This is another image from The Future heroes Role-Playing Game. It shows a dystopian future city, rust colored and dilapidated. Through the canyons of the future city swings Red Spider, a superhero with powers connected to projecting rays of web like matter from the palms of her hands.
I’m just noticing that a lot of the images I’ve been doing are of graceful superheroes. The very next one will have to be some huge brute with big muscles and bad skin, such as The Hulk, Ben Grim, or one of the other tanks that no superhero team seems to be complete without.
As with most superheroes from the Future Heroes setting, she does not wear a mask. Superpowers are much more accepted in the extreme future setting of the game, and the authorities are falling over themselves to recruit people with superpowers.
In such a universe the superhero sees little need to hide their identity.
Wikipedia gives some common motivations for a character to choose to have a secret identity, which include:
Allowing the character to live a “normal life” when not fighting crime.
Preventing the hero’s enemies from seeking revenge on others the hero may care about.
Giving the hero an advantage in crime fighting (e.g. Batman or The Shadow striking fear into criminals).
Gaining timely information on incidents as they happen, often through their occupation or that of their associates (e.g. a reporter or a newscaster would likely be more informed about incidents that a hero might be able to help with).
Aliens, upon coming to Earth, may choose to set up one or more secret identities as a learning tool. By pretending to be humans, they can explore the different roles and lives that a regular human is expected to have in his/her life and using their deeper understanding of human condition to help others.
None of these really seem to hold anymore in the setting of the far future, although if the superhero gets sent into the past, there would be some incentive to assume a secret identity.
