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I posted this on rpg.net
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?660541-Base-Raiders-Superheroic-Dungeoneering-another-worthy-looking-Kickstarter/I'm using Strange FATE for superpowers and a few other things. In general, characters start out fairly weak - normal people with one or two superpowers and not many highly trained skills. Right now, they start with 20 skill points. For every adventure they complete and base they raid, they gain resources they can use to personally improve their character or put towards an important goal of theirs.
The advancement system is similar to Strange except characters can change their powers during gameplay - if a PC find a super soldier drug, he can inject himself with it. However, this isn't free. He will have to pay for that new power in one way or another. The GM looks at the new power and its cost - say it would cost 10 skill points. The PC is due for 1 new skill point at the end of the adventure, so he can apply that now. That leaves 9 points. The GM can remove points from his existing powers, as the super soldier drug wrecks havoc with his mind and body, so his current power, telepathy, becomes less effective or stops working entirely. Let's say he loses 6 points from his telepathy skill - from trappings, rating or an invulnerability or the whole thing. It might even be worse, because he didn't test it to see how it would interact with his existing powers - maybe he only gets 3 points instead of 6 and loses the power entirely. The remaining points can be bought off with stress and consequences but at a bad ratio - in this case, he loses 9 mental stress so he takes a grievous consequence to avoid being taken out, Kill or be Killed! He snaps and becomes a berserker, unable to tell friend from foe.
Technically, he's ahead in the bargain, effectively gaining 3 new skill points, while stress and consequences can be healed, but the important thing to remember is the player did not decide any of this - the GM determined the effects of the drug. Furthermore, the 3 new skill points will eventually have to be permanently paid for - advancements from adventuring, new drawbacks, and so forth. A character that has an imbalance of power will have to pay for it sooner or later - either he loses one of his powers or he permanently loses points off his stress track or something else happens. Characters might die if their power imbalance is too high. This allows an interesting dilemma - the players could find a power source that grants a high tier power - far beyond their means - however the power imbalance they would suffer means they would almost surely die in a short period of time because there was no way to bleed it off effectively.
Player characters can partially mitigate and control how new powers will affect them if they take the time and effort to do so in between adventures. However, a character loses most of that control if they try to gain new powers in the middle of an adventure. On the other hand, they gain the advantage of partially rewriting their character during the adventure. The telepath in the above example decided to inject himself with the super soldier drug because he was being chased by the monstrous inhabitants of the base and needed the strength and speed to survive the fight. He destroys them with his new found strength but turns on his allies when he rejoins them. When the adventure ends, he removes the consequence and changes an aspect to reflect the mental trauma he suffered while he was in a berserk state.
Had the telepath kept the drug and asked his super-scientist friend to look into how it would affect him, the player would have had some control over how he paid for the new power. Perhaps he could switched powers entirely or he could have kept most of one power and a little of the other or he could have paid off some with new drawbacks. The important thing is he would have known what would happen before he tried it and it was more efficient than random injection. The net result is the character gains +2 or +3 skill points instead of +1. However, this takes time and skill to pull off. Only scientists or powerful mystics can effectively research how powers interact with each other. Even item based powers follow these rules for the sake of balance.
A player can boost their personal power, advancing up through the tiers, but by doing this, they give up the chance to cash in on the powers they find. If they sell or trade their loot, they can advance goals that can change the world. The goals system will be similar to Legacy and Dilemma aspects, but can be applied - for example, a character could find a cure for cancer in a base, which is at first a personal aspect. She can cure cancer on a single person by making a declaration and spending a Fate point. Later on, she finds some super-science gear, which lets her mass-produce the cure, so her home city gains Cancer-free as an aspect. Finally, she raids a few more bases and gets enough resources (selling and trading the magical items for scientific data etc.) to develop a worldwide cure for cancer.
Players can alternate between improving themselves or advancing their personal goals as they see fit.
The last system, Base Creation, is really more of an adventure/encounter creation system - You start with one element of the base and then build encounters by answering questions about the base. The elements are things like the base's location, its history, its treasures, its current inhabitants, and so forth. The trick is, the players tell you what some of these elements are - anywhere from half to a minimum of one element. So for example, the players want to travel. They tell you they want to find a base in Rio De Janeiro. That's their current goal.
So I have a location - Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. This creates one encounter - Getting to Rio and starting the search. I'll say it's hidden under an apartment complex there. Of course, as base raiders, the players have to travel incognito and then they'll want to set up a safe house and maybe contact local base raiders for info.
Why is it there? That's another element: The man who built it needed to be near lots of people. He built the base under the complex but had tunnels leading throughout the city. Perhaps this is how the players find it - rumors of tunnels in the city that people enter and never return. This mystery is another encounter. You don't tell them this though. You just say you'll decide why it's in Rio.
Now you've established one element on your own, there are a few different ways to go about the rest of the process. You can develop the rest of the base on your own or you can ask the players for additional elements. In this case, the players just want two more elements: the base should have an artistic purpose to it and it should have magical treasure in it.
To that, you add two final elements: the base creates magical hazards around the city and it currently houses mutated squatters.
You do this until you have enough elements to finish out the base. Every element should be an encounter for the players - so think of how many encounters you want the adventure to be. The amount of encounters will determine how much treasure the players can find. You can also link
encounters for additional challenge.
You have 6 elements to date: location, the reason for its location, artistic purpose, magical treasure, magical hazards, mutated squatters
From that, I decide the base was built by a magical artist who used human emotions as paint. He stole emotions from the people of Rio and created great masterpieces with it. Since the artist disappeared, the paint has leaked out, causing vortexes of power that drive normal people insane. The vortexes are common in the tunnels leading to the base. The paint has transformed some into monstrous psychic vampires that drain the emotions out of their victims. These monsters live in the tunnels around the base. Some of the paint is still there, along with a grimoire that details how to create the paint. The paint allows a skilled artist to control the emotions of anyone around him.
So those are the core elements of the base. The players do not have to go through every encounter - part of the purpose of a dungeon crawl is a nonlinear adventure so players that overcome one encounter can be rewarded with bypassing another one. If they dispel the vortex, they can get around the monstrous vampires for example.
