so who are the pcs in your capes in the dark campaign
I've been meaning to write this post up for ages, sorry for just getting it out now! Here's every past and present member of Greywatch and its auxiliary Capes.
ㅤFirst up is Shoggoth: Breaker 3/Trump 5, real name Hyde Princeton Lawrence. His Breaker state is a roiling mass of impossible shapes and angles that induces intense terror to behold (which effectively means you Can't Look At Him), and ever since his Second Trigger during the Warpath fight he's had the ability to transfer the Breaker state to other people on touch, making him unpowered until he undoes the effect but making the other person unable to use their power since they have his now.
He's the face of Greywatch in many regards, being the one who takes part in interviews, manages the team's social media, and generally does the brunt of the PR work. He has a youtube series that he's been running since he became a Cape called Shoggoth Says, where he talks frankly about his experiences being a hero and gives advice like first aid and emergency preparedness. He's dating Godspeed, a local independent Cape with outspoken left-libertarian ideology (and also Toronto's resident Femboy Cape) who is discussed at length further below.
Outside of his public-facing persona, he's a fairly mellow but sillygoofy guy, always looking out for others. Relatively introverted and tends to wait for his turn the speak, but he's developed more of a backbone over time from being a well-liked superhero, being the captain of a team, and dating a different smoking hot and beloved superhero.
(Art by @/atomic_blowfish on Twitter!)
Next is Calling Card: Blaster 9/Master 10, real name Kanta Basu. Originally, her power was simple: she could generate combustible gas from one hand and sparks from the other, and had minor Mastery over flesh that she burnt. She was always someone who was searching for ways to push the limits and find new greater ways to use her power; on her very first true outing as a Cape, she blew up an entire stash house and maimed multiple Capes from Trading Post (Toronto's superpowered drug empire), and things only escalated from there. In a fight against the brass of the Auteurs (Toronto's superpowered mafia), she very nearly died, but instead Second Triggered, which set her down the path of chaos she's been on ever since.
Her Second Trigger granted her the ability to generate a large explosion centered on herself, and turn anyone who was hit by the blast but wasn't incinerated into a "Metamorph", a being of free form that she could fleshcraft and control however she liked. There were harsh limits on the Metamorphs and when they would revert back to humans, but with Kanta's brand of mad science and her player's ingenuity she's continually found workaround for those limits and escalated her powers further and further. Her power has also transformed her, her Shard returning her to the form of the aliens which inspired the Shard in the first place; she hasn't let on about this to anyone, but in the art below she's actually the dog-like being on the left, and the humanoid form is a Metamorph she's using to keep up appearances.
Her power has never stopped increasing, and the more power she's gained the more confident and amoral she's become. From day one Kanta was always obsessed with her own success and was more violent than the rest of the team, but as she's become more and more capable of doing whatever she wants she's become harder and harder for Greywatch to reign in and more and more disliked by the public. She finally reached the last straw recently when she semi-accidentally exploded the base of and killed one of the Adjudicators, a well-liked independent hero team that Greywatch had close ties with; she was arrested (though let out for the Endbringer battle), and is awaiting a trial that will probably put her in the Fishbowl for her four-month rampage of chaos and death.
(Art by @/magistelle on Twitter!)
Third is Funhouse: Stranger/Brute 4, real name Cesare Nascondersi. Along with simple but solid superstrength and durability, when interacting with objects he can turn them invisible, which leaves an illusion of the object in place he turned it invisible. If someone tries to touch the visible illusion, the invisibility 'pops' and the illusion vanishes, but Funhouse is able to use the object more skillfully and effectively for a time. He's also very good at throwing knives, which it's easy for him to make invisible and then pop, thus making him even better at them.
In a lot of ways, Funhouse embodies traditional heroics. He has probably the best work/life balance out of anyone in Greywatch (besides Mandlebrot, who we'll get to), and has managed to stay remarkably well-adjusted throughout the four months of Greywatch's operations, especially for someone working alongside Calling Card and Nudibranch. He's a very reasonable, pragmatic guy with a good head on his shoulders and a strong sense of right and wrong, and wants nothing more than to help people who are hurting.
He's also the team's medic; in his civilian life he works in a hospital morgue, so he has a lot of skill and practice as well as easy access to medical supplies. He's good under pressure and has saved a lot of civilians in peril using his medical knowledge; he's well-liked by the public and a good friend to everyone on Greywatch (besides Calling Card), always there when you need him and always sure to speak his mind and do what's right.
(There's no true art of him yet, but have this doodle from @beckyhotgirl to tide you over)
The last of Greywatch's core four is Nudibranch: Shaker 6/Tinker 6/Thinker 2/Brute 2, real name Milo Barrett. He constantly secretes a blue slime with the properties of oil (floats on water, slippery, flammable), smells like shampoo, and is edible (it tastes like blue gatorade). He can breathe the slime, is made fireproof from it, and is nearly impossible to grapple. He also has proprioception with the slime — that is, he's always aware of the position of things coated in it in the same way you're always aware of where your arm is even when you can't see it. The more nervous he is, the more he slimes, and if he gets angry enough it will spontaneously combust.
Before getting powers (and for a little bit of time right after), Milo was a shut-in NEET who passed his days playing Osu! and drawing yaoi. He became entangled in Greywatch when they fought some carjackers right outside his apartment, they recruited him, and he's been a vital part of their lineup ever since. He's simultaneously incredibly nervous at all times and vacillates between incredible self-confidence and insane imposter syndrome. He has an animal magnetism that makes the public adore him even when he severely messes up, a lot of his allies are madly attracted to him, and he just keeps getting more powerful, and ever since his Shard turned him bisexual he's been dating Chaos Kitten, a famous Cape from Hamilton, Ontario (see below); he's the definition of falling upwards.
When the supervillain Legate killed his at-the-time boyfriend Chainlink, he killed her in retaliation, and due to some complicated Shard shenanigans that were going on at the time, Legate's consciousness got copied into his brain and he had to live with her ghost in his head. They got off to a rocky start for obvious reasons, but eventually grew to like each other and the lines between them slowly blurred, and now they're half-dating half-the-same-person (her name was Myra Rae, so now they go by Mylo Rae-Barrett). She was a Tinker who specialized in improving on other designs with a focus on plasma, hence his Tinker rating; he's since adapted armour and a plasma-slime whip into his arsenal.
His murder of Legate was eventually discovered by her team, reported to the police and PRT, and he was put on trial (also for aggressive behaviour due to a curse he had on him at the time due to Axiom Null). In her civilian life, Myra had been a defense attorney, so thanks to the lawyer ghost in his head (and his alive lawyer being good too), he managed to work his sentence down to a Shadow Stalker-style "you'll work for the PRT now"; he's been back and forth to Toronto in his free time, but for the past month he's been the 74th-ranked Protectorate hero, operating out of Tucson, Arizona. On the side he writes a popular yaoi webcomic called Help! My Cape Boyfriends Are Fighting. He has a kill count of 23.
(art of Milo and Myra by @/meemo.psd on instagram, and of Mylo by @beckyhotgirl!)
Those are the core four — unfortunately, it's those four in particular primarily because of irl stuff making it difficult for other players beside those four to keep up with things, rather than any particular in-universe stuff. However there are a bunch of others who have been present at some point, so I'll go over the rest now, in order of "has art" to "doesn't have art".
So next we have 1/100: Brute/Breaker 6, real name Malik Hassan. He has superstrength with some caveats, and a strange healing factor: he's much more resistant to death, but at the same time is far more fragile than the average person: you the reader could probably punch clean through his abdomen, but he wouldn't feel much pain or suffer many consequences from it and he'd be able to keep going as he healed. When he's excited and adrenaline-amped, he shifts into a Breaker state that makes him "unstoppable"; that is, he can't halt his own momentum until he hits something sufficiently sturdy (like brick wall sturdy), and his powered-up attacks are extremely difficult to block without turning yourself into paste. In this state he makes loud metallic grinding sounds when he moves, billows huge amounts of steam and smoke, and makes ambient train noises (he triggered when he failed at committing suicide by train, and his name is in reference to the fact that one person is killed by a train every 100 minutes). He has a plush rat named Mr. Bites You which has a gun hidden inside it.
The thing about Malik's personality is that he just kind of sucks. He doesn't take anything seriously, is rude to everyone but the few people he admires, doesn't carry his weight on the team outside of combat, and is really only part of the team because he dropped his entire life and burned all his bridges flying from Newcastle, England to Toronto to be part of Greywatch (to fight Calling Card and be close to Chaos Kitten), so they can't kick him out (and Chaos Kitten has a soft spot for him in a sort of "I'm gonna be this kid's mentor" way). Prior to joining the team, he constantly antagonized them on PHO as pukegirl02. He joined the campaign to be my girlfriend's character while Mylo is in Tucson, though he's now sort of permanently Human-Mastered by Fascine, so his connection to Greywatch has become tenuous.
(art by @beckyhotgirl!)
The first former member here, we have Culver: Master/Thinker 5, real name Ariane Carrier. She can create pre-programmed clones of herself that are sent out to complete tasks; before creating the clone she can see how the clone will attempt to complete the task and choose to cancel the clone as an information-gathering tactic, hence the Thinker rating. When she sends out the clone it will attempt to complete its task with moderate skill; if it succeeds it vanishes, but if it fails then Culver's consciousness is zooped into the clone's body and her old body dies, which can drastically mess up her positioning and be overall disastrous.
Culver was, years ago, friends with Milo's older brother. She, Milo, his brother, and a few of her other friends got into a car accident that lost Milo his leg, killed his brother, and caused Culver to Trigger when she had to choose which of her friends to save before they all bled out. She went off to be a hero in Ottawa, but when she heard that Milo had become a Cape she came back to Toronto and did a stint with Greywatch; she helped them when Axiom Null came to town, then decided that Greywatch was involved in too high-stakes stuff for her blood and she went back to Ottawa.
(art by my good friend and Culver's player @airbornedeer!)
These next two are NPCs played by me, but they're major characters and they have art so they go next.
Chaos Kitten: Master 6/Shaker 5/Brute 4, real name Sabine Milošević. A Cluster Trigger, Chaos Kitten has three powers. By exerting a good amount of focus and concentration she can induce extremely powerful fear, confusion, or arousal on single targets; she can create opaque purple orbs that damage and disorient those within; and she's invincible on exposed skin but not anywhere that's covered up. She's 27 and she's been in the Cape scene since she was 20, so she's a seasoned veteran who's been around the block a few times, having two previous Cape identities (Mystifier and Circe) behind her as she became more and more comfortable with the fact that her powers are kind of fundamentally sex-themed. She was the #1 hero in Hamilton, Ontario for a long time, then after Hamilton was severely damaged by Warpath she got in contact with Greywatch and began making inroads in Toronto in an attempt to get help for her city. Eventually she got close with them and began operating as a member of the team, though still spent time in Hamilton to help keep the city from descending into a hellscape in the aftermath of Warpath.
Sabine is a bubbly, fun, flirty, promiscuous person who's unserious to a fault. When she started spending time with Greywatch she initial began crushing on Shoggoth, but when he turned her down she set her eyes on Nudibranch; he was too shy to tell her he was gay, and then when his Shard made him bisexual he started to return her affection and they ended up falling in love. She's been a massive boon to Greywatch with her experience, skill, and strength in a fight, and her relationship with Milo is so deep and caring that roleplaying it played a big role in my girlfriend and I falling in love in real life.
I'm linking instead of embedding the art here because the only solo art of her is a body pillow design — there's no explicit nudity, but it's still nsfw, so know what you're getting into before you click.
The other major NPC is Godspeed: Shaker 6/Brute 5/Mover 5, real name Tracy Winstead. Along with a pretty good Paragon package (good superstrength, excellent durability, and low-tier flight), Godspeed can “rewind time” in a large AoE: every object and person within resets to the location it was at the time he designates, and while by default they maintain the state they were in he can choose to make their state revert as well. He’s an independent Cape who patrols High Park and the surrounding neighborhoods friendly-neighborhood-Spider-Man style and is well-loved by the populace; he’s an outspoken left-libertarian who refuses to join the PRT because he doesn’t believe the government should have their hands in hero business, and until Greywatch came along he preferred working alone and handling threats in his general area to being part of a team and facing down the broader-scale things that that entailed.
When Greywatch came onto the scene, however, Shoggoth immediately developed a big crush on Godspeed and over the course of a few meetings and sparring matches and missions together they eventually drew close, and Shoggoth convinced Godspeed to help Greywatch out as a bit of a tactics man while their relationship deepened and became public. He’s still officially independent and does a lot of work on his own, but he’s in and out of Greywatch HQ and coordinates with them quite a bit to the benefit of both the team and himself.
In his civilian identity, Tracy is a city councilman who is just as politically active as he is as Godspeed, and has done just as much good for Toronto fighting in the legislation halls as he has punching villains in the streets.
(Art by @beckyhotgirl! Go commission my wife or else)
The next former Greywatch member is Chainlink: Brute 6/Striker 5, real name Maxwell Porter. He could entangle himself with objects on touch, giving him an interesting form of strength and durability: if he were to link himself to a car he would be able to punch or lift with the weight of the entire car as well as his own body and any damage he took would be shared proportionately between him and the car (which is to say, if the car was twelve times as massive as him then any damage he took would be split 12:1 between the car and him). However, if the car took any damage it would also reflect back to him.
He was the brother of Ikazuchi (one of the Toronto Wards), and the son of Caldera (one of the Toronto Protectorate) and Captain Earthworm (a member of the Harvestmen, a small communist and bugs themed team). He had Cluster Triggered with his parents and they both rolled Kill on him, so he had been kicked out of the house and lived homeless on the streets of Toronto for a while, until he was controlled by Fascine and became part of her entourage. When Greywatch went to break Calling Card out of Fascine's control (long story), they ended up rescuing Chainlink as well, and he joined the team primarily so he could live in their base. He was instrumental in the battle against Warpath, and was publicly smacked with a brick and nearly killed by his mom in the aftermath, which got Caldera kicked from the Protectorate.
As he spent time with Greywatch, he drew close to Milo and they went on a few dates, but at the same time he was slowly but surely losing his mind to his Shard. Before he could lose his humanity entirely, he was killed by Legate. A small fraction of him lives on in Funhouse's brain due to the same Shard shenanigans that put Legate in Milo's, but to a much lesser capacity. He was a very blunt, straightforward person and that was the majority of his personality, but he was easy to get along with and Greywatch was deeply saddened by his death.
(the rest of the art is going to be doodles like Funhouse's)
After Max's death, his player's new character was Mandlebrot: Changer 4/Striker 2, real name Lincoln Bane (or is it?). He could grow fractal animal parts on himself, anything from extra fingers to a wolf's head with shark-like recursive rows of fangs. He could also touch objects to make them grow more of themselves, until he broke contact with them at which point they would snap back to how they were before.
Mandlebrot (Mandy for short) was a man obsessed with privacy and opsec. He was a genius at managing and laundering money, which helped with Milo's illegally gained millions (long story), and generally was an expert at all the not-quite-above-board things that Greywatch got up to in their third option grey morality exploits. He had multiple fake identities and had inroads with basically every organization in town, and was fiercely protective of the team, to the point of taking multiple bullets at one point to cover Culver's escape.
However, soon he saw the heat around the corner and had to dip, and just before the Gwynddynes Endbringer attack, he fully subsumed himself into one of his false identities and skipped town without saying goodbye.
Another temporary member who helped with opsec and legitimization was Atroph: Tinker 6, real name unknown. Her tinker specialty was Entropy; she had gadgets that broke things down, sped up decay, operated on chaos theory, and more. She was dangerous and unpredictable in a fight, and could have easily disintegrated people if her weapons had worked even slightly less reliably.
She took Greywatch from being a team to being an organization: she wrote up official contracts, helped them hire civilian underlings, and made sure everyone was fully onboard and part of the team. She was stern, opinionated, and opposed to any sort of moral calculus or equivocating; she left the team when it became clear to her that her goals for them and their vision of the team were at odds, and she went off to do her own work.
More NPCs up next. Early on, when Greywatch freed themselves from under the Auteurs and became a real team, they shopped around for Capes that no one else wanted to hire, and interviewed and recruited them.
The first among these was Bongwater: Shaker 5, real name Dutch Baumgartner. He can create large clouds of incendiary smoke. He's a 19 year old burnout stoner who spent a year or so kicking around as a street-level independent hero before Greywatch hired him; his power is pretty decent, a solid C+ or B tier, but no one in Toronto wanted to hire him because nobody wanted to deal with the optics of having The Weed Cape on their team. He's a genuinely good guy who isn’t quite cut out for big threats (he tapped out before Warpath arrived, Chainlink gave him a few hundred dollars and told him to go to Detroit until it blew over and he's dodged the rest of the major threats since), but he gets very solid results with street-level work. He's very earnest, respectable, and fairly hard-working as a Cape, especially when working with his duos partner.
That partner is Athanor: Blaster 7/Trump 3, real name Vincent Wormwood. Athanor is a 65-year old Cape who thinks he's a wizard and dresses and acts the part; his power is that he has a staff, and if he puts one end of the staff on an object or an incidence of someone's power, he can fire more of the object out of the other end. He uses this to great effect with Bongwater by firing huge quantities of his smoke around, and in the Warpath fight he combined it with Ikazuchi's lightning to fry Jura (a Sixth Extinction member who could turn into a dinosaur) into a skeleton.
In his daily life he's a history teacher at a local high school, where it's kind of an open secret among the students that he's Athanor since he looks and acts just as bombastic, minus the wizard robes and staff. All his students love him.
In the same recruiting session Greywatch also hired Soapstone, Striker 5, real name Laura McGuire. She could soften matter on touch and wasn't Manton-limited, meaning after she beat villains she would always carve a mark into their forehead to show that she beat them. She hadn't been hired by other teams for being too violent, though she wasn't on Greywatch very long because when Calling Card Second Triggered she got caught in the initial blast and was incinerated.
They also hired Exploit, Thinker 3/Tinker 1, whose real name I lost. Her power would highlight potentially useful objects in the environment, and she didn't speak but communicated using a TTS device on her arm so no one would find out she was a famous movie director in her civilian life. She was a player character, but was only in the campaign for two sessions and then the player left so Exploit fell down the stairs and died.
Another very brief player character was Ymir, Trump 7/All #?, real name Zenobia Addams. She was a civilian who Triggered during the final confrontation with Axiom Null, which was a massive battle with loads of Capes now dubbed "The Battle of Toronto", "The Imbroglio", or "The Clusterfuck". Every day when Ymir woke up, she had a random power from a set of 144, each one a cross of two of the twelve Power Ratings. It was believed she got her power due to Triggering in an event with so many Capes and powers present, but when it was revealed that Axiom Null's leader Alpeh had been an Emanation of Theophage all long, Greywatch realized that Ymir was actually a bud of Theophage. She went off to get therapy (both the traditional kind and power therapy) from The Benefactors, where she's been ever since. She was played by the same player as Atroph's.
Another character by the same player, one of the founding members of Greywatch, was Mildew: Shaker 3/Mover 2, real name Sally Schweutt. Mildew could dash-teleport forwards in a straight line, leaving spores in the air behind her. If anyone breathed in these spores they'd become sick and disoriented, and if she teleported through them they'd be briefly incapacitated. On the first first day of Greywatch's existence she got accidentally shot in the lung, which harboured a seed of resentment in her, and over time as Greywatch struggled through its early days under the thumb of the Auteurs that resentment grew until she left the team. She later founded a terrorist villain team called the Graveyard Girls, full of members with "gross"-type powers like hers, which aimed to draw attention to the harm done by Greywatch and other hero teams.
The final character, another founding member of Greywatch, was Therian: Thinker/Changer 4, real name Bjarte Geoffrey. He had a passive Thinker power that was constantly scanning for and alerting him of danger; when he chose to, he could let his power adapt his body to mitigate the danger, though he had no say in what that adaption would be, and while it was always suited against the particular threat that didn't always mean it was a good mutation (for example, developing gills against someone who can generate large sphere of water to drown people in isn't helpful when you're still in the air and can't breathe anymore). He spent much of his time with Greywatch attempting to further his own interests at the cost of others (including buying up tons of medical supplies with the advance knowledge of Warpath's approach to scalp them in the aftermath [which backfired when Warpath was defeated before she made it into the city proper]), eventually left the team to look for love, and was killed by the Graveyard Girls.
And that's everyone!! Every single player character and NPC who was ever even marginally part of Greywatch. I hope you enjoyed the massive exposé, feel free to ask any more questions about them and I'll be happy to answer!
