Superhuman worldbuilding thread

[Sol Zagato]

This is not the Superhero thread. Some superhumans might decide to act heroic, but that's not the point of this thread.

This is the thread for superhuman scenarios and general disregard for superhero tropes.

Spoiler: point of distinction

Is this a good place for 'superhuman' ideas that don't intersect much with superheroes? For example, the Aberrant RPG setting, Uber, Godlike RPG...?

Sorry, as much as I’d like new posters, this IS a superhero thread

Having superpowers doesn’t necessarily make one a superhero unless they specifically call themselves or are called ones

Some superhuman topic threads from other sites:

Spoiler: From SV

Superpower Settings (and making the most of them) Discussion

Hello there, SV; it's been a VERY long time since I've posted here. Since then, I've been writing a lot on places like Wattpad, Amino, and many others. I won't get into much details on what are my intentions, but I would appreciate if we all have an intellectual discussion about a world where a...

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

An ASB question: Chinese Civil War gets weird

Question at the end, in big type. First, some timeline. 1934-35: Apparent POD (actual POD in 1918) There is an outbreak of reported paranormal activity in China- accounts of flying people, rampaging farm animals, tame predators, etc. The Nationalists, the Communists, and most warlords are...

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Superhero worlds, demographics, and power origin musing and estimates

I'mma gonna do some dumping of superhero thoughts here, if you don't mind. Feel free to add in! Or at least say if you're interesting in hearing more. One interesting thing about superheroes worlds that often goes unmentioned- how many supers they have can vary drastically. For all of DC and...

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

How would the modern world react/change with superpowers?

As the title ask what would the world do if people started to develop superpowers across the world? (Power levels usually street level with a few exceptions) Would the people gaining the powers try to go hero? Be villains? Tell their parent? Go to the hospital? Post a selfie of themselves doing...

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Superhumans and Government Comics

Because this isn't a topic ordinary threads can contain. Superhumans, be it the humble Street Leveller to the Post-Human God, have been an obsession of ours for millennia. From Babylonian Myth to the Big Two, we have a bizarre infatuation with people possessing capabilities and licence beyond...

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Spoiler: From SB

"Realistic" superhero franchises?

Like all genres, the superhero genre relies on well-documented conventions, tropes and cliches. Are there any franchises that dispense with the conventions of the genre in favor of portraying what the author thinks superheroes would be like if they existed in the real world with all its...

forums.spacebattles.com

Native Americans gain Elemental Bending abilities in 1400 AD

In January 1st 1400 AD, all Native American people who inhabited North and South America (not including Greenland and Hawaii) suddenly gain either firebending, earthbending, waterbending, or airbending: - Random 25% of them each gets firebending, waterbending, earthbending, or airbending -...

forums.spacebattles.com

What do you want in your superhero stories?

So there's been a wide range of good and bad superhero stories, whether they be comics, tv shows, movies, or what have you. But what exactly do you want and/or need from a superhero story? Do you wish for an entertaining romp of action and weird science? Do you want it to be engaging with...

forums.spacebattles.com

Where does this idea that people with superpowers wouldn't think like humans come from?

We all know the various dumbfuckery Marvel civilians like to pull, but I just read some issues of the ill-fated Newuniversal comics by Warren Ellis, and well, to quote wikipedia: Philip L. Voight is the presiding officer of Project Spitfire, part of a government project tasked with monitoring...

forums.spacebattles.com

Superhero Worldbuilding Thread!

Is anyone else working on a superhero world? I am, and I'm going to share some of my ideas and concepts and characters with you, and hope you enjoy reading them. Here's a list of most of my OC's. · Yggdrasil – Isadriel, a half-elf with absolute control over plantlife. · Thomas Blood – Thief...

forums.spacebattles.com

Supersoldiers and the real world militaries

One thing that I have been thinking about after seeing Captain America: Civil War, is what the effect of the Super Soldier Serum they used to create him, would actually have on real-world militaries? Assuming its easy enough to make you can give it your most elite spec ops soldiers (SEAL Team...

forums.spacebattles.com

How would a military Superhero team be organized ?

Suppose the US gained a team of low to medium level superhumans (MCU type powerscale instead of comics worldbreaking scale). There are no other superhumans or villains currently in world, these guys are apparently dimensional travellers who crashed here. Being highly patriotic Americans in their...

forums.spacebattles.com

What are some plausible political systems for a superhero-dominated world?

When I see a superhero universe, I often find myself thinking "There is no way this society will survive." Superheroes destroy the government's monopoly on force and undermine the rule of law. We often don't see this decline on screen, but it seems that the logical outworking of superheroes is...

forums.spacebattles.com

Warlord China gets weird.

1934-35: There is an outbreak of reported paranormal activity in China- accounts of flying people, rampaging farm animals, tame predators, etc. The Nationalists, the Communists, and most warlords are unhappy about it (they thought 'feudal superstition' was holding China back), but the stories...

forums.spacebattles.com

Realistic Consequences of Superpowers in the Modern World

So I've been reading Worm (currently up to Snare 13.5) and I've noticed how dark it is compared to many other comic settings, how the heroes and authorities are often outgunned or outnumbered by the villains. I think part of this is because of characteristics specific to the setting, but...

forums.spacebattles.com

How Might Civilization Have Developed if Humans had Always had Superpowers?

Most of the comic series that I have seen seem to place their superheroes starting out in the 20th century. Some, like with mutants, are said to have increased in numbers due to the beginning of the nuclear age. What I'm wondering is what might have happened to civilization if we had actually...

forums.spacebattles.com

A bunch of superhumans take over the world

Decided to create this thread after re-read my old thread. The premise here is the one that you might find have been used so many times before: "what if the only (or strongest) superhumans in the world decide to establish themselves as the sole and absolute global rulers?" Superhumans in this...

forums.spacebattles.com

How Powerful Can Superhumans Get Without Destroying Society?

So the premise: literally overnight anywhere from 50 to 500 million people get superpowers. This number is fixed and will not change. Power distribution heavily favors modern nations with heavy telecom infrastructure, with China having the absolute largest number of them. People with powers are...

forums.spacebattles.com

Could liberal democracy survive superhumans?

One of the big problems that is inherent to X-Men is the idea of regulating people. Except ideas of tolerance which have shaped liberal democracies over the centuries would never be able to account for someone who can shoot a jet of flame from their hands or who could read the minds of everyone...

forums.spacebattles.com

What would a person with superhuman intelligence actually be like?

I've been planning on writing a superhero story and I was thinking about a character who had super intelligence as one of his powers. The problem is that I'm having trouble visualizing what a superhumanly intelligent person would actually be like. Something like super strength or super speed is...

forums.spacebattles.com

Wouldn't we be more afraid of organized crime in a super hero universe?

As exactly as it says in the title. We spent so much time policing the heroes I don't anyone has taken the time to think about what if groups such the mafia or the KKK had members had members who have superpowers. So, let's discuss.

forums.spacebattles.com

Can you both have superhumans and a stable society?

This is a question that has been going around in my head lately, from watching MCU films and playing in a superhero RP. Can you both have superhumans(And the common tropes of superhero fiction) and a stable society? Does the existance of superhero organizations operating independanly and...

forums.spacebattles.com

First scenario for discussion:
All living creatures have non-heritable superpowers at very low rates. Humans (and other big brained creatures) have a slightly higher rate, on the order of 1 per million or ten million. Power levels are fairly 'street' level, and sometimes not particularly distinguishable from exceptional normal people.

Assuming humans and the Earth otherwise occur as OTL, how does human society develop starting in the middle of the last ice age (30,000 years ago)?

 

[Bassoe]

Miscellaneous Hero ideas I've had at various points:

• King Arthur reincarnate. Currently a child or teenager, since he has to finish growing up to be of any use by the time England's greatest hour of need comes around. Which is apparently going to happen soon, since he's been reborn, even if as of yet, nobody knows what the forthcoming threat is.
• Someone who, by whatever means, learned the exact time of their own death. Before that specific date, coincidence will always go out of its way to keep them alive. The knowledge that they were going to die soon, combined with their temporary invincibility, led them to superhero-ing. There's probably a causality loop in effect where the reason for their death in the first place was all the mobsters/supervillains they pissed off.
• A shapeshifter, but they can only have ten percent of their body mass transformed at any given time. So they'll use it for stuff like growing gills, eyes inhumanly optimized for various specific light conditions, turning a hand into a T-1000 style blade, changing their biometrics, etc.
• Superman expy, but they're a genetically and cybernetically augmented baby in a time machine pod from future earth rather than an alien baby in a spaceship pod. Their sole weakness is retgone, they sacrificed themselves saving the world from whatever would've destroyed it, necessitating their parents sending them back in time to survive in the first place, erasing themselves from the timeline. Though they'll be born again eventually.
• A cowl/proto style powerless vigilante whose schtick/costume designed to intimidate the Superstitious Cowardly Lot is based around sword&sorcery pulp Evil Wizard clichés. They'd probably look something like Waldorf.
• Superman expy, better known as Hercules. Yes, that Hercules. Their pod landed over a millennia ago and "son of Zeus" was as good an explanation as was available at the time. The story would be set in modernity. There was an age of heroes, but that was centuries ago and now all that's left is historians tearing their hair out trying to come up with mundane explanations for the leftovers. There are legends from classic antiquity of a childless couple of farmers who found an infant in a metal shooting star fallen to earth. The child had powers but used them for the greater good of their community instead of doing the expected thing and going on a conquering spree and is now remembered as a mythological hero. The legends are presumed to be purely mythological or time-exaggerated propaganda, but that just isn't enough to explain everything. How'd this specific community without exploration have such anachronistically good maps, seemingly drawn from the air? What created that bizarre patch of rock fused to smooth glass aside from the surprised-looking silhouettes of an entire invading army? And most importantly, why are goverments worldwide throwing so much money into trying to get their archeologists to find the shooting star, a crystalline pyramidal fortress in a frozen wasteland the design of which inspired lesser human architecture or the undecayed corpse of a man whose indestructibility didn't extend to old age first?

 

[Bear Ribs]

Hmm, ignoring the heroes bit that I don't think is the point of the thread...

There won't be any debates about the Great Man Theory of history, everybody will know flat out that Great (superpowered) people are the movers and shakers. Science is likely to move more in fits and starts as once in a while an empowered Reed Richards type shows up, advances things at about twelve times its normal rate during their lifetime, then passes and things slow back down. Science may actually virtually stop when there aren't appropriate super-talents around as ordinary humans, feeling they can't compete, simply fail to bother to try to go into the field and wait for another super-genius to appear.

With some humans simply having supernatural powers throughout history, there's likely a lot more strife just because any given empire can be overthrown by a single rebel who happened to win the superpower lottery. While any given empire probably has more empowered people than said rebels, it only takes one Natural 20 to get a person who can wipe the empire out. This puts a shorter upper-limit on how long any given empire can last and increases the percentage of overthrows. However, at only 1 per 10 million births, this rate may be low enough that Natural 20 supermen just don't happen often enough to be a bigger threat than the normal predators of empires. New empires, of course, are going to often by founded by an empowered, and in the modern day some of the biggest megacorporations will get their head start from empowered founders. Steve Jobs/Wozniak pairings will be common as one person with superpowers does the lifting with ideas/powers and a second, business savvy type runs the day-to-day of things and turns it into a real company.

Religion is likely to grow wonky. There are, of course, going to be any number of religious explanations for powers some good, some ill. Religions that try to go against the empowered are going to be less successful in the long run as the empowered both act to destroy the church and the church won't have empowered people available for its own use.

Military strategy is going to be largely unchanged. At 1 per 1-10 million people, there just aren't enough supermen to significantly make a difference. F'rex the US today would have maybe a hundred or so empowered total, perhaps one in twenty of those has a power useful to military purposes so most of the armed forces are business as usual. As technology advances, the military benefit of the guy who can bench-press a car will decrease compared to how significant he would have been in, say, the Varangian Guard. Standard Military strategy will likely call for artillery strikes or similar should a known empowered person take to the battlefield rather than lose a division fighting a bulletproof speedster or such.

 

[Bassoe]

With some humans simply having supernatural powers throughout history, there's likely a lot more strife just because any given empire can be overthrown by a single rebel who happened to win the superpower lottery.

I'm reminded of some ideas I was throwing around on sufficientvelocity last year.

The big question here is if superpowers are heritable. Because if they are, someone's gonna try eugenics, even if only on the level of the local super-warlord having a harem or spartan-style infanticide leaving newborns out in conditions which only the strong (superpowered) can survive.

And if not, there's gonna be a colossal succession war every generation as new supers are born among the peasantry and the progeny of the rulers lack their parents' superpowers.

Maybe some kind of system where the powerless children of superpowered rulers have arranged marriages with the superpowered children born among the peasantry could be develop? Superpowered former peasants would buy into it because they'd want their powerless children to have the same opportunities.

I already stated before that they're not inherited in this specific setting, but the whole powerless royalty being married off to super-powered peasants is a pretty interesting idea

It's mutually beneficial for anyone with powers to opt into such a system since eventually they'll want it available for their kids. Also avoids the whole royal inbreeding cliché of real world monarchies.

You've got it backwards. People in power have an incentive to make power hereditary, but they need to be able to invest that power in their descendants. If power rests first and foremost with a random assortment of people from all social classes, who have to be identified and organized by an institution with people looking around the entire country, then that institution and the random assortment of people brought into it are going to have a lot of power, and incentive not to let the high priest accumulate power in their bloodline or whatever.

If there's a preexisting institution of hereditary rule, yeah, mutant powers will be co-opted by existing institutions one way or another. One mutant will almost certainly lack the power to replace an entire culture's institutions. But hereditary rule would need to exist first, and this is explicitly not a setting with any real-world baggage.

(It's also worth noting that the king and nobles marrying mutant peasants would make hereditary rule a lot weaker. The Hapsburgs didn't marry their first cousins, and every other European noble family their third and fourth cousins, because they all had incest fetishes or whatever; marrying into the families of powerful neighbors or vassals was a key tactic for any dynasty, and there just aren't that many appropriate families for any given monarch to choose from, especially once other concerns start crossing out potential brides. Once monarchs marrying peasants for mutant powers was normalized, I expect it wouldn't be long before they started marrying lowborn people with other types of power, such as rich merchants; I expect aristocracy as we would recognize it would dissolve into a murkier sort of class system, something kinda like the modern unofficial class system but with bloodline playing a more explicit role and mutant powers as a spanner in the works.)


Assuming that tinker mutants exist. And that they aren't recognized as mutants for the millennia they exist.
Alternatively, that they exist and Bolshevik Tinker's tinkertech is really subtle. A Masamune or Saint, not a Bonesaw or a Cradle or even an Armsmaster.

Thing is, the superpowered peasants will be taking over society anyway from the powerless second-generation nobles, so it makes sense for the nobles to formalize the system of succession in a manner such that their children don't get the romanov family treatment.

Tourneys. Once a year, the nobility holds a great festival at which superpowered peasants can demonstrate their abilities, winning themselves and their families upward social mobility. Tinkers and Thinkers aren't immediately obviously superpowered, so they're frequently missed. Their conspiracy encourages this as a means of recruitment, disillusioning new Tinkers and Thinkers with the status quo and driving them toward alternatives.

How about this for an inhuman Outside Context plothook, the effects of superpowers last beyond the death of the super who created them and therefore, there's a steadily increasing amount of land rendered permanently inhospitable by the consequences.

A superhuman who'd made a fortress only they, with the capability to create and dissipate forcefields, could breach, who then died leaving essentially Stephen King's Dome. The ecosystem within the forcefield has since collapsed, with the field radius full of corpses, ruins and anaerobic bacteria mats.

A superhuman with gravity manipulation and an area where gravity has been significantly increased, lethally impassible to anyone but the strongest of strength-enhanced superhumans.

An enormous crater which causes everyone who comes too near to sicken with what nobody in-setting can recognize as radiation poisoning.

Nilbog's fiefdom of Ellisburg with the serial numbers filed off, a pseudo-hive of rapidly reproducing monsters lethally defending a ruined castle with a corpse in chitinous armor on the throne against all intruders.

mutants with the ability to get rid of them would probably also exist so it wouldn't be an existential 'the world is always getting worse' kind of thing. Not in the long term, anyway.

Looks like we've got a protagonist's power and backstory. They weren't identified in the local Tourney as a child since their power is only noticeable when acting against other powers so they were raised by peasants and they'll be able to defeat otherwise-unstoppable warlords and reclaim otherwise-irrevocable land.