TwoDee

Red, with apologies to @TorrentYed, because I totally followed him looking at it when he'd already landed Blue. Bad sportsmanship, thy name is HardLight. Global is @ TwoDee, same as my forum name.

Sure, and obviously it's important that characters, villains especially, have, y'know, motivations. Villains get a lot more leeway with their motivations, in fact, just because there are so many more interesting ways to be "bad" - and therefore heterodox to conventional morality - than to be "good" - and therefore ascribe to orthodox morality. But all the same, there's a distinction between portraying a villain as a well-realized individual who sees themselves as being in the right, and devil's-advocating your way to a bothesidesist position regarding City of Heroes' explicitly hard-E Evil organizations. For your Circle Archivist arguing that really, the heroes are the bad guys for tooling on him and confiscating his magic tomes that let him violate people's bodies, devour their souls, and summon demons, I'd raise a Nemesis Lancer arguing just as passionately and with as much conviction that we need the overthrow of the United States and summary extermination or enslavement of all but the landed white gentry. Especially for lore-based roleplay, the villain factions are literally designed to be near-always wrong and forever be bested by the gallant hero player, or they wouldn't be 'Villain Groups' in a video game that revolves around beating the tar out of them. If I want to have a roleplay centered around 'well-actually Longbow uses flamethrowers so Evil is just as valid as Good' I'll just go to Pocket D and ask any other VEAT how their day is going.

We've kind of touched on this in our prior discussions about City of Heroes and the Homecoming community, but I don't think I associate quite the same romance with City of Heroes, and especially its roleplay community, that you do. It's a really, really good superhero game. Probably the best superhero game. But being the best superhero game doesn't mean that the playerbase are going to magically recognize that theirs is a Limitless Kingdom of the Mind and reach a platonic creative zen-state divorced from the existing assumptions they brought in, assumptions based on the kind of stories that are City of Heroes' contemporaries. In the world of City of Heroes, the PPD are good and wear blue and Arachnos are bad and wear red. People literally have in-text identities where they voluntarily register as "yes, I am a supervillain and I like to do bad things and hurt people because I am a supervillain." Objective evil definitively exists on a cosmic level, and can be quantified. There is an inbuilt level of moral abstraction from the real world in place to facilitate the escapism of the superhero/supervillain fantasy, which means that touting the City of Heroes roleplay community's ability to facilitate deeply nuanced, grey-on-grey narratives where nobody is truly right is a lot like a Dungeon Master touting how they used the nine-box D&D alignment system to tell a deeply nuanced, grey-on-grey narrative where nobody was truly right. It's theoretically doable, but as a seasoned GM I can't help but cock my eyebrow and wonder why you didn't use a system designed to facilitate the fantasy you actually wanted to have, and instead felt the need to crowbar your favorite round peg through the square hole. (This is not to say I abhor nuance and greyscale. Obviously, the character I'm best known for is a narcissistic, drug-abusing showboat with a hero license who veers into villainy on his worst days. But even he relies on the prior context of comic books and cartoons to characterize him - the running joke in the guild is that he was envisioned as a Homelander analogue, but he's really more of a Bojack Horseman - and I don't think "what if superheroes had deep character flaws and villains had a point" is a particularly groundbreaking bit of revelatory comics roleplay magic. Hell, it's de rigueur in the Marvel movies these days.) To spool back onto the 'dungeon master' thing, I often approach RP more from a facilitative/game mastery perspective, and at the end of the day the question I have to ask is "what do roleplayers want" and, not for nothing, but there's a reason the vast, sweeping majority of players play Heroes. That's the fantasy they want to live. They don't want to delve into the grit and grime of real people and real problems. They don't want to use their precious free time reenacting Wanted, or Black Summer, or - God forbid - Watchmen. They want to be Powergirl, or Wolverine, or Spider-Man, and that's completely fine, but it's incompatible with the much more niche "the villains win/bad end" fantasy. From a quantitative perspective if not a qualitative one, it behooves me to meet hero players at their level, even if my preferred roleplay space is ambiguous antiheroism.

It's worth noting that Praetoria already has Trolls in the form of the Destroyers, a former military unit addicted to "Fixadine." There are several story arcs revolving around the Destroyers and Fixadine, up to and including the old pre-Going-Rogue Dominatrix arc where Steve Sheridan explicitly refers to them as analogous compounds that can be used to treat dependency to each other interchangeably. They're different cuts of the same drug. The two factions are used largely the same on each world, as roided-up street brawlers for newbie heroes to cut their teeth on. Fixadine doesn't give the Destroyers the dermal deposit 'horns,' but it does turn them bright red, as an allusion to the bright green of Primal Earth's Trolls.

Obviously I'm not fully versed in the Ivory Tower (only a little bit of tangential exposure through my character Archenemy) but if I may speak a bit to my philosophy as a former villain main who now skews more antiheroic, I don't think "we don't want to lose" is an unreasonable expectation from someone roleplaying a superhero. This game, City of Heroes, exists in the comic book genre, and comic books have an ironclad heel-and-face formula where the villain exists as the actor and the hero exists as the reactor, ultimately ending in the hero negating or forstalling what the villain achieved until such time as the villain initiates the action again. Is this a great formula for roleplay? No, not really, it puts way more onus on villains to be interesting and engaging than heroes. Should heroes have to struggle to defeat villains? Yes, and a hero wanting to treat a VG as a 'punching bag' is disrespectful. But something that I've always felt to be an implicit rule of the City of Heroes roleplay space is that villains never win in the end, because that's the immutable, arguably most singularly important rule of comic books. The whole superhero genre is built on a foundation of fantastical morality tales, and as an inversion of your frustration that no superhero group wanted to be 'in the wrong,' I'd argue that asking superhero players to job themselves as unreasonable aggressors of helpless "villains" who did nothing wrong is entirely contrary to the social contract. This disconnect informs a lot of player conflict that I've seen both on Live and Everlasting. At the broadest strokes, roleplayers don't like their characters to lose and lose big. They like to face adversity, sure, but they want their character to come out of it always improved, better, more developed. But when villain players go into a roleplay conflict with hero players and both are expecting to win, feelings get hurt and fast. The villains get defensive about "what, can't you let me win just this once? There's like eight of you for every one of us on the server" or occasionally present a more confrontational appeal-to-realism like "villains win in real life, cupcake, now pucker up." The heroes, in turn, get defensive about the fundamental moral underpinnings of their world being violated. It's a bad scene. I love playing Archenemy, but he's a jobber. His raison d'etre is to lose to superheroes. Whenever I engage in conflict RP - and there have been 3 or 4 such occasions, to mixed degrees of success - I have him shoot credibly for his own short-term success and don't undersell his capabilities, but the question I always ask myself is "okay, and how will I ultimately be defeated so the heroes can shine?" It helps that I play him like a complete scumbag (as a card-carrying "villain" should be), which makes it fun and cathartic to lay him low, but I've always implicitly understood his roleplay purpose, as a villain, to be to act as an obstacle for heroes that is ultimately surmountable, which represents a break from what I'd estimate to be half of the villain roleplay playerbase.

I think that chef David Chang of Momofuku and Ugly Delicious fame is a complicated figure. His paeans to the epicurean value of Korean food and incredulity at the fine dining establishment strike me as earnest, but also self-interested. He is a fusion-food maverick by trade, which means that his decrying of culinary tradition always has an element of self-promotion to it. That said, I agree entirely with his ethos that notions like 'authenticity' and 'purity' are a mental trap that limit what we're capable of, and I think that's a lesson we can apply to roleplay. My number one piece of roleplay advice is to discard the sentiment of "but it's what my character would do." This doesn't mean that you should write every character as if they hold no principles, values, or opinions. Quite the opposite! But you should be constantly reminding yourself that your character is not a real person, and you are a real person, and the former exists in service to the enjoyment of the latter. If you ever find yourself in a situation where your character wouldn't do something that you want to participate in, or would do something that you don't want to roleplay, you should crowbar in contrivances and retools until you're roleplaying what you want to roleplay, and not roleplaying what you don't. Your comfort and pleasure (and, in a good faith exchange, the comfort and pleasure of the other participant) are the most important things in roleplay. That your character is 'true to themselves' is irrelevant. They have no self to be true to, because they're not a real person, just a simulated fascimile. As a classic example, say that you write a character who doesn't trust easily, and is skeptical of working with a team. Then the call to action happens: oh no! Steel Canyon is being attacked by Space Goblins and UltraTeam Five needs your help! In this situation, the 'truest' and 'most authentic' thing that your cynical antihero could do is just sit it out and not participate. You might want to participate, but nobody is required to play out their character badgering yours until you feel that it would be sufficiently narratively flush to participate. If you, the player, want to save Steel Canyon from the Space Goblins and be a cool antihero who doesn't trust easily while doing so, it's incumbent on you to contrive the exception for why your character is going to trust just this one time.

You don't need to say hi, but honestly I wish more people did. A lot of folks think of Pocket D as "for roleplay" and the rest of the world as "for gameplay"... implicitly, if not explicitly. One of the coolest moments for me in-game was when I put on the walk toggle and decided my character didn't feel like flying back from a mission in Talos, so I just meandered across the city en route to the metro, and another character flying above touched down to say hi, strike up a conversation, and walk with him.

Me having things to say is contingent on the level of discourse of the forums! I can't exactly pull incisive hot takes out of my ass, I need proper foreplay to go off on my screeds 😉

In Drowning in Blood, the player has the opportunity to rescue a Shivan from the Circle of Thorns. This is the dialogue:

You can also do /em or /me to kick it off; anything that follows those becomes emote text following your character name.

I'll confess the Space Alien stuff has always been a weakness of mine, but yes, Word of God was that Shiva were a forerunner to the Battalion. You also get hints in Drowning in Blood that the Shivans are, themselves, Battalion refugees.

Oh boy it's a highminded and largely undirected macro-level discussion about a common character archetype regarding its place in roleplay etiquette, you know you kids shouldn't leave dese tings lying around, they're like fukkin catnip to @TwoDee ova there and before ya know it he'll crowbar his way into the thread to write some kinda fukkin dissertation and nobody wants- -OH NO, HE'S HERE Okay everybody stay calm, if we don't voice innocous opinions that nobody could reasonably take exception to, he won't be able to make some kinda hyperbolic, iconoclastic opening statement that's needlessly confrontational- Originality isn't real, and anyone who tells you that their character is 'truly original' just has too much of an ego or too little self-awareness to tell you what inspirations they brought in. Humans are mimics: we learn by doing, and we tell stories by iterating on the stories we've experienced, not by magically conjuring fully-formed characters from The Story Hole. In 2011, the worst human being that I personally knew - by two metrics, morality and hygiene - decided that I should watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica, an anime about cute girls being tricked by an eldritch horror into fighting against other eldritch horrors in a cosmic war. He decided that I would like it based on two selling points: the first was "it's got lesbians in," which isn't pertinent to this discussion but paints a good portrait of where the man's priorities lay. The second was "it subverts all the genre tropes of the Magical Girl anime genre." I later spoke to my long-term partner who was, independently, also trying to get me to watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica at the time. The Worst Human's recommendation annoyed her deeply, not as an enthusiast of the Magical Girl genre, but merely because she'd watched a few different Magical Girl anime over the course of her life and found his take to be insultingly reductive. She insisted that Worst Human's statement that Madoka Magica 'subverted the genre' by being dark Cosmic Horror showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the breadth and scope of the genre. She used as examples for her counterargument seminal genre works such as - and I do apologize for spoiling decades-old Magical Girl plotlines here - Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, which delves into cosmic horror headfuck territory in its Book of Darkness storyline, and Princess Tutu, which revolves around a doomed protagonist who is consciously aware that she is a narrative construction and will cease to exist, functionally dying in every way that it is possible to die, at the culmination of her storyline. These are heady horror themes presented as part and parcel to earlier genre works... that Worst Human was attempting to sell to me as being badass, iconoclastic takedowns of a genre that he clearly only understood on an aesthetic level. Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a good anime. I liked it a lot. But it is not, in any special sense, Original, and attempting to sell it as such belies a fundamental problem that a lot of us creatives have with conflating originality 1:1 for quality. "Madoka Magica is Good, ergo surely it must be Original! I know this because works that are Not Original, are categorically Bad!" Which brings us back to the Edgelord, a character archetype defined by both "badass iconoclastic genre takedowns" and "only being understood on an aesthetic level." For the sake of ease, let's define Edgelord in in-character terms: an Edgelord is an antiheroic or antivillainous character archetype distinguished by excessive violence, personal drama/trauma, and a look that is intentionally evocative of 'villain' norms regardless of where the character falls on the morality spectrum. The Edgelord is, itself, a 'totAl GeNrE sUbVeRsIoN' that actually fits extremely well within the boundaries of its genre. The Edgelord is a challenge to the status quo of comics; true-blue heroes, blood-red villains, a crisp-lined art style and morality-tale format so mind-numbingly simple you could mistake them for a Congressman's mediocre adult children on legacy scholarships. Attaching villain demarcators to an antihero or antivillain plays with that. To paraphrase and build off of @teamtr: in an ensemble cast, Batman works because he is a foil for Superman. The Punisher works because he's a foil for Spider-Man and, later, Daredevil. Spawn worked because he was a refutation of, essentially, the entire mainstream comics industry at the time of his creation. A lot of people like to shit on traumatized-badass antiheroes and antivillains now because they became so oversaturated that they began to drown out straight-laced heroes in comics throughout the 90s and early aughts, but I reiterate that there truly is nothing new under the sun. It's very silly to me to see fans (and roleplayers!) blame a fictitious character archetype for failure to engage when the fault always lies with the author, the actual human being attempting to court your eyeballs. By and large, though, the Edgelord works as a conceit, it works as a foil, it's an iconic character type that comes prepackaged with a convenient and immediate understanding of what this character is about, in the same way that it's a lot easier to get into pickup RP with a square-jawed flying brick or an all-caps MAD SCIENTIST than with abstract, esoteric concepts less grounded in the genre of our shared space. A lot of the protest against the archetype in the contemporary roleplay community is a sort of collective strawmanning, where everyone implicitly agrees that because trenchcoats and katanas got super popular in April 1999, dark character archetypes are now Lame And In Fact Cringe, despite those themes being popular because they're resonant. Currently, the aesthetic trend leans away from Edgy, and that means there's a strong peer pressure not to use those hallmarks because they're out-of-fashion, in the same way that classic spandex was out-of-fashion when the Edgelord reigned supreme. Notice the apologetics that @Siouxsie has to go into in the third post of this thread to justify using red and black and the /Dark powerset, or @jkwak going "I make fun of edgelords (but also I play them)" in the eighth. Notice how @TaleFromYourPocket has to frame their hypothetical edgelord character's angst as having a social-commentary polemic before people here will accept it as valid. These are players who clearly enjoy the aesthetic of darkness, but understand that there is a social pressure on Everlasting to not indulge in that aesthetic without qualification or - in the middle case - performing the necessary mockery of that aesthetic to satisfy the community's expectations. I say, if you want to play the character, then let your Edgelord flag fly. Give your giant sword a name like "Slaymaster" and then lick it whenever it cuts your enemies, because you're also a vampire. Cover your body in tacticool greebles even though they serve no purpose, just because they look bad-fucking-ass. Lecture heroes about why they're weak and feeble, and lecture villains about... also why they're weak and feeble. Tell me about your family, who died tragically because they were assassins and also you were an assassin and actually it was you who killed your family in an assassin duel. "Originality" is meaningless if people won't engage with, understand, or care about your fifty pages of exhaustively realized backstory. Long live the archetype! I finish by linking a story from the New Praetorians Initiative Discord about one of the most fun exchanges I've ever had in City of Heroes, and it was because I pulled myself out of that 'I don't like what the community doesn't like' mindset long enough to really let an Edgelord player pull out all the stops to perform edginess at me. Sure, I found it more silly in its hyperbole than legitimately shocking, but that had a value all its own and I invite everyone here to really make the effort to engage with characters they find 'cringey' on a more regular basis because there are diamonds in that rough.

Oh hey, it's my department! Popping into this thread as a current game industry professional - specifically, a UX lab tech - to confirm @GraspingVileTerror's impression about the use of 'Fun.' The metrics we use in the research department are engagement, retention, bounce rate. "Fun" is something we discuss, but typically only in the sense that we as researchers are also players of our game and thus invested in enjoying our experiences with it. The only context in which I ever hear 'Fun' bandied about unironically as if the term is supposed to have institutional weight is when designers are using Fun as a bludgeon to smash the legs out from each other's creations. This is not to say that it's an invalid concept, mind; more that I tend to find that the way that it's implemented is 'feelsy', not analytical. As for what provides me enjoyment, amusement, or light-hearted pleasure, the dictionary definition of "Fun:" Making suboptimal 'gimmick' builds and then optimizing within the constraints of a 'bad build' - my greatest indulgence to my hipster, 'popular thing is bad' instincts Getting to see the creativity of the community on parade, like an art patron walking around a gallery Roleplay, on a macro level Having the opportunity to learn something new about my character that I hadn't considered prior Having the opportunity to learn something new about another character Having other people pay attention to me because I am a preening parakeet and without positive reaffirmation I will die

I was originally planning on responding to this post last week, but several family birthdays and one doggie trip to the veterinarian later, it totally slipped my mind. So let me see if I can dredge up what I was thinking of saying in the moment, because I think I simultaneously agree and disagree with this contentious post. I disagree with the heavily implied notion that 'in-depth RP plots existing behind the closed doors of a permanent group is a myth,' because I have patently contradictory evidence. The New Praetorians Initiative has had several group-participatory 'meta' plots written by members of the guild (most prominently @_Kai_ above and @CellyEl) to varying, but generally positive, degrees of success. We're always learning more about how to engage our fluctuating player base, which is reward in and of itself, and it gives players a shared backstory of crisis to reflect upon in social RP. But that's just the rub of it; there's a lot of social RP, because it's a lot easier than running a sweeping, gamemastered plot, it's available as 'pick-up RP,' and slice of life still falls very much into our mandate. Furthermore, I think I ultimately agree with you that 'what most roleplayers want' is that kind of relationshippy, parasocial space described in the post... or at least, I think that's the main drive towards RP for a large contingent of players and that's fine provided that expectations are made clear (which it sounds like they weren't, to you). Something that doesn't often get a lot of discussion vis-a-vis RP communities is that two or more RPers are generally coming at the exercise looking for something absolutely different from both a metanarrative and emotional-needs perspective. I think we all have an element of that parasocial, "this is my OC and I want to show them off" drive because it's sort of built-in to the space, but there are plenty for whom merely Existing As My OC is both the end and the means, and generally speaking that's a totally valid way to roleplay. There are others who approach RP as a storytelling, worldbuilding, or character-exploration exercise, which is more where I'd place myself, and it's lead to a lot of interesting and impassioned debates over CORP-side with [a player who may not want me to tag him] who takes a strict-simulationist approach and believes that my tendency to crowbar characters into the appropriate shapes for a narrative box-puzzle is violating their authenticity as simulated people. To call it a spectrum would be a disservice, because that implies a scalable binary between, say, 'likes slice of life' and 'likes plot.' It's more like trying to find a car, or a house, that works for you. Everyone is going to have their own intensely personalized needs. As for my suggestions to bridge the divide, it's a robust and constant line of OOC communication, be that through OOC tells, proactively asking other players to help you workshop plots, or a companion Discord or OOC channel. We're all chasing the unicorn of that magic, completely spontaneous moment where someone lines up IC perfectly flush with all of our expectations in one glorious, angel-descending-from-heaven introduction, but similar to you, I've found that relying on that as my de facto expectation is a good way to have boring RP.

I have, at least right off the top of my head, two innocuous headcanons, and two thermonuclear headcanons. The thermonuclear headcanons are spoilered for your safety. There is a pervasive and enduring stereotype that super-strong metahumans are terrible at fighting because they don't have to try, as indicated by the ridiculous hammer blows and performative wind-ups in the Super Strength set, but also just the common sense that anyone with enough raw strength to hurl a tank isn't going to have to worry about lift form or punching behind the target. There are 'super strength martial arts,' but they tend to be extremely heterodox to common self-defense practices, instead focused around maximizing the usage of the superpower because 'using your opponent's force against them' fails to matter when you are a human freight train. Super-strong martial artists and conventional martial artists mesh like oil and water. Stolen from @CellyEl, but there are a kajillion Praetorian refugees with derivative names to Marcus Cole - Cole as a first name, Mark, Marky, Marcia, Colin, Collette, and so forth. 'Marcus' and 'Cole' are to them as 'Noah' and 'Oliver' are to us, and 'Marcia' and 'Collette' are like 'Emma' and 'Sofia. Now, the thermonuclear takes:

This is the part where I raise my 'gatekeeping scum' hand. In theory, yes, I agree with the 'the kitchen sink can accommodate all concepts' ideal. However, the lore - and this is with the full acknowledgement that all of Praetoria is unreliable narrators being unreliable at other, equally unreliable narrators - exists to establish a tonal basis and give players a shared set of expectations and ground-floor understanding to build off of. Going really deep-cut requires establishing that base-level first, in the same way that niche hobby spaces exist because it gets tiresome to relitigate the 101 of 'how to [X]' on a seasonal basis. It's hard to build a house on a foundation of sand, particularly when I'm coming from the perspective of an RP supergroup leader who runs a group where the concept is 'refugees from Praetoria, now superheroes under a Vanguard remit': it assumes certain foundational points like 1) Praetoria has collapsed and there are refugees, and 2) Vanguard is in charge of their resettlement, which not everyone in the playerbase agrees with. That's totally fine, and I'm not disputing their right to be a part of the Everlasting community, but characters who don't share the guild's agreement that - say - there are no longer currently-active Powers Division serving Emperor Cole, are going to mesh with our storylines poorly. We don't go "bad concept, rejected," but we do try to negotiate concepts to better fit the shared understanding, most commonly in the form of, "Hey, love the backstory, it's super well written! Now, unfortunately our understanding of canon was that there were no active Praetors of the same stature as White, Tilman, Sinclair, Berry and Duncan, so maybe instead of being the Praetor of Light at the time of Praetoria's fall, your character could have been a disgraced former Praetor who originally worked with Tilman but had to go underground at some point to escape the purges?" In particular, we tend to most heavily litigate concepts that would require the most concessions from other player's understandings of the lore, or that least directly acknowledge that shared ground-floor thesis of 'we're refugees who were either tools of the regime or Resistance against it,' and the irony is that these character concepts tend to be some of the most obviously lore-worshipping out there, but they just make jumps with it that aren't the same jumps we've made, or preclude/override our own jumps. Most dramatically, and I wish all the best to this player because their aesthetic was awesome, we had to reject an applicant who was a True Rikti from the Praetorian dimension who had invaded Praetoria with her fleet to help Vanguard during the Praetorian War, because adding 'massive interdimensional good-guy Rikti army working in tandem with Vanguard' to our shared Praetoria fanon was way too much of a leap for the tone of the guild, which assumes a more grounded approach to the themes of revolution and abuse of power. This is not, mind you, to imply that @Sunsette's concept is in any way equivocal to inserting an army of Rikti unseating Tyrant to the canon, because it's not. It's a well-thought-out exercise and I appreciate them for humoring me being a fuddy-duddy about it. But more, it's to state that I disagree with the thesis that All Lore Hot Takes Can Exist In Harmony, or at least they can't at the depth that I like to dig to. I'm never ever going to tell someone 'your character is invalid, don't play that' because it would make me, in a scientific terms, an odious dick. But I do often have to make the value judgement of 'do I want to subject my character to the complete overhauling of everything he knows by getting a drink with this other character at Pocket D,' and that often ends with me (politely) opting-out.

Which is why I kind of lean on the 'Protectorate' thing. As @Take One points out, the Goths were still 'foreigners' to the Romans even when they fought under a Roman banner, the Zulu and Indians were still 'foreigners' to the British, and the Indonesians were still 'foreigners' to the Dutch. Praetoria isn't a nation, it's an Empire: a union of states bound up in an autocratic collective. Some of those colonies, especially the distant ones, are going to be estranged, but they still can't exist in opposition to the autocrat without drawing military intervention. As you say: it's a hegemon. And the official line from Emperor Cole, the ruler of that Hegemon, is that non-Praetorians don't exist and non-Praetorian governments are not viable, so why would a Loyalist true-believer like Ray Kang refer to 'foreigners' under the presumption that they're living free, fat and happy outside the Praetorian system? It's a catch-22. Kang would have to be a traitor to believe the latter, ergo we must - or at least I must - assume the Protectorate/Colony thesis. Furthermore, we have no indication that, for all his age and experience, Interrogator Kang has any understanding of international affairs or the scope of Praetoria whatsoever. In point of fact, his bio implies he's never left Praetoria City or seen any part of the Empire other than his hometown: Yes, we could interpret his lack of knowledge of the world outside the city to indicate 'actually the scope of the empire is a lie and there are still culturally-contiguous federal states out there,' but operating under the same logic we could argue that the rest of the planet is controlled by the Resistance, or space aliens, or the undead or something. We're given no indication of Free Nations of any substance at all existing independent and without the yoke of Cole, without them also being a secret we never see directly referred to. ---- Now, to follow up and give the premise of a 'Non-Praetorian Praetorian' a fair shake, do settlements - "small, scattered settlements" to quote you - free of Cole exist? Yes, absolutely. We see them in the Underground as Resistance strongholds, we see them as the Last Bastion (which was, again, canonically founded by IDF deserters) and we see independent Resistance settlements outside of Praetoria City confirmed by the Tunnel Rat and Dr. Arvin arcs, where the Resistance are smuggling people outside of the City to safe and self-sustainable hiding places outside the Sonic Fences. However, even the Resistance graffiti calls into question the idea of securing a human holdfast in Hamidon territory at anything beyond the Last Bastion's 'fortress city' level: I think where we're having our disconnect is not at the idea that micro-scale semi-stable societies could exist outside Cole's yoke, because they can and canonically do. It's more that I don't really see the character going 'ahem, I'm not Praetorian, I was born outside of the Empire' as being anything other than prideful pedantry, seeing as their entire life would have been completely dominated by the shadow of Praetoria and the threat of Emperor Cole, and Praetoria's influence felt in all things and all decisions from their youth to the present. We don't see ex-Resistance objecting to referring to their home dimension as Praetoria even in Primal Earth arcs, because it's useful shorthand to conflate the dimension with the sweeping society that made up its vast majority and actively sought to destroy every vestige of other civilizations, and which those other civilizations existed in permanent and all-consuming existential conflict against. If one really must make the distinction while dogmatically refusing to use the shorthand, the Portal Corps official designation of Praetoria is Earth Upsilon Beta 9-6, and we do see some dissenters saying things like 'I'm not a Praetorian, I'm an American!' (Source: Jack Hammer's arc), but I have difficulty envisioning a national cultural tradition continuing independently on Praetorian Earth through the Hamidon Wars and into the Pax Praetoria to the degree that one could say they belong to a real 'nation' as-distinct from a small, heavily-armed enclave pretending at being such.

The impression I got from the Praetoria lore was that there were no non-"Praetorian" nations, seeing as the compact with Hamidon that created Praetoria in its final form in the first place stipulated that Cole would rule the world, and the lore we see presented with Vagabond in Imperial City pretty directly tells us that Cole would run a racket where he'd let cities burn if they wouldn't capitulate. However, we know that the Seers are just an Imperial City thing, and a lot of the non-Praetoria-City nations are referred to as colonies or Protectorates (Belgium is the 'Flanders Protectorate' for instance), ergo they maintained some continuity of government or culture while nevertheless answering to Praetoria, which is also fitting given that the small Praetorian Guard would be easily capable of bringing a nation to ruin through massed firepower, but not the actual nitty-gritty of ruling. Emperor Cole's bio states that in the aftermath of the Hamidon Wars, there was an active campaign of not just subversion, but conquest to establish a one-world government: Obviously, that whole thing about the 'people of the world' is propagandized, but given that There was a nuclear holocaust consuming the world in radioactive fire The radioactive world is haunted by actively genocidal creatures that want to kill all humans The environment-cleaning technology that makes the planet habitable for human beings is being actively gatekept by Cole Cole was on a deliberate campaign to conquer all world governments and stated his intent as such Any human holdout would have to somehow have to muster the forces to resist an army of the world's most powerful metahumans, lead by the world's singular most powerful metahuman, who have the only access to vital supplies such as potable water and anti-Telluric vaccines, the world's least-damaged industrial capacity (in the form of prewar America, the first territory liberated from the Hamidon) and a behind-the-scenes quid pro quo where Hamidon is helping them do it. Nukes can't stop them, either; Hamidon and Cole are the only two beings on the planet that can survive a direct hit from a Nuclear blast. Unless there are massive pieces of the Praetoria lore hidden from us, where, say, Brazil, or Indonesia, or Australia somehow managed to hold off the combined might of Praetoria or the Hamidon by producing a super mega ray gun or something, I just don't buy it. The deck is stacked too hard against national governments that wanted to stick it to Cole. He holds all the cards. Which is why I hammer on the Zion-from-the-Matrix thing: the only way I see an organized nation existing on the Praetorian planet independent of the Empire or of Hamidon is through technologically-advanced secrecy, like Wakanda or the Dwemer from Elder Scrolls or something. The deck is just stacked too hard against a country attempting direct continuity from the Old World against the combined and active hostility of both Hamidon and Emperor Cole.

I've spotted them, but I can't say I gave them too much thought. I was more distracted by the literal Abrahamic angels in Night Ward and what that represents hahahaha! I think you're right on the money, though, that those were probably the First Ward Powers Division, who got wiped out when Keyes sonic-nuked the district. Moving on to this, I seriously doubt this characterization that Hamidon would just lazybones on his genocidal forever-war because he took the planet. Throughout Number Six's arc, we are repeatedly reminded that Hamidon is obsessively thorough. Enemy chatter in the Hamidon's woods has Hamidon monstrosities keeping an active tally of the systematic extermination of all human life on the planet: I'm not saying that "I made a life in the wilderness after the fall of Praetoria" isn't a viable character concept, because it is, but you'd need to have kind of a Zion-from-the-Matrix thing going. Hamidon doesn't just ignore human settlements or, indeed, nations. Furthermore, when you talk to Hamidon directly in that very arc, Hamidon is quite particular that he doesn't believe in 'not all humans.' He intends to exterminate all human life on the planet, and he's doing just that.

As a minor point of contention, we know that the Last Bastion is not First Ward, because Number Six tells you explicitly what the Last Bastion is in his arc: it's a wilderness outpost set up by a unit of IDF deserters to try to flee from Cole's wrath, using stolen Lambda Turrets and Sonic Fences to hold the exfil point against Hamidon. Vanguard moved to reinforce them, and bob's your uncle. The topography is similar because (1) reused assets and (2) the 'core' of the Praetorian civilization is around the Florida Keys/Gulf of Mexico region so it's understandable they'd all have similar-looking wildernesses.

I'll grant you that Duray is a liar and a clone and not necessarily the best source. There's also wiggle room, likely owing to First Ward being written while the prior taskforces were still live and relevant, on the status of Marauder. During the events of Lambda, he appears as the Praetor in charge of Neutropolis, and is stated to be in command of the IDF based in Lambda (April 5 2011). Supposedly he's taken into custody here after the serum wears off, but we don't know what the timeline is on that. Marauder appears as the Praetor in charge of Nova Praetoria and is explicitly referred to as commanding the PPD during the events of First Ward, which is anachronistic to Lambda if he's actually been captured. (Sep 13 2011) During the (then-unreleased) New Praetorians arc, Marauder is seen in Imperial City, having spent the whole time fighting and very obviously not in custody. At this point he's been withered into nothingness by Berry's serum, but Marchand's dialogue that Vanguard has been 'tracking him' implies that he's been monitored but not captured. I think the way to reconcile the three is just to ignore the wiki's insistence that he's been captured at Lambda: Praetorian War starts Marauder stays home as the head of all internal security for Praetoria as Marchand is sidelined by Cole (souce: Provost Marchand). This gives him jurisdiction over the PPD and the IDF garrison within the city, as indicated by the shared hierarchy and Marchand's 'Provost' military police title Marauder gets his ass beat at Lambda but recovers following the extraction of the Incarnates Marauder pivots to defend the Magisterum during the events of First Ward - he's weaker at this point, albeit still too much for a level 25 to fight on their own Marauder goes missing when Imperial City collapses into anarchy and it's assumed he's fled (source: Praetor Sinclair, BV's arc) Marauder resurfaces with his Destroyers in a futile attempt to defend Imperial City, and is easily chumped by the Hamidon

Furthermore, Praetorian Duray collapses into goo and escapes during Sutter TF, and the next iteration of his consciousness is sent to First Ward during the active hostilities of the Praetorian War, as indicated by his dialogue in which he expresses annoyance at being pulled from the battle lines:

@Zhym @Darmian To follow up on the timeline of the Praetorian War starting before First Ward - this is literally based on the time in which this content dropped. City of Heroes issues were published linearily, carrying on an ongoing metaplot 'in real time.' BAF, Lambda, Sutter TF were from the April 5th, 2011 issue. Keyes Island was June 28th, 2011 First Ward, Underground, and Vanessa DeVore dying dropped September 13th, 2011 (as well as Galaxy blowing up) TPN was dropped in a micro-issue shortly before Night Ward and Magisterum dropped.

Just wanted to call out that this really is the best feeling, even if I'm trashed in the morning. Some SG-mates and I were doing a silly 'teen heroes get used to their powers' thing in Atlas Park, and even knowing that I had a hard bedtime, I blitzed right past it, especially once 'established' adult heroes saw us RPing and involved themselves to give pointers and encouragement. Sometimes, RP just clicks, and that's a dragon I chase every time I load into CoX.