UnSub, as he was in City of Heroes / Villains.
With City of Heroes / Villains closing at the end of November, I’ve been a touch nostalgic for things now long gone. One of the the things that occurred to me was that sometime long ago I’d written some text that Jesse Scoble (Arctic Sun) had used in the Paragon Times, meaning I had contributed an iota of CoH/V official lore.
But it had been years since I’d seen them and the CoH/V website has been through at least one major facelift since then. Paragon Studios and NCsoft haven’t always been the most consistent of companies in keeping such things during transitions.
Fortunately Paragon Wiki had captured a lot of these Paragon Times articles, including mine. I’d written it as though UnSub – my main character – was behind it. He was always meant to be a journalist who ventured into dangerous situations because he knew he couldn’t be killed (hurt, yes; killed, no) so it was a fit for the character. (I did note with amusement that the Wiki page itself mentions that UnSub was the writer, but isn’t clear about who the writer was. It was me!)
There are two pieces I remember writing – “A City Remembers” and I wrote another article that was edited down for “Vanguard Reports Success, Rikti War in Review“. I vaguely remember writing a third that was never used.
The Paragon Times was a good idea and I’m aware that Scoble would have liked to do more with it, but everything that was written had to go through a vetting process to ensure that continuity wasn’t violated (or worse). This required extra time and resources. In the end I believe that the Paragon Times was seen to be nice for flavour text but not something that was worth the investment, plus Scoble left in 2007 and the Times was left in the ether after that.
(In the interests of disclosure, I was paid absolutely nothing for those contributions.)
QUICK EDIT AFTER POSTING: Here’s a bit of Scoble’s view of The Paragon Times written back in 2007.
World Class Villains 