Friday Worldbuilding Fun: Supers Appear in Different Eras and/or Settings

[Ruin Explorer]

Why does everyone who makes cool stuff always end up sucking as a person?

Keeping it short because off-topic - I think it's always been a major issue but the way the press operated before 24 hour news and the internet, it was generally in their interests to play it off as "funny eccentricity" or euphemise the hell out of it - i.e. "He's a ladies man" (meaning "he chases 13-year-olds around"), and celebs didn't have the same ability to dob themselves in, because they couldn't get on Twitter and say "Maybe we should politely genocide [powerless minority group] because they mildly annoyed me!". I guarantee you had Twitter existed in say, 1960, we'd have some amazing information exactly who Elvis thought should be executed, say.

Part of it is definitely age too - an awful lot of these people suddenly tilt from "has some weird ideas, or "kind of a jerk" or "seems like a creep maybe" to outright frothing nutcasery in their 50s and 60s (feels like if you make it to 70 without becoming a monster, you'll probably stay fine), I guess because of some combination of early-onset dementia, "I have too much money to care", "People don't listen to me anymore!" and so on.

God this could probably be applied to superheroes with chilling effect too.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

God this could probably be applied to superheroes with chilling effect too.

Homelander has mass-murdered the chat

 

[Blue]

There was a new GURPS Infinite Worlds PDF released recently: Gotterdammerung.

Infinite Worlds in general are a series of alternate-earth worlds with key divergences from the ‘home timeline’. Gotterdammerung is a ‘unique’ phenomena in the Infinite Worlds campaign frame. It features multiple different alternative earths that have collapsed into one. It has four different overlayed ‘substrates’ where powers first emerged: Mesopotamia in 1150 BC, China in 480 BC, Greece in 323 BC, and the USA in 1750 AD. Each source of variance tends to spawn different types of powers, and the current-day world powers (i.e. great power nations) are heavily influenced by the presence of these special individuals.

It’s a very interesting campaign concept.

Woo, that's TORG! I played that back in the early 90s.

 

[dbm]

It has some Torg vibes, but there aren’t reality cosms where the rules of reality bend as you enter them.