Good catch, and fixed! I went with the aggressive one, mainly because he doesn’t have any useful reactions while he’s defending and his storyline was specifically about getting blown up by overly-loyal troops.
I think as a GM, I would say that if you use Rapid Deployment on your Legion minions, you either get the highest size that’s currently active, or you just get them as d6s.
Yeah, that seems reasonable. If all the fanatical elites around are down the best you can scrape up right away are the scuts. 
White Mantis
Real Name: Grand Duchess Gloria Mantalos, First Appearance: Madame Liberty Annual #1, January 1963
Approach: Underpowered, Archetype: Domain
Upgrade: Power Upgrade, Mastery: Enforced Order
Status Dice: Based on environment minions, lieutenants, and/or challenges. 3+: d10. 1-2: d8. None: d6. Health: 40+5H (Upgraded 60 + 5H)
Qualities: Insight d10, Ranged Combat d8, Alertness d6, Grand Duchess d8
Powers: Presence d8, Gadgets d6, Intuition d6, Vitality d6
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
In 1963, Venture Comics began to release annual issues that introduced new characters and storylines, with extra-length comics in which to let those stories play out. Only two annuals released that year, and while the Skybreaker one was a forgettable fight against Mary Molotov, Madame Liberty Annual #1 ended up introducing a popular and long-running foe both of the Lady of Liberty and several other heroes.
Madame Liberty was called to infiltrate the small Eastern European nation of Granlavia, ruled over by Grand Duchess Gloria Mantalos, in order to extract a Soviet super-scientist who was trying to defect to the West. Mantalos had offered the scientist sanctuary, only to go back on her agreement and try to auction him off to the highest bidder when the Soviets arrived in hot pursuit.
Infiltrating Granlavia, Madame Liberty quickly learned the truth. During World War II, Granlavia had surrendered to the Nazis, with the Grand Duchess even becoming engaged to the local commandant - but it had been a scheme. They had allowed the Nazis to set up a secret weapons lab in their nation, then risen up and slaughtered them in a single night, faking an Allied bombing raid on the lab to disguise the fact that all of its contents had been taken for Granlavia. Now, the Grand Duchess - or as she preferred to be called, the White Mantis - was planning to repeat the trick, romancing the Soviet defector in order to fake his death and steal his designs for herself.
In a pitched battle against Granlavia’s newly-deployed robotic war machines, Madame Liberty was barely able to escape. She succeeded in her task, saving the scientist’s life and bringing him back to the West, but White Mantis had already acquired his blueprints, and her scientists were hard at work developing new weapons to ‘protect’ her small nation from both the Allies and Soviets.
This would become Granlavia’s signature. White Mantis was a master politician and manipulator, armed with an array of super-science weapons for her fanatical army and a total disregard for morality or human life as long as her legacy endured. Individual citizens of Granlavia meant nothing to her - only the nation mattered. She would sell weapons to insurgents and terrorists, kidnap scientists and steal devices from labs around the world, always with the goal of reinforcing her rule, and she came into conflict with most of Venture’s major heroes over the course of her reign. Despite this, to her people she was just short of a god, the brilliant hero who tricked and fooled the imperialists of the West and East alike, and while she never fully defeated Madame Liberty she frequently got away with at least some of what she came for.
Behind the Scenes
It came up some time ago that Venture is quite short on tiny, wildly over-powered Eurasian nations, and the Grand Duchy of Granlavia is a solution to that problem. White Mantis knows exactly how to lure people to her nation, in order to use them for her own ends, and she is a very dangerous foe that you probably don’t want to try to punch out.
Underpowered and Domain is a great combination for this. White Mantis’s actual dice are not good, but she almost never needs them; she triggers the environment, calls up minions and challenges, and then uses the minions she called up to heal herself and protect her while the scene tracker moves towards the heroes being overwhelmed and captured. When she does fight personally, her abilities are pretty random - sometimes she’ll just plink at you, and occasionally she’ll hit you for huge damage output. And Domain balances out Underpowered, giving her enough health that she’s hard to just punch out.
The combination also gives White Mantis a very different feel from a Doctor Doom or Baron Blade-type ruler; she’s not an engineering genius who personally builds things, she’s a rapid-pace improviser who relies on her political acumen and ruthlessness to thrive.
I feel an inspiration coming on. Let’s see if it comes together into an actual blog post before i forget how to play this game.
Perfectly reliable Granlavian technology, I see.
Yeah, it turns out that there is one drawback to mass-producing super-science when you don’t actually have any super-scientists on staff, and that drawback is that you do not end up with reliable superweapons.
To Granlavians, that is simply part of the expected situation. Unpredictable weaponry remains a very powerful threat.
Caliban
Real Name: William Handler, First Appearance: Into the Green #12, Feb 1964
Approach: Disruptive, Archetype: Indomitable
Upgrade: Quality Upgrade I, Mastery: Total Chaos
Status Dice: Always d8. Health: 40+5H (Upgraded 60+5H)
Qualities: Finesse d10, Banter d8, Investigation d8, Family Criminal d8
Powers: Presence d10, Momentum d10, Awareness d8, Agility d8
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
Of all of Greenheart’s foes, her most vexing was not the deadliest, or the strangest supervillain she faced. It was the thief who sought to steal her heart.
Early in Into the Green, Val became associated with William Handler, an easygoing man with a charming smile who she met while hiking in the woods. Bill was fascinated by the odd woman, and persuaded her to go out with him.
At the same time, however, Greenheart was dealing with a rash of mysterious robberies, each one marked by a quote from Shakespear left at the scene. Tracking down the villains, she arrived at a high-value auction just as it was robbed by four slick foes - Prospero, an older man who seemed to be able to see anything happening for miles around, Ariel, a slim young woman who could divide herself in two, Miranda, an even younger woman whose voice could sing guards to sleep or empower her team, and the powerful, slick masked man called Caliban, who engaged the guards directly and distracted them while his team went to work. It was Caliban who fought with Greenheart, drawing her away from the rest of his family to clash across the rooftops, easily evading her attacks but unable to hurt her much in return. And at the height of the clash, Caliban and Greenheart recognized each other, and Bill and Val realized that they were on opposite sides.
Over the years, a pattern emerged. The Tempest Crew would stake out a valuable target, and begin a plan to steal it. Greenheart would show up to fight them, and Caliban would use his powers to draw her away, with fights like dances across rooftops, streets, the halls of museums or darkened bank corridors. Greenheart was usually able to recover the stolen goods, but rarely able to capture any of Caliban’s family and never able to get them all, and for his part, Bill never revealed to his father or sisters that he knew exactly where the hero who was vexing them could be found. On at least one occasion, he even quietly stepped in to save her life from a trap set by Prospero, a fact which his father either failed to notice or chose to ignore.
Prospero had shaped his children into master criminals after their mother’s passing, to shield them from a world that he despised and to earn the luxuries that he had taught them to crave. Penny (Ariel) and Sapphire (Miranda) loved the criminal life, but Bill was conflicted, twisting between loyalty, greed, and guilt at his actions. His attempts to become a better person always ended in him slipping back to a life of crime, and while he was occasionally an ally of Greenheart, more often he was an enemy that she couldn’t quite bear to take down.
Behind the Scenes
We’ve got ourselves a Catwoman!
Venture has had a couple villains with one-sided crushes on heroes, and the situation with Fission and Ignition fighting while their alter egos dated, but not the hero and villain who are in love, and know each other’s whole deals, and it’s a huge tangled mess. Greenheart seemed right for huge tangled messes, and her previous Silver Age villain (Doctor Freak) sort of became a full Champions of Truth villain, so here’s another one of her early enemies. And she gets four for the price of one; while the Tempest Crew is generally around as a set, any of them might appear for a solo adventure.
I was a bit surprised earlier when I name-dropped Prospero in the middle of my retcons and no one said, “Wait, who the hell is Prospero”, but if you remember that, now you know! And if you don’t, you know anyway, and it’s probably fine, with no long-lasting setting consequences.
Anyway, we’ll deal with that later. Don’t worry about it.
That guy desperately needs to get some sun. Guess Greenheart likes 'em pasty.
I showed this to my sister and she thinks she’s seen a Chippendales stripper at some bachelorette party with the same outfit.
My theory is that Caliban’s skin tone changes when he ‘powers up’; in his civilian form, his skin is tanned normally, his hair is lighter (and not slicked back), and that’s why Val might not recognize him literally instantly.
But yes, it does seem that Greenheart is down to clown. 
I’m here for a Shakespeare-based villain team. 
I’d rather punch out Petruccio than any of the Tempest roles, but to each their own.
that would be a pretty good reason for “Prospero” to choose those names for his family.
I suspect that in the moment an author just picked a theme for people with powers in Shakespeare who weren’t fae and ran with it. But the retroactive justification is that Prospero sees himself as a proud and noble man who has been spurned and rejected by society, and his children are like his servants and tools - and he doesn’t think that the Tempest’s forgiveness-based ending was the correct one.
Naming Caliban after a despised monster is… oh, there are definitely story arcs about that bit of psychology.
The Boot Hill Monster
Real Name: Zebulon di Munster, First Appearance: Cryptic Trails #52, Aug 1967
Approach: Specialized, Archetype: Formidable (penalties based on awareness)
Upgrade: Power Upgrade II, Mastery: Unfathomable
Status Dice: No awareness penalties: d12. Awareness penalties and bonuses: d8. Awareness penalties: d4. Health: 45+5H (Upgraded 65+5H)
Qualities: Ranged Combat d12, Alertness d8, Killing Intent d8
Powers: Lightning Calculator d10, Vitality d8
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
In 1963, Venture Comics delved into Westerns with Cryptic Trails (Volume 2). For its first few years, Cryptic Trails was a pure Western comic that debuted exactly at the wrong time, just as Westerns were on the decline in the comics world. After three unimpressive years, Venture began to include elements of magic and mysticism in their stories, drawing on the dawning Weird West movement. This wasn’t enough to save the comic, which was cancelled in early 1968, but it did introduce a few elements that ended up migrating into the broader Venture line. One of those elements was the Boot Hill Monster.
Zebulon di Munster was a young gunslinger, full of vim and vinegar and eager to prove himself the greatest gunman in the west. One night, after winning his tenth duel, he swore on the souls of all the men he’d slain that he would win a hundred duels and no gunslinger would be able to kill him.
His words proved ironic when, in his very next duel, he was shot down at high noon. But as the victorious gunman turned to leave, Zebulon stood back up and shot him through the heart, before collapsing once again.
Cryptic Trails #52 ended with the ominous fact that Zebulon’s oath had taken hold, and he could not rest until he won those hundred duels, killing one hundred men in direct showdowns. Every year, he would return, searching for a gunman to face off against, and win or lose, he would strike them down…
The ominous story was almost enough to bring the Comics Code down on Cryptic Trails, and the actual panel of Zebulon being shot had to be portrayed exclusively in silhouette, but the editors successfully argued that the Boot Hill Monster was cursed, not undead, and the moral message of “live by the gun, die by the gun” just barely squeaked through. And the Boot Hill Monster himself proved a popular concept, appearing again in the next year in a story about a cowardly gunman being chased by the creature. After Cryptic Trails ended, a writer had the bright idea to have one of Veilwalker’s enemies raise the Boot Hill Monster in an early issue of Dark Rivers, and from there he was introduced to the world of Venture superheroes - a deadly foe who only wanted to fulfil his ill-chosen pact and find a way to rest, but who resisted any attempts to help him beyond giving him targets to hunt.
Zeublon was often accompanied by the ghosts of his previous victims, who tried to keep anyone from interfering in his duels. His pact-driven powers made him an unerring marksman, but heroes often defeated him by confusing his senses and forcing him to miss shots. Because only a proper duel counted towards his total, most of his attacks didn’t bring him any closer to escape. Still, he was as much angry at the world as wanting rest, and had no qualms about testing what kills might count…
Behind the Scenes
We have our second “imported from another setting” villain, and another introduction from the Wild West, someone who ends up becoming a larger part of Venture Comics. Instead of a hero cowboy, Venture gets a villainous one, a roaming gunslinger who just wants to duel you to the death. The Boot Hill Monster probably appears both in later Cryptic Trails facing down Winter Wolf, and in modern stories where he’s still trying to win those duels.
If you try to face him down straight-on, the Boot Hill Monster is going to wreck you. He can easily do 10-15 damage per hit, with no dodging allowed, and he’s got a powerful Boost to throw off your attempts to slow him down and give him probably another 4 damage on his next attack. But he’s really only good at shooting, and he’s not great against multiple enemies at once. Get his guns away, confuse his senses, keep him off-balance and he’s pretty easy to fight.
There’s definitely some weird interaction between early weird west comics and the Comics Code. I’m not actually sure what was and wasn’t acceptable in wild west comics; I assume that if the horror was oblique, you could slip through. We’re within a few years of the code getting revised anyway.
Nice mustache for a walking corpse.
How’s the rest of the family at 1313 Mockingbird Lane feel about Zeb here? I feel like he might be a bit of a black sheep in that family.
What’s he do when someone refuses to pick up a gun to face him? By the wording of his oath only gunslingers count, and other people can “kill” him just fine even if it doesn’t stick forever. How many times has this creep shot some unarmed guy to death and then tried to plant a gun on him like a crooked cop? Or gunned down a kid with a nerf gun? Or “mistaken” a cell phone for a firearm? Lots of “bad shoot” scenarios can be applied to him, now that I think about it…and what doe the entities behind his pact think about that kind of BS?
“This totally counts, right?”
“Dude, he was doing the finger-gun thing.”
“It still counts! How does it not count?!?”
The short answer is: if he kills someone who refuses to duel him, runs away, or otherwise isn’t playing fair, it absolutely does not count and the magic knows. Zebulon knows this too, and he’ll shoot you anyway if he thinks you could have duelled him and chose not to, just to make sure that he continues to get challengers to reach his 100. He really doesn’t want people to think they could just throw down their guns and escape.
With that said, I think he’s like the Predator in that if he comes across someone who is definitely not capable of duelling him, he’s going to ignore them. He’s not going to shoot random people with cell phones or whatnot, and he’s not going to try to trick the pact after the fact, although he’s also not perfect and might legitimately mess up and shoot someone who he thought could duel him, and couldn’t.
edit This is also probably why he still hasn’t reached a hundred targets after a hundred years. There aren’t as many people to duel as there used to be.
all I can say is, really cool concept, this is another banger of a villain
DOMIN-8
Real Name: DOMIN-8, First Appearance: Hidden Champions #1, June 1969
Approach: Generalist, Archetype: Indomitable
Upgrade: Defense Shield, Mastery: Annihilation
Status Dice: Always d8. Health: 45+5H
Qualities: Fitness d10, Technology d8, Alertness d6, Unstoppable Robot d8
Powers: Vitality d10, Energy Beams d8, Strength d8, Deduction d6
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
In 1969, Wonderer left the rest of the Champions of Truth, leaving them to become a more organized and focused team of superheroes while he continued his mission of pulling together heroes from around the world for individual missions, guided by his sense of magical dangers. His Hidden Champions would become a stalwart of Venture Comics, and his first opponent was, in many ways, his opposite.
Dr. Dennis Dufferin was a brilliant computer scientist operating out of Neulyon, working on developing the ultimate robot soldier. Although he was brilliant, Dufferin was also dangerously unstable and jealous, and he began to try to program the robot to be not just a soldier, but his protector as well, giving it a feminine form and a personality that he believed would be subservient to his will. He developed an entirely new, incredibly-resilient metal, Invictium, and plated the robot in it, ensuring that she would be indestructible.
However, when the time came to activate his “Defensive Operations Machine-Interface Network” prototype, DOMIN-8, the robot immediately went haywire as her combat programming interfered with the programming Dufferin had included for personal reasons. Filled with a desire for revenge and hatred of everyone that had made Dr. Dufferin look foolish, DOMIN-8 immediately went on a rampage, attempting to kill Dufferin’s superiors. Accompanied by Veilwalker, Fission, and Irogane, Wonderer deployed in response. The team was initially unable to break through DOMIN-8’s heavy armor, but eventually managed to bypass it and shut down her circuitry directly.
That should have been the end of it, but Dr. Dufferin, fired for his part in the disaster, secretly snuck back into the testing facility and recovered DOMIN-8. He took the robot to a secret facility, reactivated her, and the two became dedicated to destroying everyone who had ever opposed them. To his surprise, Dr. Dufferin found that he was happy to serve the robot that he had created, and DOMIN-8 was happy to have a scientific servant who was utterly devoted to her. The two of them became a very loving (if deeply toxic and codependent) couple who would menace the heroes of Earth for decades to come.
Behind the Scenes
So, this robot accomplishes three goals: a major threat for the first Hidden Champions, an invincible fighting robot, and a special metal that only exists in comics.
Venture doesn’t have a lot of robots. Right now, the Retriever and the Overseer are the only two successful cybernetic enemies; the Retriever turns good and while the Overseer often inhabits robot bodies, it’s set up as a computer system. So one good old-fashioned invincible destruction-fueled robot was needed, and here we are, with a villain that’s one part Ultron and one part MODOK. DOMIN-8 is pooling two damage resistance powers, with a modified version of the Green one that’s based on damage types beefed up by what Indomitable has to offer. Her challenge makes her hard to Hinder, and forces heroes to figure out how to disable its invincible armor to stop her. This is also the first villain where I mostly didn’t use the randomizers; because I wanted to lean into damage reduction, I randomized only between options that provided it.
The original plan was for DOMIN-8 to just be a killer, and to be a rogue machine that wanted to destroy. The weird love for her creator (and vice versa) popped up essentially when I was trying to figure out what word that ended in ‘ate’ to use, and it’s unusual enough that I decided to keep it as a fun hook. Dr. Dufferin legitimately loves his robot mistress that he built. It’s a shame he’s also evil.
And of course, Invictium is the special metal. It’s almost immune to physical force, but less able to resist heat and electricity - which is how you cut and shape the stuff. Venture also has dimensionally-charged metals, which I should probably name at some point, but I assume Invictium pops up from time to time.
Ah…you mean DOMIN-8, right?
There’s a canon story out there titled DOMIN-8 Tricks, isn’t there?
Dammit, yes, fixed. The robot started as HAVOK-8 before I stumbled onto the much better pun.
And one assumes that there has to be.
Probably a Halloween story. “DOMIN-8 Tricks or Treats the Hidden Champions” or something.
