A lot of supers campaigns are set in urban environments at least loosely based on our real world, and one oft-overlooked way to make your setting come alive is to do a bit of research in your campaign city's actual history. This is especially true if your game is set in a time period other than the modern day, or if you run a story arc involving time travel or alternate timelines. Any city will be a very different place depending on whether it's the Golden, Silver, Bronze or Iron Age, and none of them look identical to the 2020s.
As an example of what I'm talking about, my current campaign is largely set in Albany, New York, which is more or less the nearest "big" city for most of my players. Albany is the capitol of New York state (a fact that eludes many people due to the overwhelming prominence of New York City) and is quite small, with a population barely above 100,000 people, and forms a third of the "Tri-City" area - the other two cities being Schenectady and Troy with a number of smaller polities surrounding and separating them.
A grand metropolitan area it ain't, but its status as state capitol means it has a disproportionate number of government offices and businesses serving them. The city's population swells by a significant amount (I've seen claims it doubles) during the daytime when the state workers are in town, shrinking again when they aren't. That quirk alone can easily effect games. A super-fight taking place at night will endanger far fewer people than during the day, the morning and afternoon rush hours see much heavier traffic (although still nothing to compare to a really big city like NYC or LA), and any state holiday makes the whole city feel kind of empty. There's also loads of sensitive records for criminals to steal or destroy and politicians to kidnap.
But that's the modern day, and this is about history. All cities change over time, both in terms of demographics and physical structure. There are obvious things (eg NYC doesn't have the Twin Towers past 9/11/2001) and less obvious ones (those same towers weren't finished until 1973, and construction started five years before that) and nothing is really permanent in a living city. Almost every city in the US experienced tremendous demographic changes following WW2, generally growing in population through migration and births, and with different ethnic groups shifting between neighborhoods, mostly due to economic changes and (often) discriminatory government policies. All of these elements can be mined for story ideas, or just to add some verisimilitude to your game.
Going back to my example, Albany's most prominent (some would say only, with good justification) landmark is the Empire State Plaza. The plaza is a sprawling showpiece of white marble with artificial ponds, abstract sculptures and the bizarrely shaped theatre known as the Egg. The place is capped by the blocky state museum (also in white marble) and the much older state capitol building, a badly decaying architectural confection dating back to the 1880s. All of these are literally towered over by a quintet of intimidatingly huge state office buildings that look like something you'd expect out of Nazi or Soviet state-aggrandizing construction styles. There's also an enormous underground complex beneath the Plaza, occupying more volume than the Empire State Building and including a convention center, a food court, parking garages, and all manner of storage.
The whole place looks absurdly out of place compared to the rest of the city, where few building outside of the small downtown area exceed four stories in height and the ones that do are tower housing blocks. It's a remarkable display of how much power governor Rockefeller, mayor Corning and their political machine held back then, and is very much a memorial to their vanity and corruption.
The Plaza was built by seizing and destroying an entire low-income residential neighborhood in 1965, summarily evicting the residents who scattered to other neighborhoods or left the city entirely. Construction was ongoing until 1978, causing over a decade of traffic snarls, noise pollution and general unpleasantness. Games set prior to the Plaza would find it replaced with a residential district much like the rest of the city, with a population featuring a slightly higher percentage of African-American and Italian-American residents than most neighborhoods. Approaching the mid-Sixties there would have been some protests against the upcoming demolition and an increasing number of empty houses and closed small businesses.
There are obviously a lot of things you do with the Plaza and its history in a supers game. It makes a good stage for a brawl between supers and an obvious target for villains. Supers active in the Sixties might oppose it being built at all, or at least try to make forced displacement easier on the citizenry. The city will never lack for a construction zone to fight in between 1965 and 1973, and who knows who or what may be buried in the foundations of the place?
And that's just one feature from one city. Odds are that whatever urban area you're using for a game has something equally interesting hiding in its past. If you're using a wholly fictional city (as the SCRPG's default setting does) you can still benefit from real-world history by flat out stealing some elements from actual cities and transplanting them to Rook City or Gotham or wherever. You can also take cues from real history to flesh out a purely fictional city's past - there are some constants like the demographic shifts of the Baby Boom era that would apply almost anywhere, and the history of the last century in the US has seen a steady increase in the relative importance and population of urban versus rural areas.
Hopefully this encourages some folks to do a little historical research to mine ideas for their own games. If you find anything particularly interesting I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
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