I actually just guest-starred on a Dragon Age tabletop rpg podcast. It'll be released later this week! :P
Awesome! You better post a link somewhere in the Off Topic forum!
I've never heard of that series/book/comic. What's it about?
I already have Roach going for the 'child in an adult's body' personality, so I don't know if I want to do that for two characters in a row. I was thinking maybe something more serious or trained… Also maybe just have her able to produce Adrenaline at will instead of having it always going through her body. It's still an idea in development.
I'm working on the personality and additional power pallate for a character I like to call Deathmarch.
He's very much a meatshield via straight up durability and stamina.
Basically, I envisiion him having Haka or Legacy levels of durability, and Wraith level strength. Probably fighting with a Cestus (or just bare hands.)
I'm still not sure what secondary powers, aside form the durability, but that's going to be his key feature.
I love talking about book series I love.
It's on Kindle, by Richard Roberts. The main four books (fifth on the way) are "Please Don't Tell my Parents I'm a Supervillain", "Please Don't Tell my Parents I Blew Up the Moon", "Please Don't Tell my Parents I've Got Henchmen", and "Please Don't Tell my Parents I' Have a Nemesis". They follow a young woman by the name Penelope Ack. As you might suspect by the worry about her parents, they are retired superheroes, of the mega-genius variety. (One horrible pun I took a long time getting in the first book is that her father's name is Brian, but everyone called him Brainy. Brainy Ack. Brainiac… yeah…)
They live in a world that has a major super power presence, and she begins developing powers of the Mad Science variety. Her parents predict (again super-geniuses, though also regular mom and dad) that her powers will take a couple of years to fully mature, but they actually develop far faster than that. And, being a teenager with parents who are almost never wrong, she decides to play around with her powers for some time before revealing this too them. After an unfortunate series of events at the school science fair though, her alter ego and that of her friends get labeled as supervillains… and they embrace it, because why not. Being a villain while you're a kid is no big deal and a lot of Supers bounce back and forth. Problem is they are very very very good at being Super Villains.
There is a prequel book (and by Prequel I mean like 40 years before Penny is born at least) that gives some background on some of the other characters and gives some context for book 4, which is called "I did NOT give that Spider Superhuman Intelligence" which is where Mish-Mosh is from.
It's a good mix of a series, funny and with a world that takes the idea of Super Humans having been around and doing stuff for the past 50 or more years, so there is a lot of things like mystic artifacts and old supervillain lais just lying around. But, also intense at times. I think book 2 is the weakest of the series, but I can't recommend 1 and 3 enough.
It's one of my top 5 superhero series.
Heh... as much as I said that I generally design characters to mesh well with the party, an idea occurred to me that would work really well as a bruiser. He was a great warrior and master tactician in the Three Kingdoms era of ancient China, serving under legendary general Guan Yu. He was put into a difficult tactical decision where lines of communication were cut off and it looks like he ordered his troops to betray the general. Guan Yu also had a Virtuoso of the Void serving either under or with him (need to figure out when Xu lived), and this Virtuoso cursed him for this betrayal, condemning his spirit to wander the Void endlessly after his death, and erasing his very name from time and space.
After his death, the Virtuoso learned the truth of his story, but the curse was too thorough and powerful to be lifted entirely. The best he could do was to have a terracotta warrior built in his likeness and have the hero's spirit bound to it. The hero fought alongside the army and later accompanied the Virtuoso in his travels until the Virtuoso's death. After many years of a lack of exposure to Void magic, the hero's power waned and he eventually stopped moving entirely.
Centuries later, the terracotta warrior was on display in a museum next to other ancient Chinese artifacts, including Xu's Bell. When the Argent Adept rang the bell, the warrior slowly began to regain consciousness. Either he wasn't fully awake or was largely powerless by the time of the OblivAeon battle, but he has since regained enough of his lost strength and cognition to act as a full-fledged hero.
Wow, I'd kind of see him becoming more of a villain after the curse than eventually a hero. But it's still a very interesting concept.
That didn't even occur to me, but that's because I've read a lot about the Chinese culture of the era--or at least, as it was written about a couple of centuries later. Loyalty was everything to these people.
One "favorite" story of mine is how king Liu Bei was traveling through a forest area and stopped at a woodcutter's hut, having no place better for shelter nearby. The woodcutter was poor, naturally, and had no meat to serve his king, but to fail to serve meat of some sort would be a horrendous, unforgivable lack of respect and hospitality. When the king asks what he's been served, the woodcutter says it's wolf meat, but actually he murdered his wife right there in the kitchen and fed her to the king and his retainers. Which is wacko enough, but, in accordance with the values of the time, Liu Bei heaps praise upon him for his "correct" set of values and rewards him with an officership in his army.
Well, I mean, the guy didn't really have any family tying him to his home anymore now, did he? :B
It occurs to me to actually use the whole reason we're in the RPG timeline, to join any group who wants to use Sentinels backstory.
An Irish-American who plays folk music as a hobby with a more mundane but decent office day job (a description which fits quite a few people where I live) who loses friends and family during the OblivAeon fight and feels incredibly guilty because they survived (not even at least doing anything mundane heroic, just literally hiding under a desk). Their search to find any way at all to even out the karmic balance and soothe their guilt and see discovering they're a Virtuoso as a lucky way to do that.
Logically there probably would be at least a few would-be heroes who were originally just normal-ish people until OblivAeon totally upended everything for them.
I really wish that I had bothered to save the character backgrounds I'd written up for my old City of Heroes characters. I loved that feature - that you could actually write up some backstory and have it available for other players to read if they inspected your avatar. I got compliments on several of mine. Then the game went under and all of that is lost.
The Walking Target - Tanker (Invulnerability/Super Strength) - what I remember was that he was a janitor at some science lab who got caught in some accidental explosion.
Candle-light - Blaster (Fire Blast/Devices) - something about her developing a low-burn-temperature/high-oxygen-use aerosolized chemical that was an explanation for a non-lethal fire blaster. Devices mostly let her use a cloaking device (the invisibility effect combined with a fire aura looked really cool) allowing me to have her plant a lot of timed and proximity mines. I had the timing down so that I could set everything off simultaneously with her big nuke attack.
Defibrillatrix - Defender (Empathy/Electrical Blast) - a first-aid robot. Healing primary, but with shock hands. I had a macro set up for her to yell "Clear!" when rezzing somebody.
I'm interested in trying to model at least these three in the system eventually, even if I don't get to play them.
Now I'm reminded of a Fallout campaign my group never got to play where we had planned on creating a bunch of people with Mystery Men-level superpowers caused by various Fallout-related issues. I had a character who was essentially the opposite of Absolute Zero: He had somehow managed to survive becoming heavily irradiated so he wore a special suit and had a lead-lined tent to keep the radiation in so he didn't kill everyone around him. (He was an ex-Brotherhood of Steel member who sort of worked as a wandering engineer/mechanic.)
It just occurred to me how perfectly Victory Anna can be slotted into the Sentinels RPG setting.
For those unfamiliar, Victory Anna is a character from Seanan McGuire’s Velveteen Vs series. Her story is mostly told in “Velveteen Presents Victory Anna vs. All These Stupid Parallel Worlds”, (which is mostly about Victoria, but contains spoilers for the main series).
Victoria comes from a steampunk world, but is thrown into a different one upon that world’s destruction. She finds love in this new world, but is thrown out of that one too, and goes reality hopping mostly at random for a while, trying to get back.
“I have been through eighty-seven parallel realities to get here, and most of them were balls,” said Victory Anna wearily. Exhaustion made her accent stronger. “Now I don’t know what you did, and I don’t know how you did it, but you’re going to undo it now. If you do, maybe I won’t shoot you.”
Eventually she finds the main story world, where she learns that the world (and girlfriend) that she’s trying to return to don’t exist anymore.
Replace the various reasons that her worlds ended with OblivAeon, and bam! Instant transport.
That. Is. Glorious.
Honestly, Victory Anna is one of my favorite characters (heck, I have too many favorites from Velveteen). I love the prim and proper englishwoman, who is very politley pointing a giant cannon at your head and is interested to see if it will atomize you or simply kill you.
So many good times from such a short series of events. I'm grinning like a fool remembering her.
I asked this in the Sentinels Letters Page thread, but I figure it would fit here too. To be affected by Isoflux Alpha(Medico and Mainstay's powersource, or what transformed them into what they are), would I have to base my character in the Southwest? Or is the 'science' behind it far reaching enough that my character could be an Omega from England?
I'm sure Adam and Christopher probably talked about it when they were going through all the science, but I didn't retain much of the info...
You’d have to listen to the podcast again to get the range on the mesons that caused the effect, but my impression was that even the extra stable mesons lasted only a few dozen miles or less. That said, it sounded like Isoflux Alpha lasts until a person absorbs it, so it probably wouldn’t be to hard to manufacture a situation where a bit of mutagen goes on a trip to England.
The proccess as I understand it is that there are more stable versions of this atom/energy signature/particle/what have you blast off away from the source at amazing speeds, reaching space within seconds.
The only time this does not happen is when one of these particles accidentally intersects a (leyline spiral?) which generally seems to be related to bodies of water.
At the very least, we know these Omegas can appear in Mexico near an ancient Aztec temple because Quetzoquatl is an Omega and that is where he transformed. Therefore, there is no major reason I can see that Omega's cannot be created in other parts of the world, like England.
It is possible, Traveling at "reletivistic speeds" the sciency particles could be anywhere, They have a halflife measured in seconds but at about half light speed it takes fractions of that to go through the earth. Quetzocoatle is an Omega & his transformation happened in, iirc, Brazil somewhere. Omega's could in theory be from anywhere within an AU of Arizona as long as there is something that can Transform into IsoFlux at a leyline convergance. Trust me, i have a Sciency detector right here that goes BING when there's stuff.
Bing
See. 
Don't worry, Isoflux Alpha will work as a power source wherever you are in the RPG. I'll let Christopher reveal the details whenever he sees fit :)
Awesome. Thanks for the verification. :)