Studio Stories: Black Scorpion's Town

Black Scorpion

Black Scorpion was a character in City of Heroes that we all loved to joke about. Early on, I went through a training program to learn how to make missions with the game's internal tools. I was told to make a sample mission, so I made Black Scorpion's Guide to Being Cool. I had a lot of fun with it, and we all enjoyed just running wild with crazy Black Scorpion ideas.

One of the last ones was regarding his personal story. I was working on a personal story series for another character when I decided to do a fun exercise. Many other characters have more... compelling stories than Black Scorpion here. What could his story  be about that would make him interesting? The answer that popped into my head wasn't useful at all, but that's the point of some of these stories; they're not useful, they're supposed to be funny. I thought immediately of one of my favorite episodes of Firefly: Janestown.

I'm going to assume most people know what Janestown is; after all, how did you get this far and enjoy video games without knowing that? Anyway, the personal story for Black Scorpion was essentially the same plot for Janestown, just with Black Scorpion. I burst out laughing at my desk at the idea and stumbled over to John "Protean" Hegner's desk. I calmed myself down and threw the pitch at him and the two of us began laughing, throwing out incredibly dumb ideas about an area where Black Scorpion was considered a hero. The entire group of Arachnos patrons could be really freaked out, and Black Scorpion would just be angry at people not fearing him and paranoid that his armor was being tampered with.

We would never actually do this story, of course. But it was fun to joke around about. You'll all find that many of the Studio Story segments are going to be like that; ideas that we would never dream of putting in the game, but we absolutely love joking around and going into way too much depth about them.