On the cities thread I stumbled across an idea I thought I'd toss out for those who might be skipping that thread. Universities and their impact on the superhero community.
Obviously, universities are a major breeding ground for superheroes, or have the potential to be that. EEs who have too much coffee and not enough common sense building high tech nightmares. All these archeology students sorting through mystic relics. And of course the inevitable accidents in the physics, chemistry and biology departments. Sometimes these folks can have very destructive origins.
Likewise, these places are attractive targets for supervillains for the same reasons that they are breeding grounds for origins. Plus when superheroes take some impounded device to be studied, guess who is going to go and reclaim it? And of course the resultings uperhero/supervillain battles are another source for origins, when you get down to it, sometimes producing further collateral damage as well.
A side effect of this is that likely as not any superhero could *not* just walk into a university with a strange glowing meteor or device impounded from a supervillain but would have to go through a special department and possibly sign a form assuming all liability and damages occured to any potential supervillain attack that might occur as a result. Very few places are going to want to even touch anything Doctor Destroyer has been near. Some places might even file restraining orders just in case.
The top universities are naturally going to have standing superhero teams as a matter of course, and with a good cross-mix of powers to deal with a wide range of situations. Likely as not, this will be supplemented by 'college-league' superhero teams.
The fact of the matter is that sooner or later university officials are going to bite the bullet and deal with college-age metahumans and inventors and magicians by coopting them into the system. Give them scholarships and put together a superhero team, in the more prestigious and expensive universities as the backup team to the professionals but in many lesser colleges they might well be the primary team. A few schools might even manage an A roster and a B roster.
And of course it is going to occur to people that there's money to be made by having college superhero teams battle it out and sell the television rights. At that point you start having high school age supers being scouted by all the major schools and given attractive scholarship offers. Things like eligbility requirements and so on will also start to crop up.
After this gets entrenched, pretty soon cities and superhero teams looking for fresh recruits are going to start paying attention to the young talent on the college circuit. And in time that might even be one of the prefered routes for joining a real superhero team. The alternative would have to be one of the 'minor league' superteams that don't require any previous history.
An interesting possibility is the 'ineligable' teams that form, composed of students who couldn't or wouldn't qualify for the main team, operating against school regulations and so having to use secret identities (and having underground popularity with certain elements of the school).
Now this raises the questions: what schools are likely to have the best teams and for that matter, what sort of teams would various schools favor?
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