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Help me with a Cold War hero!
cptmillennium
Posts: 451 Arc User
Silver Sentinel is a patriotic hero from the Cold War era. Think Captain America but with guns instead of a shield, and from about 20 years later in time. He's primarily a ranged tank, mixing dual pistols and some acrobatic hand-to-hand moves. He has a Cold War-themed cave hideout and uses Ice Sheath and Ice Grenades, because puns were a great way to take our minds off the threat of Communism? I guess.
So I want him to have originated from that time. Maybe he was cryogenically frozen in his bunker and awoke when the Battle of Detroit caused a power fluctuation, or maybe he's been active since the late fifties and ages very slowly? You tell me!
I think SS deserves a backstory, I just need some help filling in the details and I love seeing what you guys come up with!
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Since WW II the United States government, particularly the Department of Defense, has researched ways to reliably create superhuman soldiers and agents, with only rare successes. One of the more reliable methods was developed by Project Perseus in the late 1960s, a combination of drug and radiation treatments which enhance a person's physical and mental abilities significantly, although not to truly superhuman levels. The Perseus process has been used ever since to create a series of high-profile "official" American superheroes, using the identity, The All-American, symbolizing American ideals and values.
Perhaps Silver Sentinel was one of the original test subjects from before the process was used on the first All-American. He could have gained the Perseus enhancements, but been considered psychologically (or politically) unfit to serve as the All-American. Nonetheless, he decided to fight for his country his way, on his own. Alternatively, the government could have enhanced another soldier for use in covert black ops incompatible with the All-American's idealistic image. "Silver Sentinel" might be a cover identity, believed by the public to be a vigilante with no ties to the American government.
If you did go that route, perhaps the Silver Sentinel operating today isn't the original. The identity would have been used by a succession of men, the same as the All-American.
BTW the All-American is fully written up in the PnP Champions book, Champions Universe.
Or he might be the victim of a Winter Soldier-style plot. A larger organization, such as the American or Soviet governments, or VIPER, has kept him literally on ice until they found a way to make use of him. But he eventually awakened and escaped, into a very different world.
There are a few Soviet-era supers still around whom Silver Sentinel might have come up against.
Or perhaps recent political events regarding Russia and its neighbors have convinced him that the world is returning to a Cold War status, and he's needed again.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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I can relate -- I grew up under the nuclear umbrella myself. Twentysomethings and younger today don't really comprehend living with the thought that the world as you know it could end at any moment.
Yeah...and they always seem to be on my lawn
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This is great. Since espionage played such a large role in the Cold War it's perfectly appropriate, and I love how it tethers him to the Champions universe.
I want it to be relevant that his base of operations is clearly a 1960s underground bunker. Maybe he was decommissioned and placed in cryogenic stasis as part of an arms reduction treaty. I also like the idea of renewed activity by Nuclear Winter being the reason he was awakened, as the treaty may have been invalidated.
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Why people are surprised and shocked when non-communist Russia acts imperialist?
They are imperialist since XVII century at least. 1904-1905 war with Japan wasn't fought for sh**t and giggles, you know?
What they do isn't really different than US or GB policy. Only made with typical Russian lack of any subtlety.
They aren't reverting to USSR or anything.
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Plenty of lore-based precedent for covert supers during that era. The Soviets certainly had their operatives, including Red Winter, which was a secret black-ops counterpart to the public official Soviet hero team, the People's Legion.
One offshoot of Project Perseus was Project Yeoman, which granted low-level physical super powers to a group of Navy Seals, code-named Ameriforce One.They performed many secret missions from 1977 to 1983.
The process that empowered Silver Sentinel might have made it necessary for him to be periodically frozen to counter detrimental side effects: rapid aging, metabolic "overheating," or similar. He might also have suffered severe injury during a mission, which could only be repaired through modern medical advances. That would make it easier to justify leaving him in stasis for decades.
However, if you want fodder for role-playing, it would be poignant if Silver Sentinel was kept frozen due to a treaty with the Soviet Union; or budgetary cutbacks; or because the fading of the Cold War made him unnecessary; or that the bureaucracy simply overlooked and forgot about him.
...I'm only going to offer a different point of view. Instead of starting with the character, I'm going to start with the base, then work backwards. Perhaps this will create a framework that explains why the Silver Sentinel was never heard of before.
The Silver Sentinel had, until now, always been a project rather than a person.
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The U.S. and the Soviet Union played a strange game in the 1960s with its arms race. They would create nuclear stockpiles, military bases, potential threats, just to leak that information to each other's spies how much stronger they were.
The greatest, yet most unpredictable, chess pieces were the superpower's superpowers.
That generation saw a proliferation of superheroes, each of whom was as powerful as an arsenal of weapons. Their governments were happy to promote them, even for mere crime fighting, as another demonstration of strength.
However, the U.S. it knew it had a problem; many of their superheroes came as accidents.
The American superheroes often came not from their government's programs, but from random industrial mishaps in the civilian sector. The Soviet Union, however, seemed to have ways to reliably churn out superheroes, no, supersoldiers.
The Soviet advantage had always been sheer manpower. They would sacrifice a hundred, a thousand lives just for a single supersoldier to be created. The U.S. were simply much more careful with their human subjects, thus the slow progress.
The U.S. then started getting secret reports of gulags of Soviet superteams worldwide.
Whether that intelligence was true or false did -not- matter. In this chess game of oneupmanship both sides played, it was enough to make the American leadership highly concerned, demanding immediate results.
So their subordinates gave them immediate results...even if they had to make stuff up.
(Edit - Liaden mentioned the CU USSR didn't have a good time making superheroes either, which IIRC is true! The Soviets fabricated their results as well, but it was enough to drive the U.S. to further action.)
Project Perseus was not enough, so they started many other top secret operations with impressive-sounding names, like Project Silver Sentinel, just to have something to tell their leaders and to scare the Soviets into backing off.
Silver Sentinel existed primarily to calm U.S. leaders and to intimidate the KGB. Using bleeding edge military hardware, strategically located where a Soviet invasion towards the U.S. would happen, it would counter any Soviet supersoldier threat.
It was a very engaging story as Silver Sentinel was such a logical extension of the American "containment" philosophy, just positioning playing pieces on the global board to deter the Soviet Union from making a move.
And Project Silver Sentinel worked great. The only problem was it was a total lie.
Silver Sentinel used the same strategy as the 2nd World War inflatable tanks the U.S. had. With limited resources, it was just a shell imitating a real threat, hoping to scare the enemy away...if only so that they never come for a closer look.
Silver Sentinel was merely a detection base, which did contain a stockpile of cutting edge experimental technology like Ice Grenades and other unconventional arms, but they were only there so spies could intercept a shipment and be impressed.
However, it was never manned by American supersoldiers. By the time the U.S. had the resources to pump out things like Silver Avengers, the Cold War had shifted under Nixon and Kissinger to relax tensions, and it was forgotten.
Thus, the Silver Sentinel base lay dormant. It served its purpose, to deter a potential Soviet supersoldier invasion. However, something set off its sensors, so it did what it was programmed to do half a century earlier...it asked for help.
The person that would be known as Silver Sentinel was a soldier or intelligence officer on a crappy assignment in the middle of nowhere. He had to dig up a classified folder from the 60s just to know what to do...and where to go.
(Edit - I liked Liaden's take, maybe he was not a soldier or operative, just some (un)lucky person.)
That's how he found the Silver Sentinel base. Perhaps he fell through its ceiling (because of that hole there). It looked like it was designed for a firesquad (thus 5 chairs at the table), but now it was just him...and the base itself.
The base didn't have an A.I., just a series of pre-recorded messages and resources to house, train, support this person. And in a case of "fake it 'til you make it", it basically turned this person into the supersoldier it was meant to.
And yet, one mystery remains. What set off the Silver Sentinel base's protocol to begin with?
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Sorry for the TL;DR, didn't have time for a short message. Just sharing maybe the base's view.
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My only suggestion, if this outline were adopted, would be to have the person who discovered the Silver Sentinel bunker not do so on orders. He might stumble into it by accident, or uncover the file describing it and seek it out on his own. That would give more freedom to the player to define his own agenda.
As for Department 17, my "Unique Character Origins" thread elsewhere on Costumes and Concepts describes that. But I will offer a summary of US government superhuman soldier programs.
During WW II research programs were haphazard. Two of them produced single successes, the heroes Achilles and The Comet, both of whom were killed during the war.
In the late 1960's, "Project Perseus" developed a method of producing enhanced (although not truly superhuman) people. This method has produced a succession of "official" government heroes up to the present day using the name The All-American.
In 1977 "Project Yeoman" granted low-level superpowers to six Navy Seals, who were christened Ameriforce One. It's unclear whether Ameriforce One was ever known to the public, but their missions were normally secret. They were killed in 1983, but a new Ameriforce has recently been created, using recruited rather than created supers.
Perhaps the most successful project was the development of Cyberline in the 1980's, a drug/gene therapy which could grant superhuman physical abilities to compatible recipients. It was used to create the Golden Avenger and a small number of Silver Avengers, who supplement the forces of PRIMUS, the American domestic equivalent of UNTIL.
In 1994, "Project Sunburst" deliberately exposed soldiers to a nuclear explosion to attempt to spawn superhumans. Almost all the soldiers died; most of the survivors remain comatose today; the few who aren't did gain energy-based powers, but to date all have become villains.
Around the same time as Sunburst, the Army's "Man Amplification Program" was trying to develop inexpensive, practical powered armor for soldiers. The only test subject to successfully interface with the prototype armor stole it and became the supervillain Armadillo.
"Project Onslaught" in 1998 attempted to use gene splicing of human with animal DNA. Two successful results are known, the now-deceased superhero Janissary, and the supervillain who calls himself Onslaught.
I think you're totally right. In terms of percentage of population, I think I saw a table where the U.S. had the highest (and it might have been something you put together for us, actually). Also, good call on leaving the actual character open-ended.
I've been mulling over my proposal. 3 points. 1st, the character is an extension of this base, this project. 2nd, the base itself is a character, even if it's not sentient. 3rd, the base is an extension, a chess piece, in the ridiculous game called the Cold War.
There's this scary poem. 'Tis a checkerboard of nights and days / where fate with men for pieces play. Each one moves, checks, then slays / and one by one back in their box they lay. JFK called this game "a long twilight struggle".
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In the CU timeline, if the Soviets leaked information indicating that they could reliably produce supersoldiers en masse, the US would have been forced to act as if these reports were correct, just in case they were. It's no good to sit there saying, "Well, we couldn't do it, so they can't," and then watch the guys in the Red-Starred supersuits come pouring across the ocean...
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Was involved in a accident exposed to heavy doses of radiation. Fearing death immanent he uses an experiment chemical meant to remove the radiation via a freezing quality.
Even as it works, it change his metabolize requiring him to now live inside a refrigeration suit. This suit is also a technological marvel allowing for all sorts of Super Powers, many cold based.
Maybe he finds/creates a reason to blame SS. Perhaps he twarted one of his mission to acquire certain chemicals that could cure him or just keep his cold suit Super functional.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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jonsills, you are a genius. A genius with a giant mustache for a topee, but a genius nonetheless.
What a quote! Jon, I forget, did you serve in the military? That sounded so strategic.
And this crystallises my own interpretation of what Project Silver Sentinel is. In relation to the Nemesis, Nuclear Winter's attempted theft of the Lemurian artifact, Silver Sentinel has to stop him because of the potential dangers.
Paradoxically, if Nuclear Winter gets it and cures himself of his meltdown issues, it's actually safer for both himself and the world. However, it's that very strategy (which is otherwise sound) that is forcing Silver Sentinel to prevent this.
And therein lies the tragedy. Perhaps both Nuclear Winter and Silver Sentinel want to do the right thing, but circumstances pit the two of them against each other to negate each other's efforts rather than for a common good.
I'm commenting only because I have been reading about the Cold War lately.
And sometimes, I think it's a miracle I'm not living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
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(And Joe, if you're reading this - you were an ***hole, but you were right about Torri. She's in the past now.)
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Man, thanks for defending our freedoms and preventing the apocalypse.
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