The Hoard Potato: Tapping the Hive Mind

[athelind]

A call for assistance to the DC comics fans out there in the audience: I need your ideas!

As many of you know, I'm currently running a superhero RPG set in an alternate DC universe, where Superman and other characters started their careers at about the times they made their comic book debuts, and time passed normally. Heroes aged, had children, passed on their names, powers, and/or missions, and, in many cases, passed on.

It's the year 2020, and the generation of heroes that were teenagers in the 1990s and at the dawn of the Millennium are now the stalwart core of the Justice League: Starwoman, Static, and the Blue Beetle fight along the grandchildren of Superman and Wonder Woman.

The sole player-character in the campaign is a teenaged girl who's adopted the nom de guerre of Robin, protecting the innocent in a Gotham City that has been without a Batman or any other costumed hero for 15 years.

However, I need interesting NPCs to flesh out the setting. In the interests of Harvesting Good Ideas, I pose this question to the LiveJournal Hive Mind:

If you were going to play in this setting, who would you want to play?

Guidelines:

1. If I were actually enlisting players for a tabletop game, I wouldn't have much trouble with someone saying "I want to come up with someone completely original". In this case, though, I'm specifically asking for characters who fit the Legacy theme.
   
2. Characters should be the Up And Coming New Generation, born after the New Millennium. I'm looking for characters who can team up with my 17-year-old Robin without making her "the kid". Think Teen Titans 2020. (Addendum, but thematically important, so it's goin' way up here.)
   
3. DC is the Borg Publisher. Over the decades, it's assimilated characters who originated in several other publishing houses. For the purposes of the Legacy game, "The DC Universe" includes superheroes from National, All-American, Quality, Fawcett, Charlton, Vertigo, Milestone Media and MLJ.
   
4. Some public domain characters, including Sherlock Holmes, have been established as part of the DC Canon, and, of course, Greek, Egyptian and Arthurian myth-cycles have played important roles in the backgrounds of several characters.
   
5. Because they play important roles in the PC's Big Story Arc, I've locked the Batman Family Legacy and the Starman/Star-Spangled Kid Legacy.
   
6. I've got fairly solid ideas for the following Legacies, but if you come up with something Really Good, I'm willing to toss my stuff out the window.
   
   • Superman/Supergirl/Superboy
     
   • Green Arrow/Black Canary
     
   • Wonder Woman/Fury
     
   • Captain Marvel/Shazam!
     
   • Doctor Fate/Tim Hunter (Yes, you read that right.)
     
   • Mr. Terrific
   
   
7. If you want to come up with characters based on villain legacies, go for it; Robin 2020's staunchest allies are the grandkids of The Penguin and Man-Bat.
   
8. As a general rule of thumb, Big Events Happened: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Invasion, Zero Hour, and all that. The details may differ, but they happened. If a character has had a Big Event Death, they're Still Dead. This includes Kara Zor-El, Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, and, yes, Superman.

Have fun with this; think of it as another LJ Meme. I know that a good chunk of the fun we've had has been from banging out the timelines, and laughing about the ways things just fall together -- often more sensibly than they did in the "canon" source material.

---

Comments

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

FUNDED BY THE COMMITTEE TO
BREED INFECTIOUS LASS IN 2008.

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

Wow, I don't think I'm even setting a precedent here:

"Color Kid (Ulu Vakk from the planet Lupra) can change the color of objects. Gained his power after being struck by a ray from another dimension. In the 1985 Legion of Substitute Heroes one-shot comic, he was temporarily known as Color Queen after being exposed to Granderian Gender-Reversal Germs by Infectious Lass." -- Wikipedia, "Legion of Substitute Heroes"

[wolphin.livejournal.com]

And sprung to intergalactic fame by turning oranges to purples and grapes into oranges, ensuring mass intergalactic confusion one what to squeeze for breakfast.

[morchades.livejournal.com]

Green freaking Lantern, man.

[morchades.livejournal.com]

Although, I have to ask since Hal had a BigEventDeath as Parallax--if there a Corps in this RPG timeline or is it just Kyle's ring?

[athelind.livejournal.com]

There's a Corps, since Kyle's recreation of Oa happened before Rebirth. By my current continuity, here's the status of Earth's Current Green Lanterns:

• Hal Jordan is, like Francisco Franco, valiantly holding on in his fight to remain dead. He might be The Spectre; I haven't decided yet, and, well, it may never come up. He was 60 when he died reigniting the sun.
  
• Guy Gardner is, alas, deceased, after the events of Zero Hour. I'm sorry; this one was required by the needs of the story arc. He was 59 when he died, but only 43 biologically, having been blown into the Phantom Zone for most of the '70s and '80s when Hal's Power Battery exploded.
  
• John Stewart has resumed the role he assumed at the end of Green Lantern: Mosaic: He's one of the Guardians of Oa. He's now 70, but it hardly matters, since, you know, Guardian.
  
• Kyle Rayner (age 50) is hailed throughout the Corps as the Torchbearer, and leads the Honor Guard. He lives on Oa, his duties take him all over the Galaxy, and he seldom winds up on Earth.

The current Green Lantern of Sector 2814 isn't human, and doesn't live on Earth. Ey's nominally a member of the Justice League, but from eir perspective, the League derive whatever authority they might have from their association with a member of the Corps -- they're eirs deputies, in effect.

I don't know if Kyle resurrected the Little Blue Bastards in the 2020 timeline, or if the new Guardians are gathered from races all across the galaxy. I'm pretty sure they're not these guys, no matter how much I love plugging obscure and embarrassing characters into major roles in the Legacyverse.

The name "Parallax" is exclusively associated with the Madness of Hal Jordan; if you tried to convince someone in the Legacyverse that Hal was possessed by a Giant Yellow Space Bug, they'd think you were making a joke in Really Bad Taste. More details on that are hidden away here.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Well, naturally.

So who -- or what -- is wearing the Ring?

[twentythoughts.livejournal.com]

Captain Musketeer! Alias: Jack Drake.

The adopted son of Captain Stingaree and The Cavalier.

Putting on a mixture of his dads' pirate and musketeer motifs, he combines jolly swashbuckling with the musketeers' sense of honor. He's been disowned by his dad (who's now 70-80 years old) for "not being the right kind of pirate". The Cavalier, having been kind of a sugar daddy for Captain Stingaree, died not long after Jack's adoption, and it's in his memory that Jack dons his outfit and sets out to rid the world of dishonesty.

Jack, having been adopted in the early Eighties, started his career as Captain Musketeer at the age of seventeen, and has honed his skills as a fighter since then. His rapier can do all sorts of nifty things (electric blasts, excreting sedatives, even deadly poison for those cases where the criminal is just a little TOO dishonest), and he's great at tossing daggers. He also carries an old-fashioned musket, which has been modified to shoot all kinds of things (think Green Arrow's arrows, only as bullets).

[twentythoughts.livejournal.com]

Wait. Captain Musketeer? That's stupid. Captain CAVALIER is the obvious name for this guy.

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

You know what I'm going to suggest because we've discussed it before, but I'll share with everyone else.

In the series 'The Batman' (the most recent animated one), Killer Croc was voiced by Ron Perlman, with a wonderful Cajun accent. In this incarnation, he was an actual crocodile-man, even to the point of occasionally booming and hissing when he wasn't talking.

My character suggestion is his Granddaughter, Delilah.
She's also from the bayou, and had been raised by a Voodoun priestess, until she died last year at the age of 120. Delilah came to Gotham to try to find out more about her Grandpappy. Of course, since she's part crocodile, she doesn't fit in to normal society, however, she does get along with the descendants of Grandpappy's pets, the crocodiles in the sewers of Gotham.

She's had a rather moral upbringing, so she isn't bent toward a life of crime, and may even be persuaded to take up a heroic lifestyle. She's 14 years old, so that would put her as a contemporary of Robin, and a possible recruit for the new Teen Titans.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

There's nothing about Delilah I don't like. She fits just fine with my plans for her grand-père.

With your permission, I will cheerfully bring her into the game as an NPC.

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

Permission cheerfully granted

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

I know he's not from the Marvel universe, but I nominate The Shadow. Not as the caped gunslinger, though, but based on his original guise.

I don't know if you're aware of it, but The Shadow started not as a character but as a mysterious announcer. He was the host of a series of detective stories on radio, but was so popular that he became a superhero in his own right, by popular demand. In the original version he was just an unseen figure who knew everything, including What Evil Lurks etc etc etc.

Since nobody ever knew who The Shadow was, nobody could notice when he selected replacements for himself. Thus The Shadow is not the original, but still appears to be the original in all respects.

He has an extensive network of spies. If he appears at all, he appears as Fritz, the doddering and incompetent janitor who just happens to be sweeping the floor nearby when the cops, or main characters, are discussing their cases.

But for your world I see him delivering intelligence to your player characters. He is a voice on the phone, a signal on the radio, an envelope on the table delivered by an unseen hand. He knows all, sees all, and tells what suits him. He is everywhere.

In other words, my dear Boojum Snark... The Shadow is YOU. The voice of the Game Master.

Have fun.

[iridium-wolf.livejournal.com]

What, no Wildcat III/IV from Kingdom Come? :)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

He's in his 30s.

[stalbon.livejournal.com]

You know about Damien, I suspect, so what happened to his role as the 'follow-up' to his father? Bruce would have been in his late 50s around the time the boy was born...so in essence, he could be the 'new' Terry Bogard. However, I also suspect you've planned for it, and had him done away with in some fashion involving Ra's. And to follow up on Hafoc's idea, I was thinking on The Shade. Minor supervillain, perhaps, he is nonetheless one of those who is close to immortal, if you follow his appearances in Green Arrow. He could easily fill a Penguin-type role with a businessman front.

[stalbon.livejournal.com]

Argh. Ignore 'Terry Bogard' and replace that with 'Terry Mcguinnes'.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

If Damien had been born in the mid-'90s, then Bruce would have been 80-something -- and Talia would have ben in her 50s (assuming she hasn't been rejuvenated like her father, and is actually centuries old). He's not so much "done away with" as "didn't happen".

Bruce Wayne, Sr., DID have both a son and a daughter in the Legacy timeline. Their mother was Selina Kyle, the reformed Catwoman.

(Trust me, if there's one Legacy I have THOROUGHLY plotted, it's the Mantle of the Bat.)

[eggshellhammer.livejournal.com]

"Gracious Emissary Fifty Two," or Niang Guan Tong, son of Jean-Paul Valley and Mother of Champions, presently employed by her as one of her personal spies and agents.

This is predicated on Jean-Paul valley being psychologically and emotionally unstable enough to be vulnerable to seduction by Mother of Champions and the Chinese government losing some control on the Great Ten after it was bought out by Chinese corporations wholesale in 2015.

But then, I'm fappo for the Great Ten.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

...does Mother of Champions NEED a sperm donor?

[eggshellhammer.livejournal.com]

Yes. She hand-picks her suitors.

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

Charles Christopher Walker, latest scion of the Walker family, Ivy League legacy graduate, whose family made much of its money in developing industries in Africa, without destroying the environment like some of the more infamous dynasties (e.g., DeBeers). The family maintains a rather large tract of privately owned wilderness reserve in Bangalla (bordering on Tanzania), which is also the home of several indigenous tribes. Walker, who is named Christopher after his father, is something of a globetrotter, spending some time in Gotham and other East Coast American cities, but is just as likely to be found anywhere between London and New Dehli.

Walker is a handsome young man of fine New England stock, and maintains a trim figure that made him a star track star, swimmer, and collegiate wrestler. The Walkers and the Waynes have had occasion to move through the same circles, especially when global philanthropy is concerned. Whether or not the Batman has crossed paths with the Ghost Who Walks is completely up to the Gamemaster.

Another Suggestion

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

The Devil. In comic canon, Bruce Wayne has met Hunter Rose and Batman has faced both the original Grendel and the cyborg Grendel-Prime. However, given the time period you're setting it in, either Christine Spar, the second Grendel, or Brian Li Sung, the third Grendel, would be appropriate.