At the very heart of DC's Golden Age, there lurks a character who fits so seemlessly into the World of Darkness, you'd think it had been intended that way from the start.  That character is, of course, Hawkman.

The dude is an eternally reincarnated former Egyptian Pharoah, after all. He could have walked out of the pages of Mummy: the Resurrection. Or more likely, flown out. Maybe he doesn't always remember who and what he is - certainly his superheroic exploits show little awareness of it - but then are not both his arch-enemy and his closest ally also reincarnated Egyptians?

And if he's really a World of Darkness character, who else might be? It seems likely that a pretty fair number of the more technologically based heroes might actually be agents of the Technocracy - the Flash certainly fits that profile.  And still others might be experiments of the Technocracy - like the being that escaped from the Void Engineer's Research Facility Krypton, for example.

Many of the villains are likely renegade Technomancers, or even fronts for actual Technocracy actions - it's not hard to imagine the Syndicate equipping a few ne'redowells and getting them to target a particular bank's branches in order to do something to the economy.

Of course, not all of them fit into this category. Some of the villains are plainly Nephandi - the Shade, for example. And some of the villains are Marauders - as are some of the heroes. The singular Quiet of Johnny Thunder is perhaps the most obvious, but there are plenty more besides him, such as the heroic Wonder Woman and the villainous Fiddler.

The Traditions also have a role to play in all of this. How could they not? It's likely that the majority of heroes are members of the Traditions - Dr. Mid-Nite, using magic to replace his blind eyes; Dr Fate, keeping alive ancient Hermetic traditions that pre-date the Hermetic Order itself; and of course, Sons of Ether like Robotman and Starman.

And all this is say nothing of the effect that all these mysterymen are having on the minds of the Masses. More than half of all these costumed villains and heroes are completely without any so-called 'super-powers'. They are not are part of the Ascension War, and yet some of them are well on the way to becoming key players in it. What masters do they serve - is it true that the shadowy Bat-Man is actually a Malkavian? And what force created the ultra-powerful Wraith calling itself the Spectre?

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