In creating a setting for a superhero RPG, one of the first steps is to think about how super-powered beings affect the world. Some comic continuities choose to alter history greatly. For example, Watchmen provides a world where Richard Nixon has successfully run for five terms as president after the presence of superheroes allowed America to win the Viet Nam War. Other settings assume that history happened as recorded, but with superheroes somewhere in the background. Most mainstream comics are representative of this philosophy.

Below is a sample history I created for a game of Mutants & Masterminds I ran some years back. This history takes something of a mix of the two philosophies described above. On the one hand, history hasn’t deviated greatly from the real world. On the other hand, many historical events happened because of superheroes – they helped captured Al Capone, inadvertently led to the Kennedy assassination, and so on. This is obviously just one example of a fictional continuity, and can easily be changed to fit many settings. Superheroes and villains are described in the history, but the details on their background and personality are vague, allowing GMs to tweak them to fit their campaign preferences.

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