How to Get Superpowers?

Hey, Veeky Forums, I've got a super hero campaign coming up, and I'm trying to figure out how to give the city super powers on a citywide scale, similar to the way the hadron collider in The Flash did.

I need some ideas for how to do it.

I'll be bumping with city art.

Mutants. the greatest and laziest power origin ever.

One night everyone in the city has a dream in which a mysterious invisible entity orders them to perform some kind of task as a test. Those who succeed at the task pass his test and when they awaken, they find that they have been given a superpower.

Planet sized organ fragments of an tras-universal space worm that seek out traumatic moments in people’s lives to latch themselves onto people and project abilities in the form of superpowers over the course of a 300 year long science experiment to discover new applications of each organ’s abilities before they destroy our world and move onto the next.

Okay, we're at least original with these.

Isn't that basically the plot to Scientology?

I’ll fucking sue you

Retrovirus goes out of control

Rewriting people’s DNA to give them extraordinary abilities

God and the Devil (or just any good entity and evil entity in the setting) have an argument over the nature of man; whether it tends more towards good or towards evil. To settle the bet, they give superpowers to everyone in a city. Now they're watching how many and which of the citizens decide to become superheroes, and which choose to be supervillians. In the end, only one side will triumph and take control of the city, resolving the bet.

Coordinated not-bang baby gas attack.

Superpower Granting STDs

Alignment with another universe for a brief moment only in that city wrecks havoc with physics and stuff to make certain people, objects, and animals super powered anomalies.

Magic ritual goes wrong, the resulting fallout of warped magic imbues people, animals, and objects with powers.

A trickster god/alien/metaphysical being visits the city on a trip through the multiverse, seeds powers in a bunch of things for shits and giggles.

Alien ship crashes, releases super alien tech into air of city, powers ensue via nanomachines, strange energy, or whatever. Alien ship is hushed up by the Government of course.

Parasites give you power ala goa'uld

The rewriting virus is on track to what I was thinking, so that's a nice one.

A meteor lands in the center of the city (lets say it's a very big city so most of it survives) and shoots up clouds into the air. These clouds actual contain microscopic eggs of alien parasites that people inhale.
Okay, so say a few years later people start noticing they have crazy powers but all of them hear a voice in their head, sometimes really chummy, other times full on "you must burn the school Timmy"-tier; when scientists study these individuals they find out in x-rays that all of them have two meter long bobbit worm looking creatures coiled around their organs. These parasites form a telepathic link with their hosts and also use alien fuckery to completely change their physiology to superhero-tier levels.

>The Superpowered Chad
>The Mundane Virgin

Fuck me that’s brillient.

The stars have aligned properly, and people are given powers based on zodiac signs

one of the programmers for the universe simulation didn't close a bracket. this resulted in some abnormal physics and people gaining powers. it has since been reported but won't be fixed until next code merge.

Don't forget the omnicidal kaiju that foster conflict around the world.

they would have to shutdown the server to perform a rollback and that would negatively impact uptime stats so they are just letting it go and hoping the admins don't notice

Keep them coming, boys. I feel like we're almost there.

No, the webserial Worm by Wildbow. Great stuff, but they don't get into that until near the end.

A back alley war of secret organizations and governments spilled out into the streets when a container of _________ was compromised and allowed to contaminate a whole city.

What kind of powers do you want the people to get?

Black market that just sells superpowers somehow. Some rich buy them, some poorer got experiemented on and have less desirable / controllable powers.

We're dying. C'mon, gals and bals.

I like some of these that have been posted already, but as an alternative you could just not explain it. People just suddenly got superpowers and everyone has a theory but no one really knows why. If one of the players has a theory you really like you can make it canon.

It’s all a simulation.

Science or blatant magic? Pick your favor, but an experiment in vacuum collapse and brane interaction suddenly adding magic to everything sounds consistent enough, it is a singular event and due to the sheer amount of physic-traumatizing technobabble it can be extrapolated to do just as much as you want it to do.

Devil Fruits

1) Flash-style. Meteor shower hits city. City is transformed into bombed-out ruin, weird meteors give people powers. Gangs form to fight over the city and the meteors.

2) Infamous-style. Eldrtich device goes off, disintegrating lots of people and concentrating their souls/life-energy/bio-electricity/whatever into a handful of survivors. Device still works, but you have to sacrifice a shit tonne of people to get powers. People fight over the device(s).

3) Worm-style. Daemons are real. Mass-possession event caused by demonic ritual gives people powers, but they seek out hosts who would use their powers violently, and twist their minds so they're even more aggressive.

Hi Wildbow

>Big Bang
Big Bang title is misleading. Actually a gradual influx of supers that become most evident during times of stress, such as war or natural disaster, but due to the nature of history and chaos, reports of supers are either believed to be exaggerations, non-replicated feats, or simple stories. For example, WW1 has lots of stories of great war heroes doing seemingly impossible things, but since shit like that happens all the time in war, modern historians can't tell if these were people activating their latent super powers during a time of need, or they were simply stories of ordinary soldiers being inspired to greatness as some soldiers are won't to do under immense stress. The actual explanation is always confusing and beyond human comprehension. Perhaps the collective of humanity's emotional suffering triggers certain psychokinetic or telepathic receptors in some genetically gifted individuals, allowing them to use a latent and dormant part of their brain in a way most humans never could before.

>Catalyst Begun
After the existence of supers are scientifically proven after a 100 year "Big Bang" period starting during WW1 and ending with the beginning of the 21st century, scientific progress explodes as public interest in science and research becomes extremely popular. People with supers are quickly recruited by the government with incredible incentives to keep them happy and loyal, or in some cases, go pro bono to help further humanity's condition. Things like mechanical engineering, bioengineering, medicine, materials science, and a greater understanding of physics can be much more easily achieved with the cooperation of certain supers, some of whom develop an interest in science as well and are thus invited by the government to pursue degrees in scientific fields, free of charge of course, which is my universe's explanation of why so many supers have "Doctor" in their titles, and also, because logically it just makes sense.

pt.1

>End of (the) Golden Era (EGE)
The year is now 2020-2030'ish and now we're at maybe the second or third generation of supers after the first announcement of existing supers went public sometime around 1980-1990. The idealization behind the superhero community is largely just that, an ideal; and of course many children born with superpowers are often treated like rockstars with rich parents, usually handsome or pretty, and often surrounded by the same types of people all their lives, which has given rise to a phenomena known as "Hyper Infantilized Superior Ego Syndrome", which pretty much just means "sometimes they grow up to be spoiled brats", to no one's surprise.

Things like super plastics, advanced quantum computers, sophisticated AI, genetic engineering, wonder drugs, and other such seemingly alien advances are now within the realm of possibility, yet still incredibly expensive, usually reserved for the military, or anyone rich enough to even have their own military.

Since the end of 2001 (9/11 still happened), the flooding of blackmarket genetic engineering and so called "super drugs" has given rise to a generation of super-intelligent inventors, tacticians, and scientists, usually young, ambitious, and slightly crazy, though often harmless and well-meaning. These super-intelligent individuals have worked to invent their own versions of super plastics and AI's and shit for the public domain with varying degrees of success. The good ones are often bought up by the government or by competing businesses, or they run off to start legitimate companies off of their patented inventions. The bad ones either sell to shady business partners or go into a life of crime themselves to facilitate their eccentric, fucked-up lifestyle.

>How It Works
Scientist's leading theory is that certain individuals were born with latent psychic receptors that activate themselves during times of immense human suffering or emotion (doesn't always need to be negative emotions). USUALLY, the potency of their superpower potential lies in the severity of the human reaction upon which the individual found themselves in when their brain activated their powers, but due to variation in individuals, some people are just born with a higher sensitivity for it, meaning different scenarios can lead to different things for different people.

For example
>Normal dude in war
Brain receptor is vestigial and his powers are not activated by the collective human suffering caused by this war. Aside from adrenaline and good old fashioned willpower, he has nothing, but often times historians have had difficulty determining whether an individual's feats during moments of war were a result of superpowers manifesting themselves in small, subtle ways, or if the person was just being a fucking beast.

>Gifted individual with weak potential for super powers in an active warzone
Even if he gets caught in explosions and sees his buddies getting blown up, and watches innocents get slaughtered and shit, he only gets, like, the ability to send vague telepathic communications to someone, only as long as that someone also happens to be thinking of him at the same exact time.

>Gifted individual with strong potential for super powers in an active warzone
Even if traumatic experience is more mild than other guy, his powers manifest as more potent. For example, seeing a single friend getting shot or nearly getting killed could trigger an immense psychic ability to communicate ("All men who identify as US Marines within my platoon, meet me at this building that I'm picturing in my mind within 3 hours. To keep in contact, just think of me and I'll be able to sense you and I'll send you a telepathic message.")

>How It Works pt. 2
Almost all known original superpowers are telekinetic or telepathic in origin. Super strength is usually just an application of tactile telekinesis. Pyromancy is just an extension of regular telekinesis with an emphasis on exciting atoms to the point of combustion and the manipulation of said combustion. Leading theory is as follows:

>After brain activates latent psychic receptor, activated super power now draws on personal force of will to sustain itself
>Everyone is different, so some people tire out quicker than others, no one is the same, but generally speaking, if you work harder, you tire faster, logically speaking
>How it works is that your brain waves learn to sync up and resonate with the natural resonant or atomic frequency of a specific thing such as fire, water, your own musculature, air, or any variety of shit, and you can then concentrate your brain waves to then manipulate that shit around to some degree
>Since research is so tough to validate, it hasn't been proven, but it's highly likely that "practicing" your powers makes it more powerful over time, which many supers can agree with at least on an anecdotal level

Extra-terrestrial object/ship/whatever crashes near the city. Shenanigans ensue.

An alien ship appears and drops pods in all major population centers. The pods release nanites that give people powers but makes them slaves to the aliens. Unbeknownst to the aliens the last race they conquered figured out a way to sabotage the nanites at the last minute. It was not enough to stop themselves from being destroyed but the change was permanent. These new nanites still give people powers but only a small fraction are suborned to the aliens will.

During the hottest summer on record, there's a secret terrorist event at the water treatment facilities. Everyone who does *anything* involving city water during a period of about 48 hours is exposed to this mutagenic substance.

The only people not affected are these hyper-rich douchebags who bathe in bottled water and brush their teeth with Perrier. Naturally, they are salty as fuck and use their piles of cash to start super-villiany.

A couple of people unknowingly play a video game that holds the date of multiple universes in their hands.

That is, I believe, the plot of the Wild Cards novel series.

Better yet, have some of the NPCs espouse some of the theories in this thread, but make it clear that they're just guessing. Then if the players end up reacting strongly to one of them, you could go with that one,

Ooh, I like this one as well. As an added bonus, you could have the sabotaging ayys be just as bad as the enslavers and only seeking to use the humans for their own ends, regardless of the collateral damage. I kind of like those stories that call into question whether the rebels are freedom fighters or just terrorists, provided you don't go full grimdark with it.

>The only people not affected are these hyper-rich douchebags who bathe in bottled water and brush their teeth with Perrier

Ahem.

I understood that reference.jpg

>Superpower Granting STDs
user, I'm going to assume that you meant "superpower-granting STDs", because the way you wrote it means something completely different.

Make up something really unpropable, like scientology beliefs level unpropable, and spread it as one of teories.
Then, after a while, show it was gobment spreading this lie to cover up the truth.
The truth is exactly the wacky teory minus the totally crazy element,
just like with UFOs in area 51 covering up Aurora project and stealth tech IRL.

Not him and english isn't my first language,
so could you elaborate?

superpower-granting STDs means STDs that give superpowers

superpower granting STDs means a superpower that gives you an STD

To clarify, it's
>Superpower-granting (adjective) STDs (noun)
versus
>Superpower (subject) granting (verb) STDs (direct object)

Oh, nice to know, thanks.

Someone destroys some funky ruins on one of earths major leylines. Turns out it was a power nulifier and magic is now coming back.

a strange other dimensional conspiracy group is slinking into the PCs world and empowering folks to deal against the coming doom-whatever-beast thats set to show up in a few decades

Someone loads up some odd .PDFs online that cause people to go nutty and also unlocks the ability to use only %10 of their brains, giving them psychic backed super powers (I think I can throw building at people so I actually can or 'that suit of armor I made actually works like Ironmans suit even though It runs off a dead car battery I found in a dumpster)

>During WWI, reports were coming in from the front lines of both sides of people with extraordinary capabilities
>These men were quickly used as shock troopers to extreme effect
>In an attempt to gain control of the situation the various powers involved in the war effort screened all letters the men sent home
>Making sure to omit or "lose" the letters mentioning these individuals.
>At the first meeting of the League Of Nations to discuss war reparations these reports were brought forth
>Seeing what this meant for the fragile state of the world, a call was sent out for the greatest minds of the age
>Assembling a crack team of expert machinists and scientists from every known field they went to work
>Their task: To nullify these abilities
>Two years later a massive device was created and hidden in a secret room beneath the Eiffel tower
>It emitted a high frequency radio wave that suppressed these traits and left everyone none the wiser
>However, due to a bureaucratic slip-up in a recent budget proposal the machine was left without maintenance for a decade
>It is now 1994, and the world is seeing a resurgence of these types
>Pockets of supernatural fueled instability are popping up all over the world
>Are you a bad enough dude to help bring the world back under control? Or are you just a bad dude?

This is a game I will never get to play.

use more than 10% of their brains?

>ability to use more than 10% of your brains
People use 10% of their brain in the same way that traffic only uses 33% of a stoplight.

The joke was that the space worm’s great big plot is like Scientology.

>Infamous-style
I have nothing to add to this thread other than this being a good one. Find a way to tie the party together regardless of their motivations, and you could end the campaign with them having acquired the notRay Sphere and fighting over what to do with it.

The whole game is a good example for a kicking off point for a campaign. It's relatively focused and grounded for being set in a specific city, with ordinary non-powered people routinely getting caught between the supers and the military cordon. The device doesn't force the powers it grants to be based on anything in particular, so you and your players can go as broad or as narrow as you like. Anyone in the city could develop powers, so the PCs can be anyone who has any reason to be in a city at some point in their lives.

One power origin I once saw in a Veeky Forums greentext was an old smart guy read a whole book on psionics, and he was smart enough that when he'd finished it he was actually able to put it into practice and suddenly had telekinesis and telepathy. That always stuck with me as an explanation I liked.

I think it can still work even if its factually wrong. It could work in a sort of low budget cheesy sci-fi kind of way.

All human beings are made in the image of the divine. To those who looked the flash of the atomic bomb was a revelation of the true nature of death and life and the cycle of rebirth. The denizens are at the cusp of enlightenment. Will the hubris fueled by their powers prevent their ascendance?