Time for another group of these, ahead of time relative to Bsky! I'm just really happy with a few of these and am impatient to share them, LMAO
I don't know what to call this group, but they're all related; their unlocks are based on kill-counts, their weapons (mostly) bounce, and are available in Big Trouser's shop, and they all get more Amount as they level.
Oh, and they all transform, even if two of them haven't had their transformations released yet. They've been teased in trailers/leaks.
Before I do the next City of Heroes OC profile, I feel inclined to lay out some background. This is the lich from Loop Hero, his name is Omicron. He is far and away my #1 poor little meow meow.
Most simply, he's the villain I would become if given vast power. His goal is to preserve the universe so that nothing ever fades or becomes lost (in his words, "to solve the entropy problem"). Faced with the impossibility of this task in a living cosmos, he chooses to slice the universe into fragments and preserve them all in stasis; to functionally end the universe and set up a The Universe Museum.
One of my favorite details to characterize his obsession with preservation is that he bursts out of a shard of amber when you approach to confront him:
There's also a fun, eerily existential note in his in-game journal indicating that he's uncertain whether he's the original him, or if he's just an array of spells he developed to mimic his own behavior while his body was asleep or incapacitated.
His journal entries are on the wiki and are a very quick read.
I've previously mentioned my fixation on the fantasy concept of liches: eternally undead sorcerers who are a natural fit for almost any villainous mastermind position you have available.
But I also liked the idea of a heroic lich, perhaps animated by holy power instead of necromantic. The character I wound up creating was influenced by many sources, including Omicron, but was catalyzed by this little guy:
Mortaccio is one of the unlockable characters in Vampire Survivors. I unlocked him early on because, naturally, I wanted to play as a skeleton. His little halo intrigued me. I guessed that he must be the bones of a saint, risen out of some dusty tomb or reliquary to oppose the hordes of evil monsters and milk elementals and whatnot. That's when I got the idea for a character who would come to be named Saint Malleus.
It's not their homeland though. It wasn't theirs to begin with.
Yes it was, they're pretty much all that's left of the Canaanites.
Archeological evidence going back thousands of years places them there.
Digs in the northern territories found a layer they date back around 4000 or more years where one particular area just stopped consuming pork and there's other things that start to stick out in there too.
Written references going back into ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria all exist and actually back up the books of 1&2 Kings and 1&2 Chronicles, more the 2nd books of each but still.
That is unless you're referencing the nazi talking point about European Jews not being real Jews.
At which point you might reconsider your position. Since DNA proves that one wrong.
For populations of the Jewish diaspora, the genetic composition of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jewish populations show significant amounts of shared Middle Eastern ancestry. According to geneticist Doron Behar and colleagues (2010), this is "consistent with a historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelites of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World".
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Citing autosomal DNA studies, Nicholas Wade estimates that "Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have roughly 30 percent European ancestry, with most of the rest from the Middle East." He further noticed that "The two communities seem very similar to each other genetically, which is unexpected because they have been separated for so long." Concerning this relationship he points to Atzmon's conclusions that "the shared genetic elements suggest that members of any Jewish community are related to one another as closely as are fourth or fifth cousins in a large population, which is about 10 times higher than the relationship between two people chosen at random off the streets of New York City".
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There's all that, and the shared culture they have even though they were separated in diaspora for as long as they were.
It's their homeland they are indigenous to the area, their faith is indigenous to the area, historical records, archeological finds, and genetics all prove that.
When the Mortaccio character sparked my concept of Saint Malleus, I hadn't fallen fully into City of Heroes yet, but I had been playing Homecoming sporadically. I didn't know what else to do with the character, so I made him into a CoH hero.
At first he was named Saint Clavicle, and his initial costume was pretty awkward looking. I made the costume shown above after I had become far more fluent with the costume creator.
Instead of taking the obvious path of making him a healer (which is not as crucial a role in CoH as it is in many MMOs), I chose Energy Blast and Darkness Manipulation as his power sets. I colored the Energy attacks white with gold to give them a "holy radiance" feel.
For the Shadow Manipulation powers, I gave them a pretty typical black/purple "void energy" color scheme.
However, all this refinement of the CoH character happened after I had developed the character in much more detail during a tabletop game.
My D&D group had just wrapped up the Phandelver campaign, and we decided to switch to the Fate rules to play a game in an urban fantasy setting.
Fate encourages you to hash out a pretty thorough background for your character. To set the tone for Malleus, I decided he had been born the year of the Cadaver Synod, and had a contentious relationship with the church authorities during his natural life, which was of course amplified when he rose from the dead a thousand years later.
Malleus' HeroForge incarnation
He awoke with a blue gemstone pendant around his neck (his phylactery equivalent), no memory of how he died, and no idea why he had risen again.
In our setting, all player characters had been contacted by a spirit guide as part of their backstory. The contact would last a few days and would alter the trajectory of their lives in some way. Shortly after his resurrection, Malleus was contacted by Judas, who revealed that he had not informed on Jesus to the Romans, and had likely been assassinated and framed for the betrayal.
I leaned hard into the Dan Brown-style secret history angle. Here's the background summary I used for the tabletop game:
Saint Malleus
High Concept Aspect: The Resurrected Saint of Exiles (i.e. a holy lich)
Trouble Aspect: Hunted by the Vatican
Phase aspects:
Searching for lore
Why/how was he resurrected
What is the blue gemstone pendant he awakened with
Why was Judas (his spirit guide) framed
Sympathy for the lost
as the Saint of Exiles he has an affinity for refugees, outcasts, and so-called heretics
Accountability for the Church
In life, he often clashed with church authorities for aiding and harboring ‘undesirables’
Seeks to uncover the dark secrets that drive the church’s historical and current misdeeds
Current-day friendly contacts:
Father Alfred Molina: a priest in Malleus’ seaside hometown of Porta di Rossi who befriended him shortly after he was awakened. Father Molina recommended a priest in the OKC diocese, an expert on resurrections, who might help Malleus elucidate his condition. However, the sudden arrival of a malevolent Vatican black-ops agent meant Malleus had to flee before Molina could put him in touch with Balthus.
Father Norman Balthus: A scholar of the esoteric who ministers in Oklahoma City. Malleus is looking to contact him in a way that won’t tip off the Vatican.
Adversaries:
Paragons of Anathiel: Vatican black-ops. Based on rumors from the townsfolk of Porta di Rossi, these assassins initially thought Malleus was a demonic entity, contributing to the failure of their first attempt at slaying him.
At the table, I voiced Malleus in a Comedy Italian accent, probably mostly inspired by Father Guido Sarducci of SNL fame. We played two major story arcs, and Malleus was able to banish his phylactery's evil counterpart by sacrificing his own, which resulted in him being re-fleshed and restored to natural life, or at least the appearance of it.
