Monday Mashup #22: The Lost Boys

For our pleasantly palindromic mashup number 22, we’ll keep on plumbing the depths (or heights) of the 80s with The Lost Boys, the second best vampire movie of 1987. (The best one will no doubt turn up in this meme at a later date.)

The setup is nice and simple; a normal family moves someplace and finds an evil both ancient and tempting. There’s not a lot of vampiric angst, although there’s a smidgen of romantic angst, but really it’s an action flick with fangs. Trivia du jour: that railway trestle is something like six feet or so above the earth. Camera angles can work marvels.

On with the mashup.

I’m going to recast this one in a superhero context. The system actually doesn’t particularly matter, so I’ll pretend I’m using Hero for the sake of argument.

The PCs are teen heros, each affiliated with a grownup hero. Think Teen Titans and JLA as an example — whether the teen and the adult share an origin, or the adult trained the teen, or whatever, there’s some sort of linkage there. You could actually have one or two PCs who weren’t affiliated, as long as the majority of the team is somehow connected to the grownups. The grownups ride herd on the kids, with a fairly restrictive approach. It sucks to be young.

The adult team just moved its headquarters to Boston, because the legendary Boston Tea Party was just decimated by a world-threatening alien invasion in the Antarctic — something to do with nanotech. This leaves Boston kind of vulnerable, and the adult team agreed to spend a year there. The teens have to move with them, because they aren’t allowed to be superheroic without supervision. It sucks to be young.

One of the surviving members of the Tea Party brought back a nanotech infection with him. It’s a subtle thing that vastly boosts (most) superhuman powers while removing inhibitions. It can also give superpowers to normal people. He’s carefully spreading it, while trying to keep the adult team from noticing. His first targets was a local street gang with a mildly superhuman leader. They’re now having an utter blast.

The teens, of course, find out; the adults, of course, don’t take them seriously. The temptation is the offer of infection — because that’s freedom to do what they want, without adult interference. Probably you’d want to run the campaign a while before kicking this plot off, to drive home how annoying the adult team is.