[Request] FS Steelhead History and Information

locochoco

I've been gathering up and trying to organizing all info requests I'll need for Northwatch, and I've decided to Make a whole thread just for things relating to him that involve lore, and then a thread for greater community use highlighting information and discussion on places and things like Steelhead, Ravenspeaker, Celestar, Kiga, etc. Starting out I need info on Steelhead, as North is a Steelhead character to the core. Rather than try to give him some huge, meaningful bubble of his own within canon, I challenged myself to make a character you can't tell from lore and player made material because it kneels to and serves canon entirely. By the end I found I had to make some assertions, particularly when it came to the inevitable conflict with Kiga. But Northwatch still revolves around Steelhead.


But now that I've explained my long absence from the lore section and a bit about why I need info on Steelhead, on to the points of interest. I need a bit of info on Steelhead until I secure some Champs books to dig in for my end-game stories.

STEELHEAD

• When was it founded?
• Who was it founded by?
• What memorials or monuments to those individuals exist?
• How many people does it facilitate at capacity?
• Have infants been born at the base? Or are pregnant women sent on leave off site?
• What are the nearest population centers to the base?
• What are the various functions and operations of the base?

I also need to know a bit about Derringer. He is a key figure in the Northwatch stories. I've made a buffer between Mark and the narratives of the day-to-day in Warmaster, the Mission Director, but Mark is founder and operational supervisor of Operation Cold Front, the team North works for. So he is key in the beginning and one of the larger "wow factor" celebrity guests that appear along with Celestar and Ravenspeaker. All three of these characters are portrayed as veteran class, elite heroes with venerated report from a narrative sense. This comes back to the character kneeling into canon vs crashing in to save it all. Like these characters are the big dogs on deck when they come through, and it's important to me that I portray all of them well in my KigaVerse AU, but particularly Mark. As the man in charge of Steelhead and one of Canada's top in-game figureheads, I have to handle him just right. Not only that but because he is so influential and important to the team and Northwatch, it's important that I know a bit about him to properly develop a team and leadership style for it that falls in line with who he is.

Right now all I know from snooping info pages is that he's a mutant, hundreds of years old, and used to be in SUNDER.

MARK DERRINGER

• Summary of backstory? (if you'd rather not spill his entire story, perhaps personal life in terms of where he's from, some of the wars he's been in, lil dialogue moment stuff that'll help do him justice.)
• Personality?
• Powers/skill set?
• Motives/leadership style?

bulgarex

Um... okay, there are a couple of things I need to be upfront about. First of all, while the Steelhead Division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the federal government's national law-enforcement agency) is very much part of PnP Canada, Force Station Steelhead is a Cryptic Studios creation that isn't covered in the source books. All the information about it is what appears in Champions Online. The old CO Wiki did collate the lore drops about it, and thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine I can link you to pages which seem to have most relevant entries:
Force Station Steelhead
Crisis in Canada!

The map of the Canadian Wilderness zone does note the location of "Great Bear Lake." Assuming this is meant to be the actual lake in Canada's Northwest Territories, you may benefit from some description of its immediate region in the real world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bear_Lake . The closest settlement of any size is Deline, and the closest city is the capital of the NWT, Yellowknife.

There is one possibly pertinent detail from the source book, Champions Of The North, which deals with Champions Canada. In the early 2000s the federal government established the Steelweb, a series of sensor installations designed to track superhuman movement and power sources operating in remote wilderness areas. It would best fit the PnP lore for Force Station Steelhead to be part of the Steelweb, maybe its nexus. It's unlikely the headquarters for the entire Steelhead Division would be in such a remote area, as CO seems to imply.

However, your opening remarks suggest you intend this thread to deal with a range of subjects, most of which are covered in the most detail in Champions Of The North. TBH I for one would be loathe to dole out that much information here for free, as I fear it would cross beyond Fair Use of the IP.

Now, for some things you ask about which there isn't much info, I think it would be fair to summarize what there is on this thread. For instance, Mark Derringer is only thinly described in COTN. However, as the character was a PC in the SUNDER campaign run by the author of COTN, CO's own Scott "Thundrax" Bennie, he would be the most knowledgeable person to hit up for details about him. Scott's health has been poor recently, though, so I'm not sure how accessible he is right now.

Here's what COTN has to say about Mark Derringer: "In 1998, the Steelhead Branch of the RCMP was set
up to deal with superhuman threats, and Forceknight designed the Steelsman light powered armor to equip the force. Mark Derringer, the retired superhero Avenger, was appointed to head the agency. He was a controversial choice, but Derringer’s aggressiveness has served the agency well." (p. 27)

"The head of the Steelheads is Mark Derringer, known in the Eighties as Avenger, a controversial mainstay of Vancouver’s SUNDER team. An immortal American who was a pulp adventurer in the 1930s, Assistant Commissioner Derringer is intense and irreverent (and some would say a borderline psychopath). He’s a dedicated taskmaster for the team, but his inability to compromise or play politics has many saying he won’t last long at his job... the same thing they’ve been saying since he was appointed in 1998." (p. 51)

"The Steelheads have been associated with several incidents where the RCMP was accused of using excessive force, and people are usually not reassured when they appear on the scene. Derringer really doesn’t care, and the RCMP’s official response on the allegations (and the Steelheads’ PR problems in general) is “no comment.” (p. 51)

(SUNDER -- "Superhuman United Nations Deployment Emergency Reserve" -- was an UNTIL-backed hero team based out of Vancouver in the 1980s.)

locochoco

Thanks. This helps a lot.

I hadn't imagine Mark in this light, but I love it and can work with it.

locochoco

@bulgarex With the new information provided, this was the angle I took in order to make North's backstory and over-all arc all the more better:

Jason McRae is a Mountie stationed at Yellowknife, NWT. He's posted at Steelhead (lot earlier than '19 now) as a compliance officer to essentially observe conduct and report back to Yellowknife. For this reason not only Derringer, but the vast majority of his loyal men are resentful and untrusting of him, generally seeing him as a rat. They are mostly professional, but he's no longer a star child of the armed mounties, he's not even an "armed" mountie.

He is accompanying a routine patrol when they are ambushed by Quick Trigger and an outfit of Hunter-Pats. Your classic story. Jason's partner, Kyle Reid, also posted as a Compliance Officer, looses his legs in the skirmish and is taken by them, but presumed dead (becomes nemesis #2, Titanium Patriot). Jason dies, but is revived by Akna (maybe Land Spirit post retcon) and given his powers to crusade against Kiga.

Now Derringer has this (in his eyes) rat tenderfoot with exactly the sort of powers he needs to take the fight to Kiga. A man claiming to have been tasking by a Goddess to do exactly that, anyway. [Undeveloped Derringer red tape magic taking total command over Jason's posting to make him...Northwatch!]

Now he has a road ahead of him, getting through Derringer's cold armor, proving to him that he can be trusted and used as more than a blunt object or flesh and blood drone. As well as earning the trust and respect of the men, with, at one point early on, a group of them letting a yet to be developed Viper sub-villain and super-brick type rough him up before tazing him down and taking him in.

I feel it gives him a much better journey as a man, and hero with what was already in place, and fits Derrigner's preexisting canon, which was so very important to me.


Thoughts? Opinions? Suggestions?

bulgarex

Sounds like a solid backstory with a good character arc. I agree that the Great Spirit called the Land would be an appropriate entity to save and empower Jason as its champion. The Land has done similarly to a few other Champions characters, hero and villain. None of those empowered supers has performed exactly as the Land intended, though, so it might keep trying with new subjects to "get it right." Note that when the Land empowered Borealis and Celestar, it drew upon the power of its brother Spirit, the Sky, for their energy powers. So Northwatch needn't be confined to just an "earthly" set of Powers.

However, another intriguing possibility would be having Jason found by Teleios. The Perfect Man has more facilities in the far North than just that Tower, and can empower any human with almost any superpower, even clone a super-powered version of them. He could also implant false memories into Jason of having met Akna, or any other spirit of your preference. Teleios is able to monitor at least some of his subjects telepathically without their knowledge, so this would give him an unwitting spy among the Steelheads. There's good story potential there for when Northwatch learns the truth.

locochoco

All of these were intriguing plot twists. I thought very hard about making Kyle Reid be recovered by Telios and made into the advanced meta-buster Titanium Patriot, with an obvious renaming. But it strayed from too much of what had been in place. I wanted to separate North from Justicair's primary villain as well. But I love that he is there. I've been patiently waiting to use him in a way that is surprising and complex enough to be amazing.