ITT: we make a capeshit setting

>he wasn't born with his powers...

fixt

The soviets would still fall
Mutants would in no way fix the economic problems
Infact, it would probably worsen russian stability

It's implied that it's actually because of a psychic bacterial infection. Grant Morrison's run on X-Men introduced a creature called "Sublime", a primordial hive-mind of bacterial cells that infects peoples brains. It doesn't do anything malicious with them, that's just where it lives. But mutants are immune to it, so it hates the idea that they might become the dominant species on Earth. It's confirmed that it manipulated people to cause a lot of the anti-mutant public sentiment, and implied that it may be constantly exerting a low-level control over people to make them hate mutants even without the PR network and government projects its set up.

Not everyone with powers is treated the same. People with parlor-trick-tier powers can live mostly normal lives. The more powerful one's powers are, the more ostracized and pigeonholed they become. Especially high-powered individuals might be subjected to anything from heavy government surveillance to complete removal from society. Because of poor conditions, high-powered people often turn to lives of crime, meaning that the world needs superheroes. Large cities might have government-backed powered defense force, but they are too small and the people within them too restrained to help everybody. The need for a less accountable type of hero is great.

>russians gain a perpertual energy source with enough output to power almost the entire country.
>they can now sell away any and all other energy resources they have.

Not in a capeshit setting!

user that just sounds retarded, but i guess random powers work with that

Also you forget all the problems mutants would cause for the common folk, especually those with no control over their abilities
If knowledge of the government using a mutant to power all of fucking soviet russia becomes common,a civil war may happen

Peter's daughter born with her powers
Franklyn Richards born with his powers
Etc
There're lots of people who born with their powers in Marvel, but only those that have X-gen are viciously hated.

That's fucking retarded.

>"People are only racist because they have the racist flu"

Makes me want to eat my gun.

>russia wont recognize mutants as human beings unless they are working in the military or in a goverment function or passed a screening and received a "citizenship" (including a bomb belt)

> Superpowered individuals also gained inhuman mutations, the more numerous and powerful the superpowers, the more numerous and extreme the mutations, and vice versa.
> For example, someone with the ability to manipulate a few gallons of water gained webbed digits, but someone who gained thirty times peak human strength, durability, and reflex speed became a schizophrenic anthropomorphic cockroach with slightly acidic pseudopods.

>super powered people are more common than gays

>gay superpowered people are a minority among a minority

>Not everyone with powers is treated the same. People with parlor-trick-tier powers can live mostly normal lives. The more powerful one's powers are, the more ostracized and pigeonholed they become. Especially high-powered individuals might be subjected to anything from heavy government surveillance to complete removal from society. Because of poor conditions, high-powered people often turn to lives of crime, meaning that the world needs superheroes. Large cities might have government-backed powered defense force, but they are too small and the people within them too restrained to help everybody. The need for a less accountable type of hero is great.

I like this. More room for player characters.

>Franklyn Richards born with his powers
AND HE WAS EXECUTED FOR BEING A DIRTY MUTANT.

>a surprising amount of shapeshifters are transsexual

Your playing with a Worm setup that could go ok, due to missing factors in that shitshow. Powers are random, not a gift from psychotic breaks that induce aggression by existence and utility. There isn't an Illuminati group designed to make shit worse to make more breaks to make more powers to maybe push all the resultant problems of the world onto someone else to fix. There isn't a multi-planar super Kyubey making it up as he goes from depression as his girlfriend died in a texting and planar travel accident.

The question is in rate of change, if we lose capes faster than we gain them, or if 10% is a static statistic based on planetary population, a new norm will likely be established siting the Civil rights movement as an example, unless the super powered black community resorted to violence and the relative peace we have now never was established. Vietnam might have been won, Watchman style. ect.

If cape production rate is increasing, however, we find a new norm in the works that everyone will know is coming. Xavier 2.0 states that if the mutant comes from the human, any human can produce the mutant, and the mutant will produce the mutant, all the mutant must do is play for time until powered are the majority. Laws about the use of power in polite society must be drawn up, it's too much change for a politician to accept they may lose power and the mutant just needs to coddle the idiots in power until popular votes overturn personal preferences and realign the desires for those who want the office of government. The normal human will eventually go extict slowly, recognized as mutant capes that lack powers in the last days. If powers come with births, humans can't exterminate the powered as they generate them. Best case scenario, we end up in My Hero Academia, not great but much better than Worm. Go Beyond! PLUS ULTRA!!

I have the trade of that issue of ultimate x, honestly loved that little story

The revelation of exactly what happened for the Xmen to fall apart in Logan almost had me in tears (because of all the implications, including Logan's reaction to Xavier accusing him of pushing his surrogate family away) but Patrick Stewart's pitiful, pathetic apologizing put me over the edge.That shit fucked me up, man.

That doge looks so soft and fluffy. I want to burry my face in his tummy.

The is an island nation state in the pacific that is just composed super powered expats. The most powerful ones rule.

>Powers are distributed based on answers to a seemingly innocuous survey.

>survey includes those trick "we asked this already, but in reverse this time" questions
>give contradictory answers
>get weaker versions of powers

>the island itself didn't exist 10 years ago
>it was brought up from beneath and made livable by a handful of very powerful supers

Is it a regular-ass survey people are quick to recognize as "oh shit, I get superpowers now!".

Or is it something you fill out in a dreamlike state, possibly to forget about when you wake.

>Or is it something you fill out in a dreamlike state, possibly to forget about when you wake.
I like this one more, but what would be the questions asked?

Weirdly symbolic questions, questions that wouldn't look out of place on a job application, and questions that start out as reasonable ones but ramble on into things that no one else could possibly have known about.

Am I going to feel things I don't want to feel if I watch that? I get the vibe that I will.

If they pass it on to their children we end up with My Hero Academy. And a world of 10/10 girls.

Many people with super-intelligence saw the writing on the wall and went underground, searching for people with similar powers to prevent their exploitation.

The resulting group does genuinely want to help the world, but factions within the group pursue their own methods of doing this. Some privately support existing governments and organizations, others perform subtle social engineering plans, while a few advocate ruling outright as enlightened philosopher-kings.

Three words: Evil Edna Mode.

Specifically, someone who can make superclothes, but will do so for anyone who pays him money. Villains included. He does have some standards. For example, he doesn't dresses armies. Each one of his outfits is a unique masterwork, to be worn by the super it was designed for. When world governments go after him, he stops selling them clothes and throws a sale to teach them their place.

This literally happened in my capeshit setting, except after the CCCP fell. I don't feel like world-level superheroes just yet, but, whenever needed, an unknown group in Russia can unleash non-sapient giants to swim to coastal cities around the world and fuck them up. Soon after they do that, the Russian president disappears, and it's never clear whether he's in the conspiracy or not. The giants are created by a super named Echidna who's forced to create monsters, and then replicated by a non-Russian super named Mr. Ford who mass-produces them.

Historically, a superhero named Russian Winter used to be Russia's trump card, but when Stalin came into power he disappeared. Russian Winter's powers are hereditary, and now there's one bloodline who still hates Stalin for killing/Gulag-ing their ancestor, and another that changed their mind and decided Stalin was their rightful leader.

Probably. Every moment that is not brutal violence is abject despair. Especially the happy bits.

It's a regular survey, nearly identical to one for an online job application for customer service

>If Jimmy has two apples, and Sally has three apples and eats one, then how much blood must be sacrificed before we enter the age of the jaguar?
>What is your biggest pet peeve?

>what is your biggest weakness?
>how might someone use your biggest weakness against you?

What if the person lies?

Does the test know and note it, making it influence the results?
Does the test not care and people lying and getting falsified results is part of the experience?
Or can people simply not lie because they are in a state of trance while answering where it doesn't even cross their minds?

Mutants randomly born with super powers runs counter to the Communist ideal. They'd be an Plutocracy where the rich are those gifted with powers that are efficient.

Worm's setting is a bit of a clusterfuck, despite anything the fanboys or the author says, it was really fucking obvious he was worldbuilding as he went instead of having a framework in mind from the beginning. It's full of holes that are poorly handwaved; it's my opinion that he pulled Cauldron out of his ass late in the game SPECIFICALLY as the Deus Handwave Machina so he could have the setting the way he wanted it without being constrained by the logic of how it would actually likely play out. Cauldron not existing, and emphasizing the fact that powers can be passed on genetically would make the setting way better. Balkanized parahuman city-states without the blatant superhero-villain secret identity shit would have been a WAY cooler setting than the forced comic book status quo shit.

Really, I'm a bit confused with how secret identities and cape shit is even a thing in that setting. It'd be way more likely that people with powers would consider themselves to be an evolution of humanity (Especially considering powers can be passed down.) and would quickly form a powered upper class of people squabbling to conquer the world. They probably wouldn't use superheroes as basis for it in any way. Most of them probably wouldn't even be secretive about it.

Not teenagers playing small-time dress-up. As I said, Cauldron is the handwave machine keeping anything cool from happening.

The author is going to be making Worm 2 soon, which I have high hopes for. But considering Wildbow's innate insistence on taking cool concepts and then forcibly running them into the ground over long periods of time and double-downing on mistakes, I'm not too optimistic. High hopes, low expectations.

I will say, however, that even though I think Worm's story is way overrated and kind of dumb, it's still the best "generic" cape setting I know of. It's just that generic cape settings don't really work in realistic, logical ways. Gritty, realistic cape settings are barely functional.

Jimmy and Sally can sacrifice equal blood, because they are now equal.
If Sally hadn't eaten her apple, she would have to sacrifice more.

This is BASIC MYTHOS PEOPLE!

One of the original drafts of the story was about parahumans organizing into cells and trying to destabilize society with terrorism to force them to be dependant on people with superpowers, essentially a world where everyone with powers was a villain.
The leader of the parahuman movement was a woman named Goddess who somehow had the ability to keep all parahumans in check and force them to do what she wanted, it was never further elaborated on since the basic description is all that is known about the draft but I suspect she was conceptually something along the lines of Scion and Eden, an entity that gave out and controlled superpowers for their own gain.

Anyway that alone sounds way more interesting than what we've got with Worm, though I agree about it being a pretty good "generic" setting.

Pretty sure goddess was in Worm proper in the end. As Blue Empress

That's actually mentioned once in one of the roleplays Wildbow did that took place in the Weaverdice IRC server (Which I still creep around on sometimes because I made connections there before I began to become secretly irritated with the setting. Not shit I can be forthcoming with there unless I want to be roasted in the author's own domain. The Weaverdice system is also ass, FYI. Though the power gens are really sweet.)

docs.google.com/document/d/1d5KFMIh0jK_W3-JPJMDr08-nA6UTS06MFMqVga5tPPg/edit#

^ Pretty sure Earth Shin was his reference to that concept he didn't use.

>people gain stands when dio awoken from his slumber

Giving false or self-serving answers gives you the Dark version of the power, tho, mind you, not the Evil version
I don't really like the trance thing, I'd much rather it be a real-life survey like one a marketing person on the street might have you do, or one on the internet. That way when people try to find the peppy girl with the clipboard or copy paste the URL that percolates within the community as the suspected cause, You can have them mysteriously disappear

>age of the jaguar
>posts tiger
Someone failed the survey

Humanity has grown so large, that the background collective unconscious grants humanity writ large actual psychic abilities to affect matter.

Superheroes are the only genre of super powered beings that people conceptualize in the modern world with any regularity. So it i's the general psyche for capes to exist.

Some kid, just like Kickass, decides fuck it, I'm gonna be a Superhero. He actually becomes a superhero.

People see, all over the world, this verifiable actual physical superhero, and more people try it. It starts working again.

The collective humanity decides that superheroes are real and that, for some reason, people have been given powers. No one is quite aware of the collective unconscious voodoo.

The more striking and notorious a person is, the more people recognize them, the stronger their powers become in a self-reinforcing loop.

Super villians arise in the same manner.

>the waaagh, but with humans

That's a cute dog.

...

Nah, that's set like 100 years or more after the apocalypse where civilization has clawed its way back from the brink with superpowers as the new normal.

It's supported by that whole "we'd probably have interstellar travel by now if not for quirks" thing.
That level of stagnation reads as "brief Dark Age" to me.