Avengers: Cold War II
There's no single media version of the Avengers being used for this particular story and players are encouraged to bring in any interesting changes or forgotten stories they think might add to a character.
The timeline is contemporary, though the setting isn't exactly like out own. In the 20th century Humanity experienced technological and scientific advances unparalleled by any previous era, attended by maelstroms of atrocity in two World Wars and the Iron Curtain. The 50s, 60s, 70, and 80's saw the X-Baby Boom, the first recorded cases of Homo sapiens mutatis births. Strange, deformed children were born for a long of reasons in a world where human life remained severely devalued. It wasn't until they began to grow up, showing that the X-Babies had numbered in the thousands, not a few dozen. Children born with powers that made the gods of their parents paltry in comparison.
Human enhancement testing had started well before WWII, had hit its stride during those wondrous years and kept on ploughing into the Cold War. On both sides of the Iron Curtain there were clever, cunning men pouring vast resources into the monitoring, analysis and control of such metahumans. Captured mutants could be repurposed or used as raw materials to develop new bioweapons.
The Avengers came to prominence when they repelled an invasion by a Draugr strike force, having finally found the long lost homeworld of their Asgardian foes. As the world was still reeling from the initial assault an alliance of superhumans launched an assault on the invaders. The defensive action led to a violent assault on the Draugr fleet in deep space. Earth went from an unnoticed backwater to a place of great interest across space. The catastrophic losses suffered by the first forces to attack Earth gave the Avengers their name, not that reputation alone would ever be enough to save the world.
In the five years since their formation, the Avengers have gone from being a loose alliance of SHIELD operatives, a genius inventor, a rogue monster and a god to being the world's primary defence against superhuman threats. After the SHIELD Civil War, when the entire structure was infiltrated by agents of HYDRA, it was reformed and integrated with the Avengers, overseen by UN appointees and several of the Avengers.
The story follows the Avengers expanding and recruiting to bolster their numbers as Earth becomes more involved in extraterrestrial affairs. Not everyone on Earth is keen to see a band of superhumans operating with little or no political oversight and others still see them as a barrier to mankind's true progress. Power corrupts and few have as much power to be coveted as the Avengers and SHIELD.
This message was last edited by the user at 11:53, Sun 26 Feb 2017.
