The History of Venture Comics!

[FrivYeti]

@Chief_Lackey_Rich

The wording on that seems a little fuzzy. The intent is like this, right?

Yeah, your wording is the intent. I will reword the ability to reflect that.

And yep, it’s meant to be both chaotic and trouble for any allies who haven’t cleared the field by the time the Calamity really pops off. They don’t get their archetype name for nothing!

@Chief_Lackey_Rich

A tracker that goes G-Y-R-Y-Y-G-Y-R or something even more peculiar would be be one possibility, or a Major twist that moves the tracker back one step for next round and then forward two in the following round.

Neat, but complex; back one / forward two actually slows the tracker down, and a rapidly altering one might be a pain. I do like the idea of a Major Twist in Yellow that treats the Scene Tracker as Red, but then treats it as Green at the start of the next turn. Nothing’s actually advancing, but the threat level is bouncing all over.

[FrivYeti]

Dr. Strife

Real Name: Willis Bradford, First Appearance: Covert Tactics (Vol. 4) #1, Nov. 2022
Approach: Creator, Archetype: Warden
Upgrade: Hardier Minions, Mastery: Annihilation

Status Dice: Scene Tracker Green: d10, Scene Tracker Yellow: d8, Scene Tracker Red: d6. Health: 35+5H (Upgraded 40+5H)
Qualities: Technology d10, Close Combat d8, Alertness d8, Criminal Underworld d8, Unstable Genius d8
Powers: Telekinesis d10, Sonic d8, Inventions d8, Deduction d6

Abilities:

• Create Contraption (I): At the start of your turn, create a d8 minion. Choose the one basic action it can take. It acts at the start of the environment turn.
• Sonic Barrier [A]: Attack using Sonic. Hinder that target using your Max die. That Hinder is persistent and exclusive as long as you are active, but does not apply to actions taken against you.
• Unleash The Experiments [A]: Use Technology to create a number of d8 minions equal to the value of your Mid die or d6 minions equal to the value of your Max die.
• Unstable Elements [R]: When one of your minions is destroyed, roll its die and deal damage equal to that roll to another target.
• (U) The Good Stuff (I): When you enter the scene with minions, or deploy minions using your own abilities or the environment, increase them by one die size to a maximum of d12.
• (U) The Bad Stuff (I): If you can cause massive collateral damage without regard for casualties, automatically succeed at an Overcome where a show of overwhelming force can solve the problem.

Common Scene Elements:

• Robot Reclaimers. D8 lieutenants. As a reaction, a robot reclaimer may step up its die size once (to a maximum of D10) when a nearby robotic minion is defeated.
• Combat Synths. D8 minions. When combat synths roll the maximum result on a basic action, they may apply it to up to two nearby targets. When combat synths roll a 1 on an action, treat it as a 0 and step them down once.
• Prepared Dangers. A set of (H) simple challenges represented people and key locations or symbolic structures in danger that have to be saved before time runs out.

In late 2022, Earthwatch lost another member – but this time, it was with a celebration. The horror comic Stutter had just wrapped up with Issue #40, and with the new Twilight Carnival taking on more horror elements, established writer Kelly Yarrow was brought in to spin up a new volume of Covert Tactics. Three of the team members (Big Brain, Irogane, and Revenant) had made appearances in World of Wonders already with temporary members Matrixx and Kynetic, but with their allies re-retiring, they were ready for some new blood. Their choices were Stutter, who had stabilized her personal timeline and come to the attention of heroes who knew well what sort of a hero she could become, and Earthwatch’s own Jitterbug! Given a full pardon, Jitterbug had just graduated from Earthwatch parole, and Big Brain wanted her on the team.

Jitterbug’s father was both proud and concerned. While some members of Earthwatch were aware of her connections to him by now, the world at large didn’t know that she was Dr. Strife’s most successful android creation. But Bradford knew and respected Big Brain’s abilities. He would suss her out, and her superhero career would be over as soon as it began. He considered various possibilities, knowing that Trixie still loved him and was conflicted about their complicated relationship, and ultimately he knew there was only one option. In order to save his daughter, he was going to have to try to kill her.

In the first issue of Covert Tactics, Dr. Strife therefore arrived at the team’s base as everyone was meeting up armed with a small army of robots, loudly proclaiming that Trixie had betrayed him and he was going to destroy her. He unleashed his forces on the base, forcing Jitterbug to fight him for the first time in order to save her new team. In the process of the battle, Dr. Strife’s latest experimental gear overloaded, seemingly killing him once again. In the aftermath, Trixie came clean about her past, and spent some time yelling at her idiot father for the plan that she had already figured out, promising that when he came back (she and the rest of the team were sure that he wasn’t really dead) she was going to throw him in jail and then make him get therapy.

And to no one’s surprise, the team was right. Dr. Strife returned several issues later, but for the first time he wasn’t unscathed. His experimental sonic deconstructer had shattered the ionic bonds holding him together; only his innate telekinetic abilities had held him together. Now a being made of pure energy bound in a loose containment field, Dr. Strife went back to business as usual, focusing on new robot soldiers, sonic devices, and teleportation matrixes. He would flood a civilian space with robots and soldiers, then retreat before the battle was even over, leaving his devices to do their work as he returned to his lab to recuperate. The new Dr. Strife was just as genial as before, but he was much more dangerous – his memory was prone to gaps as parts of his mind failed to return, his devices were even more dangerous than ever, and he was more likely to simply fail to realize the potential collateral damage of his devices. Jitterbug found herself having to do everything in her power to stop his rampages, still loving him and knowing that he still loved her, but that he had to be stopped.

Behind the Scenes

So I’d been thinking for a while about how I wanted the Jitterbug-Dr. Strife situation to resolve. It definitely wasn’t a sustainable situation, and three years of comics seemed like the right amount for the first writer to set it up and a second writer to pull the trigger. It also seemed like a good time to set up a new Covert Tactics, using a few of the less age-prone members of the original team plus a couple new Diamond Age friends, and Dr. Strife was an old nemesis of Covert Tactics, so here we are!

The new Dr. Strife creates so many minions and punishes heroes for fighting them, while having minimal personal defenses and a status die that degrades over time. His presence is probably a race to punch him down before he creates enough minions to overwhelm the heroes.

Narratively, there’s a bit of a dementia thing going on with Dr. Strife, as his mind isn’t quite all there but he’s still out there doing his thing. This makes him even more dangerous, because the previous Strife was a relatively controlled mad scientist, but he’s still the friendly nemesis who congratulates superheroes on breaking his stuff and has a big corkboard full of cut-out newspaper articles about Jitterbug’s successes.

[fjur]

Love the hot pink moustache against his bright blue and green face, and the single monocle lens thingamajig.

And his story with Jitterbug continues to be amusing. Keep at it!

(P.S. Maybe take a second look at the formatting of Sonic Barrier.)

[FrivYeti]

@fjur

(P.S. Maybe take a second look at the formatting of Sonic Barrier.)

Fixed it! Lack of a space after the two stars, which wasn’t a problem when it was just bold. Perils of posting from one word processor to multiple websites.

[FrivYeti]

Cloudwalker

Real Name: Max Cullen, First Appearance: (as hero) Starshadow #1, March 2019

Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d10
Relation: Family Member, Approach: Physical

Traits:

• Airborn: As long as Cloudwalker is flying and has plenty of room to manoeuvre, he gets +1 to all basic actions.

While all of Starshadow’s family made appearances in her title, particular attention was paid to her complex but close relationship with her older brother Max. Max was, of course, well-known to the Venture Comics fanbase, having been a part of Skybreaker’s life for the past thirty-five years as a small child. Ten years older than Maeve, he had begun training as early as she could remember, and had become a full-fledged hero a few years before. He protected Grovedale as Cloudwalker, both on his own and alongside his father, and he had promised Maeve that if she ever needed or wanted help, he was only a phone call away.

Maeve idolized her brother, and also hated him just a little bit. Max was strong, he was smart, he never had trouble using his powers and he was an unfailingly heroic young man. Instead of controlling the winds, he was able to fly through the air, something that Maeve had desperately hoped she would be able to do when she was young. Cooper and Rhonda never compared Maeve to Max, but they didn’t have to. Thanks to her powers, she could instantly see all the ways that Max helped to make their lives easier, while Maeve made things more difficult. Max was in a very literal sense the son that Cooper had always wanted, and while her father went out of his way to try to understand Maeve and her own interests, she was much too aware of the effort that it took compared to the easy way that her brother fit in with his parents, his friends, and his heroic allies. It left Maeve in a complicated place, deliberately pulling away even when she knew that Max was reaching out to her, just to avoid being a burden.

For his part, Max knew that he had a rocky relationship with his sister. Their ages were just too far apart to have grown up together, and he didn’t get her fascination with the darkness. The truth that he would never admit was that the shadows scared him, and even though he loved Maeve and wanted to protect her, she scared him a little bit too. He did his best not to show it, hiding his complicated feelings from both his sister and his parents, but he had nightmares about her shadow-magic drawing her into the embrace of the Dark Sea. If that happened, he didn’t think he would be able to fight her, and that only made him feel worse.

The result of this was that Cloudwalker’s presence always led to drama. Since he didn’t live with his parents, the writers of Starshadow were able to bring in him when it would be interesting and leave him off doing his own things at other times; he showed up in Champions of Truth and World of Wonders from time to time, lending a hand to other heroes and serving as a valuable counterpoint to the ones who hadn’t grown up in the life.

Behind the Scenes:

Siblings!

I got about halfway through writing this as though Cloudwalker was 20, and then I did the math and realized that even though the Plutonium Age ended with him as a young child, he really should have been ten already. So the timeskip ages him up a bit more than you would expect and leaves him as a young adult, which makes the gaps between him and Starshadow a little more stark.

I really like the idea of these two having a serious problem getting along simply because of their natures, but they’re both good people and try to work through it. Maeve knows her resentment isn’t Max’s fault, Max knows that Maeve’s powers aren’t her fault, but the lines are still there and it keeps them in a very dramatic place that they can’t easily escape from.

[FrivYeti]

Fly Boy

Real Name: Tyrone Mack, First Appearance: (post-timeskip) Champions of Truth #609, March 2019

Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d10
Relation: Close Friend, Approach: Technological

Traits:

• Man in the Chair: When Fly Boy is in Champions Citadel providing long-range support, he gets +2 to Boost and Hinder.
• Suit Up: When Fly Boy is in the field in his power armor, he has +1 to damage saves and Attack rolls.

With so many new titles launching, the Venture editorial team wanted to make sure that the fans didn’t feel that the older generation of heroes that they loved was being abandoned. The new titles were legacies from the previous generation, but two of the line’s ten launch titles were reserved to continue to focus on longstanding fan favorites. One of these titles was Champions of Truth, which continued its numbering directly into the post-timeskip relaunch with Champions of Truth #577. The line picked up where the timeskip left off, with the team stable and established through years of relatively calm protection of the Earth. Ivan Hanna, who had led the final run on Spectacular Skybreaker, was chosen to pick up the adventures of the new team.

The post-timeskip Champions were mostly unaffected by the passing of fifteen years. Flatfoot and Wonderer were effectively immortal, and Greenheart, Skybreaker, Solace, Madame Liberty, Reverie, and Hyperstar all had enhanced lifespans from their powers or their magic and aged only slightly during the gap. The former Kid Liberty was renamed to Sergeant Liberty, a nod to his brief tenture as Corporal Liberty back in the 80s; now in his early forties, he was still a frontline member of the team.

Fly Boy was in a different position, and one that Hanna was interested in exploring. The hero now had thirty years of experience under his belt, and with 60 approaching he had chosen to mostly step back from active affairs, supporting the other Champions as the team’s engineer and remote tactician. His super-suit had been retooled over the years, losing much of its original junkyard feel as it was supplemented by technology from fellow heroes, and while he rarely suited up, he was still able to throw down in an emergency. Every time he did, he would joke that he was going to need a week in bed afterwards.

With so many heroes to focus on, Champions of Truth remained a series that shifted focus from story to story, but the first arc focused heavily on Fly Boy and Sergeant Liberty and their complicated relationship with the team’s other members. Both heroes were painfully aware that barring a disaster, their friends could conceivably carry on the fight against evil for another century, while Fly Boy likely only had a decade and Sergeant Liberty had two or three before they would be forced to step down once and for all. This sense of fleeting mortality created a connection between the two heroes that hadn’t existed before, allowing an occasional sense of melancholy to resonate with an aging readership that remembered growing up with these heroes.

Behind the Scenes:

There we go!

I touched on the new Fly Boy back when I wrote up Doctor Freak, and I’ll have to adjust Freak’s profile for length when I put him in the book, but I wanted him to get some focus. This is one of those things that Marvel and DC mostly only do in “what if” or AU stories, and it’s something that the timeskip is really good at. Fly Boy is getting old, and that actually means something.

For now, though, he’s a solid support lieutenant who can suit up in an emergency, and he’s going bald so he shaved his head and grew out his beard. He’s kept some of his “garage-built suit” looks, but the new suit is a lot sleeker.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

@FrivYeti

This sense of fleeting mortality created a connection between the two heroes that hadn’t existed before, allowing an occasional sense of melancholy to resonate with an aging readership that remembered growing up with these heroes.

I can certainly grok that as the worms of entropy gnaw at my aging flesh. You rarely see this sort of thing executed well in published comics because sooner or later some new writer or editor will decide a graceful retirement is boring (or unprofitable) and reboot an older character so they’re de-aged, rendered immortal or otherwise get to duck the weight of years. Usually turns out to be a Bad Idea that simultaneously disappoints older fans and fails to connect with younger readers, unfortunately.

About the best you can hope IRL for is for a good legacy version if a character to come along, and even then the older version may still come back eventually - sometimes even rising from the dead to do so, which just cheapens the whole mess by lowering teh stakes even further.

Thankfully, Venture Comics needn’t fall into that trap, since you can decide how your readers react to things. What IRL editor or marketing monkey wouldn’t give their soul for that power, eh?

[FrivYeti]

Agreed on all counts. I also do have the advantage that Venture is explicitly a smaller company, with more editorial control and fewer titles to juggle. Smaller series do go into new generations a bit more often, it’s just that in the real world there aren’t many smaller superhero companies out there because they’re up against the Big Two.

But if we need to talk about the feeling of that new ache in our muscles, we can always turn to…

Dr. Sunbeam

Real Name: Adeya Talibi, First Appearance: (as therapist) Earthwatch (Vol. 3) #2, April 2019

Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d8
Relation: Professional Contact, Approach: Social

Traits:

• Lend An Ear: All heroes near Dr. Sunbeam have a +1 bonus to Overcome rolls.
• Lend a Fist: When Dr. Sunbeam Attacks, she also Boosts an ally with her roll.

The first issue of Earthwatch introduced the team’s new heroes out on a mission, giving time to flesh them out and establish how they handled themselves in heroic situations. But the new Earthwatch was more than just a few heroes with a single leader. It had a full support staff, many of whom were key characters in their own right – the team’s mechanic, Cody Jenkins, would feud good-naturedly with the Cloud over his unauthorized upgrades, the team’s doctor Sylvia Wendell would be seen in the background studying her charges’ unusual biologies, and so on. Issue #2, which focused on a mission in which Catharsis lost control of her powers and nearly got Jitterbug killed, was told through the framework of after-action reports and through the heroes talking through the situation with their team therapist: Dr. Sunbeam.

Adeya had gone through a lot of trauma in her early years as a superhero, and one thing that her time with both the Champions of Tomorrow and the Starfarers had taught her was that she wasn’t alone. She believed that heroes could benefit from a therapist who understood the context of their unique troubles, and took the time to complete a medical degree and become a fully-licensed psychiatrist, offering services primarily to superhumans looking for help. Her work soon brought her into the field of former supervillains, and she was approached to become Earthwatch’s dedicated counselor – she wouldn’t have to give up her practice entirely, but it was understood that Earthwatch would be her top priority. The opportunity to help super-criminals break out of the cycles of violence that had defined them was one that Adeya couldn’t pass up, and soon she was working as the therapist for all of Earthwatch’s new heroes.

Dr. Sunbeam’s work kept her busy, but she still kept up with her training. Her powers weren’t quite as strong as they had been when she was younger; she theorized that the magic that had given them to her might be starting to fade. But she was still an effective flying brick, able to suit up in emergencies and support her charges in the field when necessary. She was an effective therapist (or at least as effective a therapist as a comic book written by an author with minimal background in the subject could be) and supported Earthwatch’s members – including Gale Force, who she demanded also take part both so that she could understand the process and because Adeya suspected the hero was carrying around plenty of emotional baggage herself. And she had plenty of obstacles. Whether it was the Cloud’s resistance to self-reflection, Jitterbug’s evasiveness, or Merlin’s total lack of interest in the whole deal, the only member of the team that actually gave it a full effort was Catharsis. Sunbeam wasn’t deterred, though. She knew the job was going to be hard when she took it, and she was dedicated to her charges’ success.

Behind the Scenes:

Sunbeam’s back!

I had Dr. Sunbeam as a plan before I retroactively decided to make her stick around in the Plutonium Age; my original idea was that after the Champions of Tomorrow, she took off her suit and went to school, becoming a full-time therapist and not a hero at all. But it seemed sad to not have her still be a cool superhero, so now she’s a therapist primarily and a superhero secondarily.

Power-wise, she’s pretty simple. Her presence helps minimize twists, and she’s good at taking out minor threats while buffing the heroes to deal with the main ones.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

@FrivYeti

She was an effective therapist (or at least as effective a therapist as a comic book written by an author with minimal background in the subject could be)…

Being a relatively effective comic-book therapist involves getting over a very low bar indeed. The first people I think of when the concept of superhero psych therapy comes up are Doc Samson, Hugo Strange, and the obscure comedy character Doctor Blink (“Superhero Shrink”). I’m not even sure which of those three would be worst at the job.

[FrivYeti]

I would argue that Hugo Strange is extremely effective, it’s just that rehabilitation is not his goal.

Dr. Sunbeam was in part inspired by another evil therapist, ironically: Marvel’s Meteorite / Moonstone. She was an evil psychologist who Baron Zemo hired to his Thunderbolts to do evil therapy on the team and make sure that they stayed supervillains and didn’t reform. He then ignored all of her warnings about how he was doing exactly the wrong things to keep them from reforming, and then half the team reformed and she wound up flip-flopping between reforming herself and turning back to evil for a while. Not sure where she’s at these days.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

@FrivYeti

I would argue that Hugo Strange is extremely effective, it’s just that rehabilitation is not his goal.

Yes, but that makes him a very bad therapist for his patients. Also probably not going to make the American Psychiatric Association happy with him at all.

Moonstone’s always been pretty talented at manipulating people psychologically - better than Doc Samson for sure. Getting Zemo to behave sensibly is beyond her, though. That guy’s a nut. He’s crazy in the coconut.

Now that I think about it, Marvel also has Doctor Faustus as yet another evil psychiatrist. If your therapist has a monocle with a built-in laser blaster that should really be a red flag.

[FrivYeti]

Kliz’Exth Reclaimer

First Appearance: Celestial Travels #962, April 2019

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

Traits:

• Forced Perspective: As long as there are villain minions present, Reclaimers and those minions get +1 to all actions, and any Reclaimer or minion may use each other’s non-persistent bonuses and penalties.

A new era for Celestial Travels meant that new enemies were needed. While the title’s writing team had plans for individual threats that Traveller Team One would face across the borders of the Grand Galactic Union, they also wanted to start building up a major ongoing storyline – an enemy that would help throw the galaxy into chaos, reflecting the dimensional volatility that was being designed for other comics and ensuring that galactic society would be too busy to heavily intrude on Earth-based affairs. They wanted something that would be an entertaining deep cut for old readers, but who wasn’t one of the continuity-laden empires that had been heavily active in the previous decade. The solution was to revive the ancient Kliz’Exth.

The Kliz’Exth had made a few minor appearances in the past as tiny handfuls of exiles. Eons ago, they had been one of the dominant species in the galaxy, using their psychic technology to colonize the stars. But when their robotic servants developed psychic fields of their own, they were able to override the controls forcing them into servitude and rise against their masters. The Kliz’Exth were all but eradicated, and the Kel’Thoth empire rose in its place.

But the nature of dimensional travel allows for many strange things. A single Kliz’Exth colony was able to shift its entire solar system one dimensional degree, folding themselves outside spacetime to avoid their former servants. They recovered, spreading through previously unknown dimensional layers, forgoing robotics in favour of biotechnology and swearing to return for their revenge. And one day, the slowly shifting patterns of dimensional fabric brought the Kliz’Exth back into the radius of the galaxy, ready to demonstrate their psychic mastery over the universe and bring it to heel.

The Kliz’Exth began their invasion with Reclaimers – skilled psychics who would travel to isolated outposts, small colonies, and frontier space stations. Their abilities allowed them to link their minds up with other beings, showing them the Kliz’Exth view of the perfect order of the universe. Locked into a perspective that was not their own, victims of the Kliz’Exth would obediently begin to work towards a new galactic order, one made up of a perfect alignment in which no one had individual opinions or desires. However, the Reclaimers had to move slowly. They didn’t have the power to challenge the Union directly, and they didn’t want to be destroyed again. In their first appearance, the Travellers defeated a pair of Reclaimers and freed a Kel’Thoth space station, but they knew that the enemy would return, slowly working to expand their influence and overthrow the galaxy.

Behind the Scenes:

I got Otherworldly and Conquest and then I decided I wanted a big bug.

The Kliz’Exth build on the Kel’Thoth storylines I’ve been dropping bits and pieces of over the course of writing up my lieutenants; it’s a classic comics move to resurrect a dead species, and it’s honestly a surprise that it took this long for them to make it big. Psychic forced hive minds is a fun variation on the usual mind control gimmick, and it lets the Kliz’Exth become a really major threat just by infiltrating places and manipulating them. Individual Reclaimers aren’t that dangerous, but let them stick around near people they can share thoughts with and things get out of control in a hurry.

On the flip side, there probably aren’t any real Kilz’Exth villains, because they don’t have much individuality. They all have exactly the same opinions and beliefs, which makes them fairly predictable if you know what you’re getting into. It makes them good foils for other villains - what happens when some known foe becomes partially absorbed into the hive-mind?

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

@FrivYeti

Forced Perspective: As long as there are villain minions present, Reclaimers and those minions get +1 to all actions, and any Reclaimer or minion may use each other’s non-persistent bonuses and penalties.

That’s interesting wording. The “may” part means you could opt to use all the non-P penalties found on other folks in the mind link up on a single minion’s action or even saving roll, dooming it to failure but effectively purging the penalties from all its non-Villain allies. Pretty efficient sacrifice play, but you’re not forced to do it if you don’t want to, so (for ex) a Reclaimer would only have to deal with its own personal penalties for its own action/save, and could also steal bonuses from allies at the same time.

Going to play merry hell with the PC’s penalty game until you break up the link by swatting all the villain minions or Reclaimers, if nothing else.

Also, I’m once again impressed by the model builds you can get out of Hero Builder these days. To borrow a catchphrase from Virginia Slims, you’ve come a long way, baby.

[FrivYeti]

Yep, the ability to choose makes it pretty powerful as long as you have minions to sacrifice - of course, the usual rules of “gotta make narrative sense” apply, you probably can’t take a penalty from being put in a headlock and give it to someone on the other side of the room to magic your way out.

And yeah, the models are looking nice! Part of it is just that HeroForge has been slowly but steadily adding options over the past two years, but I’m also getting more of a feel for which pieces interact well and how to mess with them.

[Sea-Envy]

@FrivYeti

On the flip side, there probably aren’t any real Kilz’Exth villains, because they don’t have much individuality. They all have exactly the same opinions and beliefs, which makes them fairly predictable

until we get the “broke away from the hive-mind” villain.
probably fights its’/their own people with more passion than the heroes

What if it/they are feminine gendered and have the same body model with a princes/queen dress diadem and scepter?

also, I like the mini since I use the same communicator for my Star Wars character, and the same orb to represent the armillary sphere used in his arcane Force tradition. - Hero Forge does not have enough ancient/steam punk navigation tools in the gear section.

[FrivYeti]

Now, that is a possibility! I’ll make a note of it for later.

Lunar Shroud

Real Name: Frieda Khan, First Appearance: Vanguard Academy #3, May 2019

Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d8
Motive: Obedience, Approach: Raw Power

Traits:

• Lunar Barrier: As an action, Lunar Shroud may Overcome with a +2 bonus to create a two-box “Lunar Barrier” challenge. As long as the challenge is in play, no one may enter or exit her location.

After an initial setup issue introducing Captain Bolt and the eight students that would be the leads of the first year of Vanguard Academy, Martin and Kilmer spent four issues focusing in on two students at a time, setting up their relations to each other and their guiding ethos. Each of these issues unveiled a new villain who was set up to be a deliberate foil to the two heroes on display, and for Jackie Frost and Critter’s focus issue in Vanguard Academy #3, Martin and Kilmer decided to introduce a problem from within the student body. Captain Bolt intended to teach a new generation of heroes how to stand firm in their convictions, but there were students present at the school who were either too self-interested or too nationalistic to see the message that he was trying to convey. Of the latter, the duo’s most persistent threat was from Lunar Shroud.

Frieda Khan’s mother was a senator in the American government, a proud and slightly paranoid woman who was suspicious of superhumans and far from pleased when her teenage daughter suddenly developed the power to shape ‘lunar light’ into weapons, tools, and barriers. Senator Khan had lobbied against Captain Bolt, wanting Vanguard Academy to be under the control of a federal department that would train potential dangers into American assets for civilian or military life; despite that, she sent Frieda to the academy both to learn to properly control her ‘inhuman abilities’ and to serve as her mother’s eyes and ears in the building.

This left Lunar Shroud in an awkward position. She had been raised to follow the rules and respected Captain Bolt, but she was also specifically present to serve as one part threat and one part spy against her own headmaster. Caught between familial loyalty and her desire to be more than a soldier, she used the rules as a shield against her own emotions. In her early appearances, she was mostly a pain, using her lunar barriers to try to keep students safe by preventing them from escaping to where the action was, and clashing fiercely with Jackie Frost (who she saw as a spoiler, arrogant rich bitch who was here for all the wrong reasons.) As a result, she became the focus of a tiny counter-culture movement in the academy who believed that Captain Bolt was steering it wrong, with little support from the rest of the students but significant support from conservative politicians and the military.

Frieda and Critter had a particularly complicated relationship; they each respected the others’ beliefs, even though they were on opposite sides of the argument over Vanguard Academy’s future. Both of them tried to recruit each other more than once, and their quiet, secret friendship was a backdrop to the comic’s second year.

Behind the Scenes:

I didn’t want all the Vanguard Academy stuff to be “main characters versus external villains”, so here we are. I almost developed a political attache to be the problem-causer, but I really like the idea of a slightly self-hating fellow student who’s stuck being the bad guy, and the ability to create fairly powerful barriers to seal a location off make her a huge pain during an action scene when she locks half the heroes in a room with herself and refuses to let them go out to fight.

[FrivYeti]

Holographic Projection

Real Name: Varies, First Appearance: Venture into the Unknown (Vol. 2) #4, June 2019

Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d8
Relation: Mentor, Approach: Mental

Traits:

• Avatar: At the start of the projection’s turn, remove one penalty on it.
• Science Team: The projection gets +1 to Boost or Overcome using scientific principles.

In his first few issues, Venturer had limited contact with Earth. Protean had been able to contact Ken’s family and let them know that he was, if not safe, at least located, but while she was working feverishly to figure out how to bring him home, the audio receiver she had hooked up depended on dimensional eddies and rarely managed to connect to the lost young man.

Early in Ken’s time in the third world he found himself in (the Twilight Lands, where humanity had long ago died out and only the monsters of the Venture Comics world still roamed) Wendy finally managed to crack the unstable dimensional eddies that surrounded him long enough to open a second dimensional portal. To her frustration, it was nowhere near large enough for Ken to return home safely, but it was just large enough for her to send her homemade dimensional beacon through to him. This beacon took the form of a wristband for Ken to wear, and had three features. First, it allowed Protean and her team to track Ken, mapping out the realms he was being dragged to. Second, it let her scan his powers and the dimensional capabilities that he was copying, building a database that she hoped would help her teach Venturer to use his powers more deliberately and learn the nature of their enemy. And finally, the wristband’s built-in holographic projector allowed anyone in Protean’s lab to manifest at Ken’s side, seeing what was happening around him and carrying on conversations.

The result of this was that Venture into the Unknown had a supporting cast made up of Ken’s family and of Wendy’s employees. Wendy herself logged in when she was able, giving Venturer scientific advice and support, and the comic spent some time touching on her loving but complex relationship with Carlie, her newfound status as a multi-millionaire inventor (despite which she still lived in an old apartment and drove a beat-up ten-year-old car), and her careful balancing act between her duties as CEO and as a superhero. Ken was also able to spend time with his mother and father, showing them the amazing things he was experiencing and reassuring them that he was still okay, and he started to get to know some of the team’s lab techs, especially the night crew – Sasha, Libby, and Carl, three college interns not that much older than Ken, who built up a friendship with him and helped keep him from despair. The system was still not always able to connect, but it was much more reliable than the previous audio files and had the advantage of being able to interact with the people Venturer met on his travels.

The projections were also easily disrupted, unfortunately, and in high-danger situations it wasn’t uncommon for the forces that Venturer was fighting against to short them out. But the lifeline back home helped to ground the story and let Ken focus a bit more on the strange worlds he was exploring without worrying about whether his family knew he was safe.

Behind the Scenes:

Expanded information about Venturer’s holographic projection means a little bit of information about post-timeskip Wendy and more information about how Venture into the Unkonwn works! I’ve downgraded the aide from a d10 to a d8, because I want it to be a little more fragile of a link, and added a few extra people so that it’s not just holo-Protean.

[Chief_Lackey_Rich]

Nifty concept. Despite (or maybe because of) years of painting minis I always did like monochrome figures where the subtle shading does all the work.

[Sea-Envy]

is the default projection figure Carl or Venturer’s father?

[FrivYeti]

Deliberately vague, but in my mind it’s Libby.

Interesting fact: the projection was actually built using the “default human female” body with a bit of extra weight added; the bagginess of the shirt and the colour tone made the projection more androgynous, which I stuck with to keep it vague.