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[Arhra]

Turns out rambling is very time consuming.

I must confess I have probably missed quite a few things in my wandering rants, so please ask any questions you have.

Now let us talk about why your character might want become a superhero, what a superhero does, where those superpowers might come from and what a superhero does.

In twenty-five hundred words or less!


WHO WANTS TO BE A SUPERHERO?
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Superheroes in general revolve around the concept of With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.

The costumed vigilante craze came about after the end of the second World War, when the products of various super soldier projects had to be reintegrated back into society. It turned out that patriotism and superhuman capabilities demanded an outlet.

Superpowered individuals appearing at an ever increasing rate meant instability. Some people decided the power to shoot lasers out of their chins meant they were a superior being beyond human judgement. It was easier to give a tacit nod of approval to these 'superheroes' while rushing to establish some means of control.

It didn't quite work out. Things changed faster than anyone could keep up.

Nowadays the government is weak. It's various appendages are either benevolent but ineffectual or corrupt. Sinister corporations engage in secret projects and there's no shortage to chin-laser-ubermensch.

Superheroes however have remained quite effective by retaining a good public opinion. A person who puts their life on the line to help others is generally not a jerk.

Just to get people thinking, here's some reasons your character might have decided to become a superhero:

- You're just a wonderful person,
- Responsibility
- You want to protect your home
- You want to be famous
- Atonement
- You like fighting
- The mantle was passed to you
- Destiny


WHAT A SUPERHERO DOES
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Superheroes dress up in colourful, often skin-tight, costumes and beat people up!

No... that's not it.

A superhero is a do-gooder who is in some way extraordinary. and a snappy drsser. There's evidence that people coming by extraordinary powers has been happening for millenia. For whatever reason, it's only over the past sixty years that they've become common enough to be easily identified.

Mutations are appearing at an ever accelerating rate and bizarre discoveries are paving the way for more such talents.

Not everyone with such powers is a good person. And so it is necessary to stop them.

As superheroes, you stand on uncertain ground. The stance on vigilante justice wavers. It's tolerated, but you'll probably get nabbed if you step too far out of line. Keeping to a high moral code, like not murdering people is a good idea.


The World Is Always Doomed
There's always something going on. The approximate threat level can be classified according to this handy scale:

Class 1: Minor. No real threat to life and limb. Example: Saving cats from trees.
Class 2: Street-level crime. Example: Muggings.
Class 3: High stake crime. Example: A bank robbery.
Class 4: Severe damage to a city's processes/large institution collapses. Example: Town hall blown up.
Class 5: City in danger. Example: Mutagen introduced into local water supply.
Class 6: National emergency. Example: Entire east coast of America falls into sea.
Class 7: Whole country affected. Example: Europe conquered by giant robots.
Class 8: Several countries at risk, complete disruption to international status quo. Example: Atlantis rising.
Class 9: Global impact, worldwide breakdown of civilisation. Example: Alien invasion.
Class X: Planetary extinction event. Example: Global Thermonuclear War.

Obviously anything over a 4 actually succeeding is very rare.

I'd expect we'll be nipping quite a few evil schemes in the bud, but they would normally be four or five tops.

Atlantis is essentially getting swarmed by everyone. Founded 11,000 years ago by seven Neptunian Immortals, the last of their race (they weren't always immortal, obviously), it was sunk and they were forced to retreat to their stasis tombs and slumber through the millenia. Now it has risen again, the race is to sink it before its systems and the Neptunians come out of their long sleep.

I have decided against creating a default superhero organisation. Instead, you guys are going to found one after this first mission is completed. Should be entertaining I hope.


GIMME SUPERPOWERS ALREADY
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Alright, so you have a motivation for being a superhero, now how do you get those powers?

There are no reliable ways to give a person superpowers, or at least none with predictable results and a lack of side effects.

Klovenhogen's Intrinsic Mental Field Separator might allow you to become a entity of pure mental energy, but the disintegration of your physical body is rather unfortunate. You're rather attached to it.

Let's start with the basics.

Inherent
You are a robot. Or a mutant. Or something. Nothing was needed to give you superpowers - you either always had them or they emerged on their own.

The puzzling thing about born superhuman powers is it doesn't always seem to be genetic. Oh sure there's some arrangements of genes that seem to be related but they don't appear in all cases. Let's not even start on cases where these markers have appeared after manifestation of abilities.

Lucky Accident
A lack of equipment standardisation between manufacturers and the desire for secrecy means even a state of the art laboratory is a mess of incompatible technologies wired together by purpose build adaptors, making those freak lab accidents we all know and love more likely. Maybe you stopped that nuclear meltdown and got superpowers instead of cancer. Or maybe there was just a set of circumstances that somehow combined to give you powers. Who knew being covered in algae and struck by lightning could do that?

It's an untested theory that the people who get superpowers from this sort of thing had some latent quality that made it possible.

Deliberate
You decided to do out and get yourself some superpowers or they were offered to you. Super-soldiers, being rebuilt as a cyborg, being given the Eye of Alitz, inventing rocket boots and decided to kick people with them. You have to be careful with inventor types though. If you've made something amazing, why aren't you selling it for heapa cash?

Human peak potential is exaggerated. Maybe you just trained really hard.

Or you could just buy all these wonderful toys with your vast fortune I suppose.

Found
Maybe a dying superhero somehow based their powers on to you (or is even still living on in you). Maybe you found a lightsaber. Maybe that alien bioarmour fused to your body. Whether this could be considered lucky or unlucky is up to you.


WHAT A SUPERHERO DOES
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They do things that are super.

Let's talk about some random topics on superpowers!

First off, if your science is hard, actually make it be hard. If you're just goofing around with nonsensical technobabble then whatever.

Superheroes frequently possess unusual structural changes to their bodies. There has to be something that lets you levitate, right?

SNEERING AT EINSTEIN
There are a number of laws of the universe that get in the way of superpowers. We are assuming that the rules are a lot more relaxed because giant robots are cool, but there are still some fundamental constraints.

If you can shoot lasers out of your chin, the energy for that has to come from somewhere. If you can turn into a dinosaur, the mass has to come from somewhere (let us not get into the problems in surviving the change). Many powers don't have any direct analog (what exactly is a forcefield made of anyway?). So it would help to think of some justifications.

So here's a few handy explainations for how you might wriggle around various inconvenient science facts. They should hopefully cover all the bases:

1) Another dimension!
Your powers involve another dimension somehow, pocket or otherwise. It's a convenient source of energy, a medium to teleport through, a storage area for all that extra mass and can possess weird physical laws.

Can be useful for other things, like a size changer who actually has a dimensional complexity that allows them to interact with the normal universe as if they were much smaller or larger than they actually are. It sidesteps a lot of issues.


2) Access to a superset of physics that our physical laws are a subset of.
To be blunt, you are hacking the Matrix. Either you are invoking a thing to which the normal rules do not apply (like megafire), or changing the rules for a localised case (I have always hated you, gravity).


3) Exotic matter
You think that's atoms you're made of?

To summarise, material that's not made of matter as we know it. Obviously the aforementioned superset of rules or ANOTHER DIMENSION are handy excuses for where this stuff comes from.

There's a number of possibilities: Stable Island materials waaay up in the atomic weights (warning: stupidly dense, requires a particle accelerator to produce); alternative atomic arrangemnts that stand outside of the standard peroidic table; stuff not even made of subatomic particles we recognise...

Various uses for this are energy storage, enhanced physical attributes and excuses for other strange material behaviour like a shapechanging weapon. Obviously, many of these options are also possible with regular materials.

There seems to be forms of virtual matter: you input energy and get something that looks and acts just like a rock or sword or suit of armour as long as the charge lasts. If badly damaged the suffer critical existence failure. Some varieties seem to need constant energy while others seem to store a certain ammount. The line between these and forcefield or 'energy' projections is so ill defined it may be nonexistent.


4) Psychic Powers
Psychic powers can do so many wonderful things.

So many wonderful, unscientific things.

I don't really need to go into the details much here I suppose. Let us talk about a few random features instead. Stuff leaves psychic traces, stuff that's rendered intangible seems to end up in the same place as ghostly things and there's psychic predators.

A rather specialised telekinetic might be able to reinforce themselves in an incredibly tough forcefield and fly. Hmmmm.


Summing Up
Basically, if you can provide a handwave for the more serious physics breaking, that would be excellent.

Try to think about a few other little issues. For example, if you can project a forcefield, what exactly is holding it in position? Have ye ever heard of a thing called recoil?

It helps me judge weird power interactions.


YOUR SUPERPOWER IS A THING!
Believe it or not, there's enough cases of people finding a thing that gave them superpowers or that does something amazing that a rough classification system has grown up. Some of these items have are awfully clingy or permanently fuse to a host.


Billionaire Supertechnology
"I love being rich!"

There literally is such a thing as billionaire supertechnology. The market is pretty messed up. Companies have increasingly moved towards small product runs of extremely advanced technology. Mass produced goods are generations behind.

This sort of thing is limited to near-future level technology. Which of course still includes combat cyborgs, genetic engineering, energy weapons and giant robots.


Xenotech
"It came from spaaaaaaace!"

We are not alone in the universe.

In the seventies, an arcology of extrasolar origin was discovered on the dark side of the Moon, imaginatively named Extraterrestial Superstructure One, or ES-01 for short. It seems to have been a museum and many odd relics were found in it. The place is still being explored.

On top of the hundreds of unidentified samples, there are three known alien races:

Neptunians
The Neptunians were the most advanced race that remained confined to the Solar System. They possessed near complete mastery of the physical world; Alchemy may have its roots in Neptunian science. They were powerful psychics as well. The Neptunians themselves are essentially an amorphous mass of superconductive nerves, brains and organs encased in indestructible, shapechanging frost armour. Psionic amplifiers and some useful forms of exotic matter have been reverse engineered from samples of their technology.

Greys
Greys are the only known intact alien civilisation. It's more a loose collection of misanthropic jerks who think they are funny. Their ships have a crew of one since they can't even stand each other. The only exception is staffing them with expendable, shortlived, somewhat explosive clones, since the only other intelligent life a Grey can tolerate for any period of time is itself. To the best of humanity's knowledge, they fly around the universe messing with less developed species for the hell of it. A Grey is physically fragile, unable to survive long in Earth gravity without special equipment, part of why crashes and our puny weapons can ocasionally take them out. Their technology involves some cloning and genetic manipulation, an interesting variety of rayguns and anti-gravity.

Venusians
Not much information about this extinct race survives, because Venus is a hellhole. Evidence suggests the runaway greenhouse effect that caused Venus' current state is their fault. They were particularly interested in life extension sciences, cybernetics, chemical warfare, microbiology and genetics. They apparently looked like green, cybernetically enhanced space elves.

Jovian Lizards
There is no Lizardman Conspiracy. If there was, they would not have technology that allows them to appear human, nor would they be able to conceal their presence. This would not include shapechanging, synthetic skins, polymorphic alloys, holographic projections, tactile illusions, cloaking, computer hacking or data manipulation.


Archaeotech
"The shaman was said to be able to strike down people with his gaze. Turns out it was his mask."

Human-era artifacts that, for some reason, do something strange. Go nuts.


Paleotech
"This tyrannosaurus... appears to have been shot."

The difference between archaeotech and paleotech is about a million years. These items are all pre-human and frequently fossils.


Obscura
"What is this I don't even"

For every system of categories, there are the miscellanies. Anything that cannot be cleanly placed into the other categories.


CHARACTER SHEET
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Name: You do know your own name, don't you?
Alias: Hero name. You might have more than one.
Age: How old you be.
Gender: Male, female or robot.
Appearance: What you look like.
Equipment: Stuff you have.

Abilities: What exactly can your freakish powers do? That's disgusting.

For power level I shall say only this: you are powerful enough to make a fight on your own against half a dozen mooks interesting.

This does not mean steamrolling right over them.

I must admit actual mooks will probably be pretty thin on the ground, seeing it would take a small army of them to challenge a large group of players.

Biography: Describe your personality, origin and current status. How long have you been a superhero? Keep in mind you'll all be working together so DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE. Do you take pains to conceal your real identity?

Superhero Persona: Your costume, how you try to be perceived and a little about how you operate. I will cut the first person to use a T-shirt with an insignia and jeans as their costume. CUT YOU.

Affiliations: You might have some connections.

Enemies: Just a few thoughts for now. They probably will turn up later.