As promised, we’re opening up our T-Shirt of the month, featuring Anthem, one of our Iconic Lore characters. This shirt is available now http://cityoftitans.com/t-shirt-order-form. The shirts will be produced by TeeLaunch and be sent to press the first week of October.

Read on after the art update for a bonus Lore update on how Anthem first met American Star!

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And we’re back!

Last month we left off with a little teaser for this weeks update - so let’s get started. Below you see our basic female mesh at roughly the default presets. The garish color scheme you see below are each of our targetable costuming locations. This shot is still early in the fusing development process so you might spot some unsightly edges.

[img]http://cityoftitans.com/sites/default/files/Color%20coded%20Character%20Mesh.jpg[/img]

So what does this mean?

The first thing to understand when looking at this is it isn’t just a map of potential clothing locations. This body is a fused mesh - each one of these colored sections is a distinct piece. The biggest takeaway is that every piece can be substituted with an alternate mesh. I’ll leave that to your imagination for the moment.

These regions are also the baseline for costume pieces whether skin, spandex, cloth, or hard armour. Much like our female mesh above, most pieces will fuse cover multiple locations and that’ll all be under the hood.

For example, this is a clothing layer dress that is part of the Rooks gang costume set.

[img]http://cityoftitans.com/sites/default/files/Weighted%20Cloth%20Dress.jpg[/img]

This is a weighted cloth dress - it will react to physics such as character movement or wind. And as we plan to have almost every piece of NPC costuming available to the players, you’ll be able to pattern this your own way or leave it as is to play a reformed or solo Rook.

Some costume pieces will have built in tear aways allowing you to remove portions. Lets say you have a character with a robot arm akin to Zachary on Galaxy Rangers but you have a bomber jacket you really want to use and you also want to show off that arm. This won’t be a problem. Rip that sleeve off and show that chrome!

Written by - Petalstorm

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[h3]Of Heroes and Marines[/h3]

AMERICAN STAR: The first time I met Harriet Ross, the remarkable young lady who later became Anthem, was during a raid on the base outside of town. We – the Paragons, or what was left of us at the time – had heard alarm sirens at the base and had responded, not knowing it was a trap set for us. We later found out that the Captains of Villainy were back together, and were looking to hijack an experimental artillery system that was being tested on the base. Perhaps they were going to sell it, or aim it at the city and threaten for ransom. They were too dejected to explain their plans afterwards.

The Captains had brought in outside help on this one, hiring the sorceress Alakazam to craft and lay magical traps and hazards keyed to each of the Paragons; I was shocked to find my own armor wrapping around me like a cocoon, restraining my movement, and my fellows had similar problems. Hatemaster crowed that perhaps we could be ransomed too, but it apparently was just gloating and not part of the plan.

At any rate, we eventually heard gunfire from outside – the soldiers hired by the Captains had these guns developed by Doctor Irratio that fired “sleep bullets”, which makes about as much sense as anything mad scientists ever do. The soldiers had stormed the base and, since the base's weapons were in lockup save for a few held by the military police guarding the entrance and the weapon, they had a pretty easy time of overrunning the place. Until they got to Harriet's classroom.

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ANTHEM: Yeah, I remember the day I met American Star.

I was at the Marines base here in Titan City. I was teaching a course in hand to hand combat, and I had a class full of recruits who thought it was funny that they were being taught to fight by a woman, and that's why half of them were on the floor when we started hearing gunfire outside.

I told the rest of them to lie flat - they were much more willing to listen to me by that point - and then positioned myself near the door. A couple of mooks came in with these weird guns. I took them down. Citing base protocol, I took their weapons from them and went out looking for other troublemakers.

They were all over the place, of course. They all had the same guns that shot some sort of sleep ray. I organized whoever was awake and we started taking the base back. When I heard that members of the Paragons were being held, I decided to see if I could get them loose, because they’d be more helpful here. I stopped by the weapons locker on the way.

I found a few guards outside standing with a supervillain who was shouting orders at them about how to properly guard the Paragons, which alerted me to their location. I think it was… ‘Doctor Hate’? ‘The Hate Doctor’? Something like that. White man with an afro, you know the one. Anyway. I put his soldiers to sleep with the funny little ray guns, but he was immune, so I just knocked him out instead. Guy wasn’t much of a fighter.

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AMERICAN STAR: That was when she entered the room. Alakazam had heard the fighting outside, and so she’d summoned up something to deal with whoever came through the door - an enormous blob monster she called a ‘slime titan’. I’d fought those things before - they were pretty hard to deal with, if your main thing is punching.

So naturally she fed it a pair of incendiary grenades. I remember being surprised at how much it smelled like fresh fruitcake, until it vanished.

Alakazam had made herself immune to the sleep rays as well, so she started trying to cast a spell at Harriet. Harriet knocked Alakazam on her back, broke some bones in her hand and that was that. It took very little convincing to get Alakazam to release us after that, and then I and the other Paragons went and took down the rest of the Captains of Villainy, who mostly surrendered when they saw we were free.

I miss the days when villains sometimes had sense.

After everything was done, I had a talk with her. She was the most forthright person I’d talked to in ages. Rude, but forthright. She had a good head on her shoulders, she was sensible and direct.

I had been looking for a successor for some time by then. Everyone asks me why, I know; and I’ll tell you what I told them. I’m over one hundred and thirty now. My magic armor is preserving my life, but I can’t expect that to hold out forever. Someone else will need to take up the mantle eventually. As Harriet is fond of saying--

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ANTHEM: Some people still need fightin’.

And it’s true. And I think he liked it when I said that. I never understood that man. At least, not then.

The man liked me right away. It took me a while to figure out why. Most people didn’t care for my blunt honesty, most people didn’t appreciate the idea that you do things because they’re right or you don’t do them. James Duncan - American Star - did.

And so he decided I should be the next American Star. I changed the name, mind you, but still, I was honored. And confused. I didn’t think of myself as a hero. He said that was good.
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AMERICAN STAR: All the best don’t, you see. They think of themselves as people with responsibilities, things they take seriously.

So I took her on as my apprentice. She took a while to get used to me. I’m very old fashioned, I know it. And she kept expecting training, and I kept telling her she didn’t need training, and she kept proving it by taking down supervillains without any powers of her own.

I think she was frustrated. She liked the part where we went out and fought crime. But she kept wanting the secrets to being a successful hero, and I kept telling her what I thought the important parts where. The rest she’d pick up herself, I knew. She didn’t like it.

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ANTHEM: I wanted strategy, I wanted combat know-how, I wanted tricks for getting out of sticky situations. I kept getting… ‘sermons’, I called ‘em. He told me about how to work with people, how you treat people right, why people deserve to be treated right. He told me about morality, and I thought I’d had it all figured out, but… well. It wasn’t until later… until he died, really, that I figured out that those really were the important things. I hate that it took that for me to figure it out.

The last time I saw him? ...no, that’s another story.

Written by - Robin

Discuss this update here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/discuss-character-creation-t-shirts-and-anthem-meets-american-star