Found something stupid for the capeshit thread, but let me get on a vaguely related tangent here:
The Autism of Mutants & Masterminds
You may or may not have already heard of Green Ronin's capeshit system Mutants & Masterminds. An evolution of their True20 system, it was one of the darlings of the first wave of OGL products. Like its predecessor True20, it's a bit of an oddity in the realm if D&D derivatives in that it
only uses d20 rolls. Damage and similar effects have generally fixed values, and the defender has to Save vs Not Getting Fucked.
The most recent 3rd edition always had a bit of a rough start, incremental improvements notwithstanding. It strangely kept some ambiguities from 2nd edition which
that edition already had to clarify, and its default setting shifted focus on a new city which few people seemed to really care. Probably didn't help that the accompanying Adventure Path for the setting took forever for the next chapter, which kinda sucks since there wasn't really info of a specific part of the city until the Adventure Path bothered to cover it.
Fortunately the edition started with an actual bang in the form of an offical license for DC shit. A shame they lost that license long ago, but don't worry, they're about to repeat this with Valiant Comics, if you care about shit like this.
Then there was some drama in their official forums, mostly because the modders became woker and more totalitarian, turning a dumb argument between two longtime forum members into a dumpster fire that ultimately led to the whole forum being shut down. All because some modder perma-banned a user before she had time to apologize
Over 5 years later they finally bothered to update the main spotlight of their default setting - Freedom City - to 3rd edition.
Unfortunately during this time Green Ronin had fully succumbed to the woke, so things get a bit weird.
Now, admittedly,
some changes were just ported over from that 2nd edition sourcebook which - among other things - detailed a future version of Freedom City.
Some of their
new ideas however including turning quite a few B- and C-list with a gadget- or generic-superpower-gimmick into some kind of supernatural critter. Apparently there's some metaplot reason for this, but how many evil ghost villains do you
really need in your capeshit setting?
Then there's the big one: the new Lady Liberty.
Lady Liberty is basically a cross between the DC heroes Green Lantern and Uncle Sam. Essentially a succession of legacy heroines powered by truth, justice and the American way. Any time the current Lady croaks or retires, another one is chosen.
This is Current Year, however, so the most recent Lady Liberty to be chosen is a
Mexican dreamer troon - except I don't think the artist really got the memo regarding that latter part, since "she" is drawn like any other (de-sexualized) female.
Also why does "she" dress like a patriotic Kamala Khan? This has got to be islamophobic in some way
Aside from working on rendition of their rules for Valiant Comics, they're mostly keeping M&M on life support with mini-supplements like
this.
>A small guide for running adventures centered around a parade
>Of course it has their Budget Justice League front and center during a Pride Parade (the shirtless guy is Literally Gay Flash, btw)
>Of course the list of potential adventure seeds include "Safe Independence Day fron nationalist scum" or "Protect the Pride Parade from a literal Ku Klux Klan Ghost"