@cademy
Aberrant game, using the 2.1 ruleset and possibly some ideas I never managed to get to, like making other people spend your NP for you.
Background
In 2010, N-Day happened, bringing superhumans to a world that had until then been... not entirely prosaic, but certainly not this interesting. Heroes had come and gone, gracing novels and movies with their actions, remembered long after their retirement. But never before had there been such a massive effect on the fundamental operation of the world. The ones who came before were powerful, larger-than-life, more than capable of making great innovations or championing great causes, but never before had men and women been given the power to turn over the social order overnight. The Daredevils, Mesmerists, and Stalwarts were better than human-but still far closer than the next generation of man, the Nova,
The World of Adventure
The World of Adventure! is not entirely our world. In the 1920s to the 1940s, mad science and crazy inventions ran amok, heroes fought against villains on top of war-dirigibles using tesla rays. Nazi Germany had a successful genetic engineering program. In the 1980s, another unexplained explosion of men and women acting beyond mortal ken shaped many incidents in history. But in the thrust of things, everything happened largely the same. There were just more big names, and 80s action movies were more often than not based loosely on true stories.
Empyrea
A project to prevent the ever-decreasing ages of military-service novas, Empyrea is a pristine manmade wonder found in the Arctic ocean, a climate controlled citadel that shows that even disparate forces such as the Teragen and Project Utopia can find themselves cooperating, by virtue of the Teragen's Doctor Primoris and the head of Project Utopia, Margaret A. Mercer.
In 2025, the investors of the Aeon Society of Philanthropy (renamed from the Aeon Society of Gentlemen, renowned for their actions and their former heroes), chose to fund the most ambitious project yet known to man, finding funds from a half-dozen organizations that they had influence from, paying the most powerful novas who would listen to produce an everlasting symbol of cooperation, unity, and looking ever forward to the future. And so a new nation was born, one where novas could, in theory, learn to achieve their full potential without significant cost, and get away from the endless militarization of novas at ever-younger ages.
A roughly circular floating city kilometers in diameter, its surface dotted with towers stretching over 500 meters skywards, Empyrea is a testament to what can happen when groups with disparate goals find common ground. Climate controlled via thermoregulation elements woven throughout every building, using 3-D greenhouses and protein factories to generate food, and powered by hyperfusion reactors, Empyrea is utterly self-sufficient, allowing it to function with no interaction with any other world government. Any nova (or similar superhuman) is welcome, as long as they are not dangerously insane, gathering an endless procession of tutors, scholars, and guardians to maintain its idealized state and teach the next generation. As a city and philanthropy project, it has further picked up many non-nova refugees and asylees from various countries, men and women who have become its workforce for those things which can be done by baselines.
At its heart is the Newfield Academy of Posthuman Development, a school dedicated to teaching the next generation of novas to find their own path, and hopefully become a decent (post?)human being, no matter what their path is or where they go. Its defenders claim that they are reversing the trend of endless nationalistic jingoism and propaganda, the militarization of novas as young as 15, allowing immature young men and women with great talent to discover that talent at their own pace rather than be forced into servitude. Its critics see it as a training camp for a pan-national army that seeks to conquer all in their path. They aren't entirely wrong, as many of its graduates go into Project Utopia, supporting UN resolutions and peacekeeping, or find their way into the Teragen movement for the advancement and improvement of the nova condition and perhaps, in the end, a universal ascension to godhood.
The Shield
A powerful quantum force-field generated by a self-healing Device ringing the city, the Shield is a protective bubble which defends Empyrea from the harsh environment right outside. Inhabitants can lean right up against the field wearing nothing but a bikini, inches away from icebergs, and not feel even the slightest chill. The shield also protects from iceberg impact (although the reinforced structure of the city itself is rated for any reasonable or unreasonable impact), lost polar bears, wildlife attacks, and accidentally falling into the arctic water.
Powered by a self-sustaining quantum siphon and capable of repairing itself, the Shield is intended to last for an eternity.
The Spike
A massive magnetic launch system, the Spike is used for experiments involving acceleration tolerance, orbital launches for the resident full-size rocketry club, and commercial leasing by various corporate entities who find that Warpers and the similar facilities in America, the EU, China, and India are all overbooked. A kilometer tall, the Spike supports payload masses to geosynchronous orbit of up to 500 tons at normal acceleration settings.
Athletics Complex
As excessive and advanced as the rest of Empyrea, the athletics complex includes a mixed martial arts arena (with gravity that can be set from anywhere from -1 to 10 G and atmospheric conditions anywhere from 'vacuum' to 'Venusian'), a large reconfigurable field which has been used for various sports such as football, rugby, and giant robot dueling, and a state of the art medical facility with the best paraphysicians in the world. Included but not technically part of the complex is the track that runs the circumference of Empyrea, which does not have adjustable gravity conditions (although runners can check out inertial belts to do the same thing). A large subsurface gymnasium rounds out the complex, with basketball, raquetball, and tennis courts, a gymnastics setup (for nova-level gymnastics), and various exercise machines tuned up to nova standards.
Fabrication
Under the surface of Empyrea a cutting-edge manufactory with heavy automation and rapid prototyping capacity sits, including an extremely prototype nanoassembly system that is only allowed to run under the constant supervision of a nova with Magnetic Mastery or Cyberkinesis in the event the system goes into exponential self-replication. Although most often used by the Aeon Society, reserved by external corporate payers (and sometimes even government research agencies, when they get rare approval), the Newfield Academy gets some level of access to it. Being given minimally supervised manufactory access as a student is considered an extreme privilege, and even most of the engineering candidates at the Newfield Academy fail to be given this accolade.
Living Accomodations
Most of the living accomodations in Empyrea are built inside the skyscraper towers of the city.
The Newfield Academy
The brainchild of Margaret Mercer and Michael Dhonigal, the Newfield Academy is a place where novas can grow into their powers, an environment where learning can be done at as quick or as slow a pace as is necessary to maximize a pupil's efficient development. Due to the massively differing capabilities of novas, the classes are not segregated by age, and it is common to see mature men and women sitting in on the same classes as child prodigies. Offering courses of study in almost any field and first-rate resources, the Newfield Academy is nova-only but open admission besides that. No matter who you are, how old you are, what you can do, and when you erupted, you can go there and learn.
However, not every nova takes that offer. Some already have opportunity in their home countries, others have obligations that attending would not allow them to discharge, yet others have their own reasons for not choosing to attend.
As interesting and accelerated as the academic curricula offered is the on-campus life. The clubs of college or high school still exist, but amplified by the godlike power every member in them holds. The robotics club builds and trashes actual giant robots, the computer science club has been trying (without any success yet, but they swear they're getting close!) to create Strong AI, and after that embarassing incident in Greenhouse #4, nobody really wants to talk about the Botany Club. Similarly, even with godlike power, novas are still largely human, and cliques still exist. Of course, these extracurricular clubs and cliques are not funded by the school. Much of their income consists of deals with corporations and governments, handing down technology in exchange for royalty payments or lump sums, providing favors of various sorts in exchange for the money needed to, say, run a gene sequence off a supercomputer. This has led to many students becoming quite wealthy during the course of their schooling, although hoarding money for personal use is typically frowned upon and it is far more socially acceptable to either donate or become part of an interesting extracurricular club.
Characters
Characters are built as baselines using normal rules, but do not spend their NP during eruption the same way. Instead, the player outlines an eruption and something suggestive of a powerset, allowing another player to spend 35 NP on their behalf to achieve this. The player then gets 10 NP to spend on filling gaps in this powerset as they desire. Finally, a player has 5 NP, which they may spend at any time on new powers or M-Atts, representing further refinement of their paradigm.
A character who takes Taint at character generation splits that NP 2/1, so for each point of taint the player doing your eruption spends 2 NP for you, and you get 1 NP to fill things out. Characters may not start with more than 4 Taint total. This means that Quantum 5 characters may not take more than 3 points of Taint.
Summary: You make a baseline and an eruption, someone else spends 35 NP for you, you get to spend 10 more NP to flesh things out.
New Concepts
Controlled Eruption
With the assistance of Doctor Michael Dhonigal (the Teragen claim that the opposite was true, that he merely needed their resources to finish putting together his theory), Triton Medical has isolated several potential genetic markers for nova latency, allowing the reliable prediction, if not the engineering, of eruptions. This knowledge has spread throughout the world, with parents seeking to have their children tested for the gene. Potential candidates are almost always given an invitation to Empyrea, so that their eruption can be achieved in a relatively safe, controlled environment.
Even if it goes wrong, with the sheer weight of novas on the city and its durability, a 'bad' eruption can be contained and the nova can be put through rehabilitation.
Psions
A joint NATO-Russia project to deal with the potential threat increase created by several countries suddenly gaining tens of thousands of demigods almost literally overnight, the Psion project (Codename: WINTERGREEN) was based off of KGB and CIA research into psychic powers that had been ongoing through the 1960s to 1980s on "Inspired" individuals. This technology has born fruit, allowing the extremely slow conversion of soldiers into Psions. Psions are superhumanly durable due to the improvements made by the Prometheus Process and capable of channeling superficially similar powers to novas-although the source of their energies is different. Resistant to quantum powers, Psions have made the best strategic counterpoint to the proliferation of Middle Eastern, African, and Asian novas.
Rarer than these fixed-effect supersoldiers are Psiads, naturally occurring psions. A few Psiads have made it into Empyrea, but the vast majority stay in their home nation and do their own thing, as it is not entirely comfortable to be close to so much quantum for either party, as psiads seem like holes in a nova's quantum awareness, and vice versa for novas to a psiad's noetic senses.