It is a soda glass, although probably not a branded opportunity! I just wanted him to have something friendly to hand someone rather than a pie.
2 Likes
Wise choice. I’ve seen enough Three Stooges to regard a proffered pie as a potential threat. 
2 Likes
oh boy, X-TREME time 8)
2 Likes
The Randomizers:
Background 9, 8, 6 [Options: Upper Class, Struggling, Tragic, Interstellar, Retired, Anachronistic]
Power Source 7, 8, 4 [Options: Experimentation, Relic, Powered Suit, Supernatural, Artificial Being, Genius]
Archetype 5, 9, 5 [Options: Blaster, Elemental Manipulator, Robot/Cyborg, Minion-Maker, Wild Card]
Personality 7, 9, 8 [Options: Stalwart, Fast-Talking, Inquisitive, Jovial, Cheerful, Naive]
Knightgrave
Real Name: Mordred Pendragon, First Appearance: Knightgrave #1, August 1985
Background: Anachronistic, Power Source: Relic, Archetype: Wild Card
Personality: Jovial, Principles: Undead, Justice
Status Dice: Green d6, Yellow d8, Red d12. Health: 30 [Green 30-23, Yellow 22-12, Red 11-1]
Qualities: Close Combat d10, History d10, Leadership d10, Uncompromising d8
Powers: Clarent d10, Presence d10, Blood (Infernal) d8, Awareness d6, Strength d6
Green Abilities:
- Knight’s Vows [A]: Boost yourself using Clarent. That bonus is persistent and exclusive.
- Majestic Presence [A]: Boost or Hinder using Presence. If you roll doubles, you may also Attack using your Mid die.
- Sacrifice [R]: After rolling your dice pool for the turn, you may take 1 irreducible damage to reroll your entire pool.
- Principle of the Undead [A]: Overcome a situation where your undead nature comes in handy and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
- Principle of Justice [A]: Overcome to stop an act of injustice in progress and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
Yellow Abilities:
- Blood Magic [A]: Attack using Blood. Use your Min die. Take damage equal to your Mid die, and one nearby ally Recovers Health equal to your Max die.
- Feint [A]: Boost yourself using Clarent. Use your Max die. Hinder a nearby opponent with your Min die.
- Knight-Companion [A]: Use a Green action ability of a nearby ally (using the same size power/quality die they would use.)
Red Abilities
- Fatal Thrust [A]: Attack using Clarent and at least one bonus. Use your Max+Mid+Min dice. Destroy all of your bonuses, adding each of them to this Attack first, even if they are exclusive.
- Rule to Serve [R]: When an opponent Attacks, you may become the target of that Attack and Defend by rolling your single Red zone die.
Out
- Defend an ally by rolling your single Presence die.
Having established eight new and returning titles, Venture Comics began once again looking at expanding their lines. A decision was made to launch a six-issue miniseries which, if it proved popular, would be immediately expanded into a full run. A variety of ideas were pitched, ranging from yet another Flatfoot reboot to some truly out-there ideas, but the editors, already growing fond of Venture Comics’ slowly increasing focus on magic over super-science, decided to risk adding another magical hero to the ranks.
Knightgrave was introduced in August of 1985, a knight appearing out of nowhere on the streets of London to defend its residents from gangsters and incursions, laughing and challenging his foes to single combat before effortlessly defeating them. In the first issue, one of the knight’s enemies ran him through, only for the knight’s blood to curl around the attacker’s knife and pull it from his hands before Knightgrave cut him down, leaving him injured but not slain. The issue hinted that the knight was King Arthur returned, as a police detective named Esme Sharpe and local historian Craig Snipes tried to find him - only to reveal in its final pages that he was in fact Arthur’s son, Mordred Pendragon, loathed in legend as the Traitor Knight.
Mordred’s story was revealed in the second issue. A gallant and boisterous knight, he was the product of Arthur’s dalliance with a prominent fey noble. Finding his way to Camelot, his early adventures were full of excitement, but over time, King Arthur fell under the sway of Merlin, Master of Mysteries, a powerful mystic in the service of the Sovereign of Secrets. Arthur traded more and more of his ideals and values for a thin illusion of a glimmering kingdom, and as the people suffered Mordred ultimately found that his oaths of loyalty and chivalry were at odds. He raised an army of loyal soldiers, including the king’s wife and best friend, to overthrow Arthur and the mad magician who had enslaved him. At the battle of Camlann Fields, Mordred let Arthur run him through, driving himself up the blade to slay his father. Even in death, he did not falter, standing at the gates of Arthur’s tomb to hold the Sovereign at bay from the world.
With the Sovereign now truly defeated and sealed away, Mordred was freed, his body building itself from the dirty and returning him to the modern day. The knight wasn’t sure what to do with his new life, so he did what he did best - declared war on the forces of darkness and dedicated himself to their destruction, no matter what others might think of him for doing so. He began to work secretly with Esme and Craig, hoping to make the world a better place by taking on the criminals and mysteries that modern law enforcement couldn’t touch.
If the new reboots had heralded a darker turn for Venture Comics, Knightgrave confirmed it. Mordred was a much more brutal and uncompromising hero than any introduced since the Golden Age, and while most of his opponents he merely left injured, he was perfectly willing to kill anyone that he felt could not be redeemed. His blood magic allowed him to turn his enemies’ own blood against them, and he was held back only by his rigid personal code of justice. He was, to the surprise of some of the more traditional staff at Venture Comics, a huge hit, which would shift the focus of several comics to come.
Behind the Scenes
Let’s get dangerous.
I had literally no idea who I wanted, aside from “someone new, and someone grim.” Anachronistic is a choice that doesn’t pop up too often, and once you’ve got that and rellic you have a magic undead knight. This is technically my second magic undead knight created in Sentinel Comics, but Knightgrave is a very different flavor from the other one so I’m cool with that.
One thing that I do like is having Knightgrave himself be a pleasant and cheerful fellow, in contrast to the grim nature of his comic. Mordred is used to violence and suffering, perhaps more so than most modern people. He doesn’t brood on a rooftop about the fact that he just had to slice several people up, he just accepts it as a normal part of life. I suspect that might actually make the comic itself grimmer, because he’s not struggling with his choices.
2 Likes
Quite a twist in his origin for sure. Merlin’s often dodgy but rarely outright evil, much less a servant of a greater evil. Mordred’s frequently re-imagined as a misunderstood tragic figure or a wryly sardonic realist, but the hero role is rare and a cheery Mordred’s a new one on me. Bet he’s going be pretty annoyed by his reputation in the modern day though. All the stabbing and chopping probably won’t help that any.
Boy, that’s going to make using Knight’s Vow an extra time or two to build up to a better P+E bonus easier to justify when he can spare the time.
If that’s the Wild Card ability I think it is, the Boost/Hinder function uses your Max die as well. It’s actually quite good, one of the PCs I used to team with got great mileage out of it.
This wouldn’t be a very subtle nod to DC’s Camelot: 3000 miniseries that ran a year or two earlier IRL, would it? That was scifi rather than modern day, but still a re-imagining of Arthurian myth.
1 Like
wow, edgy and anachronistic aren’t things that tend to go together! 
quite unique!
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Hah, yep. When I was looking into it, I discovered that the character has undergone some wild shifts over the centuries. The early Welsh versions of the legends mostly just depict him as a beloved knight, and then there’s a reference to him “dying with Arthur at Camlann”, and then after that there’s a version where he’s in the Lancelot role, and Arthur goes overseas to fight so Mordred takes over the throne and declares himself king and takes early-Guinevere for himself.
One thing that I noticed a lot of myths had that almost never makes it to the modern world is that Mordred was supposed to be highly charismatic, easily getting half of Arthur’s knights and vassals to follow him in his revolt. Combine with the idea that the stated reason for the revolt in several places was Arthur’s cruelty in feeling the need to execute Guinevere, and I had the idea of “what if the dream of Camelot was literally a dream, and Mordred represented the waking world”.
Merlin just ended up evil because I can’t imagine him siding with Arthur in that situation if he wasn’t.
1 Like
I mean he is part-fey, after all, whether Morgana’s the mother or some random fairy seductress (I’ve seen both versions). Some of his portrayals remind me of classic trickster icons like Loki, too.
And he’s half-demon a lot of the time. Usually he’s on the side of good despite his heritage, but even then he’s often as manipulative and secretive as Odin tends to be.
One of my favorite Morded interpretaions is in the short story Chichevache, which was printed in Ares Magazine way back when. Link goes to an archive scan, it’s a decent read. Mordred’s approach to problem solving is, ah, novel, shall we say?
1 Like
The Randomizers:
Background 2, 6, 1 [Options: Blank Slate, Criminal, Performer, Upper Class, Law Enforcement, Struggling]
Power Source 7, 8, 2 [Options: Training, Relic, Powered Suit, Radiation, Tech Upgrades, Genius]
Archetype 5, 2, 3 [Options: Shadow, Physical Powerhouse, Blaster, Armored, Flyer]
Personality 3, 10, 9 [Options: Impulsive, Inquisitive, Alluring, Nurturing, Analytical, Jaded]
Reckoner
Real Name: Shul Gari, First Appearance: (as Shul) Celestial Travels #559, September 1985; (as Reckoner) Celestial Travels #580, June 1987
Background: Law Enforcement, Power Source: Radiation, Archetype: Flyer
Personality: Jaded, Principles: Nomad, Great Power
Status Dice: Green d10, Yellow d8, Red d6. Health: 28 [Green 28-22, Yellow 21-11, Red 10-1]
Qualities: Ranged Combat d10, Investigation d10, Deep Space Lore d8, History d6, Reborn Immortal d8
Powers: Intangibility d10, Flyer d10, Nuclear d8, Vitality d6, Intuition d6
Green Abilities:
- Cosmic Force (I): Whenever you roll a 1 on one or more dice, you may reroll those dice. You must accept the result of the reroll.
- Fly-By [A]: Attack up to three targets using Flight. Apply your Min die to each of them.
- Fade Out [R]: When you are Attacked while flying, you may Defend yourself by rolling your single Intangibility die.
- Principle of the Nomad [A]: Overcome a situation where you can apply lessons from the road and use you Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
- Principle of Great Power [A]: Overcome a situation using one of your highest rated powers and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
Yellow Abilities:
- Rebirth [A]: Boost yourself using Nuclear. Then, either remove a penalty on yourself or Recover using your Min die.
- Phase Pulse [A]: Attack using Intangibility. Hinder that target using your Max die.
- Cosmic Understanding: Boost using Investigation. Apply that bonus to all hero Attack and Overcome actions until the start of your next turn.
Red Abilities
- True Immortal (I): Once per issue, if you would go to 0 Health, roll Intangibility + Investigation + Red zone die. Your Health becomes that number.
- Fold Space [A]: Boost yourself using Flight. Use your Max+Min dice. Then, you may end up anywhere else in the scene, avoiding any dangers between your starting and ending locations.
Out
- Remove a bonus or penalty of your choice.
As they defeat the final World-Maggots and continued to trace the monstrous creatures’ origins, the Celestial Travellers met and befriended an intrepid Xur’Tani scout, Shul Gari. Shul gave the team tips and helped them backtrace the origin of the maggots to the hollowed-out husks of a handful of worlds that they had erupted from, with signs that something else had been born alongside them.
In May 1987, Shul called on the Travellers for aid. An ancient World-Maggot’s traces had been discovered in the heart of the Xul’Tari homeworld, having burrowed there millenia before, just as with the other worlds the Travellers had investigated. It was preparing to hatch, and Shul feared that the result would be the end of his planet. The Travellers raced to support him, and to save Xur’Tan.
They failed.
Shul Gari fought to the bitter end, crashing his spaceship into the heart of the creature’s coccoon in a desperate attempt to kill it. Instead, he was caught at the epicentre of the blast as a hundred World-Maggots burst forth from Xur’Tan, bathing the planet in deadly radiation and killing hundreds of millions as the survivors fled in the largest mass evacuation in galactic history. Bathed in the death-energies of his people, Shul was the first to discover just what the maggots were becoming: a massive cosmic butterfly, which grew into a white hole in a matter of moments and pressed all of its power and knowledge within him. He became its casing and its heir, a cosmic being capable of reshaping the universe.
In order to prevent the newborn World-Maggots from entering hyperspace and becoming a threat to immeasurable worlds, the newly-made Reckoner showed the Celestial Travellers how to trigger Xur’Tan’s sun to go nova. The maggots were destroyed, and the cost was every last trace of his home.
With nowhere else to go, Reckoner joined the Celestial Travellers. They now knew three things. First, the last of the World-Maggots had hatched, and while a few might still be hiding among the stars, their threat was over. Secondly, each hatching point had led to the birth of a celestial being armed with the knowledge of their entire species and the power to shake worlds. And finally, the Xur’Tani were shattered. The peacekeepers who had kept the galaxy from descending into chaos had lost their stronghold, and the universe would never be the same.
Behind the Scenes
Welcome to the 80s, planets going to explode!
This is sort of an anti-Phoenix going on here; instead of causing the death of a world, Phoenix-like powers are being born from it. It’s not clear how powerful Reckoner could get over time, but the answer is probably “very”. And that opens up a lot of potential enemies who aren’t so determined to do good with that power, all of them scarred by having lost the entire world that they lived on (and in many cases, although not Reckoner’s, probably being the last of their species.)
It’s a little bit ironic in terms of how this shook out, but Reckoner shares a Power Source with one of his teammates and an Archetype with another one. I almost tried to give him something to share with Doctor Cosmos, too, but it didn’t quite work out.
In terms of style, Reckoner’s outfit is based on the Xur’Tani uniforms that I designed for Steward and Synthesis, but with more of a patchwork look and with a darker color scheme. Didn’t want to go full black, but I like the imagery to say that he’s still trying to follow Xur’Tani ideals, just… darker.
2 Likes
so that’s what they do
I like that the end result is actually kind of positive for one person… If you ignore just what has to be given up to reach that end.
1 Like
Y…esss? But if that one person isn’t a good-spirited sort you wind up with a cosmic-threat villain on top of an exploded planet. And unless there’s something very odd going on with the maggot-starfly life cycle, those empowered beings are eventually going to lay eggs and then die, and those eggs will spawn another wave of world maggots, and the whole thing resumes. The time scale’s probably a long one by human standards - can’t get ahead of the universal rate of planet formation after all - but how many times has this happened? And why do the maggots target inhabited life-bearing planets? Even in a comic book setting most worlds are barren rocks, aren’t they? They don’t get page time because they’re boring, but they’re implicitly out there and if all they need is a molten core to pupate in almost any old dustball ought to do. Must be something more to it, like the starfly stage needing a sophont around to “become its casing” after hatching.
2 Likes
Yeah, my assumption is that the maggots are drawn to worlds with “strong psychic fields”, whatever that means, because a lot of living beings of a certain level of sapience have to be there for the maggot to gestate correctly. If a maggot burrows into a world and then the people die out, it doesn’t hatch and continue the cycle.
I also assume that, as noted, the timescale here is pretty long, on the order of thousands of years, and most maggots don’t survive most cycles. It’s possible that, as in a certain recent MCU movie, there’s a counter-force that seeds barren planets with life, or it’s possible that in this galactic civilization terraforming just happens.
Meanwhile…
The Randomizers:
Background 9, 4, 6 [Options: Military, Upper Class, Tragic, Unremarkable, Medical, Retired]
Power Source 9, 3, 5 [Options: Genetic, Mystical, Powered Suit, Radiation, Artificial Being, Alien]
Archetype 3, 6, 1 [Options: Speedster, Physical Powerhouse, Marksman, Close Quarters, Armored, Elemental Manipulator]
Personality 4, 3, 5 [Options: Impulsive, Mischievous, Sarcastic, Stalwart, Fast-Talking, Inquisitive]
Paradox
Real Name: Salma Bahar, First Appearance: Company Town (Vol. 2) #1, May 1988
Background: Medical, Power Source: Genetic, Archetype: Speedster
Personality: Sarcastic, Principles: Time Traveler, Speed
Status Dice: Green d8, Yellow d8, Red d10. Health: 32 [Green 32-22, Yellow 21-12, Red 11-1]
Qualities: Alertness d10, Medicine d8, Investigation d8, Stealth d8, Persuasion d6, Immortal Heritage d8
Powers: Postcognition d10, Speed d10, Lightning Calculator d8, Presence d6
Green Abilities:
- Frozen Moment [A]: Boost or Hinder using Speed. Use your Max die. If you roll doubles, you may also Attack using your Mid die.
- Ripple in Time [A]: Attack using Stealth. Defend yourself using your Min die.
- Read the Room [A]: Boost yourself using Alertness. That bonus is persistent and exclusive.
- Principle of the Time Traveler [A]: Overcome a problem using knowledge from your home era and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
- Principle of Speed (I): When you successfully Overcome, you may end up anywhere in the current environment. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
Yellow Abilities:
- What Was Will Be [R]: When damaged by an environment target or a surprise Attack, Defend by rolling your single Postcognition die.
- Precise Like A Scalpel [A]: Attack multiple targets using your Lightning Calculator, using your Min die against each.
- Strike From The Past [A]: Attack using Alertness. Use your Max die. If you roll doubles, use Max+Min instead.
Red Abilities
- Rewind [A]: Overcome using Speed in a situation that requires you to prevent something that is about to happen. Use your Max+Min dice. Boost all nearby allies with your Mid die.
- Visions of the Past [A]: Hinder using Postcognition. Use your Max+Mid dice. If you roll doubles, also Attack the target using your Mid+Min dice and take damage equal to your Min die.
Out
- Hinder an opponent by rolling your single Alertness die.
Time travel stories weren’t new to Venture Comics. Stories involving time travel dated back to Cryptic Tales in the mid-1940s, and superheroes had been taking part in occasional stories involving time travel since the early Silver Age. While many of these stories had been disorganized and written without much worry for long-term consequences, Venture had eventually settled into a narrative in which time travel was possible, but changing history was not. All time travel that would take place already had taken place, and any attempts to change the timestream would only cause the events you were seeking to prevent. This editorial mandate wasn’t always obeyed, but it was the Venture canon by the 80s.
However, other comics publishers were having huge success with time travel, and buoyed by that, and by the recent growth in popularity of cyberpunk stories, the Venture team put together a new storyline that blended time travel with another underrepresented facet of the company’s canon: Atlanteans. Introduced in 1973 in the Drifter’s second limited series, Heirs of Atlantis, a handful of immortal humans with special powers had been introduced as secondary heroes, and other classic Venture characters such as Iron Will and the Revenant had been retconned to have gained their powers through Atlantean blood unpredictably mixing to produce people with surprising abilities.
Dr. Salma Bahar was one such person. A skilled doctor in the dark future of 2028, she lived in the corporate dystopia of Ferristown, ruled over by the iron fist of the immortal Mr. Ferris. Dr. Bahar was one of Ferris’s doctors, until her Atlantean abilities surfaced and she witnessed a meeting in which Ferris had instructed his security team that when her work was complete, she was to be harvested so that his men could study her unique genetics. In her attempt to escape from Ferris, she discovered that she had powerful temporal abilities, and an interaction with his equipment sent her back in time forty years, to the dawn of Ferris’s return to power. There, she began to search for the Atlanteans he had stolen the DNA from, while fighting against his system and hoping that she could make a difference. She took on the name “Paradox” in the hopes that she could live up to it, and build a better tomorrow.
Company Town was split into flashforwards to Salma’s personal past and the events that she had learned about, and her attempts in the present to break the chains of history and rewrite the future. Bahar’s powers often allowed her to rewind time by a few seconds, and then make chocies that seemed to change what was happening, but at the same time, many of her stories ended with the events she knew about from her past coming true. Whether the future could be changed remained to be seen, but Company Town was also an opportunity for Salma to interact with a handful of characters who currently lacked their own books, including the return of the Golden Age hero, the Revenant, and the discovery that Fly Boy was currently in jail on trumped-up charges; Salma’s work to exonerate him was the backdrop to several issues.
Behind the Scenes
Can you believe that we got to 1988 without introducing the mess that is time travel into Venture Comics? Well, that will not stand!
Salma has the Principle of the Time Traveler, because she just has to. I have, after a lot of internal monologuing, decided that I’m just going to let her do that, rather than requiring a retcon for it. Going forward, I’m going to be doing the following as a Retcon rule:
You can do one of the following things:
- Add any d8 power or quality from any category
- Increase your Red status die by one size (maximum d12)
- Gain an extra Red ability
- Choose a different power or quality used in one of your abilities
You can also do one of the following things:
- Change one of your principles to any other principle
- Swap any two dice within your powers
- Swap any two dice within your qualities
Essentially, this breaks apart the “customization” part of retcons from the “power up” part of retcons, and gives you one of each. If I collate all these heroes eventually, I’ll make sure to upgrade anyone I gave a d6 to up to a d8.
2 Likes
Eww. That has some ugly implications if it’s widely known. If a maggot hits your planet the best response for a starfaring race might be to evacuate, especially if it’s a minor colony. If a maggot hits a neighboring planet that can’t or won’t evacuate, removing the populace by force makes sense - and if you’re genocidal enough, you don’t even need to worry about putting them somewhere. Either way an empty world leaves the maggot to…what? Starve? Hibernate until the planet gets new inhabitants?
In a basically utopian galaxy like the one James White wrote about galactic civilization would have programs in place for mass evacuations of a world endangered by stellar disaster, even (maybe especially) primitive ones that can’t save themselves. But comics usually aren’t set in utopian galaxies where that sort of arrangement could exist. Which is a shame, because False Alarm is one of the best optimistic scifi stories ever written.
Gave up on the RAW d6, eh? Can’t say I blame you, it rarely feels good to take.
1 Like
Probably hibernate, although a sufficiently advanced galaxy could likely go in and get rid of the maggot, enabling the population to return to an earthquake-ravaged world whose infrastructure was largely ruined. But yes, once everyone knows the drill, which is starting to happen this far in, the maggots become a problem more of chaos than of likely extinction for space-capable species.
Well, ironically, there was a largely utopian civilization who were acting as the galaxy’s peacekeepers and doing their best to help people endangered by stellar disaster… but their homeworld just exploded and now they’re refugees, too.
1 Like
The Randomizers:
Background 6, 3, 2 [Options: Criminal, Performer, Academic, Upper Class, Struggling, Tragic]
Power Source 7, 1, 4 [Options: Accident, Experimentation, Mystical, Relic, Powered Suit, Supernatural]
Archetype 10, 5, 5 [Options: Blaster, Robot/Cyborg, Wild Card]
Personality 6, 9, 6 [Options: Distant, Inquisitive, Nurturing, Jovial, Cheerful]
Matrixx
Real Name: Sylvia King, First Appearance: Rogue Agents #1, Oct 1990
Background: Academic, Power Source: Accident, Archetype: Robot/Cyborg
Personality: Inquisitive, Principles: Gearhead, Chaos
Status Dice: Green d6, Yellow d8, Red d10. Health: 34 [Green 32-24, Yellow 23-12, Red 11-1]
Qualities: Technology d12, Creativity d12, Investigation d8, Criminal Underworld d6, Grad Student d8
Powers: Lightning Calculator d10, Inventions d10, Presence d6, Agility d6, Leaping d6
Green Abilities:
- Fall Back [A]: Boost yourself using Inventions, and Defend with your Min die.
- Put On A Show [A]: Boost yourself using Lightning Calculator. That bonus is persistent and exclusive.
- Adapt To Change [R]: When you change personal zones, you may Boost by rolling your single Lightning Calculator die.
- Principle of the Gearhead [A]: Overcome a technological challenge and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
- Principle of Chaos [A]: Overcome a situation in a way that is truly unpredictable and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
Yellow Abilities:
- Hack In [A]: Hinder any number of nearby targets using Lightning Calculator. Use your Max die.
- Spot Weakness [A]: Attack using Lightning Calculator. Hinder that same target using your Min die.
- Bleeding Edge Tech [A]: Attack using Inventions with a bonus equal to the number of bonuses you currently have.
Red Abilities
- Backlash [R]: After an opponent Attacks or Hinders you or a nearby ally, Attack the opponent by rolling your single Technology die.
- Hacker Life [A]: Overcome using Technology. Use your Max+Min dice.
Out
- Choose an ally. Until your next turn, that ally may reroll one of their dice by using a Reaction.
As the 90s dawned and the comics market was booming, Venture Comics continued to lean into their increasingly gritty comics lines. With a major Covert Tactics storyline starting delving into corrupt military facilities, a new comic was launched to approach the situation from another angle. Helmed by a writer recently hired from Sentinel Comics, the comic began with a focus on Matrixx.
Sylvia King was a graduate student and computer programmer who was working at Guardian Industries, a major defense contractor, when she discovered evidence of unusual coding and mysterious funds. She continued to dig, returning to Guardian in the middle of the night, and accidentally activated the Omega Protocols, a secret government program based on interdimensional technology which downloaded backdoors to most of the world’s computing systems directly into her mind. With her new knowledge, Sylvia could see that the program was being developed for immoral purposes, and that it was tied to dozens of existing black ops programs. She immediately deleted everything from the servers, sending in a virus that wiped out everything Guardian was working on, and vanished into the night, knowing that she had to disappear before someone was sent after her.
Sylvia now had the world’s most valuable secrets in her head, and Guardian wasn’t about to let that stand. They activated one of their top agents to take her down…
Matrixx nearly prompted a lawsuit from Sentinel Comics, given the immense similarities between her backstory and that of the then-still fairly recent hero Parse. Venture Comics successfully argued that while both had similar origins, their characters and capabilities were sufficiently different to constitute different characters, but it was an open secret that Matrixx’s creator had been loosely involved in Parse’s writing team and had hoped to take her in a different direction. It remained to be seen whether his vision would prove popular.
Behind the Scenes
Originally, #9 and #10 were reversed, but since I was creating them as a pair the story worked better this way. You’ll see the second half of this story tomorrow!
Matrixx is a Boosting machine, which means that she’s going to be a bit slow in Green, but starting in Yellow she can do some truly heinous stuff. She can get a persistent boost going, give herself a boost/defend to protect from trouble, and Boost when she hits yellow, and then start dealing out some high-power Attacks or use great Hinders to support her allies. In Red, she’s designed to synergize with her partner, as you’ll see; he can draw fire, and she can make people hurt for attacking them.
I’m not a fan of getting two Expertise principles, so Matrixx gets Chaos as her second principle using her narrative retcon, and I upgrade an Agility-based ability to a Lightning Calculator one with her mechanical retcon so all her abilities are useful.
I didn’t intend Matrixx’s origin to be that close to Parse, but once I noticed it I decided that I should just lean in. So she’s also a Black woman, and there was a minor lawsuit over the situation.
2 Likes
Ooh, potential litigation. Shades of the many Captains Marvel.
I’ve got the typically oversized “old gamer” dice collection from buying games for 50 years, but even I don’t have a d120.
Shame she couldn’t get a good healing ability in somewhere. That reaction’s hilarious when you get to trigger it going up the GYRO scale as well as down.
We house-ruled that one to Max + Mid locally. It’s just maddeningly inferior to Canny Awareness (with it’s nice Hinder rider) down in Mental qualities by RAW, and for no good reason - especially when Info qualities are often harder to justify applying than Mental ones.
Use a d6 and a d20… 
(Yeah, good catch. 
Now is it a d10 or a d12? 
)
2 Likes
Or a d12 and a d10.
3 Likes
Obviously I just wanted the most X-TREME DICE!!
In all seriousness, I’d nudged her Red up to d12, then I changed my mind and moved the Agility ability to a Lightning Calculator one so that she wouldn’t have a Min die effect rider on a d6 power with no good associated qualities.
1 Like
Pish. Nowhere near as X-TREME as a d4 and d30.
Think I’ve still got a d34 around from some 90s scifi game that had them made specifically for it. Perfect for when your d30 isn’t useless enough.
2 Likes