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I am interested in trying out a Cypher System superpower game. This will use the Cypher System corebook with options from the Strange, Numenera as well as some 3rd party resources. Here is the premise of the game.
The Goldwright meteor was heading towards the earth and the United States. The Meteor was over twice the size of the one that hit Tunguska. With the impact expected to cause massive widespread damage, earthquakes and other deadly fallout, America got approval locally and abroad to stop its descent. Using an experimental deep-space reaching nuclear warhead, the Meteor was blasted before it reached earth's atmosphere. The plan was apparently a success as the meteor was blasted into much smaller pieces.
While the remains of the meteor caused only minimal damage as most of the fragments burned up in the atmosphere there was an unusual element inside the meteor that had golden glow as it fell from the sky. This had a strange reaction to a small segment of the population who were outdoors during the Meteor Fall. For those rare individuals, extraordinary abilities began to manifest.
For one small city in midwestern Canada an unusual number of talents have awoken. As one of the first talents to awaken in the world what will you do with the gift or curse of power?
Proposed mechanics
I am thinking of making all the PC's people who attend the same high school. They will be genetically related in some way, from siblings to cousins or distant family relations somewhere in the past, as only those with specific genes are empowered by the meteor fall.
I intend to balance out the types, so that everyone gets the same number of abilities when they tier up. I find it unfair that Explorers get much more abilities than every other type while Adepts get so few. This is especially true as I intend to use Flavors to open up more options.
Rather than the traditional type names, your characters can fall into one of four categories below:
Powerhouse (Warrior): These talents typically manifest their talents through extraordinary feats of physical prowess.
Channeler (Adept): These talents tend to focus more purely on esoteric powers that directly manipulate the world around them.
Beguiler (Speaker): These talents specialize on powers that can inspire, frighten, manipulate or bend the wills of others.
Wildcard (Explorer): These talents tend to thrive on diversity, with a mix of different skills rather than direct specialization.
Further "Multiclassing" will be allowed if your character chooses to take a "Flavor". Thus you could be a Magic Powerhouse, a Stealthy Adept, A Knowledgeable Speaker and the like. Only one Flavor can be chosen for your character however and taking abilities from a Flavor use up ability slots that might have been used for type abilities.
As your characters will be superhuman, you will in the course of the game gain "Power Shifts" that will give you further extraordinary enhancements to skills, powers and/or physical aptitude. You start with one power shift and gain an additional one per tier of advancement. While talents will be powerful, they will not start out with powers on par with Marvel/DC superheroes but may well get to that level as time passes.
Themes
This is a game that supports the ramifications of emerging superpowers in a world thought to not have any. Still your characters will more likely deal with mundane conflicts as only a small number of people are affected by the Meteor Fall. That does not mean won't cross paths with another talent in game in fact such clashes will be inevitable. As for how these new powers affect the world at large this will happen in the background during play and those events may well have a bearing on your character and his/her life.
So does this concept interest some potential players?
I love superhero games, but other than the strange I'm not familiar with the cypher system.
As far as power sets go, I would want to do either teleport or superspeed.
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There is a Super-Speed Focus called "Moves like the wind" that grants you extraordinary movement. Combined with power shifts and/or type abilities you can go pretty darn fast. The power does not get as ridiculous as the Flash though (no running so fast you'll break the time barrier). At best you'll be on par with Quicksliver at higher tiers in terms of speed (and a lot of power shift investment).
Teleportation on the other hand tends to fall into some higher-level powers. I might retool some abilities to work somewhat like teleportation as a flavor thing though.