Danger Zones: When the Mundane Goes Weird

A lot of our Danger Zones offerings have been the kinds of locations you expect for superhero slugfests: the tottering Bridge , open Streets , the iconic Bank for robberies, and Amusement Parks—both operating and abandoned—but there are a few offerings that don’t immediately spring to mind when you decide to plot of thrilling, comic-book action. A Fast Food Restaurant doesn’t seem like the best place to start hurling fireballs, and this week’s offering—the Convention Center—seems like a better place to buy comic books than reproduce their fight scenes.

But superhero adventures aren’t all about the expected. They’re about characters and where they get caught with their pants down. And superheroes spend as much time shoving burgers in their face or waiting to meet their favorite Star Battles actors as they do banking—especially in the 21^st century. Danger Zones is about giving you interesting locations, not just expected ones. The convention center and the restaurant are both great locations for characters to be caught in their secret identities when things go south. But how do things go south in such mundane locations? Here are 20 random seeds for trouble breaking out when things seem calm:

A young superbeing’s powers manifest out of control.
A supervillain is there in their civilian guise and can’t stand a mild insult.
An AEGIS courier stops by and their magical artifact or alien tech goes haywire.
A criminal running from the authorities barricades themselves inside and takes hostages.
A wannabe superhero arrives to show off.
A fire or other disaster breaks out.
One of the heroes starts hearing a cry for help no one else can hear.
An accident disturbs a forgotten spirit, who starts causing trouble.
A mundane crime takes place and one or more heroes is blamed.
The heroes get caught in a time loop.
A truck careens out of control, spilling strange fluids into the scene.
The heroes run into a family member and discover they’re dating one of their supervillains.
An unexpected event shrinks the heroes to a half-inch in size.
A hero’s powers start activating at random.
An internet prankster sets someone up for laughs and things spin out of control.
A time traveler arrives and tries to make contact with a hero in their civilian identity.
A magical being starts granting the wishes of random bystanders.
A completely different superhero’s fight crashes into the scene as their villain starts gaining the upper hand.
A villain believes they have deduced the hero’s identity and threatens them in their secret identity to prove their theory.
Everyone else in the scene is actually a robot doppelganger.