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Super-science and the magic gene
vorshoth
Posts: 596 Arc User
Superpowers in Champs are as a result of the magic gene unlocked in WW2. So, this got me thinking.
Super-science. Presumably, started by the advancement of human tech to meet the greater issues superbeings cause.
However, another thought came to me.
Is all the gadgetry, all the science... Just a bunch of cargo cult models, held together by some subconscious magical spell induced by a magic gene that allows 'super intelligence', or rather, the capability to build seemingly science-based tools and machines despite what reality would permit without magic.
Although, wouldn't this mean that anti-magic measures would also stop gadgets working?
Just some stuff that pinged my brain as I was scanning for ideas for a new alt using the books as a framework for what names already exist in-lore, and concept ideas.
Super-science. Presumably, started by the advancement of human tech to meet the greater issues superbeings cause.
However, another thought came to me.
Is all the gadgetry, all the science... Just a bunch of cargo cult models, held together by some subconscious magical spell induced by a magic gene that allows 'super intelligence', or rather, the capability to build seemingly science-based tools and machines despite what reality would permit without magic.
Although, wouldn't this mean that anti-magic measures would also stop gadgets working?
Just some stuff that pinged my brain as I was scanning for ideas for a new alt using the books as a framework for what names already exist in-lore, and concept ideas.
[SIGNATURE REDACTED]
Post edited by vorshoth on
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You answered your own question. Yup in such a context Defender is more like Xmens Forge all be it a magical version (magic genes instead of mutant ones) than say someone like Ironman.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Per champions universe
Possible because of magic, is not the same as magical
Here we are now going to the West Side
Weapons in hand as we go for a ride
Some may come and some may stay
Watching out for a sunny day
Where there's love and darkness and my sidearm
In game as @forgemccain
No, he's exactly like Iron Man.
Magic is the excuse for rubber physics.
It's comic book logic, don't analyze it too hard.
Here we are now going to the West Side
Weapons in hand as we go for a ride
Some may come and some may stay
Watching out for a sunny day
Where there's love and darkness and my sidearm
In game as @forgemccain
Defenders a magical pixie Forge clone that likes penetrating buildings and thats final -.-
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Here we are now going to the West Side
Weapons in hand as we go for a ride
Some may come and some may stay
Watching out for a sunny day
Where there's love and darkness and my sidearm
In game as @forgemccain
I sometimes explain this using the following analogy: Imagine yourself in a completely dark room. By touch you can determine its dimensions, the size and configuration of objects in the room, and work out how to navigate around it by remembering the relative placement of things in it. But suppose you suddenly introduce light into the room. All at once you can perceive things you never could before, like colors, patterns, and fine details. Moving around and handling objects becomes much easier. Whole new fields of imagination are possible, such as the creation of writing or painting. None of the things in the room have been changed in any way, it's just that adding light has actualized potential that was always there but previously impossible to utilize.
Now take that light away. All that enhanced ability is gone. You remember how things were and can try to explain them to someone who has never experienced light, but without light it won't make any sense.
Taking this analogy further, suppose during a "light period" someone invents a camera. When light disappears the camera can't function. That doesn't make it "rubber science." It's simply that the condition under which it functioned no longer exists.
Which is why almost all my technology/generic metahuman characters have extraterrestial origin so I don't have to deal with this Earth "ambient magic" thing.
There's really nothing more fundamentally generic about "cosmic power" than there is about "magic," aside from personal preconceptions; and "weakened reality" is pretty much the net effect. That said, you absolutely have the right to dislike the choice of explanation. To be honest, I'm not overly fond of it myself.
You bring up an interesting point about extraterrestrials, though. In the CU ambient magic exists throughout the Milky Way Galaxy, and probably beyond, to varying degrees. Many alien races can also manifest superpowers on rare occasions, just as humans can. However, in almost all cases they manifest them less often, at a lower average power level, and/or over a narrower range of powers, than humans do. That maintains the comic-book convention that Earth's superhumans are our equalizer against more technologically-advanced races.
Speaking of which, it's true that older civilizations than ours have developed technology superior to the general standard on early 21st Century Earth. And that technology is not magic-dependent; for the most part it continues to function after magic in the galaxy drops to virtually zero. Going back to my "darkened room" analogy, I think of those civilizations as having had more time exploring in the dark than we have, and so have discovered or interpolated more of the details and secrets of the room, and have worked out more efficient ways to get around and handle things, without the advantage that "seeing" brings.
One telling detail is the official future CU timeline as regards the Warlord. The advanced tech he uses is based on what he salvaged from a crashed Hzeel scout ship. However, his hired scientists have blended that with Earth tech in innovative ways, and exceeded the capabilites of the Hzeel. However, the Warlord's equipment will cease functioning after the magic fades, just like other examples of human "supertech."
If something similar pertains in CO, that would explain why, say, the average starting hero in powered armor is more capable than UNTIL soldiers in full gear, and for that matter why the MCPD isn't dressed in powered suits...
As for PnP, that, I would think, should be up to the individual GM. The world is as it is; if you want this to be the reason why your particular world is this way, well, here you go.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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I've seen that concept employed in a few supers-fiction settings. It's particularly appropriate in the Wild Cards series, where all super powers are ultimately the product of genetic mutation caused by an alien virus. But I've seen players of various supers games react very strongly against that explanation being applied generally. They don't like to think of their super-geniuses as actually being deluded metahuman fools. :biggrin:
I doesnt matter what we like or dislike its how it was written. I dont like the "magic gene" idea myself it always seems like clone of Marvel's mutant gene but its what is in the source books. I will have to add the magic gene is all about the 4 color universe so being an alien wont save you from it.
To avoid it you would have to be from another Universe and even then it would have to be a Universe that doesnt have it.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
"Magic" was just the enabling device Hero Games chose to make it possible for the mundane world to become a super one, via a major magical event in 1938, which in the real world marked the comic-book debut of Superman.
Same diffrence. So a big chunk of the PnP player base calls it "The Magic gene"
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Even if the majority of CO players believe all powers in CO come from magic, you can't assert that the Champions source books support that position. As gerberatetra quoted earlier on this thread, they say exactly the opposite.
Doesnt exactly say the opposite but I will admit not everything in the Champs universe is magical. What seems to happen is if they cant be bothered explaining something the authors go..
Not had such a great discussion in these forums in ages I must thank you for this ^.^
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Back atcha. It's great to be reminded that even on the Internet, it's possible for two people to have a reasonable and respectful debate over differing points of view.
Technically in Champions universe metahuman superpowers exists not because of magic, but because long time ago space race known as the Progenitors were messing with DNA of human ancestors.
What ambient level of magic does is to weaken laws of reality so said powers have greater chance for manifesting. Hence, if character is classic metahuman or X-Men style mutant, his powers will work even with no ambient magic around him. What magic did was a greater chance for his powers to happen.
There is NO thing like "magic gene" in CU, you are reading this part completely wrong. Powers doesn't work because of magic, but because of magic they had greater chance to happen. And it's really easy to bypass this whole magic idea with your character. Just give him/her extraterrestial tech (pure one, or only slightly altered), or make this toon a classic metahuman with no magical or technological powers.
And this toon is now "pure', has nothing to do with magic.
Steve Long, who developed the current Champions Universe for the PnP game, wrote repeatedly in the books and online that anyone playing the game should feel free to change anything they want in the official default setting, or the rules for that matter. You bought the game, it's your world now.
While it's true that human potential was enhanced by Progenitor tinkering, the official line from the PnP books is that superpowers do exist because of the effect of magic on reality. Consider that comic-book supers break the laws of physics as we know them all the time, like every time a superstrong guy punches something and doesn't immediately fly backward from the equal and opposite reaction.
The PnP world's future timeline (which of course CO has the freedom to change) has magic disappear from our galaxy completely in the year 2020, and all people with super powers of any type loose them as a result. As I mentioned earlier on this thread, this was done to allow Hero Games to advance the timeline into sci-fi future eras, few of which in the source literature include comic-style superhumans.
You are correct that many CU extraterrestrial civilizations have technology well ahead of what's generally available on early-21st-Century Earth. However, the "supertech" used by the top tier of human scientist heroes and villains surpasses the capabilities of most alien tech in a number of ways. Not that of all aliens, to be sure, but most of them. This helps us to fight off those nasty invaders.
But that timeline was created by Hero Games for reasons which have little to do with Champions, and which may end up being changed in CO or future publications anyway. And in any case, the "ambient magic" rationale for super powers is just background which has no practical effect on current events in the world you're playing in now. So no-one should stress over it. :cool:
I don't know. Such small detail can really spoil superheroic feel and sadly it cannot be retconned in CO.
Recently I and two other people were wondering at doing PnP RPG group and of all possible settings we had decided to go rather with our own, Marvel, DC or M&M for this exact reason - to much work to do with CU setting to retcon this everything into something more classic comic book-like and we may go with another universe instead.
After all, it's all about playing superheroes, not fantasy in tights.
That applies to any individual rules you dislike, too - as GM, you have a line-item veto on anything in the game. Again, it seems like a lot of GMs these days don't understand that. I blame MMOs.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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To be honest, I'm afraid I have trouble seeing this detail creating such a problem that it would affect your choice of PnP world. The creators of the CU deliberately built in as many classic comic-book concepts, tropes, and character background types as they could, so that it would look and feel like what most people expect from the superhero genre. It doesn't resemble fantasy, except to the degree that it imports elements from the fantasy genre, along with just about every other genre, like most supers comics do. The role of magic has no practical effect on how all of that plays out. In fact the vast majority of people in that whole universe know nothing about it, and wouldn't care it they did.
If every time you saw the word "magic" in connection to how the world works, you mentally erased it and substituted another term more to your liking (I use "quantum flux" myself), nothing else about how the CU was built or runs would change.
But ultimately the game is about having fun. If that detail is impossible for you and your group to get past, you should use whatever you'll enjoy. :cool:
Not exactly true. As you said before, magic is a paradigm of CU. Sure, it's most often word "magic" used instead of "cosmic power", but timeline of this univere relies on magic far too much.
Yes, for some people it spoils flavor. Which is why you can see any complaints in the first place. Overall, imho it's not the best design decision. Especially that in superheroic setting powers doesn't even need to be explained by the law of comic book logic.
At some point when deciding with which PnP game you will stick, as it also inlcudes purchasing more than one book, you also have to decide - do it makes any sense buying core books if you then have to fix things after authors, i.e. doing their job to have it to your liking? Or rather start with something that doesn't need to be altered?
Not that I'm THAT fond of Hero System, this mechanic is very overcomplicated and beginner unfriendly, so it's probably only choice of setting, using this mechanic was ruled out on the very beginning.
(The history I created for my game-world swipes Marvel's idea of "an evolutionary watershed", with prejudice against these "mutated" humans being ameliorated by one of the early geneticists who figured it out also pointing out that the changes are a beneficial mutation, thus will spread, and eventually even if you can't fly or fire lasers from your eyes, your grandchildren will. There have been exceptional individuals for all of recorded history, but they didn't really become common until just before WWII - in fact, the first costumed "mystery man" in my world was a gangbuster in Chicago in the 1920s who went by the name "Black Cat" ["I'm bad luck for bad guys"]. No "magic gene" in my world!
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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It also made superpowers and mutations and magic possible. And even magic was just manipulation of cosmic energies, but made not by innate powers but by rituals and pacts with cosmic powered beings.
But if it hasn't yet been stated clearly enough: if the reputed existence of a magic gene as the source of superpowers in this game world is a sore point for anyone, you should know that it's an unofficial player interpolation from some elements of the setting background. No version of the Champions Universe has ever mentioned a "magic gene." It's not in the MMO lore, it's not in the PnP books. Most supers using classic comic-book super powers are not using magic -- the source books explicitly state that they're not. A player may come to a different conclusion based on their own perceptions, but that's not derived from an official source.
Just curious, do "superpowers" function if a superhuman travels outside one of these sectors of "shattered reality?" And is "supertech" also derived from this phenomenon?
Lot of interesting things, guys. I agree that, if we see power sources as a problem, just MST3K Mantra it until it's handwaved.
Besides, if a character believes their powers work because such a set of rules, that doesn't mean that they actually do work according to those rules, just that they believe that to be true and haven't had anything to contradict that... Yet.
That'd be an interesting idea for a comic book. Build the protagonist up as a champion of light, a hero whose powers comes from some special source, only to find that their power is actually granted by a evil entity whose plans actually require the good, utopian world the hero tries to build, in order to unfold.