You (probably) wouldn't be novas, and some people will absolutely regard you as villains. Given the celebrity-culture that clings to Novas, you'd be about as welcome as the GRU or KGB. The point being that the Novas (and the corporate interests that back them) have - rather like in The Boys - a firm grip on the media. And let's face it - there's a lot you can do if you have super-heroic-levels of charisma and manipulation.
The canonical way that the Directive was handled in Aberrant was more as a foil than as a serious threat. Because it takes a great deal of effort, time, preparation, skill, and tech for baselines to seriously harm novas!
The factions:
Project Utopia is the acceptable face of nova-kind. They have the monopoly on superheroics. Sure, there are non-aligned novas that are strictly pay-for-play (mercenaries, scientists, wrestlers (yes, wrestlers. Extreme Sports became significantly more extreme)), but they're small-beer. They're home of
Team Tomorrow (think Avengers / X-Men / whatever cool-sounding name other groups have), but also the shadowy
Proteus (without shadow, there can be no light).
The
Teragen are every baseline's worst nightmare. To them, we're obsolete; our concerns and laws are as far beneath them as bovine society is beneath ours. At the time the game'll take place there aren't that many of them but that'll change.
And so we come to the
Directive. Depending on perspective, you might think of them as SHIELD, UNIT, the Gestapo, the CIA, or the dying gasp of a dinosaur. Regardless, you're here to protect baseline humans from novas. Just because they wear spandex in Utopian colours doesn't mean that they can't be wolves in sheep's clothing.
Now - how is this different from The Boys? At the start at least, the Directive isn't really up to hunting and killing Novas in the same way that you might think about killing a supe. Rather, they're more like the FBI spying on Martin Luther King. Utopia knows that they exist, and has to tolerate them for the time being. As the story progresses, will you find evidence of shadowy Nova criminality? Is Caestus Pax (Aberrant Superman) really as good as he makes out? Why is there a shadowy group of high-profile Novas meeting on a certain yacht off the coast of France? What happened to "Slider"?
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In my experience, a lot of games start with the idea "this won't be combat-heavy" and the first encounter ends up being killing rats in a basement. In this case, the rats can punch you hard enough to turn your skeleton to dust! Yay!
But the aim is to tell a shades-of-grey / age-of-steel superheroic story about the underdogs - about the bystanders and the collateral damage.
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