Kind of!
I designed the Human Torpedo as a cross between Namor the Sub-Mariner and Doc Savage, and since Tom Strong is basically a Doc Savage deconstruction he’s pretty close to the same archetype.
3 Likes
Gives me hints of the King of Atlantis character from Freedom Earth the Mutants and Masterminds setting. Since pregen M&M characters are copies of Marvel and DC he vacillates between Namor and Aqua-Man. “I’m a member of a world renown team” - “war on the surface world!” - “I protect my planet with other citizens of the planet” - “I sit on my underwater thrown and mope” - “WAR!” - "“Friends”
2 Likes
Alas, poor Human Torpedo. You had a very goofy Golden Age-style gimmick, and yet you turned out to be a dumb jerk.
I don’t know if these are actually accurate for the construction of Flatfoot, but how about the Diesel Defender or the Plastic Protector? Or, well, I don’t know if he’s made of any copper, but there’s also the Copper Cop(per).
3 Likes
And yet, he still didn’t have it as bad as Marvel’s Brock Jones version of the Torpedo, who started off his career being falsely accused of murder and the crimes of his supposed victim, then progressed to be a D-list hero until he met up with ROM, Spaceknight and got his brains eaten by Dire Wraiths…which apparently also happened to one of the two New Warriors who were time-sharing the recovered suit as Turbo??? The heck is with Dire Wraiths and the Torpedo suit?
(sounds of furious online research)
Oh BS. They retconned the Torpedo armor to be Dire Wraith technology intended to fight Galadoran spaceknights and developed on Earth by a human scientist years before ROM showed up? What guff.
I am amused to discover that Volx, the Dire Wraith queen who killed half of the Turbo iteration of the Torpedo legacy was killed in turn by Night Thrasher. You know, Marvel’s skateboard guy. Great performance there, Queenie.
Although to be fair, apparently Night Thrasher has been steadily rewritten into a powerhouse, with more gadgets than Batman, better martial arts skills than Punisher, and his skateboard can transform into a snowboard too. I don’t even want to know why one of the accessories that came with his action figure is described only as “Kingpin’s left leg” do I?
(further digging)
Really? The Michiko half of the Turbo duo (that was the one that wasn’t killed) is the same character that appeared on an episode of the Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur cartoon? I remember the episode, but never having heard of Turbo I didn’t associate the character with Torpedo, Dire Wraiths, ROM, or any of this other stuff. Certainly did not recognize that suit as the former Torpedo armor. One more useful bit of info for playing Seven Degrees of Devil Dinosaur with.
2 Likes
my favorite thing added to Night Thrasher was the 25yr old black man having a 19yr old white son.
2 Likes
Should have mentioned, but due to BC Day updates this week are Tuesday and Friday! It’s a crime, I tell you.
The Crime Club
Type: Dangerous Location
Key Appearance: Skybreaker Stories #150
Traits:
- Top-Shelf Security d12
- Mary’s Explosives d8
- Lounging Villains d6
GREEN
Minor Twists
- Booby Trap: Mary Molotov planted a bomb for just such an occasion. Roll the environment dice and Attack one target with the Mid die.
- Sound the Alarm: The club’s staff sets off an alert to offsite security! Create the following challenge: Get the alarm declared false. If the scene advances to the Yellow zone without resolving this challenge, create (H) d8 “Crooked Guard” minions and remove this challenge.
Major Twist
- Lounging Lizard: Lounge Lizard stops in for a nightcap and gets involved. Create a d8 “Lounge Lizard” lieutenant. Lounge Lizard gets +1 to damage saves, and at the start of his turn he steps up his status die to a maximum of d8.
YELLOW
Minor Twists
- The Golden Touch: Mr. Midas directs his staff to roll out the armory for his patrons. Roll the environment dice and Boost all villain and environment targets with the Mid die.
- Suspiciously Capable Waiters: The wait staff sighs, grabs the nearest object to hand, and wades in to fight the heroes. Roll the environment dice and create a number of d8 “Ex-Con Waiters” equal to the Mid die. They have +1 to Attack.
Major Twist
- The Chandelier! Another one of Mary’s bombs goes off, and the elegant golden chandelier collapses on a hero, showering someone else with sharp shards. Roll the environment dice and Hinder one hero with the Max die. Attack another nearby target with the Mid die.
RED
Minor Twists
- Bringing Down The House: Mary’s bombs are getting out of control. Roll the environment dice and Attack all targets in a single room with the Max die.
- Secret Tunnels: Mr. Midas triggers trapdoors and revolving walls to slow the heroes down while getting his people into better positions. Roll the environment dice and boost one villain with the Max die. Hinder all heroes with the Mid die.
Major Twist
- Misleading Footage: He’s ready for anything, and the cameras have caught the heroes at their worst. Roll the environment dice and Hinder one hero with the Max die, then create the following challenge: Erase the tapes before they’re sent to the press!
Skybreaker #150 featured an unusual sort of alliance between five of Skybreaker’s recurring foes, the most prominent of which was his nemesis Mary Molotov. Crime boss and alchemist Mr. Midas, who had parlayed his ability to temporarily turn objects and people into gold into a small but lavish gang, had set up a new gentleman’s club in downtown Grovedale and Mary Molotov was furious not to be invited. She easily infilitrated the club and laid down an ultimatum – she would prove she was the most feared criminal in Grovedale, and Midas would allow women into his club.
Amused at the idea, Mr. Midas went one step further. He invited three more of Skybreaker’s villains to take part in the challenge – the Lounge Lizard, a small-time lounge singer and part-time supervillain who could recover from almost any injury thanks to the curse he received looking to stay immortal, the Penny Pincher, a man who exclusively stole nearly valueless objects that would create vast amounts of chaos, and Prismatica, whose Rainbow Rowdies had been making waves in Grovedale’s criminal underworld. Mr. Midas issued a challenge to the four villains to put together the most successful and entertaining crimes, with the winner receiving a lifetime pass to his still-unnamed club.
Over the course of Skybreaker #150, the four supervillains launched a series of ever-increasing crimes, as Skybreaker was run ragged trying to deal with the fallout, racing to a new problem as soon as he’d dealt with the previous one and unable to pause long enough to actually catch his foes. As he did, Rhonda investigated the situation and discovered why so many crimes were being pulled at once, leading Skybreaker to attack the club directly to bring a halt to the proceedings. Mr. Midas and Mary Molotov were able to escape, but the other villains were captured, bringing an end to the proceedings.
Mr. Midas was so entertained by the challenge that he not only declared Mary the winner and opened his club to all genders, he gave lifetime memberships to all of the villains who had taken part. Moving his Crime Club underground, he set up a location where Grovedale’s supervillains could gather, brag about their criminal antics, and meet up for jobs and team-ups. The alchemical supervillain moved into more of a ‘fixer’ role, giving up personal schemes in favour of aiding and abetting the crimes he found so entertaining, and soon the Crime Club was a fixture in Grovedale’s criminal underworld.
The physical location of the club changed frequently, and it was raided by Skybreaker, Greenheart, and other heroes on a regular basis, but Mr. Midas was always prepared for heroic attack, with escape routes and traps laid out to make his patrons able to rest easy knowing that they could relax, take a load off, and not worry about getting arrested. Mary Molotov generously provided some of her demolitions expertise to help secure some of the clubs, although her enthusiasm did sometimes mean that a location had to be completely abandoned after the security system demolished the entire building. Still, it was a small price to pay for free explosives!
Behind The Scenes:
Okay, some pulling back the curtain here!
When I was first designing my next book, “Enemy Action”, the Crime Club was a supervillain team that I was in the process of developing. After a lot of back and forth, I ended up replacing them with the Dread Dynasty, but I had a bunch of notes already so I went ahead and fleshed them out as an environment here.
I don’t know if Mr. Midas, Lounge Lizard, or Penny Pincher will appear in future books. Mr. Midas probably won’t, he’s more or less fully-explained here. Lounge Lizard just got a mechanical writeup and there’s really not any more to him than what I listed I think, so he may be good. We might see Penny Pincher in a future volume, time will tell.
6 Likes
I am perhaps inevitably reminded of the supervillain bar run by Emperor Palpatine on that How It Should Have Ended youtube channel. That’s one’s just pure parody, though.
TBH, I assumed you were just joining your fellow citizens in boycotting US-made products, which obviously includes Sentinel Comics. Wouldn’t blame you a bit, although it would be sad to see you go.
On a related note, what do you think the odds are of Canada annexing New York State if it just happened to secede and request sanctuary? Asking for a friend. 
Random hero: “What do you mean, his tail grew back?”
Bruce Wayne, making a cameo: “Oh. You’ve got one of them too. Strange coincidence.”
There used to be a comic blog out there that had calculated the raw copper value of the giant trophy penny in the Batcave, but it eludes me now. IIRC it would have paid for a modestly-priced house with it back in the 2000s when the post went up. One wonders what the poor Penny Plunderer/Pincher would do if he were still active in the US these days. Probably go out in a blaze of glory trying to bury the White House or the Capitol Building under millions of tons worth of pennies.
Look’s like you’re missing a key appearance there, bud. From the write-up, I assume it’s Skybreaker #150?
Anyways, neat take on the “supervillain hangout” trope.
I love it.
Well, I have refrained from buying any Sentinel Comics RPG products for the last year.
Well, Penny Plunderer would be real mad!
Fortunately, Penny Pincher is more after low-value things in general rather than pennies specifically, so he’s probably fine without literal pennies existing. He definitely has either a storyline or just a goof at the start of an issue in which he stole several million dollars worth of NFTs on the grounds that they’re actually worthless so it counts.
I don’t know if anyone bothered to stop him.
Whoops, yep. One of the cases where I placed the issue while I was doing the writeup, so it made its way into the book but not the online backup.
3 Likes
A Midnight Dreary
Type: Standard Event
Key Appearance: Dark Rivers #35, November 1971
Traits:
- Roaming Spirits d10
- Elysium Equipment d10
- Entropic Aura d8
GREEN
Minor Twists
- Entropic Lash: The veil between worlds tears, weakening the nearest being. Roll the environment dice and Hinder one target with the Mid die.
- Moaning Shade: A ghost overwhelmed by pain attacks! Create a d8 “Moaning Shade” minion. It is immune to physical damage.
Major Twist
- Elysium Traps: Elysium’s magic-siphoning technology is everywhere. Roll the environment dice and Hinder a magic-using target with the Mid die. Attack them with the Min die.
YELLOW
Minor Twists
- The Veil Widens: As the rift between life and death grows, it becomes difficult to know what is real. Roll the environment dice and Hinder one target with the Max die.
- Friendly Possession: The ghosts here offer their power to those who will accomplish their final deeds. Roll the environment dice and Boost one willing target with the Mid die. This bonus is persistent and exclusive.
Major Twist
- Overload: The technology Elysium is using to hold the rift open ruptures, blasting everyone nearby with deadly necrotic energies. Roll the environment dice and Attack all non-undead targets with the Max die.
RED
Minor Twists
- Violent Possession: Ghosts stirred up by the fighting attempt to lodge themselves in a target. Roll the environment dice and Attack one living target with the Mid die. Boost them with the Mid die.
- Ghoulish Resurrections: A new thread of the rift threatens to bring the dead to life. Create a “Hungry Ghoul” minion. It has +1 to Attack. Also create the following challenge: Suppress the necrotic threads. Until the challenge is resolved, create a new Hungry Ghoul at the start of each environment turn and each time a living target is killed.
Major Twist
- Drawn Through The Rift: The rift is reaching a deadly level! Roll the environment dice and Attack all nearby targets with the Mid die. Move any targets who take damage to a “The Ghostly Realm” zone. Leaving the zone or rescuing anyone lost within it requires an Overcome action.
In her first two years as a superhero, Veilwalker had to contend with a number of plots by Elysium, Inc. to secure access to necromantic power. Elysium was hoping to industrialize the afterlife, using it for long-distance transportation, powering devices, and developing labour forces of spirits and ghostly beings. Their holy grail was to develop a reproducible method of ensuring that the dead would rise as ghosts, allowing them to sell immortality to the highest bidder.
As a rule, these experiments were carried out without any real care for who might get hurt in the process, turning innocent ghosts into agony-driven shades and giving random individual mystical powers that were very dangerous to their health and well-being. Elysium test subjects made up a third of Veilwalker’s opponents through 1969 and 1970, as she struggled to find a way to prove that they were responsible for the problems she was facing while also working to understand and develop her own powers, manage her personal life, and deal with the mystery of Asphodel and her own connection to the corporation and to Karita.
A Midnight Dreary was the two-part story that brought everything happening to Karita to a peak, and ended her first major story arc. As the story began, Veilwalker had been struggled over the past few issues with the mysterious Ravenmaster, a ghostly visitor who was stalking her for Elysium and trying to steal her magic away from her with his own tricks. His efforts were complicated both by the fact that he didn’t want to be doing it, being in thrall to Elysium, and the fact that Asphodel was secretly sabotaging his efforts in an attempt to protect her daughter from harm, but not so much that she couldn’t get useful data and power from him.
But Asophodel couldn’t stop the Ravenmaster forever, and in “A Midnight Dreary” he finally succeeded in laying a trap that neither he nor his mistress could sabotage. Veilwalker was lured to what she believed was an attempt by Elysium to capture a group of restless shades, but the site was actually intended to harness her own powers and steal her magic for the corporation to study. But Asphodel had thoroughly misunderstood how her daughter’s magic worked. She thought that Karita’s power came from within her, but she was just the conduit for it. The machines went haywire, connecting to necrotic essence so powerful that it took control of them and began to tear apart the veil between the living and the dead. As Asphodel scrambled to claim as much power as possible and the Ravenmaster spitefully egged the magic on to secure his freedom, Veilwalker was forced to try to contain the power, calming the spirits it was unleashing and sealing the rifts it was creating.
As the situation grew out of control, Asphodel was forced to choose between her research and her daughter. As a powerful rift threatened to pull Veilwalker back into the spirit realm forever, Asphodel used the accumulated energies of her gear to push Karita to freedom, dragging herself and the Ravenmaster into the depths of the afterlife. In her final moments, she revealed her true self to her daughter, and apologized for everything that she had done – and then she was gone, leaving Karita to struggle with the complexity of her mother’s latest cruelties and the sacrifice that she had made.
Asphodel would return, of course, as would the Ravenmaster, but her departure left Elysium in a shambles, and set the stage for Veilwalker to be able to focus more on the spirit world for the next few years. That story shift drew her into the Dread Depths crossover in the next year and set the stage for the formation of the Twilight Carnival.
Behind The Scenes:
For Dark Rivers, I wanted something that would touch on the storyline before Dread Depths kicks off and starts drawing Veilwalker more fully into the broader universe. I wasn’t sure whether to do something with her mother, or with the lost magical champions, but this came together nicely I think! We have the story of how she learned about Asphodel, a bit of complexity to their relationship for when Asphodel returns, and hints of a new villain who I may or may not develop further in the future.
5 Likes
Needs a die size, maybe dependent on an environment dice roll.
Ah, late stage capitalism, the gift that never stops giving - to greedy, unethical billionaires, anyway. 1971 is a bit early for that theme, although individual evil businesses have always been with us in comics.
Depressing that being a mere millionaire is no longer a sufficient qualifier for true top-tier evil.
1 Like
The Polymath font is saving my books and killing my copy/pastes. Every time. Hungry ghoul is d8.
Yeah, in 1971 Elysium is very much just a “mad science company” rather than a commentary on capitalism as a whole, although that probably starts to shift as time goes on (and definitely shifts by the 2010s thanks to a little project I worked on in the Realm of Discord that created three 2010s stories for an Elysium subsidiary to be discussed in the future.) They’re still focused on things like “making products” and “long-term planning” and “employee retention” (even if one of their primary vehicles for employee retention is turning employees into ghosts.)
1 Like