The City of Heroes team decided the upcoming Going Rogue expansion needed some new signature characters to show players that it will be possible to cross the line between good and evil. To that end, they have introduced Desdemona, a demon summoning Mastermind who questions her evil ways, and Maelstrom, a gun-toting hero turned villain.

Senior Lead Designer Matt "Positron" Miller has written a dev diary entry discussing how the two characters were created. They were purposefully given power sets being introduced in Going Rogue to show players Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning. Desdemona and Maelstrom have actually been in the works for more than a year and were mentioned on the online calendar that was released during the game's fourth anniversary in 2008.

The next dev diary will focus on Tyrant, whose bio still says "coming soon." You can read Positron's full entry below.

When Going Rogue was in the planning stages, we knew that we would need a couple “poster-children” to encompass what “Going Rogue” meant. We needed a Hero and a Villain to cross over to the other side and show to the world, and our players, that yes, this can and will be possible for your character too.

We originally thought that we would take existing Signature characters and migrate them to the other side, but since we did the “Trading Places” storyline in the comic (where Manticore joins up with Arachnos), it seemed we couldn’t do that without someone tying it back to that comic storyline where (spoilers ahead!) Manticore was only faking and was actually a Hero the entire time.

So that meant we needed a Hero-gone-bad and a Villain-gone-good. Looking back into my stable of old RPG super-heroes I remembered a gun wielding vigilante I used to play called Maelstrom. Since we really wanted to get a dual pistols Powerset into Going Rogue I thought that he would be a great guy to dust off and bring to life in the City of Heroes universe. Like all creations, he went through many iterations before the final look and style was settled for him. The Going Rogue version and the RPG version from years ago are pretty much two distinct entities now, and I just love what our concept team was able to do to modernize him.

That took care of our vigilante Hero, but I still needed a redeeming Villain. I looked to the other powerset we wanted to put into Going Rogue, Demon Summoning. This was a Mastermind set, so it was already exclusive to villains, making it obvious that whoever we came up with was going to be a demon summoner.

Desdemona was the hardest to nail down a name for. We had gone through many iterations of her name, everything from Pandora to Eve to Demonatrix to Parable. We were never happy with any of them, until Melissa Bianco (War Witch, our Senior world designer) came up with Desdemona. It fit the character perfectly and instantly became her name in the story bible. We loved that she had such an “evil” powerset, but found herself in a situation where she wanted to use her powers for good.

Personally I love the way both characters turned out. During the concepting phase Desdemona had a lot of skin showing around the neck so we were trying out various jewelry and collars to break things up. Then I realized if this girl was summoning demons, she’d probably want something mystical to keep them from controlling her. That’s when I came up with the idea of a tattooed “circle of protection” encompassing her mind, that demons couldn’t penetrate and was permanently part of her body.

Maelstrom’s power source was also a great idea. Ken Morse, the Lead Artist, wanted something that evoked “Maelstrom” more than just the name, and so his idea was to having this glowing, swirling, energy source in his chest. I think the end result was awesome.

Sharp-eyed fans will note that we’ve been working on these two characters for a while, as they had their “birthdays” listed in the online calendar we released for the fourth anniversary of City of Heroes, over a year ago. Although Desdemona was listed as Pandora on that calendar, it just shows how fluid, and long, some of these ideas take to come to fruition.

For the next Dev Diary, Joe “Hero 1” Morrissey will detail new information on Tyrant, err, I mean Emperor Cole, and the world of Praetoria where he and his Praetorian Guard hail from.