“failed math teacher” XD indeed!
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And now, our final Diamond Age lieutenant…
The Absolved
Real Name: August van Horne, First Appearance: World of Wonders (Vol. 2) #43, Dec 2022
Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d12
Relation: Family Member, Approach: Otherworldly
Traits:
- Kindle the Flame: When the Absolved Boosts a hero, they also Recover health equal to the bonus received.
- Guttering Flame: After the Absolved takes an action, step down his status die; if he is at a d4, remove him from play.
Late 2022 saw a comics reunion in the pages of World of Wonders. Original Hell’s Belles writer Christina Avalon returned in August for a three-part story reuniting the heroines fifteen years later, as they delved into the shadows of the Sovereign’s realm. Penitent had received a mystical message asking for help, and with the help of Heretic and Solace (and a reluctant Merlin, who refused to actually go with them) she devised a way to slip through the seal without breaching it, giving the heroes a chance to save some of the Sovereign’s victims. Over the course of the three issues, they confronted their own regrets and fears over their lives and the challenges they had faced, met with other ghosts that had been ensnared by the Sovereign, and faced off against dreams and nightmares as they plunged into his realm.
While most of the souls in the Sovereign’s sealed realm were long since dissolved, nothing left of them but faded dreams, the heroes were able to find their way to a collection of souls that had resisted the Sovereign’s power – souls led by the Penitent’s father, the original Penitent. Because the Sovereign devoured souls still-living, these people had been locked in a dreamlike state for years, decades, or even (in a few cases) centuries, protected by the timeless nature of the realm and August’s slowly fading mystical powers.
With the help of their friends, the two Penitents were able to reconnect the gateway that they had used and retreat, pursued by the shattered fragments of the Scion. In the final issue, Merlin was tempted with the role of the new Scion of Silence if he would stop them… and for possibly the first time in his life, he chose not to fall for the obvious trap and saved the heroes instead, holding the gate open for them and their charges to escape.
Released back into the world decades after he’d left it, August van Horne found himself at loose ends. He still had his mystical knowledge, but with his connection to the Sovereign cut away and his age catching up with him, he couldn’t keep up with the younger heroes of today. Instead, he settled into a supporting role, offering advice to his daughter and finally choosing to live some of the life that he’d put aside to try and make up for his past. Susannah was finally able to start to build a relationship with the father she had lost so long ago, and several dozen people were saved and ready to learn more about society, with Heretic pledging to keep an eye on them and teach them about the modern world. And despite being almost a century old, August still had a few friends in this new world. Many of his old magical allies were still alive, and he was happy to spend time playing poker with Wonderer, getting gardening advice from Greenheart, or visiting Lostwood and catching up with old monstrous friends.
Behind the Scenes:
Return of a classic!
I like the idea of closing out the Diamond Age book with a few callbacks to the Golden Age, and what better callback than the very first hero I created! The Penitent is penitent no longer; it’s his daughter’s world now. It’s also a chance to show that maybe Merlin has changed a little, and to potentially set up some stories for the future.
And we’re done! On Monday, I’ll be putting up the PDF of “Venture Comics: The Digital Revolution”, and on Friday next week I’ll do a quick retrospective and then discuss what’s up next (I mean, it’s D-Listers and bad variants, I’ve already said that, but I’ll be discussing schedule and follow-ups and the like.)
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A pity heroes lack the kind of abilities to repair dice degradation on allies that a few villains have. OTOH, with reasonable narrative justification an Overcome could help August last a bit longer, so I suppose they don’t need them.
For those who don’t remember him, the OG Penitent is way up on post #3 of this thread, which went up on November 2023. He’s actually about a month older than that, having first appeared in post #40 of the thread on RPG.net that this one mirrors, but the writeup is identical.
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Wow, a project almost two full years in the making, finally complete!
It’s not done. This was just the end of another stage in the ongoing process.
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I see. I thought he said before that the Diamond Age was the end.
Yeah, this is a big milestone, since it fills in the timeline, but I’ve still got a few stages left. Possibly a few years worth…
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And now, after two years of development, here it is!
Venture Comics: The Digital Revolution
Today is the second anniversary of this increasingly wild project. Ninety heroes, one hundred and five villains, and seventy-five lieutenants complete and published, and more on the way! Tune in Friday for a retrospective of the first three phases of the project, a bit of what I might have done differently with the benefit of hindsight, and what new Venture projects are in the pipeline. And thank you all for being a part of this journey with me.
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Congrats. Remarkable amount of output in such a short time and much better about maintaining a steady schedule than I’ve been.
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Nifty nifty nifty! You’re an inspiration, Friv.
And, you know, come to think of it, one could use that Motive table (and maybe the Approach one?) in the Making Lieutenants section for full Villains too.
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Sure could. I usually use a photocopy of some ancient gaming magazine article that does both heroic and villainous motivations using a basic 52-card deck, but that’s not exactly a handy resource for most folks. Not even sure what mag it was actually from any more…
The jokers meant you were actually a hero pretending to be a villain or vice-versa, so you’d draw another card for the appropriate “cover” motivation. If you got the other joker you were a double agent and drew twice more to determine what you were telling each side.
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Yeah, actually, the Motive table could definitely be used alongside the rest of the villain creation process.
Approach could also be a reasonable side thing; I had a “by category” rule for setting two Qualities and two Powers for villains, but it doesn’t actually overlap with the Approach angles too much!
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A Retrospective Essay
Whew!
Two years of work, over two hundred characters and two hundred and seventy entries, and 228,000 words later, Venture Comics is still going strong! When I started this little project, I was just goofing around, really. I had some free time and a lot of stress, and building a little project (well, even at the start it was going to be a hundred and fifty entries deep, but it spiraled.)
And here we are! Not anywhere close to finished, if I’m being honest. But looking back: what went right, and what went wrong?
Well, first off, knowing what I know now I would have scratched off the rules about duplicating combinations. As it turns out, when I want to reboot a character, I don’t want them to have mostly the same Background, Power Source, and Archetype. I want them to be pretty different. That ended up being a weird restriction that really hamstrung me in a few places. I think I would rather have said “no combination of two of those things within a given age”.
I also really should have held more strongly to my original plan to have more reboots. My original goal was that from the Bronze Age on, half of the heroes I created would be rebooted or legacy characters, and even with the changes I made to Half-Life, Aquila, Reckoner, and Zeitgeist I didn’t come close. I probably would have replaced Winter Wolf with a Bronze Age update to one of the Vanguards, folded Matrixx and Kynetic into the Remnants to have only one Extreme Team, and trimmed in a few extra places.
The second thing is that in trying to avoid the Sentinel Comics situation of static, unchanging teams for decades on end, I kind of went too far in the other direction. None of the teams in Venture Comics are particularly stable. Most of them have core members who never leave, but Venture has a lot of major teams for a company of its size, and all of them change lineups constantly. If I were going back in time, I’d have folded a few of those teams into each other, trimmed down membership changes in a couple places. Probably the Vanguards would have stayed consistent all the way through, with Covert Tactics getting a bit less shaken up in the Iron Age and as mentioned above, no Rogue Agents. But that’s way too much rewriting, so we get the chaos!
And finally: if I’d known I was advancing the Diamond Age past 2019, boy would I have done it differently. I would have had fewer new heroes in the launch period, so that I could introduce more new folks in 2020 and 2021. I’ve shifted some things to make room for a possible D-Lister in 2019 who can be brushed aside to make room for Your Comic, but I would probably also have adjusted stuff so that Venturer wasn’t leaning on Protean and her storyline (there are no actual new heroes in the new lineup as it stands, only generational ones), removed the Veilwalkers to start with and kept Twilight Carnival around, with Eli as a support and Harbinger as a solo hero launching later who isn’t connected to other teams, and pushed Stutter back to a 2021 launch. But that level of revision was also much too much paperwork, so I’m staying with the original launch.
On the other hand: there’s a lot that I liked! I love how starting in the Golden Age led to a lot of heroic developments I wouldn’t have lined up if I had started with a modern setting. Things like the Penitent, the Golden Retriever, or even Heretic wouldn’t have occurred to me. Celestial Travels grew out of my growing desire to have one comic just never, ever end for the whole run of Venture Comics. Wonderer wasn’t originally going to be a big deal, and then he became the anchor of the team for ages.
What’s Next
I’ve had a lot of fun with this, and like I said, I’m not planning on stopping any time soon. So I’m going to pull back the curtain on my absolutely batshit insane plans for Phase II of the Venture Comics project, which should last for about the next three years.
Yeah, you read that right.
First up is going to be the development of Venture Comics: Deep Cuts. I’ve already written up a lot of D-List characters, but between the slight growth in the size of individual volumes, the addition of lieutenants to the mix, and the removal of a bunch of D-List villains when I decided I liked them too much, there are another forty-nine characters to create. Over half the book, really. I’m taking next week off to enjoy Halloween and not think about updates, but November 3rd will see the start of two updates a week again, with lieutenants, heroes, and villains dropping chronologically. Most of the Deep Cut heroes and villains you’ll see won’t be new D-Listers: instead they’re going to be disastrous variants, storylines that failed or new directions that got quickly reversed. Most of the lieutenants will be new, but there’ll be a couple failed approaches in there, too.
With a couple of vacations in there, Deep Cuts should be running until mid-May 2026, at which point the collection will be released as a PDF. I’m not sure what, if anything, will be in the appendix for that one.
The end of May will see the beginning of what I’m tentatively calling Venture Comics: On Location. This is going to be a smaller collection of forty-eight Environments, each one depicting a major location or event that takes place over the history of Venture Comics, running from the Golden Age all the way to new information about the Diamond Age in 2023 and 2024. It will be using a touched-up version of my environment randomizer, which will also be present in the appendix. I’m aiming for On Location to be finished around November 2026.
On Location will be followed by another shorter forty-eight entry title: Venture Comics: Enemy Action. (Again, working title.) This supplement is going to give more detail into eight of the major organizations or supervillain teams of Venture Comics. I think all of these groups have already been mentioned, but I might change my mind and include an entirely new one. We’ll see, I’ve got a whole year to think about it! Either way, Enemy Action will be running until June 2027.
After that, I’m working out the framework for a thirty-entry mini-supplement that entirely takes place in the Diamond Age, beefing up the details and advancing the timeline to 2027. Mostly it’ll be entries in the 2022-2027 period, but when it’s done we’ll have a more in-depth present day to play in. Of course, that won’t be done until October 2027, so some time to wait.
And finally, starting in November 2027 and running all the way to the project’s fifth anniversary on October 20, 2028, I will be filling in leftover timeline gaps with 90 Years of Venture Comics, introducing one character or environment for each year that the publishing company has existed.
So stay tuned! There is so much more in store. This thread is going to need a second iteration.
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At the risk of sounding like Charlie Brown, good grief! That is one heck of a projected project there. What did I say when you started this on the mirror thread at RPG.net a few years back?
This can only lead to whiteboards and walls of crazy. I heartily approve.
Yeah, that still stands.
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Oh yeah, you called it.
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Incredible! 
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Nice. I’m looking forward to seeing what Deep Cuts, On Location, and Enemy Action have in store.
I’ve been thinking for a while that Venture Comics’ lack of environments was a bit odd, given the emphasis that the Sentinel Comics RPG puts on them, though it makes some amount of sense given that most comic universes don’t put as much emphasis on them.
And for Enemy Action, will that have any, like, mechanical bits? I.e. will it introduce new villains (or lieutenants or environments or anything)? Or will it just be lore writeups on teams of existing villains?
This is you Friv:
Mhm. One might say marvellous.
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a book about Enemies… Classic.
[Classic Enemies was a popular book for Champions 4E]
(You know it was a good book because the cover art had Seeker getting destroyed)
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do you think you could scan the playing card motivations chart and post it to your blog?
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I’ll see about digging it out for you, it’s been so long since I ran Sentinels all that stuff’s been stowed and I’m not 100% sure where I put it all. Probably easier to transcribe it, it’s a very old copy of a copy and the last time I tried scanning or photographing it the image was pretty illegible.
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