History of a superhero world

And prehistory, but the point is how would you do it?

Personally my own setting (and I use that word loosely) has the following: Mars was originally inhabited, but destroyed in a war between it and some terrestrial Precursor civilization, though there were survivors.

The various mythological gods are real, but left Earth for reasons known only to them thousands of years ago. Each pantheon has a single human Champion, who are essentially a combination of Shazam (Transformation, fragment of power from each god) and the Four Maidens in RWBY (the power transfers to a new host automatically when the previous one dies, and their existence is a closely guarded secret kept by a Benevolent Conspiracy to keep it from falling into the wrong hands)

The Nephilim also existed, and the only one to survive the flood became an equivalent of Vandal Savage or Apocalypse.

World War 2 and the period leading up to it were characterized by a “Neohuman arms race” of both sides creating and recruiting superpowered soldiers. The Manhattan Project happened, but enough people in high places were opposed to nuking a civilian population that instead the Allies sent every available super they had to invade Japan, resulting in so much collateral damage that many people don’t think it was that much better than the alternative. This also lead to this world’s Geneva Conventions having a section regulating “government use of Neohumans in wartime.”

Edited by ecss on Oct 17th 2020 at 10:37:33 AM

I conceptualized my setting after finding X-Men deppressing/annoying.

Around 50% or more^note  (this is stated to be an estimate, because lots of people in isolated areas and developing countries are unaccounted for) of the human individuals have had some kind of superpowers since before the rise of civilization, so it's considered normal. History sticks surprisingly close to OTL because most people's powers are weak, freaky, overspecialized, or seemingly useless^note  (like secreting a multicolored substance from fingertips. One main character's boyfriend uses it for painting and prefers not to think too hard about what it might be), though world- or at least war-breaking powers (like magnetism, lightning, and strong water or telekinesis abilities) do exist but they're very rare and treated in popular culture similiarly to how OTL fiction treats superpowers in general, and they're understandably feared, though most of them are just normal people^note  like (on the lower end of the scale) one character's father, who has a Make You Rot power in his left hand that only affects organic matter. He wears a glove and tries to live a normal life. Mundane Utility, war (Geneva conventions do have rules about that), and espionage aside, the world goes on pretty close to OTL.

Though it's also a more enviromentalist and generally better world than OTL, because the real world also deppresses me at the moment.

Relating to war in particular, i have visualized some war scenes (like a ww2 pilot with weak magnetic powers ripping an enemy plane's engine out after running out of ammo, and an artilleryman in ww1 shielding the mortar and his squad with a shield-shaped forcefield in-between the shots) with no real intentions/context to use them.

Edited by Nukeli on Oct 21st 2020 at 11:02:38 AM