Reasons for Superpowers?

I've got a story in mind, inspired by how comicbooks were like back when they were first made - Domino Mask super heroes, big metropolis, etc. And I don't want to be entirely scientific about this (or maybe I am in some weird subversion to aforementioned comics' tendency to do whatever the hell they wanted) but I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly where the powers would come from. Probably something to do with genetics, but I don't want to have them just pop out of nowhere.

So far I've got this; original hero of the city wasn't an amazingly special man, just an above-ordinary guy who decides to put on a costume and try to stop your average criminals. They get scared, begin to retaliate with better "powers", and basically it all escalates to the city being overrun with mutants and freaks in capes. But I can't connect the dots to how it got like that...

Guided mutation? Where a person is able to change themselves, with a new form and function, based on a strong desire they have? The actual mechanism isn't well-understood in that world (and shouldn't be, since the story seems to start out before this all starts happening), but it's something along the lines of turning your hair white through tremendous stress. Maybe something in the city's drinking water.

In superhero RPGs, there are basically four types:

Mutant - Your superpowers are due to some inherent trait that you were born with, although they might not manifest/develop until adolescence or some other point later in life. (Example: the X-Men)

Altered Human - You weren't born with your superpowers; they were bestowed/imposed upon you by an outside source, be it by accident or deliberately. (Example: the Hulk, Spider-Man, Captain America)

Alien - Your superpowers stem from your being a member of a non-human species, although environmental factors may affect them. (Example: Superman, Namor the Sub-Mariner)

High-Tech Hero - You have no actual superpowers whatsoever. Your "powers" are actually due to gadgets and gizmos that augment your natural human abilities, or grant you abilities that you wouldn't ordinarily possess. (Example: Batman, Iron Man)

edited 14th Mar '16 8:17:24 PM by pwiegle

Okay, how about this; years before when the story's supposed to start, life was normal in the city of unnamed origin (probably an island/archipelago) until this one above-average superhuman vigilante guy decides to help keep the streets clean of crime. Everything's good for a while, but then some crime boss or two decide to use some drugs, or whatever mystical thingimajig, to beef up their mooks to be stronger than that guy. Inspired by the ensuing war against the one guy, scientists or whoever develop a way to equally strengthen regular humans and make some special police force. This goes on for a huge while, with regular citizens volunteering for or being subjected to testing, until most of the gene-pool in the city is messed up or mutated in a way that future generations would get superpowers without outside influence.

I'm not that great with summary, but...sounds plausible enough, given the setting?

Sounds plausible, but that's one messed-up future the city's population is going to have.

How much of the population has superpowers by this point?

By the time the story starts? Well, it'd be localized to just the city where it takes place, so based on that...I'd say 75% of the population. But see, it's not like you're born with them. Since it's a genetic defect, any super-human abilities usually develop the same time you enter puberty, where you body starts doing new things it didn't do before, y'know?

But it's not like everyone is flying around with a shiny cape. Sometimes people develop a power that' really useless, like the ability to read the minds of insects or abnormally strong spitting. And even if they don't get anything, people will still end up with different DNA than a normal human. So technically speaking, pretty much everyone would be affected by it, and pretty much all of those people have notable powers. Not to say that you can just get cool ones some other way, of course.

August 3, 1990 - David Letterman

Top 10 Least Exciting Superpowers

• 10. Super spelling
• 9. Lightning-fast mood swings
• 8. Really bendy thumb
• 7. Can breathe soup
• 6. Ability to calm jittery squirrels
• 5. Power to shake exactly two aspirin out of a bottle
• 4. Ability to get tickets to Goodwill Games
• 3. Power to score with other superheroes' wives
• 2. Ability to communicate with corn
• 1. Magnetic colon

edited 19th Feb '16 5:28:38 PM by pwiegle

As for where the powers are coming from, some idea:

Magic - The superpowers in question are literally magic. No 'random mutations' no nanobots or 'psychic powers', this world actually has magical forces in it. Thing is, these magical forces just aren't normally seen anymore and recently there was some kind of leak or happenstance that let a bunch of people get access to it. In this case, however, that magic takes the form of giving people superpowers.

It could be something like the devil fruit used in One Piece. There's some kind of magic tree or something that produces fruit that gives people weird powers. Or it could just be an aspect of food that comes from the Fey Realms or Hell or something. Whatever the source, some bad guys got ahold of these things and are selling it, not fully understanding where it came from.

Empowering Mastermind - If you get the chance, watch and episode of Miraculous Ladybug, it has a pretty good take on this. In it, the two superheroes get their powers from tiny magical beings called Kwami (imagine the talking animal companions you see in some anime) and the Big Bad himself has the power to grant powers to other people to enact his schemes.

The Big Bad in this case actively listens for anyone having a bad day or having a tragic accident, at which point he sends out little spirit things to possess them, turn them evil, and grant them superpowers to effectively turn them into supervillains. Anyone in the city can fall prey to this, which provides quite a few good answers for many questions asked in superhero stories. Why do the heroes hide their identity? Because literally anyone from friends, family, classmates, or the police can be possessed and turned into a supervillain at any time. Why do the villains keep escaping? They don't. Pretty much every villain so far has been defeated and cured by the end of their episode... however, they can get re-possessed or have their villain persona re-activated by another villain with a suitable power.

Not sure how that would fit in with what you're looking for, but it could just be that there is some evil mastermind out there handing out superpowers for his own purposes. Like... there could be some devil, djinn, or dark sorcerer out there who's able to grant superpowers to people and his strategy is to distribute them to various villains in exchange for their servitude. The good guys might actually have a good version of this, handing out good superpowers to the heroes... along with maybe minor powers to local police, hospitals, or philanthropists who aren't "strong" enough to fight crime as full-time superheroes.

Ancient Magic - Here's an idea that got stuck in my head a while ago. Imagine that thousands of years ago, Earth was invaded by all sorts of magical monsters who in turn died of various causes. Could have been defeated by heroes, might gotten sick of various earth hazards (cold iron is poison to the Fey, could be that some ancient beast arrived on Earth, caused havok, and then died from eating a chicken's egg because it never encountered anything like it before and didn't know it was poison to it), or they just died of old age.

Thing is, these magical beasts are all dead... but their magic remains. Over a thousand years or so, all that dark magic from those beasts starts to 'stick' to people who begin suffering tragety or something. These people get powers, possibly similar to the magic those ancient beasts displayed, and alot of them either become heroes or commit crimes.

There might even be one or more people who study magic enough to know what's happening (everyone else assumes it's some kind of mutation or something) and goes around de-powering people to gather all that magic into himself and become a god or something.

Something similar to this happened in Worm, but with a few few differences I won't spoil.

Point is, I would suggest outright saying that these superpowers are derived from magic, and from that provide a definite source of where this magic is coming from or what rules it runs on.

If there is one guy handing out dark powers for the villains and one guy handing powers to the heros, maybe there is a limit to how many super-powered people there can be active at a time? Like the Big Bad can only have... say... one or two villains active at a time and everytime a villain gets captured he promptly abandons them to free up energy and uses that to empower another one of his pawns. Then, a few months later, he might check up on that captured villain and offer them another chance.

Or, maybe these dark powers are semi-sapient and are trying to merge back into a single being? They grant powers to people, who either fight evil or commit crimes. If they lose a battle, the dark magic might flee to find another host, or try to 'merge' with the victor, making the winner stronger. Problem is, if an evil person gathers too much power by beating all these villains, they risk letting the magic merge together to revive the monster that brought it into the world.

Anyway, just ideas.

#3 is actually kind of OP.

I liked the explanation One Punch Man (with some similarities to Worm) gave. Basically, superpowers are gained from intense obsession. It's basically an easy way to pick a gimmick. You have something you like, you obsess over it more and more until it becomes part of yourself, and then you choose to use that power towards some ends (usually good or evil), and you gain superpowers based around that aspect. In other cases, it's the overall influences of society that can create monsters, whether it be fear of the unknown depths of the sea or pollution. In short, belief and will power reality, and those two aspects tend to be channeled through obsession.

It's good because it makes sense without being too constrained to science, while giving enough leeway for basically anything to happen.

Another potential explanation that kind of goes with what you're saying is that the superpowers are just an extension of Asimov's Law, in that they're actually just incredibly advanced pieces of technology that started out being used by cops and shit to become slightly better at catching criminals, then when the criminals upgraded the cops upgraded, the tech trickled down to the public, and the resulting escalation basically resulted in the creation of superpowers. A lot of the tech affects on a genetic level, so they became hereditary traits and were passed down to their children, and their children's children, and various mutations and breeding and shit (as well as the natural changes in the tech itself) resulted in the powerset becoming increasingly varied and diverse.

This also has the side effect of making the techno-psychic of the group by default one of the most powerful characters in the setting, because he who controls the tech controls the supers.

The thing i use for super powers in my world and it may be useful for you, is that every species in the galaxy has a super powers. Some shoot fire, some lighting, some can fly, some are super strong, but humans have the unique power to ignore genetics and hybridize themselves with every other species in the galaxy, which is why 90% of are DNA is 'inactive', a lot of it's from alien's.

At some point, two humans have the right mix of genetics to activate super powers from some far distant alien ancestor in there children. It's rare, but with 7 billion of us on this planet, it happens plenty enough.

Additionally "super solider programs" work by activating or adding strands of alien code to the flexible human base, and people who are 'mutants' and gain power by radiation get lucky and have the DNA damage activate something previously dormant.

Hope my thoughts where helpful.

edited 9th Mar '16 9:30:06 PM by dragonkingofthestars

that's surprisingly good

When in doubt, use Functional Magic