Paragons breakout ideas 101

[ciryon]

Hello

I remember an old post about posting Paragons breakout ideas but I did not find (or I do not look with the right keywords) so I post a new one.

A powerful and cosmic race have dabbled in the future, they have foreseen that an unknown threat will menace the galaxy, they make a copy of Earth in an alternate dimension bathed in cosmic energies to experiment what humans would do with paranormal powers and if they could be their pawn soldiers versus the unknown menace.... soon, paranormal powers appears...

[King Snarf]

I was reading The Golden Age last night, and Ted Knight's explanation for superpowers (he drew forth an unknown cosmic radiation to Earth) would certainly make a good breakout.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

* Earth is moving steadily into another reality where the impossible things needed for superheroes are possible. Bonus is that if you want to you can eventually reveal all the superhero stuff Paragons doesn't cover like alien and mystic dimensions if you feel like it and have a explanation (not necessarily an interesting one, but an explanation is an explanation) for why it might not have been encountered before.

* When there were few humans to draw from the Imageria the world was bathed in its energies and gave rise to various mythic ages. However as the population of Earth increased the amount of power available to just leak out randomly and create myth dwindled. But recently the population passed a point of "critical mass" where there are more minds supplying the creative energy than drawing from it, allowing the Imageria to leak out once again and create "modern myth".

* The "gods", i.e. the beings who make sure the physics of the universe run properly by acting out "myth" on the "god stage", have finally found a loophole in their complicated bureaucracy that finally allows them to enter the mortal world. Trouble is the whole point of that bureaucracy is to make sure gods carry out their assigned roles, and with them taking "jaunts" physics is starting to go wonky.

* Humanity has been deluding itself and supers have always been possible, they just never noticed. Or maybe some ancient order has been running around suppressing all that knowledge.......

[imfarias]

An inter-dimensional ship “crashes” into our reality. The surviving crew make rudimentary repairs but need a jumpstart for their infinite improbability drive so they can go home. To create this they used the ship to unbalance the probability field of Earth, making more and more improbable things happen: like getting bit by a radioactive spider giving you superpowers rather than cancer or a garage mechanic inventing a powered armor suit that is controlled by the wearer’s thoughts.

Of course the question is, how crazy do things have to get before they have enough improbability to go home, and, once they do have it, what happens to the Earth when they leave.

[poodle]

when the hadron collider was fired up it fundamentally altered the laws of thermodynamics...
everyone is in the matrix...there have been upgrades.
The world has achieved a critical mass of consciousness (6 billion brains) to a point that the power of belief can change the rules of physics e.g. people can fly because enough people believe it is possible.
It is the Krull-scheme. By enabling superpowers they hope to disrupt earth enough that they only have to deal with superindividuals rather than governments.
Its all just technology/magic/psionics with different manifestations. A greater God has been slain while fighting his nemesis to the death. Vast ammounts of mana have been released that are attracted to magically attuned individuals (whether they know it or not).
Our level of reality is a dreamscape in the mind of a vast and deranged god.
Wild card virus of course.
We are a controlled experiment. A world deliberately kept savage and ununified. Alien races a creating random mutations in our populations so they can recruit humans in their interglactic war. Both good and evil aliens are recruiting. The aliens that own our planet charge for the priviledge of selecting super-powered individuals. Of course we don't know this as we are deemed to savage and primitive to be allowed to govern ourselves.

[Flicker]

An inter-dimensional ship “crashes” into our reality. The surviving crew make rudimentary repairs but need a jumpstart for their infinite improbability drive so they can go home. To create this they used the ship to unbalance the probability field of Earth, making more and more improbable things happen: like getting bit by a radioactive spider giving you superpowers rather than cancer or a garage mechanic inventing a powered armor suit that is controlled by the wearer’s thoughts.

Of course the question is, how crazy do things have to get before they have enough improbability to go home, and, once they do have it, what happens to the Earth when they leave.

Oh, wow. That is very much like my own idea.

An interstellar/interdimensional ship uses the Imageria as hyperspace or is from the Imageria... something to that effect. Anyway, something goes wrong and it breaks up in the vicinity of Earth, permanently weakening reality, so superpowers become possible and the Imageria is now 'touching' the real world.

The captain of that ship survived and is one of the major players in my hypothetical Paragons setting.

[TheManagement]

Here's how I answered this question in my campaign.

The Imageria itself is the cause of the breakouts. It is, in some ways, alive and though it's mental process is incomprehensible to human understanding... it sees, thinks, and feels. It is the living embodyment of the collective human consciousness.

There are lengthy expanses of time where it's effect on the world is minimal, and there are others where it's effect is enourmous. All of the times where it's affect on the world is great are times of great social upheaval... and great societal and technological changes. The awakening of literature and religious organization in the ancient middle east... the God-Kings of ancient Egypt... the battle for Earth from the Mahabarata... the Renaissance... all with stories of superhuman beings. These are all examples of large-scale breakouts molding and evolving the human race... and the one thing that remains the same is that there is a mass evolution to life as we know it in every instance. It isn't known whether or not the evolution is the cause of the break-outs, or simply a reaction to the collective human consciousness beginning to understand different levels of existence.

Over the years, there have been a few individual breakouts, where men or women develop abilities that set them apart form everyone around them... King Arthur, Alexander the Great, Martin Luther... these are mostly isolated events, but their impact is quite easily seen.

The entire twentieth century was the beginning of a mass-breakout where we went from horse-and-buggy to putting a man on the moon in a matter of decades. Instantaneous communication anywhere on the world became possible... and man developed horrifying weapons capable of destroying all of civilization.

Now, superhumans are starting to show up. It's a representation of growth-spurts in human evolution, where the Imageria makes all things possible... and the future of humanity is up for grabs.

[ciryon]

TheManagenent, I find your idea particularly interesting

[TheManagement]

Thanks for the interest. When I bought the Paragons book, I was completely blown away by the concepts presented in the book. I read that book cover-to-cover at least four times. It completely changed my entire view on adventuring campaigns, and I had one story after another after another simply fall into place in my mind... I suppose you could say that reading the book caused me to have a breakout.

I'm a firm believer in the philosophical theory (that has actually been recently adopted and tested by a large number of physicists) that reality is subjective to each individual, and that we all really do live in our own little world... the laws of physics operate in a way so that we are all grounded by the same rules.

In my Paragons campaign, all paranormals draw power from the Imageria, and it actually allows them to alter how the laws of physics affect them... so that a paranormal can catch someone falling from great heights without injuring them, or a superstrong paranormal can get hit by a car without being sent flying by the massive impact. Most don't actually realize how they are doing it, they simply do it.

On the flipside, we get into the danger of possessing paranormal powers, and using them in the wrong way. Their powers are, to a large extent, all mental based, and directly affected by their own perceptions of their personal reality. Those that use their power in the wrong way too much, or push themselves to their limits and beyond too many times, and those that simply use their powers to prop themselves up as gods... run the risk of manipulating their surroundings too much, to the point that it affects their sanity... and this creates a downward spiral that is nearly impossible to escape. Chernobyl and Hurricane Katrina are both examples of paranormals losing control of their minds and powers. Adolf Hitler is another example of a paranormal losing control.

If you are up for really going into depth for the history of your Paragons world... look into recent archeological studies of ancient humanity. In a story context, breakouts have been happening since the dawn of man, and we have very clearly (backed by real-world science BTW) reached a point in the distant past where we developed advanced technology and a strong civilization that spread across the world, and it was all destroyed. In my campaign (something my PCs don't know yet) is that the myth of Atlantis is a metaphor for this lost civilization and the near extinction of the human race... and it's all on the verge of happening again.

[ciryon]

just to be sure : is this an analogy of real world events and how they can relate to paranormal cause or is this your vision of the real world ?

[TheManagement]

A little bit of both actually. I honsetly do believe that there was a time in the past where human beings developed technology that most archeologists don't want to admit that they had.

Any engineer will tell you that we couldn't build duplications of the Egyptian pyramids today... certainly not with the precision that they were built. There are man-made structures on the floor of the ocean off of the coast of Japan, and off the coast of the Bahamas that are deep enough, that the last time that the ocean level was low enough for people to build there was literally thousands of years before mankind was even supposed to have the technology to build like that.

Also, ancient man had knowledge of the universe that would literally be impossible to know unless they had the technical knowledge to find out. There are ancient accounts in Indian and Summerian texts that describe what the Earth looks like from space. The Old Testament talks about the early universe being formless, and there being no light or dark... well, the study of physics tells us that the early universe was devoid of form and that the universe was opaque, so there was no true deliniation between light and dark... at least not in the way that we have today. Ancient Native American legends (from North and South America) talk about the Gods having the power to warp time and space to create gateways to other worlds (in my campaign they were superhumans traveling to and from the Imageria).

The Mahabarata tells the story of a city that was destroyed in fire by a terrible weapon that generated such a large conflagration, that all of the structures were in ruins, and all of the people died. After the fire went out, people that went into the area came back with horrible burns, their hair fell out, and they died. Well, in the exact spot that the writing says that the city was, the ruins of an ancient city were found in the jungles of India... and there is ample evidence of the city being destroyed by fire, the people flash-fried to death, soil-vitrification, and radiation levels much higher than they should be.

So, for my campaign, I took my borderline-obsession with my wild theories on ancient man, and the concepts from the Paragons book, and threw them together to make a cohesive world with a solid background that is a mirror of the real world... but much more weird.

A superhuman war caused the destruction of a powerful, advanced society (something else that has been alluded to in nearly every single ancient religion on the planet), and all of the survivors were thrown back to the stone-age. As they began to rebuild the foundations of civilization, the breakouts started happening again, and mankind started growing in both size and technological know-how in leaps and bounds. Over time, one man here or there had a breakout that drew a large portion of the population into one cohesive nation... so that even after their deaths, their accomplishments drove development of human civilization toward a specific destination.

When the Dark Ages happened following the fall of Rome, King Arthur broke out and drew the British Isles together into a nation that would one day become one of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen... and in turn, Major George Washington, when facing defeat by the French at the Battle of the Monongahela, had a breakout in the early stages of the French and Indian War, set the stage for a group of British Colonies to rise up into yet another powerful nation... a nation that was solidified as an almost unparalleled world power when Adolf Hitler had a breakout and caused one of the most horrible and violent conflicts in the whole of human history, and the United States and their Allies stopped the Axis expansion.

But now, the world is at the height of social, racial, economic, and political tensions. The mass introduction of superhumans to the world has the potential of sparking a war the likes of which have not been seen in the whole of recorded history... because now they have to deal with individual people that have personal power that rivals that of entire nations.

Even in a lower powered setting like mine (PL 10 is the MAX for PCs, and none of my PCs are there yet), a man that is bulletproof and can throw a car is all but unstoppable to normal law enforcement. A group of people with that kind of power could literally upset an entire nation if they worked in unison. Imagine a paranormal with the power to be as charasmatic as Adolf Hitler, surrounded by a group of PL8-10 paranormals, who founded a cult where they were worshipped as gods... now imagine that same group, and all of their followers (potentially numbering in the thousands considering the rank of the power) overthrowing security at a facility that handles nuclear weapons. Imagine a terrorist with Quicksilver's speed possessing an expertise with demolitions... or a "suicide-bomber" that is invulnerable, so that he can repeatedly strap himself with explosives, detonate, and simply walk away. Or worse yet, a teleporter who detonates bombs at a hidden location and simply teleports the detonations into public buildings and crowded intersections.

I try my best to make my badguys very, VERY frightening. I want my PCs to feel like their characters are operating on a level where every single move they make directly impacts the world. The paranormals that strive to be true heroes are the only thing standing between humanity and extinction.

[King Snarf]

Here's another breakout idea, this one cribbed from TSR's Alternity line- the Earth is passing through a cloud of "dark matter" which makes previously impossible things possible. (If you've ever read Dark*Matter, it's very much in line with Paragons).

[imfarias]

An idea for a game I was going to run. Might put this one in Settings if I get it fleshed out some more.
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The Deep One breeding program broken up by the FBI in Innsmouth, Massachusets, 1929, was continued by the US Government using injected samples from the transformed inhabitants. A facility was built to house them as well as other test subjects (condemned prisoners and hobos, people who would not be missed). A few years into the experiments, they began to use other samples collected by investigators throughout the rest of the world. Mi-go, Nightgaunts, Ghouls and other strange things that had no names were sampled and injected.

A boon to the scope of samples came with WWII and America’s presence in the South Pacific and Europe. The War provided an equal boon in test subjects as thousands of Japanese and German Americans were detained for “security” purposes. This continued with “unAmericans” during the Red Scare of the 50s.

By the second decade of the experiments, it had been discovered that mutations caused by sample injections could be passed to the next generation in a stable form if the parent were breed to someone lacking mutations. Breeding two mutants, especially of differing sample types, yielded violent and powerful offspring (some combat field test were done in Korea). But the stable cross-breeds seemed mostly normal and only exhibited unnatural traits under extreme stress. It was hypothesized and the program was under way to cross-breed the stable generation yet again to produce humans that could call on their unnatural traits at will. That is, until the Escape.

In late September of 1967, the test subject slipped from their cells, overwhelmed security and escaped the facility; some 200 mutated men, women and children as well as 41 unmutated others meant as further breeding stock. Though most of the unmutated were recaptured, only 11 of the mutants were recaptured or killed.

The Program continues to this day, though on a much smaller scale, and the priorities of which have shifted to the destruction of the surviving escapees and the capture for study of any offspring they may have since spawned. For many years the search was sparse, finding only those whose physical mutations would not allow them to hide in populated areas. It has been theorized that the escapees -most of whom had been born in captivity- could not have reintegrated and hidden in society so effectively without organized help; the nature and agenda of the help being the next highest priority of the Program.

So, why now, almost two generations after the Escape, do fully stabilized superhumans begin to emerge? Some say it is just non-captivity breeding as was originally hypothesized. But there are those that believe this is simply their time; that the stars are finally right for the children of the Mythos to realize who they really are.

[ciryon]

cool !!!

[TheManagement]

Anyways... IMHO, the nature of breakout itself, and how the Paranormals' powers work, is far less important than how the Paranormal's themselves operate in the world around them.

The Paragons setting is supposed to represent the impact of true-superhumans on the world around them.

Take the time to provide your heroes with battles that, potentially, have multiple outcomes... and make sure that the choices that they make strongly effect the world around them.

Every Paranormal on the planet basically represents a Third-World country with First-Strike capability. The concept would be utterly horrific to anyone with a job that dealt with any kind of national or regional security.