The late July is made up of two dangerous things – obscure niche characters, and guns. What’s not to love ? Roll call:

• GUNS, GUNS, GUNS !! The huge Weapons Locker article may be popular, but it’s getting very old. Here’s an even larger, extensively illustrated, dual-statted (DCH and DCA) Weapons Locker article that replaces a good chunk of it and discusses a perennial favourite of gamers — guns. As will soon become apparent it’s not meant as a technical article, but an emulation of action stories in the comics, movies, video games, etc. So it’s short on numbers and ballistics and long on cool and pictures.
  
  The older article has been pruned and the deprecated sections shooed away, to prevent any confusion for people hitting articles at random. Then Angelina Jolie shot it to make sure.
• PHASERS, PHASERS, PHASERS ! Another of the Weapons Locker article is getting reworked – the article about phasers in Star Trek. The layout’s been redone and we’re going to tinker with the content soon-ish – let us know if you have comments about it.
• BANE’S ASSISTANTS. Since the entry for classic Bane has just been rolled out, we might just as well throw in his three assistants. These three potentially useful minor characters are :
  • Trogg
  • Bird
  • Zombie
• CRIME DOCTOR. We’ll now begin our adventures in crime… doctorness… here’s the pre-Crisis, Earth-1 version of the character.
• ART. The illustrations for the Enforcer (Dan Kingdom) have been redone.
• A version of Animal Man set in Chris’s campaign in the Legion of Super-Heroes timeline, based on the obscure Animal Lad (who’s also on writeups.org).
• DC ADVENTURES. The first version of the New Rules File for DC Adventures/M&M 3rd ed. is up. It is very small, and we intend to keep it that way, sticking to the RAW as much as possible.
• Deuce, a PC from one of Pufnstuff’s old campaigns – featuring original art by Puf.
• REWORK. Significant but not revolutionary improvements to the following entries:
  • Spitfire (writeup 1)
  • Spitfire (writeup 2)
  • Spitfire (writeup 3) (updated)
  • Catman (Current)
  • Asano Nitobe
  • Christine St Clair
• NOMAD. The entries for early Jack Monroe (before the Nomad Limited Series) have been redone and resequenced – writeup 1 (1950s Bucky), writeup 2 (1970s Bucky), writeup 3 (early Nomad). The fourth entry remains to be done, though we’ve kept an old writeup as a stopgap measure.
• CLAW THE UNCONQUERED. Another monster – N’Hglthss the Damned ! I’m sure people have been waiting for him.
• Pufnstuff also assembled a first version of a profile for the famous Phantom of the Opera.
• DOCTOR WHO. From Hominid71 comes an article about the Time Lords themselves.
• As a companion entry to Master Man, Warrior Woman (aka, alas, Kriegerfrau) gets a big entry.

And that’s 4,640 entries now. Slowly but surely, heh ?

We’ve spend some time fiddling with layouts, so we can now roll out the first pack of DC Adventures/Mutants & Masterminds 3rd entries that were discussed on the Atomic Think Tank, with various last-minute changes.

Please note that we use a slightly different scale than Green Ronin – all the differences and the reasons why are explained in the OMACS II article. For most entries, though, these small benchmarking differences do not play much of a role and the stats are annotated when the differences have a notable impact.

We also encourage folks to check the M&M part of the FAQ before they check the writeup – for instance it explains how we provide more detailed explanation and add a new indicator when calculating PL, to people have more information to work with.

All these entries have now a are noted as “Dual-Stats” in the Game System category in the search engine.

Roll call:

• Lemar Hoskins (writeup 1 – Bucky)
• Lemar Hoskins (writeup 2 – Battlestar)
• Batwoman (Katherine Rebecca Kane)
• Bethany Cabe
• Big Ben Donovan
• Black Lotus
• Claw the Unconquered
• Cockroach Hamilton
• Cottonmouth (the Serpent Society one)
• Coven
• Diamondback (Willis Stryker)
• Discus
• Eviless
• Isaac Javitz
• Pistolera
• Slagg
• Spear
• Spitfire (writeup 2)
• Stalnoivolk
• Starfire (swords and lasers)
• Stiletto (Tom Stuart)
• Svetlana X
• Kimberly Taylor, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
• Thump
• Vicious
• Warhawk

Early July batch. We have a fair bit of cool stuff. As usual ! And there’s a bunch of villains for your games, too. Roll call:

• V2s. Three big guys have been revised, and they’re very useful to have around:
  • Bane. Bane finally gets full coverage, and it’ll be a three-parters. Part one (“Bat-breaker”) covers Bane from before his birth to his victory over the Venom addiction, so chiefly the events of Knightfall.
  • Master Man. The notes for this guy were just some old stuff from a campaign. Here’s the full monty about your basic wartime Nazi superman, with various notes for context.
  • Lemar Hoskins aka Battlestar aka Bucky. Our old Battlestar entry has been modernised and now exists as two separate writeups (Lemar Hoskins (writeup 1 – Bucky) and Lemar Hoskins (writeup 2 – Battlestar). Its fairly typical of modern standards, really – better-written texts, more and better art, shorter entries covering a narrower era in more detail, banners and subsections to break text every few paragraphs, more professional tone, etc.
• CALORIE QUEEN. Last one ! Probably. This one is the version from Chris’s campaign.
• CHEETAH. More Wonder Woman entries, more coverage of the Cheetah. This entry covers the Earth-1 version of Priscilla Rich, so more or else the 1960s version. Don’t worry, there’s a guide to the versions of the character in the entry.
• SECRET SIX. Gareth presents (it’s like Alfred Hitchcock presents, but with Gareth) two entries from his Secret Six arc :
  • The Secret Six base entry for the team. That is, the entry that presents all the material that would be otherwise repeated in all entries, and provide all the pointers you need about the team and its resources;
  • Junior, one of their deadlier and more horrific opponents.
• FIGHTING FANTASY. There might be such very small entries from time to time, mostly for fun and nostalgia. In this batch, the GARK from Citadel of Chaos.
• Homey the clown, from a series of In Living Color TV skits. Homey don’t play dat – but he’s in anyway.
• REWORK. Thorough improvements, fixes, additional material, etc. to the following texts :
  • Marianne
  • Gunship
  • Sanction
  • Godot
  • Mercy
  • Widowmaker
  • Family Man
  • Mister Handsome
  • Smasher (Death’s Head henchman)
  • Sexy Boy
  • She-Wolf (La Louve)
• The Worgmeister lamentably forgot to process Peter’s entry for some obscure, minor character called Doctor Doom about three hundred times — but it’s now finally in after far, far too long.
• REWRITE. Minor but visible improvements to the entry of The Tenth (La Dixième).
• INVINCIBLE. Bryan’s Invincible entry for this batch is Titan.
• ART. Some Marvel entries have received nice art from one of last year’s sourcebooks, namely :
  • American Dream
  • Empath
  • Gladiator (Kallark)
  • Runner
  • Scalphunter
  • Watchdogs
• And finally we have a scholarly article from Chris on the subject of ageing in the classic Chris Claremont Uncanny X-Men stories, which will interest most people who fondly remember these seminal tales.

Not bad, huh ? Current entry count is 4628.

As you know we are working toward dual-statting some entries for DC Adventures / Mutants and Masterminds 3rd edition. This is a slow process – we need to develop our DCA skills, there are layout issues, etc.

A prototype entry is here ; it includes a possible layout for M&M stats and a trivially different arrangement for the quotes. Let us know what you think about this display of M&M stats.

(The “Averaged PL” is explained in the FAQ, everything else is RAW save for using standard extras and flaws on skills.)

We’ve been struggling to fix an issue with two search modes (Parse, and the search interface in the upper right corner), which was preventing newer entries from being indexed. The issue now looks right fixed, and the recent entries appear normally when using these search modes.

As a random remark, note that the Parse function is the bee’s knees when what you need is along the lines of “I need a teleporting villain in my next adventure”. Parse for “Teleportation” (the name of the Power in DC Heroes) and check which entries come up ; the search engine provides enough context to skip entries where teleportation is mentioned, but not as a part of the character’s abilities.