As I’ve written elsewhere, Mundus Novit can be used for a lot of different styles of play. I mentioned my Osiris concept, which is basically a riff on the comic Planetary. That’s pretty much a super-hero concept, even though it is one without colourful costumes.
I had an idea for another super-hero game set in Mundus Novit, but this one would be with supers in costume. However, the player characters would not be those supers. The PCs would be a team assigned to remove supers whenever they got out of line.
And they get out of line a lot.
This campaign was also based on a comic, this time The Boys, written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Darick Robertson. The PCs would be part of a government (or possibly private, like Osiris) organization that keeps watch on the supers. In this setting, supers (or “masks”) start showing up and being deputized to work alongside municipal police departments. This is a move by certain corporations who sponsor the supers–and, it turns out, give ‘donations’ to the police forces who allow their sponsored supers to operate. Things get really cosy, and the municipalities, including some of the bigger ones, start to turn a blind eye to some questionable corporate actions.
These corporate shenanigans–including attempts to silence competition and opposition, as well as human experimentation–lead to the activation of the Crew (or a group with a more inspiring team name). The PCs are assigned to mess up those supers who are covering for the corporation, or who are involved in criminality themselves.
The PCs would learn, during the campaign, that someone has cracked the Oberon virus. Someone is now tailoring it specifically to order. The corporations are buying this and creating their own purpose-built supers. The PCs may be the same, they may be have higher stages of the Oberon effect than the supers they face, and they may be random or designed. The campaign was to be based on the discovery of this new aspect of Oberon, and to find out who had cracked its code.
I’ve got a short piece of fiction for this setting, but its language is even stronger than what we’ve been presenting with Dark Horizons, so if you want to read it, it’s available here. I’m warning you, the attitude and language may offend, so don’t be complaining if you read it.
The Crew is much darker, much dirtier, and much more violent than Osiris. Thing is, they could inhabit the same world. It’s a stretch, but these guys might even inhabit the world of Dark Horizons as well. The idea of the campaign was that the supers would start to appear late in the secret history, outside of what is presented in the sourcebook.
In Dark Horizons, after the mission in Kathmandu, Tangible Stream or the Vault might be pulled into the campaign as the supers begin to appear. Maybe only one or two supers or teams are active, but already there are concerns. Supers in colourful costumes kind of destroys the gritty, black-ops feel I’m going for with Dark Horizons, but I think it could still work. A bit of a shift in gears, but totally doable.
As for Osiris, it has its own story arc that leads to a discovery, and tacking on the Crew’s campaign narrative would be pretty easy. But that revelation needs to wait until the Osiris Files actually come out.
I think, for this game, I would use Mutant & Masterminds 2E. It just seems fitting when one has super-heroes, whatever their source. However, once the Mundus Novit True20 supplement comes out, I would suggest it instead. It is actually planned to address exactly this need–something that balances True20 and superheroics–though the method I use may not be acceptable to some.
That method? Again, sorry but you’ll have to wait and see.