Randomizers:
Approach: 4, 6, 4 [Options: Underpowered, Disruptive, Mastermind, Overpowered, Ninja]
Archetype: 2, 4, 4 [Options: Inventor, Guerilla, Overlord, Inhibitor, Titan]
Upgrade: 9, 2, 4 [Options: Villainous Vehicle, Calming Aura, Hardier Minions]
Mastery: 4, 10, 1 [Options: Behind the Curtain, Mad Science, Total Chaos]
Madame Calamity
Real Name: Marianne Leblanc, First Appearance: Venture into the Unknown (Vol. 2) #9, Dec 2019
Approach: Ninja, Archetype: Titan
Upgrade: Villainous Vehicle, Mastery: Total Chaos
Status Dice: Begins at d12. Health: 50+5H (Upgraded 65+5H)
Qualities: Alertness d10, Close Combat d10, Stealth d8, Fitness d8, Enemy of Order d8
Powers: Size-Changing d10, Shapeshifting d10, Intuition d8, Vitality d8
Special Challenge:
[] []: Restrict Madame Calamity’s power, reducing her status by one die size.
[__]: Trap Madame Calamity at her current size, reducing her status by one die size.
Abilities:
- Change Scale [A]: Change Madame Calamity’s form and move her anywhere in the scene. Take a basic action using Size-Changing, using your Max die. This ability cannot be used if the special challenge is complete.
- Surprise Smash [A]: Attack using Close Combat, using your Max die against one target, your Mid die against another, and Min die against any target.
- Reactive Transformation [R]: When Attacked, Defend yourself by rolling for your single Shapeshifting die. Boost yourself with the amount of damage reduced.
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(U) The Night Mare. Madame Calamity rides this terrible steed through dreams to pierce impregnable facilities. The Night Mare is a d10 lieutenant with three abilities:
- Sturdy (I): When rolling a damage save, add 2 to the result
- Aura of Fear (I): To attack the Night Mare, a hero must make an Overcome action in order to face it.
- Infiltrate [A]: Take a basic action. You and one other target end up elsewhere in the scene.
- (U) Master of Total Chaos (I): If you are in a situation where everything is spiraling out of control, automatically succeed in an Overcome to accomplish a task by throwing out the rules.
Titan Form:
- No Vital Points (I): Reduce all damage taken by 6 (if you have a d12 status die), 4 (if you have a d10 status die), or 2 (if you have a d8 or lower status die.)
- Living Calamity [A]: Activate one of the environment’s twists in its current zone.
Infiltrator Form:
- Slippery Character (I): At the start of your turn, remove a penalty on you and restore one box of the Special Challenge. Heroes cannot Overcome to resolve the Special Challenge.
Common Scene Elements:
- A Populated Environment which Madame Calamity is dedicated to devastating.
- Local Support. D8 minions who can step down their die after rolling to add +2 to their result.
- A multi-step challenge to evacuate the area.
Venture into the Unknown mostly worked as a series of two-parters in its first year; Venturer would come to a new world, spend an issue learning about it and its problems, and then address those problems in the second part before being dragged to his next destination. The first four such locations all had the same rough structure - the world was a pocket dimension reflecting the world of Venture Comics, someone was trying to conquer them, and the heroes were in disarray or defeated. In Issue #9, however, a new twist threw the situation into chaos.
The story opened with a steampunk Paris, as a group of ‘stormguards’ searched for a mysterious thief. When they cornered her, she was revealed to be Marianne Leblanc - but instead of shapeshifting to distract them, she simply grinned, clenched her fists, and turned into a fifty-foot tall monster, obliterating the airship she had been infiltrating and sending wreckage raining down over the city. Venturer appeared just in time to save the Mayor of Paris from her rampage, using his mirroring to grow to a massive height and wrestle her towards the ocean.
Over the next two issues, however, it became clear that the Mayor was the threat that Venturer’s shadowy nemesis was using to conquer this world. He’d already wiped out the heroes of the realm, and was fitting the populace with control chips to use them as manual labour.
Madame Calamity wasn’t even a native of this realm - she was another interdimensional travellers, who had made deals with the fae of her pocket dimension to fight against the Nazis after experiments left her with the ability to transform into a monstrous state, only for her entire world to be burned down in the resulting war. She found Venturer, and warned him that someone was trying to align the subnarrative nature of a variety of pocket worlds. If successful, the worlds would collapse together, creating one unified dimension and releasing whatever was contained between them. To prevent that, Madame Calamity was willing to do whatever it took. She had seen what happened when worlds burned, and burning a few cities in retaliation was a small price to pay.
Venturer refused to believe that Calamity’s methods were necessary, and the two of them clashed as he looked for a way to defeat the Mayor without laying waste to Paris. In the end, he was narrowly successful, but the razor-thin margin of his victory left Madame Calamity convinced it was a fluke. She swore to him that she would not rest until matters were resolved - one way or the other.
The dimensional disaster proved to be wildly popular, and Madame Calamity re-appeared in World of Wonders #13, a three-parter set in another world that Venturer had previously liberated. The Animaster was attacking that world, trying to turn it into an outpost for his own activities, and the Drifter and Alchymia arrived to stop him; Madame Calamity once again served as a third pole to the conflict, smashing Animaster’s approach but uncaring about the fates of his conscripted soldiers.
Behind the Scenes
Evil alternate!
Well, sort-of evil. As is classic in comics, this is the alternate-universe character who stands against other bad guys, but also goes too far.
Obviously, I’ve given Madame Calamity a unique ability - the power to shift between being a human-sized threat and a giant monster. This ability gives her a different inherent in each form, but locks some of her best tricks behind being a giant monster. I think it will make for a fun action scene, especially if the players show up to fight a giant monster and suddenly the monster is gone and a woman is bolting through a window, only to explode back into monstrous size a couple of turns later and wreck a building.