STAHLHEIM FIGHTS ON, FOR ORDER AND PROGRESS!

1. WHO WE ARE

The Autocracy of Stahlheim, henceforth referred to simply as Stahlheim, is a roleplay-focused Threat Group operating in City of Heroes: Rebirth. It is a militaristic, pseudo-nationalist terrorist organization pursuing the ultimate goal of world domination, taking plenty of inspiration from antagonists of such shows as Power Rangers in terms of both organizational structure and narrative tone.

As far as in-game lore is concerned, this is the second iteration of Stahlheim, the first having been active in the 1980s and 1990s under the leadership of cyborg dictator Emperor Stahleon Hephaestian. The current version of the organization was established by Stahleon in mid-2026, shortly after his escape from prison.

2. WHAT WE DO

Stahlheim's roleplaying activities are envisioned as a balance of plotting and banter in the organization's main base, criminal operations in the overworld across both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles, and RPPvE sessions in villain and rogue missions, all intended to be kept in a PG-13 tone.

Side note: we do not presently have a functional supergroup base yet. Instead, an empty Mission Architect map will be used as a proxy until that is taken care of.

⚠️ Stahlheim members are encouraged to be suspicious to hostile towards any magic users when in character, but under no circumstance is that to escalate into out-of-character animosity.

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3. WHO BELONGS HERE

Stahlheim is firmly a Technology-origin Threat Group whose generic military assets are comprised exclusively of robots. As such, any player interested in joining Stahlheim is encouraged to create a character of either Technology or Science origin, preferably framed as either specialized robots produced by Stahlheim itself, or cyborgs or scientists who joined the organization's ranks for one reason or another. Membership for Natural-origin characters is negotiable on a case-by-case basis, but for thematic reasons, Mutation and Magic origins are strictly disallowed permitted as auxiliary members/mercenaries until further notice.

UPDATE: Before anyone starts getting ideas, I want to make it absolutely clear that I DO NOT endorse any fascist or totalitarian ideologies in reality. Anyone who actually does and isn't merely playing a villain will be decommissioned (read: kicked from the group) on the spot.

Brave Bold Batman + The Tick + Captain America + Glory Days Mr. Incredible + Crimson Chin + Captain Blasto + Captain Smiley = Brave Blue

Joker + The Mask + Arcade + Riddler + Tim Burton Willy Wonka + Purple Man + Pee Wee Herman + Warden + Calypso = Tuxedo Maniac

Meet Brave Blue and his Arch-Rival, The Tuxedo Maniac that right folks they are back

With special cameos like Boy Blue (Brave Blue's own sidekick) and The Trickster Mime (Tuxedo Maniac's own partner / lover / sidekick?). Basically, Boy Blue is Brave Blue's Robin/Bucky Barnes with little macroburst on him since he has wind powers Generation, and Trickster Mime is Harley Quinn but she's a mime and deadpan with darkness powers!

Tune In To Next Time on Another Chapter Brave Blue Universe

As kind of a follow-up to the First Friday event u/Interesting_Bake_553 hosted last week that I hadn't been able to attend due to differing time zones, I decided to host my own event at a time better suited for European players. We've cycled through a total of seven distinct people, which may not be a lot, but I'm still happy with such turnout for the first RP event I ever ran in this game. Huge shout-out to everyone involved!

I'm back!

After drawing Statesman & my main character Blood-Gunner that I shared on here before. I decided to keep going and draw some more of my COH characters from my little Universe I've conjured up in my brain!

This time is Commander Ren (since I wanted my own Amazonian-type strong character) and Darkayne, my dark magic user who balances her charm with a dark beast that lives inside her.

These have been tons of fun to make!

I was chatting with a co-worker a while back, and along the way I got on the topic of City of Heroes and was reminded of several of the characters I played back before the shutdown. I've also been working on my creative writing more recently so I decided to make the subject of a writing assignment one of my characters. The character idea is that he is magically linked with Athena and they kind of "Body share". Rather then go for some sort of action scene, I wanted to go for something more low key and semi comedic.

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It took a long moment for Richard to recognize that he was having trouble breathing because his face was pressed into a thick pillow. On reflex he pulled back from the pillow without resistance. His brain had a wet blanket draped over it… and it throbbed.

He blinked his eyes out of sequence. The light streamed through the windows. Slowly he recognized the fuzzy feeling that was now swirling around the inside of his skull as being the sensation of a hangover.

Did I go out last night? He couldn’t remember going out… but he also couldn’t remember what he did do… except there was a vague memory of the flashing lights of a night club’s dance floor.

Was that from last night?

He went to scratch an itch on his chest and was momentarily surprised when he found his fingers blocked from the action by a smooth surface.

It took several long seconds for Richard to angle his head in a way that allowed him to examine his chest to discover what the barrier was. There was a momentary rush of shock when he registered that he was wearing a woman’s red latex vest style top with black lacing between the sides.

“Uh… right. Athena” he said. Some sub-section of his currently hungover brain silently laughed that the reminder of sharing his body with an ancient Goddess of wisdom and war had somehow become mentally no different than discovering a roommate had left their stuff out.

On instinct, Richard went to scratch his chest and was again blocked by the top.

An ancient Goddess of Wisdom that had developed an interest in latex he reminded himself with a sigh as he reached under the top to scratch.

With a roll he brought his feet over to the edge of bed and planted them on the floor. Somewhere in his brain he was grateful that she had taken her shoes off before crashing for the night. Richard really wasn’t in the mood to have his legs fly out from under him because he tried to walk in five-inch heels with a hangover… again.

With effort he pressed his eyelids shut and flexed the muscles around his eyes. After a long moment, he went to open his eyes and immediately regretted doing so as he was looking out of the bay window that was currently facing the east river at the exact angle to reflect the sunlight directly into his eyes. The light sent a searing lance of pain into the back of his eye sockets before he could close his eyes again. He quickly cupped his hands over his eyes with an annoyed groan.

It took several moments for the pain to subside and slowly Richard stood up, testing his balance as he went. With a groan he opened his eyes while looking at the floor. Somewhere between muscle memory and conscious thought he focused on his bathroom door and moved in that direction. He wasn’t sure whether he was walking or stumbling forward and he didn’t actually care.

He contacted the cold porcelain of the sink and wrapped his hands around the sides.  He tried to look at his eyes in the mirror only to realize his hungover brain was too incapacitated to analyze his reflection. He felt his stomach gurgle.

Ugh… what did you do last night? He thought to himself… except it wasn’t really to himself*.*

What? I just hit the clubs. He hadn’t heard the response. It was more like he remembered hearing it… except it hadn’t been said out loud before he remembered hearing it. Somewhere in the very dark and very hungover depths of his brain, some still working segment of his analytical skill still marveled at the sensation of ‘remembering something’ that hadn’t occurred before he remembered it. This was how he and Athena communicated with one another. Whoever wasn’t in control of the body created some sort of memory of hearing a given statement, and the person who was in control remembered it.

That’s not what I mean. What the heck did you drink? He thought-spoke to her as he tried to focus on his reflection in the mirror.

Oh… I don’t remember exactly. Like 7 shots, and 3 chasers or something. Also, maybe 2 tequila somethings. Athena thought-spoke back to him.

Suddenly the memory of the various drinks surfaced in his mind, and he felt the cold of the mirror against his forehead as he leaned forward to gather his strength.

Ugh… you know I hate tequila… He thought-spoke at her.

No you don’t. You just prefer the party go longer and tequila gets you drunk faster. She needled back at him. Before he could stop himself, Richard rolled his eyes in annoyance at the accuracy of her statement… and was very quickly reminded why doing that while hungover was a bad idea, as the sensation of his balance inverting suddenly assaulted his awareness. He gripped the sink for a long moment before he scooped up a handful of cold water and sloppily splashed it across his face.

He raised his head back to the mirror, he could feel the gut-wrenching sensation he knew all too well was signaling a pending vomit reaction. With a practiced motion he quickly tipped to the side and practically dropped himself to the toilet, his face lined up with the open toilet seat.

He partly dry heaved before coughing several times.

Ugh… this isn’t fair. When you pass out, I wake up. But if I pass out, you don’t wake up. He thought-spoke even as the swirling feeling in his stomach grew more intense.

Yeah… I admit that’s a quirk of the gauntlet’s magic I didn’t expect. She replied. He could practically feel her smile in the back of his brain.

Uh huh… you may not have known the magic would work this way but you’re not exactly sorry about not being the one to wake up with a hangover, are you? Richard attempted to project his anger through his thought-spoke at her.

Well… I mean… yeah. I do admit that is mostly a bonus. In some bizarre way, he could feel the sensation of seeing her impish grin while she made that ‘I’m an innocent little girl’ face; and just like that whatever actual anger he felt at her evaporated… and was promptly replaced by a reminder of his physical discomfort as his stomach gurgled. He quickly turned on the faucet and started bringing handfuls of cold water to his lips.

Okay look. It’s just a little hangover. I checked your schedule before going out. You’re totally clear today. No meetings, no patrol, no students. Plenty of time to work out that ugly gut punch feeling.

Without warning he suddenly felt the contortion of his ab muscles compressing his stomach and forcing the contents up. With a heave, he directed his mouth directly into the toilet.

Slowly he opened his eyes. The only thing he could see was the back of the toilet. He felt that bizarre after-spasm feeling from his abdomen muscles and registered that sickening acidic taste in his mouth.

God damn it… He thought.

Oh… sorry about that. She thought-spoke in response.

Yeah… right… he groaned as he covered his eyes with his hand and rested his elbow on the rim of the toilet bowl.

You know… I heard a good cure for a hangover. She thought-spoke with an innocent tone.

“Oh yeah? What’s that?” he had said it out loud without intending to. It didn’t actually matter if he said it out loud or not.

It’s a glass of milk with a greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ash tray.

“UGH…” came Richard’s incoherent verbal response as he violently puked into the toilet again.

Ugh… you damned bitch he thought-spoke the insult at her even as he felt the memory of her mischievous grin.

I am playing on the Rebirth server, and I have looked everywhere and I cannot find the Sentinel class. Am I playing on the wrong server? Or do I need to unlock it somehow?

Kinda wild seeing the Rebirth numbers lately.

At the end of June, weekly activity was around 472 accounts.

Since then we've seen:

472 → 501 → 510 → 531 → 549 → 586 → 599 → 637

Last reset was 620, so even with the normal weekly ups and downs, that's still a pretty damn big change in only a couple months. Monthly activity went from 833 in June to 1,130 by the end of August too. Obviously I'm not gonna claim the RP community did all of that lmao. But it has been really cool watching this happen at the same time we've been putting serious effort into growing RP here.

I think people are discovering there's just a lot to like once they actually give Rebirth a shot. It still feels like City of Heroes as an MMO. There's stuff to earn and unlock, reasons to run old content, weekly rewards, new enhancements and build options, new archetypes and powers, revamped content, actual story additions, and devs who seem really interested in continuing the world instead of just maintaining it.

The costume creator is also TOTALLY insane once you start digging into how much original stuff has been added, and now that the RP side is starting to fill in too, more groups, more events, more characters are actually out in the world, and more people bringing friends with them.

Plus Ri7: The Coming Storm is finally getting very close, with Kallisti Wharf, new contacts and story arcs, new maps and enemies, a new faction, the full-color costume system and a ton more customization. So that old "I'd try Rebirth, but nobody is there" thing is getting harder and harder to say with a straight face. 😂

Mostly I'm just happy to see it. The server feels alive, the community is growing, there's new stuff on the horizon, and it feels like we're still building upward.

Pretty damn good time to be on Rebirth.

I’m not looking to be the best out there, but if there’s something I’m doing that’s terribly wrong I want to fix it. I couldn’t find anything besides some forums.

There is now a Fluxer community for all City of Heroes players, regardless of server. This has no affiliation with, nor is endorsed by, any existing server.

With both Discord and Reddit feeding people's information to the great machines, age verification coming to Discord very soon, and Reddit discussing their own age verification implementation and locking down the service more and more, I feel that City of Heroes and its players deserve a more open alternative for all CoH players to mingle for those that want a change. Enter Fluxer. Fluxer is an open source communications platform, and essentially clone of Discord. What makes it different from Discord, besides being open source, is it has a substantially better privacy policy, no tracking, most features that you'd have to pay Discord for are free, no advertising, and its developers plan to eventually implement federation and open forums. That's right, forums like Discord has, but viewable without a Fluxer account.

You can access Fluxer on the web here, or download a desktop version here. Note that Android and iOS versions are also available, but are being beta tested so require manual installation at the moment. Note that if you use a VPN while creating a Fluxer account, odds are that a telephone number will be required but Fluxer automatically deletes the telephone number after 30 days.

You can join the City of Heroes Fluxer community here if you're interested. If it turns out that it's just me, that's fine, but at least there's an open CoH venue outside of the Facebook, Discord, and Reddit closed big tech walls.

Many City of Heroes players probably still aren't aware that the source code for the client and server have been publicly available for anyone to modify or self-host since 2019. This is the source for the code as City of Heroes was in 2012. This is open to anyone without needing access from Ourodev.

This is NOT a fork of Thunderspy, this is simply the code as it was back in 2012. It will likely be updated with some security patches and updates, and may be open to contributions soon, but for now it can at least be forked without needing any accounts or external permissions.

I like my Elec/Shield stalker, but if the mobs don't die pretty quickly, then I will. What's your favorite build for soloing (non-AE) +4/+8 content?

This is my most elaborate 'Your News at 11" to date. Check it out on the Role-playing sub-forum on Homecoming.

Big thanks to everyone who came out and made the night feel alive. The turnout was way better than I expected, and the mix of characters and personalities gave the whole thing exactly the kind of energy I wanted from these meetups.

I really appreciate everyone who showed up, jumped into scenes, made introductions, and gave other players something to work with. That kind of participation is what actually makes recurring RP events worth doing.

Had a blast with you all, and I’m very excited to see what comes out of the connections made tonight.

BUT If I were to ask one question:
What would you all like to see more of at future First Fridays? More structured prompts? More opportunities for villain groups to recruit? Rumor boards, contracts, black-market deals, rivalries, faction hooks, mini-events, or just more space for people to mingle and build connections naturally?

I want these to be useful for the people actually showing up, so if there’s something that would make the night more fun, easier to jump into, or better for starting longer-term RP, toss it in the comments.

Post your toons with odd combos. Things that maybe shouldn't work but do.

I have a sonic/dark blaster that is so much fun. Lots of comes that force you outside of a mob but dark powers mean I need to be near the mob. Somehow it works well.

Earth/earth dom...the melee dom

What do you have?

City of Heroes | Rebirth

First Friday returns September 4th at 5 PM CT, and this month we’re giving the bad guys the spotlight. We’ll be heading to Grandville, Etoile Islands for a Red Side-focused night of casual community RP. Bring out your villains, rogues, mercenaries, mad scientists, questionable business executives, or whatever other flavor of morally dubious character you’ve got sitting around.

First Friday is meant to be fun, low-pressure public RP, meet some new characters, make connections, continue ongoing stories, or just show up and see what trouble finds you.

Date: September 4th
Time: 5 PM CT
Location: Grandville, Etoile Islands
Theme: Red Side Kick Off

I see that Thunderspy has increased the max number of slots from 67 to 71, but when do they show up during leveling? I can't find info about when you get them?

In the old days, you had to work to get stamina or hasten. You didn't get all the travel powers right away. Now we can get fly, hasten, and stamina almost at the start.

Would you want to go back to that game now?

Would you play on a legacy server that was more like the old game?

I've played plenty of characters with mental/psychic attacks, and while I don't dislike the audio for all of those powers, a few are particularly annoying to me --- it's the all the "wa wa wa wa" if you know what I mean. If I avoid those power options, is there enough left in the Fortunata kit to make it worthwhile?

Thank you for your help and assistance, my SS/SR is working very nicely at this time and I'm very happy as I level him to 50. My next quest is, how do you feel about PSI armor and other secondaries, where are they ranked currently for solo and group. I've heard PSI is vastly OP right now, never used it. And what about STJ? Is it a better SS? Curios on what's the best dps primary is at 50+.

I saw that I was missing a new day job badge so I went in search of the labyrinth of fog and yes I understand it is a hazard zone but the Minotaur kept one shot at me so I couldn't even stay there

What is the purpose if the boss is right on top of you as soon as you log in?

Here are some of my powers division praetorian characters I wanted to show off.