The Patriot Regiment

As the Civil War raged on a thousand bloody fields, a collection of strangely gifted individuals fought their own battles to save the Union. Brought together in the fall of 1861 by President Lincoln and the second Minuteman, the Patriot Regiment became one of the first (if not the first) teams of so-called “mystery men.” Minuteman’s insistence that the team carry out its missions in secret kept the Regiment’s exploits largely out of the history books, but “tall tales” about their adventures have endured for generations.
The Patriot Regiment was present at nearly every crucial moment in the War, working in secret to stop any extraordinary threat to the Union war effort, be it Confederate mystery men, mad scientists, supernatural menaces, or agents of meddling foreign powers. Concerns over the latter prompted the team’s overseas covert missions during the War’s quiet winter months, carrying them as far away as Mexico, Canada, and the great powers of Europe. Naturally, the team was a frequent visitor to Freedom City during the War.
Despite its invaluable contributions to the Union victory, the War took its toll on the regiment, and its surviving members disbanded after the Confederate surrender. In the end, the Patriot Regiment sacrificed much, including personal glory, for the sake of victory, and in doing so, it set the standard for all the costumed champions who followed.

Structure

Minuteman II

The blessings of the Manaka Root ingested by Isaiah Hawthorne were passed on to his great-great grandson, Joseph, who grew strong enough to wrestle a bear and fast enough to outrace a horse. Even more miraculously, he had the “second sight,” foreseeing dangers before they occurred. Joseph honored his forbearer’s secret life as the patriotic Minuteman, and when President Lincoln’s call for volunteers went out, he was among the first to answer.
On the eve of the First Battle of Manassas, Joseph’s second sight showed him which of his friends and loved ones were doomed to die in the impending struggle. Despite his best efforts, the universe of battle proved too chaotic and immense for him to change their fates. Though he fended off the Confederate mystery man Achilles and saved the Union army from a total rout, constantly seeing the shadows of death falling on his comrades’ faces eventually proved too much for him. On the verge of madness, Joseph was discharged and sent home.
Still wanting to serve his country, the ever-patriotic Joseph followed his visions and donned his grandfather’s Minuteman costume. In this guise, he successfully sought an audience with President Lincoln, a man similarly haunted by the deaths around him. Their sense of kinship was immediate, and Lincoln offered his administration’s support to the reborn national hero. This sanction later extended to the Patriot Regiment as a whole, resulting in Minuteman’s commissioning as its leader.
While others on the team were older, smarter, and more ruthless, none commanded more respect than the living icon of the Revolution. He ultimately humbled even those who deduced his true nature as a melancholic boy of eighteen. Whenever anyone seriously challenged his authority, Minuteman used his knowledge of their futures and deepest secrets to put them in their place. It was an action seemingly out of character for the earnest young man, but it served to keep the team in line.
The second Minuteman’s career ended in April 1865 when, despite his premonition and all-out effort, he was unable to prevent the assassination of his friend and mentor, President Lincoln. After the fallen president’s funeral, Joseph returned to his farm, burned the Minuteman costume, and carried the secret of his family’s heroic legacy to his grave.

Goliath

Nothing is known of the Union mystery man called Goliath before the fateful night Columbia saved him from a Maryland lynch mob looking to avenge an unspeakable crime he’d allegedly perpetrated. She sensed that inside his giant, misshapen body was the mind of a child, and she vowed to protect and educate him. Given his tremendous strength and the exigencies of the time, Columbia decided the best way of accomplishing these goals was to sponsor him for membership in the Patriot Regiment.
Despite Columbia’s uncompromising support, Goliath’s presence disconcerted his teammates, at best. Though Columbia endeavored to teach him everything from Mozart to Methodism, Goliath remained dangerously unpredictable. Goliath was all the more volatile when Columbia wasn’t around, as she alone seemed to have his trust. At any given moment, Goliath might forget his strength and do considerable damage or wander from a pitched battle to float flowers down a stream. He could go from sweet and childlike to angry and berserk at the slightest provocation.
Goliath met his fate during the fall of Richmond. In the chaos engulfing the burning, frightened city, Columbia discovered Goliath in the commission of an unspeakable act. As he walked toward her for a forgiving embrace, she snapped his neck, killing him instantly. Using the nearest burning building as his funeral pyre, she laid him to rest and wept inconsolably for days after.

The Ironclad

Dr. Michael Dunn was among the most brilliant scientists and engineers of his time, as well as being a cultured raconteur and accomplished vocalist. He would have certainly gone down in history had it not been for his 3’10” stature, which rendered 19th century society incapable of regarding him seriously.
Undeterred, Dr. Dunn designed and built devices far beyond what was thought possible with the technology of that time. He eventually tired of creating his mechanical miracles in obscurity, and the onset of the Civil War seemed to be his long-sought opportunity for fame. In its time of peril, he believed the Union would have no choice but to recognize his genius and use his inventions to accomplish his other great goal: destroying the South. Dunn had long hated retrograde, discriminatory Southern culture, and now his wondrous technology would crush the Confederacy straight into the modern enlightened scientific world.
Like other notable inventors, Dunn demonstrated his futuristic weaponry before the President himself. While Lincoln was impressed enough with Dunn’s steam-powered iron suit and shoulder-mounted cannon to compare it favorably to an ironclad warship, he thought it impractical for mass production. Instead, the President offered to make the prototype and its pilot part of the new Patriot Regiment. The pilot, after some internal modifications, became Dr. Dunn himself, though he maintained the fiction an employee named “Kiel” was actually inside the suit.
As the Ironclad, Dunn gained the power and stature he’d always craved, compensating a bit for the indignity of serving under “that idiot child,” Minuteman. Despite his occasional haughtiness, Dunn’s cultured charm made the Ironclad one of the Regiment’s better regarded members. Dunn’s fate after the war is unknown, but he is rumored to have headed west, where his research progressed along with his megalomania.

Pathfinder

Steven Mullray, like all the Mullrays before him, suffered from a hereditary condition that made his sight, hearing, taste, and touch progressively hypersensitive. While learned men held the malady was natural, Steven remained steadfast the condition was divine retribution on his family for making its fortune in the slave trade. After completing his education, he left his family mansion in Maine, vowing to atone for his forefathers’ sins.
He found absolution as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, using his heightened senses to guide runaway slaves to freedom, even in the blackest night. Steven had always been an abolitionist, but hearing firsthand tales of slave life made him utterly committed to the destruction of the “peculiar institution.” With his abilities and unshakable resolve, he became “Pathfinder,” a figure of whispered legend. By the time the War broke out, the whispers were loud enough to catch President Lincoln’s ear.
Mullray resisted joining the Patriot Regiment, judging Lincoln too mild in abolishing slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation eventually changed his mind and solidified his place on the team. Though the Regiment respected Pathfinder’s passion and dedication, his undisclosed illness made his behavior erratic, and his unexplained pleas for quiet and darkness made his teammates doubt his sanity.
After the war, Pathfinder continued fighting for the black man’s freedom. He violently opposed the Ku Klux Klan and other Reconstruction-era scourges until his condition worsened and made him a prisoner in his family mansion. In 1873, he leapt from its roof in the midst of a particularly violent nor’easter, ill of mind and body but cleansed in spirit.

The Sharpshooter

Grief-stricken by her husband’s death at the First Battle of Manassas, Nicole Winchester lost everything but her thirst for vengeance. Trading her widow’s black for Union blue, the disguised “Nick” Winchester used the deadly aim she’d developed growing up in the wilds of Minnesota to become the North’s most feared sharpshooter. Her vengefulness proved her undoing, as she refused to obey orders that interfered with her personal war against the Confederacy. Insubordination led to a courtmartial and the end of the Sharpshooter’s time in uniform.
The Union Army quickly buried all accounts of a superior markswoman in its ranks, but Minuteman learned of her skills and recruited Nicole into the Patriot Regiment. The Sharpshooter remained a defiant, fundamentally damaged soul, but Minuteman valued her prowess as a mistress of disguise and an executioner who could strike from a mile away. Moreover, he understood she’d carry out any order without fail, so long as the mission ended with someone who wore a gray uniform dead by her hands.
The Sharpshooter walked away from the team at the war’s end without so much as a goodbye. Her fate is unknown, but she and her rifle were last seen headed south....

The Lion-Man

Daniel rarely spoke of his days as a slave in Missouri, revealing only that people there sensed he was different, fearing and shunning him because of it. When Daniel’s innate powers manifested, he repaid his master’s beatings in blood and made his way to freedom with Pathfinder’s help. At the War’s onset, Daniel was part of the Liberators, a team of former slaves possessed of extraordinary abilities, organized by Frederick Douglass to fight to set their brothers and sisters free. Daniel’s ferocity and willingness to spill blood earned him the nickname “the Lion-Man,” but it also put him at odds with his teammates who wanted to set a less threatening example. By the time President Lincoln finally enlisted the Liberators’ aid, Daniel felt singled out, and he left to join his old benefactor, Pathfinder, in the Patriot Regiment.
The Lion-Man’s combination of quiet menace, berserker fury, and eagerness to do the team’s dirty work made him invaluable to the Regiment. Daniel coolly accepted inhumanity as a part of life, having known little else, and he carried out the often horrific duties of war without flinching. He was reliable under the toughest of circumstances, and in wartime, there’s no better thing to be. This plus his grim integrity made him one of the most trusted and respected team members, despite not being likeable in any traditional sense. Like his closest associate, the Sharpshooter, the Lion-Man disappeared at war’s end, going off in search of more battles to fight.

Divided Liberties

Whenever freedom is greatly threatened, the Spirit of Liberty has endowed young women with superhuman abilities to aid in the fight against tyranny. The Spirit is naturally intertwined with the free and democratic United States, and she was acutely traumatized when the country divided over competing notions of liberty during its Civil War.
Mirroring America’s split, the Spirit fractured into warring halves, both of which imbued a champion with their power. On the Union side, her surrogate was called Columbia, after the female embodiment of America itself. Her Confederate counterpart was known simply as “The Southern Belle.”
Columbia’s spiritual host was seventeen-year-old college student Amelia Connover of New York, a dedicated suffragette, abolitionist, nativist, and temperance activist. These attitudes made her a perfect match for the Spirit’s “Yankee” fraction, dedicated to liberating others from perceived vices (whether they wanted to be freed or not) by any means necessary.
While Columbia was one of the most powerful beings fighting for the Union, Amelia and her divided Spirit were of limited effectiveness. Though Columbia manifested as an adult, Amelia remained saddled with a young student’s responsibilities, and she had to juggle her masked heroine life with exams, chaperones, student activities, and a bevy of young gentleman callers. Even as Columbia, she frequently busied herself with busting up saloons, hectoring immigrants to “become real Americans,” and other activities unrelated to winning the war.
Despite nearly killing each other during the war, both Amelia and Mary survived and returned to their mundane states when the Spirit reunited in 1865. Unable to find a man who could cope with her crusading, Amelia died a spinster, succumbing to heart failure while protesting the Spanish-American War. Her claims of having once been the Spirit of Liberty itself blended seamlessly into her rhetoric during the remainder of her life.

Type

Adventuring Party