The Superteam Handbook and Anti-Earth

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RainOnTheSun
Posts: 1152
Joined: Wed May 03, 2017 7:20 am

The Superteam Handbook and Anti-Earth

Post by RainOnTheSun »

This are some notes I made for myself on the latest M&M supplement that came out. I posted them on the main forum, but never on this one, so... now I am!
RainOnTheSun
Posts: 1152
Joined: Wed May 03, 2017 7:20 am

Re: The Superteam Handbook and Anti-Earth

Post by RainOnTheSun »

Anti-Earth is one of my favorite things about the setting. I think it's because DC's Crime Syndicate of Amerika is the opposite of a world where the heroes are the strongest and smartest and most powerful beings on earth, so you get a completely doomed world, but when you apply that to a more Marvel-like world where the heroes are the underdogs as often as not, what you get isn't hopeless, it's just... different. There's more room to do different things with it. I liked the Superteam Handbook a lot, too, so!

UNIQUE on Anti-Earth:

There's no actual team called Unique on the Tyranny Syndicate's world. If there was, the Syndicate wouldn't stand for it, and they have the advantage in numbers and resources. There's just a woman with an agenda who knows a few other people.

The Matriarch:

The woman who calls herself the Matriarch has walked the earth for hundreds of years, watching peace and kindness in human society be ground down by the strong and cruel, and she is pleased. Generation by generation, she sees the human race becoming colder. Deadlier. Moving closer to its destiny as the apex predator of the universe. Her plans for the world didn't include the Praetor's rise and fall, but she knows that the history of humanity is a cycle of oppressive order and bloody chaos. The Matriarch is confident that the Tyranny Syndicate is doomed to collapse without the Praetor's firm hand, and she quietly puts her pieces in place to ensure that the chaos that follows the Syndicate's end is the bloodiest yet.

Doctor Marston:

The Anti-Earth counterpart to Epiphany takes pride in the fact that she's never tested a poison or drug on anyone else that she hasn't also tested on herself. If the others die, or beg her to kill them, that's hardly her fault. If she gets stronger every time her body is tested, maybe that's just evolution at work. For a while Doctor Marston did very well for herself, providing medical consultations to the Tyranny Syndicate some of the time and staying out of their way the rest of the time. Then the Praetrix, newly cloned and looking to inherit the Praetor's reputation as the strongest person in the world, decided to find Doctor Marston and punch her through a skyscraper "just so everyone knows I can."

The battle that followed wasn't quite as one-sided as the Praetrix had hoped it would be, but it destroyed Doctor Marston's labs (along with most of downtown Columbus) and made her an enemy of the Syndicate. With her base of operations gone and the most powerful group in the world as an enemy, Doctor Marston was in serious danger. Fortunately for her, the Matriarch made contact with her and offered to fund her work. She now has a new laboratory in Viridian City, where she can study the people affected by Lady Anarchy's Chaos Storm and the fascinating notes of one Dr. Gordon Shockley. She also has a nice little summer home in La Jolla, California.

El Pararrayos:

Rolando Santiago has always wanted one thing: love. When he couldn't get it from family or friends, he turned to his engineering talent and electrical powers. As El Pararrayos, the lightning rod, he he sometimes punishes small-time criminals with spectacular displays of excessive force, but the battles that made him famous are the ones where he defends Mexico from giant mechanical menaces. He knows the powers and weaknesses of these robots better than anyone, because he builds them himself. Some people who see his apparent heroism are inspired to become superheroes themselves, but none of them last very long. Rolando sees to that personally. El Pararrayos doesn't need any help.

Rolando doesn't dare attack the Tyranny Syndicate, but he hates them all. Not because of their crimes, but because the eyes of the world are constantly on them. He craves that level of fame, positive or negative, and he'd do anything to get it. The Matriarch sympathizes with him and encourages his jealousy. She shares exotic technology with him from her contacts all over the world, he deciphers it for her, and they both benefit. He's already started to incorporate the gravitic and temporal field generators she's shown him into his battlesuit.

Madame Najjar and the Orateur:

Pierre LeMaitre was a talented, ambitious, and extremely persuasive lawyer who received a strange offer of employment from a man claiming to be a wizard from Atlantis. The world had been corrupted and deceived by the Praetor's arrival, the wizard said, but with Pierre's help, he could cast a spell that would open the eyes of the world to the truth. The people would throw off their shackles and a new age of peace and freedom would begin. Pierre thought this was all nonsense, but the wizard paid well, and he'd never actually met a wizard before, so he accepted.

The ritual might have worked, if the wizard's apprentice hadn't killed him halfway through it with his own magic knife. As it was, the spell connected Pierre to a truth of sorts, but it was a truth so horrible that it destroyed the young lawyer's personality instantly. It breaks the will of anyone else he shares it with, too, which was a nice stroke of luck for Blackberry Shu Najjar, who now has two powerful magical weapons at her command for the price of a single murder. The only person she's ever seen the Orateur's secret fail against is the woman called the Matriarch, and she isn't sure if the Matriarch knows some way of nullifying it, or if the Orateur's secret is something she already knows and has become accustomed to. Neither possibility pleases Madame Najjar.

(I imagine the Matriarch to be a lot like Young Justice's interpretation of Vandal Savage. She believes in humanity more than anyone, it's just what part of humanity she believes in that causes problems. El Rayo is a brilliant inventor with a love for superheroes and a need for attention, and it seems to me that when you make that evil what you get is Syndrome from the Incredibles. And the Orateur is just a walking Anti-Life Equation.)
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