Your Heroic Non Praetorian Villainous AT

Boy, it was hard to think of a subject heading for this ...

I was kind of thinking about this last night...

For those of you who are going to play a Heroic Primal AT from the Redside choices (Brute, Stalker, etc), how are you thinking about their background?

Are you going to go for the "reformed" route on all of them?

Are you going to have them be unjustly accused, wrongly convicted innocent heroes who manage to clear themselves? (There's a Malta mission Blueside where you prevent an innocent newbie hero from being framed by Malta so the precedent exists).

Or ... and this is what I've found myself considering as an option for some characters ... are you going to totally IGNORE their past Redside and retcon them as ALWAYS having been heroic?

Dinah Ewers, also known as Alraune, was bonded with a plant symbiont after being accidentally killed at an environmental protest at a secure facility surrounded by forests. She wound up eventually on the Rogue Isles, altered by the encounter with it, and started to work as an eco-terrorist against polluting companies there, as well as holding down a bar job. She soon moved to working in Pocket D, and employment opportunities came up elsewhere, finally landing her a position with the Unity Vigil hero group as a counsellor and a place she can utilize her training (having served under various rich households before heading to the Isles and learning a wide range of talents) for helping the members to relax, from manicures and pedicures, to just talking or therepy. And her door's always open for a cup of tea.

Alraune is a Plant/Thorns Dominator.

Coming over soon is a group that found themselves on the wrong side of the law, but are soon making there way back to being heroes, or at least 'good guys'. Gail Treland is an ex-black ops agent, who utilized her mutant ability to great effect in various wars and conflicts around the globe, and now she's bringing her boys to set up shop in Paragon City as a PMC.

She's a Storm controlling mutant.

They're Mercs.

They. Are. GAIL'S FORCE.

My Mastermind main is an alien who wrongly accused Paragon City of being behind certain attacks on her home. Mostly because I had to choose to get CoH or CoV and at the time CoV had more content.

I have a brute who is a sort of golem-like creation. She's treating the world as her playground with her immature mind and doing what she wants to do. Eventually, she'll learn to focus her energies more constructively and learn to do good instead of just smash-and-grabs as the mood strikes her.

My brute is a deniable asset of the Canadian Government, originally stationed in the Rogue Isles to monitor and/or destabilize potential threats. He has since been recalled, as his replacement is about to finish his training. Realistically, I'm swapping my brute for a blaster.

My Demons MM has the rather unimaginative back story of being overcome by her fathers demonic powers when he passed them on to her. As she and the essence of the demon inside her became more powerful, she has surpassed it in willpower, and has been able to start acting for a good cause.

Its pretty lame, but i had the benefit of that always being the plan when I made her. My current level 50 stalker is too evil to go Hero, he may go vigilante, as that seems more "true" villain, self serving rather than arachnos serving.

Quote:

Originally Posted by VoodooGirl [*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*

My Mercs/TA Mastermind, Profiteer, is going Rogue strictly so she can work both sides of the financial fence. No heroism, no idealism, just pure profit.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Well, my 50 Stalker is probably staying Rogue. It fits her backstory - she's already gotten her revenge, gotten her memory back, and found that villainside doesn't really fit where she wants to go.... especially after she made a promise to an alternate-universe her's parents (where she, herself, was never coming off life support - or regaining consciousness.) She wants to redeem herself by helping in both the Isles and being accepted in Paragon.

Then there's my bots/pain MM. After barely surviving an attack while in a program (similar to "doctors without borders - volunteering to go where there's otherwise little to no medical care,) she tried to find a way to balance protecting herself with "do no harm," and figured modifying her robotic surgical assistants to defend and protect her still meant *she* wasn't doing any harm. Though it gives, for her, new meaning to "Sterilize the area."

See my Guides and Tutorials

I have a Bots/FF Mastermind that I always intended to take Blueside, and I was very tempted to ignore the whole 'villain' thing. Once it turned out that I had to get him to Level 20, I did try for a while to level only by doing Heroic AE missions, but eventually I joined a team, and that all sort of fell apart...

So I formed a new plan. This character had spent a lot of time in the Rogue Isles and ultimately done a lot of questionable things, but I figured that I could essentially roll with that, especially considering Arachnos's rather anarchistic internal structure, and adopt the theory that living in the Rogue Isles for very long pretty much forces you to do bad things just to survive, in a He Who Fights Monsters sort of way. Arachnos might even deliberately encourage it.

He just happened to grow up in the Rogue Isles, then, and he still always wanted to be a hero. He refused to work for Arachnos, so eventually he had to go to ground. Even when you're trying to run and hide, you meet a few people, you make a few friends, you start to see the grey in the black and white, you rationalise and compromise a bit, and pretty soon you're a wannabe hero whose two best friends just *happen* to be Arachnos Crab Spiders. I mean, you have nothing against them personally, right? And if you're just shooting up some Snakes, that's actually defending the public, and where's the harm in that? Sure, pretty soon they're trying to rob banks and asking for your help, but remember, they're your *friends*. A friend is someone you call to help you move, but a real friend is someone you call to help you move a body. Do you really want to abandon a friend?...

So, yeah, he's going to end up with something of a complex past, but he was never intentionally evil for its own sake or for his own benefit. He just ended up wading through far more darkness than he ever thought he'd have to, and became rather darker himself than he ever thought he would while trying to get out from under the thumb of Lord Recluse. And as many people have complained about before, it's actually quite surprising how many CoV mission arcs aren't actually all that villainous...

I have two 'villains' going rogue.

One is an alien (earth/ice dominator) who fell to earth (literally) and was having a blast basically just running amok (Earth people so FUNNY when they run away screaming! Earth = Planet of FUN!) but then it began to dawn on him that, unlike members of his own species who are virtually indestructible, most Earth people are extremely fragile and don't always recover from being smashed flat by large boulders. When he began to really pay attention to what was going on around him he noticed that not all Earth people had 'super powers' or special armors/weapons and some of these Earth people were actually rather affable when they weren't fleeing in terror, especially the one that gave him those delicious coconut chocolate chip cookies. Such people must be protected!

***

The other is an Arachnos Widow who was at one point a pampered and spoiled beauty queen who married a dashing and handsome and brilliant and wealthy businessman. Classic tale: everything was oh so perfect until the day she found out what he really did - and it was something so horrible that even *she* understood it was horrible. "Sorry, my dear, but now you know too much." (Yes, he actually said that.) Somewhere between 'Dispose of the body,' and the actual disposal of the body, someone who had often admired that body from afar decided to take matters into his own hands, and things got all 'Bride of Frankenstein-y'.

Eventually, of course, vengeance was had - with a vengeance, so to speak - but then what? What was left? Nothing. After several conventional and unsuccessful attempts at doing away with herself, she started going after superhuman, supernatural, and/or super-augmented beings, hoping one of them would be able to do the job. At first any old super type would do, but soon she developed a preference for fighting the 'bad guys', as they were less likely to show mercy or feel pity or try to convince her to use her 'gifts' for the benefit of mankind. Another factor, perhaps: people on the street saying things like, "Did you hear what so and so did? Awful! He'd better watch his step: the Trophy Wife will get him."

Well, my villainous claws/dark scrapper really ought to have been redside from the beginning, but since I can't do that I'm using her to explore the praetorian content. Once she's redside I'll just pretend she's always been there, so this character is going the 'ignore' route.

Whenever the devs get around to proliferating illusion to doms I'll be making an illusion/energy redside and then taking him blue. His story is that he was a powersuit designer for the PPD who was mindwarped by a fortunata into defecting to arachnos. Eventually his daughter (shield/mace tank) finds him, defeats him in an epic (at least in my head ) powersuit battle and manages to take him back to paragon and get his brain fixed. So here I'm using the 'reformed' route, with the variation that neither the villainous beginning nor the reformation were completely voluntary.

Michael Comnenides will become a Rogue specifically because he has never subscribed to the "juvenile comic opera sophistry" of Lord Recluse. Social Darwinism as an explicit model for society? Balderdash! While there is certainly a place for personal initiative, self-interest unfettered is nothing but self-defeating chaos. Conflict is merely a tool, to be used or discarded as higher wisdom dictates. It may be necessary to impose a proper state, but it is afterwards the duty of the state to channel conflict to productive ends and insulate the populace at large from conflict. Glory and might are certainly useful, but a happy farmer grows more grain and a happy factory worker makes better and more guns. Even dissent has its place. No bureaucrat is perfect, and even Emperor Michael is not omniscient. Thus, healthy dissent allows a living, breathing state to exist and advance in perpetuam. Of course, when dissent becomes driven entirely by selfishenss or cupidity, then it needs to be quickly exterminated, but that is but a regrettable result of the basic limits on human nature.

Dynamic order is the source of ultimate power, not chaos, and not static order, in which all thought is regulated and restricted.

Thus, Lord Recluse is a self-defeating fool, given enough time. This alternate world Statesman sounds like he has achieved nothing but the perfection of the tomb.

Emperor Michael will do it right.

I have a Huntsman who is a Soldier of Arachnos only because of the Rogue Isles' Employment Agency. He might check out the job oppertunities in Paragon City.

My Fire/Traps Corruptor's backstory has always been that he's commiting evil acts in the Rogue Isles in service of a greater good. He was rightfully arrested, but it was for vigilante-style actions rather than eating babies, and he went along with the Arachnos breakout because he felt redeeming himself in his own eyes was more important than redeeming himself in the eyes of the law, and he saw opportunity to do good in the Isles. He's been around the Rogue Isles long enough to acquire a lot of information to trade for a pardon, so he's coming home.

My Fire/Storm Corruptor on the other hand, I have no idea what to do with. She hasn't had a proper backstory since I rerolled her from a Defender when Storm got ported over, but she was always supposed to be a hero. I might just retcon her.

My scarecrow went Rogue simply because supernatural scarecrows belong in Croatoa. Maybe I'll even switch him back to villain once I get that Witch Hat, but I'm not sure I will. I've always thought of him as kind of characterless, more a magical machine than a personality, and extremely suggestible, which explains why he does whatever his contacts tell him. The Rogue switch actually made the least sense of anything I've ever done with that character; I can't really picture him working up enough consciousness to take a stand on anything.

My Arachnos Widow is going Rogue because he's meant to be an unknown quantity, who performs both heroic and villainous acts seemingly at random. His bio even mentions, along with six different theories about his origin, that he'll occasionally steal all the money from a bank, then replace it with different bills. This is the one character that I'd consider taking all the way around the alignment circle, but since I'd probably bring him back to Rogue eventually, I may just leave him there and be done with it.

Da Krusha (NRG/NRG Brute) will go Rogue. Basically he woke up in science lab with a monstrous appearance and super powers but has no idea what happened to him or even who he is. He uses his new found powers to escape, but is taken down and arrested in the process. Arachnos breaks him out and tells him that they'll help him get his memory back if he becomes a villain and causes some chaos for the heroes to deal with. Thinking he has no other alternative, he does it.

He will soon realize that Arachnos has no intentions of upholding their end of the deal. He will then start down the path of the hero and find friends on contacts in Paragon that really will help him figure out who he is and how to go back to the way he was before.

My AE character will be Rogue due to being based on the AE system and that's represented on both sides equally. He'll either be a Controller, Dominator or Brute.

Once Martial Arts or Broadsword gets ported to Brutes (if it ever does) then I'll be making a Brute and moving it to full Hero status. She's an old Russian superhero who used to be "evil" as in just serving the other super power.

I have a druid like controller who will be going Vigilante - battling anyone on either side of the fence who harms nature. I have another nature toon who starts off as a Villain and will be Rogue for the same reasons.

So mostly I have people going gray but one villain going blue.

I intend a bunch of explanations.

Professor Perdition the Demons/Traps is obsessively rationalist and an ivory tower scientist - he learned to summon demons via magical ritual by deducing the rituals from transuniversal physics, and still doesn't believe that the "hostile interdimensional aliens" he summons are actually demons. The fact that he can summon them by waving his hands is just interesting physics, not magic. Cole's shiny, orderly utopia appealed to his sense of how the world was supposed to work, and it was only as the story went along that he became disillusioned. But he was well meaning all along.

Earth-Heart the Earth/Earth Dominator is a earth-elemental type magical being, which was woken from its long sleep by the Hamidon Wars and only just now emerged to the surface. Where it was promptly told that it was now a member of Powers Division since that's where superpowered types are automatically assigned to by the Empire. His response has basically been "What's a Powers Division? What's an empire?" He's well meaning but baffled, and is presently just going along to get along.

Earthspawn the Plant/Earth Dominator is the result of a mother contaminated by the Devouring Earth but not actually Devoured, and has faced hostility all her life due to her weird appearance and connection to the DE. She's been going through the Crusader missions, lashing out at the world that mistreated her and I plan for her to be the atoning-hero type in Paragon.

Lady Apex the mutant brute is going Loyalist/Power (so far), and her attitude is basically "Cole Lite". She's a superior being (in her own eyes at least) who is out to gain recognition of her own superiority even as she sets out to help the "little people" of Praetoria. Her desire to help others is greater than her arrogance so she'll go hero (probably not Vigilante; they aren't admired enough), but still she's the sort of person who should make people glad that I don't role play outside my own head.

Steel Mage the Grav/Psi Dominator was created from stolen copies of the Tin Mage schematics that were in the Omega Team time capsule, and is supposed to be an improved model (Steel > Tin). However, Tin Mage not being stupid foresaw that kind of possibility and left hidden heroic-impulse inducing trojan subroutines in the programming he left behind...

Shatterqueen the SS/Shield brute wanted to be a hero in the first place; it was her temper that got her thrown in the Zig. Given the opportunity she's more than willing to work her way back into the good graces of Paragon.

Weaver of Sorrows the Fortunata was taken from her family (who were then killed) as a young girl for her psychic potential and then brainwashed into loyalty; her going heroic is due to the breakdown of the brainwashing due to conflicts with psionic enemies.

My Brute has never been a villain. Sure, he grew up in the Rogue Isles, but your (unwilling) choice of birthplace doesn't make you bad. In fact, he has never made any conciously evil decisions. He has the poor impulse control of a toddler, a lack of parenting and strength from unknown sources, likely Dyne residue from his negligent addict parents. Of course, he doesn't know his own backstory.
He is "Terrible Two", a superstrong toddler who punches mean guys and gets mad when they hurt him.
Signature Move: Spin around till dizzy (Whirlwind) and throw up (Bile Spray).