Good catch. That is a weird copying typo and I have no idea how it generated. It wasn’t there when I put this up on the other forum.
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yesss, Mathcore and Netizen, at last! 
I could not be happier lmao
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Yeah, I happened to read that one first today and only just noticed it here. I can’t even re-create it. Weird.
Speaking of the other forum, Ray’s busily flunking lab over there. You should nip over and have Kyle show us how to get a quick A+. 
1 Like
The Randomizers:
Background 4, 8, 2 [Options: Criminal, Military, Law Enforcement, Struggling, Unremarkable, Adventurer]
Power Source 6, 9, 1 [Options: Accident, Nature, Powered Suit, Radiation, Tech Upgrades, Alien]
Archetype 1, 1, 9 [Options: Speedster, Shadow, Elemental, Robot/Cyborg, Sorcerer]
Personality 10, 7, 4 [Options: Mischievous, Stalwart, Stoic, Nurturing, Jovial, Naive]
Gutterpunk
Real Name: Beatriz, First Appearance: Champions of Truth #423, Jan 2008
Background: Struggling, Power Source: Nature, Archetype: Sorcerer
Personality: Stoic, Principles: Street, Magic
Status Dice: Green d6, Yellow d8, Red d12. Health: 34 [Green 34-26, Yellow 25-13, Red 12-1]
Qualities: Conviction d10, Imposing d8, Magical Lore d8, Investigation d8, Criminal Underworld d6, Street Living d8
Powers: Transmutation d10, Teleportation d10, Weather d8, Shapeshifting d6
Green Abilities:
- Worldbreaker [A]: Attack using Transmutation. Use your Max die.
- Spacial Barrier [A]: Hinder using Teleportation. Use your Max die. If you roll doubles, also Attack using your Mid die.
- Petrify [A]: Attack using Transmutation. Hinder the same target using your Min die.
- Principle of the Street [A]: Overcome in a situation related to street living or knowing locals. Use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
- Principle of Magic [A]: Overcome against a mystical force and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point
Yellow Abilities:
- Binding of Pain [A]: Attack using Transmutation. Use your Max+Min dice. Then gain a Boost using your Mid die. The target of the Attack gains a bonus of the same size.
- Summon Windsprite [A]: Gain a d8 minion. It takes its turn before yours, but goes away at the end of the scene. You may only have one such minion at a time.
- Cursecraft [A]: Destroy all bonuses and penalties on a target. Then, Hinder that target using Transmutation, using your Max die.
Red Abilities
- Clutch Magecraft [A]: Overcome using Conviction. Use your Max+Min dice. Hinder all nearby opponents with your Mid die.
- Shield of Power [A]: Defend using Transmutation against all Attacks against you until your next turn using your Max+mid dice.
Out
- Defend an ally by rolling your single Conviction die.
Heroic Lieutenant: Sunbeam
First Appearance: Champions of Truth #423, Jan 2008
- D10 Lieutenant
- Light of Hope: When you Attack or Defend, also Boost a nearby ally with the result.
- Never Stop Shining: Once per action scene, when you would be taken out, restore your status die to a d8.
With the new team nearly assembled, Kid Liberty’s last two stops were Brazil and Nigeria, in search of the powers of Wonderer and Hyperstar. Brazil was where he met Gutterpunk.
If Stormrider was a raging fire, Gutterpunk was a cold blade. Born in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Beatriz was an orphan with no last name, no community to protect her, no family to look out for her. She grew up hard, scrounging to survive and moving from derelict building to abandoned storefront, one step ahead of anyone who might be looking for her. By the time she was nineteen, she was proud of her self-sufficiency, seeing her ability to make do as a badge of honour. She would take time to look out for the next generation of street kids, protecting them from abusers and sharing what she had, but she also kept apart from them, unwilling to get too close.
When she suddenly developed the ability to reshape the world and the wish-granting powers of a genie, it was something of a shock.
When Kid Liberty found her, Gutterpunk made it clear that she intended to use her powers mainly to help make food and shelter for poor kids around the world - but given her teleportation powers, she was willing to also lend a hand to fighting threats, as long as they were a big enough deal. Having a chance to set her powers against criminal tycoons making the world worse seemed like a good deal to the grim young woman, and she was soon fighting alongside the other Champions, even if she kept them all at arms’ length outside of missions. Netizen made it a personal challenge to find a way to get Gutterpunk to smile even once. He never succeeded.
Sunbeam, the team’s final member, could not have been more different. Born in Lagos, Adeya Talibi grew up poor, but loved, part of a massive family that looked out for each other and taught her to do the same. She was a cheerful girl, always looking to help and protect others, and when she woke up one morning with superhuman strength and speed and the ability to fly, she knew that she needed to do something good with it. She patterned her costume after her personal hero, Hyperstar, without knowing that was exactly whose powers she had inherited. When Kid Liberty arrived and explained the situation, it was a dream and nightmare wrapped up into one, and Adeya took on the name Sunbeam and swore that she would make her hero proud.
The relationship between Gutterpunk and Sunbeam was one of the only things that earned praise in Kid Liberty and the Champions of Freedom. The acerbic, cynical Gutterpunk often clashed with her bubby, outgoing teammate, ultimately leading to a heated argument in issue #18. Gutterpunk finally exploded on Sunbeam, demanding how she could be so sheltered, so naive in the face of the monsters they fought. Sunbeam’s response was simple. She said quietly that she knew what the world had thrown at them all. She knew exactly what was waiting in the dark. “And that,” she said, “is why I have to shine. If I don’t, who will?”
In the next few issues, Gutterpunk stopped ragging on Sunbeam, although she didn’t become any friendlier. Instead, she talked to Kid Liberty about his own experiences, living through decades of horrors and somehow staying strong, and she started to be a little bit less acerbic to the team as a whole. There were hints that she was working her way up to another conversation with Sunbeam, but the comic ended before she had a chance to talk it over.
In the end, as Greyheart and the Lost Souls overwhelmed the Citadel and every attempt to fight them failed, Gutterpunk was the last Champion standing. She looked back at Netizen, lying unconscious on the ground, his prosthetics in ruins, at Kid Liberty, his breath ragged as the life faded from him, and at Sunbeam, blood streaming unheeded from her own wounds as she struggled to keep the others alive.
For the first time in twenty-four issues, Gutterpunk smiled.
“Never stop shining,” she said.
And before Sunbeam could stop her, before she could even say goodbye, Gutterpunk teleported her three surviving comrades to safety, sealed what remained of Champion Citadel into its own pocket universe, and faced the dead alone.
Behind the Scenes
RIP Gutterpunk. You were utterly ridiculous but I still managed to make myself feel bad for killing you.
Sunbeam, like Netizen, survives this situation and goes on to be a minor supporting character. Following up on yesterday’s editorial notes, I decided that the editorial direction was “you can’t kill Kid Liberty or Netizen, you can keep one other person alive if you really want to, if you do keep a third person alive please make it one of the women so that we didn’t just kill all the women on the team and no one else.” Then there was a long discussion at the Champions desk about whether to keep Gutterpunk or Sunbeam, and Sunbeam narrowly won out. She definitely has at least a few appearances between 2010 and 2018, only one of which I’m firm on (the Champions of Truth Annual in 2012*,* which is entirely about Kid Liberty, Sunbeam, and Netizen getting together to mourn, and then Doctor Strife shows up and there’s almost a fight, until it turns out he’s there with a bottle of very expensive whiskey to drink with them and mourn his fallen foes) but I know exactly where she is post-timeskip.
It is probably worth noting that this is not a great build. Gutterpunk is missing any Athletic or Intellectual powers to match with her qualities, which makes it hard for her to do normal Overcome stuff without magic and really weakens her Imposing and Investigation dice; this is made even worse by her D6 status die in the Green zone. She has to explain how she’s using magic for everything, which is sort of deliberate. In actual action scenes, though, she’s much better off, with a d10 Conviction to key off her powers when possible and a d8 Magical Lore when not. “Principle of the Street” is just the Principle of Business for street living.
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Oh man, Gutterpunk seems like she actually might have been a worthwhile character. Shame they had to pick between one or the other, but maybe that meant Sunbeam would continue on with a little bit more shade to her shine.
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long workdays kept me from commenting on a daily basis-
the anticlimactic Bloodbath ending fits with most occult detective stories where you beat the devil by rules lawyering not combat
Was there time for a silly bit of Cooper Cullen trying to do skate tricks to reconnect with his misplaced power?
Were the writers (or you) familiar with the possible context of the song Green Sleaves?
from Wikipedia- A possible interpretation of the lyrics is that Lady Green Sleeves was a promiscuous young woman, perhaps even a prostitute At the time, the word “green” had sexual connotations, most notably in the phrase “a green gown”, a reference to the grass stains on a woman’s dress from engaging in sexual intercourse outdoors.
An alternative explanation is that Lady Green Sleeves was, through her costume, incorrectly assumed to be sexually promiscuous. Her “discourteous” rejection of the singer’s advances supports the contention that she is not
what was Flatfoot like when he lost his robot body powers?
Yes, if she had been written by someone who had the first clue about Brazil, homelessness, or young people, she would probably have been a pretty successful character!
Probably not, except maybe as one rather hostile page. I think the writer of Spectacular Skybreaker at the time was pretty annoyed by having his comic thrown into chaos.
I am familiar with that theory, but I don’t find it particularly plausible for a variety of reasons. Greensleeves technically got her name from Greenheart’s sidekick in the 1940s, who got it as a reference to youth and innocence.
Initially, he shut down completely. The Rogue Agents were able to get some of his old parts to get him back online, which left him prone to breakdowns and needing a lot more maintenance than usual during that time period.
Randomizers:
Approach: 9, 3, 3 [Options: Prideful, Disruptive, Specialized, Tactician, Creator]
Archetype: 5, 4, 6 [Options: Guerrilla, Indomitable, Overlord, Loner, Squad, Fragile]
Upgrade: 8, 9, 7 [Options: Quality Upgrade I, Quality Upgrade II, Calming Aura]
Mastery: 2, 3, 12 [Options: Behind the Curtain, Conquest, Malice]
Headmistress
Real Name: Unknown, First Appearance: Kid Liberty and the Champions of Freedom #7, Sep 2009
Approach: Prideful, Archetype: Guerrilla
Upgrade: Quality Upgrade I, Mastery: Conquest
Status Dice: Based on engaged opponents. 4+: d10. 2-3: d8. 0-1: d6. Health: 45+5H (Upgraded 65+5H)
Qualities: Alertness d10, Insight d10, Close Combat d8, Self-Discipline d8, Cult Leader d8
Powers: Precognition d10, Suggestion d10, Agility d10, Gadgets d8
Abilities:
- The Fulcrum [A]: Attack one target using Agility. Use your Max+Min dice. If that Attack causes the target to change zones, Boost using your Mid die. That bonus is persistent and exclusive.
- Get In the Middle [A]: Attack using Close Combat and use your Max+Min dice. Defend against all Attacks made by targets other than that target with your Mid die until the start of your next turn. All Defended damage is dealt to the target of your Attack.
- Waiting For You To Slip [R]: When a nearby hero rolls a 1 on one of their dice during their turn, roll your single Precognition die as an Attack against them.
- Thriving In Chaos (I): At the start of your turn, gain a bonus equal to the number of opponents that Attacked you since your last turn.
Common Scene Elements:
- The Head Cases: d8 minions. Head Cases always roll a d8 to Attack, no matter what their status die is.
- Jimmy Hix. Hanging around acting as Headmistress’s second in command.
- A Location Worth Conquering: An environment with an appropriate amount of wealth and luxury to loot, creating Hinders for putting delicate things in danger, civilians threatened by the Head Mistress into panic, and whatever traps she has prepared in advance.
The writers of Kid Liberty and the Champions of Freedom did their best to include a mix of villains during the comic’s short run, including a handful of stalwart opponents of the Champions of Truth and a few entirely new enemies. They also drew derision by creating multiple ‘new’ characters who were directly tied to earlier villains, billed as the ‘new and even more dangerous’ incarnations, and none was more tied to that than the Headmistress.
Headmistress’s true name was never given, but she was introduced as the estranged daughter of Headmaster, having inherited his powers along with a much more direct approach to problem-solving. In her first appearance, she pitted her prophetic powers against her father’s, easily defeating him and usurping his Outfit, stealing his soldiers to turn them into her personal Head Cases. Alongside Headmaster’s former second-in-command, Jimmy Hix, she set her sights on the one force he’d never been able to defeat: The Champions of Truth!
Then she found out that they were gone and went after their successors instead.
In her first appearance, Headmistress was able to outmaneuver, outwit, and outmatch the Champions of Freedom, turning the team against each other and taking advantage of their individual attitudes to succeed at a plot to rob a charity auction blind, which was just securing the funding to set up her next target: the minor nation of Juristan! After spending a few issues training and learning, the Champions discovered her plot, and in Issues #11-12 they went after her and freed Juristan from her conquest. Headmistress and Jimmy retreated, with her swearing vengeance and him just interested to see where this went.
Where it went was not very far. The Headmistress would appear briefly at the end of 2009 in Issue #21, revealed to be the villain behind another plot, but whatever her plan was ended up interrupted by the Night of Lost Souls and the deaths of her nemeses. Instead, she next appeared in November 2010 in Company Town #262, in which the Headmaster returned, summarily reclaimed control of his people, and revealed that he had been ‘testing’ his wayward daughter and was disappointed in her. He sent her off for ‘advanced training’ with an unknown villain… and that was the last time that anyone wrote about her. The authors of Company Town were annoyed that one of their major villainous organizations had been so thoroughly usurped, and weren’t interested in revisiting the storyline, and no one else picked it up. Headmistress ended up a footnote in the history of strange, sudden reversals that made up the Plutonium Age.
Behind the Scenes
Here and gone again.
There’s a long history of successors both in Venture Comics and the real world, but this one was a flop. Introduced too hot, attached to an unpopular comic, pissing off other writers and then having her main storyline unfinished isn’t a great combination for long-term success!
Mechanically, she’s pretty dangerous. Solid defenses, a whack of health, powerful attacks and a nasty reaction combine to make her a dangerous enemy to fight directly without a lot of vulnerabilities, especially since she powers up from being ganged up on. She’s not super-exciting, though, and she’s quite vulnerable to Defend-ignoring abilities (which is fitting, since precognition doesn’t really help if you foresee that you can’t evade a thing.)
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I had a precog villain back in my V&V days that I’d run a combat with, and if he wound up getting beaten or killed (which happened a lot since none of his other powers were anything to write home about and he was fragile as glass) I’d just rewind game time to just before the fight and (having foreseen his defeat) he’d surrender immediately, begging for mercy if he’d really gotten savaged. The first time it happened the players were pretty befuddled, but when he made a return appearance they “got it” and would really cut loose on him because they knew they’d be reset if/when they won.
His last appearance he was working with another villain for the first time, and the heroes went through the fight, eventually drubbing both of them and getting a reset, then were shocked when Oracle (still a fairly original name, Killing Joke was years in the future still) didn’t give up right away. One of the heroes grabbed him and demanded to know why he was “breaking the rules” and the poor guy explains he’s been through two resets personally, and after the first one his villain ally outright killed him when he tried to give up so he couldn’t just do that again. The players did the obvious and mauled the other bad guy first this time while Oracle pretended to fight them. They were pretty beat up at the end of it, to the point where Oracle might have actually managed a real win for a change - but after a quick reaction check (a big thing in V&V mechanically) he just shrugged and raised his hands, saying the PCs had earned it already.
I should bring him back sometime for a modern game. Silly metagaming gimmick, but it’s amusing the first time or two.
EDIT: Congrats on hitting 10K views over here, BTW. Of course, the mirror thread’s at what, 43,000 and some change? Says something about relative traffic volume. :\
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Well, relative traffic volume and also timing! I made my first post here a month later than the first post on the other thread, which does have an affect. Not that much of an affect, though. RPGnet is still one of the biggest RPG sites around.
Randomizers:
Approach: 8, 1, 6 [Options: Relentless, Disruptive, Focused, Mastermind, Specialized, Ninja]
Archetype: 8, 5, 6 [Options: Indomitable, Overlord, Inhibitor, Fragile, Invader, Domain]
Upgrade: 4, 5, 3 [Options: Group Fighter, Villainous Vehicle, Power Upgrade]
Mastery: 6, 7, 12 [Options: Mad Science, Mercenary, Malice]
Gravedigger
Real Name: Marissa Veldt, First Appearance: Covert Tactics (Vol. 4) #84, July 2010
Approach: Ninja, Archetype: Domain
Upgrade: Villainous Vehicle, Mastery: Mad Science
Status Dice: Based on environment minions, lieutenants, and challenges. 3+: d10. 1-2: d8. None: d6. Health: 50+5H (Upgraded 65+5H)
Qualities: Conviction d10, Science d10, Stealth d8, Ranged Combat d8, Commander of the Dead d8
Powers: Illusions d10, Necromancy d10, Intuition d8, Gadgets d8, Invisibility d6
Abilities:
- Hidden Among The Dead (I): If you take an action on your turn that does not involve an Attack or Hinder, also use your Min die to Defend against all Attacks against you until your next turn.
- Slip Through The Chaos (I): Ignore damage from an environment source during the environment’s turn.
- Necromantic Formulas [A]: Activate one of the environment’s twists in its current zone or one zone closer to red.
- Replenish Supplies [A]: Roll any number of environment minion dice and Recover that much Health. Remove those minions.
- Sensory Overload [R]: When Attacked, Defend yourself by rolling for your single Conviction die. Boost yourself with the amount of damage reduced**.**
-
(U) The Boneyard (I): This automated mobile workshop is flooding the scene with undead forces. It is a d12 lieutenant with the following abilities:
- Well-Hidden (I): To attack this vehicle, a hero must make an Overcome action in order to discover it.
- Bone Thresher [A]: Add minions to an existing group of undead equal to half (rounded down) the vehicle’s current die size. Those minions are of a size equal to the highest die size already existing in that group. If the vehicle has a bonus or penalty, adjust the number of minions created by that amount and then remove that mod.
- (U) Master of Mad Science (I): As long as you have access to materials, you can automatically succeed when Overcoming a challenge by using scientific principles and inventions.
Common Scene Elements:
- The Dead Rise! An environment in which the dead are rising from their graves, leading to challenges to save civilians, spawning uncontrolled zombies, and Hinders and Attacks created by panic or confusion.
- Undead Superhumans: d8 lieutenants. Each has a unique ability based on their former natures, and gets +2 to save against physical damage and -2 to save against Radiant damage.
- Undead Minions: d6 minions. Undead minions get +2 to save against physical damage and -2 to save against Radiant damage.
After the end of the previous Covert Tactics in 2002 and the spinning off of Madame Liberty and Kid Liberty into the new Liberty’s Dream, a new writing team was appointed to develop the remaining members of the team into a newer, grittier Covert Tactics, acting with dubious governmental approval to fight dangerous enemies. The three remaining team members - Big Brain, Half-Life, and Irogane - recruited the Revenant as their new master of disguise, and Aquila as their expert in magical realms, and set about carrying on the good fight.
The comic was modestly successful, lasting a hundred issues, but didn’t have many recurring enemies that weren’t prior Covert Tactics foes; the team tended to kill their major opponents, most of whom would only survive one or two appearances. This came back to bite them when they faced the Gravedigger.
Marissa Veldt was a brilliant scientist affiliated with the secretive organization SCOURGE, obsessed with solving the greatest puzzle facing humanity - immortality. During the Covert Tactics tie-in to Night of Lost Souls, her lab equipment picked up the magical distortions created by Greyheart, and she set about trying to harness them, leading to Covert Tactics arriving to try to stop her from creating a direct portal between Earth’s dead and the Plane of Rot. In the process of fighting them, several of the villains they had slain over the past several years were returned as Marissa’s assistants, and from them she learned about Covert Tactics, the super-science projects they had shut down, and the dire forces controlling her organization. Quitting SCOURGE, she became the Gravedigger, determined to use her new technology to end death and bring about a twilight age of perfection to Earth.
Gravedigger didn’t get very many chances to accomplish her goal. After the initial two-parter, she re-appeared in Covert Tactics #92 as part of a three-part story in which she resurrected more of the team’s enemies and unleashed a zombie apocalypse on Neulyon. At the end of that story she was killed herself as her zombies fought against Aquila’s ghosts, but a stinger to the issue implied that she had used her powers on herself, and death would not hold her for long.
Instead, Covert Tactics began to work towards a conclusion, as falling sales and leadership struggles put the comic in jeopardy. Gravedigger fell by the wayside, and her gimmick of raising villains killed by the heroes didn’t have much of a place with no particularly lethal hero teams around, so she ultimately didn’t return.
Behind the Scenes
Covert Tactics Vol. 4 is a comic that I invented on the basis that if a comic ran more or less non-stop for over sixty years, there was no chance that Venture wouldn’t give it another go. This is part of a series of minor retcons I’m currently working on, but I wanted to give them at least one enemy here.
Gravedigger is an enemy who would have been very popular if she’d been introduced in the 90s, when a lot of people were killing their enemies. She comes in at the tail end of the 2000s instead, just as Venture is pivoting away from that, and as a result she doesn’t get enough of a foothold to survive cancellation. Not impossible that she would return post-timeskip, though.
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I think it’s actually kind of puny compared to Enworld, but the latter’s community is so narrowly D&D focused it more than makes up the difference. Still, either is pretty big compared to almost any company forum.
That’s a pretty solid run for the early 2000s by RL standards. Anything getting to triple digits after the 90s speculator collapse has to be considered a win, especially with so many mandated crossover events interrupting ongoing stories and (for the Big Two) pressure to make characters conform to their movie depictions no matter what - all to little benefit for individual books.
That’s a good way to keep random uncontrolled environment targets from pestering your ride. Minions and even lieutenants aren’t likely to waste time hunting for the workshop when there are more accessible brains in sight.
1 Like
Well, yeah. ENWorld is its own beast. It pretty much blows all the rest out of the park.
This is definitely true for the Big Two, but despite my best efforts, it’s not true for Venture (or Sentinel Comics, for that matter.) There are sixteen titles that have issues during the Plutonium Age; seven of them run uninterrupted through the whole fifteen years, and eleven of them reach triple-digits. The only five that don’t are Liberty’s Dream Volume 2 (which ends very early in the age in 2005), Kid Liberty and the Champions of Freedom (24 issues), [Redacted], Gale Force (44 issues), and House of Jotu-Kal (25 issues). And both Gale Force and House of Jotu-Kal only technically end because of the timeskip in 2019.
The result of all of that is that Covert Tactics is the sixth-shortest comic run of the 2000s and 2010s. This may need to get revised.
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Damn, the God of Rot’s kind of been the gift that keeps on giving.
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Yeah, he’s really turned into the Mephisto/Darkseid of the setting.
The other Great Powers do things, but Urak’s hands-off confidence that he can give power to people and it will ultimately consume them makes him a much easier origin story for dangerous villains - the Empress of Ash wants to compel people, Balor wants to control them, and the Sovereign is really supposed to be an echo at this point.
1 Like
Randomizers:
Approach: 10, 10, 7 [Options: Focused, Overpowered, Leech, Ancient]
Archetype: 10, 4, 10 [Options: Guerrilla, Squad, Domain, Titan]
Upgrade: 5, 10, 3 [Options: Group Fighter, Power Upgrade II, Calming Aura]
Mastery: 2, 8, 7 [Options: Behind the Curtain, Mysticism, Profitability]
Tiberius Rex
Real Name: Tiberius Rex, First Appearance: Earthwatch #134, February 2011
Approach: Ancient, Archetype: Squad
Upgrade: Power Upgrade, Mastery: Profitability
Status Dice: No other villains: d6. 1-2 other villains: d8. 3+ other villains: d10. Health: 35+5H (Upgraded 55+5H)
Qualities: History d12, Ranged Combat d12, Alertness d10, Conviction d8, Dinosaurian d8
Powers: Stone d12, Density Control d10, Deduction d10, Strength d8
Abilities:
- Meteor Strike [A]: Hinder using Stone against multiple targets and use your Max die. Attack each using your Mid+Min dice.
- Landslide [A]: Attack using Conviction. Use your Max die. Defend all nearby allies with your Mid+Min dice until the start of your next turn.
- Millennial Calculations [A]: Boost using History. Boost another target using your Max die, and use your Min die to Defend against all Attack against you until your next turn.
- Seen It All Before [R]: Take 1 irreducible damage to reroll a dice pool of someone Attacking or Hindering you.
- (U) Prehistoric Paragon (I): Increase your Density Control and Deduction to d12 and your Strength to d10. Increase damage you deal by the number of nearby non-minion allies.
- (U) Master of Profitability (I): If you have access to great wealth and other resources, automatically succeed at an Overcome to leverage those resources to get even richer, no matter who else pays the price.
Common Scene Elements:
- Well-Known Villains: Previously-established Venture villains who are inexplicably following your commands.
- Dinosaur Warriors: d10 lieutenants. Dinosaur Warriors get +1 to Attack.
In late 2010, a new team took over the Earthwatch comic, led by Deirdre Powell. Powell had a few small credits to her name, but this was her biggest role and she intended to do something great with it. Having grown up on the Peacekeepers arc, she laid out a five-year plan to reproduce it by introducing a new character to the team, building them up into a fan favorite, and then revealing them as a villain and turning them into the comic’s primary antagonist.
Things didn’t quite go as planned.
In early 2011, with six issues under her belt, Powell introduced Tiberius Rex to the team. Tiberius Rex was deliberately created as a slightly jokey character - an ancient dinosaur who had been at a dimensional fissure sixty-five million years ago when the asteroid struck, and who was merged with the Earth instead of dying. After countless years in stasis, Tiberius had emerged to discover a changed world, and wasn’t happy about it, immediately going on a minor rampage. After being arrested and calmed down, he was deemed a potential fit for the Earthwatch program, with his previous crimes explained as stemming from his confusion and despair at learning that he was the last of his kind.
Tiberius quickly settled into the team, using his tactical capabilities, physical prowess, and mastery over stone to great effect. But this was where things started to go wrong. It was obvious that Powell loved him, but the readers didn’t latch on, and she responded by giving him more page-count to try and build him up. The comic was already struggling after having its previous storyline derailed by the Night of Lost Souls, and readership began to drop. Powell was called in and informed that Rex needed to leave the team immediately.
So in Earthwatch #150, she pulled the trigger on his change of heart early. Frustrated and overcome by his attempts to fit into a world full of idiot monkeys, Tiberius Rex sprang a trap, revealing that he had been in conversation with several Earthwatch villains, primarily including both Hive-Minder and Adjudicator Zhaa. With an army of robot minions at his back, he planned to wipe out Earthwatch, genetically engineer a new race of sentient dinosaurs, and overthrow the Earth in a three-part adventure.
He failed. And Earthwatch fans were baffled at why Hive-Minder would work for someone whose goals were so opposed to his own, or why Adjudicator Zhaa would be supporting him instead of, as was more common, setting up a situation to pit him against Earthwatch. Instead of sympathy, the series drew scorn, and it sent Earthwatch into a tailspin. Powell quit the title in frustration, and a guest writer was brought in to write the last eight issues that would bring the series to a satisfying conclusion.
As for Tiberius, he was seen at Venture as the villain who had killed a venerable comic, and editorial unreservedly banned any further appearances of the character, ensuring that he would not appear again as long as anyone in charge remembered the damage he had done.
Behind the Scenes
It’s like Benchmark, but so much worse!
It’s really hard to create a character and say “I want this particular person to become such a fan-favourite that everyone will be sad when he turns evil.” It’s especially hard in comics, and probably not a good idea. Having that someone be the best of the team, and then making them just really good at leading other villains who shouldn’t all be on their side, is even worse. So fare thee well, Tiberius Rex. Perhaps once you’ve been gone for fifteen years someone will ironically resurrect you.
3 Likes
At least he’s got a neat hat.
3 Likes
how can he say something so brave, yet so true? XD
2 Likes
Randomizers:
Approach: 2, 3, 3 [Options: Skilled, Prideful, Bully, Disruptive, Creator]
Archetype: 6, 5, 1 [Options: Predator, Indomitable, Overlord, Formidable, Fragile]
Upgrade: 10, 12, 1 [Options: Mook Squad, Calming Aura, Brainwashing Zone]
Mastery: 10, 3, 9 [Options: Conquest, Superiority, Unfathomable]
The Luddite
Real Name: Branson Jones, First Appearance: Company Town #285, Oct 2012
Approach: Disruptive, Archetype: Predator
Upgrade: Brainwashing Zone, Mastery: Conquest
Status Dice: Based on engaged opponents. 0-1: d10. 2-3: d8. 4+: d6. Health: 35+5H
Qualities: Close Combat d10, Insight d8, Stealth d8, Technological Sabotage d8
Powers: Invisibility d10, Power Suit d10, Awareness d8, Agility d8
Abilities:
- Electrical Interference [A]: Attack multiple targets using Power Suit. Use your Min die. Hinder each target with your Max die. If one of those targets rolls doubles on their next turn, they take damage equal to the penalty.
- Distortion Strike [A]: Attack using Invisibility. Use your Max die. A target dealt damage this way Attacks an ally by rolling their single largest power die.
- Takedown [A]: Attack using Close Combat. Use your Max die. If the target has a penalty you created or is in the Red zone, use your Max+Mid dice instead.
- Feedback Field [R]: When Attacked, roll your single status die. Hinder the Attack using that result, and deal damage to the attacker equal to that penalty.
- (U) Hotwiring (I): While the scene is in the Green zone, all tech-based heroes’ quality dice at d8 or above are reduced one size. In the Yellow zone, all tech-based heroes’ quality dice at d10 or above are reduced two die sizes. In the Red zone, all tech-based heroes’ quality dice are treated as if they are d4. Heroes may remove this ability with four Overcome successes. If a hero takes a minor twist, the hero must lose access to a quality entirely until this ability is removed. If a tech-based hero is knocked out while this ability is active, you may create a new minion using the hero’s highest power die to represent the controlled version of that hero.
- (U) Master of Conquest (I): As long as you are in command of your own forces, automatically succeed at an Overcome involving seizing an area or capturing civilians.
Common Scene Elements:
- Circuit Breakers: d8 minions. Circuit Breakers get +1 to Attack or Hinder technological targets.
- A High-Tech Environment. Machinery is going haywire, systems are overloading, and the Luddite has spies everywhere.
In 2012, the writers of Company Town decided to unite the various heroes of the title against a major opponent who would threaten them all, bringing Flatfoot and Fly Boy to fight alongside the Rogue Agents. They wanted an enemy who would be a serious threat to the entire team, and who would be a thematic opposition to both groups.
The decision was to create an anti-technology fanatic, a man who had seen the potential dangers of artificial intelligence and integrated cybernetics and had become convinced that if he couldn’t stop it, humanity was doomed. Developing his own high-tech suite of jamming and hacking gear, he intended to take the world back to a time when humanity controlled their own machines, and when computers were no more complex than simple math engines. He called himself the Luddite, in honour of the movement that had fought the threats of the Industrial Revolution, and he gathered fellow anti-technology fanatics to his cause, the Circuit Breakers. And his first target was the AI-infested traitors to humanity, the Rogue Agents.
The Luddite was a patient hunter, isolating and targeting his foes one by one. He took out Wildstyle and Flatfoot, destroyed Matrixx’s rig when she tried to uncover him, and took control of Fly Boy’s power suit. But Paradox and Kynetic were able to track him and his men down to their base - where they found the Luddite waiting with a reprogrammed Flatfoot and a controlled Fly Boy! Paradox and Kynetic held them off while Matrixx reversed the hacks, at which point everyone joined forces and defeated the Luddite.
The writers of the Luddite were extremely proud of the six-issue storyline they’d created, and were more than a little caught off-guard when it promptly sank like a stone. Memetic panels of the Luddite’s speeches spread across the Internet, fans made jokes about Fly Boy trapped his suit, and sales plummeted. Absolutely no one could take the character seriously, partially because of his name and partially because of the writing of the storyline, which most reviewers agreed made Flatfoot and Fly Boy look like idiots to prop up the Rogue Agents, a team that was already popular and didn’t need the propping. The writers abandoned the character, and never returned to him.
Behind the Scenes
This whole thing originally started because Company Town doesn’t have a lot of non-crossover notes, and then I hit on the name “The Luddite” and couldn’t not do it. Some writer read about the history of the Luddites, thought they could reclaim it, and just absolutely tanked the storyline, complete with dubious super-hacking and nonsense tech-powered techphobia.
Which isn’t to say that we’ll never see the Circuit Breakers again, post-timeskip. Them, I like. They’ll just have a different boss.
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I had a King Ludd as a villain in an old campaign in the 80s. He was actually a metaphysical parasite feeding on the technophobia of his followers and egging them on to increase his own power. If I were going to redo him these days I’d play him up as the source of all manner of science-denial misinformation on the internet, which certainly seems cynical enough for 2024. Smashing weaving frames is all very well and good, but you really have to change with the times if you want to keep gorging yourself on human fear and ignorance.
Come to think of it, he also showed up in an abortive historical Changeling game, where he was a mask for an archfey who wanted to delay or even reverse technological advancement to prevent the Industrial Revolution from reaching full bloom.
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It’s interesting, because technically the modern Luddites should be, like, the people going after AI because it’s replacing jobs with slurry, not people who are opposed to technology in general.
But that ship sailed pretty badly.
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