Trenchcoat Brigade
Our ookiest, spookiest superteam is the Trenchcoat Brigade. Based in Metropolis, these stealthy avengers take their unit name from an old DC Vertigo limited series. The team doesn’t really have much structure to it: members meet once every couple of weeks, with the duty of arranging a meeting place rotating among the members. Sometimes one member will present a problem to his cohorts for assistance; other times, a secretive organization known only as ‘Safeguard’ drops a situation into the Trenchoat Brigade’s care.
Most often, however, they come together with separate bits of information from their unique investigations, only to have many threads link into one source of villainy.
Along with trenchcoats and a slightly grittier approach to the whole “Masked Avenger” calling, each member tends to have a home area where he patrols when he’s not actively working on a team project — naturally, crime-ridden areas full of poverty and despair. The Shadow calls Suicide Slum his turf, and works hard every night to keep pace with rampant predation. Litmus, guardian of Little Moscow, searches the streets and the newspapers for any hint of Russian Mafia incursion. Agent Chameleon’s beat is not a physical place, so much as it is the eddies and backwaters of the support structure for the international intelligence community; it is through his careful analysis that Safeguard gained access to the burgeoning “caped crusader society”, and he analyzes it precisely by becoming one with it.
In addition to being the most likely team to fight organized crime, or deal with occult threats, the Trenchcoat Brigade is the most likely team to face mentalists or the dangerously deranged. Their gear tends to be esoteric, or MacGuyvered cheap stuff; they tend to have low Wealth, but they’ve put some serious effort into their Thief (Stealth) subskill.
They’re also the most fun team, bar none, to hand physical “clues” to figure out. I can’t tell you how many proto-plots I’ve discarded because the chance of a decent puzzle or physical clue was too low.
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