I am now imagining a Clockwise who enhances luck directed at themselves, and just doubles the value of any bonus or penalty they receive.
edit I expect it would break the game extremely fast.
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You’d probably limit it to max. ±4, which might not be quite as bad as turning -3s and +4s into -6s and +8s, but would still be pretty dramatic; any mod greater than ±1 would turn into ±4.
Or you could base it on the Experimentation Power Source’s Overpower Green ability, and do something like:
Whenever you are Boosted, increase that bonus by +1 (max. +4). Whenever you are Hindered, increase that penalty by -1 (max. -4).
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Yeah going by Overpower and a couple of similar villain abilities keeping the absolute cap at +4 is probably the limit for heroes, and the rare +5 for villains. Bullies have one that adds one to the size of all penalties they and their allies produce, and Inventors can add to the size to all the bonuses they personally create (which usually count toward their status die size as well). Technically a scene with multiple Bullies could exceed even that, but stacking villain abilities is always kind of dangerous mechanically. Even just one Bully can turn a minion swarm into a nightmare as they all Hinder for at least -2.
Although it might be funny (once) to do some crazy multi-Bully/Inhibitor combo where they spend all this effort sticking a -6 P&E mod on a hero each turn and then promptly have each of them inverted to a +6 by some Gadgeteer with Turn the Tides or a similar trick. Plan the scene deliberately just to play up why giant honking mods are not part of normal game play and to give an already-good trick (mod inversion) a moment to really shine. Make the baddies really one-trick ponies set up around the combo so they just don’t really have a Plan B when their mega-mods keep getting turned against them, and then play up the bafflement.
“I don’t think this is working.”
“Shut up up and keep doing it, it’s all we’ve got!”
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Yeah, +1 would seem like a more solid effect, but a lot less silly! Imagine just desperately piling Hinders on the bad guy because he’s got a +15 to his next action. 
As far as the Bully - I think as a general house rule, “there’s no way for bonuses or penalties to go past +5” is a good one just in general to prevent accidental cascades. But yeah, Bullies can make minion swarms really, really nasty if the players don’t have a good counter in play.
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Some quick scheduling notes for the next few weeks!
We are now through the last of the Plutonium Age lieutenants, and the end of this phase of the project is in sight. Next week, I’ll begin the “advance the timeline into 2021-2022” phase of the operation, with a 2021 villain and a 2021 hero added to the Diamond Age to bring the third volume in line with the others. The week after that, I’m taking a week off for my birthday, so there will be no updates, and then I’ll come back with our last three Diamond Age villains covering 2022, and then the end of August will start off our Diamond Age lieutenants, a few of whom already have short write-ups but are in need of longer ones and portraits, and most of whom are brand new.
We are currently on track for Venture Comics: The Digital Revolution to release on October 20th, which will be the second anniversary of this project’s start!
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Black Hat
Real Name: Toby J. Oakley, First Appearance: Earthwatch (Vol. 3) #25, June 2021
Approach: Generalist, Archetype: Thief
Upgrade: Power Upgrade, Mastery: Superiority
Status Dice: Number of bonuses on you: None: d6, 1-2: d8, 3+: d10. Health: 35+5H [Upgraded 55+5H]
Qualities: Technology d10, Conviction d8, Leadership d6, Adaptive Prosthetics d8
Powers: Lightning Calculator d10, Remote Viewing d8, Speed d8, Awareness d6
Abilities:
- Efficient (I) : When you use or discard a non-persistent bonus rated at +2 or higher, halve it (rounding up) instead of removing it.
- Destruction Testing [A]: Hinder multiple nearby targets using Lightning Calculator. Boost yourself using your Max die.
- Prosthetic Shift [A]: Boost using Speed. Use your Max die. Defend with your Mid die.
- Hack The System [A]: Attack using Technology. Use your Max die. Recover Health equal to your Min die.
- Plan For Failure [R]: When someone Attacks or Hinders you, you may discard one of your bonuses to reduce the Attack or Hinder result by twice its value.
Common Scene Elements:
- The Codebreakers: Black Hat’s team of fellow villains who share his vision:
- Scrapyard, an Adaptive/Inventor villain who rebuilds his robot frame with parts stolen from his targets.
- Night Bird, a Ninja/Bruiser villain who uses stealth and her alien technology to protect her allies
- Gacha, a Creator/Guerrilla villain who summons hardlight constructs of her favorite characters.
- The Cloud, a Disruptive/Formidable villain who dissolves into a cloud of unstable molecules
2021 saw the first cancellation of the Diamond Age, with the end of Venture Academy at Issue #25. While some of the characters had proved popular, and would be moved into other titles over the next year, the school setting as a whole had never quite come together. Venture’s editorial team chose to take this as an opportunity to test a new system, designing comics that were meant to run for two or three years before wrapping up and setting the stage for something new. The hope was that these comics would be able to attract new readers more easily, and that they would keep the setting of Venture Comics moving at a decent pace.
The first new comic to be created was Flatfoot and Fly Boy, reviving the pair into a planned three-year run that would detail the new world they lived in and their struggles. As it happened, the comic’s launch tied in with a planned Earthwatch storyline earlier in the year, so Handman suggested that the two writers collaborate on a new team of antiheroes that would act as nemeses to both titles. The result was Black Hat and the Codebreakers.
Black Hat was introduced in Earthwatch #25. The mysterious vigilante intervened in an Earthwatch operation against a rogue super-scientist, using his technology to turn the villain’s robotic creations against him. The villain was killed in the resulting rampage, and only Earthwatch’s interference prevented many of his employees from following him. In the resulting standoff, Black Hat’s true identity was revealed – he was the former child superhero Netizen, now grown and embittered from watching the world fail to improve since his brother’s death. Black Hat made a recruitment pitch to Earthwatch – the world was never going to change until everything at the top was wiped clean. Business leaders, politicians, and super-criminal gang leaders needed to be destroyed, or else it would be an endless treadmill of putting out fires.
And to the shock of Earthwatch, The Cloud agreed. He turned on the rest of the team, incapacitating them long enough for Black Hat to escape, and became a founding member of the Codebreakers. This team of high-stakes vigilantes ran criminal operations against the structures of the world, avoiding targeting low-level villains or individual criminals in favor of trying to break society itself. Bad code needed to be deleted, after all. Black Hat recruited Gacha, a young woman whose life had been ruined when her ideas were stolen by a major tech company, Night Bird, who had been scorned and used by so many would-be warlords over the years and saw Black Hat as a new master she could trust, and Scrapyard, a self-repairing robot that had been built in an attempt to reproduce the Retriever, then discarded when he was unable to match that robot’s capabilities.
Black Hat and the Codebreakers would become recurring threats to Earthwatch and to Flatfoot and Fly Boy, who the antihero still blamed for leaving the fate of the world in the hands of teenagers. The Codebreakers were sometimes allies, helping to fight against dangerous super-scientists, but their “take no prisoners” attitude and belief that all of society needed to be smashed to rubble so that something new could be built meant that they were more often enemies, a living counter-argument to Earthwatch’s dedication to rehabilitation and Flatfoot and Fly Boy’s belief that a better world could be built out of the current one. Despite this, the team was sympathetic enough to be popular, and unofficial “I’m With Black Hat” merch became popular among Venture fans. The Codebreakers even received a popular six-issue miniseries in 2022, in which they prevented the Overseer from being reactivated by a greedy and foolish businessman, opening the door to a more heroic portrayal in the future.
Behind the Scenes
The first of our four Diamond Age villains is a very familiar face! I knew that I wanted a heel turn for Netizen; that was why I kept him alive to begin with, to return post-timeskip as a bitter Red Hood-style character. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to introduce him as a villain, or introduce him by putting him on Earthwatch, and I ended up somewhere in between. I also wanted him to be notably distinct from previous “the problem is we aren’t killing enough people” antiheroes, which makes sense - his team died to an eldritch horror leading an army of supervillains who got killed, so he’s well aware that getting killed is not necessarily going to stop a problem.
Black Hat is a very sympathetic villain, but he’s ultimately a Hard Man Making Hard Decisions who is letting his anger dictate his targets. Of course, in 2021 there’s already a decent undercurrent of “maybe we should take out all the billionaires”, and he’s going to get a cadre of fans. There’s a good chance that his team ends up in sort of a Deadpool spot morally-speaking, where they’re often set up as the good guys but they’re also just bad enough to never fully turn.
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I see nothing sympathetic at all here, although the back end of the word sure does apply to the character.
So very tired of the mindset of “to build a better society, we must first destroy the existing one” that’s echoed by both ends of the political spectrum and a whole lot of religious zealots to boot. There’s never a coherent explanation of what Utopian vision they hope to bring into being or how a power vacuum will lead to it. And while it’s bad enough in the real world, it’s intolerable in fictional settings where going somewhere else (another planet, another dimension, a conveniently empty spot in history or the future, etc.) and starting fresh is perfectly viable.
Mind you, it doesn’t help that Netizen’s name reminds me far too much of this aborted disaster from a few years back. He probably plays on the same WoW server as Screentime with his internet gas. 
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My thoughts on this exactly.
Wow. I think I’d vaguely heard of that team before reading the article, but… just wow. That’s worse than I thought.
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dang, never expected to see Netizen again, let alone as a villain! D:
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