Halt Evil Doer! thread IV - (Zombies!)

[Phrozen]

I watched Dr. Strangelove again a couple nights ago. Why haven't people mined that movie for characters yet?

[Charles Phipps]

I watched Dr. Strangelove again a couple nights ago. Why haven't people mined that movie for characters yet?

No clue!

It is very rippable, isn't it?

Oddly, I was thinking of doing a "Week of Freeport" because everyone was so quiet.

[Libra]

I'm working, I'm working!

(At least on comments, although I'm working my way around to actual articles).

By 'A Week of Freeport' do you mean 'A Week of Freehold' - or are you referring to the Green Ronin Fantasy setting? (because if you're planning on posting about a setting I WILL badger you with pleas to make that setting Winterwier ... you have been warned!).

[Charles Phipps]

I'm working, I'm working!

(At least on comments, although I'm working my way around to actual articles).

By 'A Week of Freeport' do you mean 'A Week of Freehold' - or are you referring to the Green Ronin Fantasy setting? (because if you're planning on posting about a setting I WILL badger you with pleas to make that setting Winterwier ... you have been warned!).

Freehold. Slip of the tongue.

But yes, basically it's in honor of the new Spiderman movie.

I'd be developing Crinos' rogues and also explaining the secret origin of JWIII.

(Remember the HOS' headquarters is under the city)

[EnigmaticOne]

I'd be developing Crinos' rogues and also explaining the secret origin of JWIII.

(Remember the HOS' headquarters is under the city)

Didn't I already do that?

[Charles Phipps]

I'd be developing Crinos' rogues and also explaining the secret origin of JWIII.

(Remember the HOS' headquarters is under the city)

Didn't I already do that?

At the risk of eye-roll, I actually had a big explanation WHY he was a crazy killbot.

[Charles Phipps]

Freehold

Freehold is one of the oldest settlements in America, originally settled by exiles from Wales during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. A vast amount of gold was paid to the crown as a bribe to allow the settlers to leave, having been accused of many things from cannibalism to ritual sacrifice to papistry. The settlers, of course, were in no way worshipers of the Pope and thus were allowed to leave England safely and set up their colony on the shores of Massachusetts.

In truth, the Freeholders were not Satanists but a collection of mixed pagan/Otherworlders who primarily venerated the Celtic gods as a set of angels who had fallen from God's grace but were still allowed to have some dominion over humanity. A certain amount of Satanic influence afflicted the colony but that was primarily due to Belial due to the fact that the Old Serpent had been driven out of their lands by a Welsh Saint and who was now free to harass them (since said Saints bones were not taken with them).

The colony was nearly wiped out before it was born by the Merrow, who considered the territory to be theirs by right. In an early alliance between Native Americans and white settlers, the two joined forced to drive the Merrow back into the sea. Later, a family of Englishmen called the Macneers made an unholy pact with the Merrow, interbreeding with them in exchange for both magic as well as gold from the sea bed. The Macneers were driven out but their followers went on to found the village of Lowtown which was eventually joined with Freehold once the town expanded and the old legends died down.

Local hero and pirate, Michael O'Hara became famous along with Saint Alyssa during the early days of New World when the two of them bound The Kraken beneath the city after the Lowtowners summoned it in order to kill all of the non-believers in the New World. The Kraken, actually a half-Merrow/half-Entropic Master demigod, was then bound beneath Freehold's bay and became known as the "Beast of Pirate's Bay." It still appears in dreams and occasionally free a tentacle or two to drown swimmers or lure lovers to their doom. Michael's statue still stands in the center of Freehold and his descendants are still famous, being almost as politically prominent as the Kennedys.

Witch-hunting fever eventually afflicted Freehold and drove its pagan worshipers underground with almost a hundred hangings. The irony of this is that it caused many of the previously white witches of the region to turn to genuine worship of Belial and the Entropic Masters. As a result, Freehold has remained a center for a low-level occult war between various factions ever since.

Freehold was at the center of the American Revolution, being a place where the British set up a major headquarters and inadvertently ****ed off a lot of the locals. Fleeing renegade mystics of the European Illuminati proceeded to recruit many of the local Masonic lodges into their ranks, creating the grounds for the American branch. Anti-Royalist, The Bluecoat, waged a vigilante war against loyalists during this time, though his activities were far from benign. German mercenary Karl Mueller would fight as a human during this time period, inflicting staggering casualties on the rebels while also murdering literally hundreds of monsters freed from Freehold mystic's prisons (the violence of the revolution violating their prisons).

Troublesome for Karl, he's heard that more than forty families claimed illegitimate children by him and while he only has one son in the Modern Era, he isn't sure he can discount the possibility that most of modern day freeport can claim heritage from him. It would explain the town's "spooky" nature. Post the Revolutionary War, the town would become a center of the Illuminati's double-dealing and where much of the plans to create an American Empire were formed. The Lodge of the Serpent would be founded centuries before the House yet make use of much of the same imagery.

By the time of the Great Depression, Freehold was a major port that created its own boardwalk rivaling Atlantic City. Falling under the sway of local crime boss, Boss Ronald O'Hara gambling was legalized within certain parts of the city and it became a place where prohibition was more or less was ignored. The gang violence was terrible and eventually got just plain weird with the introduction of vampires.

The city fell under a shadow and it would not be freed from that shadow until the arrival of Ink Spot.
Ink Spot, known as the "Scientiffic Hero", was more of an occult investigator than anything else. Through the late 1930s, inspired by Doc Aeon, he was involved in literally dozens of supernatural cases. While not a scientist himself, he represented the banner of reason in the minds of the public. A secret society of inventors, called the Knights of Aether joined him with the Starling Family, The Golden Alchemist, and The Invisible Queen. Most of these ended up dead but they broke the power of the dark supernatural forces over the town and also ended up assisting the FBI in taking down Boss O'Hara.

During the 1940s the town became host to the Liberty Men and the bad guys were simply clobbered every weekend when all of America's best heroes came into the city to talk shop. The FBI, with the assistance of the Liberty Men, raided much of the remaining holdouts and Lowtown mysteriously burned to the ground in The Great Lowtown Fire. Only a small number of people died in the fire itself, officially, but reports claimed that the fire was sparked by some sort of Treasury Department raid. Few of the agents involved could later be reached for comment.

After WW2, President Einsenhower named Freehold the location where much of the United States' 'hard superhuman' research would be done. No longer trusting Project: Icarus, they became working on physics experiments related to super-technology as well as alien devices. Project: Icarus, amusingly, ended up building several labs in the location just because so much new technology was coming out of Freehold's labs. Doctor Aeon created the first John Smith Society Institution there before his disappearance.

The place would eventually be renamed the Freehold Institute of Technology after they accidentally summoned Typhon with a radio mating call. Even so, FIT remains a center for oddball researchers and is only slightly less eccentric than the Utah JSS headquaters. It is here the majority of supervillains and heroes that now work throughout the city were born. A bizarre rivalry exists in Freehold between the science criminals and the more supernaturally inclined ones with the former often refusing to believe in the later, despite the fact that magic is a documented phenomenon in Heroic Earth. Likewise, the supernatural wizards and cultists of the town often try to diss science whenever possible despite the fact that science heroes routinely smash their summoned gods and monsters down.

Modern Freehold is a much larger city than Boston and much more influential, being roughly the size of Freedom City. Protected by Splotch, the city could use a much larger number of heroes within its ranks even though he is constantly trying to save it from the flamboyant number of criminals which makes it their home. The city is VERY politically active and the headquarters of the House of Serpents is underneath it. This has, of all things, resulted in a staggering number of advanced weapons ending up in the hands of local criminals and street toughs. Despite this, the locals aren't particularly living in a shadow of fear.

For whatever reason, the criminals of Freehold have CLASS.

[Libra]

Freehold. Slip of the tongue.

Or a quirk of the finger - it's honestly a fair enough mistake to make (I know that I sometimes have difficulty keeping the various worlds turning in my imagination, in the same way a plate-spinner has difficulty keeping the china on the pole!).

I may still tease you a little about it anyway: we'll have to wait and see.

(Remember the HOS' headquarters is under the city)

I do, in fact - one of the major reasons I placed America Force 1s old Home Base in Los Dios, instead of one of the spiritual homes of the American Spirit was because the mental image of them briefly setting up shop in the area then getting wind of the major HoS concentration in the area before exercising the better part of valour was slightly depressing (and possibly accurate).

Also because my mental image of them as spiritual heirs to the Big Men of American Tall Tales had pretty much solidified at that point and where else would modern myth-killers set up shop other than beautiful Los Dios?

Freehold is one of the oldest settlements in America, originally settled by exiles from Wales during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

In truth, the Freeholders were not Satanists but a collection of mixed pagan/Otherworlders who primarily venerated the Celtic gods as a set of angels who had fallen from God's grace but were still allowed to have some dominion over humanity.

Most of the colonist leadership was drawn from those born in the region of Anglesey (aka Yns Mon), once the heart of the Druidic faith in Britain and still of interest to the majority of Celtic Cosmic Eternals, even if those who worshipped openly them have had to keep their little theological peculiarities very, very quiet since Saint Cybi set up on Holy Island - mostly to avoid attracting more monks!

A certain amount of Satanic influence afflicted the colony but that was primarily due to Belial due to the fact that the Old Serpent had been driven out of their lands by a Welsh Saint and who was now free to harass them (since said Saints bones were not taken with them).

Amusingly Belial COMPLETELY denies the whole affair, since it would be somewhat embarrassing for him to admit that he'd been driven off by Welshman TWICE OVER (Saint Patrick being a Welshman, or something close enough to one, for all that he'd made his life's work in neighbouring Ireland).

The colony was nearly wiped out before it was born by the Merrow, who considered the territory to be theirs by right. In an early alliance between Native Americans and white settlers, the two joined forced to drive the Merrow back into the sea.

Casualties amongst both settlers and natives were so high that both came near to extinction before a considerable degree of intermarriage occurred and the second major wave of immigrants from the Old Country arrived - in this case containing a significant Irish Minority, taking their inspiration from the Flight of the Earls and in many cases fleeing the Plantations of Ulster.

History fails to record this in any legible form because most of the English clerks found one Celtic vernacular as incomprehensible as another - allowing this Irish contingent to pass itself off as being as Welsh as Edward of Carnarfon. Well, that and the eyesight-affecting consequences of having one's palm crossed with silver.

Later, a family of Englishmen called the Macneers made an unholy pact with the Merrow, interbreeding with them in exchange for both magic as well as gold from the sea bed.

Not to mention the security only putting an entire ocean between themselves and their own personal nemesis Saul King could give them. Given that he largely operated on the right-hand side of the Atlantic until the dawn of the 18th Century, it wasn't a bad bargain (despite having only Evil consequences for the World).

Michael's statue still stands in the center of Freehold and his descendants are still famous, being almost as politically prominent as the Kennedys.

Family legends that Saint Alyssa was the foremother of their lineage (and that Michael O'Hara regarded getting past her drawers as a touch more difficult than thwarting the Kraken, she being a good Catholic Nun and a Saint to boot) remain current, despite almost certainly having only this for a grain of truth:

Michael O'Hara loved chasing what he had no honest business catching.

Witch-hunting fever eventually afflicted Freehold and drove its pagan worshipers underground with almost a hundred hangings. The irony of this is that it caused many of the previously white witches of the region to turn to genuine worship of Belial and the Entropic Masters.

There is considerable evidence that it was this wave of hangings (most of which involved no sentence of Witchcraft, taking place as they did during the first quarter of the 17th Century, when such things were going out of vogue, none of which fooled the locals in the least) and the ensuing backlash of genuine practitioners turning down the Left-Hand Path were what drew Saul King to Freehold for the first time.

To say he was not happy with the prevailing state of affairs is a considerable understatement.

Freehold was at the center of the American Revolution, being a place where the British set up a major headquarters and inadvertently ****ed off a lot of the locals. Fleeing renegade mystics of the European Illuminati proceeded to recruit many of the local Masonic lodges into their ranks, creating the grounds for the American branch.

There are suspicions (in fact there are MANY suspicions when it comes to Freehold's shadow history, since the cabals involved tended to find rivals to be so numerous that raising their head above the parapet to be about as survivable as jumping into a shark tank while bleeding) that what REALLY ticked off the locals was the fact that the British contingent garrisoned in the town contained a significant number of representatives of those factions which had chased the local Illuminati across the Atlantic.

To be more accurate this scared the spirit out of the local Illuminati, who swiftly took advantage of local protests against certain political acts of Parliament to whip up a certain amount of trouble for their pursuers and a smokescreen for their speedy departure - even they were a bit surprised when this led to bloody Civil War across the 13 colonies.

Anti-Royalist, The Bluecoat, waged a vigilante war against loyalists during this time, though his activities were far from benign.

Almost equally-efficient and unpleasant was his primary opponent, one Captain Crown, an American Loyalist whose attitude towards Patriots was no more warm-hearted than that of 'The Blue-coated Slave of Satan and Son of Hell'* was towards Tories.

*Modern histories tend to trim the name a bit: Karl Mueller remains just a little bit amused that the figure most associated with Hell in Freehold during the Revolution wasn't HIM.

German mercenary Karl Mueller would fight as a human during this time period, inflicting staggering casualties on the rebels while also murdering literally hundreds of monsters freed from Freehold mystic's prisons (the violence of the revolution violating their prisons).

Troublesome for Karl, he's heard that more than forty families claimed illegitimate children by him and while he only has one son in the Modern Era, he isn't sure he can discount the possibility that most of modern day freeport can claim heritage from him.

Rumour has it that seeing entire families impregnated by a potential Antichrist was the last straw for a lot of those worshippers of the Celtic Cosmic Eternals who'd clung on in Freehold - most of them would move westward with almost unseemly haste after the war was done, eventually winding up in Los Dios.

After that the occult scene in Freehold became just a wee bit morally grey.

Falling under the sway of local crime boss, Boss Ronald O'Hara gambling was legalized within certain parts of the city and it became a place where prohibition was more or less was ignored.

O'Hara has since been described 'as more Joe Kennedy than Al Capone' - being more interested in expanding his political power by doing favours for ALL his constituents than in falling in line with the Phantom League (to the point where local government was outstanding in it's contribution to the hunt for the Black Phantom).

Ironically, his son would become EXTREMELY Electable by virtue of his activities as an anti-crime crusader and failed to achieve anything more than local success only due to the fact that he was obliged to take his father down for his ties with the local gangs to do it.

Ronnie kicked himself for a month after that one.

The gang violence was terrible and eventually got just plain weird with the introduction of vampires.

Interestingly Freehold at this time was a heck of a lot worse than FALCONCREST in terms of gang violence - it wasn't until after the vampire showed up that the local Irish and Italian mobs buried the hatchet (in this case in the skull of the first Vampire Boss, although that didn't keep him down for long) and local crime began to be organised in the Ankh-Morpork style.

A secret society of inventors, called the Knights of Aether joined him with the Starling Family, The Golden Alchemist, and The Invisible Queen.

The Knights of Aether at the time being a cabal of inventive types who admired King Arthur only slightly less than they did Doc Aeon - rumours that Merlin was an associate of theirs at this time are probably only partially accurate.

The Starling Family can best be described as two generations of Law Enforcement (local and national) working as one, working their way around the jurisdictional conflicts so elegantly engineered by Ron O'Hara mostly by virtue of the fact that it's sort of hard to sustain arguments with your own family when they aren't personal.

The Golden Alchemist was a probably-foreign gentleman of colour who'd been drawn to the city by it's unique mixture of science and magic - then kept there by genuine philanthropy and the fact that he'd only be offering up his back for a stabbing if he took the road out of town.

The Invisible Queen remains more obscure than all the rest put together, but appears to have been a chess-obsessed genius kept housebound by sheer physical sloth and able to make a significant impact on the Underworld never-the-less by virtue of the squadron of agents kept close at hand.

Few of the agents involved could later be reached for comment.

Sadly at least half could only be reached care of Lovecraft Asylum.

A bizarre rivalry exists in Freehold between the science criminals and the more supernaturally inclined ones with the former often refusing to believe in the later, despite the fact that magic is a documented phenomenon in Heroic Earth.

This is more by virtue of the fact that refusing to believe in something is a pretty valid strategy when it comes to beings which tend to react to faith like an opium fiend reacts to the prospect of a quick fix - also because the varied and amusing reactions of frequently-flabbergasted (or just annoyed) mystics really lightens a science-heroes day.

For whatever reason, the criminals of Freehold have CLASS.

Also a wide range of very large and shiny implements of destruction, as well as an ongoing internal feud (Science Vs Magic again) which keeps them pointing their nastier colleagues at one another, rather than the population.

[Phrozen]

Freehold, its like if Derry, Maine met the City of Tomorrow and had a baby.

[Charles Phipps]

Samhain I-IV

Oswald Macneer was the third son of the Macneer's final remaining in-bred branch. His mother was, in her own way, deeply committed to preventing the family from falling into the ancient pagan roots of its ancestry. So she devoted herself to becoming a Calvinist of the absolute worst sort, being the sort of mother that Tom Riddle and Carrie were born of. Oswald, himself, was mentally ill from an early age and prone to arsonist tendencies. The beatings did little to discourage them and when he finally killed the old biddy by burning her alive in their apartment, he ended up taking the entire city block with him.

Ironically, his absentee father had taken out a life insurance policy on her and in lieu of his abandonment both Oswald and his brothers were the beneficiaries. Adopted by a much nicer family that was only slightly weirded out by their cruel, bullying, and positively surreal children - they all succeeded in their own way. Oswald, himself, sought higher answers. Determined to revenge himself in some small way against God, he became involved in Freehold's thriving occult scene.

The occult scene being slightly more respectable in this world than our own, Oswald was the kind of puppy killing black-wearing Satanist teen that parents groups feared corrupted their youth. Bizarrely, given Freehold was the kind of community prone to love and tolerance for its diversity, this completely escaped most. Ironically, Oswald never made any contact with supernatural entities or achieved any results with his spells. Bluntly, all the malevolent powers of the universe could tell he was hopelessly evil so there was nothing he could offer them.

Still, Oswald believed if he just 'believed' enough he could achieve success. His last major attempt was when he sacrificed his foster parents to Arawn by causing their brakes to fail in a fiery crash.

Oswald's youngest brother, Enoch, was the darling of the family and soon devoted himself to becoming an inventor. Getting himself a scholarship to F.I.T, Oswald decided that his brother would be his meal ticket and became a Master of business in both senses of the word. Setting himself with SpartaCorp, he became a headhunter of talent. Oswald was very good at getting impressionable young minds to sign over the rights to their theories and works before they were aware of the full benefits. He was also very good at getting the less talented to spy on the corporations that hired them for peanuts on the espionage they did.

Oswald was a very wealthy man by the time he was thirty-five and actually getting help with his pyromania, only killing his therapists twice to prevent them from going public. That was when the Stein Brothers appeared in their superheroic identities and he instantly recognized them as harnessing the power of the Annihilation Zone. They were, undoubtedly, the heralds spoken of in sacred pages of Orkus he'd inherited from his grandparents. Splotch and Ink soon found themselves harassed on a near daily basis by superpowered mercenaries hired by Oswald.

Frustrated by the lack of success in acquiring him "real" occult power, Oswald decided to capture them himself. Suiting up his stupid but thuggish brother, Herod, in a special power-suit they were testing; he unleashed Samhain, the Master of Halloween. Oswald, bizarrely, grew jealous of his brothers frustrated attempts to defeat them and ultimately ended up murdering his brother in order to claim the identity for his own. He believed, erroneously, that his new found costumed identity would cause the Entropic Masters to contact him.

This failed.

Oswald ended up getting captured a year later, arrested for the murder of Dorothy Parker, the fiance of Noah Stein. Death Mask III used this opportunity to frame Oswald for many of his own crimes, resulting in him being institutionalized and the key thrown away. This lead to Enoch Macneer trying to avenge his brother. Enoch was afflicted with a split personality, believing that the spirit of Halloween was possessing him at times. In the end, Enoch ended up exploding his Demon Glider and was presumed killed.

Splotch thought that was the end of Samhains reign of terror.

He was wrong.

Ichabod Hallows became the fourth Samhain, a Hamilton University professor who served as the dark avenger of fear for much of the nineties and later 21st century. Ichabod Hallows was much more psychological and dark than his fellows. Recently, he was captured by the Patriots and interned in Super-Alcatraz for a sentence of two hundred and fifty years.

Ichabod Hallows, it should be noted, was in no way a relation to the other Samhains. In fact, he actually began his career after being their therapist in prison. He was conducting a study on supercriminals and abnormal psychology which lead him to create the belief there was a line of mnemonic descent between them. This, of course, was later proven to be nonsense but it was this sort of theatricality which lead Ichabod Johnston to change his last name to Ichabod Hallows.

Amusingly, the other Samhains TRULY *HATED* Ichabod for his usurpation of the mantle and employed plenty of catspaws in order to try and get it back from them. Only recently has that become possible due to the man's ignoble defeat.

Oswald was recently released from the sanitarium, "evidence" having come up he was not responsible for the many crimes of Death Mask III or himself.

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHhahahaha.

Samhain appears as a burning jack-o-lantern headed scarecrow wearing a suit of power armor that gives him exceptional strength as well as enhanced spacial awareness. Samhain possesses a wide variety of technologically based tricks and "magic" designed to imitate magic. These include exploding pumpkins, raven-shaped boomerangs, and a bat-shaped glider. In all of his incarnations, his public persona is completely mad.

[greycrusader]

I quite enjoyed Freehold.

As for being relatively quiet, I'm sort of in a contemplating phase as to what I need to do to jumpstart my writing efforts, as my recovery continues. My mental fatigue and then full blown illness reduced my enthusiasm and energy over the past year, with the preceeding twelve months being diffcult as well, with my wife's illnes and the death of my father-in-law (who was a really great guy).

I'll be back in short order no doubt.

All my best.

[Phrozen]

(Thanks to Libra for providing names. Sorry you aren't going to get any work on this bit of lore.)

The Renegades

When Deputy Hepburn reaches for his antacid, it is most likely he just read a briefing on the latest exploits of The Renegades. After he takes his tums, he then calls General Starr and demands to know if he was the one that hired them. To put it bluntly, if their targets didn't happen to be worse people then themselves most would consider them one of the single most destructive forces on the planet. Up there with UNITY, PHANTOM, and the House of Serpents. That is saying something for a group that numbers about 20 at its height. There are three main reasons for this: 1) The group welcomes a certain type of crazy. Your average Spec Ops soldier is a calm and collected individual. The average recruit for The Renegades is a violence prone adrenaline junkie. They relish combat, they also are supremely creative in the application of said violence. 2) They don't care about a criminal record. This would normally muster out anybody in the regular armed forces, for the Renegades that is resume building material. As long as you follow the few rules they have and play relatively nice with their teammates all is good. Violate those rules and you end with two in back of the head in a bog somewhere. 3) They know they are expendable. Legally they can't rely on anybody but themselves so dodging local authorities, the various organizations they have bloodied, the Foundation, and even Ultra Force 1 have bred a certain creative ruthlessness into the members.

The Renegades get most of their work from General Starr to do things that Ultra Force 1 can't do officially or where the risk is too great. Ultra Force 1 can't go into Ruritania and blow up Death Mask's latest death ray but The Renegades can. To do this, Starr has been using old Illumanati resources and channels. This could backfire as the criminal underworld is getting sporadic reports that the Illumanati is not quite dead. Besides, General Starr the Renegades will take work from anybody including other villains as long as they are attacking other bad guys. The Renegades will be quite happy killing a Death's Head cell for UNITY one week and then the next breaking into a UNITY data center to steal some servers the next. On their downtime they do fight crime, though they don't see it as heroism. Its training.

Still with all their ruthless creativity, the body count is pretty high. The average lifespan for a Renegade soldier is three months. So, if you meet a member that has been around longer than that know that you are looking at a very dangerous individual.

Long Term Members
"Why do we have codenames? We aren't some spandex wearing b*****!
"If we didn't have codenames, everybody would know you are Sven Olafsson and wanted in almost every country in Europe for acts of mayhem. We couldn't get you a passport"

Big Dog: Big Dog has been around in Soldier of Fortune circles forever. His resume reads like a list of every hotspot in the world for the last 30 years. In the 80s it was Afghanistan and Africa. In the 90s Bosnia, Burma, and Columbia. In the 2000s Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan again. When General Starr was looking for someone to help evaluate and select members for Ultra Force 1, Big Dog was the top of his list. It was then were the form and function of The Renegades was first discussed. After helping Starr form the first generation of what eventually became Ultra Force 1, Big Dog was given the freedom to recruit his own team from the scraps and washouts of Ultra Force 1. It is said that organization adopt the attitude of their leader. This is very much the case with the Renegades. Big Dogs life as a mercenary has taught him to regard combat as an any means necessary fight. There are no rules of engagement.

Big Dog is a man in his late 50s and while he doesn't go out on missions often, he is still dangerous. He is skilled enough to shoot out Black Wings zip line with a pistol when Black Wing is in full swing. Supreme usually sends a HoS hit squad to kill him on his birthday since Big Dog is one of the few baseline humans to ever stymie him. Suffice to say this is usually a death sentence for whichever unlucky members get sent on it.

Alligator: A Cuban-American metaman. Alligator is a disgraced CIA operative. His metaman abilities make him more durable and a little stronger then the average human. He lifts in about the 1 ton range. Alligator was drummed out of the CIA due to his style of operation being a little bit louder and a little more hands on than the CIA would like. Louder in the case of a trail of bodies and large explosions and more hands on in the fact that Alligator is wanted on 14 counts of murder in Mexico. Alligator is proficient with most small arms and explosives. On his right arm he has a self generating carbon fiber zip line launcher which he can use for a variety of purposes. Alligator usually wears a gator leather teflon backed vest, gator leather cowboy boots, and a silver cross into battle.

Bull Bull started his career with the Danish Navy. Finding that the military wasn't a good fit due to his problems with authority. Being dishonorably discharges for fighting his superior officer. Bull soon joined an outlaw biker gang and rose quickly through the ranks in part to his sheer propensity for violence. Leading the gang for several years, Bull racked up an impressive number of warrants throughout Europe. Again finding that even life with a bunch of hardened criminals couldn't sate his lust for action and violence, Bull signed up for The Renegades. It seems that he has truly found his calling, the life provides him with near constant battle and Bull smiles like a maniac through all of it. Describing explosions and gunfire like the most beautiful music to him. Bull is a tall man with black hair and lot of tattoos. He has two full arm sleeves and a large bulls head on his chest. He doesn't prefer any particular weapon except for one that is loud and can cause a lot of damage. He wears motorcycle boots, chains, and a leather motorcycle vest into battle. Even though he left his gang, no one is dumb enough to try and reclaim the gangs colors from him.

Ace: The groups helicopter pilot. He actually would of made Ultra Force 1 except that it was discovered that Ace wouldn't fly if he wasn't properly dressed for battle. Properly dressed being the helicopter pilots helmet and radio and a kilt with nothing else. Yep, Ace says that he flies best when he flies almost nude. In fact, it was found that Ace could barely fly when forced to wear an actual pilots uniform. He was drummed out but Big Dog snatched him up and let him fly with whatever he wanted to wear. Figuring that if someone gets upset about being flown around by a half naked dude then The Renegades are probably not the best place for them.

Rock-On: A heavy weapons and demolition specialist. Rock-On was washed out of Ultra Force 1 due to a fascination with fire and explosions that no sane person should have. A Frenchman of Algerian descent Rock-On usually serves as the Renegades door gunner and usually sings, badly, in the middle of battle. His artist of choice is Elton John. Rock-On is not allowed to detonate any explosives but he can make them. He tends to sit down and watch any explosion with no regard for what is going on around him. Rock-On has scrawled on his M2 "This Machine Kills Fascists".

California: A female sniper. Despite the cold sniper cliche, California is endlessly chatty. Filling the radio with all sorts of babble. This doesn't seem to effect her ability in anyway but is the reason she got drummed out of Ultra Force 1. Though she seems like an airhead if you stick around her very long you begin to pick up the double meaning behind her words. While it seems like she is talking about nothing, she is actually calling targets and giving scouting information. Its just so heavily entrenched in babble that anybody listening in would wonder why they would take along such a person. Her mouth never stops off mission either.

[Charles Phipps]

I do, in fact - one of the major reasons I placed America Force 1s old Home Base in Los Dios, instead of one of the spiritual homes of the American Spirit was because the mental image of them briefly setting up shop in the area then getting wind of the major HoS concentration in the area before exercising the better part of valour was slightly depressing (and possibly accurate).

The execution of the previous Congress of the House has resulted in a great deal more activity in the area. Bluntly, JWIII's ascension has rattled more than a few feathers so it's become a place of considerable more conflict. The new Congress is almost uniformly JWIII's cronies but they're also less intelligent than Jack Washington II's picks.

Most of the colonist leadership was drawn from those born in the region of Anglesey (aka Yns Mon), once the heart of the Druidic faith in Britain and still of interest to the majority of Celtic Cosmic Eternals, even if those who worshiped openly them have had to keep their little theological peculiarities very, very quiet since Saint Cybi set up on Holy Island - mostly to avoid attracting more monks!

Hehehe, a very good one.

Amusingly Belial COMPLETELY denies the whole affair, since it would be somewhat embarrassing for him to admit that he'd been driven off by Welshman TWICE OVER (Saint Patrick being a Welshman, or something close enough to one, for all that he'd made his life's work in neighbouring Ireland).

Amusingly, my original write-up had Belial driven off by Saint Patrick but I was worried people would wonder why I was confusing the Welsh and Irish.

Casualties amongst both settlers and natives were so high that both came near to extinction before a considerable degree of intermarriage occurred and the second major wave of immigrants from the Old Country arrived - in this case containing a significant Irish Minority, taking their inspiration from the Flight of the Earls and in many cases fleeing the Plantations of Ulster.

Freehold is one of the cases where not much persecution of the local Native Americans occurred. Three or four tribes are still officially in-residence around the Freehold area but the number of citizens with ancestry is about 40 to 50%.

This has occasionally been a source of irritation due to various local gods and curses affecting large portions of the city for reasons they're completely unaware of. Amusingly, several of the Covenant Lodges of shamans are pretty orthodox in their tribal beliefs but look like an incredible cross-ethnic mixture.

History fails to record this in any legible form because most of the English clerks found one Celtic vernacular as incomprehensible as another - allowing this Irish contingent to pass itself off as being as Welsh as Edward of Carnarfon. Well, that and the eyesight-affecting consequences of having one's palm crossed with silver.

Freehold is noteworthy as something of a safe-harbor for people and one of the places where racism has never quite been the same as in the rest of the country. For large portions of American history, it was something of an equivalent to Paris for interracial couples and sort of an East Coast refuge for people who wanted to be treated as human beings who weren't of the right skin color. It's tolerance was one of the major bright sports to an otherwise quite haunted and bizarre town.

The Confederacy actually intended to burn the place down like Atlanta according to some sources.

Not to mention the security only putting an entire ocean between themselves and their own personal nemesis Saul King could give them. Given that he largely operated on the right-hand side of the Atlantic until the dawn of the 18th Century, it wasn't a bad bargain (despite having only Evil consequences for the World).

The Macneers, ironically, eventually faded from prominence occult-wise due to its inbred nature. The majority of its family that survives went on to become Merrow and Half-Merrow while those that didn't gradually lost their magic. It was Macneers followers who went on to form the decadent and twisted ancestors of many of the town's Satanic and Entropic Master worshiping cults.

Unsurprisingly, many of these went on to become the servants of the Mass family when they arrived from Germany with Count Reich II.

Family legends that Saint Alyssa was the foremother of their lineage (and that Michael O'Hara regarded getting past her drawers as a touch more difficult than thwarting the Kraken, she being a good Catholic Nun and a Saint to boot) remain current, despite almost certainly having only this for a grain of truth: Michael O'Hara loved chasing what he had no honest business catching.

Saint Alyssa, of course, was a WIDOW and not nearly as sheltered as Michael thought.

There is considerable evidence that it was this wave of hangings (most of which involved no sentence of Witchcraft, taking place as they did during the first quarter of the 17th Century, when such things were going out of vogue, none of which fooled the locals in the least) and the ensuing backlash of genuine practitioners turning down the Left-Hand Path were what drew Saul King to Freehold for the first time.

Amusingly, Saul King originally came to the haunted town because he was interested in taking a vacation from all of the craziness in Scotland. After all, how haunted could the New World be with its settlement only several decades? Surely, the natives were too pure from their association with God's natural world to summon demons as the Ancient Romans did.

Saul ended up getting approximately two brews together before all hell broke loose.

There are suspicions (in fact there are MANY suspicions when it comes to Freehold's shadow history, since the cabals involved tended to find rivals to be so numerous that raising their head above the parapet to be about as survivable as jumping into a shark tank while bleeding) that what REALLY ticked off the locals was the fact that the British contingent garrisoned in the town contained a significant number of representatives of those factions which had chased the local Illuminati across the Atlantic.

To be more accurate this scared the spirit out of the local Illuminati, who swiftly took advantage of local protests against certain political acts of Parliament to whip up a certain amount of trouble for their pursuers and a smokescreen for their speedy departure - even they were a bit surprised when this led to bloody Civil War across the 13 colonies.

For the word of God, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamen Franklin were both members of Illuminati lodges but neither of them were particularly interested in the occult side of things. Thomas was quite capable of continent-spanning world-domination plans on his own. The actual two Founding fathers who WERE crazy Illumainti-types were mostly notable for raising money for the Continental Army and being weirdos the other Founding Fathers enjoyed mocking. The third member from Freehold, Seamus O'Hara, rivaled Sam Addams for the ability to pack it down and inflicted fairly devastating casualties on the British navy.

He was also eventually hung as a pirate since he never got around to getting US approval as a privateer after the war. Freeholders take a perverse sort of pride in his being the only Founding Father to be hung as a criminal.

Almost equally-efficient and unpleasant was his primary opponent, one Captain Crown, an American Loyalist whose attitude towards Patriots was no more warm-hearted than that of 'The Blue-coated Slave of Satan and Son of Hell'* was towards Tories.

Suffice to say the British were actually fairly cordial towards the colonists and the kinds of atrocities depicted in Mel Gibson's "The Patriot" didn't often occur save at the hands of Hessian mercenaries and the rare local colonial nutter. Captain Crown, however, committed numerous atrocities that would have gotten him hung if not for the fact he was good at greasing palms and blaming Indians.

*Modern histories tend to trim the name a bit: Karl Mueller remains just a little bit amused that the figure most associated with Hell in Freehold during the Revolution wasn't HIM.

Karl was a hell-raiser indeed during his mortal life and guilty of quite a number of hell-worthy offenses. Oddly, he was still better than many of his mortal fellows. Probably because Karl would kill you if you annoyed him and burn down your house but didn't really make a business of it.

Rumour has it that seeing entire families impregnated by a potential Antichrist was the last straw for a lot of those worshippers of the Celtic Cosmic Eternals who'd clung on in Freehold - most of them would move westward with almost unseemly haste after the war was done, eventually winding up in Los Dios.

After that the occult scene in Freehold became just a wee bit morally grey.

Really, you can't blame Karl for the above, which isn't true. Karl was more of a man who pushed the envelope by dating sisters or women who worked in the same tavern, not seducing every young woman in Freehold like hes' depicted as. In fact, the forty were children dedicated to Belial by the Illuminati hoping to form a new nation to rival Europe. They were "touched" by hellish magic and went on to form many families involved in the Order of the 9th Circle and Entropic Master cults but didn't hold Belial's own blood.

Ironically, his son would become EXTREMELY Electable by virtue of his activities as an anti-crime crusader and failed to achieve anything more than local success only due to the fact that he was obliged to take his father down for his ties with the local gangs to do it.

Ronnie kicked himself for a month after that one.

Part of the issue was that Ronald was very popular with black voters (once they could) and just about everyone who was a blue collar worker who wondered why beer was suddenly so expensive. Ronnie, unfortunately, underestimated just how nasty the Phantom League and other criminals could be so he brought a lot more darkness to the city than he really expected.

Of course, unlike HBO's current series about Atlantic City, Ronnie was a descendant of pirates and knew how to slit throats on occasion. To this day, Freehold's boardwalk is riddled with casinos linked to organized crime of all sorts.

Interestingly Freehold at this time was a heck of a lot worse than FALCONCREST in terms of gang violence - it wasn't until after the vampire showed up that the local Irish and Italian mobs buried the hatchet (in this case in the skull of the first Vampire Boss, although that didn't keep him down for long) and local crime began to be organised in the Ankh-Morpork style.

Needless to say, organized crime is still a big force in the city. Likewise, the city is pretty divided along ethnic and location lines.

As a famous saying goes:

"You're from Boston."
"South Boston, yeah."
"Is that different?"
"If you're from Boston, yeah."

The Knights of Aether at the time being a cabal of inventive types who admired King Arthur only slightly less than they did Doc Aeon - rumours that Merlin was an associate of theirs at this time are probably only partially accurate.

The Starling Family can best be described as two generations of Law Enforcement (local and national) working as one, working their way around the jurisdictional conflicts so elegantly engineered by Ron O'Hara mostly by virtue of the fact that it's sort of hard to sustain arguments with your own family when they aren't personal.

The Golden Alchemist was a probably-foreign gentleman of colour who'd been drawn to the city by it's unique mixture of science and magic - then kept there by genuine philanthropy and the fact that he'd only be offering up his back for a stabbing if he took the road out of town.

The Invisible Queen remains more obscure than all the rest put together, but appears to have been a chess-obsessed genius kept housebound by sheer physical sloth and able to make a significant impact on the Underworld never-the-less by virtue of the squadron of agents kept close at hand.

Literally hundreds of superheroes have actually existed in Freehold's 250+ year history, the vast majority of them magic users. Roughly around the 1930s onward, however, the city has produced a steady number of science-based heroes. To show you how dangerous the city is, however, more than half of these died violently and almost all of them found more than enough to keep them occupied in the city alone.

There's a reason it's called "Haunted Freehold." HP Lovecraft, because he knew the Pulps would sell VERY WELL there, insisted on changing Freehold's name to Arkham in his stories just so he wouldn't offend the locals.

This is more by virtue of the fact that refusing to believe in something is a pretty valid strategy when it comes to beings which tend to react to faith like an opium fiend reacts to the prospect of a quick fix - also because the varied and amusing reactions of frequently-flabbergasted (or just annoyed) mystics really lightens a science-heroes day.

Freehold is also a place where the barriers between worlds are at a ridiculous low. The Otherworld is closer in Los Dios but the Netherworld is much closer in Freehold. You're more likely to get Lovecraftian horrors and ghosts in Freehold vs. fae. The fae that DO arrive, interestingly, are much more traditional than the wide variety you'll find in Los Dios.

Also a wide range of very large and shiny implements of destruction, as well as an ongoing internal feud (Science Vs Magic again) which keeps them pointing their nastier colleagues at one another, rather than the population.

Indeed.

[Charles Phipps]

Freehold, its like if Derry, Maine met the City of Tomorrow and had a baby.

Not a bad description at all.

I love the Renegades, btw.

They're a wonderful collection of mercs.

The kind of guys you want to point at your enemies to get them as far away from you as much to hurt them.

Also, even Death Mask III pays up.

"WHERES MY MONEY, HONEY?"

[Phrozen]

As noted earlier, "Everybody Pays" is their motto. It doesn't hurt that they will do things such as completely topple your government by themselves if you figure you are not going to pay. Or kidnap you and hold you hostage while putting the video of you wetting your pants in terror up on youtube.