Grand Warlord Tempest and the Sentinels of the Evil Alternate Universe

So the other day in the Twitch stream people got onto the topic of talking about Iron Tempest/Grand Warlord Tempest in an alternate timeline where Tempest conquers the Thorathian fleet but goes over to the dark side in the process, and were coming up with fake cards Iron-Legacy-style with taking their normal cards and making them high-powered and destructive and honestly I thought it was kind of a funny/entertaining idea.

Any other evil alternate twins people would find interesting/want to see?

I've actually got a half-completed project along these lines, just narration and ideas laying out. The difference being, the heroes and villains don't swap sides (for the most part), they swap powers. So M'kk Dall'ton fights evil alongside a band of freed Genebound, against a battered and ego-bruised Voss and his massive weather-controlling powers. I never posted it because A) it's not finished (I can't, for the life of me, figure some of these out) and B) I dunno where I would.

Jeysie: That's awesome. I've wondered about Sky-Scraper as a Coliseum champion taking Kaargra's place. Also there's that comic cover that they came out with showing variant Prime Wardens, which included Apostate as Fanatic, making me wonder if she switched places with him...

TakeWalker: Currently, we're not to post variants straight up, so yeah, not here. I hope when OblivAeon drops, we can move that stuff here to keep the community thriving with helpful interactions.

RIght now, that stuff does happen over on the BoardGameGeek site, though! Not a bad spot to go for that stuff.

@Bowie: Didn't that cover also include a good-aligned Akash'Bhuta? So, a world where Mother Nature is a benign force and the Virtuosos are agents helping civilization to wipe out the natural environment with steel and concrete?

Seemed to have a good-aligned Ermine, as well, IIRC.

Also, maybe I should have posted this in the fanfiction forum, then? Oops.

Yeah, it did. But I'm less intrigued to try to imagine a "good" Akash since we're getting one!

http://sotm.wdfiles.com/local--files/sotm-arg/bethegate.jpg is the picture.
Skyscraper as Tempest
Parse as Captain Cosmic
Setback as Legacy somehow
Apostate as Fanatic
Akash’Bhuta Goodly-like
Ermine Goodly-like
Chrono-Ranger as an Indigenous woman.

Only Fanatic-Apostate really fit well as a ‘hero/villain switch’ inspiration, but they all are interesting for sure.

This is the right place to spitball these story ideas, I think! It's just like posting straightup variants.

True, but there's a difference between "I'm 'good' for the time being because I don't want the place I keep my stuff to blow up" and "I'm good because I'm good and my usual adversary is now the bad guys". It's fun imagining what circumstances led to the latter scenario.

Kind of like Fem!Luminary and the Legacy of Destruction versus Blade!Luminary.

If you really wanted to do full reversal, Evil Overlord Tempest does not conquer, he destroys. He has destroyed hundreds of planets. The surviving refugees want to fight back but don't know how. There is a man who is willing to stand up to Tempest. Freedom General Voss. Voss gathers his army of refugees of various planets and together they fight to stop the mad destruction of Evil Overlord Tempest.

I dig it! That could also feasibly be the same world where Sky-Scraper is "Tempest", as obviously a "good" member of Tempest's race instead of Voss's.

Also, in retrospect, the whole "Good Akash/Bad Virtuosos" idea would probably need a theme change anyway to fit well. Like a setup where the virtuosos are instead experts in whatever passes for the most prominent technological devices in their era, with Anthony himself being instead a sort of cyberpunkish hacker/decker type of archetype.

I'd be very interested in seeing an evil vampire Haka or a good Miss Information that is redeemed.

We did see one. She got time-brain-swapped-thingy-magiggy with the bad version that died-but-somehow-didn't-die. Somewhere, in some time, there is a dead miss information with the brain and memories of the original good one.

Parse was overwhelmed by the Cosmitron data that gave her powers originally, and became emotionless and determined to destroy humanity. Miss Information, instead of being upset that she wasn’t saved, was instead filled with pride that her heroes would prioritize the greater good over all else, and decided to take action so that next time she won’t need saving. She was the first to notice the malicious hacking of Parse, and coordinated the other heroes to quickly put down the threat.

Variants? I'm talking completely new decks! :B That I don't want to make. So I'm actually just talking stories explaining how the characters work now. Maybe it would fit in Fanfiction...

Evil Haka would basically be DC's Vandal Savage, but that character changes quite a bit over his eternal lifespan.  To make Haka different from Iron Legacy, one might use a Haka from the far future–either one finally driven mad with loneliness in the Final Wasteland future, or one from a different timeline that ended badly.  That could give him not just physical strength, but technology as well.  Shock Taiaiha and Atomic Mere?

Evil Absolute Zero would be basically Mr. Freeze.  Mechanically that might be too similar to Spite, with his constant HP yo-yoing and bringing out modules instead of drugs.

Of course, Tachyon, Bunker, and Wraith have evil twins in the game already (and DC has the Reverse Flash), although Wraith shows a much darker side in the Iron Legacy future.  Wraith might actually make an interesting promo variant of The Chairman, who gets down and dirty directly (though stealthily) herself.

Sounds like we might be getting an evil Visionary and an even-more-evil Harpy/Matriarch as Scions of Oblivaeon.  So we can wait and see how (and if) that works out.  I've suspected we might get the evil Virtuoso of the Void as a Scion as well, but if we don't, that could be really interesting as well.  I'd like to see a mechanic where he attaches melodies, harmonies and rhythms to each other to create composite ongoings with unique effects.

Nightmist might lend herself directly to an Iron Legacy-type "twisted cards" design, and could be legitimately terrifying.  She has plenty of reason to be evil without digging at all.

I'd like to see an evil Setback, actually.  His cards would have to be changed so that they always have an effect, but that effect depends on the size of his unlucky pool and how many points get expended from it.  Easy enough to have an alternate timeline where the drugs that made him twisted his mind like all the other subjects of the Spite program.

As for the Naturalist, I'm thinking of a version that did not repent at the end of his series of transformations.  As a result, he transforms constantly and uncontrollably.  On his front side, he can have only one form out at a time, like the basic Naturalist, and his one-shots have different effects based on which one is in play.  But on his flip side, he can have multiple forms out, representing bizarre hybrid creatures as he becomes more unstable in his rage, which makes his one-shots two or more times as dangerous.

I think evil Setback would be the one possible character flip I'd find more disturbing than interesting, just because normal Setback is just so much made of cute nice guy sugar-pie adorableness. It's like turning a puppy evil.

He just wants a hug! D:

Why not have a Haka from a different universe who got corrupted at a young age. When his triumphant return was not well received, he slaughtered his village in a fit of rage, and due to his ability to withstand the test of time, absorbed the souls, and energy of his enemies. He continued to do so going to village to village, on an endless rampage, his rage intensifying, he just gets bigger and stronger, slowly consuming the energies of not just the people he murdered, but of everything around him. Eventually, he started to emit an aura, making anything around him lose control and attack without warning. Making him an unstoppable force. 

I was thinking something similar about Unity. Not that it would be so disturbing, but incredibly tragic.

Yeah, that's certainly true, Unity is another one I have a hard time seeing as being evil, ever.

I think I could buy her as a sort of Obliviously Destructive Mad Engineer, though, where she kind of innocently goes around reshaping every inch of metal and electronics in her wake into her cutesy toys and robots and not really comprehending this is not a very good or moral idea because it's just so much fun.

You could have it where Setback is the one member of the group that doesn't have an evil counterpart. Setback is always a good guy no matter which universe you go in.

Now I'm picturing an alternate universe with Setback as a good-natured nice fellow who's just too ditzy to cotton on that the rest of his team is not actually on the up-and-up like he is. I can work with that.

Setback being a good guy is a "fixed point?"  That would explain the effect of the Spite drugs on him.  Him as the protagonist of that whole storyline would be a lot of fun.

Haka's mana going out of control would be a pretty great idea.  Maybe at first he accidentally killed someone in self-defense, but holding onto a captured soul and not striking back out with it started to drain him psychologically.  At first he became more violent but refused to use the mana for violence, then realized that holding onto it increased his strength and chose not to.  Mechanically, he could be like Chokepoint--he could even have "hero" targets in his own deck, and grow stronger as he destroys them, environment targets, and anything else he can get his hands on.

I can easily see Unity ask just plain selfish, which is pretty close to evil.  She might even delight in watching her creations kill people, just because she's so proud of them.  That would be less her "becoming" evil, more her lacking a moral center to begin with.

But I can also see her becoming evil due to rejection.  She desperately wants to be accepted.  What if Tachyon refused her into the F5 because her "audition" robot turned out too violent?  She could become a supervillain just because she felt she had something to prove.  Maybe not a "conquer/destroy the world" sort of villain, but maybe an Iron Legacy sort, who does evil things with good(-ish) intentions.

There's also Golem Unity, who has a clear "corrupted AI" path to becoming evil.  Maybe she wasn't copied over correctly and just comes out evil, or maybe she just ends up on one of the paths above.

Unity aquires the Matriarch’s mask and starts making cyborg birds that she regards as her children.

@MindWanderer:

...I never connected before that Setback was a part of the same experiment as Spite.

I had thought it was two totally separate experiments. Baron Blade trying to figure out how to enhance himself produced Setback, while Spite was a product of The Chairman doing experiments in Pike Industries presumably for more stuff to sell.

@Arcanist Lupus:

Ooh, I like the way you think.

Spite and Setback aren't part of the same set of experiments.  Spite had the drugs tested on him at Pike Industries and Setback's experiments were done at RevoCorp.   Setback's powers came about due to Baron Blade trying to reverse engineer his regression serum.    Spite's drug testing were part of the Chairman's experiments  in the Barzakh Wing of Pike Laboratories and he later uses some of the drugs himself to become Exemplar in Sentinel Tactics.

Ah, you’re right. I put that together in my head a long time ago and never fact-checked myself when I knew more about the setting later.

Ironically if you'd been right, it would have been a pretty tidy explanation for why Setback's niceness is a fixed point. Namely that the compounds work like Super Serum in the Marvel universe.

So use the compounds on a serial killer and you get a hate-crazed super-strong and powerful bloodthirsty obsessed serial killer.

And use the compounds on a somewhat ditzy nice guy and you get a really sweet incredibly nice guy with a peak physique who has Ditzy Luck Powers.

Of course this kind of also implies that Spite being a scary mass murdering SOB is also a fixed point, so, uh, maybe this not being the case is for the best.

I want to read this one. Or better yet, see it.

I put my vote torward Fixed Point Setback. I think that would be an interesting mini-series adventure in the comics, with the Inter-Dementional League of Setbacks Nabbing our Setback for an adventure.

Is that like a ditzier version of the Interdimensional Council of Reeds?

You read Hickman's run on fantastic Four! Isn't it the best!

I've read a little of it, enough that I want to read the rest at some point. Hickman is pretty much a mad genius and I miss him writing for Marvel (though thankfully Al Ewing is a mad British genius which makes up for it somewhat).

An evil Idealist would be terrifying, Same with Medico

Did we ever get anything official about Haka, souls, and absorbing them? That sounds really cool, but I've never heard anything like it before

Just Savage Mana, and its flavor text:

"The essence of defeated opponents serves well to strengthen a warrior." - Ambuscade, The Deadliest Game #2

Didn't we get a sort of anti-heroic, at least, Medico with his Malpractice variant?

The Foil Dr Medico Voidguard has him/his power being corrupted by someone on his incap side, I don't think that makes him evil anymore than a mind wrested Blade Battalion becomes good but it is interesting to see that Dr Medico's power can be corrupted that way.

I imagine it's no worse than Dark Visionary, vis-a-vis being corrupted. He's still fighting for the heroes, just, y'know, beating face more than healing it.