PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENT: Shared Origins: Sky-Q

[DShomshak]

Hello, all! Within days, (I hope), the HERO Store will stock my latest little supplement. It's called Shared Origins: Sky-Q. I hope to make it the first in a series of mini-supplements that supply reusable character origin gimmicks and stories.

 

This one deals with Sky-Q, the "smart drug" that sometimes works too well. Not only do people who use it a lot get addicted, sometimes it makes them super-smart, able to master exotic sciences and invent radical new technologies... but also makes them barking mad, with peculiar obsessions. The effects never last, though. As with many drugs, abusers develop a tolerance: They are only super-genius inventors for a short time. The madness, however, is permanent.

 

In short, it supplies an origin for all those goofy "theme" gadgeteer villains, or those guys who somehow are smart enough to invent one or two bits of amazing super-tech but never invent anything else.

 

The supplement gives background and mechanics for Sky-Q, and writeups of 5 sample characters: one hero (who got an intervention before she went off the deep end), and four villains.

 

Later on, I'll try to get some feedback on what Shared Origins projects to finish next. (I have several in various stages of completion.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[bubba smith]

sounds good I hope it is success would yo put a link when it's available ?

[DShomshak]

Jason posted a link in the Product Line forum. Will that do?

 

I'll probably be incommunicado from the forums for a while. When I can return, I hope we can discuss what other Shared Origins supplements people would like to see.

 

Dean Shomshak

[bubba smith]

I've got my copy thanks

[DShomshak]

I hope people enjoy Sky-Q as much as I enjoyed writing it. I want to write several more Shared origins mini-supplements, and I’m spoiled for choice. Let me describe the types of shared origin stories that I ponder, and the examples I think could make good supplements. Some are further along than others; but I’ll prioritize the projects that get the best response here.

 

Origin Substance: Radiation, Super-Serums or other exotic drugs, strange meteors… I already did this one with Sky-Q, so I’ll wait a bit before writing about any others.

 

Shared Accident: Whatever the source of their powers -- a chemical spill, exposure to a nuclear explosion, a gift from a powerful wizard or god, or whatever -- a group of characters received their powers at once, through events they did not plan and which would be difficult to duplicate. Paradigmatic case: the Fantastic Four.

 

As a premise for a supplement, Shared Accident has the advantages that characters can be tightly connected, and even more than other shared origins you only need to write the origin story once: It’s a good origin story for entire teams. OTOH, it may be hard to fit in new characters after the fact because only so many people experienced the accident: Once the accident is done, it’s done. (Though someone might try duplicating the accident, the way the Red Ghost and his Super-Apes, and the U-Foes duplicated the Fantastic Four’s origin. In which case, the origin story might slide into a different class of story.)

 

* Demoniacs of the Doomsday Cross. The villainous master wizard Archi -- I mean, Zazamanc the Witch-King (working name, could change) -- created the Doomsday Cross to channel powers of demons of the four elements. When the blasphemous Cross was shot, it exploded. The four demons were wrenched out of Hell and forced to seek refuge by possessing four nearby mortals. All four became supervillains: Quake, Pyre, Tempest and Flood. The teenage Quake was less influenced by his possessing demon, and ended up pitting his powers a master villain’s Earthquake Machine. The cowardly demon abandoned Quake and fled back to Hell, but Quake kept his powers: He now tries to go straight as a superhero. The other three remain possessed and more or less mad and evil. Pyre, for instance, sees her rampages as performance art. What do a bunch of people burned to death matter, compared to Art?

 

Problem: There’s no room for inserting your own characters. Solution: The Doomsday Cross recreated itself, but now it calls random demons out of Hell and places them in the bodies of susceptible people who hold the Cross. After being the cause of one Shared Accident, it now functions as an Artifact (q.v.)

 

* The Parallax Event. The secret government Parallax Project to study a wrecked alien FTL drive was compromised from the start. The military security liaison and one of the scientists were bribed by a big tech company to smuggle out experimental data and bits of the drive so the company could perform its own experiments. One such experiment blew up when a couple of beat cops stumbled on the improvised lab. Several nearby people gained super-powers with space-warping aspects. The surviving cop became the super-strong, super-fast flyer Blue Star. The company gathered surviving employees (including its two bribed agents) as a villain team dubbed the Constellation. The company quickly had the new supervillains trash the Parallax Project and steal the rest of the alien tech, covering up that some of it was already missing. The Constellation now acts as the company’s secret strike force, attacking rivals and gathering materials and data for its own FTL research -- because the first group that reaches the stars stands to gain incredible power and profit trading with aliens, and why should governments be the only ones to compete in the Secret Space Race?

 

The Parallax Event creates one hero and a complete villain team in one shot. It’s conceivable that one or two other people gained powers in the accident, but there just isn’t room for a whole lot more. OTOH, if anyone can get hold of the same sort of alien tech, they might attempt a duplicate “accident.”

 

* The Sparrow’s Curse: The adventurers from Earth should not have broken their promise to the little bird that guided them. They should not have laughed when it cursed them, and then killed it. Even less should they have touched the Rhinegold, the object of their evil quest. In Faërie, the curse of one truly wronged has power, and the Rhinegold magnified that curse into a force the gods would fear to challenge.

 

An eldritch wind blows through Faërie. It seeks out beings of power and sends them to Earth in a whirl of golden motes. The Sparrow’s Curse is upon them: They cannot return to the realms of myth until they find and slay one of the supervillains who betrayed and slew the sparrow… or anyone who fights to defend one of the villains. A few castaways of the Curse have noble hearts. Rather more of them bear darker natures.

 

This is the most open-ended “accident.” It will keep pulling characters out of Faërie until all the targets of the Sparrow’s Curse are dead. (It also has aspects of a Program or a Heritage -- q.v.) But it’s the least developed Shared Accident so far.

 

Artifact: An object might give people super-powers. The simplest form may be a weapon or device that’s so powerful whoever has it functions as a super-being. That’s okay for one character’s origin (or a series of people might wield the artifact), but that isn’t the only option. Instead, a single object might cause several origins, whether serially or all at once. The object might be magical, or the product of super-advanced or alien technology, or some freak of nature. What matters is that the object can pass from person to person, but cannot itself be duplicated. If you want an origin, you must obtain the artifact.

 

For a variation, the “artifact” is a place. More than one person can come to that place and receive super-powers. For another minor variation, a small set of objects might grant powers to one person each.

 

* The Dynatron: Many brilliant scientists have tried to build a machine to give people super-powers. The Dynatron is the most successful, and the most aggravating. It’s highly reliable; its inventor, the villain Red Giant, is sufficiently skilled at its operation that people hardly ever die from the machine; and the parts are surprisingly easy to obtain (Red Giant scavenged many parts from junkyards)... but the Dynatron only works if Red Giant built it. Telepaths have ripped secret from his mind, but several governments, criminal syndicates and master villains have warehouses full of precisely duplicated, non-functioning Dynatrons. Once Red Giant builds a Dynatron, though, it will work for other people. The villain takes care never to let a Dynatron pass out of his hands: He knows that as long as people need him to rebuild his miraculous machine, he will not stay in jail for long. His client list includes organized crime gangs, villain teams seeking additional members, strongly motivated individuals with money and no scruples, rogue regimes, and not a few “respectable” governments. Because when you have POWER for sale, you never lack for customers.

 

(I’m well advanced on this one, with several characters written and illustrated and most of the background written as well.)

 

* The Cosmic Crystals: AKA the Psi-Gems. These quarter-sized crystal lenses fell in a meteor. The man who found them sold them on eBay. Only later was it found that some people who obtained a crystal lens also gained psychic and psychokinetic powers. They kept most of the powers if they lost the lens, too. Ambitious people throughout the world try to obtain a Psi-Gem in hopes of gaining super-powers, or to regain a gem they lost. And somewhere far away, the vast, cool, alien intelligence that created the Cosmic Crystals watches the people who claim and use the gems. Soon, It shall render Its judgment.

 

This is an example of a “limited set” Artifact. Each can empower a character, (or even several in sequence), but there are only a few Cosmic Crystals circulating. Naturally, some people aren’t satisfied with just one, and characters do get power-ups if they can obtain more than one gem. I’ve only just started writing characters, though.

 

(And yes, any resemblance to the Lensman series or the Infinity Gems from Marvel is purely intentional.)

 

Dangerous Choice: The mechanism for this sort of origin story matters less than the motivation of characters. The mechanism could be anything from use of a drug that might kill you if it doesn’t give you powers, to a course of training at a secret martial arts temple with a final test that not everyone survives. What matters is that people risk death for a chance at gaining super-powers. Usually they know how dangerous it is, but they take the chance anyway.

 

* Metamorphosis of the Green Butterfly. This ancient grimoire gives the instructions for a mystic ritual. Those who perform the ritual correctly gain powers like unto a god. Those who make even the slightest error die or are transformed into tormented, rampaging monsters. For centuries, occultists dismissed the Green Butterfly as a legend or a fraud (there’s a fake grimoire of that name, of the Faustian tradition). The master warlock Zazamanc found the Green Butterfly, however, refined its magic, used it to empower minion villains, and made several new copies. Those copies now circulate through the Mystic World and the damndest people obtain and use them...

 

The superhero Coil tried curing his AIDS by embedding the ritual in a prayer to Asklepios, the Greek god of medicine: It worked, and incidentally transformed him into a super-strong snakeman with healing powers. A stockbroker in trouble with the Mafia, who also practiced minor astrological magic, became the supervillain Capricorn. A member of a small occult lodge who resented its sadistic and manipulative leader built the ritual around the sigil of the silver-tongued devil Belial and became the Dictator whose commands no one can resist. And a college student whose occult knowledge was limited to tacky pop-occult books screwed up the ritual completely and became the mad, rampaging Elemental.

 

This particular Shared Origin was actually complete but built around a story arc of the Devil’s Advocates trying to mass-produce copies of the book. I now prefer to stay away from the characters I contributed to the mystical side of the Champions Universe, so something else is going on with the Green Butterfly. I’d also like to add at least one more character, who might be involved with why people are obtaining copies of the book.

 

Heritage: Some characters in some sense inherit their powers. For a shared origin, super-powers might run in the family, they were taught by the same mentor, or something of that ilk. Super-powered “hidden races” such as Marvel’s Eternals and Inhumans, super-powered alien races, or pantheons of deities push the idea to an extreme. Clans of vampires or tribes of werewolves are other examples. Characters who share the Heritage are intimately bound to each other and to allies, enemies and conflicts based on that Heritage. (Think of Thor’s allies within the Aesir, his enmity with Loki, giants, trolls, and the various monsters of the Nine Worlds, or the enmity between New Genesis and Apokalips.)

 

* Five-Element Kung Fu. For centuries, the Five Families kept the secret of Five-Element Kung Fu, the world’s second-most powerful martial arts style. They held themselves aloof even from the rest of the Martial Arts World. In the Superheroic Age, though, all secrets are revealed. A scion of the Families, trained in the Metal substyle, lives in America as the superhero Steel Phoenix. His renegade father, who broke the proper cycle of training to study the Water style (and perhaps went mad from Qi imbalance), is now the Triad enforcer Crashing Wave. Other members of the Families serve the Chinese or seek their fortunes in defiance of tradition. It is even possible that a kung fu genius will learn Five-Element Kung Fu without being trained from childhood to properly attune and strengthen his Qi.

 

* Zetrians. This humanoid alien race lives relatively close to Earth. Zetrians enjoy technology far in advance of Earth’s and a near-utopian society. Even here, though, some are discontented. Zetrian criminals see Earth as chance to seize profits they could never obtain at home. A few Zetrian lawmen want to stop them, or see the primitive planet as a chance to do some real justice instead of writing interplanetary parking tickets. Zetrians have no intrinsic super-powers, but technology that Zetrians consider off-the-shelf (such as their omnipresent antigravity bracelets) make them powerful superbeings by human standards.

 

Programs. A government, megacorporation, crime syndicate, or other well-resourced group tries to recruit or create a group of superbeings to serve its ends. They might use cybernetics, psionic training, battlesuits, origin substances, an artifact, or other means to empower their recruits. Several groups might use the same methods in parallel Programs (and particularly expensive methods, whether measured financially or in lives of candidates, are most plausibly used by Programs rather than individuals). What matters most for the story is the connection to the sponsor.

 

* The Huán Process. Many superbeings gain powers from chemical, electrical, or radiation accidents that should have killed them. Why not? Doctor Huán said: Who cares? Just gather a group of people and keep hitting them with everything, then try o keep them alive until someone gets super-powers. (And close monitoring might even reveal the X-factor responsible for empowerment.)

 

Even with the best medical care, the Huán Process suffers at least 90% mortality; but some people don’t care. Dictators of rogue regimes, criminal gangs, and terrorist zealots have conducted several Huán Process programs, never empowering more than one or two superbeings at a time… but they keep trying.

 

The Huán process carries some risks for the scientists as well as the test subjects. Doctor Huán’s first and only success, the North Korean supervillain Fire-Eye, killed him as soon as his pyrokinetic powers appeared. Different sponsors attempt different gambits to keep their successes loyal.

 

Spinoff Characters: Sometimes one superbeing can give other people powers like his own. The paradigmatic case is Tony Stark building powered armor for various friends, and having his technology stolen for use in other people’s battlesuits. (Red Giant and the Dynatron are an example of Spinoff Characters as well as an Artifact, since RG gained his own powers of Growth and glowing red force field from the machine he invented.)

 

* The Psychotronic Cyborgs of the Sinister Doctor Synapse. An experimental “neural pacemaker” gave telepathic powers to a man who suffered from severe epilepsy, creating the villain Seizure. A French neurologist figured out how to duplicate and control this fluke. He first used electronic brain implants to become the telepathic supervillain Doctor Synapse. After his first stint in jail, Doctor Synapse decided it made more sense to sell psychotronic empowerment to other people. The psychotronic implants, surgery, and tweaking and training weren’t cheap but Doctor Synapse did very well in his new business.

 

It was, of course, a ploy. Eventually Doctor Synapse sent the radio signal to activate the slave-circuit in all his patients and gathered them into a psychic army to conquer France. Doctor Synapse failed and died (no, really, they found the body) but other scientists are reverse-engineering his discoveries. Most psychotronic cyborgs are still villains, such as the super-Jihadist who calls himself Commander of the Faithful, but a few have chosen the hero’s path.

 

* The Gifts of Zazamanc. The mystical master villain Zazamanc creates potent mystic items and gives them to people he believes will serve his goals. Most of them don’t know they are his pawns. The hero Sir Ebon sure doesn’t. He believes he found magic items and rituals to restore a lost order of monster-hunters who use the powers of Darkness against the creatures of the night. Most people who receive Zazamanc’s gifts become villains. The greatest gift, though, is Zazamanc’s own staff: The warlock first cheated death by coming back as a lich; destroyed more completely, his spirit now possesses people who touch his indestructible staff of power.

 

So, what would you most like to see?

 

Dean Shomshak

[pinecone]

I like most all of them...but 5 Elements Wu Shu stole my heart.

[Tasha]

I really enjoyed your supplement. I hope to see many more in the coming months.

[bubba smith]

five elements kung fu