I'm ok with shifting! I'm just trying to keep up with the shifting. Don't let the antibiotics keep you away.

Quite personally I'd prefer that we start off with superheroes in the world but not in Crystal Falls and that as our characters grow and establish themselves the things like the school and the increased hero/villain presence come afterwards.

Although, I have to admit there is something intriguing about the prospect of a dozen or so wannabe superheroes each individually trying to make it big in a city full of superheroes...

And....I just had an awesome idea about why superheroes would flock to Crystal Falls!! The Civilian Justice Ordinance, which states that non-law-enforcement citizens are allowed to apply due force in aiding in the apprehension of a dangerous criminals within the city-limits, especially in situations where the normal law-enforcement resources are insufficient to properly stop/apprehend the criminal. It's every superheroes dream! A city that lets them do their job without having to dodge the police and catch a bunch of legal flack. Everyone who wants to be a superhero would come to CF so that they could make a name for themselves without having to worry about the government. And we could start off our story-arcs before this ordinance came into existence and have our characters be the ones who helped bring it to pass. Or not.

Okay, cool.

Those are good ideas, too. The first and last we could probably do from the start, and then begin working the second after the universe and characters are more established.

I like those ideas because it let's us develop the characters seperately before bringing them together so that we have some idea as to how they would respond to/interact with each other. Plus, I'm having a hard time fitting an Invictus origin story into Crystal Falls. I'm not starting with an origin story neccesarily but I don't think Invictus was always in Crystal Falls and I think a lot of his initial development needs to take place against a more varied, internation background.

My latest conception of Invictus is that his body and mind respond to stress/damage by adapting resistance to whatever the specific damaging agent is. If Invictus was burned on his right hand, then the skin on that hand would become burn proof. Or on a more subtle level, constant stress to his bones due to activities like sprinting would cause the affected bones to become more durable and probably a bit larger in order to deal with the stress. These things have a total effect that causes Invictus to look a little scary, and not entirely human, kind of like some sort of patchwork monster. Of course, he won't actually be monstrous or really inhuman looking until later on, but it's an interesting and darker take on the idea of invincibility and adaptability.

For explanations, I'm thinking that a good story might be that as a newborn, he was infected by an engineered virus that adds genetic information to his DNA that allows his extreme adaptation. Possibly he might also produce a constant supply of stem cells that allows his body to quickly heal/regrow damage parts. (Virus are quite efficient at altering DNA; much of the human genome is infact viral DNA that we have aquired over generations. Mostly it does nothing, and occasionally it is harmful. To have any sort of specific impact the delievered DNA would have to engineered to a very specific set of conditions.)

Wow. That is an awesome idea for a character.

You're right though, he would need a larger backstory to really get all of that to work.

I thought of a different superhero who would definitely be my own (and is much easier to develop than the other ideas). Only catch is that the spark for her idea comes from my Fantasy novel.

As far as powers go, she is impervious to cold and is capable of melting and freezing water by touching it (possibly by controlling her body temperature).
In regards to origin story (as Niel said, not that I'm going to start off writing that), I was thinking along the lines of cryogenics gone bad (if I kept that, 'twould be the closest tie to my Fantasy character whose predicaments are partially caused by cryogenics gone bad).

How do easter eggs sound to you guys?

This whole thing is very addictive. I think you can officially count me in.

My plan, however, is just to keep reading and commenting until I've absorbed the general feel of Cyrstal Falls and then sit down with a pen and see what comes out. So don't expect me to come up with a specific character just yet. Worldbuilding ain't my thing.

Shadow will be a mostly good loner. Because she's pretending to shadow teleport, she hangs out in the walls of dark alleys rather often. From there, she can pretty easily trip up petty criminals and makes her living robbing them back. She discovered her powers when she was about nine and has lived in Crystal Falls all of her life, but never really in one place.

Excellent. Sui and Kitra, good. Those both sound like good characters. Awesome.

Jaynin, that sounds good. Welcome aboard.

A thing about origin stories though, is that it is one of the most vital stories you need for a character. It is one of the most life-changing events the character will ever go through. You don't have to start with it, story wise, but it is important to know as character backstory.

Cool stuff!
I was thinking in a more different style of hero-origin:
A teenager on vacation find an old artifact-box and inside of it there is a black mask, a black ring and a black katana sheated.
After some time that man discover that when he put the ring he can "bend" the shadows and darkness around him. The mask make everyone run scared when he uses it. The katana has so many power that can't be unsheated safely.

He starts to call himself "Terror" (a very villain-name xD) but the point is that he is the antithesis of his own power: darkness and fear. But he is a very kind and optimistic person.

Welcome aboard, Isaac! There is certainly plenty of room for a wide variety of origin stories and power-sources, and I like yours. I was hoping somebody would grab an artifact-powered hero for this project. High five! Where do the mask, ring, and katana draw their power from?

Welcome!

Definitely a unique character there. Awesome.

Roughly finished my character.

Carmen Blake is The Night Wisp.

Excellent! Sounds fantastic!

If anyone ever wants to create some character art, but can't draw, a good website for that is http://www.heromachine.com
Use version 3. It's really good.

That items absorb power from three different origins: darkness (you know, shadows, no-light spaces), fear and anger. They had been forgotten for too many centuries in a old prison (a place with a lot of darkness, fear and anger) so Terror will have power for a lot of time.
But maybe in the future that power can became limited if he uses it too much (against a boss supervillain?) and he can became really tempted in using it the power in a wrong way (using his own fear, anger and darkness).

That makes sense, and adds some innate conflict to the character, which is always helpful.

So, we have a basic idea of where we're going, and people have characters they're working on.
What's the next step?

We need either some indepth character sketches of important shared characters, or we need someone to write a short story introducing them.

I'm gonna work on a short story introducing Invictus in a different setting, and bringing him to Crystal Falls at the very end. Not the origin story, just a demonstration to get the character rolling.

At this point, The Night Wisp lives a secluded and methodical life, so there's not really much to short story her with, but I could write a few scenes if that would help.

That means then, it's time for the shared city characters, I think. The mayor, police chief, important people, and some information on the city.

Anyone have any thoughts for these characters? I don't think we'll really need in-depth character sketches for them though, unless someone wants to write a story with them as a protagonist or supporting character.

Maybe a place? A café or bar can work as a place where every protagonist go sometimes.

Well, it sounds like a big city, so that would depend on their location and income, I guess. If they're all very different people, they would probably have to know each other as heroes before they would really get to hand out much. Unless they have alter-egos that unknowingly hire another super hero's alter ego...

Yep. That would be good idea to develop.

I had a quick idea for the Mayor. Her name is Kristen Lin, and she's the daughter of two Chinese immigrants who individually moved to Crystal Falls for their jobs, met, got married, and decided to stay. They became citizens, and Kristen was born a citizen in Crystal Falls. She grows up there, and very involved in community service and civic service as a reformer, and she gets elected mayor on a platform of civic pride, reform, community involvement, and hard work ethics. She's what really pushed Crystal Falls towards a really successful, happy, vibrant city. People love her for this, but there's tension because reactionary groups claim she's not American, corrupting American society with Communist values, and so on. Others hate her because she's not progressive enough and can come down pretty hard on people.

*pokes nose in to say she is interested in this topic muchly, but isn't sure how involved she can be*

So far, though...

Wonderful! Don't worry about not being able to be very involved though.

Is that a good reaction?



Good points.

Yes.

I liked!
Some kind of mafia can be involved in a attack on mayor and initiate a superhero x mafia/villains war.

Yep. That could definitely work and things would get nasty pretty quickly.

Maybe not too nasty too fast though. I think superhero stuff has a habit of getting too huge really fast.

All out Mafia wars get nasty pretty quickly. Granted, in a superhero universe, the Mafia are actually small fry, small time players. They just can't stand up to even the lowest powered superhero. The real threat is with super-powered criminal organizations.

Things will get big when mafia is going to loss: they will call the secrets supervillains organizations. Until that, the heroes are still fighting low levels xD

That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that.

Red Rider is taking a more definite shape in my head. I should have stuff up in a day or two.

Um....I thought we were going with "there are superheroes in the world, but not in Crystal Falls until our characters come in and start to make a name for themselves." The mafia-assassination story-line doesn't fit in that just yet. Sounds like something for in the future.

I think it fits pretty well. Our superheroes start their career in a new city, getting more well known. The Mafia get pushed to their limit, and take a shot at the Mayor. Our heroes suddenly find themselves in a full out mob war as different groups try to take advantage. They start winning, and get all cocky and sure of themselves, and Mafia bosses call in some supervillain help, forcing our heroes on the defensive and really have to fight to win.

Seer's point still holds: we aren't ready for almost all of that plot stuff.

However, we could work towards that goal... Our storylines are about superheroes starting to make a name for themselves, but we could give a potential focus on Mafia villains/thugs.

I think it's an ok story-arc. I just think it should come later on in the timeline.

Speaking of which, I have proposed system for keeping things neat and orderly in our timeline.
ITB = In the Beginning (where we come in)
BTB = Before the Beginning (backstory and other stuff leading up to where we come in)
ATB = After the Beginning (stuff that we want to happen later on)

And like AD and BC, you can use years with these, so let's say maybe the mafia-mayor story arc comes in 5 yrs ATB, just as a wild example. And Crystal Falls = superhero capital of the world maybe 10-15 yrs ATB. Those are just example numbers.

Sound like a good system to yall?

Okay, yeah. Those make sense.

It sounds like a good system.

Ok. Great!
So our first step then is to figure out who all and what all we have ITB. Once we've got that figured out, then we can look at what events/characters might come ATB.

It is a good system! I liked.

Well, ITB Wisp lives on the streets and robs criminals to make a living. ATB, I'll probably have her join up with other heroes, but we'll see how that plays out.

Right. Yeah, that's a good idea.

I think right now, all the characters we're working on right now could be the ones who'd start there ITB, and then the people populating the city.

A list would probably be helpful, I admit.

A little basic geography would be a good idea too. Other than timeline, that's the big area where consistency can easily be lost. If Rin has a story where her character pops down to the city hall at the corner of Nth and Maravel and Varon has a story in which Red Rider bust's up a bank robbery at the corner of Nth and Maravel, we could have a problem.

I'm not too worried about it, and we don't have to go too into detail, but a basic idea of the major regions/areas of the city, major roads, and important places like city hall or the local paper (because let's face it, half of our characters will probably wind up working there ) should be figured out so that we start off all on the same page. We obviously don't want to go too overboard. You can bogged down in the details of worldbuilding a city just as easily as you can worldbuilding an entire world. However, I think it important to have a basic framework in our minds and then each of us can pick an area/neighborhood for our characters and develop that area as needed.

Yeah, that would be a good idea. I've been trying to figure out how to do it, but I don't know how to make a map of a city.

Well, since it's a big city, would it work to take an actual city (from google maps or something) and change the shape a bit? They we can just mark the buildings and such. Are we going with the waterfall/river through the city too? I really liked that idea.

I guess that might work, to steal an actual city.

Yes, I do plan to keep the river and waterfall in the middle. I've been sketching it in my head, and I've been thinking maybe a park/common surrounds the falls with the government and old town businesses around that with fancy stairs leading from the top of the falls to the bottom on both sides. Heading upriver, you get into the business district. On one side of the river it bleeds into a rougher section. Not bad. Just poor and rundown. The other side heads into residential areas. Going downstream leads into more businesses and residential areas, and ends up in the industrial area, which is surrounded by warehouses and leads into the really bad parts of town.

You can't do both: steal from a real city and have a waterfall in the middle. Because no city in America that I'm aware of has a waterfall of any considerable height in the middle of it. Most don't even have rivers in the middle of them for that matter. It just goes against the normal flow of urban development. Most cities follow the path of least resistance as they grow, starting beside a river and then growing out and eventually cross the river. But waterfalls have a drastic division of elevation that would be a natural barrier to urban sprawl. The city would either start at the top of the falls and sprawl back along the river or at the bottom and sprawl along the bottom. Just think about infrastructure problems. How would the roads look. Most large cities are circled by an interstate or other expressway, such a road would have to circle both the higher elevations of above the falls and the lower elevations below the falls, that would be quite the feat. You also have to bear in mind that many many cities in America date at least back to the mid-1800's and I would imagine that towns/cities in VA mostly date back to much earlier. Back then the path-of-least-resistance model of settlement was even more adhered to because traveling up and down that kind of elevation would take a lot of work.

The closest city IRL that comes to mind with waterfalls is Niagara Falls, but....the city still seems to be split by the banks of the river itself and not by the Falls. In other words, you don't have half the city at the top and half the city at the bottom. You have half the city on one side of the river, and half on the other.

Beyond that, most of the waterfalls in Virginia are up in the mountain country, not near the coast and you mentioned wanting CF to be near/on the coast. The best falls seem to be on the Potomac River, which is too close to DC, which you also said is a no-no. So, I'm not sure how we're gonna pull this off unless we not only create a new river in Virginia, but also defy the natural topography of the region and put a waterfall on the coast....

So if you're die-hard set on having falls in the middle dividing the town elevation-wise, we're going to have to build it ourselves, because no other cities are going to fit into this rather unique model and because there don't seem to be any waterfalls on the VA coast. If we're going this route, I think it would be handy to dig into the history of Niagara Falls and how they were settled, so that we have something to work with rather than building something from nothing.

Yes, that is a more challenging thing than superhero origins.

We could drop Virginia and put it somewhere else (I just picked a state), if it would save time and effort that could be used actually developing the city instead of trying to explain why it's there despite geographic and historical difficulties. Maybe up in New England? If people want Virginia, though, we could definitely try and work something out.

As far as elevation goes, you can build right up the sides of hills. It's not a very American thing to do, but there's a lot of that further south (Quito is the first one to come to mind, it's full of mountains). That could mean residential, or fancy terraces or a lot of things.

I would think the waterfall would almost make the map easier to fake, because you can just take two cities from a coast and line them up (with a bit of tweaking), maybe make a few road connections crossing the river...

That is a possibility. Or they started at the top of the fall and then later moved to the bottom, especially if it isn't a really big waterfall. Fifteen feet or so, maybe? That's not a huge drop, and isn't really hard to get around.

That would make a really big city. We could trim it. Or, I did download a city map generator I could try and work with.

Thought: there have been cases where two cities which were originally small and fairly close to each other met when they grew and basically became the same city. This might be the case with the parts of the city which are on the upper and lower parts of the falls – as in, they used to be two separate towns but grew and met each other's borders. That would solve the problem of why it was built that way that Seer mentioned.

Having looked at Niagara Falls a little more closely, I'd be ok with the Falls in the middle of the town. I'm just still not sold on the top-bottom division of the town. Like I said, what you seem to have with Niagara is that settlement was divided by the banks of the river/falls, not by the elevation. I know, I know, part of that is because the Niagara river is the border between the US and Canada, and that affected things too. But I would still prefer that kind of a layout over the top-bottom dichotomy.

Or....you could move CF to a mountainous region and have the Falls be taller and then use Juliet's idea of having there be a town at the top and a town at the bottom that eventually merged into one city.

Also, we need to pick/create a river.