gained the power to actually go to space on her own? Amazing. That it was the first space-capable superpower on record? Even better. As The Astronaut, Linda expected to go on to have a career full of really amazing exploits.

This wasn’t exactly where she expected to be for her final posting... but it had its own entertainment value.

“Superior madam I must protest!” The little reptile guy said in a voice that belied his stature. “My cargo has been verified as perfectly safe by the Imperial Shipping Board! For you to forbid me to offload here even just to transship is a significant breach of protocol.”

Not an entirely untrue statement, and yet... “Regardless sir,” Linda replied evenly. “Your own manifest says that you’re moving thirty thousand head of Tau Ceti beffel. Perhaps you were unaware, but beffel are considered a grade-1 invasive species by the UN Environmental Program.”

“I am aware, superior madam,” the Halessi ground out, eyestalks drooping forward in a fashion Linda had come to describe as ‘extremely annoyed but trying not to start an international incident.’ “However, almost all of the beffel aboard my ship are in cryogenic stasis!”

“Almost, Mr. Wallafess,” Linda said. “There are the matter of almost a dozen other beffel outside the tubes.”

“Personal pets!” Which was a big load of codswallop, as Linda’s grandma was fond of saying. According to her sources, beffel made for okay pets – on the ground. Not the confines of a starship. So Wallafess was moving unfrozen beffel around, probably to one or more of the restaurants on-station, and didn’t want to deal with the extra EIS paperwork. Which, well, fine; Linda could sympathize. But sympathy only went so far and the higher-ups at UNOOSA and UNEP were crystal clear: beffel were not to land on Earth in any sort of breeding condition.

“Can you provide documentation that they’ve been sterilized?”

Wallafess huffed. “I can, but I see no need-”

Linda cut the aggravated merchant off at the knees. “You, Mr. Wallafess, are not the person who has to deal with an infestation of fast-breeding alien livestock suddenly trying to muscle out native livestock and the wildlife when they manage to get down to the surface.” 2010 had not been an especially fun year for anybody on either side of Olympus. “If you have the documentation, then my office requires copies of it, as well as tracking chip frequencies for all of your ‘pets’ before we allow you to move cargo.”

The Halessi’s eyestalks flattened out and went side-to-side, before returning to their neutral position. “Very well, superior madam,” he sighed. “It shall be done, if only so I don’t have to come back to this dirtball any time in the near future.”

The Astronaut flashed the disgruntled alien the PR smile she used back in the old days. “See? Nothing to worry about.”

---

While Earth-1 started failing upwards in the direction of a world government, little did they know that they were being watched by intelligences not terribly different from their own, who sought to reach out.

In 1987 the world woke up to the news of one of the least-dignified examples of First Contact in galactic history, when a spacecraft of distinctly nonhuman origin splashed down in the River Thames just outside the village of Sonning Eye. Aboard that ship was an explorer-ambassador from the nearby Federated Kingdoms of Myrr, who greeted the people who helped extract him from his ship in Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and English. The ambassador was a Meeranar, a species of lightly psychic felinoids from nearby Epsilon Eridani who are junkies for novelty and adventure and just really think humans are kind of neat. Within a week of him and his ship being pulled from the Thames, the ambassador was in front of the General Assembly proposing a diplomatic and trade agreement between Earth and Myrr. By the end of the year the UN had a preliminary agreement drafted. By the end of 1987 the ambassador’s ship had been resupplied and he was off to his homeworld. By the end of 1988 he was back, in a much larger ship containing a full embassy staff and the first symbolic interstellar trade goods.

In 1990 the tourists started arriving.

The Federated Kingdoms were no more connected to the pulse of galactic society than Earth – the first contact in Sonning Eye was just as much a first for the Meeranon as it was for humanity – but something about two civilizations making peaceful contact was like a dam breaking in Earth’s general neighborhood. In 1986 humanity thought they might be alone in the cosmos; in 1996 not only did they have a remarkably stable diplomatic agreement with the Meeranon, but several other species were now making regular stops in the skies over Earth. The reptilian Halessi made contact with Myrr first but have since expanded their not-quite-colonialist ambitions to Earth, while the deeply strange and yet affable colony creatures known as the Blorg have set up limited refueling operations around Venus.

Word of Earth-1 continues to spread through the Galaxy: Meeranon traders have ventured further than any human to date, and they’ve brought back trading ships from the enigmatic humanoids of the Kyz, who themselves tell of a large Galactic Confederation that exists an almost impossibly far distance away from Earth. No great dangers have emerged from the void to threaten the world – but everybody figures that it’s only a matter of time before somebody decides to try their luck with the species of the local neighborhood.

The Multiverse Is Calling
Dateline: Holy City of Chead, Earth-F049, 11 November 2023 9:05 am (adjusted)
Haru huddled in the gilded chair, trying very hard to cry. Six weeks ago she’d been just another middle-school student in Tokyo going about a regular, boring life. And then the magic circle opened up under her feet just before homeroom began and deposited her here, in the central city of the Empire of Chead, alongside four others from her class.

The people of Chead called them saints, said that their goddess had delivered her and the others to protect the empire from monsters and the Demon King’s invasion. Tetsuhara had been overjoyed at the thought of being a hero and threw herself into the training and the work, becoming the Empire’s favorite by the end of the week. But Tetsuhara was so caught up in her new chuuni world that she refused to look at anything that wasn’t monsters or magic or swords.

Haru wasn’t the smartest girl in her class, but she wasn’t stupid. She saw the strange, plastic looks the Cheadians gave her and the other saints when they thought she wasn’t looking. She’d heard all the mutterings about being “barbarians” who the Emperor summoned. She’d endured all the quiet bullying the maids put her and everyone who wasn’t Tetsuhara through. And she’d seen the smile Prince Rodney gave her, the one he thought was charming but reminded her of the sort of smile a bad guy might have on the news.

Whatever the Empire wanted from their “saints” wasn’t a good thing. At least, it wasn’t good for Haru and the others. And so, in a room that had more opulent furnishings than anything she’d ever experienced back home but felt more and more like a prison cell with each passing moment, Haru Watanabe sat, arms wrapped around her legs, telling herself that she had to be strong.

Suddenly there was a commotion on the other side of the door. Haru heard maids screaming and knights shouting, the sound of armor clanking and lots of expensive pottery smashing. She pulled further into herself, expecting the worst. The Cheadians had enemies, and none of them were likely to be very kind to their saints. The huge double doors flew open, a squeak escaping Haru’s lips as the source of the mayhem outside strode in.

It wasn’t a huge knight or some kind of assassin, nor was it a Cheadian with their almost uncanny good looks. The attacker was a woman, tall and pale with short, curly black hair, and she was dressed more like a delinquent than a knight, in leather pants and jacket and a bright blue t-shirt. Haru sat there frozen as the woman came into the room on long legs.

“Watanabe Haruka?” the woman said. Haru started. Plenty of others had said her name before but there was something about the way this woman said it that Haru couldn’t place until she repeated “Are you Watanabe Haruka-san?” It was then Haru realized it: this woman had said something in Japanese, not the Cheadian language that she understood through (she assumed) some kind of magic.

Still frozen, Haru could only make the slightest of nods. The woman’s expression softened a touch as she knelt by the chair, reaching out to touch Haru on the shoulder.

“I’m Telcontar,” she said. “I’ve come to get you home, Haruka-chan. Your family is very worried about you.” The mention of her family made Haru’s heart twist, but then she remembered the color of Telcontar’s shirt, and where she’d seen the symbol printed on the front before.

“IST,” she whispered, the tears finally starting to well up in earnest. Telcontar smiled and nodded, and in a moment Haru was wrapped around the hero’s torso, sobbing into her shoulder while the older woman patted her gently.

“Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Telcontar murmured, “I’m here, you’re safe now. How long?”

“S-six weeks,” Haru choked out. “H-how-?” Had she been gone for just as long back home? Had her mother, father and older brother been afraid for her that long? The thought was almost as awful as the thought of never seeing them again had been.

“Not quite a day and a half back home,” Telcontar assured her. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find you. It’s been hard, but it’s almost over now.” More shouting and the sound of a lot of people in heavy armor running very quickly filled the hall. “In fact, I think we’ll move the timetable up a little. Can you stand up for me, Haruka-chan?” Haru reluctantly detached herself from her savior, who immediately rummaged around in her jacket, producing a notepad and a ball-point pen. The hero scribbled something on the pad, tore off the sheet and handed it to her.

“As soon as you get home, give that to Dankaiser, okay?” the hero said. Haru nodded dazedly. (Dankaiser? The number-one hero in Japan was looking for a little nobody like her?) Telcontar muttered something in a language Haru didn’t understand. All of a sudden she felt lighter, almost like the circle that had kidnapped her from school.

The hero winked. “All you need to do now is say, ‘there’s no place like home.’”

Haru said it and the world erupted in rainbow light. The last thing she saw of Chead was the look of shock on Prince Rodney’s face as he burst into the room at the head of a squad of knights.

(Tomorrow, Haru would learn that Telcontar would send the others back one by one over the rest of that day, culminating with her escorting a disheveled and disgruntled Tetsuhara back home.)

---

The sharp-eyed reader might’ve noticed that Earth is often styled as “Earth-1” over and over in the text. Thereby hangs a tale.

The multiverse was a theoretical thing in quantum physics for a very long time until the Nineties when otherwise-routine experiments in metahuman power relations proved that the theory was correct – sort of, kind of, it’s complicated – but alternate versions of Earth were in fact accessible with the right technology and/or metahuman power. Then the Millennium Crisis happened and people, well, they didn’t forget but they were way too distracted to publish anything for a few years. It wasn’t until the mid 2000s that the first papers on multiverse transit hit the field and the Parachronic Revolution began in earnest.

Naturally, the UN tried to get on top of this as quickly as they could, establishing the UN Interworld Office and the International Parachronic Laboratory in order to try and coordinate parachronic research as best they could. This didn’t work out quite as well as the UN hoped; the potential economic benefits of accessing the entire multiverse were too tempting, especially for nations that were more than a little cool on the UN experiment at the time. During this time UNIO successfully made contact with two specific alternates: Earth-2 where pulp heroes and the League of Nations staggered on into the Eighties, and Earth-3 where a weird-science-tinged Vietnam War sparked a global communist revolution and an American civil war that saw the Midwest go the way of Atlantis. The three quasi-world governments circled each other cautiously for a while, but realizing that they had more in common than not (particularly the whole “would rather live peacefully than get shot at” thing) they agreed to regular travel and trade between them. This tripartite influx of new ideas would lead to some surprising effects on Earth-1, like the division of the old Soviet Union into the reformist Sovereign Union and the Earth-3 influenced United Socialist Republics.

The multiversal “gold rush” saw a lot of new developments hit Earth-1 in the early 21st century: new technologies, new culture, an influx of resources and even possible solutions to present problems. But an entirely new frontier of the Universe also meant new problems and foes. Not only did Earth-1 have to deal with the ever-present threat of supervillains using parachronic technology to go a-viking on unsuspecting timelines, but not everybody traveling across the multiverse were nice people. In particular the paranoid neoliberals of the Infinity Unlimited corporation aren’t fond of anybody playing around in “their” sandbox, and have been a constant thorn in UNIO’s side since first contact in the 2010s. Villains from other Earths have shown up from time to time, usually just on raids though a few have tried to take root. The late 2010s saw a rash of kidnapping incidents across East Asia as a number of “fantasy kingdoms” were in the habit of stealing Japanese, Chinese and Korean students for a host of confusing reasons. And then there’s the Time Nazis: timelines where the Nazis win are tragically common but only one, the Weltreich, has an actually stable Nazi regime dominating the world. These jokers aren’t very numerous, but their occult wizardry makes them slippery opponents to UNIO/IST operatives.

The less said about the Domination of the Draka, the better. Only that IST spanked them so hard in 2020 that they likely won’t try for another go for at least another century.

How We Got Here
Dateline: Fort Collins, CO, United States, 16 January 2024, 10:30 am
“Alright, if everybody’s seated...” The professor trailed off, scanning the classroom. The first class of the spring semester was always tricky, especially given that the holidays had just ended. “First of all, welcome back and I hope everybody had an entertaining, if not necessarily productive, winter break.” That got a few weak chuckles from the students; not the best opening ever perhaps but for before lunch on the first day of classes not terrible. “For those of you who’re new, first of all please make sure you’re not in the wrong class, second welcome to Metahuman History 101. I’m Dr. Celine, whom some of you will probably come to loathe over the next few years because you were foolish enough to want to major in this.

“So, what is metahuman history? If you remember your high school classes you’ve probably got a general idea of the Shadow, Doc Savage, the war, maybe a bunch of stuff about the history of the Justice League and that’s about it, right? If your high school had really high standards they might teach a little about the Metalithic as part of the general history course, and maybe you get something in there about the civil rights movement and POWER because boomers never pass up an opportunity to self-aggrandize.” That got a stronger laugh from the students. “And that’s fair, to an extent. High schools have to teach a lot of stuff to their students, and history is very large. It’s easy for things to get passed over or given a superficial treatment because we’ve got to get you from Sumer to the UN by the end of the semester.

“In this class however we’ll be doing a much more in-depth overview than you might’ve gotten elsewhere. Our focus is on metahumanity and how metahumans effected history. This can be big flashy events that everybody’s heard of, like if Bob Kennedy hadn’t had a metahuman bodyguard he might not have lived to be President in 1980. Or it can be something a bit more subtle but no less profound in its effects, like the history of the Roland Power Cell.” The professor paused, then lifted a small battery pack off his desk. “Most of you have seen one, or one of the eight million derivatives that’re floating around these days. You have them in your phones, your tablets, laptops, even thirty percent of your cars likely run on a Roland cell. What you might not know is that these little batteries are one of the first successful technologies derived from the study of metahumanity, and without them history would be a whole lot different.

“We’re not going to get to everything in this course. Even if you’re pursuing a degree in metahuman history, you won’t get to everything because it’s history, and even relatively recent history is a very large topic. That said, if you’ve received your syllabus in your email – and if you haven’t please come up after class so we can get that sorted out – I’ve included a list of further reading, as well as some podcasts and YouTube videos that are well-sourced and will be able to help with additional context to the things we’re discussing in class. I’m not so cruel as to demand you listen to hundreds of hours of podcasts for class credit, but if you find the subject interesting beyond ‘will I pass the course’ I highly recommend taking a look.

“Now, with that in mind, let’s wind our way back all the way to the very beginning and get started, shall we?”

---

As the first quarter of the 21st century draws to a close Earth-1 stands on the edge of multiple epoch-making events all at once. It’s simultaneously become part of a modest interstellar trading network and the hub of a multiversal diplomatic system that – in time – will change the nature of interuniversal politics. It’s not united under a world government no matter what the lunatic fringe might suggest, but the fractious nature of human politics has moved with torturous slowness in the direction of greater unity. The damage done by generations of rushing towards industrialization is being pushed back and repaired millimeter by millimeter. Humans live on the Moon, in any of several dozen large orbital habitats and a few souls are now permanent residents of another star. Earth-1 has its supervillains, but it also has heroes willing to put themselves between the people and harm, whether that comes from the ray guns of Dr. Insano or the bombs and missiles of a government out to destroy the weak for their own ends.

It’s a different world from the one where you, the reader of this document, live in. The advent of superpowers has changed things in ways that are big and obvious the way you’d expect superpowers to change things, but also in ways that are a bit... let’s say “off-kilter” from what you might expect. For example: Much like in your world Earth-1’s America had a bit of a stir about Dungeons & Dragons being dangerous for kids, but instead of being a moment of weird mass panic spun out of nothing by bored suburbanites like you remember, on Earth-1 some bright young teenager figured out how to make Magic Missile work from first principles and accidentally blew up his parents’ garage with it. (The garage was a total loss, and D&D got some side-eye on the next edition, but the teenager would go on from there to win the Nobel in 1995 for his work unifying magic and physics.)

Though despite all the differences, it’s still recognizable. For all the superpowers, humans are still human. They’re born, they grow up, laugh, cry, have loved ones and do all the things ordinary people do all across the multiverse. They go to work, even if some of them do that by donning a cape and mask, they go to school, live and die just like everybody else. People read books and go to the movies, listen to music, play videogames and spend too much time on social media the same way that you do.

The path to get to this point wasn’t an easy one. Nor was it short. It didn’t start in 1982 when the world said no, nor did it start with the founding of the UN in 1945, with the first true superheroes of the Thirties, or even the first demonstration of powers in the Twenties. The path to Earth-1 being what it is begins long, long ago, far back in the misty depths of human evolution before the emergence of Homo sapiens as the dominant intelligent species on Earth. It’s a path that travels the length of human history, from ancient kingdoms where gods and monsters still walked the earth and myths were reality all the way to the dawn of modern civilization, and it intertwines with every facet of humanity along the way. Explaining it all would the work of multiple lifetimes, and even then some things would remain unknown or inexplicable. This document can never be anything but an abridged version of the whole. But even an abridged version of the tale has merit.

So let me tell you a story...

SIDEBOX: “The World Outside Your Window”
Superheroes and comic book settings exist in tension with the so-called real world. On the one hand, the goal of a superhero setting has traditionally been to be as close to the real world as possible in order to make it easier for readers to imagine themselves in that world. That Superman or Spider-Man could sail past the window at any moment. On the other hand, the sheer amount of weirdness that piles up in superhero media, powers and supervillains and gods and aliens and big world-threatening crossover events happening at least once a year, would have a very visible effect on civilization.

Most superhero media ignores it; the world is just a backdrop for the action soap opera stories being told. Some works, particularly Alan Moore’s Miracleman and the Trinity Continuum TTRPG, lean into the transformative effects of superpowers on humanity much harder, resulting in a hard shift from superhero media to science fiction, fantasy or (in Moore’s case especially) mythology. Essentially, this is the butterfly effect in action: low-butterfly media more closely resembles the real world and thus is more relatable for the citizens of Current Year, while high-butterfly media often gets more experimental and alien.

Where then do we stand?

GURPS IST, the work that this is a fanfic/reboot/reimagining of, is low-butterfly to the point where most major historical events happened the same way regardless. This honestly strains credibility in a whole bunch of areas, but a) it is on-brand for GURPS timelines in general and b) it makes the world more easily recognizable as the “world outside your window” for a reader/gamer in 1991-93 when the core GURPS IST books were all published. Truth, Justice and the UN Way has a higher number of butterflies but it’s still pretty low-butterfly overall – I’m not pulling a Miracleman. The world is different from the real world – it’s pretty different from the world of GURPS IST in a lot of ways – but because I want it to still be at least somewhat recognizable people from the real world will show up, sometimes as expected and sometimes not (I’m a cheap mark for the “Nixon the car salesman” trope, forgive me) and the material culture won’t be excessively alien to the reader.

This isn’t the world outside your window. Not quite. But maybe it’s the world outside your window if you throw a few Instagram filters on before you look out.

SIDEBOX: A Lot Of History
Back when Truth, Justice and the UN Way was “just” meant to be a simple update to the GURPS IST setting for the 21st century, it was a pretty big topic. The decision to start revising things just made it worse. This is – to be frank – a full century in the history of the entire world, and in our history it was one of the more eventful centuries to boot. Adding metahuman and supernatural weirdness to the mix is only going to make things more complex.

Getting too granular on this project is a rabbit hole that I will likely never escape. So in the hopes of eventually finding my way back out of Narnia before somebody has to send the isekai rescue squad after me I’m trying to provide expectations here. I make no pretensions on depth on every possible subject; this will be largely a general overview of world history with an emphasis on how the existence of metahumans affects the flow of events. If a topic grabs my attention and demands a more in-depth look, that material will be added to the back of the book as an additional essay. This is a very make-it-up-as-I-go-along sort of project, so I can’t say with 100% certainty what will be available here. But I’m pretty confident the journey will be interesting!

SIDEBOX: On Gaming Material
GURPS IST was a sourcebook for GURPS 3rd Edition, so in addition to providing details on the world of the International Super Teams it had a fair amount of what we’d call “crunch.” That is, specific skills, advantages, disadvantages, templates and pre-generated NPC characters that could be used by a GM to mount an IST campaign.

I went back and forth on this a couple times, but have (at least for this iteration) decided against providing a large amount of specific GURPS game material in Truth, Justice and the UN Way. My reasoning is as such: GURPS IST is a third edition book, so everything in it would need to be updated to the current fourth edition to be playable. This has been already been done in the fourth edition version of GURPS Supers, and redoing that work is pushing the plagiarism line in a way that even I, the fanfiction writer, feel uncomfortable with.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that I eventually provide character sheets for some of the supers mentioned in this book, but for the most part Truth, Justice and the UN Way will remain a mostly fluff-based entity. On the bright side, this means it’s system-neutral, so if you want to run an IST campaign in Fate, Trinity, 5e (why?) or the niche system of your choice, you have my blessing to go ham.

SIDEBOX: On Sources
While there’s a lot of additional material presented in Truth, Justice and the UN Way, as well as a lot of “clever” references, in-jokes and other such nonsense, the primary source material remains GURPS IST and its subordinate books Supertemps, Super Scum, Supers Adventures and IST Kingston.

In addition, I’m using two specific extracanonical sources: IST In The 1990s was an article creator Bob Schroeck wrote with an eye towards getting it published in Pyramid Magazine somewhere around the year 2000ish, but was turned down by SJG editorial. He later posted it to his infodump of IST material on his personal site (see Publication History in the Introduction for links). Likewise, in 2014ish Bob began drafting an outline for a 25th anniversary edition of GURPS IST, reworked for the fourth edition and updating the setting to the then-current year of 2016. To this end he enlisted the aid of the members of his private message board (of which I am one) to help with brainstorming ideas. This also was turned down by SJG.

Material from IST In The 1990s and the outline of IST 25th Anniversary is being used in the creation of this document, though not necessarily in the same way as presented in either of those works. Like the original source material, stuff can and will be messed with as needed based on the criteria set by the Introduction. Caveat lector.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, nice. That was a great lunchtime read, Mal. The only criticism I have after a single readthrough would be that you have a few instances of "it's" where you mean "its". Everything else -- <chef's kiss>.