Kingsport is our Gotham. Like Gotham, it's somewhere along the coast of New Jersey. Pretend it's like any American big city you've ever seen in movies or on TV. It is a melting pot of culture, so you don't need to worry about whether you're "accurate" or not. Surely, whatever location you make up will exist somewhere in the city.

In broad strokes, the city Kingsport is at the mouth of the Miskatonic River. It's split up into a central administrative sector and then north, south, east, and west sectors: Kingswood is the administrative center; Dunwich is the north sector and grotesquely rich; Innsmouth is the west sector and the financial district; Old Town is the east sector and the entertainment district; Sentinel Hill is the south sector where normal people live; Arkham is an adjacent island run by supervillains.

In general, technology levels are similar to comic book universes. While the possibilities are limitless, at a glance, they're not further along than us. It's only the superheroes and supervillains with incredible genius and lots of resources that can produce wonders like cybernetic limbs, life-like AI, human-like androids, flying cars, combat suits, private spaceships, immersive VR, and more.

Superheroes have only become popular and commonplace over this last decade. However, superpowered entities have been around for quite a while. Ancient deities are in fact aliens of incredible longevity. Magic, and therefore magicians and sorcerers, have existed since the dawn of humanity. The first mutants were discovered in the late 1800's with the rise of industrialism, though it's been theorized that they existed earlier as well. Various supersoldier programs have been attempted since the 1930s.

The rise of superheroes began in 2008, when an alien spaceship crash landed in a field outside Kingsport. Initial attempts at contact were met with violence that rapidly became cataclysmic. Brave men and women, many of them with startling powers and weapons, gathered to fight back, eventually defeating and removing the alien threat. In 2009, the Initiative was founded to provide fulltime employment and salary to these new-fangled superheroes.