Plausible origin story for a Cosmic Gem wielder

[AlgaeNymph]

How would I handle the backstory of a character who has a Cosmic Gem?  Specifically:

 

• How did they get the gem?
• What were they able to do right at the start?
• How long did it take to become proficient?

 

Given that a true Cosmic Gem is essentially a do-anything VPP it’s important to know how much one can do how fast.  And why it became available.

[assault]

PC or NPC?

Who are they?

 

The Gem could easily have just fallen from the sky. Its backstory before that can be filled in later. At most you might want to know if someone else is looking for it (a Hunted?).

 

Or, of course, you could write a novella about it. Such things tend to be rather useless in a game though.

 

In theory it could "grant wishes" right from the start. Or it could just allow the owner to fly, zap things and be protected from harm.

 

Learning its full potential could be as easy as becoming telepathically linked to it. It could tell the character "everything" about it - or at least what it wants them to know, or what they think to ask ask about.

[Tjack]

   I think the cliche is “Take this Lens, Kimball Kinnison.”  Or the comic book version “Take this Ring, Hal Jordan of Earth.”  See also “Take this Star Brand, Ken Connell.”    *It’s been around for a long time.*
   The Gem (a.k.a. McGuffin) could have shown up by itself either sensing this was the right person to wield it (that’s a problem all its own depending on if it was looking for a hero or some schmuck it could manipulate)

   It could have been sent by someone else. Lensmen/Guardians/Evil League of Evil, whoever.

  Maybe it was sent back in time to/by the guy who just got it in some freaky time loop paradox thing.

  How about the guy doesn’t know where it came from (see DC’s current Blue Beetle) that can be a plot hook to last for a while and provide a lot of good episodes after the player and GM think of something neat to do. 
 

   The power level question is a different horse of a different color.  VPP’s are notoriously difficult for new players to run. Hell even experienced players sometimes get bogged down in the fast “at the table” math required.  You’re a new poster so I’m not sure if I’m trying to “teach Grandma how to suck eggs” or not.  Maybe a new player might have more fun with an easier to run multi-power?  At least at first and then convert it into a VPP when the character has the points to really make it sing. This can also be a playable moment when the “True Power” of the Gem reveals itself.

 

EDIT;  I misremembered the name of Star Brand.  Ken Connell is the superhero....Ken Jennings is the new host on Jeopardy.   D’oh!!!

[Steve]

I strongly suggest avoiding VPPs at all costs for new players unless they have a pre-written list of abilities. Even then, if the list is too long, you’ll run into decision paralysis which will bog down the game.

There’s nothing wrong with starting out with a Multipower or several Multipowers (one for attack and defenses and maybe a second one for movement powers). Avoid a big list here too. It can always be added to with experience.

 

Others have already given pretty good origin advice. Being given it by a cosmic group of some kind (Lensman/Green Lantern Corps) brings in a background for nearly endless plotlines involving that group, it’s enemies and many potential character Disadvantages (5th) or Complications (6th).

[Greywind]

I'd suggest reading Green Lantern from when Kyle Rayner was given the ring. Ron Marz did an excellent hero's journey with him.

[Duke Bushido]

In this way has the universe perpetuated itself for more millennia than even I have lived.  There is a draw here, and such things have fascinated me for the entirety of my life.  The gasses and particles are indeed infinite, so far as I can tell.  I, who can travel for for thousands of years at a whim, and race at such speeds as to make the light hard and brittle-- I who have enjoyed so much passing that speed at which the light falls apart and flows as ripples of liquid, moved each by only the resonance of its companions-- I have never found an end to the particles.  I have outstripped the light, but the gasses and the dust exceed me.

 

Even in their infinity, though, they are not ubiquitous.  There are great deserts of purest black, so vast as to be unimaginable to the lesser things I have encountered in my travels.  Even then, these deserts are ringed by the particles. They are infinite, but not evenly spread.  There are currents, eddies, movements-- some no more than simple rotations-- within the gasses.  There are places -- places they do not wish to be?  I have never been able to communicate with them; I have never been able to fully understand them.  I have always been fascinated by them, however.  Outside of me, only the particles and the light appear to capable of true movement, and even the light will falter eventually.  What makes us different?  What lets us move freely?

 

For me, I do not know.  I believe it to be my whims and my desires, but that was so long ago, when none of the suns I see now had even existed, nor had those whose discarded matter form the ones I perceive now.  I have no reason to want it and therefore no word to express how long ago it was I felt my last whim, but it doesn't matter.  The particles entertain and interest me, for I have never cracked their mystery.  I know only that they move, and that is enough.  I have learned that they are drawn, and after following them to thousands upon uncountable thousands of migrations, I have learned to feel the draw myself.  It does not excite me nor pull upon me the way it does the gasses, but I am able to sense it.  Soon the particles will begin their slow migration, creeping across the distances of All That Is, making their way here, to the Draw, and begin to press into it, one upon the other.

 

I watch as slowly, meticulously, the first of the particles is caught in the draw.  It spends a few thousand years moving closer, slowly increasing its speed, circling the draw, closer and closer, and by the time it is a single rotating speck in the center of the draw, billions of its companions have made their way closer, slowly forming orderly rows spilling from the vast clumps and clouds on the periphery of my perceptions.  These few lines becomes hundreds, then thousands, then begin to blur as more pour in, looking like nothing so much as a vast disk of dust, formed by billions and billions of orderly rows of the particles, pressed into gasses, pressed into dust, as they follow their mindless call to the Draw, spinning slowly and lazily in upon each other, pressed tighter and tighter and as I am old now, and tired, and I have no desire to make another mad dash away at the last minute, I move slowly back.  I have watched this phenomenon effectively forever.  I do not remember a time before I would watch the particles as they spanned All That Is.  I do not remember a time before I watched them mindlessly fall together, crushing into each other, tighter and tighter until they created a bubble of disturbance, at which point the Draw would magnify a million fold and the gasses crushed together and in an instant would ignite with a painful roar that tore through the All and a blistering wave of heat that always stirred and ... somehow frightened me.

 

I had a healthy respect for the stars, particularly when they were at their newest.  There was something about the heat they shed-- it wasn't like the light; it wasn't like the bubble of heavy nothing.  The heat had a unique power, for I could feel it.  At the right distance, it would energize and elevate me-- make me feel complete and at peace.  Too close, and there was a sensation the heat gave that nothing else could.  I have no word for it; it is terrifying, and it reduces me, removes abilities from me and replaces them with warnings and---  I have no words.  I do not wish to experience it.  I have subjected myself to it several times for study after learning that the effect is not permanent.  I will not do it again, because one of those warnings is the idea of a concept I have come to call "yet."  The effect is not permanent.  Yet.

 

I move far, far out to that distance that should, based on the size of the this Draw and its collection, should be ideal for maximizing the pleasant sensations, and I wait. 

 

Something is different this time.  The collection has begun to contract and the Draw has bubbled, and the collection ignited, but it was so soon, and so small!  It burned the barest fraction of what it should have, even at that size!  I had scarcely rotated my existence completely through the zone of pleasure two times when this new miniature star flung apart-- showing burning chunks of itself impossibly far out of the Bubbled Nothing-- I perceived huge chunks of the star material burning their way through my existence, and the sensation...  I still had no words.  I would have to devote time to creating them, as it was obvious that this unpleasant sensation could be had in varying intensities.  This had been the highest.  For the first time, I had found myself contemplating the preference of non-existence to continuing to endure the sensation.  There was no logic in that, as without existence, I would not be able to perceive the sensation nor decide a preference.  The sensation had been so intense as to have deprived me of logical thought!  Never before had--

 

 

What is this?!

 

There, at the center of the former Heavy Nothing; at the center of the Bubble-- the very heart of what had once been the Draw-- was a thing!  A new thing!  I had almost not perceived it, tiny as it was-- barely larger than the particles whose dances I enjoyed.

 

No.  This is not a new thing.  This is a thing I have perceived before.  It lay floating, rotating lazily in the heart of the Draw.  It was a strange and altogether hideous thing to behold, as it radiated so many energies, and it was so jarring in structure- it had taken many perceptions to determine its symmetry, as it was along only a singe plane!  I had encountered many poorly-symmetrical things, but this was the first time I had encountered one in a Draw.  It was the first time I had encountered one out among the particles.  They were not common, and they were not all alike, but they seemed to be grouped by type and were usually part of the smaller Heavy Nothings that were often cast off by new stars when they exploded as this one had.  I pushed my perceptions to their utmost periphery- pushed to a distance I had not attempted since the moment I came to be-- and I found no such smaller Heaviness within reach of the light this star had once generated, even so briefly.  I pushed beyond where that light now was, and still found nothing.  There was no need to perceive further; I had already established that only I and a certain of the particles could move faster than the light of a star.  

 

Why was this thing here?   For what purpose had the particles created it?  Was it...   was it intended for me?  Had this happened before, outside of my horribly-limited perceptions?  Was this how I came to be?  Had I a companion or perhaps even a progenitor who was formed this very way?  Had my hypothetical progenitor perceived such a thing?  What message was in the energies the tiny hideous thing radiated?  What message was in the energies that even now dwindled away from it's envelope?  I imprinted everything in my perceptions and began to study them, to develop experiments but even as I did so my perceptions indicated that the energies from the object were beginning to dwindle.  What would happen should they cease?

 

I had never done something in haste before.  There had never been a need: all things lasted long enough for me to learn everything about them, and nothing had ever changed as rapidly as did this object.  I understood that it should be preserved were I to study it further, were I to learn anything from it.  The shock of its coming into being had created within my understanding so many questions about things I had never before questioned, and for the first time-- probably because I had begun to understand Yet-- I wondered if a thing might happen that would never happen again.

I reached out my perceptions again to the tiny object, which I now understood was delicate, and I understood that it was possible for at least this one thing to be ever more delicate than fragile light, and I probed and questioned and learned and I gathered what particles I could-- those distributed throughout my physicality and those I passed through as I moved.  I pushed and squeezed and forced and eventually I had created from them heat-- I marveled at this ability.  I had never before wanted to effect anything.  It was an interesting phenomenon. I pushed the heat toward the object and enveloped one within the other as I remembered the path to the small Heavy Nothing I had seen that was covered with objects like this one.  Perhaps it would be safe amongst those objects sorted similar to itself.  I began to move, and as I thought it, we were outpacing even the youngest ripples of light.  I had to take care; the object might not survive contact with light in that state.

 

My travel was slowed by the decision to avoid solid light, and by the need of perceiving the state of the object and its responses to the heat and the various gasses I offered.  I did not want to destroy the object, but did not know without experimenting what the object needed in order to perpetuate.  By the time I had brought it to the Nothing filled with objects like it, I had determined that the object was in deed stable, and radiated similar to how it had radiated at the moment of its creation.  I had reveled in my ability to affect the components of All That Is, but did not account for the affect that altering myself to do this would have on me.  My physicality had never been so small or so compressed, and the sensations were overwhelming.  As we neared the small bubble of the Heavy Nothing I had sought, the bubble was affecting me in ways I had never before been affected.  My physicality compressed as if it were merely particles in a Draw, and nothing I attempted could undo or even counter this.  I was barely able to place the object onto the warm surface of the Nothing before all my perceptions were overwhelmed with sensations of Self.  I could not force my perceptions to the external, nor could I control my movements or my placement in existence; there was nothing but the sensation of being crushed, compacted, tighter and tighter and in my single moment of clarity I wondered if this was how particles were formed, and if I had been wrong to assume their permanence and suddenly I was dwarfed by the object I had placed on the surface of the Nothing and there was heat unlike any star had provided for me-- worse than even having the burning fragments tear through me-- and I felt my form compress and harden and the indescribable heat burned and hardened my physicality and I fought to keep my connection to All That Is and my awareness and my knowledge and then I was surrounded by the strange matter of the Nothing---

 

I could feel the object.  I was deeper into the nothing that it was, and I was unable to move or to use any of my abilities to affect myself.  I could still feel the All.  With practice, perhaps I could affect the All, and extricate myself.  Perhaps I was still eternal, and had, in my haste to salvage the object for study, forced myself into the next stage of my existence.  I wondered if I would have a successor, or if perhaps this is the method by which I would sire one.

 

Above me, the object stirred.  I reached out to the All.  I pushed it to affect the other objects on this Nothing; I willed the All to summon aid for the object above me.  I reached out to the object, planting within it the understanding that I alone had kept it alive; that I alone could continue to nurture it.  Find me.   Find me.

 

 

 

 

------------------------

 

 

 

There.  That's how Gem users and Gems are made.

 

 

 

 

 

[Greywind]

9 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

There.  That's how Gem users and Gems are made.

 

 

 

What about the Hollow Grahams?

[Duke Bushido]

It's got to be late.

 

It took me like eight minutes to catch that, and I have a passion for puns.

 

I live in the wrong damned time zone to participate on this board.  😕

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

On 2/20/2021 at 8:51 PM, AlgaeNymph said:

How would I handle the backstory of a character who has a Cosmic Gem?  Specifically:

 

• How did they get the gem?
• What were they able to do right at the start?
• How long did it take to become proficient?

 

Given that a true Cosmic Gem is essentially a do-anything VPP it’s important to know how much one can do how fast.  And why it became available.

 

Of the three known Cosmic Gems, only one is unaccounted for, the one claimed by the renegade StarGuard Tathregar a hundred thousand years ago, which was lost when he committed suicide by diving into a star. The Gem survived, though. Perhaps it was ejected on a solar prominence, and drifted through space until landing on Earth. Lots of other interesting things got here that way.

 

Galaxia has had her gem long enough to build an interstellar reputation, and her powers are still relatively limited in scope. As we've been told a gem's power is proportionate to the will and power of its possessor, we shouldn't assume that every wielder inevitably progresses to "do-anything VPP."

 

How long did it take to become proficient? Speed of plot.   If you want someone with a Cosmic Gem to start lower-powered and build to their full potential over time, I would suggest looking at the write-up for any of the Meteor Mans as a template for their starting phase.

 

Rather than increasing the wielder's power, perhaps you could instead buy off the Focus Limitation. That's one of the things I changed about Galaxia.  As written if she's beaten you can grab the gem, and most of her power goes with it.

[AlgaeNymph]

On 2/20/2021 at 6:27 PM, assault said:

Or, of course, you could write a novella about it. Such things tend to be rather useless in a game though.

That's pretty much the idea in the first place, and since it's not for a game the aforementioned utility won't be an issue.

 

4 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

How long did it take to become proficient? Speed of plot.

That's...pretty convenient.  And pretty in-genre now that I think about it.

 

Let's suppose it does start at the 90pt VPP level.  What sort of story can we get from that?

[Greywind]

Depends on what the character can do with those points. That would be dependent upon their personality and drives.