List of character ideas

Games Sentinel Comics RPG
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Still haven’t gotten anywhere near making the purchase, but hopefully before black Friday I can get it done. Meanwhile, I have so many hero ideas that I figured I’d better start jotting them down.

  • Homestead - a character deliberately designed to be as red-state as possible, a down-home salt-of-the Earth family man who bleeds red white and blue, perhaps literally. Nothing about him could reasonably be criticized as problematic, he’s every positive stereotype about good old boy farmers and hunters and church volunteers, with none of the negative aspects that are sometimes associated therewith. He’s perfectly willing to partner with heroes that are female, nonwhite, or otherwise contrary to his demographic, so long as they give him all the respect that they expect him to give them. Loosely patterned on Captain America, but with the military background traded out for his hard-working rural history, the hard part would be motivating him to go out adventuring, so maybe he has the power of effortless teleportation to “anywhere my country needs me”.

  • The Dickensian - so far all I have for this guy is a name (with the punning mundane alias of Richard Nathanial Zion), and a vague mental picture of someone dressed in Victorian fashion, with a tall top hat and flowing black cloak. He’d be a street-level vigilante who fights with a sword cane and might have Sherlockian detective prowess, but I’ll need to actually read some Dickens again for the first time since childhood, before I actually know how to roleplay him.

  • Ladies’ Man - this is one of the first ideas I had, but would be one of the last I’d actually try to play, as even the PG iteration of it would likely cause discomfort at the table. The concept is that he’s a very skilled lover in his mundane life, who discovers that anytime he satisfied a woman, he gains the ability to draw upon the energies of her soul (not in a vampiric way, but more like a reverse version of multiple flowers all feeding on the light of the Sun), enabling him to perform magic whose potency is directly tied to the number of ladies with recent memories of afterglow they’re still basking in. The possibilities for how this magic can be used are limitless, so this is a very vague character concept, which combined with the amount of his downtime spent fading to black means he’d be hard to make work in gameplay terms, even if the group was okay with him being there, which many wouldn’t be. But what I really like about this concept is, although I want to play him as a straight guy with a bunch of girlfriends, nothing about the character changes if you Rule 63 it, or make an LGBT version; it’s still free license to imagine any character’s bedroom escapades fueling their heroic potential.

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To be named - a character based on the song “Gangster’s Paradise”, who was gifted by the opportunity to reinvent his life by traveling back in time with knowledge of his hopeless future. The new version of him works hard to get out of the ghetto and avoid being dragged into their downward spiral. He effectively grows up to become Doctor Ben Carson, but retains his street smarts and combat abilities from when he was nothing but a hoodlum, and as an aging billionaire in the 2030s, he funds and advised a superhero team while working to help solve the problems of the post-oblivaeon world, and occasionally lifting other talented youth out of a situation as dead-end as the one he was miraculously rescued from.

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I have the rulebook now available to download, so this will probably be my last posting of just a character idea rather than an actual character.

ABSA - the name is an acronym for As Below, So Above; the character is a giant alien intelligence, probably a sentient nebula or even an entire galaxy, who projects is consciousness down into smaller and smaller forms until it reaches the subatomic realm (as portrayed in the movie Quantumania), and it’s representation in the human world is a person who studies astronomy and microscopy, in order to duplicate the discovery process for information that Absa already knows just from existing on that scale. This is a character who can talk to the personification of the Earth as if they were equals, and is equally capable of giving every virus and bacterium in a person’s body a name and then selectively targeting and destroying just one of them. Their human identity fights crime because actions taken on the human scale have repercussions on the subatomic and intergalactic worlds; as an enormous hyper-intelligence, replicating human behavior perfectly is trivial for Absa, whose manifestation on Earth is perfectly logical and self controlled, yet fully capable of empathizing with those that are far less than itself, rather like Haka.

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Okay, here goes my first ever use of the Guided Method to create a character. All I have is a name, which I think is funny: Ray Chalcelerr. If I decide that name no longer fits at some point in the process, I can change it, but for now I’ll just call him Ray and assume he’s a dude.

Step 1: I roll 1 and 5, which gives me the background choices of Upper Class, Unremarkable, or Law Enforcement. The first and the last both combine with that name I chose in a potentially very unfunny way, so I’m left with Unremarkable as my default option, but I’m gonna at least try a reroll. That gives me 1 and 6, so I now get to choose Academic instead of Unremarkable, but that’s only slightly less bothersome than the previous options, so Unremarkable it is. Ray Chalcelerr is a totally ordinary guy, nothing unusual about him. So I’m apparently given Close Combat, any Social or any Mental, with an Identity principle, 10 and 8 in those qualities, and 10-8-6 in power source.

Step 1A: A Mental quality seems like a good idea since it’ll increase my health, so Ray is possessed of Self-Discipline at a d10. I’m not feeling Close Combat, so I’ll pick the Social quality of Banter, that seems to fit; it gets a d8.

Step 1B: I think of the rather strange Identity options, I’ll go with the Principle of Detachment, although I might change the name. A calm and rational mindset doesn’t mean a lack of social or emotional connections, just the ability to control them. He’d still worry if a villain kidnapped his girlfriend, but he’d keep a cool head and work on getting her back safely, not just sit and cry about how lost he is without her. I’m going to be reluctant to accept the Minor Twist of “Which hero or supporting character have you just alienated with your distant behavior?”, but am more okay with the Major Twist “How have you withdrawn from the current situation to cope?”. My max-die, everybody-gets-a-hero-point ability is “overcome a challenge related to duress or fear”. (By the way, shame on Dave and Christopher for using the term “hero point” in a game where you already have “hit points” or “health points” to track in the GYRO system. I can’t use the abbreviation ever again while talking about this game!)

Step 1C: I roll 1, 3 and 8 (if it matters, the d10 rolled the 1 and the d6 rolled the 3). Using these three numbers plus the sums of any two of them (4, 9 and 12), my power source choices are Accident, Genetic, Experimentation, Powered Suit, Radiation, or Artificial Being. Genetic is right out because of the same Unfortunate Implications that made me avoid being rich or a cop; I reject Accident and Radiation as being silver age cliches, and while Artificial Being really tempts me (how else could he have ended up with such an improbable last name?!), it seems awfully complex for my first character ever. So I’ll go with Experiment for now, with Powersuit as a backup option; either way I feel like a connection to RevoCorp is a reasonable possibility.

Step 2: Okay I already did part of this, but to continue from my Experiment selection, which I didn’t really look at, my d6/8/10 are to be divided among Signature Weaponry, an Athletic power, an E/E power, an Intellectual, a Mobility, or a Self Control. My attention immediately goes to the latter. I’m also told to choose Yellow Abilities, figuring to ignore Throw Minion as not Unremarkable enough, and of the two Green abilities I immediately like the synergy that Overpower has with Personal Upgrade. So here are my abilities so far:
Green Inherent - Overpower. Whenever Boosted, increase that boost by 1, but if it goes over +4, lose that bonus and take 5 or more damage.
Yellow Action - Personal Upgrade. Boost yourself using Power and use your max die to gain a persistent exclusive bonus.
Yellow Reaction - Misdirection. When a nearby Hero in Red or Yellow would take damage, Defend with your single Power die, then redirect any remaining damage to a nearby minion of your choice.

Step 2B: First, before I forget, I roll 3d8 for archetype selection, getting 6, 6 again after fairly thorough shaking, and 1 after much more vigorous shaking. Tabling those results for now, I shop the Powers list and come up with the Self-Control power of Absorption. For my second option, avoiding things that are disappointingly generic, I consider Cold as a reference to his calm demeanor, but decide a better option is Sonic; he prefers not to yell or make others yell, but if a cacophony does break out, he can channel the noise more usefully. I might like to come back and put Deduction in place of one of these options later (actually nevermind I was supposed to pick three anyway, so that’s the third), but for now I’m going to go with the idea that Misdirection is his best ability and uses his Sonic power. So that one gets to be a d10, Absorption is a d8, and Deduction is a d6; he’s no Sherlock Holmes, but he can put 2 and 2 together to an extent that is above average.

Step Not 2B: I have 1, 6, 7 and 12 as options here, which gives me Speedster, Close Quarters Combatant, Armored and Psychic. I don’t like any of those, so Reroll time. Now I get 7, 3, and 4, also summing to 10 and 11. Sorcerer, Robot/Cyborg, Marksman and Physical Powerhouse; almost all of those radically change my concept from where it was a moment ago, so I guess I’ll ignore the reroll again and go with Armored by a slight margin over PP or CQC, thinking of it as a weird variant on Armored where it’s more mental than physical. So I guess I’m dividing my D8s among more powers - Signature Weaponry again or Vehicle this time, Athletic and Intellectual and Mobility again, and also Materials and Technology. Not wanting to shop any more powers lists, I guess I’ll just take Signature Vehicle at a d8, but it’s a weird one - I envision him in either a flying chair or standing on a flying platform, the latter being a cool image I once got out of a comic book panel featuring a villain named Per Degaton who comes from the future, so levitation disks are standard issue in his time or something. Where exactly he got this device remains to be decided, but it’s by far the best idea I currently have. And this form is erroring a lot, so I think I’ll submit the post, and then continue from step 4 in another one.

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Okay, so Ray is continuing on from step 3, which I think is mostly done (I’m supposed to pick Physical and Social qualities, but I’d like to think a bit more before I do that, given how generic they all are). I have the Armored inherent ability, which I’ll put into Energy damage, and I’ll take the Green abilities of Repair (Absorption), the rather weak Deflect reaction, and a weird version of Unstoppable Charge which uses his Banter quality, where he can deal unavoidable Sonic damage just by talking at someone. I also choose another Principle, from Expertise, most of which annoy me so I’ll pick Clockwork as the least obtrusive. My new hero-point ability is “overcome a complex problem with a simple tool”, which fits his very common-sense attitude, and I’ll finish by rolling those same pair of d10s I started with, getting a 3 and a 7. So now I guess I’ve really done step 3, and it’s step 4 for sure.

Step 4: My choices for Personality are Impulsive, Stalwart or Alluring; that’s definitely reroll territory. But I get the same roll again, so I suppose I’m Stalwart, it’s the only one that’s not grossly inappropriate. “Make up a d8 Quality based on your hero’s backstory.” Well, great, that’s helpful. I don’t have a backstory yet, to any great extent. My annoyance with Dave Chalker ticks upward one more step. So my Status Die is a d8 and never changes, which is boring but at least sort of appropriate for a guy who’s all about being level-headed; my Out ability is “defend an ally with my Self-Discipline die”, and I have two red abilities to pick, but that’s another step. I’d really love to revise this system just so that the steps flow more naturally and I’m not constantly rolling dice in one step just so I can save them for another.

Step 5: For my first Red ability I’m definitely taking Eruption with Sonic; as much as his shtick is always being reasonable, if things get bad he may well just yell “Shut up!” at whatever idiot has ruined everything today. I find an appealing ability in the Intellectual category which lets me stop shopping: Give Time, a Boost action which unfortunately uses my d6 Deduction, but allows me to target a hero who’s already acted for the turn, using my Max die for the boost and making them “lose health” (presumably intentionally not using the word “damage”) equal to my Min, in order to also give them the next turn. As much as the die size kinda sucks, that could be an advantage given the ability’s drawback.

So here’s my complete set of abilities:

Green Inherent: Armored - In G/Y/R status, reduce Energy damage taken by 1/2/3.
Green Reaction: Deflect - When reducing damage with Armored, a nearby Minion takes the damage prevented to you.
Green Action: Repair - Attack using d8 Absorption; recover health equal to your min die.
Green Action: Inescapable Cutting Truths - Attack using d8 Banter; the damage cannot be reduced by penalties or defend actions and is not affected by reactions.
Green Inherent: Overpower - Whenever Boosted, increase that boost by 1, but if it goes over +4, lose that bonus and take 5 or more damage.
Yellow Action: Personal Upgrade - Boost yourself using d8 Absorption and use your max die to gain a persistent exclusive bonus.
Yellow Reaction: Misdirection - When a nearby Hero in Red or Yellow would take damage, Defend with your single Sonic d10, then redirect any remaining damage to a nearby minion of your choice.
Red Action: Eruption - Attack three targets using d10 Sonic, one of which must be yourself. Divide your Min, Mid and Max as damage among the three targets.
Red Action: Give Time - Boost using d6 Deduction, but allows me to target a hero who’s already acted for the turn, using my Max die for the boost and making them “lose health” (presumably intentionally not using the word “damage”) equal to my Min, in order to also give them the next turn.
Out - Defend an ally with my d10 Self-Discipline die.

Step 6 - Retcon. I’ll come back to this when I’m actually at the end.

Step 7 - Health. 8 plus 8 plus my Mental Quality of Self-Discipline, which is 10, plus a d8 that I can roll twice, but I’m tired of rolling dice and they’ve been unkind to me today, so for this character it’s appropriate that I just take the below-average but reliable 4. I have 30 health.

Step 8 - Finishing Touches. I’m not going to rename abilities much since it would complicate looking them up later; Unstoppable Charge becomes Inescapable Cutting Truths, that’s about it. So to do that retcon I skipped…I’m tempted to change out Principle of Clockwork, but that would require shopping the entire Principle list, or to improve my Deduction die, but that seems dubious given the drawback. So maybe I’ll tinker with the dice, but that would make it helpful for me to actually have a quick list of what they are:
d10 Self-Discipline
d8 Banter
d8 Absorption
d10 Sonic
d6 Deduction
Looking over the list, I found I had accidentally already done a retcon just by losing my place; I thought I had Sonic at d8 and Absorption at d10, but that was dumb and I’m not wanting to make it so. The one thing I am tempted to do is reduce the die associated with my Eruption attack, but that doesn’t necessarily help me. I’m unclear about the line “choose a different power or quality used in one of your abilities”, as to whether that would allow you to replace a power with a quality or vice versa. Probably I should just bump up my red status die and gain 2 extra hit points, but I was considering that the final fallback option, so to avoid it I’ll instead say that my favorite of these abilities, ICT, now uses Sonic instead of Banter, making it a d10 instead of a d8. Banter was extremely appropriate, but Sonic works too. If I find a ruling somewhere that I can’t switch a quality for a power, then I’ll accept the higher status die instead.

As a reminder, I have Principle of Sensibility and Principle of A Rationally Ordered Universe. To grant a hero point and use your max die, overcome using a simple tool to solve a complex problem, or overcome a challenge related to duress or fear.
Minor Twists: Which ally have you alienated with your borderline smug assuredness? What tool, possibly a human one, just “broke” in some sense?
Major Twists: How have you shut down to process the severity of your current problems? What faraway location are your “tools” now occupying?

Okay, I have a better name for him. Ray Chalcelerr is an embarrassing name his great-grandpa got stuck with by some jerks at Ellis Island when the family first emigrated, and his parents were preoccupied with keeping their son from discovering too much about his grandpa’s dad, so they named him Raymond Hall, having long since legally changed their family name to that. But he was determined to honor the old man, stupid name and all, and so he lives in his day to day civilian identity as Ray Chalcelerr…but when he needs to defend his neighbors against a rude shouty person, he dons the costume of Lecture Hall, and goes and gives the malcontent a stern talking to! He’s resistant to all sorts of energy attacks, which tend to do more damage to annoying individuals around him than to himself, and when he manages to get royally ticked off, the tongue-lashing he can give someone is almost literally blistering. He may not be an academic, but by gum he’s going to have some peace, order, and quiet in his surroundings!

Name: Lecture Hall
Alias: Ray Chalcelerr
Gender: Male
Age: 44
Height: 5’11 (huh, same as Jim Brooks, though a hell of a lot heavier)
Eyes: Green (I didn’t realize I was just making a Citizen Anvil of myself, but here we are)
Hair: Slightly Reddish Brown
Build: Sedentary (not quite The Scholar level physique, but definitely not superhero typical - more like a dwarf’s build in D&D).
Costume/Equipment: I’m resisting the urge to say “tweed jacket”, but in general I figure his heroic apparel is just sturdy high-quality clothing that’s less cheap than he wears when going to the grocery store etc. I don’t see him ever wearing a mask, though some sort of badge or hat might be fitting.

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The descendant of Polish and Hungarian immigrants, particularly his great-grandfather Rejczis Csalczedjalliejrnr (loosely “royal chancellor” in the mother tongue), Raymond Hall looked up to the old man he’d barely missed meeting in his high nineties, but had so many stories of from the man’s loving son, who was much better as a grandpa than as a dad. The elder didn’t mind having his first name shortened to Ray; the rest was a clear act of mockery, but the proud old Eurasian didn’t let some sneering Anglos ruin his sense of pride, and he did the usual Greatest Generation thing of buckling down and making things happen for himself. That quality was something Tomas Chalcelerr admired, but the Boomer didn’t share Rej’s slightly elitist attitude, and was disappointed when it turned up in his son, who started life as Tomas Chalcelerr Junior but quickly filed papers to become Thomas Hall.

In life, Raymond Hall was a modest fellow, smart but not prone to emphasize his exceptional nature, since he didn’t want to cause envy or shame or anything in others not quite as quick as himself…and he wasn’t really exceptional anyhow. But he did seem smart enough that a certain “market research” company sent him some surveys and application forms for a “scientific study” on individuals with high scores on their college exams. He did well on these initial tests, and flew to Megalopolis to take part in the first round of trials, being given various vitamin supplements and energy drinks and kept from sleeping for numerous hours, then forced to solve several puzzles under tight time constraints while receiving mild shocks…it was pretty uncomfortable, and he was quite glad when he was told he hadn’t qualified for the second round of tests. He went home with a modest stipend for his time, a splitting headache, and little reason to feel special or to remember the experience.

What Ray Hall didn’t know was that the process he’d been weeded out from was intended to identify people with truly exceptional brains, possessing either psychic power potential or a superhuman degree of intellect, so that those individuals could be recruited into the service of Highbrow, a villain with fewer ego problems than those who speak of conquering the world, and who has the calculating patience to actually do so. Her goal was to stay under the radar enough that by the time heroes noticed what she was maneuvering toward, she would already control so many social institutions that the heroes would effectively be working for her rather than against her…they can hardly oppose the entire social order they’re sworn to uphold! It was a good plan, and it may still be underway, but it meant not attracting too much unwanted attention, and thus she couldn’t simply disappear all her candidates. And the thoroughly ordinary crossword-puzzler intelligence that a sleep deprived Ray displayed just wasn’t exceptional enough for Highbrow’s needs, so she willingly allowed him to go…not realized that the drugs meant to make him show signs of superhuman mental acuity he already contained had instead created those very powers within him, at too low a level to be initially apparent.

Now, having finally evinced special powers and returned to his home in the Midwest, Lecture Hall is completing a correspondence course in superheroism from Freedom Academy of Phoenix, not wanting to have to travel again. He helps keep a lid on problems around the University of Minnesota campus, socializing with other local heroes but being slightly disliked by several of them for his unflappable demeanor. Highbrow is loosely aware of him but currently deems him a low priority retrieval target, as he didn’t awaken true super-genius abilities like she needs; he was remarkable among unremarkable people, and now that’s reversed, so he isn’t worth the trouble of bringing him in again.

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Just a couple of names: character named Strong Suit, and a hero who’s Nu-Clear (possibly with cola powers). Also a hero named Fancy Rat.

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All in all, not bad for a first run-through the hero creation process!

I’m probably just a bit dense, but I don’t get it. It seems like this name is supposed to mean something, but to me it’s just a collection of arbitrary letters. Care to enlighten?

Actually, the Sentinel Comics RPG doesn’t have hit points or health points — here it’s just called health. In fact, I think hero points are the only kind of “points” in the game.

Everybody’s free to like the tropes they like, of course, but IMHO those two power sources don’t seem noticeably more common in the Silver Age than most of the other ones. (Also, I’m just curious: if you have a beef with Radiation, do you also take issue with Superman’s yellow sunlight power source? Light is radiation, after all.)

Huh. You know, come to think of it, I think it ought to be that if one rerolls and gets the exact same results as the first rolls, one should be able to keep rolling until one gets something different.

Despite the fact that the book says that, many of the sample heroes have unique qualities that aren’t really backstory-based. Tachyon has Mind Over Matter and AZ has Cool Under Pressure. Furthermore, the description the book provides for this “Special” quality on pg. 121 doesn’t even mention backstories:

As part of hero creation, you write your own quality that describes your hero. Think of this as your “high concept” or “elevator pitch” that defines an important part of the hero that’s not otherwise represented. This quality helps define your hero, but also provides a good default quality for situations where a more specific quality might not do.

You do you, though for what it’s worth I’ve observed that most folks get around that particular obstacle by simply copying down the texts of each of a hero’s abilities alongside their new names, either on a traditional character sheet or just in a forum post or word doc or something.

It looks like Ray’s Signature Vehicle hovering platform whatsit and those qualities that he was supposed to get from his Archetype aren’t listed here, if I’m following along right. Did you ever end up choosing them?

So, the Highbrow drugs only gave him mental powers? That explains the Deduction, of course, but what about Sonic and Absorption? How’d he get those? Did the experimentation give him them as well? Or is his particular implementation of the Sonic power less actual control over soundwaves and more just being real good at verbal sparring?

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It’s Racial Slur. I thought it would be funny if that was literally your name. But I’m definitely more interested in calling him Lecture Hall now that I got there.

Har har. No, sunlight obviously doesn’t count as radiation, because Peter Parker didn’t get bitten by a sunbathing spider. But to the contrary, Ray’s power over sound is mostly based on his talking; he does actually have mild superpowers of sound manipulation and energy absorption, but it’s sort of the equivalent of Ambuscade having one card in his deck which definitely represents his powers (Charged Attacks), and then all the rest might be the offensive use of those powers but could just as easily have been a laser gun or a bomb that he planted. He’s probably got loosely similar powers to the Shrieker.

There’s a question in my mind as to whether I followed all the steps right in character creation, since I wound up having two surplus Qualities I never bothered to name. I do think his “vehicle” shows up occasionally though.

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I created another new character who I may post here in abbreviated form, now that all the steps are complete, but for now I’ll just say that she’s another Experiment, with the Retired background and the Close Quarters Combatant archetype. Her Personality roll was two 10s, so she had to be either Alluring or Arrogant, and I found the latter to be extremely disappointing for an option that you have only a 1% chance of qualifying for.

PS, I’ve decided that Lecture Hall’s roleplay quality is Honoring The Past, and his other two qualities, superfluous as they are, are Finesse and Persuasion. I’m still unsure why exactly I got those instead of gaining two additional Powers, which seem like they would be more useful than Qualities, but he was intended to be somewhat more of a Badass Normal kind of character without a ton of superpowers, so it might be just as well…though I don’t see a huge benefit to having multiple extra Qualities anyway.

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Here’s hoping that Raymond Hall discovers his long lost relative Monty at some point.

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No, Monty’s a Python, but Ray might have a distant cousin named Hector.

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Okay, time to start building my third character; this time I’ll do at least a partial Constructed method, as I’ve rolled enough times to have an idea of the option lists.

I had a half-thought about a powersuit and a connection to RevoCorp before, so that’s where I’m going to start. Having not yet picked a Background, I’ll look at Powersuit, and not wanting to reinvent Benchmark the first Power I’ll pick is Elasticity, going for more of an Inspector Gadget inspiration. I’ll go with Lightning Calculator for similar reasons. I’ll take physical Damage Reduction as a Green ability, and for Yellow abilities I’ll go with Explosive Attack (Power Suit) and Energy Converter (Elasticity).

Going back and picking my Background, I decide to go with Blank Slate, fittingly enough for my not having a clear idea of who this is. So my Power Suit is an 8, Elasticity is a 10, and the other 8 goes to Lightning Calculator. My d10 Quality is Physical and the d8 is Mental, to go with the idea that he’s not that bright; I don’t want to copy IG too much, so instead of the Mental pick being Investigation, I’ll go with Alertness (Self-Discipline might have been more fitting, but I don’t want to duplicate any aspects of Lecture Hall). The Physical pick then is Finesse, though Acrobatics and Fitness would also have worked.

My Identity principle is Amnesia, the obvious choice for a Blank Slate; I don’t want to be quite that obvious by having Robot/Cyborg for an Archetype, so instead I’ll go for Transporter. I get to pick a Mobility power, a Technological one, and an Athletic one, not wanting to settle for any Qualities instead. My Green Abilities are Hit and Run (Elasticity) and the Mobile Dodge reaction, which doesn’t have a Power associated but I assume this is still legal or it wouldn’t be listed in this table. I also get a Yellow ability of Displacement Assault, which can again use Elasticity. My Archetype selection is 10/6/6, and I haven’t even used any of my new Powers for the Abilities; I’m all in on Elasticity, but I also have Wall-Crawling d6, Inventions d6 and Agility d10.

I’ll pause here, since I probably want to actually roll for my Personality. It’s pretty obvious to me now that this character is like a quad-amputee, an aborted fetus, or maybe even a brain in a jar, with infinitely stretchable robot limbs; that doesn’t tell me anything about the mind inside, though. This could work for ABSA but is definitely not what I had in mind, so this is probably a new character and not a dent in my backlog. I’ve started picturing them as having dozens of tentacle-like waldoes rather than just the stretchy arms and legs of the Inspector; we’ll see if I continue to like the idea that they’re just a ball of metal snakes with a solid core, or if I actually want something more person-like despite the Elasticity power.

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I’ve decided that this character is a normal man who’s been reconstructed after an accident or something; I had a name for him earlier today but misplaced it, but it was definitely some sort of pun that established he was a dude.

EDIT - I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the original name, but for the sake of at least having something to call him, I’ll go with the name Wrecktangle. Or perhaps Rextangle, if his name was Rex.

15

New character name: Non-Sensequitur

And a name for a Villain probably: Visceral

Meanwhile, Wrecktangle’s Principles are Amnesia for Blank Slate and Gearhead for Transporter; his Personality roll is a 5 and a 7, adding to 12, so that’s either Sarcastic, Stalwart, or Nuturing. The first interesting idea I’ve had about this guy’s persona is the idea that there’s a Nurturing heart inside that cold steel shell, so that’s my choice; his Status die is a 12 in the red zone and 6 any other time, and if he’s Out he can Boost an ally using one of his Qualities as a single die (that’d be his Finesse d10 so far). Unfortunately, I can’t finish the character with its Red abilities, because I’ve lost track of what categories my Powers and Qualities came from, so I’ll come back and redo the entire process tomorrow or thereabouts.

16

Okay, here’s both characters reconstructed fully.

Lecture Hall - Unremarkable, Experiment, (mentally) Armored, Stalwart

  • Principles: Sensibility aka Detachment (overcome a challenge related to duress or fear), A Rationally Ordered Universe aka Clockwork (overcome a complex problem with a simple tool)
  • Powers: Elemental Sonic d10, Self-Control Absorption d8, Signature Vehicle d8, Intellectual Deduction d6
  • Qualities: Mental Self-Discipline d10, Physical Finesse d8, Social Persuasion d8, Social Banter d8, Roleplay Honoring the Past d8
  • Green Abilities: Repair (Absorption), Inescapable Cutting Truths aka Unstoppable Charge (originally Banter, changed to Sonic as my Retcon if legal), Deflect, Armored (energy), Overpower
  • Yellow Abilities: Personal Upgrade (Absorption), Misdirection (Sonic)
  • Red Abilities: Eruption (Sonic), Give Time (Deduction)
    Retcon: See above under Unstoppable Charge. If GM vetoes switching a Quality with a Power under an Ability, then instead increase Red Status die to d10 and recalculate HP for +2 total.
    HP (took 4): D8 Green 30-23, D8 Yellow 22-12, D8 Red 11-1
  • Out Ability: Defend an Ally by rolling your single Self-Discipline die.

Wrecktangle - Blank Slate, Powered Suit, Transporter, Nurturing

  • Principles: Amnesia (completely fresh perspective), Gearhead (technological challenge)
  • Powers: Self-Control Elasticity d10, Athletic Agility d10, Technological Power Suit d8, Intellectual Lightning Calculator d8, Mobility Wall-Crawling d6, Technological Inventions d6
  • Qualities: Physical Finesse d10, Mental Alertness d8, Roleplay Keep It Together d8.
  • Green Abilities: Hit And Run (Elasticity), Mobile Dodge, Damage Reduction (Physical)
  • Yellow Abilities: Displacement Assault (Elasticity), Energy Converter (Elasticity), Explosive Attack (Power Suit)
  • Red Abilities: Paragon Feat (Agility), Endurance Fighting (Finesse), Change Self.
    Retcon: Third red ability.
    HP (took 4): D6 Green 32-25, D6 Yellow 24-12, D12 Red 11-1
  • Out Ability: Boost an ally by rolling your single Finesse die.
17

Time to start again, fully Constructed this time, as I work on figuring out the rules for a Modular hero.

I’m going to start with Tragic background, because I haven’t even looked at the Ideals Principles yet.

Qualities: Imposing d10, Mental ? d8

Principles: Ideal

d10, d10, d6

For Power Source, I’ll go for Mystical, so my d6 is Teleportation, and my d10s are Cold and Telepathy. I’ll use Telepathy to do Modification Wave, Mystic Redirection using Cold, and I have a d10 Magical Lore Information Quality.

d10, d8, d8

Now the rough part. Being Modular, I choose a base archetype of Sorcerer. Needing 4 powers, I choose d10 Fire, plus the d8 qualities Information and Mental. So I have the Switch Action in Green associated with Magical Lore, Quick Switch in Yellow, and the Emergency Switch reaction in Red.

Default Mode:

Powerless Mode optionally: d10 Cold and d6 Teleportation (this is Powerless? I’m very confused). No abilities other than Principle overcomes. So you theoretically have Teleportation, but you have no ability to actually teleport and do any of the stuff you normally do, you can just craft overcomes using these two power dice, and otherwise use them for basic actions. I’m not at all sure I’m actually going to have this.

Okay so the actual choices start happening here. Besides Default, my only green mode is Debilitator Mode; I can Hinder all nearby opponents using Cold, but cannot Defend, Boost, or Overcome. So in this mode I’m capable only of outputting so much frost magic that everyone around me becomes nonfunctional (except allies). If I roll doubles, I take my Max in damage and Attack the enemies I’m Hindering with my Min (so non-Villain opponents will immediately use the Hinder on their save, I guess?). In this mode my Cold is d12 and my Teleportation is d8, but my Fire is only d8 (and my Telepathy remains a d8).

Yellow modes: Stalwart Mode, in which I can’t Hinder or Overcome, and Analysis Mode in which I can’t Attack or Defend. So in combat, I have Teleportation d10, Cold d8, Fire d8, and Telepathy at the normal d10; this is me strictly containing my ice into a solid block which teleports around to Defend others, while Attacking with Telepathy probably. Analysis mode is strictly noncombat, but allows d8 Teleportation and d12 Telepathy for boosts, hinders and overcomes.

The red mode choices are all crippling; rather than lose either Attacks or Overcomes as options, I’ll go with Destroyer Mode, which can’t move or Boost, but can Attack, Hinder, or Overcome. In this mode I apparently just plain don’t have one of my previous four powers, which logically would be Teleportation because otherwise how am I not capable of moving. But my Fire in this mode is d12, with Cold and Telepathy at the normal d10s. I may well switch a bunch of these around to make more sense later.

The loose idea is that this character is a mage based in part on my own IRL tragic backstory, who I may refer to with my long-adopted character name Doctor Thermocline. What I’m envisioning is that he was content to be a humble scholar of magic who used Telepathy and Teleportation spells for his own convenience, but one day a supernaturally severe blizzard destroyed an electrical transformer on the outside of his house, which was not warded against mundane fire and thus burned to the ground, with him trapped inside (the real me didn’t live alone and thus was gotten out without magical assistance). The teleport took him to the otherworldly source of the blizzard, bringing much of the fire with him into a realm that was otherwise an eternal Niflheim, and thus he was forced to weave the flames of his former house and the frost of the lifeless realm together into his teleportation spells, causing his body to be transmuted into a living temperature boundary with a psionic mind inside it, constantly shifting across the temperature currents of the frozen Utterdark, screaming psychically in search of any other mind, until eventually latching onto some passing astral traveler and hitching a ride back to earth. Reconstituting a passable human form from memory, he was now permanently changed by the cold and flame, and could assume the form of an implacable ice mountain, a tornado of consuming fire, an insubstantial phantom consciousness, or a relatively human “frost wraith”. Only if willingly severing all spell power for a time through some ritual can he regain a mundane human form resembling who he formerly was, albeit permanently blue-skinned from the cold that penetrated his soul. This form alone retains full freedom to act as desired; all the others are situational.

Overall I’m displeased with the execution of Modular heroes. Granted my concept was weirder than most, but the whole thing seems uniquely designed to make Bunker work, and have little application to other highly versatile heroes.

18

Ironically, it doesn’t work that well for Bunker, either. Because it has four Modes instead of three, his RPG version needs an extra mode. Because the Turret Mode equivalent is in Red instead of Yellow, none of his giant war robot’s core Modes can attack until Red, and the Modes that align with his suit synergize poorly with the Powered Suit Power Source. He’s playable, but not very good.

Modular is a really weird build. Without moderate system mastery, it’s just a mess. It’s not really designed for playing highly versatile heroes - you want Form-Changer for that. What it does is gives you heroes with a handful of extremely specific and moderately different roles that they can hop between depending on the action scene. It’s pretty good for someone like Mimic

There are two ways to make Modular highly effective. The first is to build a character with decent Boost reactions, and then spend your time destroying the bonuses you get from your reaction to hop into the mode you need every action so that the limitations aren’t a big deal. The second is to build a character who has Abilities that include big drawbacks as a balancing factor, shift into Modes that don’t allow you to use those drawbacks, and laugh all the way to the bank.

2 Likes
19

That feels appropriate actually. Giant army robot bristling with guns shows up and just stands there, Hindering with the threat of unleashing all that fury, and not actually firing a single one of those $2000 flak shells until things get desperate. It’s kind of exactly how our army rolls. All reputation and posturing to make the entire rest of the world stay in their lane and show proper respect.