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Are there supervillain gaining powers due to toxic dump?


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Grond's origin involves him falling into a polluted river then being struck by lightning. 

 

Shadowboxer (Detroit hero; CU:84 and MC:16-17) gained his powers in the early 1980s after being shot and his body dumped in a construction site that was also an illegal toxic waste dump.  He was killed in the Battle of Detroit in 1992.

 

 

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You can always alter the background of an existing CU supervillain to add in the toxic element.  Take someone like Blackguard, and say that he actually got his powers from exposure to some toxic waste dumped in his neighborhood.  He just didn't know it, so he assumed he's a mutant.  Easy peasy.  (Heck, the guy's from New Jersey - need I say more?  :winkgrin: )

 

Alternately, you can easily create a villain (or villains) who gained powers from a toxic / chemical dump.  In my campaign, I had the new Aquans - a group of oceanographers and ship crew who happened upon a toxic dump site at sea and were attacked by the group doing the dumping and shot / dumped into the water at the toxic dump site, thus gaining their powers (as well as an intense hatred for the multinational corporation responsible). 

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Project Sunburst members, Gigaton, and in an extremely lesser degree Amarillo all gained there powers via nucuilar testing (explode an atomic bomb while wearing various armors and see who survives).

 

Inspired loosely by the Scooby Doo villain the Space Kook, a theory villain known as Black Skull was one also. He died of terrible radiation burns and his radioactive body was buried deep in the desert. Then Takofanes walked over the area, and he started to awake, screaming.

 

Remind me to save a pic for the Super Images Game...

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images - 2019-11-12T130620.638.jpeg

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Freakshow gained his fear-inducing powers, and enhanced physical abilities, from falling into a pool of toxic waste. Fleshtone's powers were the result of being accidentally doused with a soup of chemical and biomedical waste. (Both villains are in Champions Villains Volume Three, as are Grond, Glacier, Blackguard, and Armadillo mentioned above. Mr. Zombie and the Brain Trust are in CV II, while Gigaton and the other Project Sunburst mutates are in CV 1. Shadowboxer can be found in the Millennium City source book.)

 

From Digital Hero #11 comes Sludge, mutated by a dousing of chemicals from an explosion in a chem lab. Active from 1970 to 1997, he was a frequent opponent of the Fabulous Five.

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5 hours ago, BoloOfEarth said:

Grond's origin involves him falling into a polluted river then being struck by lightning. 

 

 

The pre-5th edition origin story had him having a bad reaction to experimental drugs injected into him, then panicking and tripping into the containment pool of an experimental nuclear reactor with questionable shielding before the lightning and the polluted river.  The line that followed all that always made me laugh: "No one knows what triggered his transformation into Grond..."

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I have two characters that fit that origin although these are heroes not villains. Hydrofoil was an environmental activist (more of a practical joker than an eco-terrorist) who was interfering with a ship that was illegally dumping waste into the North Sea when she was forced overboard and fell into an area where the waste was leaking and turned her into an amphibian who could only stay out of water for six hours at a time and obtained water control powers. Finback was a teen-aged fisherman who fell overboard during a storm in an area where a Soviet era cargo ship carrying "strange materials" was rumoured to have been sunk gaining amphibian abilities as well being able to grow to the size of a finback whale.  

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  • 2 weeks later...
1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:

Close. Fleshtone was the victim of a clumsy bio-lab waste disposal tech, who dropped a huge cocktail of experiment leftovers on him. I guess it depends on how sharply you define "toxic chemical."

That reminds me, Hideous gained his powers when chemicals splashed him during a superfight in a warehouse.

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