Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

[freakboy6117]

Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

 

basically the thing that starts and stops witch hunts is funding if you have the local lord or bishop on your side paying for the trials the witch hunters and the propagandists usually priests or what have you then its easy to set up that sort of mass hysterical denouncing. if the funding isn't there or is working in the opposite direction then these things tend not to get out of hand. like a lot of things that don't really make a lot of sense in life it starts making sense when you realise someones getting rich off it

[massey]

Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

 

The problem with a uniform event causing all the powers is that there are a lot of character concepts that don't fit within that event. Hard to have a 1,000 year old immortal if everyone got superpowers last Tuesday.

 

Years ago I saw a nice little formula to figure out how many supers a nation would have. I think it was on this board. You took into account population, level of advanced technology, number of different cultures, history of and interest in mysticism, geographic area, military funding, tradition of martial training, and several other factors. So the US, being a technologically advanced nation (and thus more likely to have active particle accelerators and research labs, etc), is more likely to have tech-based supers than a country of similar population but 3rd world technology. We have a well-funded military, so you've got a higher chance for super-soldier funding. We have different cultures, so you can representatives of weird mythologies showing up. A place like China, with a massive population but little cultural diversity, has less of the important factors and so is less likely to have the right elements for lots of supers to show up.

 

I like the idea that supers to some degree have always existed. They didn't dress up in costume, but their legends persist. In American folklore, guys like Paul Bunyan or John Henry could have been early superhumans. But in the days leading up to WWII, the first public supers started dressing in costume. The start of the Atomic Age, the public appearance of supers, the interaction of supers, this would basically lead them to reach critical mass. More supers running around together will lead to more and more supers. This kind of thing draws the attention of alien empires, who invade, causing more supers. Why does the Skrull Empire get like two guys? The Shi'ar get one team? Because Earth has a chain reaction of super activity.

 

1962: Professor Amazing creates a robot. Robot turns evil.

1963: Robot builds a hot female android to infiltrate Professor Amazing's lab. Androida falls in love with Professor Amazing.

1964: Robot empowers street thug with radiation beam. Steelface attacks Professor's lab. Steelface is driven off.

1965: Androida gives birth (???) to Professor Amazing Jr. Robot's first form is destroyed. Robot's second form is activated in cave outside city.

1967: Steelface has first of 3 kids.

1969: Robot irradiates 6 humans with Evolvo Ray. They change into dinosaur men and attack city. Professor Amazing changes them back at the end of the battle. Their DNA retains traces of the change. They will go on to have 19 kids, 7 of whom will develop some type of super-power.

 

And so on. In part because of the costumes, in part because of more modern news coverage, in part because of the appearance in 1938 of The Caped Wonder, hero beloved by all, the superhuman population exploded in the latter half of the 20th Century. Eventually you'll get some Crisis type event that wipes out a decent chunk of the supers population, keep things from getting out of control.

[kahuna's bro]

Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

 

good theory cou could even say most of thee ww2 supers scaled down thir actitveite thinking they were needed less ater the war corresponding to the real world decline of superheroes following the printing of seduction of the innocent

[DShomshak]

Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

 

In my long-running Seattle Sentinels/Keystone Konjurors series of campaigns, I began with the standard "Golden Age/Silver Age Reboot/More from there" setup, in part because one of my first players wanted his character to be a legacy hero.

 

If I start up a brand-new campaign, I think I'll have the first costumed heroes and villains appearing in the 1980s. That still leaves time for legacy characters and for some heroes and villains to have built up reps, some super-technologies to have matured, etc. But nothing before that. Well, maybe. It might be that there was an earlier Age of Heroes -- early Bronze Age, in fact a whole cycle of civilization that mostly erased itself from history through time paradox. (My current campaign thoughts have time travel being an important element.)

 

But things are still up in the air.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

 

Oh, and don't believe too much of what you think you know about witch-hunting. It was a complex social phenomenon, with great variation in time and place.

 

For instance, most people probably don't know that the Spanish Inquisition had, overall, nothing to do with hunting witches. (It hunted heretics, especially backsliding former Jews and Muslims, or jews or Muslims who only pretended to convert.) The professional theologians of the SI had doubts whether witches even existed. There *was* one episode of witch-hunting, driven by popular demand. Once the inquisitors started, the accusations and confessions multiplied.

 

However, one of the inquisitors thought the whole thing smelled fishy. Alonso Salazar de Frias did something no one before him thought to do: He checked the stories and found that the details didn't add up. As in, he had people hiding at the places and times that the witch's sabbaths supposedly took place, and nobody showed up. Or, he knew the witch wasn't whisked out of his/her cell by magic to go to the sabbath because he had people watching them.

 

In his final report to Inquisition Central, he laid out in detail how the interrogation process generated false confessions and false accusations against other people. It was probably the world's first sociological study. The SI promptly freed the accused witches still in jail. From then on, Spanish canon law held accusations of witchcraft to pretty stiff standards of proof -- and leveling a false accusation was a crime.

 

In England, OTOH, witch-hunting seems to have been connected to changes in class and social structure. Modern studies of the old witch trial records show that in many cases, the person accused of witchcraft was a poor relation of the accuser. It appears the witch accusation was often used by the emerging middle class to rid itself of poor relations who tried to invoke traditional economic obligations among family. (You also had such entrepreneurs as Matthew Hopkins, self-styled Witchfinder-General, who had their own financial interests.)

 

In Germany, yeah, a lot of witch-hunts seem to have been coopted by the local bishop or burgomaster as a way to acquire land and money. But there was also unquestioning popular belief and fear of witches for centuries. One of the broad patterns that emerges is that witch hunts were usually pushed by local authorities, in places where wider church and state authority were weak.

 

The end of European witch-hunting was as complex as its other aspects. In England, for instance, witch accusations ended abruptly. A woman was accused of being a witch; as evidence, her accuser claimed to have seen her flying on a broomstick. The judge, Lord Mansfield, ruled that he knew of no English statute that specifically forbade flying on broomsticks, and the woman was welcome to do so if this was within her power. It was England's last witch trial.

 

lesson>

 

Dean Shomshak

[Stephen Mann]

Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

 

Before the 20th Century, there were a few super-normals like Zorro or the Lone Ranger floating around, but very few and far between. Masked heroes became more common during Prohibition when the Mob started gunning down lawmen/prosecutors/judges who were too effective at busting rum-runners. If some of these were stronger than normal or faster, it wasn't obvious enough to be noticed. There were stories of superhumans, but these mages and psionic marvels kept to the shadows if they really existed.

 

Powered people didn't show up until the late 1930s, and they were relatively weak powers at that. By the end of the war, some men could lift tanks or fly with the fastest pursuit fighters, but they were rare.

 

The power level of Superman or Green Lantern didn't show up until the 1960s, and didn't become common until the 1980s. Well, common as in "more than one per continent".

 

= = = = = = = = = = = =

 

For the longest time, I never was really concerned for explaining this slow progression. I like the Galactic Champions theory of returning magic, and have retroactively applied that to my world.

 

And yes, the power increase is generational; the 1800s allowed exceptional humans to push their limits, but they were limited to human normal. At the turn of the century, an invisible corner was turned and certain humans suddenly had no real upper limits. The fact that most of these people lived in the electrified cities probably has nothing to do with it (electricity is the early "nuclear accident").

 

The critical mass was reached with the generation born in the early 1920s; some of these were blatantly superhuman. Their children were slightly more powerful; their children even more powerful, etc.

[Doc Quantum]

Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans

 

In Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, there were always people with "superpowers" but they were mostly only suited for low-power campaigns. The closest the series had to Invulnerability was a magic charm tattoed on Mike Fink's (see the Disney film Davey Crockett and the River Pirates) backside (his mom had it done when he was a child) that acted like damage resistance. Alvin Maker himself was like a low-level Dr. Manhattan with some transmutational powers that extended to body control (self and others) and even DNA changes. He did this to a runaway slave child so that the trackers couldn't find him anymore.