Patron for a Heroic Spider

As I've previously mentioned, my Crab Soldier Spider Blue surprised me by turning out to be a hero. I consider him a hero in the Prince Namor sense. Spider has no trouble beating up Longbow or the Freedom Phalanx because they have invaded his home, but he will protect what he considers his-- and that includes the innocent bystanders of the Rogue Isles.

Spider is now 42. Originally, I wasn't going to run the Patron Arc at all as I didn't consider him interested in working with Arachnos ...

And then I found out that if he was ever going to lead the Recluse SF he would have to have completed a Patron Arc.

Now I'm faced with what Patron Spider is going to take.

Mako is out of the running. Spider isn't going to work for or with a bloodthirsty maniac.

Black Scorpion ... well, he's not much better. On the other hand, he's not very bright and Spider might consider him fairly easy to fool.

That leaves me Ghost Widow and Scirroco. On the face of it, Scirroco would seem like the obvious choice. If I were someone with heroic leanings who hadn't done his Arcs before, he would seem like the most honorable choice among all the Patrons ...

Of course then we get to Second Arc and I have to justify how/why I'd betray him ...

Ghost Widow, on the other hand ... well, I could see doing her Arc as her plans don't seem to have any inherent downside for the welfare of the Rogue Isles in general or Spider in particular ... but then again I have to work out why I'd be willing to betray her ....

What do the rest of you "heroic" villains think?

Or you could do what I generally do: Re-Write the arc on the fly. Ignore the NPC text and mission text and come up with your own reason for running each arc.

Not one of them has you doing anything that can't be handwaved into heroics. Fighting Longbow? It's a Terrorist Army invading the Etoille. Beating down A Phalanxer? They're mind-controlled and needs to be trapped so they can be cleansed of the evil taint. Mako's Arc involves heading to Sharkhead and fighting a powerful evil entity.

So yeah. Just ignore the contact, rewrite the mission text, and go for it.

-Rachel-

You only betray your Patron on the second arc, so you could just do the first arc, gain the Patron powers, and leave it at that. <_<

Or, you could justify your actions as "heroic" as what each Patron is trying to do might be detrimental to the people of the Islands.

Another alternative is to simply ignore the mission story and take just the powers. Either they manifested on their own, or in the case of my own Crab, he got Scorpy's stuff "secondhand" off eBay. In short, the actual patron arcs can be considered personal non-canon.

Take Scirocco. You come off as being a chaotic goodguy. You have honor and loyalty, but you value freedom above safety.

I'd probably go with Scirocco. He makes a good "heroic villain" contact because, as a couple of other posters have mentioned, he enables you to do a bunch of basically decent things, then prevent him from unleashing a crazily dangerous plot on the entire world, which seems like a fairly heroic thing to do to me. In fact, Scirocco's interesting in that his arc could be interpreted as showing that the player villain is more heroic than Scirocco himself.

All that said, my halfway-decent Crab Spider took Mako and spent most of the arc laughing behind his back, so it's really up to you.