Help: Reusable Origin for Mentalists/Mystics

[assault]

I've been pulling together a bunch of reusable origins for various types of characters, but I've drawn a blank on Mentalists and Mystics.

 

I've got a serum which creates half-lizard brick types (based on the pre-5e character Gremlin, herself inspired by Mark William's Gargoyle).

 

The Blood, from Organizational Book 3, and originally Aaron Allston's campaign, provides a nice source of energy Blasters.

 

Martial Artists can be trained in some school, or by rogue former students.

 

So I've already used a serum. That rules out the official CU's PSI serum.

 

The Blood already have the family (of mutants) thing covered. No Sylvestris or Vandaleurs.

 

Training schools have been covered, so the Circle is out. (Also, the characters in the Circle used such a variety of different kinds of magic that it doesn't really help with easy/lazy character creation).

 

In any case, I probably really need Mentalists rather than Mystics.

 

There is the Lensman thing, but I'd rather avoid focus dependent characters if I can. Still, if most mentalists in a campaign are focus users, essentially none are, compared to each other. (But are tougher compared to everyone else). It might be an option.

 

"Psibernetic" implants are an interesting option from The Ultimate Mentalist. I'd need to rework them a bit.

 

Basically, I'm creating a bunch of character templates that can be easily and quickly tailored to represent specific individuals.

 

The ultimate aim is to be able to create playable characters in 5 minutes, complete with relationships with other characters in the campaign setting.

[assault]

Or... maybe I should reuse my reusable origins.

 

A bunch of different serums/substances, families, schools, equipment sources, alien races etc, each tailored to one of the four main food groups, and maybe some of the more specific archetypes.

 

By "four main food groups" I mean Brick, Blaster, Mentalist and Martial Artist, if it's not obvious.

 

I'm not entirely sure this would really help though, since the actual power sets wouldn't vary much. It would only be the fluff text that varies - but the fluff text matters. More for PCs than NPCs though. I wouldn't require a player who wanted to play a Brick to play a Green Lizard Person, no matter how easy it would be to integrate the character into the setting.

[assault]

Oh. While I'm drawing on old sources, a lot of the inspiration for this project comes from Dean Shomshak's "Shared Origins" series.

 

I'm just trying to use what I already own.

[pinecone]

Do you have Atlas? It had "Quarm" energy...that could cause Mentalists...?

[assault]

One of the absences in my collection. Good thought.

[Doc Democracy]

You thought about simply switching the vampire trope - turning people into mentalists rather than into undead - they need to feed on the mental energies of others.  For the most part this does no harm at all and they can live quite happily among people soaking in the ambient mental emanations.  For some this provides a low level empathic ability for a very few it provides greater power.

 

Some of those use these powers for good, others for evil.  All of them want to prevent too many people finding out about this community and they have developed an underground community where people can commune mentally and help each other cover up when the authorities find out about them.  They do not want to be subjected to the kind of testing that central governments would be inclined to conduct to weaponise this resource first...

[death tribble]

You could also go with the Chosen route. people are born with the gift and are then tracked down and indoctrinated by an organisation. Works for both.

[BoloOfEarth]

Alien symbiote / implantation.  IIRC, Esper fits that category.  Don't know if there are other CU characters for whom that works, but I've used it for homegrown supervillains (Joe Normal happens upon an ET crash site and the psionic symbiote takes over poor Joe).

 

Or you could combine "psibernetic implants" and alien symbiotes to make it Implanted Object/Being. 

 

For Mystics, you could separate Mentor from Schools.  A school implies a bunch of students, whereas a mentor takes on one or two apprentices.  Maybe add in the Chosen route as DT brought up - the mentor seeks out those with magical affinity, or the Chosen is mystically drawn to the mentor.

[TheQuestionMan]

PSIner Force - part of the Canadian Supersoldier program in the 90s.

[DShomshak]

Or... maybe I should reuse my reusable origins.

 

A bunch of different serums/substances, families, schools, equipment sources, alien races etc, each tailored to one of the four main food groups, and maybe some of the more specific archetypes.

 

By "four main food groups" I mean Brick, Blaster, Mentalist and Martial Artist, if it's not obvious.

 

I'm not entirely sure this would really help though, since the actual power sets wouldn't vary much. It would only be the fluff text that varies - but the fluff text matters. More for PCs than NPCs though. I wouldn't require a player who wanted to play a Brick to play a Green Lizard Person, no matter how easy it would be to integrate the character into the setting.

If this is mostly to help players create PCs, there's no way you'll use them all, so it doesn't matter if you have a Mentor/School/Other Spinoff Character Device for all four character types, a Family for each, a Serum/Other Origin substance for each, and so on.

 

I'll get back to you tomorrow with a list of Shared Origins for mentalists. (Some of them might become Shared Origins supplements someday if the spirit moves me, but there's no reason you shouldn't have the ideas now.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[assault]

The other thing with reusable origins is that they help define the campaign setting.

 

"These things/people exist in this world".

[Tjack]

I always liked "the family business" origin. Dad, Mom, Grandpa were paranormals or a multi-generational bloodline of heroes to learn from. It worked nicely for the Now Comics version of the Green Hornet, and the whole Wold-Newton universe is populated by a family tree full of champions and scoundrels

[massey]

I like the idea of having a dozen or so "shared origins", at least to flesh out the universe.  Not that PCs would have to use them, but they could be available.  Right now the MCU has variants of the super-soldier serum, people empowered by the Infinity Stones, and Arc Reactor/Stark Tech.

 

These power sources would be easy origins for NPCs, or a PC if they wanted to use it.  In a world of tremendously powerful characters, it makes sense that groups would want to have their own superbeings that they could control.  So a government or something would get one power source and they'd stick with it, tinkering and trying to "get it right" the next time.

 

--

 

So, for mystics, how about a handful of secret schools located in remote locales?  You go there, train for 10 years, you come out as a 350 point (or whatever) sorcerer.  Sort of like Dr Strange and the Ancient One, but more like Mr. Weird and the Pretty Old Guy.  There are four or five people training at each of these schools at any one time, and the schools could be opposed to each other or allied with each other for whatever reason.

 

Also for mystics, how about Count Vlad and the Book of Secrets.  Or something.  You've got a 500 year old vampire who has been wandering through the campaign world, biting people and wreaking havoc.  And there are lots of problems that he's created that are still around.  He's a powerful master level vampire, but he's probably spawned hundreds of secondary level vamps in his time.  Some of those could be pretty powerful.  And stealing from the old Universal films, I bet he's woken up the Frankenstein monster a few times, and had a hand in creating a few werewolves, and probably been the head of several dangerous cults.  And these things are still in motion out there somewhere, just because Vlad got bored and wandered off doesn't mean the problems he created have been solved.  But all this time, he's been looking for the Book of Secrets, a powerful magical tome that would give him dominion over all the Earth.  Of course, the Book doesn't want to be found.  Like the opposite of the One Ring.  And it keeps making sure that it is found by some plucky heroes, who will carry it away from Count Vlad and hide it somewhere.  And so they get empowered in some way so they can act as guardians.  Maybe some of them learn magic, maybe some find powerful items, maybe some are vampires or werewolves who the Book was able to give back their self-control.  And they're only a guardian for a short time, enough to defeat this particular plot.  But like Count Vlad, the Book is a litterbug, and leaves lots of empowered people in its wake.

 

Mentalists?  Go back to the CIA experiments back in the 1960s, where they were giving LSD and other drugs to people because they thought it might trigger psychic powers (to be fair, the people who wanted to take LSD thought the same thing).  Well in this world, it worked.  Now most of those people would be pretty old by now, but suppose there was a latency period.  They take the drugs, nothing happens, and then the CIA shuts the program down.  But then a few years later, BAM!  Lots of new psis running around.  And some of these guys, of course, would then want to start their own psychic centers.  So around the world, you've got little druggie hippy communes, but within those there's a lot of experimentation trying to recreate (or improve upon) the original experiments.

 

You could also use some Lovecraftian stuff for your mentalists.  Back in the 1920s, there was a group of mathematicians and engineers who were corresponding with one another, trying to create some sort of machine.  The idea was that they could open a gateway to a parallel world, another dimension.  Well, it worked.  They completed 3 or 4 of these machines in different locations around the world.  The plan was to turn them on all at once, everybody walk through at the same time, and then congratulate each other for being so smart while all standing on this other world.  Nobody is exactly sure what happened, but it didn't go according to plan.  None of the scientists came out sane afterwards.  But many did exhibit strange powers afterwards.  Some of them were also horribly mutated.  As the years have gone by, people have tried recreating the experiment in different ways, with different precautions.  And many of them have come out very powerful, though maybe with a few "personality quirks".

 

For martial artists, what about stealing from Street Fighter?  Some evil organization wants to collect the very strongest fighters, because of reasons.  So they set up a series of secret tournaments around the world.  Then what starts as a more violent, underground sort of MMA competition starts getting weird.  While most of the people who show up for this thing are competent normals with a combat level or two and 10 pts of martial arts, you also get 100 to 150 point heroic characters who can beat up half a dozen people at once.  And you get people who have trained their whole lives, developing strange chi abilities.  So for the first time, these guys are meeting each other, training against each other, and saying "ooh I want to learn how to do that".  And pretty rapidly the best of these guys start improving and gaining points by the bucketload.  So now say that this thing started back in the 70s.  And that these underground tournaments have continued as the decades have went on.  So if you're a guy who thinks he's a badass, and you're kicking people's butts at your local karate tournament, maybe one day you get an invite to be at a certain place at a certain time.  And there are multiple levels to that, you start out with mere MMA level competition.  And if you win there, then they invite you to the real stuff.  Martial arts characters could have gone through that gauntlet at some point in their histories.  The whole thing is infested with organized crime, of course, so heroes probably wouldn't still be involved in it.  But it gives them a good connection to other martial artists.

 

Finally, be sure not to forget those good old comic book staples, radiation and genetic engineering.  You can't go wrong there.

[DShomshak]

ARTIFACT: THE PSI-GEMS

The man who found the six Psi-Gems sold them on eBay for just a few dollars each. He tried for hundreds, but nobody believed his claim he found the quarter-sized disks of faceted violet crystal in a meteorite. Most purchasers thought they were nothing but pretty baubles of glass. Over the coming months, though, a few people who encountered the jewels felt drawn to them. To press the gem to their forehead. And each person’s mind exploded with new awareness as the alien crystal blasted open the latent channels of psychic power.

 

People eventually realized the violet crystals could turn people into super-powered mentalists. Not everyone, of course — but enough to make each Psi-Gem worth a fortune. Or worth murder.

 

Fortunately, people who lose their Psi-Gem do not lose their super-powers. The origins are permanent. The jewels do bolster a person’s psychic energy somewhat, and some special powers may require the jewel as a focus, so few people would want to surrender a gem. Quite a few people wonder what increase of power might come to someone who obtained more than one crystal. Quite a few people also wonder who created the Psi-Gems, and why.

 

Far away, an Entity with a mind vast, cool, and unsympathetic watches the humans who attune themselves to the gems It sent. It does not actually care what these primitives do with Its gifts. It merely watches through the eyes of those who wear the gems. Studying. Evaluating. And perhaps, when it has learned enough… judging.

 

(This is of course a blatant ripoff of the matrix crystals from the Darkover series, with a touch of Lensmen and maybe a bit of the Infinity Gems. Just remember the old dictum: Steal from one, and it’s plagiarism; steal from many, and it’s research.)

 

ORIGIN SUBSTANCE

You already have the Psi Serum. Just let someone besides PSI obtain it, if players don’t want to be renegades from the organization.

 

DANGEROUS CHOICE: THE CHAYEFSKY PROCESS

Way back in the 1960s and ‘70s, renegade scientists such as Timothy Leary and John Lilly claimed that hallucinogenic drugs opened human minds to ultraterrestrial realms of existence. They claimed similar results for other hallucination-inducing processes such as floating in isolation tanks, or even better, combining drugs and other processes. Orthodox scientists suggested that hallucinating that one had telepathically contacted aliens, Lemurians, or the god Mescalito, was not reliable evidence that one had actually done so.

 

Eventually, though, someone found a combination of drugs and other therapies that sometimes really did spark paranormal powers. Rather more often, it drove people insane. Sometimes both, and these cases became deadly dangers to the world. A person who yearns for psychic powers can train his brain through a regimen of meditation and practice with mind-altering substances, preferably under the supervision of a qualified psychologist or shaman. But the process is never entirely safe, and so few reputable doctors or scientists will assist anyone who wants to risk his sanity for the sake of power. Which means one must go to disreputable scientists and clinics, which have dangers of their own. Some criminal doctors offer to grant Chayefsky Process empowerment in return for a period of service committing crimes on their behalf or for a third party. The methods for ensuring compliance are unpleasant but, fortunately, not foolproof.

 

(The name is an homage to Paddy Chayefsky, author of Altered States, of which this origin is a blatant imitation.)

 

POWER VENDOR: THE PSYCHOTRONIC CYBORGS OF DOCTOR SYNAPSE

See the Appendix to SHARED ORIGINS: THE DYNOTRON. Doctor Synapse himself would give powers to anyone able to pay, since it was all a scheme, or scam, to acquire super-powered slaves for his attempt to conquer France. Once people knew his psychotronic technology existed, though, and they had examples to study — say, taken from the brains of dead former clients — it was only a matter of time before other scientists were able to duplicate his brain implants.

 

Psychotronic implants are one of the safer and more reliable routes to mental powers, but the procedure costs a lot. Engineers and neurosurgeons with the requisite skills do not come cheap. Still, if you’ve got the money and the motivation, you can buy a headful of psi-inducing electronic widgets.

 

Even if you don’t have a few million dollars to spend, you might get psychotronic empowerment other ways. Like, a crime boss who wants psychotronic enforcers — or powers of his own — might grab a few random schmucks for his crooked brain surgeon to practice on, not expecting any of them to live. Only, the PC does and gets away to become a hero.

 

SHARED ACCIDENT: THE MATTOON INCIDENT

When people think of Mattoon, Illinois — if they think of it at all — the think of the Mad Gasser that terrorized this small town many decades ago. People reported strange odors and dizzy spells. The prevailing theory was that a mad anesthetist was gassing people. Before long, people even claimed they saw the Mad Gasser about his dastardly deeds, but no physical evidence was ever found. Panic became extreme, but the phenomena eventually stopped. When a sudden wave of nightmares, fainting spells, seizures and similar phenomena swept over Mattoon, EPA scientists diligently sampled everything in search of some drug or poison, but found nothing. Most people then put it down to a repeat of the Mad Gasser mass hysteria, and forgot it.

 

They should not have. Evil had visited Mattoon and left its enduring stain.

 

It was one of those rogue government programs that somehow keep happening in comic books. In this case, the Brainfreeze Project sought to develop a telepathic amplifier powerful enough for a government psychic to take control of and pacify an entire town, ostensibly as a way to quell riots. The project chose Mattoon for its history, trusting that only crackpots would see the experiments as anything but a repeat of the old hysteria — and the crackpots would discredit anyone else who looked at Mattoon.

 

The early tests were erratic but seemed promising. Then the machine ran out of control. Mattoon experienced a mass flip-out as minds were assaulted and randomly linked in brief telepathic fusions. The test psychic’s head finally exploded and the scientists — nearest and suffering the worst psychic attack — likewise died or went catatonic. In the cover-up, all records of the Brainfreeze Project were destroyed.

 

Of the thousands of people exposed to massive telepathic energies in the Mattoon Incident, an unknown number gained mental powers of varying strength. Many of them stayed in Mattoon. Others left, whether to escape their fellow psychics or for the normal reasons why modern people move so much. (And some people were just passing through at the time.) A few become heroes; most become villains. (Blame it on the trauma of the Incident rather than dramatic necessity for more villains than heroes.) Wherever they go, though, mentalists who gained their powers from the Mattoon Incident instinctively recognize each other. And eventually they all find themselves going back, if only briefly, to Mattoon, which has secretly become the weirdest town in America.

 

(Hey, I think I have a TV series here. Actually, two or three shows: The Mattoon Incident is a psychic version of the Dark Matter Wave from The Flash or the meteor fall from Smallville. It doesn’t even need much of a special effects budget because the powers are all mental.)

(Apologies to anyone from Mattoon.)

 

PROGRAM: VARIOUS

This is a motive, not a method. Pick an origin gimmick (the Chayefsky Project, psychotronic cyborgs, the Psi-Serum, whatever). Then pick a group that could sponsor an attempt to empower a group of mentalists. (A government is easiest, or at least brings the most resources and the most obvious motivation, but the sponsor could be anyone from a world-spanning criminal/subversive syndicate such as VIPER to a group of college grad students conducting dangerous experiments on themselves as in Flatliners.) Then decide what happened to the program and the other participants.

 

Note that if the sponsor acted under false pretenses, a mentalist would be about the best person to discover this. A mentalist hero with such an origin story gets an instant Hunted by the evil organization that sponsored the program.

 

HERITAGE: LEMURIAN LINEAGES

Homo Sapiens is not the first human species to live on Earth, nor the greatest. The ancient Lemurians achieved heights of technology and culture far surpassing present humanity. In particular, they developed vast psychic powers, both innate and augmented by their machines. Over the millennia, they genetically engineered “races” of biomachines that they controlled through telepathy.

 

When the Ice Age began, the Lemurians decided to let it happen as a necessary part of Earth’s geological history. Instead they moved underground to wait it out.

 

Unfortunately for the Lemurians, they built their biomachines too well. After millennia of direction by Lemurian minds, they became intelligent themselves. The Lemurians tried to raise their former robot slaves to full sentience and equality. Instead they got a slave rebellion that nearly wiped them out. The remaining Lemurians retreated to hidden and well-defended enclaves, while their creations became the malevolent Deros — Detrimental Robots. Unable to attack their former masters, the Dero vent their spite by using captured Lemurian technology to inflict all manner of harm on humanity, from engineering plagues to shooting airplanes from the sky.

 

A few Lemurians can’t stand living in their subterranean refuges. They live in hiding among humanity. Sometimes they even fall in love with humans, resulting in part-Lemurian families. These hybrids often manifest Lemurian mental powers to some degree, from the occasional psychic flash to full Lemurian telepathic and telekinetic mastery. Sometimes strange new powers appear through the genetic mixing with humanity. A few become heroes, whether from their own personal virtues or because their family has preserved advanced Lemurian ethics; rather more use their powers to exploit ordinary humans, just like most people would do if they had mental powers. There’s an entire aristocracy of such Lemurian lineages that imagine they are the secret masters of humanity.

 

The Dero hunt all Lemurians and their descendants. They use Lemurian technology to give super-powers to villains who act as their agents. Worst of all, the Dero have gotten to some of these half-Lemurians and corrupted them. Such traitors with full lemurian powers, augmented by ancient Lemurian technology but serving the Dero cause, can become among the world’s most dangerous villains.

 

(This is a mélange of several varieties of Hidden Race mythology. If it sounds a lot like the Eternals, Deviants and Subterraneans from arvel, well, I suspect Stan and Jack drew heavily on the Shaver Mystery version — the Celestials taking the place of the dero-creating Titans in Shaver’s version of the myth.)

 

(As Assault says, a Shared Origin is a statement about what exists in the world. Lemurian Lineages carry a lot of baggage and define a lot about the world; more, perhaps, than most GMs would like. But you can adapt the idea without using the Lemurian mythology. Maybe the super-powered families are descended from a handful of alien castaways, faerie lords exiled to the mortal world, or something like that. Possibly choose an ancestry that fits with some group you already want to fill the villainous role of the Dero; or make the source race the villains who Hunt the halfbreeds, whether from bigotry against “race mixing” or because the founders of the lineages were rebels in some way. The variations are innumerable.)

 

SPINOFF CHARACTERS (SCHOOL/MENTOR): THE HERMETIC ACADEMY

The school for sorcery is an ald trope, from the Medieval legend of the Devil's School to Hogwarts. Hermetic magic is well suited for this origin because it's a very scholarly, academic kind of magic. It's also copiously documented, so you don't have to make up a lot of stuff (if you don't mind wading through occult books, which IRL are a lot duller than they are in Fantasy. Fortunately, you're mostly using the lore just to enhance the "look" of characters. You don't need to know the theory yourself.)

 

Define a lodge of mystics to sponsor the school. Decide how they look for students -- a possible source of conflicts. Like, steal the Potterverse conceit of rivalry between the "old wizarding families" and people born outside the Mystic World. A PC's school rival can become his arch-nemesis when he becomes a hero.

 

The Hermetic Academy can continue to play a role in the campaign beyond a source for more characters. PCs can revisit their alma mater to consult its copious archives of eldritch lore, investigate mysteries that could present conflicts of interest for the staff, sponsor new students to the school, etc. Or have a group of former students who became villains loot and destroy the school, giving PC graduates the challenge of rebuilding it.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Lord Liaden]

 

ORIGIN SUBSTANCE

You already have the Psi Serum. Just let someone besides PSI obtain it, if players don’t want to be renegades from the organization.

 

Interesting continuity datum about the PSI Serum: Dr. Sebastian Poe, who invented the serum, was betrayed by his underlings in PSI and arrested. In 1995 he was tried and sentenced to twenty years in Stronghold. That means that officially, his prison sentence was up last year.

[segerge]

Interesting continuity datum about the PSI Serum: Dr. Sebastian Poe, who invented the serum, was betrayed by his underlings in PSI and arrested. In 1995 he was tried and sentenced to twenty years in Stronghold. That means that officially, his prison sentence was up last year.

 

If he didn't escape from Stronghold in the 2009 breakout.  Don't remember off the top of my head if he was one of the escapees.

 

EDIT: Checked my copy of CVV2.  He didn't in official canon.

[bigdamnhero]

A bunch of different serums/substances, families, schools, equipment sources, alien races etc, each tailored to one of the four main food groups, and maybe some of the more specific archetypes.

I like the idea of giving the players multiple choices to pick from. And even if you have multiple players pick similar origins, that just gives them something to bond over. "You're from a family of psionics? My family were all magicians. Were your Thanksgivings as weird as ours?"

 

Mentalists: in most genre examples, people with psionic abilities tend to either be born/bred with them (like B5's Psi Corp) or got them through dubious experimentation (Firefly's River Tam). In one game I ran, people who had been attacked psionically could try to learn psionic abilities themselves; without that experience, it's like trying to describe color to a blind man. So the campaign started off with the PCs getting attacked, surviving, and then developing their abilities from there over many XP dumps. But here, you could just establish that as backstory.

 

Becoming a mystic usually involves a long period of study, so that lends itself towards families and/or schools. Or sometimes they find a powerful object ala Dr. Fate's helmet. It's worth noting that many mystic artifacts are hard to take away (see again Fate's helmet), so it's possible to have an item-based origin without having a Focus-based character build.

 

I like the concept, and look forward to seeing the finished product!

[DShomshak]

Interesting continuity datum about the PSI Serum: Dr. Sebastian Poe, who invented the serum, was betrayed by his underlings in PSI and arrested. In 1995 he was tried and sentenced to twenty years in Stronghold. That means that officially, his prison sentence was up last year.

The most interesting aspect, from my POV, would be the example of a supervillain who actually finished his sentence and was released instead of escaping. You don't see it happen that often in comics.

 

Dean Shomshak

[bigdamnhero]

The most interesting aspect, from my POV, would be the example of a supervillain who actually finished his sentence and was released instead of escaping. You don't see it happen that often in comics.

That's the set-up for the classic Astro City "Tarnished Angel" storyline. But yeah, I sure can't think of many other examples.

[DShomshak]

Incidentally, Tom Deitz's "Soulsmith" trilogy presents a setting of mystical families that might serve as inspiration for secret lineages of mentalists. It's been many years since I read it though, so I don't feel confident in trying to give any details.

 

As an added note, the Shaver Mystery version of Lemurians also included the Teros, or Integrative Robots. (Shaver had a unique way with abbreviation.) The Teros were good, or at least not warped and evil like the Deros. Lemurian races were diverse -- some multi-armed, the better to operate machines with complicated controls (and the source for Hindu myths of multi-armed gods), while others were of mixed human and animal heritage and forms (and the source for satyrs and other man/animal hybrids in various mythologies). So if you really want a six-armed martial artist or tech-wielding centaur from a Hidden Race enclave, the Lemurian setup lets you do that, too.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

That's the set-up for the classic Astro City "Tarnished Angel" storyline. But yeah, I sure can't think of many other examples.

Steeljack is also unusual for comics in being visibly middle-aged. Yeah, there are a few guys in Marvel and DC with a little gray at their temples but most characters -- heroes and villains -- seem caught in perpetual 20s/30s. One more reason he's one of my favorite characters and Astro City is currently my favorite title. Busiek loves the classic tropes, but he isn't bound by them.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Amorkca]

Isn't Luke Cage, Hero for Hire an ex-con?

[pinecone]

Yep, but he was "wrongly convicted" unless They have retconned it since...

[assault]

More a postscript than a real Bump...

 

I've decided to go with a generic version of Esper's origin: possessed/in symbiosis with by an alien thingie.

 

It's a little awkward coming up with a true heroic version, but the human side can be (mostly) dominant.

 

There are also echoes of the Australian superhero Dark Nebula, which is nice.

 

Naturally I've become distracted by something else. I'm putting together a vaguely promising megavillain, who is unrelated to the shared origins.

 

Although... his could be a shared origin itself, since it's kind of "powers bestowed by aliens". It could work with the Esper origin, either though the same or different aliens.

[Lord Liaden]

When aliens come into the realm of origin types, I always rather liked the cosmically-powerful alien, or "space god," who empowers a new super for its own purposes... which need not be revealed or defined initially. You can wait until you discover an idea you can spin into an interesting story arc.