SPOILER: Godlike Origins

Origins that will be guessed at when the public is aware of the powered people......

General

Many will call them HOAX.

Conspiracy Theorists

will say that the government had chemical and/or biological agents as secret toxins, biological warfar materials either trafficed by US scientists on board or in the cargo hold. On the crash these chemicals did *something* to the victims creating the "godlike".

Religious groups

will boast god or demon given answers. The more sane of the groups will note them either as gifts or as signs of the coming end times... the apocalypse...

UFO theorists

will point to the passengers being abducted during those 5 years they were "in comas" and they were either replaced or changed by aliens... the most popular theories being War of the World type theories - ramping up on the new upcoming movie by Speilburg staring Tom Cruise! Some geeks show examples of that cheesey sci-fi movie "Millenium" as an example of how they'd do it...

Old Ones

Some even note the combination of gods and aliens such as the "old ones" from Mu and Lemuria giving them their powers from deep below... This might even be "justified" with crackpot astrologers showing the stars *are* in a "strange" alignment...

Wild

a freak solar storm penetrate the ozone layer, and irradiate the plane, the passengers and crew, who unwittingly got exposed to a gas being tested by the FAA/FBI that suppose to calm passengers down to the point of apathy, reacted with the radiation, and Zap! Microwaved batch of Meta-humans. Who by the way stay crunchy in milk!

POSSIBLE TRUTH

My main theory (that won't be suggested in campaign until much much later) is that these people were simply adjusted by humanity of the future. Humanity have found a passage "key" to travel through time, I'll be using theories from the RPG Continuum for time travel. http://www.aetherco.com/continuum/index.html And they've altered these people NOT to change things but to KEEP the status quo. Their "history" tells them that these people were given powers that changed the world's direction toward the "real" future. And they're simply making sure that comes to be. Later I may have a 1-2 person "team" appear in the world that WERE NOT on the flight manifest that DO have powers like the "Godlike"!! These people would basically be the X-files type agents (spanners) from the future... coming back to make minor adjustments.

The Lucidity Institute: "EEG Differential Amplifier"

This theory is what was happening in the early 90's, and the players (and other 283 people WERE the volunteers) actually mingled through some psychnic phenominon arranged (themselves) to board the plane together and unleash the power that made them "real" super heroes... They just don't remember all the backstory...... Now just trying to survive!

There are people suffering countless illnesses of the mind, tortured by internal demons, haunted by glitches in the wiring, or emotional traumas that can't be easily medicated, counseled or removed. The scientific discipline of dream research is oneirology. Dreams have a long history both as a subject of conjecture and as a source of inspiration (artistic or otherwise). Throughout history, people have sought meaning in dreams. They have been described physiologically as a response to neural processes during sleep, psychologically as reflections of the unconscious, and spiritually as messages from God or predictions of the future (oneiromancy).

Dr. Theodore Dillingham

Dr. Dillingham (Director of JCF), with the technical aid of Stephen LaBerge, however has a solution and a theory. He's going into the subconscious, through peoples dreams, he's sending people in to fight the evils in the minds of others, to salve the wounds, and heal. His theory is that many people need heroes, need to believe, even if subconsciouly that things can be better, to get well.

Stephen LaBerge

Dr. LaDerge is a psychophysiologist and a leader in the scientific study of lucid dreaming. He began to research lucid dreaming while working on his Ph.D at Stanford University. He developed techniques (REM cues) to enable himself and other researchers to enter a lucid dream state at will, most notably the MILD technique (mnemonic induction of lucid dreams), which was necessary for many forms of dream experimentation. In 1987, he founded The Lucidity Institute, an organisation that promotes research into lucid dreaming, as well as running courses for the general public on how to achieve lucid dreaming. His technique of signalling to a collaborator monitoring his EEG with agreed-upon eye movements during REM became the first published, scientifically-verified signal from a dreamer's mind to the outside world (the actual first confirmed signal coming from Alan Worsley under study in England - his group however witheld their results, awaiting more solid evidence and repeated successes, presumably from an understandable fear of ridicule from peers in the field of sleep and dream research, and hence LaBerge's Ph.D thesis results were published first). Though the technique is simple, it opened up broad new avenues of dream research that are still only beginning to be explored, and pushed the field of dream research, or oneirology, beyond its protoscientific and largely discredited psychoanalytic roots, establishing it as a fruitful and respectable discipline. Other significant contributors to the scientific study of dreaming include J. Allan Hobson, Patricia Garfield, Tore A. Nielsen, Mark Solms, Francis Crick of Nobel prize fame for his co-discovery of the helical structure of DNA, and innumerable others.

VOLUNTEERS

You are one of the chosen volunteers. You log into the "EEG Differential Amplifier" when you goto sleep at night--and are given dangers to thwart, innocents to save, and disasters to be averted. The "EEG Differential Amplifier" makes you a superhero. Though no one will remember your name, no one will sing your praises. But each night you log in, wrap about yourself the iconographic splendor of superheroes and make a real difference in someone elses life.
This could be run on multiple levels, too; you could add in questions of a "Cold War of the Unconscious", with governmetn and corporate spies and saboteurs wreaking havoc on others' sleeping minds (giving the Heroes some direct, "aware" opposition to confront). And then ... there're the nightmares of Heroes. If it takes a Superhero to help ordinary people suffering mental anguish in their dreams ... what does it take to help another superhero suffering such dark dreams?

Dream argument

While people dream, they sometimes do not realise they are dreaming. This has lead philosophers to wonder whether one could be dreaming at the moment (or at least that one can't be certain that he or she is not dreaming). In the West, first formally introduced by Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy. the dream argument has become one of the most popular skeptical hypotheses. In the East, this type of argument is well known as "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly" (莊周夢蝶 Zhuāng Zhōu mèng dié) introduced by Zhuangzi. It relates that one night Zhuangzi dreamed that he was a carefree butterfly flying happily. After he woke up, he wondered how he could determine whether he was Zhuangzi who had just finished dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who had just started dreaming he was Zhuangzi.

the Joseph Campbell Foundation

Mission Statement of the GODLIKE Program
The Joseph Campbell Foundation was founded in 1991 to...

• Preserve, protect, and perpetuate the theories of Joseph Campbell by:
  • Cataloging and archiving myth interpretation through dream analysis
  • Developing new publications based on these works
  • Directing the sale and distribution of these published works
  • Protecting copyrights to these works
  • Increasing awareness of these works by making them available in digital formats on JCF's website (www.jcf.org)
• Further Campbell's pioneering work in mythology and comparative religion by:
  • Promoting the study of mythology and comparative religion
  • Implementing and/or supporting diverse mythological education programs
  • Supporting and/or sponsoring events designed to increase public awareness
  • Donating Campbell's archived works (Joseph Campbell / Marija Gimbutas Archive & Library)
  • Utilizing JCF's website (www.jcf.org) as a forum for relevant cross-cultural dialogue
• Help individuals enrich their lives by participating:
  • Globally in JCF's internet-based Associates Program
  • Locally in one of JCF's international network of Mythological RoundTables
  • Periodically in various related activities that JCF undertakes

DRAMATIC SCENES!!

• the reason Arthur has duplication is because of his fragile/fractured mental state, he may have been a test subject for Jack to prepare for! Imagine a flash back/forward with Jack setting this up for Arthur.
• Mandy is pulled out of the program BECAUSE of the 9/11 disaster. But the in-world effect took longer to realize.

PLAYER SPECULATION

• Aliens, for various reasons/scenerios
• Time Travel, some sort of intervention from the future
• Old Gods, this is more the UNBREAKBLE movie idea where every now and then A HERO is thrown into the world that comic books are the mythology of our age and sometimes myths are real and are born into the world for a reason. That Maybe all the storys of gods from olden time are other groups of Survivers like us and this has all happened before. Like the Roman Gods, exctra
• Strange phonomenia
• Inteligent Design meets evolution, god introduces the next stage of man?
• Government experiment they bombarded us with Cosmic exray bomb and we mutated

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The AMERICAN GODS