The History of Venture Comics!

Games Sentinel Comics RPG
1505

You could go either way and I don’t think anything breaks. There’s only the one of him, his die is very small, and even with his reaction he won’t last long if the baddies want him gone.

I suspect the only people who actually care much about the responsibilities of a butler are actual butlers, but I might be wrong. Wodehouse pretty much established Jeeves as the archetype for most folks, and Bertie’s household (such as it is) doesn’t really call for the kind of staff commonly associated with having a true butler.

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1506

A normal update tomorrow, but today, some random stats!

I very belatedly thought that I should take a quick look at the powers that I’ve been giving people, to spot where there are holes in my setting once I move past the deep cuts and back into major things. There’s some time to spare; the events aren’t going to use them much, so it’s really not until we hit the orgs. But it’s not a quick process!

I’m now through the first volume (Gold and Silver Ages) tracking d12s, d10s, and d8s (d6s seemed small enough not to bother) and I have learned a few things about my character creation instincts!

  1. There are a bunch of powers that no hero or villain has at d12 or d10: Cold, Intuition, Stone, Water, Part Detachment, Postcognition, Remote Viewing, Leaping, Swimming, Swinging, Wall-Crawling, and Signature Vehicle. On the other hand, there are only four powers that no hero or villain has at d8 or above, and they’re mostly mobility-based: Stone, Leaping, Swimming, and Swinging. But no stone-supers! That surprises me a bit. I know I have a couple coming up as I do more Animate stuff, of course.

  2. I’m not surprised that I usually give characters, especially heroes, Intellectual powers. I was surprised that the powers I gave them were mostly Presence (18) and Awareness (17), rather than Deduction (7), Lightning Calculator (4), or especially Intuition (4) which I would have guessed a lot of folks would have.

  3. Similarly, I’m not surprised to see a lot of physical traits, but I am surprised that apparently I didn’t much care for Speed at this point, with only three characters having it at d8 or above and one at d10. By comparison, there are 13 characters with Strength d8 or above, 11 with Agility, and 8 with Vitality.

  4. Venture is definitely much more Marvel than DC when it comes to flight! Of thirty heroes, only six can fly, and two of those fly at d6. Notably, none of the Champions of Truth fly at this stage.

Curious to see how the balances shift when I finish tracking the Bronze and Iron ages.

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1507

Is there a specific reason you kept going to a 10/9 ratio of heroes to villains? It seems oddly specific, and contrary to the population of SC, since while there are more heroes than solo villains, there are way more Nemesis targets and Environment villains and so forth than there are heroes if any variety.

Anyway, I absolutely love the idea of Flatfoot. I’m super happy to see some positive representation for cops, and as someone who’s really tired of evil robot tropes, I’m really pleased with the idea that someone builds a robot to be the perfect crimestopper, and nothing goes wrong, he’s just superhumanly good at fighting crime and protecting non-criminals.

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1508

The ratio actually changed later on (30 heroes, 35 villains was the final setup) but yes, there was a reason initially!

The reason was that the hero character creation pieces are all in sets of 20, whereas there were 18 villain approaches and 14 villain archetypes. I was going for even sets, so I added four archetypes to bring the number of villains up to 18 and then just halved it on both sides. That left ten heroes and nine villains to get all of the options a roughly even amount.

1509

Petal Pixies

Petal Pixie
Petal Pixie450×575 362 KB

Real Name: Something unbearably twee, First Appearance: Wondrous Adventures #65, July 1967

Lieutenant Type: Enemy
Die Size: d8
Motive: Destruction, Approach: Magical

Traits:

  • Garden Mites: Petal pixies have +2 to Attack or Hinder as long as there is plenty of nearby foliage for them to dart in and out of.
  • Vanish: When a petal pixie succeeds at a damage save, they can’t be targeted again until they take an action. A hero may make an Overcome action to locate a hidden pixie and allow all heroes to target them.

As the 1960s wore on, Wondrous Adventures found itself in an unusual place. While other superhero comics were moving increasingly towards serial plots and higher stakes, the title was firmly ensconced in adventures of the month. Slightly over half of its issues continued to feature Wonderer as the lead, with the Drifter would appear two or three times a year, and another two or three issues a year featuring minor heroes like Gold Guardian or Splendor. In an attempt to bring some consistency to the line, Harold Mossby suggested an ongoing plotline to take place over a year from mid-1967 to mid-1968. It would include Wonderer as its lead, but side characters would also become involved in the overarching plot, and while each issue would be readable as a standalone there would be a throughline of a particular threat to keep readers interested. The writers who worked on Wondrous Adventures were game, but unfortunately their brainstorming session was accompanied by several bottles of bourbon and a truly brutal smog outbreak, resulting in the creation of the petal pixies.

First introduced in Wondrous Adventures #65, petal pixies were not fae despite their name. Rather, they were once-innocent nature spirits living in the parks of Ferrisville who were corrupted by pollution, gradually becoming twisted and violent. In order to protect their beloved plants, the petal pixies decided that they needed to destroy all of Ferrisville’s industry and machinery and kill anyone who tried to stop them. They began with subtle sabotage, wrecking a new factory that was preparing to open, and Wonderer intervened to save the lives of the foreman and workers. Over the next several issues, the petal pixies struck through a variety of plots and schemes, tricking other supervillains into helping them with their goal and gradually escalating their operations until they finally attempted to drown all the humans of Ferrisville and render the area pristine to nature once again.

In the end, Wonderer was able to use his magic to purge the corruption from the petal pixies, restoring their childlike natures and returning them to the woods, and he pledged to help protect the wildlands of Ferrisville from industrialization, a pledge that no other writer ever bothered to follow up with. The petal pixies themselves had been an interesting enough idea, but the writers were never really able to balance their whimsy and danger and the storyline was considered a bit of a flop. The little nature spirits would appear again from time to time, twisted by some new pollution, but they were largely forgotten by the broader Venture Comics community.

Behind the Scenes:

I knew I wanted a Wondrous Adventures monster lieutenant, but I didn’t have any strong ideas. Some futzing around with randomizers gave me “enemies that are plant and inivisibility-based”, and that gave birth to this idea of pollution-tainted flower spirits that dart out of the undergrowth and claw you up while cackling maniaclly. It’s not a particularly original idea, but these are deep cuts, not common foes.

Kitbashing comes to victory again - I spent rather longer than I would prefer to admit working on the wood-and-plant wings for these pixies. They’re actually built out of a bow, with various plant pieces stuck onto them.

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1510

Alcohol and air pollution are not an ideal mix for connecting with one’s Muse, I suppose. :slight_smile:

Making good use of that membership upgrade, I see.

My personal proclivity for physical kitbashing has me mulling over how I’d about a similar project. I’ve got some old Fairy Meat miniatures that might do as a basis, and there are several small sets of evil fairies out there if they wouldn’t. Making them woodwings would be pretty simple, I’ve hot plenty of leaf-and-flower pieces from various terrain projects and craft store sales in Ye Olde Bits Boxxe. Which reminds me, I really need to arrange a good home for all this modelling stuff when I die. The three people I’d planned to leave my stuff to have all gone and pre-deceased me, the old adage about gamers being immortal as long as they have unpainted minis having proven sadly untrue. The few other minis enthusiasts I’ve kept up with online live too far away to make a post-mortem pickup practical.

Minor stylistic suggestion if this ever gets published:

Slightly more natural-sounding that way, and avoids repeating “two or three issues a year” in such close proximity while retaining the gist of the sentence.

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1511

“incredibly twee” lol

Ah, I remember Fairy Meat. Not with any fondness, just the bemusing fact it exists.

1512

Brightforge

Brightforge
Brightforge401×576 322 KB

Real Name: Duncan Forger, First Appearance: Liberty’s Dream #69, Dec 1969

Lieutenant Type: Ally
Die Size: d10
Relation: Frenemy, Approach: Raw Power

Traits:

  • Forgehammer: When Brightforge Boosts another character, he may either Attack a nearby target with a value equal to the bonus created, or gain a bonus of the same size as the bonus created to his next damage save.

As the Silver Age began to shift and change in the aftermath of Dimensional Devastation and Venture’s new leadership, every comic line found itself lightly experimenting with new ideas and concepts. In the case of Liberty’s Dream, one such experiment began in 1969 with the slow transition of the Animate Townships from individual locations that the Animaster would create and then immediately abandon into an increasingly thriving patchwork of communities scattered throughout the Underhill, neighboring both Earth and fae societies and learning from both. This new nation required a new approach for Reverie; she couldn’t just march in and overthrow Animaster when he had actual guards and armies. It also meant new characters, and one of the most initially promising but quickly forgotten was Brightforge.

Aden Forger was a high-ranking loyalist in New Anima, the capitol of Animaster’s growing nation. Born of fire, he crafted both weapons and luxuries for the small but growing Animate nobility, and his crafts earned him similar luxuries from his fellows. From his creation, however, Aden was troubled by the strict hierarchies that the Animaster enforced. He crafted himself a costume and went to explore the other townships, quickly discovering how brutal his master’s rule was and vowing to work to fix it. As Brightforge, he raided weapon shipments, melting them down and turning them into tools to benefit the common Animates, and liberated food shipments from warehouses to feed the starving.

Reverie encountered Brightforge during one of her attempts to stop Animaster from conquering a small fae enclave. Any hopes that she had of the Animate hero becoming a fellow revolutionary, however, were quashed. Brightforge pointed out that his people were dependent on the Animaster for new children, and that he couldn’t be so simply overthrown. While Brightforge fought to help people, he saw Remedy as a foreign interloper with no care for what her interventions might inflict on the people who suffered the most. He was willing to quietly help her curb the Animaster’s amibitions of conquest, but he would not seek revolution. Instead, he hoped to continue to sabotage the Animaster, weakening his rule until his people could assert themselves and force him to step down and turn over the secret of their creation.

Unfortunately, while Brightforge was a popular character at first, the limits that had been placed on him by this philosophy meant that he wasn’t a commonly-occurring one. To make things worse, by the early 1970s Reverie’s writers had shifted to focusing on the fae and integrating her into the return of the Fomorians, allowing Animaster to fall by the wayside for several years. In the process, Brightforge largely vanished; he would make a few occasional appearances once Alchymia returned, but never became a core part of her supporting cast.

Behind the Scenes:

I don’t have a lot of notes about what Animaster is up to in the 1970s, even though he is overall one of Reverie’s main opponents. It made sense that he faded for a bit when the Fomorians became the Big Thing, and this character got created to buff that storyline up.

Brightforge is definitely a low-key Vietnam critique, creating a situation in which even if the bad guy is worth overthrowing you don’t necessarily want to come in swinging. But that’s not very superheroic, so when we get back to Anima it’s full of a lot more large-scale revolution and cool fights and his core conflict isn’t really brought up (in fact, I think by the 90s the Animates just know how to make more of themselves and the core conflict straight up doesn’t exist.)

And that’s in for the Silver Age! We’re roaring ahead into the Bronze Age next, with a few Bronze Age people slated to go up before my winter break. I’d sort of hoped I might align the break with the end of ages, but things did not quite work out that way.

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1513

It seems strangely appropriate that the Animates would quietly figure out the “facts of life” sometime in the Bronze Age and the whole thing was a given by the fan-service-filled Nineties. The Comics Code was steadily losing its deathgrip on censoring even vaguely adult material throughout the time period and writers didn’t need to dance around the subject so much anymore. Not actually much outrage left by 1984, as this article reminds us.

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1514

I have 2 of the issues named in the article.
Death of Korrey’s H.I.V.E. BF includes the Captain Carrot preview leading to issue one of Zoo Crew.
Issue with Dick taking of the costume and Terra making a joke is a random issue I have,

Now I am picturing a story where a group of Animate academics needing to observe two humans have sex and the comedy of how the heroes arrange that.

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1515

Why would you be unable to post a custom Principle?

1516

It’s been a bit since I’ve had a chance to catch up here, so this is a bit of a long one. Mea culpa.

I love Barnaby. He kind of gives off some Snapper Carr vibes to me, as a pretty much normal dude who is kind of randomly associated with a team of heroes. And they even share the fact that their departure from comics is caused by a villain taking advantage of them to get at the heroes: Head Master for Pinstripe, and the Joker for Snapper Carr.

So, couldn’t Wonderer just directly summon spare costumes, rather than summoning a butler valet holding costumes? I imagine he could, and he just doesn’t because Silver Age and you need something for Barnaby to do.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I don’t know if this is entirely right, but the way I see it is that a valet is a “gentleman’s personal gentleman,” while a butler is the head of the household staff, though I suspect Alfred the Butler is responsible for adding to the confusion in at least some people’s minds.

If I’m remembering correctly, it is explicitly clarified at a few points that Jeeves is a valet, not a butler, but when the time calls for it he can “buttle with the best of them.”

Postcognition being here makes sense — it’s the lamer cousin to Precognition. And all of the Mobility powers being here but Flight, Teleportation, and Momentum make sense too — moving around in different ways oft isn’t as exciting as other things.

Makes sense. Presence is pretty much the social power, and is useful for intimidation and leadership and, well, pretty much everything in the Social Qualities category. Likewise Awareness seems like a real generally useful thing that many characters could justify having, while Deduction seems to belong with a narrower range of characters, probably mostly investigators or scientists, and same thing with Lightning Calculator, though I think only really scientists or techies would take it.

Strength is THE superpower for a reason. (Which does make me wonder — just out of curiosity, do you happen to know which is the most common superpower amongst your characters?*) And Vitality has always felt a little weird to me — it seems the least “active” and most “passive” of the powers, and one of the only ones that it seems like it’d be real hard to justify making Attacks or Hinders with.

Yeah, now that you mention it, that does sound like a classic setup for an evil robot story.

I learned a new word today.

I might’ve missed something, and maybe Reverie’s got a ally named Remedy or something, or this might be a typo.

*And no, I don’t mean that kind of Most Common Superpower.

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1517

At least twice that I can think of, although the subject of his exact terms of employment gets ignored more than its addressed.

Nah. They both have their uses. Precognition might sometimes prevent a crime or disaster if the GM is up for that level of planning ahead. Postcognition is incredible at solving crimes and discovering what went wrong after the fact, not mention being great at figuring out weird ancient artifacts, learning to speak caveman or dinosapien, figuring out where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, etc.

As the default blanket power for all super-senses, it should be more common than it is, if anything. Access to Intellectual powers isn’t all that broad, unfortunately.

Both of those (and Intuition) show up constantly IME for use in justifying combat abilities, usually pooled with Alertness, C/R Combat, or even things like Banter for “social damage” attacks/hinders. I largely blame that damn modern take on Sherlock Holmes, where instantly “reading” foes in bullet time is the heart to their fighting style.

And yet I’m consistently surprised by how few groups include a brick or even a more generalist brawler strongman in practice. Agility is more common overall IME, at least at levels beyond the token d6 “I’m a little stronger than almost any human” level. Again, modern media featuring freeze frame and bullet time effects is likely responsible, not that reaction time hasn’t always been popular in RPGs.

There’s a player in one of my groups that runs a d12 Vitality, which is mostly keyed to mystically-themed abilities where they’re using their life force to power effects. Comes up in Overcomes as insane pain tolerance, which his Principles work well on. He also speed-heals with Major Regen, predictably - and if you don’t have a Self-Control power and want that big Red recovery, at least a little Vitality is a must-have, and if you run a d6 Red status a larger Vitality die is better.

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1518

Oh, that’s a blast from the past.

To make a long story short: Several years ago, someone posted a custom archetype to this forum, and someone else said “isn’t that against the rules”, and then the mods put their heads together and agreed that they weren’t sure if people were allowed to post homebrew on the GTG forums that wasn’t made using existing resources. They said they’d coordinate with GTG and get some formal rules, but until then people should only post characters, adventures, and environments built using the existing rules, and not post homebrewed material like new power sources, archetypes, or villain approaches. At the time, “a custom Principle” felt like it fit the bill, so I avoided putting it up until a decision was made.

And then years passed, and a decision was never made, and people occasionally posted new homebrew with no interventions and the rules were never updated to actually say that it wasn’t allowed, so I just started doing it and no one ever complained.

Absolutely. Entirely doable with Transmutation. But then I guess he would have to stop doing other things? It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think about it. :wink:

Good catch! I’ll fix that.

I think the problem is that people find bricks boring. When you’re writing a team of heroes, it’s good to have one that’s just “the straightforward one” for other people to bounce off, and that’s the personality that a lot of bricks end up having, but when you’re all PCs everyone wants to be at least a bit quirky.

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1519

I’m pretty sure the rules explicitly allow homebrewing a principle, the same as they allow a custom power.

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1520

Not the rules of the RPG, the rules of the forum.

The question was whether homebrew content was allowed to be posted on the Greater Than Games forums.

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1521

Yes but if the rules say you can make a custom power, which they do, then a custom power isn’t homebrew, it’s an application of the rules as written.

1523

I’m really not sure whether you’re being intentionally obtuse or if you actually think that forum moderator decisions about what sorts of custom content to allow would be swayed by that kind of “Um, Actually” mendacious line-dancing, but it really doesn’t matter because
(a) the original ruling was quite clear, and also
(b) the original ruling no longer applies.

So unless you would like to hop in a time machine and go get banned trying to explain to the mods that you’re not technically breaking forum rules because Rule 0 exists, I really do not understand why you are continuing this sidebar and I will no longer be engaging with it.

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1524

Well my statements were sincere, and I’m sorry you apparently took them as some kind of harangue, that certainly wasn’t my intent. But I’m happy enough to let the matter drop.

1525

You just described most comics media. :slight_smile:

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