Re: Big Question: How did superpowers come about in your campaign?
The origin of superpowers in my old UNCoPS world went something like this:
As far as the majority of humankind knows, there were no superhumans on UNCoPS Earth until the end of the second decade of this century. (Those Who Truly Know, of course, know that save for a few practitioners of magic and the rare Wild Psionic, this is true.)
The first quarter century was marked by its great explorations and great discoveries; it was during this period that G.E. Challenger announced and proved the existence of the so-called Maple White Plateau, where an ancient civilization lived side by side with the last dinosaurs; that Richard Byrd formed his 'Hollow Earth' theories; and Donnally Beaumont announced his contact with members of the underwater Kikládhean civilization. Sadly, while Byrd would later be proven correct during the infamous Hohlwelt Chase of 1947, the Kikládheans would not reveal their existence to the world at large until 1973, four years after Beaumont's death.
In the year 1908, however, an aerial blast in Tunguska, Siberia flattened every tree within 20 miles and caused burns to people as far away as 40 miles. It would be over 40 years later before the world at large found the truth about this event - a member of the star-faring corps of world defenders known only as The Silver sacrificed himself and his ship to defeat a scouting party of the world-devouring Gurges race. This action undeniably bought enough time for Earth's technology to advance to a level sufficient to defeat the Gurges in the First War of the Worlds.
The first metahuman officially recognized by historians is the Russian variously referred to as the Worker's Champion, the Silver Cossack, or the Silver Revolutionary. Appearing in 1917, the Revolutionary was instrumental in the October Revolution until he turned on the Bolsheviks and attempted to prevent the 1918 executions of the Czar and his family. Able only to save the two youngest princesses, he dropped out of sight after smuggling the girls to Finland.
The great proliferation of the "two-fisted" heroes, such as Elliot Ness and Tyson Clay; and the "mystery men", like Professor Perdu and the first Midnight Man, began to appear in 1919, their ranks finally dwindling with the approach of World War II. They fought not only gangsters and rumrunners, but also the likes of the Snark and Madjack the Mystic, madmen and would-be world-conquerors.
However, the mystery men were to fight one great battle, and the world was finally to find out that we were not alone in the universe. On October 30, 1938, the Gurges returned in force, their capsules landing around the world. News of the landings interrupted a dramatization of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, broadcast by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater of the Air troupe. For 48 hours, Welles and a group of mystery men, led by the Midnight Man, used the power of the CBS broadcast to coordinate much of the freelance heroic resistance to the invasion. Researchers including Oswald Gerald Whizz and Tyson Clay searched for a weapon to use against the aliens and their war machines in makeshift labs inside the CBS studios. According to witnesses, the turning point came with the arrival of the long-missing Silver Revolutionary and an unnamed gentleman in Victorian garb. The two conferred quickly with those heroes present, then the Silver Revolutionary flew - flew - out into the night, quickly returning with the Paladin and the Wolfshead. Then all sequestered themselves inside the laboratories. What happened then is unknown - none of the participants of that night has broken the silence about what happened behind those closed doors. What is known, however, is that the Gurges began to die where they stood, self-destruct circuits blasting apart the tripods. In twelve hours, every war machine in a two hundred mile radius was scrap metal. By November 7, those aliens that had not fled the planet were dead. The aliens were dead, the scientists told the world, because of their lack of resistance to the diseases of our planet.
This, of course, wasn't quite true. In fact, the Paladin and the Wolfshead were not of this world, but rather refugees from another world where magic flourished. Using a mix of scientific theory and super-sorcery, the greatest heroic minds of the age identified and isolated the diseases native to the world of magic, and supercharged them to defend the Earth from the invaders.
The death of the Gurges, however, did not mean the death of the magical bacterium and virii released to defeat them. Charged, in both senses of the word, as they were to protect humanity, they began to infect humanity. The Circe Virus, as it was popularly called after its discovery in 1979, was found to be the cause of most superpowers, rewriting the genetic code after it being triggered by massive stress or life-threatening situations. The virus also came to be known as the Survivor Virus, or, more whimsically, the "Spider-Sense" bug.
And those parts of the world affected by the War of the Worlds began to rebuild. People returned to population centers to resume their lives. And then Adolph Hitler and his Third Reich proved that it did not require being inhuman to be possessed of an entirely alien inhumanity. The Second World War progressed much as it did on our world, with one exception; the rigors of military training, and the stresses of combat, gave birth to the first true metahumans, beginning with British hero Dunkirk Johnny in 1940, and quickly followed by the American (with token Brit) 'Victory Six'...
