Just published my first arc with the City franchise's Architect system. If any heroes or villains that might read my blog are interested in trying it, it's Arc #145654 "Iniquitous Inventions, Inc.". The story is a fairly simple one, although there are a few complex things I tried to do that I don't think quite worked as planned, revolving around my primary City of Villains character, a (now) Level 41 Bots and Bubbles male Mastermind named Inique (feminine form for a latin word for sin, related to the English word iniquitous, which is not to be confused with ubiquitous or even unique).
When I first started playing this particular villain "way back" in 06, what I sort of imagined doing with the character is basically what plays out in the arc: define a nemesis hero for him, and then place him and whatever goons I put together into silly situations for heroes to narrowly escape from. (I was a little disappointed at the time to find that City of Villains was just sort of a "grimier skin" on just about the exact same game.)
This arc is definitely a little on the silly side, but does flow naturally from what I had been doing with the villain from quite early on. As a robotic mastermind, the character has 6 robots that he can call on to do his evil bidding. When I first started playing that character, robotic masterminds were something like a dime a dozen and it quickly became apparent to most of us that we could rename our pets, our robots, and add some differentiation to the robotic hordes that would sometimes show up in a team mission. My theme for Inique's robot names quickly became "household appliances" and so the names of the six bots are: Toaster, Waffle Iron, Iron Skillet, Crock Pot, Steel Collander, and Oven. Unfortunately when you face the Inique arch-villain at the end of my story arc he will have the boring default names for his (final) bots, so some of that is lost (I got the costume the exact same, but couldn't find a way to rename pets in this current iteration of the architect). On the other hand, I had fun coming up with a crazier assortment of other household appliances for heroes to fight for most of the story arc.
I think the custom villains work pretty well as a mostly balanced group. I'm particularly proud of the fact that all of them fit the central theme and seem like good variations on a formula, and yet every single "model" has a very different silhouette to differentiate them all in battle. I am sorry about the intensity of the Vacuum Cleaners, however, but they wouldn't be nearly as fun if they weren't so crazy/insane, plus that idea for a powerset combination comes lovingly from my old main Hero.