athelind: (Default)
athelind ([personal profile] athelind) wrote2008-08-23 08:57 pm

The Hoard Potato: Tapping the Hive Mind

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.

[identity profile] morchades.livejournal.com 2008-08-24 09:30 am (UTC)(link)
Green freaking Lantern, man.

[identity profile] morchades.livejournal.com 2008-08-24 09:31 am (UTC)(link)
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?

[identity profile] athelind.livejournal.com 2008-08-24 03:29 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
Edited 2008-08-24 22:37 (UTC)

[identity profile] athelind.livejournal.com 2008-08-24 03:31 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, naturally.

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