"I'm stuck in this dream
It's changing me
I am becoming"
NIN - The Becoming
The recent quasi-revival of City of Heroes by fans is tempting me terribly to give it a try, despite being sure I'd wind up with a stolen identity and a virus-melted hard drive for logging in to a fan run game server. I'm also painfully aware how misplaced my nostalgia truly is, considering I quite cheerfully neglected to log into CoH for years prior to its final demise. In terms of gameplay it was a mind-numbing grindfest.
But you see, in yon days of yore there existed this concept of "roleplaying" and even for those like myself who never really got into the amateur theatre aspect, investing one's virtual selves with personal personality was a major selling point for online games. CoH excelled in inspiring and empowering users to do so, by letting you pick both a wide array of powers and an even wider array of costume pieces to mix-and-match into a unique individual look. Its graphics were simple enough to be expressive, detailed enough to express nuance. Certainly most players did not bother with this creative angle, and either hit the randomizer, copycatted print superheroes or just half-assed a completely nonsensical identity to feign nonchalance. However, a surprising proportion of CoH's population proved creative enough to turn heads. Each player could moreover pen one's own autobiography, and as the game heavily encouraged large alternate character rosters, I spent quite a bit of time coming up with alternate me-s.
Almost all of them were werewolves named Werewolfe, Werrewulfe, Werwulfe, etc. I had some other ideas, like a force field robot from beyond the solar system, or a teleporting assassin robot looking for its lost master, or a bird-winged lightning-summoner, or a clown with boxing gloves named The Unstoppable Farce, but mostly I took it as a challenge to interpret as many archetypes and powersets as I could in terms of lycanthropy, from magic to high tech, from punching to healing. Most of them were, to say the least, a bit of a stretch. And, while most of my CoH screenshots got nuked upon switching PCs last decade, I had a habit of writing my character descriptions into text files before pasting them into the game's interface. The largest of those text files survived. So, here they are, what few remain of the many-fold me of fifteen years ago:
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Earth / Storm Science Controller
The will may sometimes bind to itself even the wildest of forces.
Lost now to memory, an ancient thinker once sought immortality and found it in the tainted blood of Lycaon's cursed ilk. A hermit found the stones and sky echoing his howls. An alchemist linked his hunger to the natural forces of earth and air and brought them to serve at his fingertips. Of late, a wolf came out of the woods in Paragon City and calmly asked if he might have use of a physics laboratory.
What has the philosopher, the witch, the alchemist, the scientist sought through the ages? No sacrifice too great, no change too frightening, no battle too difficult, even against mortality, but for the gift of knowledge.
(This was my main.
The controller archetype was arguably the squishiest in the game on the hero side, but I delighted in taking its most defensive powersets and adopting a hulking brute aesthetic. It helped that earth and storm powers come across as druidic enough to lend myself a nature-mage air to suit my lycanthropy. Of course, since most of my characters were created long before City of Villains added wolf heads, claws and such to the existing costume options, my early incarnations mostly just looked like filthy hobos in torn clothing, with the odd fangs or darkened eyes to suggest bestial natures lurking beneath.
Hard to put a lycanthropic spin on far-reaching crowd control powers. It worked much better than anticipated. For as long as I played the game, I never got altogether bored of playing this guy.)
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Sonic / Dark Magic Defender
It has been centuries since the curse came upon me. If you hear the agony of my victims in my howls, mourn them not, for through their deaths you have gained an ally in this troubled night. It is through the madness of his hunger that the lycantrope gains respect for life and the will to defend it.
(Never was particularly crazy about this one. Too... "goth" for lack of a better term, for a healer. Should've just gone with a more druidic description.)
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Dark / Sonic Mutation Defender
What is lycantropy? An age-old curse or the natural advancement past our human forms? The scientists marvelled at my genetic make-up and called me transcendent. The commoners just screamed and called me "freak".
If, with every passing year, i feel as if i am changing into something new, why is my body taking on forms older than humanity itself? Why does my voice echo ever more clearly the primeval snarl and howl of the wolf, and why do i feel more at ease stalking through the night than under the celebrated sun?
Until i find the answers, i will remain among the hungry damned, the beast-men of the forest, the only ones who ever called me "brother". I do not yet share their strength or their resilience, their physical maleability or their torment of hunger, but it is perhaps because of these lacks that they see, in me, hope.
(Can't even remember what this one looked like. Much better angle on the description though.)
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Plants / Ice Magic Dominator
I am the dying echo of a world you'd wish forgotten. I am the vengeance of abandoned gods, pushed ever northwards by impertinent children playing at shaping their world. I am the icy breath of the tundra and the creak of the endless primordial taiga. I am the hunger of the world you've scarred, and the chilling embrace of the world-tree's roots follows behind me.
(Ah, my first villain. Yeah, I went for the "ancient evil" routine. Sue me. Also, for some reason my controllers tended toward magic backgrounds. Even I couldn't make too many of CoH's powersets fit a werewolf. Archery or fire or force fields just didn't mesh with my central theme. So I did a lot of regeneration, nature themes, darkness, howling, and so forth.)
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Necromancy / Poison Magic Mastermind
"The hunter in the moonlight, the stalker whose breath reeks of tombs and shallow graves... yes, yes, i have met him, i have seen him, never such a night as when he beckons you to surrender to his grisly feast. Soft paws and the velvet rumbling of his growl, it's all you'll know, just the caress of fangs is all his victims ever feel.
No death, no death, no peace and slumber for the bitten; his prey is ever a part of him. The shambling remnants of those he defiles herald his coming and the pestilence and venom of the scavanger's maw spread in his wake."
(Masterminds, for the record, were a villain pet class almost entirely dependent on their pets. Very fond of this one conceptually. Modern media tend to forget that old werewolf myths reflected, like vampires and ogres and other fangs in the night, the cannibalism taboo, and were also heavily associated with graveyards, grave-robbing, necromancy, etc. Real-life wolves' propensity for scavenging certainly helped.
I think the only thing I'd change now is having my venomous breath herald my coming and my shamblers tread in my wake.)
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Warshade
The other lives superimpose themselves on the present sometimes. Against the backdrop of this great metropolis i see a ravenous monster stalking old world forests through the ages. Opposed like a mirror image of the same beast is the ageless evil of the nictus, frantically wandering alien worlds in search of victims.
No. No more. Let the hungers within me feed on each other. Whatever the two halves of my being wrought upon the universe in their dark pasts, i shall redeem now.
(CoH featured an alien symbiote species, Kheldians, as superheroic origin story. They were difficult to write for, already having a pre-set backstory. You were basically creating only half a character. On the other hand, their transformation motif and warshades' own vaguely lycanthropic lore meshed almost too well with my predilections, to the point of redundancy.)
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Ice / Sonic Magic Corruptor
My shackles broken, captors scattered
My pain returned a hundred-fold
Yet cursed, by no remorse now burdened
I feel my hunger driving stronger than of old.
This pledge, to those who've sinned by one who's sinned:
Hide though you might behind your iron citadels and lies
My vengeance heralded by howls on arctic wind
Shall drown you lawful torturers' last cries.
(Another villain. Yes, some of these were in verse. Deal with it. What more appropriate wolf-man form of self-expression than... doggerel? And damnit, I still think this sounds like a badass antivillain declaration of war upon the world which wronged me. His costume was one of the later, wolf-headed ones, with chains wrapped around his bare torso. Guy was freakin' METAL!)
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Super strength / Dark armor Natural Brute
Not been born with sharp wolf fangs so i sharpened them myself. Ain't no son of a demigod, so i give my hatreds form. Never had no head for gadgets so my body's my greatest tool. I see reason beyond reason in the will to frustrate norms. I am myself, perfected and improved. It my strength which crushes your achievements, my will that saps your own. I am more, in myself, than you whole herd of humanity in your interdependencies.
(My tanky villain. Byron, eat your heart out.)
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Claws / Reflexes Science Stalker
A dash of this, a pinch of that. Fangs and claws and disembodied midnight howls, this is what little lycantropes are made of. Who says mad scientists can't do their own dirty work? Quick as your last breath and silent as your lost hopes, look for me under the full moon. One touch is all i want..
(A villain in a lab coat, complete with bright yellow lab gloves and hood obscuring his Mr. Hyde visage. Unsurprisingly, I had a lot of trouble fitting lycanthropy to the "science" and "technology" backgrounds. Thank you, Robert Louis Stevenson.)
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Sonic / Ice Technology Blaster
What do you expect of a lycantrope? A ravenous beast, fangs dripping with gore? A mindless monster on the outskirts of society? I have no interrest in being your superstition, your rumour, your primal fear. Accursed or bestial, i am at my core what i always was. This body is but a tool with which the mind can build, a framework upon which i, the intellect, can create new forms. Dynamos and amplifiers, capacitors, routers and zero-point energy drain, stacked fer-on-fur upon the howling, hulking predator whose body i inhabit. What is a lycantrope's body? To me, it's no more than a battery pack.
(I'm not much for damage-dealing in games. A blaster is such an inelegant weapon. Still, I ended up enjoying this guy more than I'd expected. He was a howler with a muzzle like Bane's from Batman, which fit more neatly than most of my creations. Plus, I still find "fer-on-fur" a delightfully pithy turn of phrase.)
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Arachnos Widow
Out of the forest and into the wild. I sometimes wonder what it must have been like before i was changed, before gunpowder, silver bullets and canine tracking teams. Ah, to have roamed the woods of mesopotamia and stumbled upon plentiful and unwary primitives, instead of scrambling to track down lost children by the highway before police sirens shatter the night.
If there's one thing you learn quickly in your first nights of hunger, it's that pride has little place under the full moon. Most lone wolves don't last long. I've learned to keep an open mind about... employment opportunities.
I usually have to keep a low profile. Even the most vicious humans don't trust me to keep my fangs to myself. What they don't know won't hurt them until it suits me. That's the beauty of Arachnos though. The fortunatas already knew my little secret by the time i found them.
And they didn't care.
(The villain counterparts to the heroic Kheldians were also difficult to write for. Though fully human, they were intrinsically tied into the main villain organization, which came with its own rather strict spider-themed aesthetic. There was absolutely nothing in Arachnos lore about werewolves. On the other hand, I had no trouble imagining that a ruthless megalomaniacal supervillain organization might keep werewolves on its payroll...
Coincidentally, since widows were described as an all-female order, this has been one of my scant handful of female characters in any game. Hey, you go where the lore takes you, even if it's to a snip-snip parlor.)
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Arachnos Soldier
I've been around. Climbed through the Black Forest with the trees crashing behind me, got out before the pack's empty stomachs turned us on each other. Hounded the wounded in Crimea and took three bayonets for every bite. Outran the rescue planes in the Alps when the hikers started carrying radios for emergencies. Circled London ten times over hoping for a power failure so the lights wouldn't cut through my fog cover. Got chased across the fjord by those older, stronger and hungrier than i was.
This isn't an age for old legends. There's little place for the hunters in the night beneath the glare of science. I've gone hungry for too long, far too often. And then a fortunata sought me out, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Said there's no shame in being domesticated. Just gotta play hound-dog for the right master. So i took the deal. I took the leash.
But hey.
All you can eat.
(One of the last characters I ever created. It was nearly 2010 and I was toying with the notion of starting a blog, having noticed I'd developed the ability to turn the odd phrase over the years. Man, I was really channeling Neil Gaiman with this one. I do like the sonority of "hounded the wounded" and "took the" repetition.)
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Ice / Stone Magic Tanker
Hoarfrost on your windows draped in candle-light
Daylight through the sunless hours on the plains veiled white
Tired bones all welcome creaking night by endless night
Permafrost on matted wolf-hair, and it still feels right.
No regrets for age-long bargains spoken under shimmering veils
Fear me, curse me, make of me the monster of your tales.
No regrets for dust returned to the dust from whence it rose
Tenfold i repay my blood price through the blood spilled by your foes.
Let my howls serve as your warning, stay inside tonight
Through my woods i'm called to follow a much older fright:
Fangs and claws, cold-hearted nightmares we once knew too well
But far greater gluttons they than can your stories tell.
Stay inside fair children, tired workmen, aged friends
Ageless i remain your monster, hunted foe to greater ends.
Stay inside and tell grim stories, out of winter's sight
Fear the fang and frost for sometimes, i must claim my right.
(Never really got to play him before losing interest in the game as a whole. Pity. More poetry but damnit, I'm kind of proud of this one too. Good rumbling tanky cadence, apt imagery. Ties everything together: the self-sacrificing antihero schtick, the link of a werewolf to nature magic, the dark bargain and blood price angle. Old school druidism right here.)
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I need to turn some of these into stories at some point.
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