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.
2 Likes
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).
2 Likes
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!”
2 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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!
3 Likes
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.
3 Likes
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. 
2 Likes
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.
2 Likes
dang, never expected to see Netizen again, let alone as a villain! D:
4 Likes
I mean, he is still the bad guy.
In all seriousness, I do have some sympathy for people who are at least trying to aim at the right targets, but I absolutely agree with you about the fundamental problems with Black Hat’s philosophy, and I think the comics he’s in do, too. He’s an angry traumatized kid who never really grew up, and he’s looking for someone to blame for the fact that the world is a mess.
(For the second half - yep, I did have that failed New Warriors setting in the back of my mind when I was first writing up the Champions. I do like Black Hat as a villain name more, although it’s still pretty on the nose.
Victory!
It’ll mean some wild storyline interactions with Sunbeam, who took a very different lesson from their shared time as heroes and resulting trauma.
3 Likes
Doctor Cobalt
Real Name: Bertha Giles, First Appearance: Earthwatch (Vol. 3) #29, October 2021
Background: Former Villain, Power Source: Unknown, Archetype: Elemental Manipulator
Personality: Sarcastic, Principles: Detachment, Hacker
Status Dice: Green d8, Yellow d8, Red d10. Health: 30 [Green 30-23, Yellow 22-12, Red 11-1]
Qualities: Technology d10, Criminal Underworld d8, Banter d8, Alertness d8, Science d6, Show Them All d8
Powers: Lightning d12, Fire d10, Inventions d6, Intuition d6
Green Abilities:
- Phlogiston Charge [A]: Defend using Lightning. Use your Max die. Boost using your Min die.
- Phlogiston Burn [A]: Hinder using Fire. Attack using your Min die. If you are in the Red zone, you may apply the penalty to any number of nearby targets.
- Principle of Detachment [A]: Overcome a challenge related to duress or fear and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
- Principle of the Hacker [A]: Overcome by using your digital network and use your Max die. You and each of your allies gain a hero point.
Yellow Abilities:
- Charged Shot [A]: Attack using Lightning. Hit one target using your Min die, another target with your Mid die, and Boost using your Max die.
- Firestorm [A]: Attack multiple targets using Fire. Take damage equal to your Max die.
- Epicentre [A]: Boost all nearby allies using Inventions using your Max+Mid dice. Hinder yourself with your Min die.
Red Abilities
- Phlogiston Waves [A]: Attack using Lightning and at least one bonus. Use your Max+Mid+Min dice. Destroy all of your bonuses, adding each of them to this Attack first, even if they are exclusive.
- Energy Conversion (I): When you use an ability action, you may also perform any one basic action using your Mid die on the same roll.
Out
- Hinder an opponent by rolling your single Technology die.
Fans didn’t have to wait long to learn how Earthwatch would fare having lost The Cloud to the Codebreakers. Finnegan’s plan had always been for the first three years of the comic to include one failure and one success in order to drive home the idea that the team was more malleable than previous Earthwatch incarnations, and while Catharsis had originally been pegged to be the one to turn traitor, everyone agreed that The Cloud was much more interesting as an antihero. As a result, however, Finnegan already had a replacement in mind, carefully chosen to both adapt to the loss of The Cloud, and the upcoming graduation of another team member. He made a passionate pitch for a minor character that hadn’t been adapted to the post-timeskip era yet, and while Handman was concerned that it might lead to an overabundance of sarcasm on the team, he cautiously greenlit a redemption arc for long-running minor supervillain Professor Phlogiston.
Bertha Giles was revealed to have spent the past five years in jail, after one of her schemes to demonstrate the power of her Phlogostonium went badly awry. She was a model prisoner, aside from an incident in which she almost blew up the prison cafeteria attempting to hotwire the microwaves to turn them into air fryers, and another incident in which she attempted to stop a group of gang members from beating up a friend and accidentally magnetized the entire prison. It was the second incident that drew her to Gale Force’s attention, and Earthwatch #29 retroactively revealed that Aihan had made Bertha an offer – use her prodigious intellect to help people, and maybe she could demonstrate the value of her science without widespread collateral devastation.
Bertha turned the offer down, refusing to be a ‘trained monkey’ for ‘stuffed suits’, and was thus not part of the initial Earthwatch lineup. But she regretted her decision almost immediately, and after hearing that The Cloud had vanished, she swallowed her pride and contacted Gale Force to ask whether that spot was still available. Taking on the name Doctor Cobalt to put some distance between her criminal past and her probation-filled present, she swore that she would prove herself to be the best member of Earthwatch, the most reformed, the most effective, and the most intelligent! Every one of those military officers would regret ever having thought that she was unredeemable! Every superhero she had faced before would come to respect her as a fellow! She would show them all!
As a result, Doctor Cobalt managed to simultaneously be one of Gale Force’s most dedicated parolees and one of her most frustrating. She got along well with Catharsis and Jitterbug, but clashed with Merlin constantly, and her obvious smug superiority didn’t endear her to the team’s government sponsors. It didn’t help that Cobalt was a preeminent hacker, able to extend her phlogiston lightning directly into circuitry to alter code and gain access to secure systems completely untraceably. As it transpired, she could have broken out of jail at any time; the only reason she hadn’t was because she was convinced her rivals expected her to, and she wanted to prove them wrong. Her hacking skills would prove invaluable for the team, especially when they clashed with their former teammate and his digitally-powered boss.
Behind the Scenes
So there’s a few things here.
First off, now you know why things got moved! I wrote this hero in response to Black Hat, then realized halfway through Doctor Cobalt that this meant that she was joining the team in response to a villain that I had not written yet. So I had to do a quick reshuffle to put her in the middle of the villains instead of between Iron and Plutonium. Whoops!
Secondly, I’m feeling silly, so I did the Sentinel Comics thing and made my alternate-universe self the final EIC of Venture Comics. Misha Handman takes over as EIC in 2021, after being fortunate enough to do some writing in the later Plutonium Age. I don’t know which comics I wrote. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.
Finally, this was always the plan for Professor Phlogiston; the original Doctor Cobalt was a hero who was a former villain, and I intended for the new one to join Earthwatch in the Diamond Age the moment I thought of tossing the lieutenant version in. I’m very tickled at the idea of someone trying to reform through a stubborn desire to show them all because it takes a villainous personality approach and applies it for good.
Mechanically, this is a risky build, but I kind of love it. In Green, Doctor Cobalt can set up Defends and Boosts, or plink at enemies to slow them down. In Yellow, she can either play it safe with Lightning, boost allies with her Inventions (relying on her low D6 to have a minimal Hinder from it), or go wildly all-out with Fire and blast herself into Red, where she can start unleashing Max+Mid+Min every turn by using Energy Conversion to Boost herself after each Phlogiston Wave. With no other defenses, she’s relying on her team to take hits for her; as it happens, both Gale Force and Jitterbug can oblige her.
It’s also a very different build from my original Doctor Cobalt, who used Supernatural and Blaster. That’s partially because this team already has a Supernatural-source character, and partially because I wanted to lean into the fire and lightning and away from the pure alchemy of the previous theme.
3 Likes
Have to ask, where’s that big d12 coming from? Former Villain brings a10, 8, 8 to the table for powers, and Unknown’s a 10, 8, 6. Artifact of the previous writeup?
Other than that, dig the writeup, both mechanically and narratively.
1 Like
It’s the houseruled background table again!
Venture’s Former Villain gets d12, d6, d6 for Power Source, which is also where Bertha’s d6 scores for Inventions and Intuition come from.
1 Like
While you can use whatever rules you want to create your characters, do you think that a simple indication (like an asterisk) that they were built with rules different from those found in the Core Rulebook would be a good idea? It could let people know up front that you used different rules and aid them if they are trying to use your character as a template for one of their own. It would also save you some time having to explain things. Look at it like stats achieved in a different league. For example, stats achieved in Canadian football (CFL) do not translate (or count) towards those achieved in American football (NFL). Same game, slightly different rules. Just a suggestion.
2 Likes
I was about to say that I did announce that, it’s just that it was two years ago when I started the thread…
But I just realized that when I first started moving things over, I didn’t move the revised character rules! I think I was worried about the forum’s extremely vague “no new stuff” policy, and whether the revised creation rules would apply.
So yes! I will post the revised character creation rules here tomorrow. The revised hero rules are in History of Venture Comics: the Classic Years, and the revised villain rules are in The Dark Ages, but they should be in this thread somewhere.
2 Likes
Okay, so I just remembered why I did not originally post my revised character creation rules, and it wasn’t entirely because of forum rule concerns. It was also because unlike the other forum where I post these things, the Greater Than Games forum implemented spoiler blocks exclusively as greying out material. I had hoped to drop the rules behind spoiler blocks so that there wasn’t an overwhelming block of text, but no such luck.
So instead, I’ve made a couple of low-size PDFs of the creation rules for heroes and for villains, which I’m including here. You can get them as part of the full compilation on my Itch page, but this may be easier to reference for those who are interested.
Let’s see if this is small enough for a forum upload!
Hero creation rules:
Venture Comics - Hero Creation.pdf (252.3 KB)
And villain creation rules:
Venture Comics - Villain Creation.pdf (214.7 KB)
3 Likes
Actually, I don’t think that’s quite true.
In the post editor, clicking on the gear 
icon does show a Blur Spoiler option which just blurs stuff like this.
[spoiler]this[/spoiler].
But also on the gear menu is the Hide Details option, which does collapse text...
…like this.
[details="...which does collapse text..."]
...like this.
[/details]
Of course, the PDFs look great too! 
Also, I think I might’ve spotted a couple of errors. In the Hero doc, the Principle of the Hacker’s Green Overcome action looks to me like it has the text of the Principle of the Empath. And in the “assigning random dice” step of the Villain doc, it says to assign “their two largest Quality dice to the numbers rolled on the d10s in any order,” but I think it was supposed to say d6s?
And what’s more, I’m a touch curious why you chose to make the Leech and Ancient Approaches and Legion and Titan Archetypes twice as likely as all the other options? It’s obvious that you had to choose some due to the fact that there’s no such thing as a d18, but I wonder if there’s any rationale for why you chose those particular ones. (Though I suppose if one wanted each option to have equal likelihood, one could add a “19-20: Reroll.” entry at the very end.)
1 Like
You can roll a d18 by rolling 1d6 followed by another d6. If the second die comes up 1-2, add nothing to the first die and that’s the result (1-6). If it comes up 3-4, add 6 to the first die (7-12). On a 5-6, add 12 to the first die (13-18). There’s your 18 results, all with identical odds of coming up.
There’s obviously other combinations that will do the same thing, but that’s perhaps the easiest to execute.
1 Like
Ooh, good to know! I’ll keep that in my pocket for the future.
Urgh! Those first two are mistakes that I spotted when I was assembling the book, and thought that I’d corrected in the finished volumes. Apparently, I did not. I’ll have to fix them here and in the full PDFs tomorrow.
For the third, though: that’s actually an artifact of the fact that the generation system for Sentinel Comics is weird. Because it uses d10s and their sums, there is a rapid exponential decrease in the likelihood of getting results above 12. The chances of 19-20, even with 3d10, are vanishingly small. I considered just leaving 19-20 as some kind of reroll or blank, but then I realized that 17-18 gave about the same chance as 16, and so I bundled the final numbers together. Leech and Ancient are still the least likely choices to roll, despite getting two numbers each.
2 Likes
Yeah, I still don’t get what they were trying to accomplish. Gating the more complex Archetypes (eg Modular, Divided) away from (presumably newer) players using the random method kind of makes sense, but the odds for anything beyond 12-ish are wonky as heck, and the order things are listed in don’t conform well to complexity. Form-Shaper is arguably a “hard” Archetype, but it’s only a 16 compared to Gadgeteer and Reality Shaper at 17 and 18 - both of which are a little odd (all those mods, or a raft of Yellow reactions) but far from complex.
And the other steps’ (Background, Power Source, Personality) randomization makes even less sense to me. Personality is especially baffling, since some of the more common ones are mechanically ruinous for all but specialized builds. Worse, I’ve had people get all the way to that point, roll personality options they just hate (easy to do with doubles) and balk at the whole process even after you tell them they can just rename it.
Like you said, weird choices involved in that part of the design. And I say that as a Villains & Vigilantes fan.
1 Like