The History of Venture Comics!

[FrivYeti]

Rebound

Real Name: Dan Dalton, First Appearance: Company Town #102, June 1997

Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d6
Motive: Wealth, Approach: Physical

Traits:

• Momentum: When Rebound Boosts, he also Defends with the same result.
• Ricochet: As long as Rebound is not Hindered, he has +1 to all actions.
• Bounce Back: The first time Rebound is destroyed in a scene, return him to play with a d6 status die at the end of his next action.

The fall of the Overseer broke the Man’s hold over the twin cities of Ferristown and Ferrisville. While Hank Ferris Jr. was able to keep Ferris Industries running, the Company was shattered and many of its lieutenants and enforcers struck out on their own, looking for a piece of the action. The Rogue Agents found themselves working to stem the chaos and restore peace to the cities, purging Ferris’s influence and making the twin cities a better place to live.

As a result, Company Town became even more of an an anthology piece in the late 1990s, with the Rogue Agents taking up half its issues, Flatfoot, Fly Boy, and Revenant taking most of the rest, and one or two issues per year devoted to minor characters or villain against villain tales. A new array of colourful villains filled the pages, and Rebound was one of the prime examples of the sorts of problems that the Rogue Agents now faced.

Dan Dalton had been a low-level Company Man, taking a paycheck to get beaten up by superheroes and shake down small businesses. When the Overseer was destroyed, he saw an opportunity, stealing a prototype power suit from the lab he was supposed to be guarding and running away with it. With the suit, Dan could leap twenty feet in the air, and be sent flying from punches or bullets without harm. He used it to gather a few of his fellow crooks together and start raiding Company safehouses, hoping to get rich before someone else caught on. Instead, he ran afoul of Flatfoot, and after a few false starts ended up in jail.

Luckily for Dan, he wasn’t in jail long. The suit had been a prototype because it was dangerously unstable, and getting rattled around in it so much overcharged his cells with strange particles. Dan quickly realized that he still had his momentum powers, and used them to simply leap out of jail one morning and make his escape. Without his suit, his powers were wild and uncontrollable, but once he stole it back he was back in business, pulling heists and dodging trouble wherever he could.

Rebound was a small-time problem, more often showing up as an introductory detail or part of a bigger gang someone had pulled together, but he was emblematic of the challenges the Rogue Agents faced. Company equipment was flooding the streets, and while none of it was nearly as dangerous or oppressive as the enemy they’d beaten before, a thousand tiny problems had replaced one massive one. Balancing the new gangs and breaking their power would become the main through-line of Company Town for the next six years.

Behind the Scenes:

I didn’t mean for both of the d6 lieutenants I wrote up to be Ferristown folk. There’s just something about the city that calls to them!

More seriously: Rebound is a very different shtick than Number Cruncher, and I think he’d be a good lieutenant to fill in a scene with. His Bounce Back makes him tougher than most low-health lieutenants, his Momentum gives him a bit of a punch, and his Ricochet means that he can alternate between powering up and getting a good punch in, but he’s still a relatively light enemy to take down.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

Interesting layered mechanics there.

[FrivYeti]

Thanks, I like how it came together. Building a d6 lieutenant is always an interesting challenge; you want them to be actually effective, and a lot of abilities aren’t that impressive at d6.

[FrivYeti]

Astrologian

Real Name: Ralaven Zhar, First Appearance: Celestial Travels #713, July 1998

Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d10
Motive: Power, Approach: Otherworldly

Traits:

• Redshift: While Astrologian is active, the environment has a +1 bonus to all actions.
• Blueshift: Astrologian has a +1 bonus to damage saves for each environment target in play.

With the successful foundation of the Grand Galactic Union in Celestial Travels #700, the focus of stories in the title shifted back from large-scale politics to more personal and immediate threats. The Celestial Travelers were hired by the new Union’s Diplomatic Corps to travel to the edges of Union territory, convincing small outposts and planets to begin negotiations and dealing with particularly dangerous pirates and warlords that still thrived at the edges of space. This meant that in addition to running into many of their older foes, and tangling with the ongoing Uranian civil war and expansion attempts from the Kel’Thoth Empire, the Travelers encountered many new allies and enemies.

One of these was Astrologian. Ralaven Zhar hailed from the small world of Trevalian, whose people mixed magic and science in their studies of other dimensions. Zhar was by far their most prodigious sorceress, and her efforts had allowed her to tap into the essence of Flame, igniting passions and the environment alike in her quest for power and becoming the planet’s mystical champion through manipulation and force of power. When the Travelers reached Trevalian, Astrologian recognized Ember as a former acolyte of the Empress of Ash, and believed that she was a rival come to take away Zhar’s power. She compelled the king of Trevalian into believing that the Travelers were here to overthrow the planet in the name of a false democracy, and convinced him to arrest the Travelers and sentence them to death.

As it turned out, Trevalian’s armies weren’t able to restrain Wavelength, and the team quickly escaped and used their abilities to undo Zhar’s control over the king. Trevalian joined the Union, the king promised more diplomatic reforms, and Astrologian was exiled for her crimes. She swore vengeance and began to travel the stars, using her magic to insinuate herself into the ranks of powerful warlords, pulling down dimensional energies to secure her own power. Over the next several years, writers would pull her in when they wanted a quick opponent to Ember and Reckoner, using her dimensional magics to oppose their cosmic might and bring the battle against a more important foe to a more even footing.

Ralavan was a cunning and manipulative sorcerer, but she was also as good as her word. As long as her employer was on what she saw as the right path, she remained loyal to them, and she never had any intention of overthrowing her masters. She simply believed that, from time to time, they needed some ‘encouragement’, a stance that often ended with her banished once again.

Behind the Scenes:

Space magic!

I don’t have a lot of space magic, and it’s always nice to slide a little bit more in to blur the lines. Astrologian is tapping into dangerous forces, but she’s not working for them, just borrowing here and there. Mechanically, she’s a buff enough lieutenant to be hard to smack down, but her primary threat is how she makes the environment a lot more dangerous, then hides behind it. Don’t deploy her if there’s no environment in the scene!

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

Now I’ve got Doctor Seuss stuck in my head.

One shift
Two shift
Redshift
Blueshift

A full villain writeup would have a little car as a signature vehicle, of course.

[FrivYeti]

Thanatillers

Real Name: n/a, First Appearance: Twilight Carnival #170, February 1999

Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d12
Motive: Need, Approach: Raw Power

Traits:

• Reap: As an action, step down a Thanatiller’s status die and then create a “Necrospawn” minion whose status die is the same as the Thanatiller’s.
• Sow: As an action, all Necrospawn step up their status dice to a maximum of d10.

Necrospawn: At the end of their action, each Necrospawn steps down its status die; if it was a d4 it is destroyed. Then, create a duplicate of each Necrospawn.

The Elysium Corporation went through several changes over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. While Dark Rivers had overseen a storyline in the late 1970s in which Veilwalker was able to calm her mother’s soul and send her on to whatever comes next, the next writing team had missed the dynamic between daughter and mother, and took advantage of the Sovereign of Secrets event to reset the clock. In the revised timeline, Veilwalker wished for a world in which her mother was alive, and Adrianna Denton had lived for another six years, growing increasingly bound to Elysium politically while also spending more time in her daughter’s life. The lab accident that transformed her into Asphodel happened after she had secured a place on the company’s board of directors in the post-Sovereign timeline, ironically creating a situation that was the opposite of what had happened before – after her mother’s death, Veilwalker was immediately aware of who Asphodel was, but Asphodel had no idea that the more experienced, cautious necromancer she was involved with was her daughter as she used her influence to push the newly-branded Elysium Inc. to research more necromantic tools and weapons, building a board made up equally of living and undead members.

Elysium was temporarily broken in the early 1990s, as the next Twilight Carnival writing team increasingly focused on Dawn Rider and Prometheus, but they gradually re-appeared throughout 1997 and 1998, hunting monsters for experimentation and threatening the people of Lostwood. This culminated in the development and release of their Mark I Thanatiller in Twilight Carnival #170. Carefully assembled from undead flesh, the creature was capable of absorbing residual ghostly fragments, merging them into dangerous necrospawn which were capable of further dividing into a small army. For safety purposes, the Thanatiller was the only part of the self-replicating swarm capable of grafting new entropic parts onto its creations, ensuring that if the necrospawn went rogue, they would quickly divide too far and dissipate. The first Thanatiller was deployed to a small town near Lostwood, and nearly overwhelmed the town before the Twilight Carnival hunted it down and stopped it. Elysium’s Board was impressed by the artificial creature’s efficiency and control, and began to produce more to act as short-range attackers or defenders for its facilities; the Thanatillers would become a common threat in coming years.

Behind the Scenes:

Bad news bears!

The first draft of Thanatiller was just a blob that was constantly splitting in half, but I kept refining the power until I ended up with something a little more manageable, while also incredibly dangerous. The Thanatiller has a limited number of necrospawn that it can create, but it can keep buffing them as they duplicate so you really want to stop it before they get out of control. You probably do not want two of these in the same scene at the same time, unless your team has extremely good minion control.

Thanatillers serve as another “consistent threat” lieutenant, demonstrating the sort of thing that Elysium gets up to. We really haven’t focused on Elysium at all since back in the Silver Age, and I think they deserve to be one of the major magical threats in the setting because I like the idea; their Iron Age reset of becoming an actual mixed human-ghost company leads the way for them to become increasingly threatening. I’ll have more details on them… someday. Some distant day.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

@FrivYeti

Necrospawn: At the end of their action, each Necrospawn steps down its status die; if it was it is destroyed. Then, create a duplicate of each Necrospawn.

Something missing after the bolded section, I think. Probably “already at a d4” or something like that?

Neat concept otherwise. Tricky balancing act for a small team, especially if paired up with an Overpowered villain who has that big “step up lieutenants/minions” ability and/or the Hardier Minions upgrade.

[FrivYeti]

Whoops! Yes, it was written as “if it was d4 it is destroyed”, but I’m writing these in the book and copying them over to the Internet to make sure I have the right length, and I’m using a fancy font for dice. So there was a “d4” icon there which didn’t survive the copy over.

It was a bit added to make sure that the Necrospawn didn’t just double forever when they dropped to d4. Thanatillers have a bit of a balancing act to keep their minions up, although as noted, the right villain can really cause trouble there.

[FrivYeti]

Alright, put your shipping goggles on for the final lieutenant of the Dark Ages:

Mel Sandoval

Real Name: Imelda Sandoval, First Appearance: Protean #37, July 2001

Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d8
Relation: Romantic Interest, Approach: Social

Traits:

• Crowd Control: When Mel Boost or Hinders, she may also apply the bonus or penalty created to the environment’s next roll.

The early arcs of Protean focused on Wendy growing accustomed to her new social status, while Carlie grew into a more mature teenager. By 2001, however, Protean’s writing team all agreed that the friction they’d created was becoming too stable; Wendy was getting used to her friends, and the lingering guilt Carlie felt wasn’t as dramatic as it had been. Rather than having the friends backslide, they decided to create a new problem to keep things fresh.

Mel Sandoval was introduced in Protean #37 as a new student at Max West Memorial High, a witty but sarcastic outsider who skipped classwork and clashed with her teachers. Mel was much more interested in her news blog, through which she investigated the ‘mysteries of Ferrisville’, especially when it came to weird science or strange magic. Mel was particularly interested in Randco and the events that had led to its creation of a dimensional proto-goddess, and began to verbally spar with Carlie as she investigated. One thing led to another, and in Protean #44 Mel asked Carlie out on a date. Carlie was caught off-guard. She hadn’t thought of herself as being into girls, but there was just something about Mel. She hesitantly agreed, and soon the two were dating exclusively, with Mel showing off cultural hotspots and excitement.

Wendy did not like this. Her best friend was suddenly busy all the time, and Mel’s interest in Randco was deeply suspicious. Convinced that something was up with the teen reporter, she repeatedly tried to investigate her, holding her at arm’s length and questioning her motives at every turn. This fractured her friendship with Carlie, who just needed someone to be in her corner; her father thought she was going through a ‘phase’ and her friends didn’t understand what she saw in a counterculture girl like Mel. In Protean #60, when Wendy and Carlie were captured by the supervillain Deaththrow to be held for ransom, all of Carlie’s frustrations spilled out. Wendy was shocked into the realization that her suspicions had all been based on the fact that she felt like she was losing her friend; before she could apologize, Mel burst into the situation to try to save them both, and when Deaththrow was about to kill her Wendy was forced to reveal herself as Protean to Carlie so that she could intervene and save Mel’s life – Mel immediately figured out what was going on, but promised to keep Wendy’s identity safe. In the aftermath, Wendy, Carlie, and Mel became more tightly-knit; while Wendy and Mel still clashed sometimes, they started to learn to get along. The three girls also worked more closely together to fight super-crime, with Carlie and Mel increasingly acting as Protean’s support team.

While Wendy’s jealousy of Mel was framed as platonic, some fans saw it as proof she was also in love with Carlie, and arguments spread across fandom about who Carlie should end up with. Both camps had solid defenders, and their arguments would affect Protean for years to come.

Behind the Scenes:

Whew! Crunching this one into one page and keeping everything I wanted to say about it took a bit of work, but here we are! I was originally thinking of this as a potential romantic interest for Wendy, but they I got to the jealousy angle and that was much more interesting. Mel is totally above-board, but Wendy was just convinced there was something suspicious about her. Early Protean’s investigative instincts were not always the best.

This is also a slight shift in my timeline for Wendy and Carlie. If Carlie is revealed to be bi in 2001, I think it doesn’t take until 2017 for Wendy and Carlie to date for the first time. Instead, Carlie dates Mel for like five years of comics, and the storyline is supposed to be about Wendy getting used to her friend being busy, but instead comes off as romantic attraction. In 2006, Carlie and Mel break up due to graduating high school and Mel going off to travel the world. Around that time, Wendy starts dating some guy, and for the next few years there’s a love triangle between him, her, and Carlie that really fires up the unintended romantic subtext. Around 2010-2011, Wendy and Carlie both give up on the guy and start dating each other. That lasts a few years, and then they break up for contrived superhero reasons while still being in love, and then they get back together during Passing the Torch. I’ll have to try to actually write some of that out in the next book; I don’t know exactly when the various breakups and reunions happen yet.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

Love that Crowd Control mechanic. Times I feel the game needs more interaction with the environment than it has, particularly on the hero side of things. There are a few environment-focused abilities here and there, but nothing on par with the level of deck manipulation the card game featured. Domain villains obviously have a fair bit of play there, but even so with only six abilities (and the one to trigger the environment twists feeling near-mandatory) they start to feel same-y mechanically pretty quick.

[FrivYeti]

Good morning, friends!

Today was supposed to be the official launch of Venture Comics: The Dark Ages, but once again the project has been afflicted with some technical glitches that I wasn’t able to work out last night. So I’ll be finishing conversion and uploading tonight. Stay tuned!

Until then, as a little taste, here is the revised backstory for another one of our D-Listers who got upgraded to B-Lister and made it into the book:

Shatterpoint

In 1997, the writing team in charge of Covert Tactics decided to reverse one of the more controversial decisions of the post-Sovereign age, one which had been going for twelve years now. Earlier that year, Covert Tactics had taken part in the destruction of Guardian Industries and the defeat of the Overseer; in the process, a writer involved in the crossover had included a mention that the team’s temporal energies were a mess due to having their timelines so thoroughly meddled with by the Sovereign. Rather than leaving that detail to lie, the team decided to take a short break between AEGIS storylines to focus on that situation, and in April 1997 the team faced off against Shatterpoint.

Owen Nash was a powerful lieutenant of Hank Ferris who ended up cut loose after the Overseer’s defeat. Grabbing what he could, he stole a collection of technology he didn’t fully understand and accidentally activated several pieces of alien gear, sending himself careening into a dimensional vortex. Nash was just barely able to save himself, but in the process he ended up dimensionally unstable, vibrating between energy frequencies and bringing entire regions back and forth across the dimensional barrier with him.

Searching for more dimensional energies to stabilize himself, Shatterpoint discovered that Covert Tactics were a potential source of deeply locked-down temporal power. He attacked the team, siphoning power away from them and using it to reshape the world according to his desires. In the process, Covert Tactics’ lost memories of their old lives resurfaced, and Madame Liberty reclaimed her shapeshifting abilities, mingling them with her psychic impressions to combine her classical and new capabilities. Using their newly-recovered decades of experience, the team was able to defeat Shatterpoint, sending him careening into the void.

The villain vanished for two years as Covert Tactics focused on AEGIS-related plots, but by 1999, things had changed. AEGIS had fallen, and with it went the primary focus of the team and the reason for their secrecy. Looking for a new primary antagonist and direction, Covert Tactics’ newest head writer brought Shatterpoint back, now established as a multi-dimensional crime lord who could use his dimensional abilities to smuggle goods between worlds and attack his rivals from impossible directions. Using his newly-constructed dimensionally-locked armor, Shatterpoint could stabilize his own powers while weakening the superhuman abilities of his foes; with it, he intended to establish himself as untouchable.

Initially, Shatterpoint was an effective foe to Covert Tactics; he could outmaneuver them and infiltrate their defenses with ease, forcing them to once again go underground. The team moved from base to base, fighting back against Shatterpoint’s attempts to establish a permanent foothold on Earth and clashing with him in half of their issues between Covert Tactics #176 and Covert Tactics #200. Unfortunately, the team’s new direction didn’t really catch on. As an occasional villain, Shatterpoint was popular, blending dimensional stories with criminal ones and pulling in a few minor characters like Gunrunner to his organization, the Fragmenters, but readers were less interested in seeing Covert Tactics constantly having to fail in order to stay on the run. As a result, the team managed a significant victory against him in Covert Tactics #200, breaking his organization, which also marked the end of the series. While Shatterpoint would continue to operate as an interdimensional crime boss, the Fragmenters would be revised down to a smaller, more focused crime group with a handful of key members and a few small bases in key dimensions.

[FrivYeti]

And we are live! Take a look, and I hope you enjoy Venture Comics: The Dark Ages

[unfortunateSD]

Whoot!

[FrivYeti]

And now, time to start the Digital Revolution with our first Plutonium Age lieutenant…

Lance Holden

Real Name: Lance Holden, First Appearance: (as ghost) Twilight Carnival #250, October 2005

Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d6
Relation: Mentor Figure, Approach: Mental

Traits:

• Mystical Attunement: When Lance Boosts or Hinders a magic-user, he gets +2 to the result.
• Ghost In Your Ear: When someone follows Lance’s advice precisely, they get a +1 bonus to their Overcomes.
• Insubstantial: Lance has +1 to his damage saves.

“Ashes to Ashes”, the first truly massive crossover of the Plutonium Age, stretched through two main titles and a whopping six companion stories and covered twenty-six issues over six months. It all kicked off when someone idly pointed out that Heretic should have lost his powers the way that Merlin did when the Sovereign was wiped out and proposed a solution.

In Twilight Carnival #245, Heretic discovered that while the Sovereign had linked his powers, they actually drew from the Empress of Ash, and the light and flames that he channeled were Her terrible forces! The Empress was planning to use the Heretic as a link to devour the Sovereign’s realm, adding their power to her own and becoming an unstoppable threat to every dimension. As her power reached out, mingling the frenzy of flame with wishcrafting, Heretic was forced to turn to the least likely ally imaginable - Scion. Together, and supported by the Twilight Carnival, Heretic and Scion delved into the dimensions, working to break the link that the Empress had forged between her own magic and the Sovereign’s.

The event cascaded through the rest of Venture Comics. In Earthwatch, Nightguard and Gale Force were caught in the Empress’s new magic, drawn into a vision of a world in which their powers were burned away, leaving them as civilians in their ideal bodies. In the end, the two heroes were forced to sacrifice their dreams to save their friends, but they came out of the story in a new relationship and with even more determination. In Champions of Truth, the Empress assailed the Earth’s greatest heroes, her forces threatening to burn the world to keep them from assisting her enemies; only quick action by Wonderer was able to protect the team as they developed countermeasures. The heroes of Liberty’s Dream were joined by Moon Angel as they fought to save worlds on the fringes of existence from being absorbed, and the newly-launched Vanguards Volume 2 began with the team, now including Partisan once again, dispatched to the Jotari realm to save the provisional government from the newly-reinforced Cult of the Flames. Greenheart and Skybreaker also had solo events in their own comics, and Ignition faced off against her past as the Empress’s power roared within her in Celestial Travels #799 and #800.

In the grand conclusion in Twilight Carnival #250, Heretic lived up to his memes and sacrificed himself, becoming the lock on the Sovereign’s tomb and preventing Scion from unleashing her god. This time, however, Heretic understood that a thread of power was needed to prevent the dimensional god from gathering its power and breaking free in another few years. As such, the ghost of Lance Holden went searching for a new hero to bear his mantle, one who would be willing to give up their soul to save the world and channel dark power for good…

Behind the Scenes:

A lot of this text is going to feel familiar, because it’s the revised and adapted “Ashes to Ashes” text from my first draft of the Plutonium Age. The events and comic numbers here are the fixed, revised ones, and now we have a better idea of who Lance is!

This support character is pretty funny. Just kind of hangs around as a tiny-die ghost, provides passive buffs if you will just listen to him, and is pretty good at supporting mages. He is not that hard to disperse for a while, even with the damage save buff, but he’s nice to have around.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

@FrivYeti

He is not that hard to disperse for a while, even with the damage save buff, but he’s nice to have around.

I’ll say. Lot of villains can just one-shot him with 12+ damage, but that’s probably a waste of their turn unless it’s part of a lucky/boosted sweep. Be more worried about him going down to two-three d8 minions who rolled halfway decently.

[TakeWalker]

Venture Comics enters its own definitive edition era.

[FrivYeti]

It’ll probably be up to the GM. If I were running it, I would probably say that most minions don’t have the cleverness to make attacks that can affect Lance, and just ignore him because he’s a wispy ghost and that’s not a thing that matters. He’s not technically immune to physical damage, because a cool physical attack could break his concentration or otherwise cause him to dematerialize, but it probably takes more effort than just throwing a punch.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

@TakeWalker

Venture Comics enters its own definitive edition era.

Given the way that’s worked out, I certainly hope not.

@FrivYeti

He’s not technically immune to physical damage, because a cool physical attack could break his concentration or otherwise cause him to dematerialize, but it probably takes more effort than just throwing a punch.

I was thinking more along the lines of lesser demons, hungry ghosts, and similar mystical minions, some of whom might look at Lance as an extra-tasty snack.

[FrivYeti]

Flaywire

Real Name: Kaleth sutu-Gathar, First Appearance: Vanguards (Vol. 2) #1, July 2005

Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d10
Motive: Obedience, Approach: Physical

Traits:

• Exploit Distraction: When a nearby hero takes an action that does not target Flaywire, he may roll his single status die as a reaction and Attack them with the result.

In addition to closing out Liberty’s Dream and paving the way for a new title, “Ashes to Ashes” served to revitalize a team that had been out of action as leading characters for twenty-three years. The modern Vanguards maintained the team lineup that had been established with Vanguards of Hope and used in the various one-shots and limited series that had featured the team since 1999: Captain Bolt as team leader, with Pulsejet, Nucleon, Mr. Infinity and Partisan once again united in service of justice. The team was still government-affiliated, but after the events of AEGIS, all of them were more cautious with authority, building an internal team they could trust and treating their political handlers as potential obstacles.

The first three issues of the second volume of Vanguards were entirely set up by the “Ashes to Ashes” arc, with the team fighting alongside former foes to protect the Jotari realms from the Empress of Ash once again. But once that story was concluded, the team was left with a complicated political situation, one that was rife with bigotry, oppression, and a trembling government on the verge of collapse. The Jotari Provisional Government, which was under fire from the resurgent Jotari Authority, leaving the twelve dimensions of Jotarus in a state of simmering cold war. While the Provisional Government and the Authority were not officially at war, the Provisional Government viewed the Authority as a collection of ragtag pretenders from a handful of Great Houses, soon to collapse under its own weight, while the Authority viewed the Provisional Government as a temporary aberration that would quickly implode, allowing affairs to return to their proper state. When this didn’t happen, they weren’t above putting a finger on the scale to help make things worse.

Flaywire was one of those fingers. A rare Jotari commoner with superpowers, he had the ability to generate plasma with his movements, absorbing blows and striking with impressive force. He was an elite member of House Gathar’s retinue, and believed firmly in the right of his master, Lord Farahd Jotu-Gathar, to rule over his traditional realms. Flaywire formed a secretive order of noble-supporting commoners, who struck at those they saw as overstepping their stations, creating a reign of terror in outlying territories. The Vanguards responded, and crushed the insurgency, but Flaywire escaped to build more cells. The True Jotari that he belonged to would be a consistent danger, operating as vigilante bigots within Authority territory and dangerous terrorists against the Provisional Governments.

Behind the Scenes:

Revived Jotari stories means a need for what’s been going on with the Jotari since the 90s, and we’ve got something that’s a cross between the Reconstruction South and Germany in the mid-century. The True Jotari are operating as a Klan, a horrible group of bigots attacking people who want to live free, and they get beaten up a lot in this time period.

Flaywire himself is a big bruiser who gets up in your face and needs to be pounded down. Expect him to take up service near a major challenge that needs to be resolved, so that he can punish people for resolving it.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

That is a very Nineties name there.

@FrivYeti

Exploit Distraction: When a nearby hero takes an action that does not target Flaywire, he may roll his single status die as a reaction and Attack them with the result.

I’ve fought a lieutenant with the exact same mechanic, but their ability was called “Attention Hungry” instead.

@FrivYeti

Expect him to take up service near a major challenge that needs to be resolved, so that he can punish people for resolving it.

Knowing the way my players tend to think, I suspect Flaywire would rapidly find himself being used as an involuntary tool in those Overcomes.

“This guy generates plasma as he moves? Awesome! I’ll Overcome to use d12 Telekinesis to grab him, wave him around till he’s going good and hot, and then use him as an impromptu welding torch/blacksmith’s hammer to start sealing this hull breach.”

“Cripes, the environment saddled Florida Man with a -4 “Chilled By the Depths of Space” penalty? That’s mean. I’ll grow up to full size and use an Overcome to grab Flaywire and shake him up to use as a handwarmer so I can strip that penalty off.”