Australian supervillain origins - a brainstorm

[freakboy6117]

Tasmanian tigress could be a geneticists attempting to clone and restore the Thylacine from the surviving samples only to be exposed to a retroviral complex that altered her part woman part thylacine.

[SteelCold]

Tasmanian tigress could be a geneticists attempting to clone and restore the Thylacine from the surviving samples only to be exposed to a retroviral complex that altered her part woman part thylacine.

Holy The Howling 4, Batman!

[SteelCold]

Next Issue of Outback Comics - THE INVASION OF THE PLATYPUS MEN FROM PLANET MONGORR!!!

[SteveClark]

Assault, if you're setting a campaign in Brisbane in the 80s, then I assume you're aware of this guy. He had a Kung Fu school in Fortitude Valley, and would make a great villain in a Dark Champions style game.

 

Other than that, interesting things from Australian history that might be fun for a superhero campaign are:

• Nuclear testing at Maralinga included tests on soldiers who had to travel through the area only a few days after a test, and they also problems keeping the indigenous people out of the test area.
• During World War II, the Japanese were rumoured to have landed troops at the River Styx in Queensland. They were apparently killed by locals and buried on an island at the mouth of the river. My father worked in the area in his youth (in the 1960s) and heard this story from locals at the time.
• Some convicts thought there was a secret white empire 300 miles south-west of Sydney. (from Girt: The Unauthorized History of Australia)

[Ninja-Bear]

Assault I wouldn't be so hard on yourself for full concept characters. That to me seems more of an invention of roleplaying games than of comics. Ibcould be really wrong but most of the well known superheroes were fleshed out over a course of time not fully developed from the get-go.

[assault]

Some character concepts from the first (stupidly munchkinised) Champions game I played in. It was first edition, but I will use a later edition when I eventually get around to writing them up.

 

My first PC. I hadn't read comics for years before I played Champions - my adult comic addiction is a consequence of playing the game - so I was stuck for a character concept. Someone else in the group suggested I play a character based on Elric. I suspect this was as much to test out the Transfer/Drain powers as much as anything else. I only played the resulting character once. He was really tough, but basically dull.

 

The idea of a guy with a magic energy stealing sword is OK though. It's not so rare that it has to be a blatant Elric rip. Making the sword black isn't all that specific either. So, here is part of the background of a character almost entirely unlike the first Champions character I ever played:

 

"The warrior, maddened, had fled to the end of the Earth. There, in a cave, he died. But his cursed sword survived him. For thousands of years it waited for a new wielder. Those lived in the area shunned the haunted site, but in time they were displaced and destroyed by newcomers, who knew nothing of what lay beneath their feet.

 

Still the sword waited, until one day..." I'll get around to finishing the story.

 

Stupid, clumsy and cheesy, as usual.

 

The cave is probably in Tasmania or somewhere. Perhaps on an island off its coast. Pretty much literally the end of the Earth. It could even be Antarctica.

 

Name: Black Sword or the Black Knight. Might prefer the former, but gets called the latter by the press. Obviously Black Paladin has a similar name, but who cares.

[assault]

My second character was another short lived fantasy stinker - Grendel the Troll. Growth, Density Increase. The only good thing about him was the image of him peeking his head around the corner of high-rise buildings.

 

Again, this version is only loosely based on my original concept, which, bluntly, didn't really exist.

 

I can't be bothered writing fiction here, so the concept is that a guy (who is naturally "troll like" - big, strong and ugly) finds a troll-skin cloak, puts it on, and ZAP! Big Ugly Giant Monster.

 

The only real problem is where did he find it? Trolls are pretty solidly European. He could have found it in Europe, but I'm already milking the Ring of Gyges (Turkey) and a Lost City in Libya. I don't want to keep rehashing ideas.

 

Big Hairy Dudes are a thing in Australian indigenous cultures, but that stretches the Grendel concept. Of course a white guy finding such a gizmo might use a European cultural reference even if it wasn't technically correct. It's unlikely a guy who turns into a troll would care much for the finer points of anthropology.

 

So I think that will be the approach I take. I'll refrain from mentioning where he found the cloak, but it doesn't really matter.

[assault]

A final character inspired by that first campaign. This one is based on a character was created by someone else. She was basically a rip off of DC's Emerald Empress. What's kind of interesting is that she once showed up disguised as a Bonnie Parker style "gangster's moll". Unfortunate terminology aside, it's an interesting concept. Eliminating the disguise aspect, there's a similarity to another DC villain - Terra-Man, who used alien technology made to look like artifacts from the Wild West.

 

So, my version of this character would have been abducted from Earth in the 1920s/30s and Starlorded around space for a while before being returned to Earth in the campaign era. Relativistic effects, advanced technology and so on would have prevented her from aging much during this period.

 

Now she's here, she's alienated from society, probably wasn't a wonderful person in the first place, and has high tech weaponry...

 

No name yet, but I'll almost certainly refer back to the sources I've used.

[assault]

Finally, just for fun...

 

The actor Geoffrey Rush was born in my home town (Toowoomba) and was educated in Brisbane, where I also lived for many years. He's a bit of a "local boy made good".

 

And he played Casanova Frankenstein.

 

So, Lothario Strangelove becomes a "local boy made evil". Why he's back in his home town(s), nobody knows. Maybe he has some old grudges to settle. Maybe there are people who know too much about him. Maybe he's just taking a break from the Big Smoke. Maybe he's pursuing his First Love - supervillain style. Whatever, he's here, and he's really dangerous.

[assault]

OK, so there's four villains who could have been active in 1980s Brisbane, or, of course, in the present day.

 

Five if you include Blue Dynamo, who is ultimately an antagonist rather than an ally. He's probably the most 80s though, since he's directly inspired by pre-Fitzgerald Inquiry Queensland.

 

These characters could easily be supplemented by "fad showcase" characters, both heroic and villainous.

[assault]

I spent a bit of spare time today working on Disadvantages/Complications. It's not so difficult to come up with them for NPC villains/heroes as it is for PC heroes.

 

Of course most of them will end up a bit generic unless you have a particular explanation for specific things.

 

Most villains are hunted by the particular PCs they are opposed against in the particular campaign. This is legitimate. For example, every time the Joker escapes from Arkham, he has a serious Batman hunted. And in a more general situation, who else is going to stop the villains if not the (PC) heroes?

[assault]

I still have to deal with the fact that I can't draw to save my life.

 

No, really. I was a medical student back in the day. I would look down a microscope and wouldn't be able to draw what I saw. I could see it while I was looking, but it would have totally gone away before it could travel down my pencil.

 

I know about "swiping" comic images, but they usually require modification, and I have to deal with colour and stuff too. Difficult, for me.

[assault]

Oh, yeah. I've been unhappy for a while about calling the character with the Ring of Gyges the Scarlet Spectre. I have other plans for that name.

 

The invisible character is now called Nightmare. Her real name is Virginia Griffin.

 

The Scarlet Spectre is a different joke.

 

The shrinking character - the Crimson Cockroach - was an oil prospector who gained his powers while exploring the ruins of a city of the Garamantes. The city had actually survived by its population shrinking to a size that allowed them to live inside the wells that provided them with water. They might have been discovered, and learned to speak English, during WW2, but that's not certain, since it adds complication to the story.

[assault]

There needs to be a Chesty Bond homage of course.

 

"During the 1940s, an accident at a Sydney textile factory created a batch of clothing that bestowed incredible strength and stamina upon their wearers. This accident has never been replicated or explained.

 

Until now.

 

Everyone laughed at nerdy industrial chemist Chester Pond.

 

They're not laughing now."

 

Of course, "they're not laughing now" should really be used by an evil clown. So:

 

"Everyone laughed when Polly Archer wanted to be a clown.

 

They're not laughing now."

 

Add a picture of an evil female clown (perhaps with guns), labeled with 'Killer Clown", and that's all the background you need.

[Amorkca]

Have you tried any of the character generators? Like HeroMachine or X-Girl?  They are quite basic, although losing the work once and having to start over from scratch was not a fun time, but its easier than trying to draw it yourself!

[wcw43921]

There needs to be a Chesty Bond homage of course.

 

 

 

Doggone it--you had me thinking this was some sort of legendary Australian burlesque queen.  Now--I'm disappointed.

 

How disappointed, you ask?

 

 

This disappointed.

[assault]

Have you tried any of the character generators? Like HeroMachine or X-Girl?  They are quite basic, although losing the work once and having to start over from scratch was not a fun time, but its easier than trying to draw it yourself!

 

Yes. They don't really float my boat.

[assault]

Doggone it--you had me thinking this was some sort of legendary Australian burlesque queen.  Now--I'm disappointed.

 

How disappointed, you ask?

 

 

There was a series that was originally named "Chesty Blonde", but it was renamed for legal reasons.

[assault]

A page about Chesty Bond.