This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
How much work do you have to do to convince yourself that you’re normal?
He goes out at night wearing gauntlets he built, with knuckledusters designed to keep gangs down and send a message. He returns home to the mechanic shop and sleeps. And through it all, he tells himself he’s a normal guy, just fighting crime how he can.
Which doesn’t explain the flaming aura.
Or the unbreakable bones.
Or the way gods shudder at his presence.
Callum thinks he’s a normal guy, fighting evil with no greater purpose. And he couldn’t be more wrong.
If you’ve done vigilante work around Kings Row, you might have dealt with this guy. One of the real bottom-feeder vigilante types, crashing into the gangs like Skulls and Trolls and Outcasts, fist-fighting people while wearing a hoodie and a painter’s mask to protect his identity. Dude’s dangerous, in that sort of reckless idiot way; the kind of person who charges into gangsters with guns because what are you going to do, idiot, shoot me? He gets stabbed and kicked and punched and comes out of it okay, and through the application of nothing but energetic violence, he keeps a area around his own space, a partition about his workshop, safer.
It’s that typical kind of ‘hey, you should register for this, bro’ kind of vigilantism. You might even have a vibe for who he is in his day job – it’s not like he’s subtle about the place he protects. That guy, who runs a machine shop that works on heavy engines for the nearby Independence Port shipyards and specialised needs. Yeah, that guy. Ask him who he is, he’d probably just tell you his name’s Callum, and he’s just some guy.
He’s wrong.
Callum is a superhuman on a level that most people don’t even imagine is possible. Callum is a super-synthetic cyborg human stitched together of cloned material from Cearmaid, a universal aberration formed by natural materials to predate on gods, and Zex, a human technologist and borderline supervillainous super-scientist, all wrapped around a synthetic skeleton made out of components whose unnatural superiority to most construction is a byproduct of what you get when you can craft materials in universes with different rules.
Callum thinks he can’t handle being shot, because bullets kill people. Despite this, he still fights people with guns, because he’s convinced he can avoid being shot, and assumes he does so. The bullet holes in his clothes afterwards, they’re easy for the artificial memory to smooth away.
That memory smoothing is important. It’s very necessary that he forgets things. That he not realise how he doesn’t remember where he came from. He doesn’t remember his childhood. He doesn’t remember times when he’s donned a red and black outfit and fought terrible threats to the world and then returned home, drank four beers and fell asleep.
Callum was made to be a weapon to rival his mother, his father, and any gods that sought to interpose themselves. More than that though, he was made by something that wasn’t quite human that wanted to understand being a human, by the great machine intelligence the Iron Tyrant.
I see Callum’s story going through sequences of revelation. One level of it, the first level, is meant to be a discovery that for all he imagines himself self-made and independent, just some guy, just some normal person, he very much is not, and he’s the beneficiary of unimaginable privilege. Then the question becomes what do you do with it?
Callum’s got a lot of story stuff I like. Perhaps obviously – he’s basically a kind of Infernal Exalted, someone with immense power, a permanently damaged ego, anxiety about the good he’s doing, and a bad relationship with his dads. One of them is a god figure that wants him to inform it about the meaning of living; one of them is a working class trillionaire that doesn’t know how to dad at all. But also, in the moment, he’s someone who doesn’t know what to do with problems aside from relating to them violently. Absorb the violence, deal the violence, direct the violence. There’s more there, there’s the way machines know him, the way that he can reach out of himself with long metal tentacles and rampage like a one-man kaiju, but that’s not how he thinks. That’s not how he tries to solve problems.
And in most superhero groups, when he comes into his own, when he has that suit, he’s still going to be basically the same guy: Someone who can’t die and will beat his face and fists into problems to solve them.
Mechanics
Callum’s build is pleasantly basic. He’s a Fire Armor/Claws tanker, he can benefit from pool powers that meet Tanker needs, and he doesn’t need to protect himself from many holes aside from Knockback. It is a reasonably expensive build, but most of the cost is in powers that make him better at fighting, not things that keep him up on his feet.
His build at base has:
- Capped (90%) resistance to smashing, lethal, and fire damage.
- Soft-capped (45%) defense to melee attacks, and 32% to smashing and lethal attacks (covering a lot of ranged attacks)
- A 25% global damage boost
- 85% global recharge, which means almost permanent hasten – which means it’s closer to 155% global recharge
- Knockback protection on his travel powers, and knockback-to-knockdown in his area attack knockback power
Fire/Claws is a really robust build for a tanker, it can do a lot of stuff and claws also has a lot of what I think of as coverage. Coverage is ‘how can I deploy my powers in ways that changes my priority for enemy positions.’ Coverage plagues control sets; many of them want enemies bunched up for this power, or spread out for this power. Claws has a melee cone, a ranged cone and two melee aoes, which feels like they shouldn’t work together very well, but I find they tend to work great for dealing with really target-rich experiences.
Basically, the melee aoes are really good for when you’re swarmed, but when you close with a group, you want the cone and for tagging runners.
You can check out the build here.
History
This is complicated. Ironworks owes his origin to the confluence of multiple stories with another player, who I value greatly. First things first, the character this builds from is the character Zex, who I’ve written about in the past. During her story back on live, one of the stories she ran that endures in our own continuity is the story of Iron Tyrant.
Zex is a super scientist; she’s a mechanist, a technologist and she’s also extremely scared. Of everything. One of her enduring fears is an AI singularity, and as with many very smart technologists without a lot of emotional scaffolding, she gets in her own head about ways to solve these problems. Since she was already managing multiple personalities, this wound up incarnating itself in a problem-solving supervillain, whose existence would represent an existential threat, that other people would be forced to address. This conceptual character started to ‘leak’, resulting in the Iron Tyrant incident, where Zex fell into her own mental landscape and became The Iron Tyrant, dressed in black, red, and gold armour, and putting all her technological prowess to bear on defeating heroes she knew well, to force them to innovate.
This wasn’t done as a playtest, mind you. That wouldn’t achieve the intended result. Iron Tyrant was a real, actual supervillain, because Zex’s head is a bit messed. Part one of her plan was to kick Cearmaid, her at-the-time boyfriend off-planet so he couldn’t endanger her plot, which also meant I didn’t have to hold things up for my weird play times. The players fought the Iron Tyrant, downloaded her (him?) from Zex’s brain and threw it into another dimension, banishing it (her?) forever. And that was that, there wasn’t any plans to bring the idea back.
Then City of Heroes closed, and I was left with people I cared a lot about but without a common platform for play. Some of us set up a way to keep playing and we kept playing and we advanced the story a chunk, to tell the story of a next generation, building on what we already had. The city wasn’t there any more, we could just imagine a new one, different in some major and structural way. In this space, Zex’s player and I both conceived different ways that Zex and Cearmaid could have kids… and then made mysteries about where they came from.
The first was Anise, who is awesome, but not mine to talk about; she appeared on Cearmaid’s doorstep, called him Dad and he had to work out where this grown adult child of his appeared from, while she had to work out what to do with her new life.
The other was Callum. Callum didn’t appear on anyone’s doorstep. Callum showed up in Kings Row one day with a backstory in place, and a job, and a surprisingly basic set of social connections. People knew him, but nobody remembered when he arrived. He kept to himself working in a machine shop for specialised single large engines, and at some point started doing the vigilante stuff. He attended fight clubs under the handle Ironworks.
That play space petered out, eventually, and then, City of Heroes came back. We got Homecoming. In Homecoming, we got to rebuild things, and of course, some of us picked up where we left off. I made Cearmaid again. Zex’s player made Zex again. These characters were revisited and recreated and then the question hovered around me about… well…
… I could get the name Ironworks.
It’s such a cool name!
I got talking about this, because I do not like time-travelling children from the future. Not my bag daddy-o. But Callum’s extradimensional origin, and the questions he asked, don’t really need to involve time travel. The Iron Tyrant’s plan just needs to start a little earlier, and he just needs to slip the leash a little faster. The pieces are in place, and all he needs are people who can connect to that story to see it in action.
Right now, he has at least one friend – a bitey kitsune orphaned from a story, fleeing disaster, who sees him as a temporary way to waste some time, until she has to run again. Just some tough goon she can throw around and have fun with, because that’s all he is, right?
He’s just a friend.
And just some guy.