It’s up there. Manifesting mental aspects as physical ones is a nifty twist, and the transient forms are a great way to describe fleeting changes.
Yep. Easy to miss that one with this archetype.
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Yeah, I think I have made that mistake with every Form-Changer I design. Fixed now.
If Wicker had become the new head of Earthwatch, the colour scheme uniform would only have been “use yellow as part of the theme” rather than using the full colour palette. He’s not nearly as strict a leader, and he wouldn’t have seen a team uniform as particularly useful, whereas Gale Force thinks it helps promote team spirit. I don’t know how hard she would push if someone outright refused, but I may find out on Friday…
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She’s got a mercenary/paramilitary upbringing from her mom (way up in post 179), so if nothing else she’s familiar with the idea of “even crude uniforms reduce friendly fire incidents” from those days - which you’d think would be a real issue with supers considering the diversity of outfits they tend to wear. Can’t hurt to engrain a “stop and be sure before attacking people in red” habit, right?
Also, has Catharsis gotten any offers to appear in an ad campaign for the popular fast food chain Beef Patty Royalty yet? 
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Especially since Earthwatch is mostly former villains, so it’s useful if other heroes who’ve fought them before can recognize an Earthwatch uniform.
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Yeah - it’s kind of interesting in real comics that team uniforms seem to have really gone down in recent years. In the past, outside of the Avengers and the Justice League, a lot of comics teams tended to have either a loose uniform or a pretty specific one. Then the X-Men started going back and forth on the subject, and lately it seems like nobody except the FF still has something like a team uniform.
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I’ve always found the FF uniforms striking but also rather amusing, since (when the original team is active) you’ve got one person who you can’t see half the time, another one who’s just a mass of fire even more often, a guy in trunks and nothing else, and Reed, who’d arguably be much better off if whipped up some adaptive camo fabric so he could use stealth with his elasticity more efficiently. That snazzy team look goes out the window the minute they power up - although once the kids grew up some there were more people to hang uniforms on, and no one in their right mind would complain about She-Hulk’s blue-and-whites while she was on the team. Can’t remember if any of the other temps and associates got a union suit - not Luke Cage, not Ant-Man, and they didn’t pay enough for Peter to join up way back when.
The Lantern Corps folks are still mostly pretty uniform (within the limits of their varied anatomies) but they’re not really a team so much as an organization, and orgs have still stuck to uniforms pretty faithfully even today. Good thing too, who would even recognize AIM if they lost the apiary hats - and how would they keep Swarm out of their bases without them? No one wants their lair overrun with Nazi bees.
“Hey, hey! Enough with the punching! I’m wearing my hero suit here!”
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Yeah, even in Sentinel Comics there don’t seem to be many team uniforms - other than the extremely brief stint of the Adamant Sentinels, the closest we see to a team uniform is Dark Watch (which, incidentally, also has the excuse of “the team leader was raised in a paramilitary group by a supervillainous mother and therefore knows the practical value of a uniform in avoiding friendly fire”).
(aaaand now I want to see the metaverse Dark Watch/Earthwatch crossover. Whoops.)
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The Prime Wardens also had a period in which they had something approaching a team uniform - all the Prime Warden variants use red and yellow as major parts of their colour schemes (Argent Adept the least, but he did shift to a red cape with yellow highlights, and added yellow flair to his gloves and boots.) I don’t think it stuck, though.
edit Actually, looking at their history, I might have it backwards. I think they put together the team costume and colors in 2011, when they reformed, and then only had them for five years because that’s how long they lasted until Oblivaeon.
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All I can think is that Outburst is such a cool name for a villain. XD Wish we could get those five portraits, lol.
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It is, as are several synonymous words. There’s the Skyscraper foe Tantrum, the V&V villain Temper, several published Rages and Rampages and Furies and Frenzies, my own Tirade…hey, I never posted him. Huh. Oh, and there’s the Spleen from Mystery Men and Flaming Carrot, but that’s not the meaning of his synonym - although teammate Mister Furious is prone to outbursts himself.
We still seem to be waiting on a Hissy Fit (no doubt a boa constrictor Animalverse villain) or a Conniption, though.
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The Randomizers:
Background 2, 7, 5 [Options: Criminal, Academic, Law Enforcement, Tragic, Adventurer]
Power Source 1, 2, 2 [Options: Accident, Training, Genetic, Experimentation, Artificial Being]
Archetype 5, 1, 2 [Options: Speedster, Shadow, Powerhouse, Blaster, Close Quarters, Armored]
Personality 8, 2, 7 [Options: Natural Leader, Stalwart, Fast Talking, Inquisitive, Alluring, Jovial]
Jitterbug
Real Name: Trixie Ford, First Appearance: Earthwatch (Vol. 3) #1, March 2019
Background: Criminal, Power Source: Artificial Being, Archetype: Physical Powerhouse
Personality: Alluring, Principles: Double Agent, Stealth
Status Dice: Green d6, Yellow d8, Red d10. Health: 30 [Green I-J, Yellow L-M, Red N-O]
Qualities: Persuasion d10, Acrobatics d10, Stealth d10, Criminal Underworld d8, Casual Larceny d8
Powers: Presence d8, Agility d8, Awareness d8, Strength d8, Vitality d8
Green Abilities:
- Superior Being (I): Whenever you roll a 1 on one or more dice, you may reroll
- those dice. You must accept the result of the reroll.
- Set the Stage [A]: Boost using Persuasion. Apply that bonus to all hero Attack and Overcome actions until the start of your next turn.
- Pas de Deux [A]: Attack using Acrobatics. The target of that Attack must take an Attack action against you as its next turn, if possible.
- Principle of the Double Agent [A]: Overcome in a situation where you can draw upon resources from your ‘father’ and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
- Principle of Stealth [A]: Overcome to infiltrate somewhere or avoid detection and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
Yellow Abilities:
- Push Through The Pain (I): Reduce any physical or energy damage you take by 2 while in the Yellow zone and 3 while in the Red zone.
- Gymnast [A]: Attack using Agility against multiple targets, using your Min die against each.
- Showstopper [R]: After rolling during your turn, you may take 1 irreducible damage to reroll your entire dice pool.
Red Abilities
- Easy Come, Easy Go [A]: Hinder any number of close targets using Acrobatics. Use your Max die. End your turn elsewhere in the scene.
- Shadow Dance [R]: When an opponent Attacks, you may become the target of that Attack and Defend by rolling your single Acrobatics die.
Out
- Boost an ally by rolling your single Presence die.
The third member of Earthwatch was a cheerful, friendly, and absolutely larcenous young woman with a mysterious background. Trixie Ford was a dancer who moved from city to city, winning attention with her fluid, easy movements while also robbing banks and museums at the same time. When a bit of bad luck wound up springing an alarm, she ended up in a little tussle with Skybreaker, and the next thing she knew, she was in prison! After a few months as an absolutely model prisoner, she applied for parole as a member of Earthwatch.
From the first moment, everyone knew something was strange about Trixie. She maintained that she had no idea where her superhumanly perfect physique came from, her identity was impeccable but lacked any kind of corroborating evidence outside of digital records and physical identification papers, and she didn’t seem to have any family or friends from before her twin dance and criminal careers began. She was simply a superhuman burglar who had appeared out of nowhere, gotten arrested, and applied for parole. Although Gale Force was suspicious of her, Earthwatch didn’t only exist for people whose backgrounds were obvious.
Readers were equally confused, until Earthwatch ran into a problem with some killer robots in Issue #5 and Trixie secretly went for help, calling up her creator - Doctor Strife!
The truth was that Trixie wasn’t human at all. She was the first generation of Doctor Strife’s Indistinguishable Android Assassins, set loose into the world to test her capabilities. Strife had deliberately slipped Trixie onto Earthwatch to determine whether the heroes could identify her android nature, and was delighted to learn that they could not. He was slightly less delighted to learn that Trixie really enjoyed being a superhero; the various loyalty and networking subroutines he had designed to make sure the androids wouldn’t turn on either him or their buyers had combined in unexpected ways, allowing her to actually make friends and empathize with her civilian cover. Annoyed, but also fascinated and a little bit touched, Strife started quietly supporting Trixie’s superhero career, as long as she didn’t turn it against him.
As a result, Jitterbug was in a complicated place! She truly wanted to be a superhero, but she also truly wanted her supervillainous father to succeed. He, in turn, was developing a fondness for his surprise superhero daughter, but still wanted to create a proper android assassin program. The two of them were both aware that this was not a sustainable situation, but since neither of them had a way out they both wordlessly agreed to shelve it for the time being. Jitterbug did her best to be a proper Earthwatch member in every respect except for dealing with her father, and Strife did his best to make sure that his villainous schemes wouldn’t cross Earthwatch’s path. Only time would tell how this would resolve…
Behind the Scenes
Trixie started as a Shadow, but then I realized that Criminal/Shadow was Madame Liberty, so I had to make some revisions. I think she works out okay, and the concept is deeply entertaining to me. Venture Comics is always looking for new ways to subvert the evil android situation, and this is a new one! Trixie is a double agent, but a very conflicted one, and ironically so is the villain she works for. My other option was that she was created by Sca-Venger as part of a plan to DESTROY EARTHWATCH but this seemed way more entertaining to read.
It also gives us yet another way for a character to either make it as a hero or fail. Eventually, Trixie’s loyalties have to come into conflict, and who knows what will happen then? I can imagine a storyline in which she finally stands against her father, a storyline in which she goes back to him and becomes a reluctant villain for a time, or even a storyline in which Doctor Strife turns himself in because of her. So many directions it could go.
Physical Powerhouse is, I think, the only Archetype that can get damage reduction starting in Yellow, and I quite like it. At first, Jitterbug seems pretty normal, and really minor injuries are taken as usual, but then she gets pushed and suddenly, superhuman durability under the skin!
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Robot/Cyborg can too, but only for physical damage (rather than both physical and energy). Technically Form Changer can too, as they can choose a green form for their yellow form.
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I like how her backstory immediately makes Doctor Strife into a sympathetic character. 
What a fantastic concept!
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Kind of reminds me of T.O. Morrow. Yes, Red Tornado betrayed me but that was because my A.I. program was so good it gained free will. I win at A.I.
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Morrow used exactly the same argument with his temporary partner Professor Ivo when Tomorrow Woman went all heroic on them instead of killing the Justice League.
Not that Ivo’s track record with Amazo over the years has been all that good either, but at least when that overpowered Silver Age mess betrays its creator it doesn’t normally become a wanna-be superhero, it just wants villainous autonomy for itself. The only times an Amazo was even sort of heroic were the animated episodes with Lex and (briefly) the Kid Amazo story.
How is it that no creative team seems to have written a villain team-up between Amazo and Composite Superman? Would the sheer amount of suspension of disbelief required collapse the fabric of space-time? Closest we’ve gotten was that attempt to retcon Ivo into having accidentally made “Composite” as a sort of Amazo prototype, and that wasn’t close at all.
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The Randomizers:
Background 9, 9, 1 [Options: Blank Slate, Tragic, Unremarkable, Exile, Otherworldly]
Power Source 6, 2, 1 [Options: Accident, Training, Genetic, Nature, Relic, Powered Suit]
Archetype 2, 5, 6 [Options: Shadow, Blaster, Close Quarters, Armored, Flyer, Sorcerer]
Personality 3, 4, 10 [Options: Impulsive, Mischievous, Stalwart, Alluring, Analytical, Decisive]
Merlin
Real Name: Merlin Ambrosius, First Appearance: (as ‘hero’) Earthwatch (Vol. 3) #1, March 2019
Background: Exile, Power Source: Training, Archetype: Close Quarters Combatant
Personality: Mischievous, Principles: Self-Preservation, Debtor
Status Dice: Green d8, Yellow d8, Red d8. Health: 32 [Green 32-25, Yellow 24-12, Red 11-1]
Qualities: Insight d10, Finesse d10, Close Combat d8, Otherworldly Lore d8, Persuasion d8, Magical Scrounger d8
Powers: Intuition d10, Presence d8, Teleportation d8, Artifacts d8
Green Abilities:
- Dirty Fighter [A]: Attack one target using Close Combat. Attack a second target using your Min die.
- Run the Con [A]: Take any two basic actions using Intuition, each using your Min die.
- Break Artifact [A]: Attack using Artifacts. Ignore all penalties on this Attack, ignore any Defend actions, and it cannot be affected by Reactions.
- Principle of Self-Preservation [A]: Overcome to get yourself out of immediate danger and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
- Principle of the Debtor [A]: Overcome in a situation related to repaying a debt and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
Yellow Abilities:
- Pocketful of Tricks [A]: Boost yourself using Artifacts. That bonus is persistent and exclusive. Then, Attack using your Min die. You may use the bonus you just created on that Attack.
- Hit and Run [A]: Defend using Teleportation. Attack using your Min die.
- Your One Remaining Curse [R]: When you are attacked by a nearby enemy, the attacker also takes an equal amount of damage.
Red Abilities
- Let’s You And Them Fight [A]: Boost another hero using Intuition. If that hero has already acted for the turn, use your Max die, and that hero loses Health equal to your Min die. That hero acts next in the turn order.
- Warding Amulet [A]: Hinder yourself by rolling your single Artifacts die. You are immune to damage until the start of your next turn. You cannot use this ability again this scene.
Out
- Hinder an opponent by rolling your single Intuition die.
The editors of Venture Comics wanted the newly relaunched Earthwatch to include one member who was a former Venture villain, but the fifteen-year timeskip made this difficult. The writers of the comic were charged with finding a classic villain who could be an interesting team member, and who wouldn’t take much explanation for new readers.
Instead, they brought in Merlin.
Merlin had a complicated Venture history. He had first been introduced in the backstory of Knightgrave, a powerful mystic whose connection to the Sovereign of Secrets allowed him to weave dreams into reality, a power which he used to garner favours from demonic forces across the cosmos. When the Sovereign was sealed away, all of his spells abruptly stopped working, leaving him completely powerless and with a number of very angry former clients chasing him. He spent some time as a Knightgrave supporting cast member, alternately assisting and frustrating the hero while using him as a shield against demonic forces, and following the end of Knightgrave’s comic took up a similar role for the other magical heroes in the Venture setting. His final pre-timeskip appearance was in Twilight Carnival in 2016, in which one of his schemes ending with him becoming king of a small demonic realm. The writers had planned to revisit it, but their timeline was thrown off by the System Crash event, and then by another crossover in 2017, and then by the need to tie up loose ends in preparation for the timeskip.
Earthwatch revealed that, like all of his schemes, that one fell apart, leaving Merlin exiled once again, on the run through demonic dimensions for over a decade before he was rescued by Gale Force and Night Guard. Now back on Earth with only a handful of artifacts that he’d gathered and about three spells that he still knew, Merlin wanted nothing more than to sit on the couch, watch this new ‘streaming’ invention, and bemoan his fate. However, he was still wanted for numerous crimes dating back centuries, and on top of that he owed Gale Force his life. When she suggested he could avoid a very long time in a very small cell by becoming Earthwatch’s magical expert, he groaned and agreed.
As a member of Earthwatch, Merlin was snarky, still more than a little depressed, and prone to putting in the absolute bare minimum amount of effort possible. For the first three issues of the comic, his uniform was just a hoodie, white shirt, and jeans; after multiple lectures, he found a new hoodie with a red inner lining and added a yellow belt and shoes to technically meet Gale Force’s dress code. However, he was also still being pursued by demons and very much did not want them to find him, so when the chips were down, he could be counted on to save his teammates - as long as the risk to himself wasn’t too high. To his surprise, the cynical magician began to enjoy spending time with his teammates, especially the complicated Catharsis. Other heroes were all sticks in the mud, but these half-reformed villains were much more interesting. Perhaps there was a chance for him to reform after all, or perhaps he would end up the greatest temptation luring his teammates back to villainy…
Behind the Scenes
This is the silliest build I have designed in some time, in part because I already had Corporal Liberty as Training/Shadow, Greenheart as Exile/Armored, and Midnight Rider as Training/Sorcerer, and I didn’t want to bring any of them back as Earthwatch reformed villains.
So powerless punch-Merlin it is!
Merlin scampers around the battlefield, making it unpleasant for people to attack him with his collection of artifacts and either doing a lot of little things or doing things that people can’t strike back at. In Red, he gives up his actions to either hide from everything for a turn, which is super-unhelpful but very thematic, or just hurt allies to give them turns instead so that he can hide, which is kind of helpful. He likes to cause trouble, he doesn’t like to do work… and his massive karmic debts mean that he has to help the team anyway. With the wrong player, this guy will be a nightmare, but with the right player he’ll be delightful.
I’ve also gone ahead and made yet another revision. Since I’m already in the Diamond Age and my revised Mischievous was persistently not interesting, I’m re-revising the Mischievous personality as follows:
Mischievous: Green d8, Yellow d8, Red d6
When calculating your Health in Step 7, you may replace either your Red status die or your power/quality die with a d12.
Out: Hinder an opponent by rolling your single Intuition die.
This guarantees that you get some decent health, since you can use your Red die if you have a good power or quality, and it certainly helps Merlin, but it doesn’t break the bank. It’s just a bit more reliable compared to the in-book version.
3 Likes
What a fun, and absolutely convoluted, history!
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If you think that’s convoluted, just wait until you meet…
The Randomizers:
Background 6, 9, 8 [Options: Upper Class, Struggling, Tragic, Interstellar, Retired, Anachronistic]
Power Source 9, 8, 7 [Options: Relic, Powered Suit, Radiation, Genius, Cosmos, Extradimensional]
Archetype 10, 3, 3 [Options: Powerhouse, Close Quarters, Robot/Cyborg, Transporter]
Personality 9, 5, 6 [Options: Sarcastic, Distant, Inquisitive, Stoic, Decisive, Jovial]
Stutter
Real Name: Salma Bahar, First Appearance: Stutter #1, March 2019
Background: Upper Class, Power Source: Extradimensional, Archetype: Transporter
Personality: Inquisitive, Principles: Mask, Fugitive
Status Dice: Green d6, Yellow d8, Red d10. Health: 32 [Green 32-25, Yellow 24-12, Red 11-1]
Qualities: Investigation d10, Fitness d10, Banter d8
Powers: Teleportation d12, Lightning Calculator d8, Precognition d8, Speed d6, Postcognition d6
Green Abilities:
- Break Spacetime [A]: Boost yourself using Teleportation. That bonus is persistent and exclusive. Damage dealt using that bonus is all Cosmic.
- Frozen Moment [A]: Attack using Teleportation. Either Hinder your target with your Min die or move them somewhere else in the scene.
- Stutter [R]: hit with an Attack, you may take 1 irreducible damage to have the attacker reroll their dice pool.
- Principle of the Mask [A]: Overcome using knowledge from your civilian life and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
- Principle of the Fugitive [A]: Overcome a problem by directing those pursuing you towards it and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
Yellow Abilities:
- Teleport Tackle [A]: Attack using Teleportation. Use your Max die. Hinder that target with your Mid die. Hinder yourself with your Min die.
- In Harm’s Way [A]: Attack multiple targets using Precognition. Then, take irreducible damage equal to the number of targets hit.
- Out of Sync [A]: Attack using Teleportation. Defend against all Attacks against you using your Min die until your next turn.
Red Abilities
- Time Stop [A]: Attack using Teleportation. Use your Max die. Then, Hinder that target using your Mid+Min dice.
- Temporal Flickers [A]: Hinder any number of close targets using Fitness. Use your Max die. End your turn elsewhere in the scene.
- Shattered Reflections [A]: Use Precognition to create a number of minions equal to your Mid die. Choose the one same basic action that they each perform. They all act at the start of your turn.
Out
- Choose an ally. Until your next turn, that ally may reroll one of their dice by using a Reaction.
One thing that was important to the Venture editorial team as they planned out the first year of post-timeskip comics was to actually take advantage of that timeskip to tell interesting stories. Most of these comics were meant to introduce new readers to the setting, but it was also a chance to pull on some threads that might otherwise never have happened. One of those threads was the horror-superhero comic, Stutter.
Salma Bahar’s life was great. Her parents were well-off - her father owned a chain of local restaurants and her mother was a respected journalist at the Ferristown Gazette. She’d been both her high school’s student body president and one of its star track athletes, and now she was at Ferris University on a full scholarship. Everything was going her way until the night that the sky ripped open above her, and an elderly version of herself fell bleeding into her arms. Her last words were, “They’re coming.”
The shock of the event, and the power of the temporal fractures created by Salma’s future self, triggered her Atlantean genetics and drove them into an unstable state, tearing apart spacetime around her and trapping her in a frozen moment of time. In order to escape, and to avoid the flickering paradox-creatures hunting her through stopped time, Salma had to learn how to use her new abilities to escape from stopped time, going so far as to create temporal reflections of herself to hold the creatures back. She put together a costume and became the hero known as Stutter, slipping into and out of frozen time, seeming to blink from place to place as she tried to figure out what darkness her future self had been warning her against. Salma had no background in superheroism, no real idea what she was doing, and was terrified that if she was too open, it would draw the paradox-beasts after her against her family. She tired to understand the dangers facing her, committed to doing so alone.
Salma was also not aware that there was a third version of her in the world. The superhero Paradox, now in her early fifties and with her own time-manipulating powers slowly fading with age, had successfully altered time to give herself a better life. The Rogue Agents were now retired, but when Paradox’s abilities mysteriously vanished just as she felt a wave of temporal energies wash over the city, she began an investigation of her own…
Behind the Scenes
So, I got a little bit Legends of Tomorrow with this one. Zari’s “I rewrote time and gave myself a better history” arc was a very neat one, and it gets reflected here in a surprisingly creepy comic about the dangers of time travel! I’ve also been slightly inspired by Quantum Break, which was… not a great game, but certainly an ambitious one.
There are some similarities between Stutter/Paradox and Muse/Visionary, but their stories are sufficiently different that I’m comfortable calling this another case of “no new stories in comics”, especially because Paradox is actually Stutter from a modified future. There might be more of her coming down the pipeline. It could be an issue. And are Paradox’s powers gone because only one of her can have powers at a time, or is it a side effect of time breaking? Who can say?
Transporter is our first heroic option to be blocked out this age; future results will be Minion-Maker instead. And you may recall Principle of the Fugitive from all the way back in Half-Life’s character sheet; here, it reflects dangerous time-monsters rather than a government agency, but the basic theory is the same.
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The mental image of her Overcoming difficulties by siccing Hounds of Tindalos on them is an amusing one. Presumably she baits them in with fourth-dimensional doggie treats.
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If by “fourth-dimensional doggie treats” you mean “deliberately reckless use of her powers against the fabric of time”, yeah, pretty much!
It’s… not an Overcome you want to use against people.
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