Origin of Powers

Now that you've determined what your character looks like, the next question is how did he get that way? More importantly, how did he get the Powers that set him apart from mortal men (or cyborgs or centaurs or kitty cats)? This is the stage where you determine the Origin of Power. There are 11 possibilities here, each one a single event in your character's life that transformed him/her/it into a Super Hero.

The player can interpret the Origin two ways. The first way assumes that the character has always had approximately the same Physical Form that he now possesses. In that case, the Origin is the event in which his Powers first appeared. The second way of interpreting the Origin is to assume that the character began life as a perfectly Normal Human, say a kid from Euclid, Ohio. In that case, the Origin was an event that not only gave him Power, it may have also drastically altered his Physical form.

Example 1: Ken rolls a 78 for Physical Form, a Mechanically Augmented Cyborg, and a 58 for Origin, Technical Experiment. He interprets this to create Steve Piano, a man who has volunteered to be a test subject for a new weapons system his company has developed. The system is surgically implanted within Steve's body. Since the implantation is experimental, the lab wants him to retain the implant for a time while they study its effects on him. What they aren't telling Steve is that the implant is not working out at all like the plans said it should; the Powers Steve has manifested are entirely unexpected.