Vengeance Heroes

Hey!  We finally have the Vengeance Heroes released!

K.N.Y.F.E. - ex-filter super-cop.  Her nemesis isn't clear.

The Sentinels - a team of four heroes, includes Mainstay (the brick), Dr. Medico (the healer), the Idealist (the psychic), and Writhe (the dark hero).  Nemesis of La Capitan.

the Naturalist - captain planet sort of guy.

Setback - Both physically boosted and weirdly lucky/unlucky.  Nemesis of Kismet, member of the Dark Watch (nealy mentioned team).

Parse - We finally get an archer hero!  And a math nerd!  Nemesis of Miss Informaiton.

I'm kind of bummed that we didn't get the fifth Prime Warden.

It looks like we now have nemesis for all of the published villains now. 

I'm surprised you would link naturalist to Captain Planet and not Beast Boy. And do that over linking The Sentienls to the Fantastic Four. Setback always reminded me of Gambit (from Xmen) but less cooler it looks, and it's more akin Longshot.

When you think about it, The Scholar's actually closer to Captain Planet than The Naturalist. Cap could change into elements, or control them, but couldn't transform into animals.

I'm not familiar with Beast Boy, but I guess that fits.  Considering that Captain Planet is elemental and not animalistic, that's a bad comparison.

After thinking about it longer, I realized that yeah, the Sentinels are the fantastic four.  There's a four element thing going: Earth - Mainstay, Fire - Dr. Medico, Air - Idealist, Water - Writhe.  Plus the team has a familial connection.  It's pretty cool.

KNYFE sounds like Nick Fury.

Parse looks like Green Arrow + Oracle.  I'm really looking forward to that one.

Setback seems to have gotten a Captain America style supersoldier serum, he has Longshot's luck powers, and the brains of Booster Gold.

I… Think the new heroes are all original and interesting. I personally think most comparisons like this are kinda forced, and not really useful.

Probably just me, though.

I like the new heroes, and I agree that they're all original, but it's fun to think of them in terms of storytelling niches they fill.

For example, I've been hoping for an archer hero for a while, and I'm glad we're getting one.  I'm also glad that she doesn't mirror Hawkeye or Green Arrow - she's a good take on the archetype.

It's interesting seeing the different perspectives here. Now I'm not a comic book or superhero fan, and basically I know very little about the majority of the "real" superheroes the new Vengeance guys are being compared to.

I've heard of the more mainstream ones - I know the Fantastic Four but couldn't tell you their names, I could recognise maybe 5 of the X-men by sight, but other than that it's just basically the usual Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, etc.

So yeah, I'm somewhat superhero-naive. I wonder how much that affect the way I assess the Vengeance guys? I'm obviously lacking the "wow, this hero is great, they remind me of IguanaBoy* and he's very cool" and the "bah, that hero's a bit of a Napalm Shark Wrangler expy and that sucks".

Napalm Shark Wrangler was a great character until he jumped the... well you know

And now I want to know if that hero wrangeled sharks made of napalm or if their power was to produce napalm sharks for others to wrangled, or if they were just called Napalm and happen to wrangle sharks for a living, or whatever.

superheroes have been created for the past 50 years, it's impossible to create new ones and avoid comparisons with popular ones if you keep within the tropes of the superheroes genre. The challenge then it's to make ones that are fresh and original and worth knowing over older ones and I think GTG has done a good job at that. No hero truly feels like a rip-off or watered down version of one from another IP, each one feels unique enough to stand on it's own. So when comparisons are drawn they are more in a light of homage towards the source that (probably) inspired them. So I do think it's cool to draw the comparisons since they give a broader perspective to interpret the characters.

I'll draw comparisons for new players. I play in a gaming club, so we're a bunch of geeks. If someone has a favourite superhero, I'll pull a Sentinels character who is thematically or mechanically similar, to help them get the feel of the game.

Which makes me sad that my two favorite DC characters are completely un-resembled by anything in Sentinels so far.  We don't have a shapeshifting telepath like Martian Manhunter (Visionary gets the telepathy and Naturalist at least some shapeshifting, but nothing resembling the combo), nor does anyone conjure energy objects from their imagination like Green Lantern.  For that matter, there isn't anyone who bears much resemblance to Wonder Woman, my #3, either (Fanatic is vaguely closest, but entirely fails for my purposes).  None of this would sting if not for how obvious Wraith is as a Batman homage, how nearly Tachyon resembles the Flash, and how much Legacy looks like Superman (even if his deck functions a lot more like a Captain America archetype).  The Sentinels designers chose to channel inspiration from about half of the core membership of the JLA…and unfortunately it was precisely the half I like least.  (The core JLA is also generally assumed to include Aquaman and debatably Hawksomething; Cyborg is sometimes included but he more properly belongs with the Teen Titans, and putting him into JLA is usually an act of tokenism for the more popular team, when they aren't using John Stewart as their GL.)

I usually describe the Agent Adept as a green lantern that switches the color theme for a music theme.  The Virtuoso of the Void title sounds similar to a Green Lantern job description.

I think Fanatic can sometimes fill the Wonder Woman niche (physically powerful woman with strong will).  However, Haka is as close to Wonder Woman as he is the Hulk.  He comes from an island, he has physical powers which are magical in nature.  It maybe fits.

I don't think we have a Martian Manhunter character at all.  Tempest is the only alien we have, and like you said, we have no shapeshifter heroes at all.

Haka doesn't feel at all like the Hulk to me, but comparing him to Wondy?  No, just…just no.    I forget who I felt he compared best to, but I'm sure we've had other culture-based warrior types.  He doesn't get his power from rage, so the Hulk comparison doesn't work for me…if anything, I might compare him to the Thing, minus ugliness.

Adept as GL is at best an incredibly vague similarity at best.  If his songs formed into physical objects, I would buy that as GL-esque, but instead, they're just random bits of music jargon which have one or two effects randomly slapped onto them.  This is part of why he's one of my least favorite characters.  With the exception of Scherzo of Frost and Flame, none of his cards actually tell me what they do, let alone which of the three types they are; I find him to be both un-evocative and headache-inducing.

I would guess that as we are nowhere near cosmic events, yet that a GL stand in would be a way off (and released in that sort of expansion)

The Argent Adept is the Music Meister, but good. Random snippets of songs are sung occasionally at our games.

And he could totally be voiced by Neil Patrick Harris, as per Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

I think having the vocabulary to know what the names of the Adept's song titles mean probably helps. I mean, "alacritous" means speedy, with alacrity. A bulwark is like a protective structure/wall/fort thingy. Dissonance is what happens when two notes "clash", sounding wrong together. And so on. He's not the only character to use long words in his card names - look at Ab'Zero, for example (Null-Point Calibration Unit, Isothermic Transducer...) ;).

In terms of comparison of Sentinels heroes to alreayd-existing ones, I'm basically in the same area as Silverleaf - I've heard of all the most famous ones but I don't know what they all do (Green Lantern wears green and has some kind of...magic ring...thingy). I just tend to look at Sentinels decks and base my opinion on how they feel to play. Unity is good but can take a while to get started and has a bad time if lots of AE damage is coming out, Omni-10 has loads of cool stuff but suffers if he gets hit for a lot and doesn't have the right plating out (and sometimes even if he does), the Adept seemed complicated at first but turned into my favourite once I got the hang of him, etc.

The Green Lantern analogue is totally Unity. Creates a wide variety of things useful for any situation!

That…is actually a really good point, and I hope you are correct.  PLEASE do this, >G!  I would love to see the Brass Beacon Brigade bringing their arsenal of Xth-Metal nanotech creations.  It'd be a great reason to make a Hero who relies heavily on creating new Hero Targets, without having to jump through as many hoops for it as Unity.

Not the same thing at all.  GL constructs are wished into being ex nihilo.  If Unity was GL, she wouldn't need parts or Construction Pylons; she'd just squint funny and create a "robot" out of stationary lightning, which would be as likely to deal any other damage type as lightning damage.  Golem-Spawn Unity sort of gets close (taking damage to put a card out does feel something like creating a construct through pure willpower, though 4 is an awful lot), but a real GL homage character wouldn't be prohibited from playing their constructs straight-out; they'd be balanced as something you can bust out as easily as Legacy throws a punch or Wraith invents a new gadget.  Also the GL rings let you do stuff like flying or putting out fires; Uni seems to lack such versatility (indeed, she has no Ongoing cards, while GL's forcefields and intangibility and such definitely would be represented as such, rather than being targetable, even if they're technically the same thing as the constructs).

I have an excellent vocabulary, so I know those things.  It's just the music jargon that's unfamiliar to me.  Off the top of my head, I can recall Sarabande of Destruction, Inspiring Supertonic, the heal-everybody thing, Cedistic Dissonant, and Scherzo of Frost and Flame; the latter tells me what it does, and Supertonic gets discussed on this forum enough that I have some idea what it does.  Cedistic's spaceship-busting primary effect is pretty memorable, but I don't recall what its secondary effect is.  And Sarabande of Destruction both looks (artwise) and sounds (namewise) like it ought to deal damage, rather than just removing Ongoings or Environments (even though you "destroy" such cards mechanically, from a flavor perspective it tends to feel more like you're "disrupting" or "banishing" them, and the picture does show Argy blasting Akasha right in the face).  I'm fairly certain I got one or two other songs in play during my two games with him, but they failed to stick in my head, and memorizing all the Accompany parts (which can't be played off your base power, so I pay them less attention) will take a lot of time, while memorizing which are of which type will be difficult for me to ever accomplish.

(Green Lantern wears green and has some kind of…magic ring…thingy).

Only the 1940s Green Lantern's ring was magic; the modern version is alien super-science.  (Not that this is a terribly relevant distinction to non-geeks, but I think it makes a difference as to which kinds of writing are plausible enough not to break suspension of disbelief…although the writers haven't always observed that distinction well IMO.)

A friend of mine recently contributed a section to the Gonzoplanet podcast on Green Lantern, you can listen to it here

http://www.gonzoplanet.com/2013/09/greenlantern/

I honestly get a little bit of Deadpool vibe with Setback.

He gets his powers from the experiment of a bad guy's organization.

Has laughably terrible luck.

Seems like it's pretty hard to kill him. (his appearence in ExPatriette's deck/ his bio pics of him standing in a room full of explosives about to go off and tackling Plague Rat off of a roof top.)

Super wacky personality.


Easily the hero i'm looking forward to most which is really saying something with how good these five look.

Being a musician myself I did know most of the "jargon" but I don't find that it really helps. Subdominant and Supertonic are just names of particular notes in the scale for example, and I have trouble linking them to what the card actually does. The adjectives Alacritous and Inspiring are far more helpful there, so I don't think you actually need to know the terminology.

Can I recommend Spiff's search sheets? There's a helpful little table there that shows which instrument does what. Easier than memorising.

For anyone who doesn’t have them but is insterested, Spiff’s search sheets are on his Print-and-play page, under “Deck Search Sheets”.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. I said in my rambling thoughts about the bios that if he doesn't break the fourth wall in at least one bit of flavour text, I'll be very disappointed.

I won't. Characters like Deadpool are more of an annoyance to good storytelling than anything else.

Characters like Deadpool are more of an annoyance to good storytelling than anything else.

/agree.

Subdominant is the 4th degree of your Tonic scale. In laymans terms, if you had a song in the key of C (C being the Tonic, or root), then the Subdominant chord would be F (as F is the 4th note in a C scale). It is a very important chord within music as the relationship between the Tonic, Subdominant and the Dominant (the 5th scale degree) is the backbone of all contemporary harmonic theory. Between the Tonic and Subdominant, there is very little disonance, making modulations from the I to IV relaxing on the ear and there is little tension to play off of.

A Supertonic is the 2nd scale degree of your Tonic chord (so if C is your Tonic, D- is your Supertonic). Notice that the D is minor here as opposed to the major C and the major F of the subdominant. The Supertonic creates a lot of tension with the Tonic chord but has a tonal tendancy to need to move to the Dominant 5th and strengthen that progression.

EDIT: To continue this thought, Alacritous means a "cheerful willingness or eagerness". An Alacritous Subdominant makes sense from a harmonic viewpoint. It is cheerful, since there is very little tension present in relation to the Tonic. I forget what the actual card does without it in front of me, but maybe there is a good connection to be made to the game mechanics. 

The Inspiring Supertonic also fits very well. The purpose of the Supertonic in harmonic theory is to strengthen the harmonic progression and move it toward the Dominant chord. One could say that the Subdominant "inspires" the Dominant chord in this way, which has easy litteral translations into the game mechanics and inspiring other heros to become the dominant hero with out of turn power uses. It also chains and extends into other chord progressions easily, just as it allows AA to chain additional effects.

Alacritous Subdominant, if I remember rightly, has the Perform text of letting someone (including the Adept) play a card, while its Accompany is that the Adept can use a power now but Alacritous Subdominant is destroyed once that power is resolved.

I had no idea a tonic was something music-related. I was just thinking of a medicinal kind of tonic, lol.

Depending upon who is writing him.  I found Joe Kelly's run to be incredibly lackluster, but Daniel Way portrayed him more as a character who wanted to do good but was constitutionally incapable of it.  In my experience, bad storytelling is an annoyance to good storytelling more than any disappoiting character.

I approve very much of using a character's insanity as an excuse to have them break the fourth wall.  I can't swear to how effective it is in Deadpool, but I used it to great effect on some lunatic NPCs in my D&D game.

Breaking the 4th Wall only effectively pulls the reader out of the escapism of the submersion into that world.

so it better be funny ;-)

It can also be used to show the absurdity of a world you're in. In the case of Deadpool it's used to just show how isolated he is from everyone around him. He is unable to make lasting meaningful relationships with people and is forced to see the world in a skewed way to cope. I try to avoid universal statements when related to storytelling because any device can have meaning and move the story in an interesting direction. The question isn't whether or not the device itself is good, but whether or not it's appropriate for the story being told.

It doesn't seem to me like Setback is a good type of character to break the fourth wall with because he's very oblivious to what's going on around him. You can do it with Deadpool because it is established in the world that Deadpool is insane and just sees things differently from everybody else. Setback doesn't seem to have a skewed or impaired sense of reality. He's just very optimistic and isn't fully aware of what's going on around him at the time.

Added emphasis as that sentence is the truth and the light. 

...and then you take into account that Loki is the one that made Deadpool aware that he's a comic book character...

Some canon is more canon than others…

Edit: For clarification, Deadpool was breaking that 4th wall well before the Loki and DP interaction you are refering to. 

http://www.slushfactory.com/content/EpupypyZAZTDOLwdfz.php

We're all nothing more than products from the mind of a young man staring into a snow globe.

It is canon, after all.

Re: the discussion of the names of The Argent Adept's cards:

Besides being a game designer and a story-teller, I am also a musician with a good amount of theory background. Foote's explanation was excellent and spot-on. So, in short, I apologize for making things occasionally difficult to grasp by using more niche jargon, but I didn't just assign random music words to effects. Those names were considered carefully and shaped by the mechanical function of the cards.

As for Vengeance heroes, I'm thrilled to hear that people are resonating differently with each of the heroes. Some of you love all of them - some of you are more drawn to specific ones. They're all getting a lot of love, and I'm glad to see people as excited about what we're up to next as we are!