Legacy Name: Ursae Minoris.
Real Name: Alexandria Stella Hathaway.
Look: Woman, White, Trendy Clothing, Predecessor’s Costume, Simple Symbol Insignia.
Abilities: Super Strength, Eye Beams, Flight.
Labels:
Danger -1
Freak 0
Savior +2
Superior +1
Mundane +1
Conditions ❑ Afraid (-2 to directly engage a threat)
❑ Angry (-2 to comfort or support or pierce the mask)
❑ Guilty (-2 to provoke someone or assess the situation)
❑ Hopeless (-2 to unleash your powers)
❑ Insecure (-2 to defend someone or reject others’ influence)
Backstory •
How does the public perceive your legacy? Well, that depends on who you ask. I mean, besides the people who are philosophically opposed to supers getting away with the crazy shit they do on a daily basis, which would be very illegal for anyone not wearing a costume, in general no one really, “dislikes,” any legacy as long as there haven’t been any villains to come out of it, and Ursae Minoris has no blood related super villains to speak of. So far as how different people and the public look at the family, it’s not like most kids dress up as Lodestar on Halloween. There’s always a few, though, and despite being definitively eclipsed in popularity by Felitrix and Gravitron she’s close to the top. Adults sometimes point to her clearly being a Lonestar City implant to the city, but this is Halcyon, more than half the people here are from somewhere or another, including Gravitron. Of that little group, Felitrix is probably the only really popular local super. Of course Lodestar is still very popular in Lonestar City, saved the daughter of the owner of the football team in a very public fight with some villains who kidnapped her, to ransom her or whatever, the usual bit, and he gave her lifetime season tickets as some kind of thank you gift. I think it was mostly for the publicity, “buy tickets to the games, might just see a super hero there,” you know? Lonestar City isn’t known for having a prominent super hero community, so a local who is directly attached to football’s bound to be popular. Plus, she wears that stupid uniform… Have I mentioned how much I hate the costume?
The story behind the outfit is kind of asinine. Lodestar, Savannah Newman I mean, mom, was actually a cheerleader for the Lonestar City Steers. Not in a super hero capacity, but actually was employed as a regular person as a cheerleader for the team, back before she moved to Halcyon. So she’s at work, there’s a loud bang, and plumes of green and purple chemical smoke just start pouring out from some plant a few miles away and the tv news reporter people on the field start talking about their having been some kind of attack. So Savannah, mom, back before Lodestar was a thing, just walked off the field and responded to the call of supervillany in Lonestar City without having had time to change into something less ridiculous. So here’s this super powered blonde cheerleader, in Lonestar City, punching it out with some eco warrior type who got it in her head to use experimental chemicals to make herself a weapon capable of fighting for her agenda, against the company that made said experimental chemicals. Of course everyone in the city loved it, “evil liberals threaten the mild mannered and well to do businessmen and factory workers of E-Star-Chems Inc., who were only dumping a possibly harmless little bit of chemicals into the ecosystem,” and who comes to save the day? A literal hot blonde cheerleader with super powers. I mean, as you can imagine everyone was just blown away, it stuck, and people just assumed that it was a recognizable enough costume while still remaining somewhat anonymous, and that she must be a fan of the home team, like everyone else in Lonestar City.
The semi-sheer lace veil with all the embroidered constellations and the white gold tiara with the Ursa Minor constellation ornamentation came later, after Lodestar was an established hero and resident of Halcyon City. The first mask was an actual wedding veil. Why? Some tailgaters were celebrating a couple members of their party having just gotten married in the stadium parking lot in their dresses and tuxes, yeah, that’s how important football is in Lonestar City, and mom, Savannah, swiped the bride’s veil off the backseat of their no doubt rental convertible on her way towards that chemical plant. She says it was the first thing she saw that could be used as a mask, but if you ask me, she’s just kind of a bitch and wanted the veil. I mean, I love my mom and all, but I know her too, and that’s just the kind of thing she would do. That woman spent years accusing the hero, who would come to be known as Lodestar, of having taken her wedding veil, too, but most just assumed that the rightly unhappy bride was just some bitch who wanted attention and thought she could get it by accusing the hero of the day of having stolen her property, and just wrote her story off as obvious fiction. Really, mom could have just dropped the thing off on the lady’s front door the next day and left a note, “hey, sorry, had to take the veil so I could go fight that super villain,” instead of letting people think that she was some raving lunatic. Mom kept the veil, too, it’s on a mannequin head in the parlor.
That’s the parlor on the second floor, not the one on ground level. Did I mention the legacy comes with some money? Why does it come with money? Well, there are rumors of illegal gambling rackets, but the money really came from my dad. Our legacy was traditionally working class, which in Lonestar means ranch hands and service sector types. Back when the first Ursa Minor, known more commonly as Little Bear, was working the local stuff in and around Fort Alexandria, and yes I was named for a city named for a fort named for some old Macedonian guy, oh, and the middle name’s an obvious star reference like the rest of the legacy stuff which is in turn a reference to Lonestar, the most any of the supers in the family could afford was a tin roof and porridge, maybe some bacon on Sundays. Those who still remember the first Little Bear, and those aware of the second Little Bear, look at the legacy as paragons of Southwestern cowboy culture. Not the ones who have shoot outs in every other major thoroughfare twice daily on the tv, the ones who actually drove cattle and fought off the occasional bandito and horse thief who spent their lives dirt poor despite keeping the rest of the country in fresh meat. In Halcyon the opposite is true. Lodestar can fly, and yet owns a jet. There’s a hidden landing strip in my backyard, which is itself on acres of land in the heart of Halcyon City. Felitrix and Lodestar together are probably worth more than the lower twenty percent of the entire city’s population, real champions of wealth.
•
How does your legacy tie into your reasons for being a hero? My legacy
is my reason for being a hero. I don't mean that in the, "me and my family have super powers, b, so obviously we do this hero thing," kind of way. I mean that I don't actually want this joke of a life. Not like I want to die or any of that emo shit, but I don’t want to be a super anything. The only reason I'm doing this is because I've been drilled since childhood to expect that this was coming, that whole, "with great powers comes great responsibility," yada yada. You know I've literally never been on a date? I'm f#$%ing eighteen.
I’m smokin' hot. And sure, I can be kind of a bitch sometimes, whatever, but seriously.
No one asks out Savannah Newman-Hathaway’s daughter. Even the people who don’t know that Savannah is Lodestar are turned off by the whole, “hey, isn’t she that super important Southern politico of the weirdly far right always ranting about Mexicans on the TV,” thing, and not being able to have friends over because the house is a computerized death box with twitchy biometrics scanners, and not being able to stay out because the robot butlers make sure that I get home or else they come flying out to find me, death rays blazing and everything in between considered collateral damage? Yeah, that is totally not helping things. Putting on the, “uniform,” did help, though, in its own way. I mean, I can go out for, “work,” now, without the mall being destroyed by flying robots ala mom. It doesn’t change the fact that this is a miserable way to live and, chances are, die.
I’ve watched people, totally reasonably good people, die in this line of work. In the end it really doesn’t matter all that much that they were super strong, super tough, super fast, super smart. Some villain gets it in her head to put you down one day, and, “blammo,”. There you go, super smarts spattered all over the pavement in some filthy, jank little alley somewhere, and your husband and kids are left mourning over the goop, and after they cry about it for a while they stop and realize that they barely even knew you at all to begin with. My dad wasn’t a super, wasn’t even particularly above average. Just some totally normal guy, loved sunsets and beaches, real passionate about digging wells in developing countries to get clean water to poor families living in the muck. He did more good for more people around the world than Gravitron and Lodestar
ever did. Sure as hell are never going to see either of them with their hands in the dirt and their boots covered in mud. Yeah, they’ll take a picture holding a shovel at a worksite for some charity to get those donation monies flowing in, but it isn’t the same. Not that you should really compare supers to normal people like that, I know full well that we didn’t ask for these powers and they didn’t ask not to have powers, plus a horde of shovel wielding average humans couldn’t stop a super villain that Gravitron could have knocked down in his sleep, although that would be hilarious to watch and would make a killer pay per view, but that’s hardly the point.
When I first punched through my desk all the way through the floor of the second story and down into the basement just setting down a glass of water, it wasn’t my mom who walked me through the sobs, existential dread and absolute terror about being a total freak. It was my totally normal Joe, every day, regular old dad who had no powers and couldn’t have put a hole through that desk with a hammer if he tried. Where was Lodestar you might ask? She was off fighting some King Kong wannabe on a jungle island in the South Pacific with the other Guardians. You think its awkward having your dad walk you through getting your period the first time? I had that too, mom was doing some political thing in the Midwest somewhere that time, and in retrospect I can guaren-f#$%ing-tee you that it isn’t anywhere near as shitty as having a normie try to tell you that there’s nothing wrong with accidentally causing thousands of dollars in damage to the house because your super powers are developing, and that’s what, perfectly normal for a girl your age? Thanks dad, but no, I’m not stupid and I’m well aware that being able to bench the combined weight of the entire varsity football team is not normal for a girl, or woman for that matter, of any age. Even worse, it wasn’t until I was about fifteen or so that I realized it hadn’t been his fault for trying, and failing, to console me, but that this was something me and my super powered mother should have discussed, were she around to have had the conversation.
But it all comes back to the same thing. Being a super hero means that you aren’t, can’t be around to deal with the normal stuff that comes up with your family. The good times, the bad times, the just kinda okay times, you spend off fighting the woes of the world. It’s like having a parent who’s a soldier, except they’re leaving a box in your closet that will one day open unexpectedly and drop a loaded gun in your lap with no safety and a trigger that’s directly attached to your nervous system. Oh, and there isn’t a manual or, like, classes or whatever to teach you how to respond to what’s happening when it invariably comes, and your literally incapable of knowing that your carrying the thing before or after it’s put in your hand. Like, one minute you might be stronger than average, maybe even a lot more than average, but not anywhere near strong enough to cause serious damage to anyone unless you were really trying to, and the next a high five might take the other chick’s arm off without you realizing what was happening until after it was over and done with, no take backs. Plus, you can’t put the damn thing down, it’s just there, attached to you like some parasite that didn’t apparently exist one day and the next it’s just attached to your brain stem, never to go away, and all you can do about it is learn to control it and use it to beat up on super villains. I couldn’t have told you that before it actually happened to me, though, and normies couldn’t understand.
Relationships You trust Andrea/Doktor Faust and told her an important secret of your legacy. Maybe everyone trusts someone, even in this line of work, where secrets are more dangerous then bullets and, keep in mind that this is coming from a chick who can punch through a cement wall, in this case knowledge really is power. I’m no different, I have no desire to die or get maimed or whatever, and I hate that my lineage has put me in a situation where I have no choice but to be a soldier in some endless, pointless series of battles until they eventually kill me, but if I could make a deal with Mephistopheles to trade my right arm for Andrea’s life I would. I wouldn’t tell her that, of course, certainly not in anything even close to those exact words, seriously I have to call her a bitch with the same breath on the rare occasion that I tell her I care about her, but I would. Lodestar, I mean Savannah, mom, and the former Doctor Faust were teammates, I’ve known Andrea since we were babies who didn’t know supers from cats. Her family secret is hardly secret to anyone even remotely attached to the former Doktor Faust in a professional capacity, and I remember when she realized that not only was her dad going to die, but that she would die. Not like, in eighty years, when she’s old, broken, crotchety and well and ready to move on to whatever comes next, but when she was reasonably young, healthy, happy, and it wouldn’t be pleasant going. It’s gotta be hard enough to swallow that pill for yourself, but to know that you’re leaving it for your daughter? It was awful.
Andrea really gets what this is all about. Whether or not she feels the same way as I do about supers and the whole lifestyle, as far as I’m concerned, me and the Doktor share a common bond, while the others, well… Swarm is a bratty kid playing at being a superhero, and Riley is even worse; some idiot alien who got lost on a foreign world who, were it not for the protection of the group and super heroes in general would have been picked up by some evil organization or another by now. No shortage in Halcyon City of super villains looking either to experiment on her to discover the genetic secrets of her shapeshifting, or mold her into a weapon for their own crazy purposes, maybe a doomsday cult looking to send a message to the people of her home world by publically killing her in the hopes of inciting some war of the worlds just to keep things interesting. Hell, all it would take is some wealthy collector of rare and exotic aliens to learn about her existence and the next thing you know she’s in a cage in some creepy take on a zoo. Andrea gets that this isn’t a game, this is real life and being a hero is always dangerous, quite often terrifying, and
will get you killed in the end. Who could understand that better than her, after all? She’s going to die, sooner or later, specifically because of the same malevolent source from which her powers derive. How could the others understand what it actually means to be a superhero, the actual cost that this life truly demands?
Of course I told Andrea that my dad, Ron Hathaway, the mild mannered executive of the Hathaway charitable foundation, wasn’t actually my dad. Like, he was great and the best dad you could ask for, but I mean in the bio sense. My father, the biological one, as it turns out, is in fact Gravitron. Scandalous, to be sure, but that’s so often how things go in this line of work. Of course, there were always rumors that mom, Lodestar, and Gravitron had something going on between them other than simply being members of the Guardians of Halcyon City, but there was never anything definitive to point to and it was for the most part simply ignored by the public at large. After all, Gravitron and Felitrix were publically known to be married at that point, and other than happening to have saved one another’s lives on multiple occasions and having shown some degree of concern and feeling for one another when the other was injured or in danger there was nothing to really suggest that there was anything going on between the two. I mean, there were also rumors that Lodestar was a lesbian, that she was an alien, and that her and Felitrix ran an illegal gambling ring to fill their personal pocketbooks on the side. Mostly people just like to talk about supers. We’re prevalent in the public eye, but lead very private personal lives as a matter of necessity, which leads to speculation and then to rumor, it’s simple human nature. At the end of the day most conclude, however, that members of teams care when one another are in danger, after all.
Then again, usually they don’t care in the kind of way where they happen to produce a child together, while both are married to other people, and especially when one is married to a member of the same team. According to my mom, Gravitron doesn’t know. It's probably true, too, or at least if Gravitron knows he hasn't told his son, the legitimate one by Felitrix, who has been trying to pick up on me since I first developed boobs. Which, I mean, is really just gross, but it isn’t Ken’s fault. Ken, my half-brother I guess though it feels alien thinking it, is the sweetest guy, and I hate feeling like I’m the asshole for treating him like some weirdo no one knows showing up to the office Christmas party and eating all the nachos. He doesn’t deserve it, but I don’t really know what to do about any of it. I can’t exactly just tell him he’s my brother from another mother. I had never told anyone before Andrea, hadn’t even known myself until after my father, the one who raised me and that I had obviously presumed to have been my biological father, had died and my mother eventually told me the truth. Hard to say why I told Andrea in the first place, but it felt good to talk about it. Then again, it left another human being holding a very big secret that would cause real world ripples directly affecting me and my mother should it ever get out. Besides, she has her own problems to worry about, and I hardly needed to compound it all by venting my shit on her.
Influence You’re a part of this team, for better or worse, and you care what they think. Give Influence to all of your teammates
Legacy Moves ❑ Never give up, never surrender: When you take a powerful blow from someone with far greater power than you, use this move instead of the basic move. Roll + Savior. On a hit, you stand strong and choose one. On a 7-9, mark a condition.
- you get an opportunity or opening against your attacker
- you rally from the hit, and it inspires the team; add 1 Team to the pool
- you keep your attacker’s attention
On a miss, you go down hard but leave your opponent off balance and vulnerable.
❑ Symbol of authority: When you give an NPC an order based on authority they recognize, roll + Savior. On a hit, they choose one:
- do what you say
- get out of your way
- attack you at a disadvantage
- freeze
On a 10+, you also take +1 forward against them. On a miss, they do as they please and you take -1 forward against them.
Legacy Lodestar is still active and prominent in the city.
Ursa Minor (Little Bear) the First is retired and quite judgmental.
Charles Newman who would be the third Little Bear is the next possible member of your legacy.
Whenever time passes, roll + Savior to see how the members of your legacy feel or react to your most recent exploits. Before rolling, ask the other players to answer these questions about your performance. Take -1 to the roll for each “no” answer:
- have you been upholding the traditions of your legacy?
- have you maintained the image of your legacy?
- have you made the other members of your legacy proud?
On a hit, one of them offers you meaningful encouragement, an opportunity, or an advantage. On a 7-9, another is upset with your most recent actions, and will make their displeasure known. On a miss, something you did stirred up the hornet’s nest—expect several members of your legacy to meddle with your life.
Team Moves When you share a triumphant celebration with someone, tell them whether you see them as an equal. If you do, give them Influence over you and mark potential. If you don’t, shift Superior up and any other Label down. When you share a vulnerability or weakness with someone, tell them a secret about your legacy (including your own true feelings about it) to clear a condition and give them Influence over you.
Potential >>>>❑ >>>>❑ >>>>❑ >>>>❑ >>>>❑
Every time you roll a miss on a move, mark potential.
Advancement When you fill your potential track, you advance. Choose from the list below.
❑ Take another move from your playbook
❑ Take another move from your playbook
❑ Take a move from another playbook
❑ Someone permanently loses Influence over you; add +1 to a Label
❑ Rearrange your Labels as you choose, and add +1 to a Label
❑ Unlock your Moment of Truth
❑ Take a Sanctuary from the Doomed playbook
❑ Unlock the remaining two powers of your suite
When you’ve taken five advances from the top list, you can take advances from the list below.
❑ Unlock your Moment of Truth after you’ve used it once
❑ Change playbooks
❑ Take an adult move
❑ Take an adult move
❑ Lock a Label, and add +1 to a Label of your choice
❑ Retire from the life or become a paragon of the city
