Alicornutopia

Kappa wrote:Heroes sounds fun too, but I never got past season two... is there ever anything more to it than Generic Superpower Setting?

Consider yourself a lucky person and never try to change that.

...for what I remember... no, pretty Generic, which isn't necessarily bad, it could be interesting to see Our Heroes in such setting, but you could just as easily as take inspiration on other shows, like The 4400, and not lose anything and gain more.

Powers come with no safeties.
Exploding radioactive-man and cheerleader-wolverine are my first visual memories. Been a while since I watched it.
Previous generation of capes have a secret conspiracy.
Cylar collects powers by serial killing.
Kind of slow paced for my taste.

Check out Alphas if you like Heroes. Some cool powers there.

How about Misfits for Effulgence?

If you interpret Heroes a certain way there are godlike forces of "Destiny" and "Evolution" (and also "Bad Writing") that seem to control powers and drive things, but it requires a lot of reading in (the voiceovers at the start of each episode can be rather suggestive) It never quite gets as good as S1 again; S2 is meh, S3 is worse, and S4 recovers to better-than-S2 levels. There is an annoying tendency for powerful female characters to get fridged too, but they generally stick around for a Season or so doing cool stuff.

Heroes also has a lot of time travel that gets casually thrown about, which is handled really badly in the middle seasons and also could cause problems in Effulgence if not kept off in a corner. Comparing it to Worm, the most similar Effulgence setting, it has an active and fairly rigorous Masquerade, the main participants are thinner on the ground, the scale of the powers is more variable, powers are repeated sort of frequently but can be developed in independent directions, and as a whole the setting is less malicious even if the stakes are about as high. Being abducted by the Haitian and having her memories erased would be likely to drive a Bell totally nuts if she found out about it, and there are a lot of other Bell-Nightmare-fodder mind-affecting powers too.

If we did Heroes, I would pretty much be inclined to nix the time travel completely (but keep all relevant powers of prophecy, like Isaac - were there others like him?), and have time pausing be it as far as time-control powers went.

Angela Petrelli is another prophet by canon (dreams, poorly controlled), though if you watch the episodes closely she seems to have some other really subtle Master-like power as well for influencing people (may be bad writing). Also Usutu (S3) has another copy of Issac's power.

Hiro Nakamura is the only Time Traveler, but Time Travel is really important for his stories, and his interactions with Adam, who was born about 400 years ago and is immortal. Some substantial reworking would have to take place for basically anything involving Hiro that got kept.

Peter Petrelli copies Time Travel and tends to visit the future and find things out once a Season, but it isn't central to his arc logic the same way it is for Hiro.

I only vaguely remember the immortal dude, when did he show up?

Season Two. Same power as the cheerleader, if you want to be technical about it. (All the Wolverines!)

Aha, right. Well, if we stuck to the Season 1 arc it wouldn't be a problem, then. Edit: The Steven template would make an amazing Sylar...

In S1 Hiro's Charlie romance plot makes no sense without Time Travel either, watch out for that. Also, Hiro and Peter got warnings from going to the Future that season I think, but that could be folded into precogs.

Oh geez Steven totally would. Or Addy, now that I think about it. (Do you normally slot people in by personality or history or magic or what? I mean... I don't see a Wolverine fitting into the life of a cheerleader all that well xD)

Effulgence has historically not seemed to care much for incorporating Every Single Plotline in a world (hi Buffyverse) so I don't think the Charlie romance plot would be much of an issue to ditch?