Cheap Supers

[Chris Goodwin]

(Setting riff-ish. Feel free to add or ask for details, ideas for powers, characters, etc.)

 

This is a world much like the real world, with no powers up until this point.

 

There's this guy who somehow figured out how to reliably give people super powers. It involves mixing together a concoction of noxious chemicals (things like fabric softener, plant food, glass cleaner, and the like) in the right amounts and proportions, then drinking it down (turns out about a large spoonful is enough). Most households have half or more of the required products around, and if you didn't have any of them at all you could pick them up at your local MegaMart for less than $75.

 

Anyway, the guy posted the formula on the web.

 

If you've gotten the right things in the right proportion (and there's lots of room for error), it doesn't harm you (though you may not feel very good for a while afterward), and you absolutely will develop some kind of powers. Get it wrong, and you get pretty sick, get your stomach pumped, spend a couple of weeks in the hospital, and no powers (but you can try again later). It's hard to get it wrong, though.

 

Here's the catch: You're stuck with what you get; there's no way to reverse the process, and it only works once. You get a random power or suite of powers at a random power level. There are no monkey's paws or Wild Cards style black queens; no one dies, no one spends the rest of their life burning to death while simultaneously regenerating. But, some of the powers are less than useful, and in fact some are less than useless. There's plenty of folks who can telekinetically lift about an ounce, or who can hold their breath for four hours. There's also a guy who can turn his skin blue, in patches -- just blue, not any other color, and he can't turn it back. (He's considering just finishing it up; he looks pretty hideous, and at the moment about 40% of his skin is blue.) There's also people with pretty much any set of powers you can think of, at any power level. One woman is terraforming Mars; she started by flying it to the Sun-Earth L4 point and is hydrating it by throwing comets at it. She burned off all of her clothes once by standing on the surface of the Sun. (Distribution is about 40% less than useful, 30% low powered supers, 20% medium powered, less than 10% high powered, and the balance extremely high or borderline cosmic.

 

The type of power you get, and the power level, is completely unrelated to how much of the stuff you drink, though it's possible it may somehow be related to things like the exact proportions of which chemicals you mix in, as well as your own body chemistry, state of mind, phases of the moon, sun in Scorpio with Mars ascendant, etc. There are too many variables for anyone to reliably figure them all out.

 

What would this world be like?

[kahuna's bro]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

super fast and acurate reflexes with spped to match

[Tradewind]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

Right when it first happened things would go into absolute chaos, even without the super serum killing people you'd see thousands if not millions of deaths as people experiment with their powers or attempt to identify powers in less than sensible ways ("Maybe I can bounce, let's head to the roof!"). Most likely, at least at first, the government would try to crack down, sending the FBI and Homeland Security to every reported sighting, I'd give it about 6 months or so before enough people have 'Sup'ed Up' that prevention would no longer be considered a viable option. Fast forward to two years in society would likely re-balance itself, there would be laws on the books to punish the guardians of children under the age of 17 who 'Sup' and there would be debates in congress as to how to classify and categorize people with powers for forensic purposes. This would be different than the X-Men style 'Registration Act' though mostly due to the fact that gaining powers is a choice. Most likely the debate would be fairly similar to the push and pull of gun control in the United States, and likely even only two years in most states would have power classification and registration (and fines for failing notify the authorities if you take the serum). Most likely the balance of power between crime and law enforcement would remain roughly the same after the initial chaos, after things are proven safe it's probable that taking the serum would be all but mandatory for law enforcement agencies and similarly almost every criminal would happily take any edge they could get. You'd see some early spurts of vigilantism but inside a year you'd probably see a major crackdown on such activities in most large cities while small cities could go either way, embracing the extra help or not tolerating such activity at all. All told I think you'd see about 20% of the US's and 10-15% of the rest of the worlds population choosing to take on abilities. At least that's what I'd expect in that scenario.

[JmOz]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

Well I think everyone would have powers, but the low and useless would be at least socialy second class citizens.

[Clonus]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

This catches on _big_ in the third world. Every revolutionary movement and band of guerillas will be among the first to take their chances. In short order there are a bunch of superhuman dictators. The entire male population of Iran is lining up to get the powers that will let them fight off the American invasion they've been waiting for since forever. The American presence in the Middle East becomes kind of unmanageable.

[BoloOfEarth]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

If some key ingredient in the Supe-Up formula is only manufactured in the US, the government would find a way to regulate and restrict sales of it outside the US. (Look at the restrictions imposed on Sudafed sales after it became used for creating meth.)

 

Agree with Tradewind; still a number of deaths related to Supe-Up as people try to figure out what power(s) they have. Also possibly from people drinking modified versions of the Supe-Up formula in an attempt to go from a useless power to a useful one.

 

Fly-by-night companies come out with products "guaranteed to increase your Suped-Up abilities!" Who knows, some of these might actually work for a fraction of the population for relatively short times.

 

"Pure Human" fringe groups, equating Supe-ing Up with drug use, pushing for laws against all Supes.

[Badger]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

(Setting riff-ish. Feel free to add or ask for details, ideas for powers, characters, etc.)

 

This is a world much like the real world, with no powers up until this point.

 

There's this guy who somehow figured out how to reliably give people super powers. It involves mixing together a concoction of noxious chemicals (things like fabric softener, plant food, glass cleaner, and the like) in the right amounts and proportions, then drinking it down (turns out about a large spoonful is enough). Most households have half or more of the required products around, and if you didn't have any of them at all you could pick them up at your local MegaMart for less than $75.

 

Anyway, the guy posted the formula on the web.

 

If you've gotten the right things in the right proportion (and there's lots of room for error), it doesn't harm you (though you may not feel very good for a while afterward), and you absolutely will develop some kind of powers. Get it wrong, and you get pretty sick, get your stomach pumped, spend a couple of weeks in the hospital, and no powers (but you can try again later). It's hard to get it wrong, though.

 

Here's the catch: You're stuck with what you get; there's no way to reverse the process, and it only works once. You get a random power or suite of powers at a random power level. There are no monkey's paws or Wild Cards style black queens; no one dies, no one spends the rest of their life burning to death while simultaneously regenerating. But, some of the powers are less than useful, and in fact some are less than useless. There's plenty of folks who can telekinetically lift about an ounce, or who can hold their breath for four hours. There's also a guy who can turn his skin blue, in patches -- just blue, not any other color, and he can't turn it back. (He's considering just finishing it up; he looks pretty hideous, and at the moment about 40% of his skin is blue.) There's also people with pretty much any set of powers you can think of, at any power level. One woman is terraforming Mars; she started by flying it to the Sun-Earth L4 point and is hydrating it by throwing comets at it. She burned off all of her clothes once by standing on the surface of the Sun. (Distribution is about 40% less than useful, 30% low powered supers, 20% medium powered, less than 10% high powered, and the balance extremely high or borderline cosmic.

 

The type of power you get, and the power level, is completely unrelated to how much of the stuff you drink, though it's possible it may somehow be related to things like the exact proportions of which chemicals you mix in, as well as your own body chemistry, state of mind, phases of the moon, sun in Scorpio with Mars ascendant, etc. There are too many variables for anyone to reliably figure them all out.

 

What would this world be like?

 

Hard to get the proportions wrong? Trust me with my chemical "expertise" I'd find a way.

[casualplayer]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

Most, if not all, of the ingredients would become ridiculously expensive as a result of being government regulated and prohibited. And just about every person in the military and law enforcement would be given a swig.

 

Things would seriously go off the rails as individuals developed power to match or exceed that of governments. We would end up with a few good super-samaritans, probably a few thousand celebu-titans all acting like spoiled Gravitars but if power and will coincide we are going to have conquerors.

[OddHat]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

With those numbers (10% high powered, something like 1% cosmic), your talking potentially just over 3 million Cosmic Supers just in the USA. Call it 1 million Cosmic Supers if only 1 in 3 people try it. With normal demographics, that's 20,000 cosmically powerful sociopaths. Call it a bare minimum of 200 people, just in the USA, who would both destroy the world for the hell of it and have the power to do so.

 

Earth goes boom. Everyone not space worthy dies. Re-roll your characters.

[novi]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

Hmm, I think oddhat may be right, depending on how many cosmically powerful beings there are.

 

Though, just to over-think things, terraforming lady could do even better: drag both mars and venus to earth's L4 or L5 point and set them orbiting each other, which would give them stable inclinations. Spin up venus so it has approx. 24 hour days. Now, it gets trickier as she needs to bring a bunch of hydrogen to venus to replace what it lost, as well as cool the planet off some how. Once it cools off, I think it still has just enough internal heat left to run plate tectonics and a magnetic field. Mars is both easier and trickier. Moving closer to the sun and dropping a coupe hundred comets on it is almost all you need to do. But if she wants to go all the way, she'll need to figure out how to re-liquefy the core of Mars so that it can have plate tectonics and a magnetic field.

 

That gives you three habitable planets. Now, if I could just recall how fast a transfer orbit is between lagrange points...

[Gnaskar]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

I've done some thinking about a similar setting, though I used vastly different distributions. 90% useless or cosmetic, 9% useful but dependent on outside power source (ability to store and release heat, instinctive understanding of how to build a battle-suit, etc), 0.9% low powered,0.09% medium powered, 0.009% high powered, and the remaining 0.001% cosmically powerful "Alphas". In addition, it was only a third of a generation who got powers, so there's only about 200 Alphas running around. They still wrecked havoc, though.

 

Now, to your world. It takes about 100$ to build the super serum presuming you have none of the needed stuff, correct? That's my monthly "fun" budget, and I'm living on a student loan, meaning just about the entire population of Norway (only counting those older than about 14) could scrape the funding together. However, there aren't that many people in Zimbabwe who could afford that, even if they saved up a whole year. I would expect a lot of third world looting as desperate citizens scramble for the ingredients before local war lords and governments lock all the stuff down. The Wild Card nature of the serum, that you have no clue what powers you'll get means there will be a massive turnover in leadership and massive worsening of conflicts in Africa (and South America, I suppose, but I'm no expert on how things work there). The gears shift from "the richest war lord wins" to "the war lord with the best power wins" and the number of warbands increases by an order of magnitude.

 

I figure any form of government collapses from Nigeria to Zimbabwe coast to coast. Half of Africa becomes a battlefield. The sudden shift in power balance triggers every other brewing conflict as well, from Tibet, Burma/Myanmar to Northern Ireland and the Confederate States of America. Every fringe group and maniac now has access to a super weapon (assuming the group has over about 15 members they'll have a complete superteam at their disposal). As each group gains publicity through crime or insurrection others flock to them, polarizing the populations.

 

I'd guess it would take about a year before some kind of order is restored. Presuming Oddhat's apocalyptic vision hasn't already come to pass, of course. After that, things can go one of two ways: Either we get an authoritarian rule where the most powerful supers make the rules, or there are enough powerful super democrats (meaning believers in democracy, rather than member of an American political party that represents 2% of the world) to give us a global democracy. Note that this isn't saying dystopia or utopia; most likely it will be something in between in either case.

[Certified]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

Human rights groups smuggling the formula to women and doctors in third world countries to help empower them.

 

Dictatorships would spring up around the world as governments fall to cosmically powered beings or governments retain power though cosmically powered super patriots. Pick your pleasure, or take some of both. This could lead to a breaking up of larger countries US, Canada, Australia and China all being likely suspects.

 

New social orders would emerge, this may be more pervasive in some countries and less in others. As the numbers of supers ramps up law enforcement and military may feel the need or be mandated to juice just to keep up.

 

Really you might be looking at 10 to 50 years of chaos and upheaval as new societies are created. One thing in question is do super powered parents pass on their powers to their children? If so you may see breeding programs. People with crap powers looking to better things for their children. Maybe the Blue man mates with a woman who can turn invisible or create skin plates of armor. This may lead to empires of Cosmics who eventually become a new ruling class or empires. If powers are not hereditary there may be less social restructuring, at least around bloodlines.

 

Another thing to consider is power. Someone who can generate electrical blasts might help remove or diminish the world's dependence on oil, whether he likes it or not. Strapped to a battery the more he fights the more power the grid has.

[OddHat]

Re: Cheap Supers

 

I usually use the following numbers:

 

1 in 1,000 with the potential to get any Superpowers whatsoever. This allows some faint hope of recruitment programs working while keeping the pool small.

1 in 100,000 manifesting Superpowers at some point.

1 in 10,000,000 high power Supers (which give you about 30 high powered Supers in the US, or more if you go with the idea that high power Supers will be drawn to wealth and one another)

1 in 1,000,000,000 with Cosmic levels of power (giving you 6 or 7 Cosmic Supers on Earth; enough that the PCs can run into more than one in a campaign, not so many that you as GM can't keep track of them)

 

Of course in any story or campaign the real number of Supers is the number the author / GM wants, and the real reason they don't destroy the world off screen is that then most stories would be over.