Legion World Forums LEGION OUTPOST Bits o' Legionnaire Business The Writers' Discussion/Ideas Thread

It depends on what the story needs: for example, I wanted Tenzil and Violet alone on a mission to build some romantic tension between the two. A mission where only two Legionnaires would be prudent wouldn't call for say The Archmage obviously XD so I went with Magpie being rumored to steal a Kathoonian NightRose from the United Planets Memorial Garden; that way I got a stakeout for the scenes I wanted, and also enough potential Legion-Power to deal with the thief.

But it doesn't always have to directly be the enemy, and the right Legionnaires for the job are often needed. I was planning on a story where a McCauley representative poisoned a planetary atmosphere, so Element Lad and Chemical Queen and Sound Sorcerer (Tyroc) were the three on point to keep the toxic chemical in check and try and reverse the process while Brin and Dawny and Lyle tried to track down the saboteur.

A lot of times I like finding out what characters will do in a situation sort of organically, without planning the response past just what baddie pops up: I started scribbling down a story where Ferrous Lad and Calorie Queen are arguing about the scope and mandate of the Legion an its ethical ramifications outside a coffee shop, and Mordecai burst out of the road in front of them and they have to hold him back til reinforcements arrive and, while they're bruisers, Mordecai is a tough customer and they have to get creative with keeping him in check.

On the full-team threats, there's some great ones from the comics, and I've designed a few myself and the guideline I've tried to use are the likes of Time Trapper and Darkseid and Mordru: could this one baddie (or small group of baddies) threaten not only the Legion, but the Galaxy if they go unopposed?

Cool! All great story ideas, and agree on the point that it depends on what the story needs. This is fiction after all, so it should not be too hard to pick or generate the right type of villain for each story.

That's where coming up with a smaller sub-team or mission-specific team can work out well, because you don't feel the need for every threat to be someone that can take on the entire team (like Mordru, Darkseid or the Time Trapper), or fielding a Legion of Three Worlds style team of super-villains that includes the entire LSV, Fatal Five, Super-Assassins, Justice League of Earth *and* Universo and Mordru (in which case, ten pages of your fic is going to be spent describing the fight scene!). That sort of thing, IMO, is best saved for the climax of a story.

A smaller group can handle a single villain, or smaller group of villains, and possibly be part of a overarching plot, while leaving room for individual characterization and rival match-ups (Magno Lad vs. Cosmic Boy, or one or more Super-Assassins vs. 'that traitor Blok' or whatever).

As for creating villains, the Legion has tons aching for more development (some old, like Molecule Master or Evillo's long-forgotten daughters, Stilleto and Styx, some new like Immortus, Sun-Killer and Akko), and yet it's also fun to throw your own inventions (like Gladiatrix or Princess Pain or Red Seven) into the mix.

Some day I might even be inspired to use my Dominator or Khund teams from the aliens thread linked earlier as villains. Or other random villains, like the old-school 'theme team' called the Interplanetary Gang I came up with (each with powers related to a planet or phenomena in our solar system, like Asteroid Belle with her telekinetically controlled orbiting rocks, or Saturn Man with his destructive energy rings).

Yeah, that's what worked for Volume 3 of my fic - I had to juggle about 45 characters, so I split them up into groups of 3 or 4 each (which was extremely difficult by the way!)

It was fun tossing dozens of villains into the mix as well. Kid Quantum II and Star Boy vs. the Emerald Empress; Andromeda and Thunder vs. Validus; XS having a rematch with Tangleweb... Micro vs. Umbra and Timber Wolf... oh the match-ups!

Would love to see your ideas in writing Set. Sounds like a lot of fun villains there.

Aargh I wrote a massive reply to this and my sprocking computer killed it :[

But basically with villains I have a couple of different approaches....I like using minor villains to develop individual characters if they're not powerful enough to face the whole team; eg I had Orion the Hunter fight Cos and Night Girl so I could get them back together as a couple....I used Terrus to give Dawnstar a bit of spotlight for her power...etc

I like using major villains like the Fatal Five or the Infinite Man to give the whole team a challenge

And with some (usually homemade) villains I have a story in place for them that gets moved along a bit at a time whenever they appear....Bile and the Legion of Substitute Villains rock up every now and then because I like to chronicle his painfully inept journey into villainy. I have long term plans for pretty much all of my Oversight Watch, but as they're not major characters it doesn't take centre stage very often.

As much as I like giving the less dramatic powers a chance to shine it is fun being able to write Mon-El or Supergirl busting out, so I like having a big bruiser of a bad guy every now and then so I can write scenes of people punching each other through buildings and such

Finally, one of my favourite Legion challenges is when they're not fighting a bad guy but the conflict comes from somewhere else. Rounding up wild animals, cleaning up after battles, escaping from dangerous situations...it's fun for me to write and read different situations than just 'bad guy does x, Legion fight bad guy'

I dig the hell out of fiddling with this as well: charity events, diplomatic arbitration, public appearances at museums or schooles, consulting for the Science Police...treating the Legion like the public face for the United Planets can be fun, and can help you figure out how your galaxy works!

Agreed. That also gives Legionnaires with less offensive powers the chance to shine.

Another topic I wanted to open to you all - what rules, if any, do you follow when reintroducing or borrowing elements from other realities?

For example, in my fic set in the Postboot universe, I introduced Lamprey but changed her powers to control over water. I did this to differentiate her from the Ranzzes.

I also want to change Tellus' powers but am not sure yet to what. The purpose is to differentiate him from Saturn Girl, Kinetix and Mentalla.

Would love to hear all your thoughts!

I have been trying to plan out a gauntlet story in which Blok (or Chip) is able to demonstrate in a series of encounters ALL of the powers he has ever displayed before: strength, resilience, energy absorption / redirection (including limited abilities with regard to magical energies), silicon-based telepathy, resistance to organic telepathy, mass absorption (including healing abilities), nullification of anti-gravity, and super-slow super-intelligence.

As for Tellus, telepathy and telekinesis are not powers in themselves, but classes of powers. Saturn Girl, Saturn Queen, Esper Lass, and Mentalla all display telepathic ability in various differing ways. Saturn Girl originally had only sensory abilities, but this expanded to mind-speaking, mind-blasts, and eventually illusion-casting.

Also, as another example, Kinetix’ original powers were more similar to Life Lass than Superboy (Kon-El)

One might limit Tellus’ telekinesis only to liquids, or his telepathy only to projecting delusions. (An illusion is something you see that isn’t there; a delusion is a mistaken notion about the nature of reality: such as believing that you are drowning in air, or that all the stars are watching your every move.)

Thanks Klar, for the suggestions on Tellus. Those are nuanced but material differences, certainly. I may pick a totally different class of power for Tellus though, as my Saturn Girl and Kinetix have both expanded their powersets.

I don't really have any rules as such, as long as they're still recognisable as possessing the character's main traits by the time I'm done (otherwise you might as well just make a brand new character). Turtle, Gazelle, Sizzle, Sludge and Inferno all first appeared in my fic as members of the Legion of Substitute Villains, but Turtle has gone on to be a source of annoyance/love interest for Lamprey and Sizzle I think from memory is on a different home-made team of super powered wardens on Takron-Galtos but I'd have to check my notes on her

I chose to have Tellus' powers be more three-dimensional and have a kind of 'whalesong' like element to them, to differentiate them from Imra's telepathy.

Imra'd communicate like a message laser, targeting a single mind (or multiple selected minds), and nobody outside of that would have any idea anything had been 'said.'

Tellus would communicate more like radio waves, blasting out in all directions, but only those he wanted to 'speak' to would 'get the frequency,' and everyone else would just get a blast of 'static.' In this case, the 'static' would be a sense of something vast moving in the darkness, as if the eavesdropper was a man in a wetsuit, surrounded by dark waters, while a pod of whales passed around them on all sides, or perhaps just a ringing echo of something like whalesong reverberating in their skull for a moment. *Something else else* would have just happened, but they'd have no idea what had been said.

His telekinesis, which I didn't describe this way in my two fics that used Tellus, would work similarly, feeling like an irresistible tide sweeping them towards where he wants them to go, or a watery environment restricting their movements, if he's 'telekinetically grappling' someone to hold them in place. Everyone around him would feel a 'wave' of telekinetic energy, perhaps even a gentle one that rustles their hair and clothing, for minor manifestations, as he activates his telekinetic powers to do something, making it, like his telepathy, very 'unsubtle' compared to someone with a more unidirectional and focused sort of power.

I wanted to add this sort of 'special effect' for multiple reasons;

A) to differentiate him from Imra.
B) to make him feel more alien.
C) to make him feel unusually powerful, almost primal and elemental, and yet also much less experienced and lacking Imra's lifetime of fine control and training, as she was raised among an entire population of lifelong telepaths and he's quite possibly the first telepath of his species (and only indifferently trained by the Gil'Dishpan).

I just checked, and it turns out I used him three times, so far. Once in the Princess Pain tryout, once in the 'Last Stand of the Fatal Five,' and once dealing with the long-delayed fallout from the death of Nemesis Kid and an alchemically powered group from Myar. I mostly address his psychological distance in two of them, and mention the above telepathic differences in the Princess Pain tryout.

Great question again IB.

My viewsare it's okay to duplicate abilities as certain characters will focus on certain points - for instance the difference between Imra creating telepathic illusions and controlling eople while Tellus was more about communication. I try not to alter things too much though have added a fewthings in my own writings, for instance Laurel Kent being affect by being stuck in the temporal stasis by the Manhunter giving her a limited form of tactile psychometry. Nothing too huge but just enough to distinguish her from other invulnerable folks without making her another heavy hitter. Mwindaji finding the ruby of Life was another.

I did think of tweaking Tellus' telekinesis so he found the 'feel' of solid objects uncomfortable to his mind so would be sneakier, so perhaps moving a persons blood - so throwing their entire body around, for instance.

Gazelle is different enough from Brin in my mind that they don't need any tweaking to me. I try to think about how the Legionnaires would use their powers so that it isn't just punch and blasting things every time, though sometimes that's great fun too.

There are numerous ways to broadly and generally classify characters in video games, board games, and so forth.
This is mine, adapted especially for the Legion.

1) ULTIMATES are characters with a wide range of powers, up at the outer edge of power levels.
In the Legion world, examples of Ultimates are Andromeda, Duplicate Boy, Kid Psycho, and Green Lantern.

2) BRUTES are distinguished by their strength and indestructability.
Such as Blok, Monstress, and Colossal Boy.

3) SCRAPPERS have abilities primarily suited to close-in fighting.
Examples are Karate Kid, Timber Wolf, Catspaw, and Gazelle.

4) RANGERS utilize ranged abilities.
Such as Lightning Lass, Cosmic Boy, Echo, and DragonWing.

5) SPEEDSTERS are a special class of scrapper, although half-way to ranger.
Their abilities allow them to attack from a distance by rushing in, hitting, and rushing out.
Any classification scheme is necessarily subjective, but I feel speedsters deserve their own class.
Examples are XS and Bouncing Boy.

6) INFILTRATORS are a class not determined by their fighting style.
Rather, infiltrators have abilities which primarily allow them to go 'behind enemy lines' unnoticed.
Invisible Kid, Phantom Girl, and Shrinking Violet are obvious examples.
7) MAGES have abilities which affect the nature of reality, and not necessarily magical.

Examples are the White Witch (obviously), but also Projectra, Brainiac 5, Star Boy, and Element Lad.
8) SENSORS have powers primarily related to enhanced or exotic senses.
Dawnstar, Computo (Danielle Foccart), Ivy and Dream Girl are examples.

9) TRANSPORTERS are useful in Dungeons-and-Dragons type games, but rare in the Legion.
They allow a groups to move quickly from one location to another. Most are teleporters.
In the Legion world, most transporters are objects, like time bubbles or cruisers.
However, we also have Gates, VeilMist, and Bounty.

10) HEALERS are indispenable in video games, restoring life, health, and energy to other characters.
In the Legion world, we have ReAniMage, and… well, nobody. Dr. Gym'll?

11) This being the Legion, there are a few unique characters that really don't fit into any category.
Matter-Eater Lad, Quislet, Gear, and Stone Boy, for example.

It might be argued that Matter-Eater Lad and Gear are Mages, Quislet is a Mage / Scrapper, and Stone Boy is… I don't know. A Healer, whose powers only work on himself? While asleep?

Obviously, there are characters with double classes. All Ultimates are by definition multi-class.
There are also Legion characters who have progressed through classes.
Chameleon Boy was originally utilized almost exclusively as an Infiltrator. In fact, his power was originally described as 'super-disguise'. Over time, he began to weaponize his body through shape-shifting, and gained Scrapper class.
Saturn Girl was exclusively a Sensor, then gained Ranger powers with super-hypnosis (and eventually, 'mind-blast'), and added a third class as a Mage with illusion-casting powers.

All of this is pretty subjective, as I said. I classify BloodClaw as a Brute, but FireFist as a Scrapper.
And where on the Scrapper-Brute continuum does Timber Wolf fall? It depends a lot on the specific writer.

Fortress Lad might be thought of as Unique, but I classify him as a Transporter: but the place he transports you to is himself.

Your breakdown is probably the best I've seen, Klar. It's certainly more inclusive than most.

City of Heroes broke it's five types into Tankers (most invulnerable heavy hitters, like Colossus or Blok), Blasters (zappers like the Human Torch or Lightning Lad), Scrappers (non-invulnerable hand to hand fighters, like Wolverine or Karate Kid), Controllers (control or restrict movement or actions of others, such as Princess Projectra, Element Lad, Kinetix, Karma or Spider-Woman 2 with her 'psi-webs') and Defenders (healers and 'buffers' like Elixir or our 'amped up' version of Amp Girl).

GURPS had a similar breakdown, with Tanks and Flying Zappers, etc.

I originally tended to think of them along a military schema;
Airborne (flyers, of which very few, such as Angel, are *only* flyers)
Artillery (Cyclops or Lightning Lad are 'pure' Artillery. Lots are also Airborne or fill other roles)
Armor (Colossus, Blok, Hulk, the Thing, etc. are all 'pure' Armor)
Infantry (hand to hand fighters who aren't armor/invulnerable, like Wolverine or Karate Kid)
Transportation (team transport, not merely able to fly or teleport, but able to bring everyone with them, like some version of Raven or Gates, or Ilyanna/Magik. Thanks to Legion Cruisers, Blackbirds, Fantasti-Cars, JLA teleporters and / or Quinjets, lots of people get this as a device.)
Communications (usually telepaths, but thanks to Flight Rings or JLA communications or Avengers ID cards, another thing that can appear as a device)

*Many* heroes cover lots of these roles.
Every Legionnaire has transportation, communication and airborne built in via Flight Rings and Legion Cruisers.
Mon-El is Airborne, Artillery (heat vision) and Armor.
Saturn Girl started as Communication, but added Artillery with mental blasts.

Most of these schemes don't really account for a lot of characters with utility powers (Dawnstar's tracking), or other unusual abilities (Chameleon Boy's shapechanging allows him to function as Infantry, but also allows for infiltration and information-gathering, making him more versatile than Karate Kid or other 'scrappy' sorts). That's where your addition of 'Sensors' and 'Infiltrators' is a cut above the rest.

Due to the number of 'Scrappers' and 'Tanks' the Legion already has (and *everyone* having free flight, communications and life-support gear), I occasionally try to mix things up when considering new characters (either as allies or foes), to come up with buffing / debuffing ideas (like Amp Girl or Princess Pain or Leech), or 'control' characters that affect the environment or hinder people, by spraying sticky chemicals or slippery surfaces or paralyzing harmonics or disorienting lights or whatever (Water Witch, Kid Silicon, Pharmacopiea, etc.).

I agree, nice classification.

Lots of great ideas here.

I have to admit that so far I have not really considered classes of powers in my team building except for keeping a mix of Scrappers, Ranged Fighters and Infiltrators/Others. I mainly try to avoid duplicating powers.

This type of thinking becomes more important as the team gets larger though.

Me and Cobalt had a talk about this for 21CL Lamprey, since we not only had Garth & Ayla counterparts, but I also had Surge in the Academy. The point I made to follow-up was that lampreys have absolutely nothing to do with generating electricity like electric eels. The two suggestions I made were *checks* "turning her name into a pun and giving her light powers (a lamp's rays of light) ala Superboy's Legion Light Lass; or going the opposite route, taking her name more literally, and giving her a pseudo-vampiric iron-draining/anæmia-causing power."

We went with the former.

[There've been other stuff - someone introduced flight rings iB, which we weren't entirely happy about for the present-day setting. Consequently, "health'n'safety rules banned them" to stop common usage, although I've had them "sneaked" into use occasionally "under the table".]

On similar powers - yeah, you can make fine distinctions [one of my yet-to-be-posted bits has Irma and Rachel comparing their telepathy], but in the middle of a fight scene it can be hard to make them clear, unless you put VERY hard limits on what they can do (like how the New Mutants' Karma could only possess people, not do memory alterations and other such telepathic tricks. And even that's fallen by the wayside over the years...)

IIRC, the original write up for Lamprey gave her some sort of death touch, which was deemed an inappropriate power for a Legionnaire. Learning to 'tone it down' to a life-draining / energy-sapping / devitalizing touch could indeed be the best way to push her away from being yet another electricity manipulator (on a team that already has two much better lightning-chuckers).

If it's actually vampiric in nature, strengthening and toughening her, while weakening whoever she's grabbed onto, then it becomes even more useful, as she might clamp onto a Daxamite foe like Ol-Vir and if she can hold on long enough (depending on how quickly it works), gain temporary Kryptonian class strength and toughness as he passes out, making her a little bit like Rogue, in that sense, with some added aquatic elements.

Was I the one who first introduced the flight rings? I remember using them and then editing out when Cobie told me the direction was not to have them used often. I can't remember being the one to actually have them debut though.

Was thinking similar thoughts about the similar powers thing. Having Tellus' telepathy and telekinesis work differently from others with the same powers is great in a reality where those powers are already established, but I want to make more radical changes in my writing to further diversify. I don't want to go the X-Men route with a dozen telepaths and psychics on the same team the fine distinctions others have mentioned above are great for exploring Tellus' alien nature though

I'm posting here because this seems like the most appropriate thread on this subforum. I need help developing powers for a new character. I came up with an awesome codename: Prism Lad.

However, it has been harder to find powers that would fit. I was tempted at first to make him a Rainbow Girl clone (not literally, just the powers), but that just feels wrong given the fact that I already made one in the past.

I looked up Mirror Master, and it appears that his powers come from a pack or gun (depending on the version). I kind of want internalized powers. So I'm down to three ideas:

1) Portal Creation
2) Uses Ice to Create Mirrors (Thinking his actual powers are too generic)
3) Standard Light Powers

Do any of these ideas seem good? Does anyone else have more suggestions?

The only other powered member of the team I've designed thus far has electric powers, if that helps.

Hey Emily!

All of those seem like solid ideas! Another possibility you could explore would be to have his powers be the REMOVAL of color. Since light passing through a prism creates the colors of the rainbow, why not have the character work as a reverse prism, able to sap an object of it's color and tone irreversibly. There's some potential there for combinations with other characters whose strengths or weaknesses are color related (i.e. Green Lantern's weakness to yellow).

Great discussion, ya'll!

Reboot and IBL I love fiddling with Lamprey, and I made her a mutated Atlantean who follows in her people's footsteps as Aqualass - she has some control over water, can absorb lifeforce energy through touch, and can expel a large amount of it by touch as well, so she's got a varied powerset that pushes her further from the other bolt-throwers and makes her sufficiently 'Aqua'!

Some great stuff on Tellus and Mentalla, and for my two cents: I've had a lot of fun basically varying the Titanians to where, while they all at base have some telepathic abilities, their actual 'powers' vary from person to person: I made Otaki able to absorb talents and skills telepathically, and Mentalla's powers deal more with possession and motor control of others, where Imra is more a telepathic communicator with a lot of raw power that she can focus into her mindblasts, and Saturn Girl is a sort of paragon of the Titanians, in that she's just so adroit with her powers were most other Titanians aren't.

And Emily: Prism Lad sounds like he could really rock! In the Legion RP I play the Color Kid player has been reading up on light and its affects, and some of it may be useful to help you out on - it could be that Prism Lad casts a 'rainbow effect' as a byproduct of activating his power, where his real power is to push and amplify light to its Ultraviolet and Infrared extremes. This means he can cast infrared as a sort of heat beam and Ultraviolet as a sort of Photodegradation beam (Check out Photodegradation's article on wikipedia, but essentially it's a sort of light affect that can disintegrate matter!), and I'm using a version of this power for a Legion Cadet in my own stuff!

Combine these with some of the reflective powers you were looking at for Mirror Master, and I'd say you'd have a pretty unique powerset on your hands!

One of Invisible Brainiac's powers is to convert himself to light, pass through a prism and disperse himself into seven selves - one for each of the 7 colors of the rainbow.

There've been a few characters named Prism or Prizm (one a mutant-massacring Marauder at Marvel, the other a Team Titan overshadowed by her more popular teammate, Argent, IIRC).

Both assumed a crystalline form, which is automatically a cool visual, and likely comes with a side-dose of rock-like strength and durability. Being able to refract light allowed the mutant dude to reflect energy attacks (such as Cyclops optic blasts) in whatever direction he choose, making anyone who zapped him basically a free attack on their own allies, as he usurped control of their attack and 'regifted' it to someone else.

What might make it more interesting than just splitting light up into different color frequencies might be for this Prism Girl to be able to shift the wavelength up or down the spectrum, turning a laser attack (or even a really bright flashlight) into microwaves or X-rays or ultraviolet or gamma radiation, giving her a wide range of possible energy types (sort of like how Monica Rambeau can manifest these various energy types, in her case, by turning into that energy). If her ability to refract energy also includes the ability to alter it in other ways, such as to convert a laser into a blinding flash (de-focusing it) or bright sunlight into a weak laser (very much focusing it), or even enhancing or reducing the energy levels of something (turning that laser blast into a weak little sparkle, or that sunlight into a more powerful laser!), then she's got some real potential.

Or her multi-colored crystalline body could break apart on the slightest impact into seven floating colored crystals, each with their own Eye of Ekron-like colored force constructs, and later reform into her normal self. Just to be different.

I really like all these ideas so far. This is a bit of a spoiler, but I'm thinking he was part of a mass experiment in mirrors or light. He was kind of a Radiation Roy; wanting superpowers for the sake of joining a superteam. However, he's disappointed that he didn't turn out to be like a Green Lantern.

I'm a little saddened that Prism already has been taken, but I can't think of anything better. I am hesitant to call him Mirror Master, as the character has to think his powers aren't very useful. If anyone has suggestions for this, let me know.

By the way, do you think it is good for every superteam to have a brick/tank?