FWIW, Connecticut Yankee was written as a satire of Sir Walter Scott’s novels and of a number of popular socioeconomic ideas Twain took umbrage with in general. It’s also considered a seminal founding work of the time travel genre. Make of that what you will.
I personally would hold up Pathfinder as proof you can have something that combines a ton of genres but still overall feels like fantasy.
Yes! My point exactly. Time travel can definitely be fantastic. Rip van Winkle, for example. (Although that could be considered to not be “true” time travel.)
And for everything else, really. This page has plenty of examples:
Well since a spambot was good enough to flatter me with imitation and reup this thread, I say we start working on it again.
@fjur , what would you say to flipping the genre on Ra and having the “Egypt” he comes from actually be a hypertechnology society that was apocalypsed in the distant past of this world, so it was basically modern New York about six thousand years ago, blew up five thousand years ago after achieving Clark’s Law levels of tech, and is now just mysterious ruins in the desert. A scholar named Lord Blake, of the House of Washington, discovers this high-tech staff in a pyramid (which was basically the Louvre, or maybe a Vegas casino), and it transforms him into a Solar Fusion Engineer named Ra (actually Ray), but Lord Blake’s garbled medieval interpretation of a 30th-century average Joe’s lifestyle and worldview ends up coming all the way back around to “Foolish creature! Stand not before Ra!”
Yeah, sorry we let that one slip through. 
Please continue … 
Huh, it’s interesting that both @The_Justifier and @Sea-Envy have suggested making Realmverse Ra tech-based:
Not that I’m complaining or any such thing. I simply find the coincidence notable.
I did already describe Ra, but seeing as both of you have suggested doing something sciencey with him, maybe I’ll reconsider.
So, let’s quickly rolodex all the decks and whether you’ve covered them so far in this project.
Absolute Zero = Old Man Frost.
Bunker = Sir Tyler.
Chrono-Ranger = see below.
The Sentinels = see below.
Expatriette = Amanda (prefers no other name.
Fanatic = see below.
Guise = see below.
Haka = initially no change, later removed.
Sky-Scraper = easily extrapolated from changes to GWV.
Setback = Pete (I suggest that the common folk should rumor him under the name “Lucky Pete”).
KNYFE = even I’m having trouble with this one.
Legacy = Sir Paul the VIIIth, Son of Paul
Tempest = Maekius.
Nightmist = very minimally referenced under Lady Lillian’s backstory.
Omnitron-X = not yet officially named as either Allcastle “Ecks” or King Aldred the “Tenth”.
Parse = I got nothing, this is either easy or impossible.
Captain Cosmic = Sir Hugh.
Ra = being reconsidered, see above for now.
The Scholar = superficial changes only.
Tachyon = Dame Meredith.
Unity = Squire Debra.
Visionary = see below.
The Wraith = the Lady Maia of House Montgomery.
Mister Fixer = Old Man Robert (needs other names).
The Naturalist = see below.
The Argent Adept = see below.
Stuntman = see below.
Luminary = see Baron Blade, needs hero rationale.
Lifeline = see below.
La Capitan/Commodora = this is the one character I would agree should appear in the “Realmiverse” as the exact same individual who visits all other timelines. She needn’t even look out of place (unlike CR), as the Realmiverse’s oceans can easily be frozen in a perpetual (early) Age of Sail just as the inland areas remain eternally (late) medieval.
The Matriarch/Harpy = Lady Lillian.
Akash’Bhuta’Thriya = superficial changes only.
Benchmark = Probably best treated as Sir Tyler 2.0, funded by a shady merchant from the Benedetto Viscounty, after Sir Tyler’s patrons failed to fund the construction of a second mechanical masterpiece.
Baron Blade = see above under the same name.
Citizen Dawn = Magister Dawn, the Magus-Supreme(acist). Fjur can call her Magus Dawn if he wants, but this is my list, and I already cringe at “Dame Meredith”, I’m drawing the line at this one.
Grand Warlord Voss = see above.
Omnitron = the Allcastle.
Ambuscade = see below.
The Chairman, the Operative, and the Organization = see above under basically the same names, except the last is The Guild.
Plague Rat = Randy the Burke (or Burke the Randy for a marginally less PG version).
Spite = Jack the Mad.
Apostate = see below.
Gloomweaver = see extensive debates above.
The Ennead = see whatever we decide on for Ra.
Iron Legacy = this one is pretty up in the air, for now I’ll hold off on saying anything.
Kismet = Miss Gabrielle.
The Dreamer = superficial changes only.
Miss Information = see below.
Deadline = see below.
Infinitor = the former Sir Nigel.
Kaargra Warfang = either superficial changes or none, depending on whether this Bloodsworn Coliseum is an identical visitor from space, or a local analogue. (Importantly, it is not Singular, so even if it is identical to our version, it isn’t the same.)
Progeny = probably totally unchanged, though unless any of the locals saw it fall from the sky, they would probably assume it to be a naturally occurring monster rather than an alien from the sky.
Wager Master = the other character besides La C. Who travels the multiverse and visits both this reality and the canon one. Unlike her, however, he typically garbs himself in local color to blend in.
Chokepoint = this is the one character so off-theme that I’m uncertain she can be made to work in this setting at all. If she can, it’s probably as part of the whole Sir Tyler / Benedetto Man / possible Sentinels thing, which I’m still working out the details of.
The Fey Court = basically identical (that’s a step up from “effectively unchanged”).
Apex = Carl the Wolf-King (superficial changes only).
The Terrorform = the Terror Tower.
Ermine = superficial changes only.
Friction = see below.
Fright Train = see below.
Proletariat = see below.
The Slaughterhouse Six = see below.
Biomancer = not even superficially different, except his costume is probably made of different materials, and the metal to make his skeletons is probably more expensive, so he might use wood or stone instead for the more disposable ones.
Bugbear = no change necessary.
Greazer Clutch = see below.
Sergeant Steel = see whatever we do with KNYFE.
Insula Primalis = Insula Draconis.
Megalopolis = Freedom City.
The Ruins of Atlantis = see below.
Wagner Mars Base = Port Wagner.
Freedom Tower = the Tower of Freedom.
Rook City = the City of Rooks.
Pike Industrial Complex = I’ll have to think about this one.
Tomb of Anubis = we’ll need to figure out Ra first, though this needn’t exactly match him.
Realm of Discord = zero changes needed, regardless of what we do with Gloomweaver.
Time Cataclysm = a tough nut to crack, loosely the same concept but probably completely different in execution.
The Block = see whatever we do with KNYFE.
Silver Gulch 1883 = see below.
The Final Wasteland = no longer in the future, and now only a moderate sized area, but otherwise effectively unchanged. A hermit might dwell in the Library who is effectively the local replacement for Haka, though not the same person.
Mobile Defense Platform = see below.
Dok’Thorath Capital = effectively unchanged.
The Enclave of the Endlings = see below.
Omnitron-4 = the Allcastle Ruins.
The Court of Blood = effectively unchanged.
The Temple of Zhu Long = effectively unchanged.
Madame’s Festival = effectively unchanged (though I’d probably refluff Alzrabar).
Magmaria = I disagree with Fjur that this is basically unchanged, as even though the place and its residents could appear unchanged, medieval heroes would have a harder time justifying how they reach such a location and exist unharmed there. Honestly I’d probably just refluff the entire deck to represent a tropical island inhabited by trolls or something, with no mechanical changes. The locals still collect magma crystals, but these come up from a volcano instead of being on the cavern walls, and their fireproof nature has an explanation other than being made of lava (at worst, they might effectively be “carbon elementals”).
The Celestial Tribunal = see below.
Champion Studios = see below.
Nexus of the Void = effectively unchanged.
Mordengrad = see Baron Blade.
Maerynian Refuge = is probably now the original home of Makius’s people rather than a refugee colony, but otherwise basically unchanged.
Fort Adamant = for simplicity’s sake I would recommend merging this with Sir Tyler’s backstory, as it stretches credulity that the kingdom could contain multiple facilities of this type without breaking immersion. Perhaps say that it’s currently being run by the Benedetto merchant. The Sentinels equivalent can easily have their promo and whole-deck versions come from a similar story that happens in some completely different location, or maybe they’re still here too; it’s not like the Mad Baron and his Benedettois accomplice would be above collecting and studying Oblivion Crystals.
See Below pt. 1 - The Sentinels
These four characters are all pretty challenging to fit into a medieval paradigm; the Idealist is the only one who is super easy to do, as she can just be a “sorceress” in D&D terms (or a Psion as D&D conceptualizes them, to be slightly more apt), but the most essential aspect of her character is that she’s a kid, her imagination empowered by TV shows and the like, so this needs to be reflavored a bit in terms of how she developed her picture of the world (replacing the Karate Robot with a Shining Knight, for example). Writhe is also not super hard, since on a shallow level everything he does with hypertechnology can be done with magic instead, but the specific way his “shadow stuff” operates is a very limited set of applications of “science”, and it’s a bit tricky to make him feel equally fitting as a wizard with very narrowly defined powers (to go back to D&D, a Warlock probably works best). Then there’s Doctor Medico. A man made out of living healing energy isn’t hard to deal with in a fantasy world, but Nick Hernandes’s day job is much more anachronistic; healers in the medieval age were unlikely to cure anyone of more than superficial symptoms that could be treated with herbal poultices and the like, so making a character who’s an actual doctor fit into a medieval setting is a challenge. You can handwave him away as a “sage”, but the vibe is very different. And lastly, there’s Mainstay. Mainstay absolutely does not work in The Realm as-written; a “biker” is such a thoroughly modern concept that it can’t even begin to be translated. Even if you turn Sweet Rhonda into a miraculous mechanical horse, this is an extremely different wavelength from being one of a few thousand motorcycle riders patroling America’s interstate system, getting into bar fights and chomping cigars while wearing spiked leather jackets. While we can create a character for Jackson the Brave in this setting, he is by far the most superficially different from the version we know, and a great many of his cards will have to be renamed (nobody in The Realm knows what a Highway is, Lonesome or otherwise, and while they’ve pretty much all had a few Hard Knocks, very few of them could conceive of a School of that or any other variety).
Regardless of where these characters’ powers come from, Nick Hernandez (or “Hernan” as his name probably is in this setting) and Jackson are definitely not Omegas in this universe, since there is no Nolan Generator to generate antimatter particles which turn into exotic muons that interact with water 0.0001% of the time to create superpowers. We could just replace all that with “a wizard did it”, but that’s boring, so a new explanation for the two’s abilities is needed. One possible backstory comes from an obsolete theory that I had about Haka and Mainstay being the same type of being, from back before the podcast answered most of our questions (and posed a bunch of new ones). If Haka had been, for lack of a better term, a “Highlander”, then Mainstay might have just been another of those. But that isn’t the case, so let’s keep looking. Right now the best theory I have is that, in frustration with the limited abilities of medieval medicine, the deeply compassionate sage Hernan ended up casting an ancient Wishing Scroll, which freed a genie-like angelic being that allowed him to gain the power to heal others, but doing so required him to exchange places with the bound efreet. Now the ancient spirit walked the world as a mortal man, and Nick had an immortal form with extraordinary powers but unusual limitations. At the same time, however, freeing this powerful spirit of good and healing and light had also liberated another spirit, one of evil or at least of darkness and chaos, and this “devil at the crossroads” sought out Nick’s best friend and offered him a bargain. While not tainted by the powers of Hell or anything so extreme, Jackson gained an unnatural edge as a result of this exchange, and any leftover similarities from his biker form that don’t quite make sense in the medieval context might be explained away by this bit of Ghost Rider aesthetic.
As alluded to in the Fort Adamant section above, the Sentinels might or might not have gotten their promo forms from interacting with the stuff going on in that location’s equivalent here; rather than answering that question, I’m going to look at a different aspect of their careers together. Why did these four individuals all start “fighting evil” together? Instead of following the comics too closely, I think we can come up with a much more interesting answer: having independently mastered their various magics or fighting skills, the sage and the warrior and the psion and the dark magus all ended up coincidentally together in the same location one day, and they were promptly attacked by La Capitan, who acted as though she knew them all and was very accustomed to fighting the team of all four of them, even though they had never met her or any of each other before (except probably Jackson and Hernan, who could well have been friends before, and so I went back and wrote the paragraph above on the assumption they were). This was a tough fight, as the Captain knew them better than they knew each other, but in the course of managing to defeat her (or at least survive the assault and escape together), they realized that they had a good dynamic fighting together, and they decided to band together to try and do good in the future. In other words, by assuming they were already a group, Cappy actually made them one; such are the perils of time travel.
Everything I have said here applies both to the deck “The Sentinels” and to the Void Guard individual decks, so I didn’t list them separately above.
See Below #2: Deadline/Lifeline
The realm has been free of dragons for as long as anyone can remember; the beasts persist in ancient tales, but if they ever existed, they were slain long ago by heroes whom history has forgotten. When the creature calling himself Tarogath stalked out of the wild mountains, wielding ancient weapons of neither elven nor dwarven make, those who saw the imposing eight-foot reptilian humanoid thought that the old tales might have some truth to them, and who is to say they were wrong? With single-minded determination, Tarogath cut a swath of destruction across the countryside, deviating not a step to either side as he advanced; the peasant rumors spread like ripples from a stone, telling of the “line of death” that was crossing the kingdom, seemingly bound for the imperial city itself. The Fellowship of Freedom and other such heroes rallied to stop this juggernaut, and though the cost was great, they succeeded in capturing him, whereupon both victors and vanquished simply disappeared. The heroes later returned, but they refused to speak of where their opponent had gone, saying only that the matter was dealt with now.
Years later, a tall and fearsome figure began to be seen abroad in the world, destroying monsters with mysterious blood magics and other incomprehensible powers. Though loosely similar in appearance to Tarogath, and similarly prone to incredible straightforwardness in his actions, it remains unclear whether this individual is the same person or creature who once threatened the lands he now seemingly protects (without showing any particular care for them; he avoids causing collateral damage, but never stops to explain himself or attend to the wounded or anything of that nature). Tales of this warlock’s power over life and death have spread once again, and many interested persons are watching the saga unfold with great curiosity as to the being’s next step.
Yeah, I like that.
Agreed, although I would replace her laser sword and pistol with magic weapons.
I am glad that we can agree to disagree regarding Dawn’s title.
What’s wrong with “Dame Meredith?” It’s the feminine equivalent to “Sir.”
I would definitely not make it be from space. As a general rule, the Sentinels of the Realm avoids space stuff, with the possible exception of Ra.
I haven’t thought about the Wasteland yet, but your concept seems good, although I think that the Cryptids would need to be replaced with more fantastical monsters. Perhaps it could contain the remains of some long-lost civilisation. Hmm . . . Maybe I should merge it with Atlantis?
Yeah, I too am starting to reconsider my initial stance on it, but I’m not quite sure what to do with it yet.
I think it could still work as a refuge.
Magmaria could be an above ground volcanic realm with volcano trolls
Alliteration naturally between normal words subsequently impairs speech fluidity y’see.
Fair enough. I can see your point, but it doesn’t seem major enough to me to warrant a change. Besides, the only alternative title for a female knight is “Lady,” which to me is more of the equivalent to “Lord” than it is to “Sir.”
I somewhat like the idea of an above-ground Magmaria, but I’m not sold on the volcano trolls part. To me, trolls are just big dumb brutes (no offense to any trolls reading this), whereas Magmarians are more enigmatic, shamanistic, and peaceful.
Yes, that is quite true. Although I’m leaning away from the Psionicist option, as — despite them being in D&D — they are a pretty Science Fiction-y archetype.
However, I think that I have an idea for her that is based on her origin story, rather than her archetype.
The Idealist’s mother originally created her to use as a sacrifice in a necromantic ritual to resurrect her husband. That still works in the Realmverse; just make Miranda’s mother a straight-up necromancer instead of the necromancy-mad science thing she had going on in Universe 1.
The Idealist was a clone of her “mother” in the main timeline, but clones don’t really work in fantasy. So I think she’ll have to be some sort of flesh golem instead. And not a Frankenstein’s Monster-style flesh golem, but one that looks more or less human. Hmm . . . Flesh golems are kind of Biomancer’s deal, so why don’t we just go ahead and say that Mrs. Fischer commissioned one from Biomancer for this express purpose.
And then the magical ritual went wrong, blah blah blah, she was rescued and because of her unusual nature and said ritual, she developed magic, with a special aptitude for conjuring objects.
Agreed. I think that the simplest way to go about that is just making her like reading stories.
True. I think that what I’d do with him is make him an alchemist who created and then drank some sort of “shadow elixir,” which imbued him with dark magicks. Or, to go a bit further, perhaps it transformed him into a shadowy wraith- er, I mean specter- no, um, a phantom.
Eh, I’m not overly concerned with that aspect. I’d just call him a “healer” and be done with it.
True. Although I don’t think it’s impossible. He could be some sort of wild horseman — basically a highwayman but without the thievery. A hooligan, if you will.
He rides across the countryside and gets into tavern brawls, etc. Or one can make him vikingesque, although I’m not entirely sure about that.
I don’t think that he needs a mechanical horse; I believe that a traditional one would do. And he can still have spiked leather armour.
I think that just “Nickolas” or “Nicholas” would work.
Ah, but you are forgetting that C&A have explicitly said that the Nolan Generator is a Fixed Point, thus something like it must exist in all realities. But what would its fantastical counterpart be? I’m thinking some sort of mystical fountain high up in some undiscovered mountain peak that was created by the Wizard Gregory. Every so often, a trickle of enchanted water from the font finds its way into a river and flows down into the wider world, where someone may be bathed in it and find themself with a magical gift.
So, Gregory’s Fountain does exist in the Realmverse, but I don’t think that it is the source of any of the SW Sentinels’ powers.
As for your origins for Dr. Medico’s* and Mainstay’s powers, @The_Justifier, they are good, but probably not what I would do. For Jackson, I think I’d just make him a completely mundane warrior, who just happens to be stronger than most. Maybe explain it by him having some “nonhuman blood.” Reason being, Universe 1 Jackson’s superpowers aren’t all that spectacular, and I don’t think that they need an explanation in a fantasy universe. In fantasy, you can just have normal folks be at the same level as magic-users. (Just look at D&D.)
Nickolas, though, definitely does need an origin. I do like your Djinn idea. Yeah, we can say that he found a magic scroll, and uses it to transform into a Healing Genie.
As for the team’s Void Guard phase, I haven’t decided what to do with Fort Adamant, but I figure that one way or another, the four find four magical artifacts containing Oblivion Shards: Nickolas gets an amulet, Jackson gets a flail, Miranda gets a ring, and Eugene the son of Wilken gets a circlet. Nickolas, Miranda, and Eugene often use their relics to enhance their magical prowess, whereas Jackson only rarely uses his flail’s ability to transform into an earth elemental.
Now, what is the team called? I suppose the Sentinels of the Southlands could work.
*When I typed “Dr. Medico,” my autocorrect replaced it with “Dr. Mexico,” which sounds like his less politically correct alternate.
So don’t make her a knight. She’s a scholar or sage in medievalist terms; her title could be “court wizard” or something. Besides, as a lesbian who’s modeled originally after two male characters (the powers of the Flash and the personality of Barney from HIMYM), it would be fitting for her to say “just give me the same title that the guys get”. Calling her “Sir” would be a bit too eyebrow-raising for most Middle Age people, but a nominally masculine but mostly neuter title such as “wizard” would fit well enough, such that I don’t think anybody would show up and be like “nu-uh you have to call her the court sorceress”.
You’re clearly not a World of Warcraft player; there the trolls are all whip-thin and fairly intelligent. Neither version really matches the Magmarians super-well, but frankly the Magmarians don’t match themselves that well in the first place; just being immune to fire damage, as opposed to automatically dealing fire damage to everyone in the same room as them, is exactly why I think they could be translated to random fireproof trolls or elves or anything else, and it would only improve the Environment to further Justify it in this way.
Warcraft trolls have the shamanism thing down; not so much peaceful, but that’s more because other people keep attacking them than because they want to fight. And enigmatic? Well, I don’t know them well enough to be sure… wink
Never was particularly fond of that origin, but you’re right that it fits here at least as well as it did there.
There you lost me. I don’t see Miranda the Elder as being a Biomancer knockoff; the equivalent to cloning in a fantasy setting is some sort of doppelganger pulled out of a magic mirror, so Miranda I could just be an Evil Queen type wizardess who tried to gain eternal youth by stealing the soul from her magically de-aged reflection, but the ritual went awry, the mirror broke, and Miranda II emerged into the world as an innocent child with all her original’s magical potential, but none of the blackness in her soul that she acquired through the process of learning those forbidden spells. (To further tie together the team’s origin, in defiance of the canon “this other guy just happened to be nearby” thing, maybe the darkness which was absent from Miranda ended up as an animate semi-sentient force, and Eugene was another wizard somewhere nearby who captured this, having no idea where it came from, and experimented upon it until it fused with himself. It could still turn out to have been Voidsoul in the end, and maybe its influence upon him is part of why he and Miranda ended up bonding so well with each other, as the darkness whispered in his ear to get him to stay close to her, so that it could eventually find a way to reunite with its original body.)
I mean, if you wanna do that, I can’t stop you, but IMO this isn’t a great story. Biomancer isn’t really the type to work for anyone, especially not without exacting some horrible cost. And the original Miranda was probably bad enough on her own.
Or just like having stories read to her, given that literacy was extremely rare and books were super-expensive in the medieval era. I always intended to have my version of Idealist be one of several characters who were tied in with a bard-type character, who might or might not be the Argent Adept (my See Below #3 will probably cover this topic, as I have few more pressing parts of the above project to further explicate on).
Okay you avoided getting sued by either DC or Sentinel Comics, but I’m pretty sure The Phantom is a character, though I forget who owns him.
Highwaymen engaged in thievery because, back when there were no grocery stores, it was pretty much impossible to eat unless you either grew your own vegetables in a rural farming community, or lived in a city where bakers and butchers and such were within walking distance of your house and your job and whatever passed for a bank. If you couldn’t stand the company of other people, and wanted to live as a vagabond wandering the countryside, then unless you were confident in your ability to hunt and forage for food, robbing people was basically the only way you could sustain yourself. If going this route with Mainstay he’d virtually have to be some sort of Robin Hood archetype, as it would be way off-flavor for him to have the forestry skills necessary to feed himself off the land.
That certainly is closer to his existing vibe, but again suggests that he’d probably be more of a marauder than an agent of the Crown. If the superheroes in this setting work for a benevolent feudal monarchy, then the aristocrats supporting that monarchy probably aren’t corrupt enough that a Robin Hood type character makes sense within the same universe. Then again, the Southwest Sentinels are meant to be somewhat physically segregated from the rest of the setting, so maybe there’s a rival nation which is much more unsavory than the Megalopolis setting, probably not quite as bad as the City of Rooks (although that would work), but still bad enough that antiheroes would have the support of the common people as they prey upon the wealthy.
Well if Rhonda is a living horse, she should probably not be an Equipment card, as this would take Squire Devra in a very different direction…
These names feel very, very un-medieval to me. “Hernan” isn’t great, but it does feel quasi-Arabic, which is fitting since the Moors ruled Spain at around this time in the real world. (The fact that this whole setting needs to be pseudo-European rather than mostly-American but also global will make things a bit interesting for some of the more international characters, like KNYFE and the Naturalist; it’s not an insurmountable challenge, but for some characters such as Parse and Ra I’ve felt it was better to handwave their country of origin rather than to have them all hail from “some distant land” beyond the borders of this Realm.)
Hm, okay I missed that. scratches head Given that I don’t care for Clarke’s Law stuff, I’d probably rather just rule that the Fixed Point requirement happens on some other planet elsewhere in this universe, and has no effect whatever upon The Realm. There still should not be any Omegas in The Realm, as it’s completely off-theme even if you change the Nolan Generator to a wizardly artifact or something.
Okay, I guess that’s not too bad. I’m still going to ignore it entirely for my further explications of my version of this project.
That is an option, certainly. My main reason for wanting to have her and Sir Paul and Sir Tyler have such titles is to signify their working with the kingdom, akin to how the U1 FF are government-funded.
You’re correct there.
I think what I’m leaning towards regarding Magmaria is simply an above-ground region that’s full of volcanoes and lava and stuff, and the Magmarians are just called Magmarians and are pretty much the same.
Well, having a fleshchild in the Sentinels of the Southlands seems like a pretty good motivation for him.
How did he know she would end up in that team, you ask? Well, let’s just say everything went according to his plan.
Yes, she would definitely care for verbal storytelling as well.
Consarnit, you’re right! Okay then, so I’ll call him a shadow? No, a ghost? Oh come on!
Well, I am glad that I avoided legal trouble with a comic book company that totally for reals exists.
I’m not overly concerned with historical accuracy or minutiae, given that this isn’t history. Quoth Twain: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
“How does Mainstay pay for food?” is a question that has always been with the character. U1 Jackson doesn’t really have a clear job either.
I’m imagining that The City of the Phoenix is somewhat more lawless, yes.
For See Below #3, a couple of quick Environment notes, and then the shortest and most obvious hero note I can think of, as I’m overdue for bed.
Mobile Defense Platform = this was inaccurately a See Below; the Baron Blade equivalent might be slightly less technological, but he can still build a flying fortress and then abandon it to be taken over by other heroes, leading his Battalion of Minions to run the place in his absence (and prove surprisingly loyal to Admiral Voss when he sails in to conquer the Realm).
The Enclave of the Endlings = Forgot to mention in my Deadline/Lifeline post…I’m assuming that since the Enclave and Jansa are not Singular, they have different versions in different universes, even though this probably contradicts the canon with regard to the Block, which I know was a creation of Jansa’s species (the Vyotians or whatever they were called). Thusly, Deadline is still an endling in this universe, but he’s the endling of the species of dragons rather than of Procytors, and Jansa probably transformed him into a humanoid as part of her effort to protect him. The Enclave’s Kirbyesque aesthetic is incompatible with The Realm overall, but I imagine it’s large enough to contain several biomes, and doors to a compatibly fantasy-esque biome within the extra-universal Enclave might open onto isolated corners of The Realm, allowing The Last Manticore and The Last Chimera and The Last Catoblepas to all wander in and take refuge.
Moving on…
One of the most archetypal heroic figures in the medieval tradition is the Bard, aka the Minstrel or Troubador, a wandering performer who brings news of current events from town to town, and trades information and entertainment in exchange for lodging and food from commoners, kings, and everyone in between. We have a character in Sentinels who is practically a Bard straight out of D&D…but the magical D&D bard is a very different animal than the historical medieval one, and quite frankly, I feel that The Argent Adept fits into The Realm better as a straight-up Wizard instead, leaning into the magical side rather than the musical side of his abilities, in order to fight whatever eldritch horrors emerge from the shadows to threaten the world.
So instead, I have a different character picked out to exemplify the minstrel/troubador archetype: the King’s Joker, or “Joe” as his friends call him (or would if he had any), aka Guise. While the cartoon silliness of his comic origin story is off-theme here, the differences are only superficial; he is still a fanboy of the heroics of others, particularly Sir Paul, and the Fellowship of Freedom still considered “Joe” a nuisance at best, finding that he had a habit of getting underfoot, endangering himself, and thereby giving an advantage to various villains. Eventually, his luck ran out and he was shoved out a castle window to his death - but he happened to land in a puddle of purple goo that had been left behind a few minutes earlier. That was when the Wager Master had seemingly been slain by an unrelated group of heroes who were fighting in the courtyard below, at the same time that a different villain battled the group which Joe had been “recording the annals of your heroic exploits” at, just outside the throne room.
Emerging from the liquefied remains of the blue-skinned imp, Joe was now clad in a pristine new purple jester costume instead of the travel-worn roughspun he’d previously afforded; his tawdry tales of the heroes’ exploits now suddenly held the power to bring those heroic visions to life around himself, though his idols still found his presence difficult to tolerate, even now that he could actually contribute somewhat to a battle. Either before or after this transformation, one of the few groups of the Defenders of the Realm who could tolerate Joe’s presence were the Sentinels of the Southlands; though Scholar Hernan found him less than amusing, the wizard Eugenius ignored him entirely, and Jackson the Brave had to be restrained from punching his lights out a few times, Miranda absolutely adored his recitations (she gets along with everyone, after all, and with no televisions in this universe, an animated tale-teller like Joe was basically her favorite thing in the world). Thanks to her genuine fondness for the obnoxious mountebank, the other Sentinels gradually grew to at least tolerate his presence, and eventually the Wardens of the Prime and other groups followed suit, though the FoF and other more “serious” heroes still tend to groan when he turns up. (The Watchers of Darkness were also on that list: Amanda probably pointed a crossbow at him and told him to go away, and Old Man Robert was likely thinking the same even if he was patient enough not to say it. But Lucky Pete likes everybody, to perhaps an even greater extent than Miranda, so eventually he would talk the other members into letting him help. Lilian is nothing if not a believer in second chances, so she probably defended his presence as well; perhaps even Tabitha the Wolf-Maiden decided he smelled good.)
I could probably shoehorn in Champion Studios as some sort of common-folk performance theater (maybe call it “the Champion Harlequinade”, or simply “Joker’s Follies”), which “Joker the Mighty, aka the Living Disguise” eventually managed to somehow spearhead the creation of; maybe connect Madame Mittermaier to this as well, saying that she provided the funding for the stationary installation in Freedom City, but also took her show on the road, growing progressively more sinister the farther away from the kingdom’s defenders she got. Anyway, I’m gonna leave that thought half-complete, and get some sleep already. Twenty-odd decks yet to be accounted for, so expect several more of these articles yet to come…
When Blake II of House Washington discovered an ancient spear in a long-forgotten crypt that spoke to him and offered him the power of the sun, he assumed that it must be the relic of some lost god. But in reality, it was actually a very advanced technological weapon built by an ancient alien civilisation. That civilisation, whose name has been lost to time, originated on another planet far out amongst the stars. Their society there collapsed, for reasons no one alive now knows. However, a small number of refugees managed to pilot spacecraft to Earth. That was thousands of years ago. Those refugees have all died out, but their high-tech devices remained buried in hidden crypts and tombs. Blake II had found one of their warrior’s weapons. The spear was equipped with a rudimentary AI system, which would instruct its user how to operate the device. It originally also possessed a database of useful information, but the ravages of time have made that feature function only erratically. Blake mistook the AI for the voice of a god, and its occasional data output as guidance from the god. The spear’s main functionality, though, was to store solar energy, and then discharge it in blasts of plasma.
Blake’s spear was not the only piece of that civilisation’s alien technology that survived the ages, however. Deep in a trackless desert, inside another sealed tomb, an alien medic android resides (along with the incredibly long-lived alien creature Amyt). The memory banks of the android, an 4NUB15 model, were severely damaged by the passing of the centuries, so it no longer recalls the fact that it is a machine. All it retains is its directive to carry out its medical functionalities. One day, however, some hapless travellers stumbled across the tomb. They had sustained several injuries from their travels, which the android quickly mended. The travellers were astonished by the machine’s healing ability, and thought it must be a god. 4NUB15 had nothing else to call himself, so a god he was.
Some time after Blake II’s discovery, a band of nine thieves led by a man named Roderick found another cache of ancient alien weapons. They claimed the devices, and decided to use them to conquer the land.
Explaining the relics as technological won’t be hard for some Ennead members… Set gets a weather control device, Geb a localized seismological inhibitor which works in reverse, Atum has his laser beetles (a subtle point being that these no longer need to pretend that their fire is different from Ra’s fire despite both being sun gods), and Nephthys has a device very similar to Extremis from Iron Man 3, which stimulates biological healing but easily destabilizes into causing extreme metabolic heat, so it can effectively only heal the strong while burning the weak. But other Ennies will be harder to reflavor. Shu literally exists as a near-invisible gaseous substance; it takes VERY high tier technology to make that seem feasible. And Isis is the goddess of magic, so if we’re saying all the magic is actually science, what limits her from just having control of this entire technology?
Certainly it can’t be that difficult for ancient techno-aliens to vibrate molecules at a frequency such that photons and matter transmit through them, no?
And how do you stop the person’s molecules from drifting apart on the gentlest breeze? How do the person’s neural synapses function at the speed of thought when they’re literally airgapped to an extent that prevents electrical transmission? No, actually being air and still functioning as a human being is a tall order even at Clarke’s Law levels of hypertech; you have to be all the way to the “precise mathematical description of the human soul” extreme before this is plausible. And at that point, Ra would be soloing Oblivaeon while the Ennead would be a Difficulty 12 villain, whose Advance mode requires the player to transcend death Horus-style before he has a chance of surviving three game turns.
Bottom line is, technology and magic are fundamentally different approaches to power. Arbitrary restrictions on what someone can do are fine for magic; if Matriarch has power over "the birds of the sky, and that works on an Archaeopteryx but not on an ostrich, that’s perfectly fine, because magic manipulates reality on the basis of human-comprehensible (if only by way of their negative space, see Xxxhulish) concepts and conceptualizations. It doesn’t matter if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, only which one it was believed to be, by the crazy old magician that gave Inversiverse Green Grosser his magical fruit-exploding powers and told him to protect the universe from the ancient cosmic horror of Nega-Guise.
But conversely, science operates on the basis of what’s actually true, and while you can break like one scientific law per character or franchise, and still call yourself “science fiction” rather than “fantasy” or “science fantasy”, everything else needs to pretty much make sense. An unexplained chemical accident turned Ryan Frost’s body into a perfect heat sink, and everything about Absolute Zero’s powers unfolds with mechanical precision from that single fact; he can’t just make ice out of thin air (the GM of a SCRPG campaign might allow that he can, but this is just an abstraction for the sake of gameplay convenience, like not bothering to count how many bullets are in Expatriette’s guns). Instead, he has to be in an area with a normal-range temperature, and he opens a few vents on his suit, allowing air to begin dumping heat into him, which cools the air around him, and precisely manipulating which vents open how far allows him to shape the area that he drops to freezing temperatures, and if that air also contains an adequate saturation of water vapor, that will freeze into a particular crystalline shape based on the hexagonal structure inherent to the H2O molecule, and NOW he’s made ice.
We don’t always have to see him go through every step of the calculations necessary to do it properly (likely he doesn’t do it at all, Tachyon did all the math in advance when building the suit, and he’s just learned how to activate all the macros she wrote to produce desired effects), just as we don’t need to see Expat or Bunker buying every single bullet. But if we know Expat is out of bullets, and her gun fires anyway, then suspension of disbelief is broken (or she has superpowers, which ruins her character). Without some explanation, likely involving Nightmist or Harpy doing magic, Expat can’t shoot an empty gun, AZ can’t make ice in the vacuum of intergalactic space (within system or even within galaxy, the vacuum is never perfect, so his powers work a little but have drastically escalating failure chances as he drifts further from any source of water or heat), and Techno-Shu can’t think with a brain that’s been literally turned into air.
No, I’ve decided Techno-Shu simply can’t be The Air Unleashed while keeping the Ennead at their current power level; it just wouldn’t be possible for it to make sense. We’ll have to settle for giving him a combination Predator shield and Phasing Cloak, so that he’s 99% invisible and insubstantial, via shifting him into a dimensional sublayer where kinetic energy has no effect on him, though sound and electricity and extremes of temperature will still pose a threat. Given the sci-fi postulate that such a dimension exists, it is then scientifically deterministic that researchers and engineers will eventually learn how to master it. That’s only like five steps up from us on a pretty reasonable tech tree; actually turning a person into something non-solid is basically the LAST possible step on any such tree, right up there with time travel and consequence-free resurrection.
(As an aside, this is why I see characters like Colossus as proving that the X-Men aren’t really mutants. DNA is a specific combination of adenine, guanine, cytosene, and t-something-ene molecules; if you replace those molecules with “organic steel”, then they’re no longer carbohydrate atoms structured into amino acid sequences which form those four proteins, and thus Colossus no longer has any DNA, is not alive anymore, and most assuredly does not have an X-Gene in his chromosomes that can grant him the power to change back. No, most of the “mutant” powers I can at least vaguely accept, but that one completely kills it; I love the X-Men, but they absolutely have to be powered by some sort of magical or divine or transdimensional force, not just their own bloodlines.)
I think the current backstory is that the x-gene was invented by the Celestials, which would make this assumption correct.