Since when does Lois smoke? No one carries lighters for an emergency light source any more, that’s what phones are for. The other reason would be to enable a bit of impromptu arson. Disturbing.
Given the DC universe, I suppose it might be handy for detecting Martians or something. 
I think it’s largely due to the format to date. He’s been focused on characters and their stories. I can tell you from experience adding an environment to a villain writeup makes for a much, much longer post. Coming up with the things can be time-consuming too, more than doubling what a single villain with a few signature minions required in my case.
Probably says something that my entire blog (which is on par with this thread for content posts) only has 20 of them. It’s by far my shortest index, the next smallest having almost twice as many entries.
Yeah, that is a bit odd, admittedly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her depicted smoking either, excpet for the one story that that panel comes from, the 2019 Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.
Yeah, that makes sense. The project has focused primarily on characters, which environments of course aren’t.
Evil duplicate, maybe?
I guess hypothetically they could be, sort of. The book does talk about using environment twist rules for “powerful entities” beyond the scope of even Titan villains. I experimented with that a couple of times with mixed success. Wonder if I’ve still got any of my notes from those sessions?
Nope, lots of new stuff. Each organization will come with a summary writeup, and then some combination of villains, lieutenants, minions, and environments. Not sure the exact lineup yet - leaning two villains, two lieutenants/minions, and two environments, but there may be switch-ups.
As far as the environment discussion goes: Yeah, you guys nailed it. Initially, this was a character creation challenge. As it grew and got more expansive I started thinking about environments, and there’s probably a universe where I thought about it early enough to have ten in each book and bring the number of entries up to a round 100, but I narrowly missed the boat. So a full-environments supplement happens instead, and then the supplements afterwards will include some environments.
And now we’re back! It’s time for… deep cuts! Kicking off with the Golden Age, which only has three new characters to add to the book, we start off with:
Simon the Schnook
Real Name: Simon Ridgemont III, First Appearance: Cryptic Trails #71, February 1945
Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d10
Relation: Fan, Approach: Physical
Traits:
By 1945, Skybreaker and Cormorant were the sole main characters in Cryptic Trails; while some of the comic’s secondary stories still featured the strange realms, unusual magics, or even appearances by other superheroes that the title had initially been known for, the duo’s war against the Fomorians (and against any humans foolish enough to seek Fomorian power) was the focus of the title. Vincent Chambers, Venture’s EIC, was concerned that the focus might lead the comic to get too dark, outpacing even Campfire Terrors as it focused on the hate-filled forces that Skybreaker opposed. He asked the title’s lead editor, Glenn Cochrane, to add a little something to lighten things up.
Cochrane wasn’t a particular fan of broad comedy, but he was game to try anything. Overnight, he developed an old college chum of Wayne Alton, a fellow recent graduate making his way into the world, well-meaning but completely out of his depth. Simon Ridgemont III had attempted to sign up for the war, but his father had pulled strings to have him placed far from the front lines in an administrative position. Frustrated, the young heir happened to learn that his friend Wayne had found a more direct avenue to fighting the forces of evil, and used his leave to show up as Skybreaker and Cormorant fought against Fomorian forces at the Isle of Wight!
Simon almost immediately screwed everything up. Eager to prove himself, he charged into the middle of a cult ritual, accidentally knocking over a brazier and setting the cult leader on fire, and then nearly got himself stabbed to death by the cultists. When Cormorant raced in to save his friend, Simon stumbled backwards into him and sent the duo falling over the side of a cliff, with Wayne barely managing to call his wings in time to save them from a watery death. Afterwards, Skybreaker lectured the young man on knowing his limits, telling him that he wasn’t ready for the kind of fight that the pair were undertaking.
Simon took that as a challenge. Over the next two years, he would appear in seven issues of Cryptic Trails, including two solo appearances in backup stories. Each time, Simon the Schnook would hear about some dangerous situation and rush in to help, but be completely outmatched. He would lend a hand, usually by accident, and barely avoid getting himself killed, and then stroll off having learned nothing and confident that ‘he’d get it next time.’
In the end, Simon was not popular, and Cochrane retired him late in 1947 to focus more on the high-paced action that his readers loved. But his existence wasn’t a complete lost cause; he gave Cochrane the experience writing broad comedy that he took to Flatfoot Adventures in 1953, which helped keep that hero afloat during the difficult years at the end of the Golden Age.
Behind the Scenes:
And we’re off!
A broad clown archetype isn’t really what people come to their action-adventure pulp-adjacent superhero comics for, so Simon never really makes a splash. If the 60s Skybreaker had been Lewis Lamont, he probably could have been revived, but there are other people to take up the idea so he never really comes back after the forties.
Mechanically, he’s not good, but he is funny! He has to Hinder with every action, so if he can get stuck in he’s pretty powerful but if he’s near the heroes he’s a huge liability. And of course, he is truly, ridiculously fragile, but when he goes down he gets an extra round worth of actions in.
Off brand Setback without the big upside, I love it. Plus Simon the Schnook is just a perfect name. I just wish he had a buddy named Schuster the Schlemiel
this is such a great idea XD
Hey, I was wondering if you were still around!
Warhead
Real Name: Warren Flint, First Appearance: Flatfoot Adventures #62, August 1947
Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d10
Motive: Wealth, Approach: Technological
Traits:
Throughout the late 1940s, Flatfoot would do battle with dozens of increasingly gimmicky costumed foes, most of them targeted at the young teen readers that Flatfoot Adventures was increasingly trying to capture as the market for superheroes slowly dwindled. Many of these characters would prove entirely uninteresting, spectacularly silly, or otherwise not fit for purpose; one of the most telling examples was Warhead.
Warren Flint had been a war profiteer, stealing weapons from American armories and selling them on the black market. When the war ended and the money dried up, he decided that it was time to go into business for himself. Gathering the last of his advanced weapons, he formed a gang of street thugs and started robbing banks, using his incredibly powerful cannon helmet to blast open vaults and take everything that was inside.
Ferristown was one of Warhead’s early targets, and when he went face to face with Flatfoot he demonstrated the power of his cannon, knocking the robot detective through a wall and making off with the money while Flatfoot was still freeing himself. He and his gang declared that they owned this city now, attacking a string of banks in rapid succession. At the end of the issue, however, Flatfoot tricked Warhead into blasting through several pillars in his latest bank heist, bringing the vault crashing down on himself and allowing Flatfoot to disarm him and hand him over to the police.
Warhead would make a second appearance a year later, when Mr. Ferris broke him out of jail and equipped him with a new head cannon with which to DESTROY FLATFOOT ONCE AND FOR ALL. This went about as well as his first appearance, and pretty soon he was back in the clink. He would pop up a few more times over the next decade, always as a minor bodyguard to a criminal villain, his earlier dreams of control seemingly abandoned in favour of a steady paycheck from a new criminal mastermind. He faded out of popularity over the course of the 1960s, and by the 1970s was gone.
There was a certain ironic charm in the villain, however, and starting in the late 1990s a generation of writers who vaguely remembered the weird yelling guy with a gun on his head pulled Warhead back for random jokes, single pages, and deep cut references. He never received another starring role, but dedicated Venture readers would always get a laugh out of seeing his ridiculous cannon-helmet pop into frame.
Behind the Scenes:
This is so stupid and I refuse to apologize.
Warhead marks a new milestone in my use of Hero Forge. I really, really, really wanted him to have a cannon helmet. I absolutely could not make a cannon helmet happen. But I’ve also been using Hero Forge for a while now, so I sucked it up and bought a three-month membership. This membership allows for kitbashing, which meant that I could just drag a cannon into the air and shove it through his helmet and deliver this brilliantly stupid model.
Expect to see more brilliantly stupid models as we move through the next few months; in January I’ll decide whether it’s worth the money to keep the subscription going, but for now it seemed like a worthwhile investment.
That is indeed a brilliantly stupid concept. I’m slightly reminded of an obscure Iron Man villain named the Unicorn, who had a zap-gun thing as his helmet-horn. Also the Doom Patrol villain the Codpiece, who also hung his weaponry from part of his body I would not want to hang a weapon from.
One of my old V&V characters was Battleman, who got re-created in Champions 1st edition as well. Even did a (physical) miniature kitbash for the guy using some armored fighter figure as the base. His helmet and both of his big chunky shoulder pads (built up with putty) sported triple-barreled turrets that I cribbed from an IJN Yamato model kit. One of my first multi-media conversions, and probably one of the first dozen or so on a partially-metal fig, so it stands out in my long history of customizing models and minis.
Battleman’s catchphrase was “Face my nine barrels of justice, evil-doer!”
Hey, it was cool when I was 13 years old. Sort of.
Was it an intentional choice to give WarHead the steel moobs? Did you think he was somehow not ridiculous enough yet? Or is this just like the base model for any male character of middle age with a non-heroic physique? I haven’t really been looking at your minis, they’re not my thing, because I don’t really think they look good, but in this case that’s kinda the point, so it’s fitting this would be the one to catch my eye.
And going back to Simon:
So I know very little about this system, but just from following the SCRPG Live Season 1 sessions, I know that minions tend to be D6 or D8; Simon is a Lieutenant, and I don’t know how exactly those work, but with die sizes in general only going up to D12, I don’t know how a D10 Lieutenant is “fragile”, when you didn’t post any Health or other stats that would make me think that he works differently from a Minion.
Warhead is wonderfully silly. I love it.
By sheer coincidence, I also came up with a pretty similar villain concept some time ago. An inventor ridiculed for his extremely unorthodox interpretations of physical principles who gets back at everyone who laughed at him by building a helmet-mounted cannon. He calls himself Headcannon. Blatantly inspired by this xkcd strip.
I know that comics, especially Silver Age ones, have folks not die when they should, but a normal dude surviving being crushed by a bank vault seems a bit of a stretch. Does Warhead have some secret Atlantean super-toughness genes?
Well then I guess I have the tastes of a 13-year old. : )
When a minion is Attacked, it rolls its die as a damage save. If it rolls above the Attack roll, its die size is reduced by one (e.g. from d8 to d6). If it rolls below, it’s instantly defeated and removed from play. The only difference between minions and lieutenants is that when a lieutenant succeeds on a damage save, it’s not reduced at all, and when it fails, its size is only reduced one step rather than being defeated entirely.
So the thing that makes Simon particularly fragile is his Aw Geez ability. A normal lieutenant without that ability would only reduce its die size by one step on a failed damage save, but remain in play. But as soon as Simon fails one, he’s immediately defeated. So, in most cases, a typical lieutenant can survive several attacks; meanwhile there’s a good chance that Simon will be KOed in one hit.
sir XD the audacity
You get the heart both for answering my question and for HeadCannon. Sorry, WarHead, your reign as my favorite character with a cannon helmet was short lived, but memorable.
Question has already been covered, but a bit of HeroForge under-the-hood: I used the “wetsuit” piece for Warhead’s chest, and it always ends up looking a bit boob-ish. I decided it worked well enough for the character.
He’s got reinforced armour to withstand the blast of a cannon going off on his forehead. In the comic, the whole vault didn’t come down on him, just enough of it to pin him to the ground. His armour was assumed to be able to handle the weight.
This is highly unlikely, and if he were important enough for people to care about there would probably be some retro-justification about a whole exoskeleton power suit getup making the head-gun function, but he’s a D-Lister so it never comes up.
Yippee!
Mm, yeah, I hadn’t thought of the need to account for recoil, given that comics often ignore Newton’s Third Law, but that explanation makes sense. And “just getting pinned by part of a vault” does sound more survivable than “crushed by a vault.”
Wickmen
First Appearance: Twilight Carnival #102, October 1953
Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d8
Motive: Obedience, Approach: Otherworldly
Traits:
By the early 1950s, Venture’s superhero comics were well and truly in a slump. Of the eight remaining comics in the line, three had abandoned superheroes altogether, and three more were increasingly pulling back and shifting back towards a more pulp-focused approach in order to keep the lights on. One of those three was Twilight Carnival. Despite still technically being a superhero, the Midnight Rider’s antics were much more squarely in the vein of horror comics than in the more traditional superhero fare that she had started with, and her enemies were shifting to match. To that end, the writers of the comic introduced a new foe in late 1953, a sort of shambling creature that would pose a terrible threat to the Midnight Rider and her carnival. The Wickmen would prove to be a terrifying and very short-lived enemy in her repertoire.
The story began in a small town in rural Montana, where the Twilight Carnival arrived to discover another circus already in town. This circus, the House of Illumination, featured a travelling wax museum as part of its displays. However, when townsfolk went missing and the Twilight Carnival was blamed, the Midnight Rider immediately investigated. She discovered that the House of Illumination’s mesmerist, Xanthus the Brilliant, was a real magician who had made use of an ancient alchemical formula, creating living wax that coated its victims and turned them into obedient zombies. His house of wax was actually an arsenal, which he used to control the House of Illumination and force them to do his bidding.
As the Wickmen came to life and began to terrorize the town, the Midnight Rider fought against Xanthus, breaking his control over his creations. The tormented souls of the Wickmen turned on him, drowning him in wax – but the Midnight Rider knew that the spell that had created them still existed, and other sorcerers might emerge with wax soldiers of their own…
Or at least, might have returned if not for the fact that the Wickmen were terrifying. The artists lovingly rendered the wax pouring out of their mouths and hands, engulfing screaming victims, and burning them alive. Issues of Twilight Carnival #102 were burned by furious parents, trashed by frustrated shopkeepers, and used as examples of the need for a Code in Senate hearings. An urban legend even claimed that the issue was single-handedly responsible for a key senator changing his mind and voting to enact legislation against comic books, leaving the Wickmen a particularly robust legend that would never, ever return to the pages of Venture Comics.
Behind the Scenes:
I cannot be trusted with this power. Kitbashing has allowed me to move spell effects to a model’s mouth. As a result, we get the Wickmen, and their terrible imagery that spelled doom for a comic line. I guess you could say that they are the one villain to succeed in killing their hero!
Next up, we are moving into the Silver Age, with one hero, two villains, and five lieutenants over the next four weeks!
That’s great. Xanthus the Brilliant probably used lit candles in his mesmerism act, right? And of course the wax is yellow.
The Dyson’s Decahedron blog had something vaguely similar a while back, but his wax men were basically wax golems that shambled around with lit candles on them, trying to hand them to any living creature who would take one. If you did, you got a magic light source but were cursed to slowly transform into a new wax man over time and perpetuate the curse.
Yeah, that was my thought. He’s got candles everywhere for mesmerism, so readers assume that the reveal is going to be that he’s mind-controlling people, but nope, wax monsters.
And that is a cool variant on the wax monster! Probably couldn’t trick a player into it, but maybe next time I run a Heart game I’ll include it. Figuring out how to get the candle without getting turned into wax seems very Heart.
