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Heronymus
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Name: Jerome
Country: United States
State: Illinois
Metro: Chicago
Gender: Male
Interests: RPGs. Mostly, that's it.
Expertise: Das Blinkenlights Monitor and all-around tech geek.
Occupation: Technical Support Associate
Industry: Email Marketing
Message: message me
Yahoo:  heronymus_waat
Member Since:
9/6/2003
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| My friend Brian is putting together a Supers game, set in 1970, starring a bunch of retired heroes putting on the tights to face one more threat. I immediately wanted to play the speedster, because the image of an old guy running really, really fast was one I thought was amusing.
So here's my flavortext for him:
Mister K. is what the kids all call him, at school. Which is fine; at least they're using 'mister'. The last decade or so have been hard to watch, hard to take. Too many youngsters disappearing, off to war, off to drugs, off to Canada. He doesn't blame them; the Great War left him with some pretty serious scars, and not all of them show as clearly as his shaking hands.
Aram remembers volunteering, of all the stupid things. The day that Pearl Harbor was bombed, he was 26, but he had students who were volunteering, and he didn't want to see the boys go off to war without a leader. College educated, he was inducted as an officer, 2nd Lieutenant Katchaturian, 2nd Platoon, Able Company, 45th Reconnaissance Troop, 45th Infantry Division. As a Recon soldier, he did scouting and intelligence work, earning recognition, and attention from the brass, and eventually a chance to be a "real patriot". He was to be part of the elite, a new breed of soldier, to match the SS Ubermenchen. And, for a time, he was. He passed the blood test, he passed the physical, he passed the screening...and he was given the serum, and like a few of his fellow soldiers, he became a member of the Special Weapons Division.
He was there for the fighting in North Africa and Italy. He helped break the Seigfried Line. And he was there when he and his fellow SWD members broke through the gates at Dachau. And he was there with the troops when Munich was taken.
And after the war? He went back to teaching. History and Civics and Home Economics, since the aftereffects of the serum made it dangerous for him to be anywhere near the shop. When Korea rolled around, he was tempted to re-up, until the Geneva Convention was updated to forbid "Special Weapons" on the battlefield. So instead he stayed home, teaching. And so as not to seem ungrateful, he worked with others with gifts, keeping the homefront safe.
Eventually, others filled the roles that he and his associates, his friends, tired of playing, and he went back to teaching full-time. And watching the young men in his classroom pass through his hands like smoke, fuel to the fires of war, and anger, and fear, and waste. Until now...
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| I moved all of my worldbuilding notes to here:
http://pumilianempire.blogspot.com/
In the hopes that I would get back to actually writing, and consequently using this blog for it's intended purpose.
We'll see how that goes.
I'll probably be making an announcement sometime after Saturday. We'll see how Saturday itself goes.
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| I've been thinking about magic in Teria, recently. I've been trying to figure out how to limit the impact of spellcasters and various other arcane concepts, since this is a world where civilization is, basically, dying. Even just a couple high-level casters could solve most of the problems that the failing holdouts have.
So, then, obviously the solution is to remove them.
Well, not ALL of them, but most of them. Since the big magic-users were mostly elves in the Pumilan Empire, and the elves have all gotten up and left, I've decided that there just wasn't enough infrastructure to keep the wizards around. Which actually does a bit for the whole 'darkness encroaching' setting, since it means that there really is a large body of lost and forgotten lore and hidden and mystic ideas that has been buried in time (not to mention literally). Which means that wizards are going to be extremely rare. Like, there should be a special case for a wizard to even exist, let alone be a player character.
It does mean that Sorcerers and Psions are a bit more common, but also, not terribly. Which is going to make it interesting for the PCs to find anything custom-made, unless they make it themselves. It also means that there is a lot more chances for technology to start to sprout: things that would have been taken care of by magic in times past now must be brute-forced into working. I'm tempted to include Warlocks as well, but we'll see.
Anyway, magic is something that's becoming more and more rare, as the civis die out and the Beastial tribes reclaim the world. So, since tribal magic is mostly shamanistic in nature, they're going to win more often than not.
I don't know if the PCs are going to play magic-users or not; it should be interesting.
Also, a note for later: illithids are ex-elves, left behind by the exodus. They don't talk about it.
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| Here's the background for my new Shadowrun character. I'm putting it here, because this is where (at least in theory) my creative writing goes. So, here's Treant, the Troll Mercenary.
He goes by Treant nowadays. It's from an old, old game that his
grandparents used to play, with their friends on the Rez, back in the
early days. Back before things got weird, back before Independence
Day. Chris' parents played the game, too, and it was through them that
he learned a lot of things. Including how to be someone else, for a
while.
Treant started life as Christopher Running Bear, son of John
and Maria Running Bear, Lakota Sioux who joined up with the NAN almost
at the beginning. John and Maria were good parents, but they were
human, and they were somewhat surprised with Christopher's appearance
when he was born. They raised him, though, in a careful and loving
environment, and passed on both their love of him and their love of the
Earth and the environment.
It was the love of the environment that Christopher that
really latched onto, and through friends of John and Martha, and others
of Chris' age group, and as teenagers they hooked up with some
old-school Earth-Firsters and other Eco-focused Direct Action groups.
His education was picked up piecemeal, often from ex-professors who
had, for one reason or another, been kicked out of their teaching
positions. Intensely interested in biology, ecology, and political
science, Chris was also deep into the Environmental Underground, going
on more and more direct-action missions, and generally becoming the
"heavy hitter" of his local cell.
During a time when other children were thinking about college
and graduation and dating, Chris was already an active player in
cross-border eco-raids, moving out of the NAN and operating in the
UCAS, the CAS, and Aztlan, as well as the California Free State.
Familiarity with all sorts of firearms, spent significant time doing
black-bag work, sometimes raiding animal experimentation sites,
sometimes blowing up or burning down or just messing with places or
companies that didn't "properly respect mother earth".
Then, things got darker. The Direct-Action cell that Chris
was working with decided to go one step farther, to kidnap and
"interrogate" a mid-level corporate officer of a small subsidiary of a
megacorp -- which one wasn't particularly clear to Chris. It didn't
matter anyway -- it was righteousness in the pursuit of the cause. And
it worked; they were able to find and capture a convoy of biochemical
waste, which they then rerouted back to the corp HQ and blew up in the
parking lot. It was righteous action, it was good. Chris was doing
the work of Mother Earth.
And then Chris found out that the last several raids the went
on, the equipment they'd picked up in the last several months, the
funding, the intel, was all being sponsored. By a corporation that was
just as bad as the ones they were raiding. All of the work and blood
and sweat, all of the outright torture that Chris had committed weren't
for some greater cause. They were just another mercenary team. The
run after that, the whole team save Chris was wiped out, and Chris
himself was injured quite badly.
So then, Chris became a mercenary in name as well as truth.
The take from the last run was all his, and so he bought the best
enhancements he could afford, gathered his things, and went into the
killing business. Cut off from his family, his friends dead, his faith
in the righteous cause broken, he committed himself to a life in the
shadows, and became a gun for hire.
The last of the money he had, he sunk into two safehouses,
and some pocket change. There was still the cause. Now it's just a
question of finding someone who agrees to his values.
That gave me a million nuyen to play with. In addition to all of the
cyberware, I also purchased two 12-month Low-level lifestyles: a
Junkyard Apartment in the name of Rafael Cartacos (with a Rating (5)
credstick in that name to back it up), a rooftop floproom in the name
of James Prufoy (also Rating (5) credstick), and the rest of his money
is on a certified 'stick under the name Charles Kuralt. The two
rating-5 sticks have 500Y on them, and the certified 'stick has 250Y.
He's currently got 47 nuyen in pocket money not attached to an ID.
I also bought a year's worth of DocWagon Platinum Service
(under the name Virgil Grissom), and an extra contact, Halley Nyugen,
who I imagine was an old FOAF from back in his Eco-Terrorist days. His
two other contacts are Harry Keegan, a member of the NAN-analogue of
the FBI/BIA, and an old Mr. Johnson from his eco-work, "Chris Jones"
(almost certainly not his real name).
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| Hm, interesting. Here's a quick peek behind the curtain of my brain; if you don't care about this, you can skip down to the part under the horizontal rule below.
The interesting thing about Teria, to me, is that when I started I had a clear image of the post-Imperium civilization, but the OPFOR wasn't terribly well defined, beyond the Roman-analogue idea of "barbarians". So when it came to creating the pantheons, I wanted something to distinguish the two. So while both pantheons start with a goddess mother figure, the Pynerian Circle is mostly male-dominated, and in fact several of the gods are ex-rulers of the Imperium. The Circle is very closely involved with the politics and tightly bound to the Imperium and the various offshoots, by virtue of being careful to co-opt any opposing gods and goddesses. Except the All-Mother, of course, since there really weren't very many Beastials in the service of the Imperium (they got all the plebes and slaves they needed from the human population).
So I created a strongly-matriarchal pantheon to oppose the patriarchal system of the Circle. Which immediately informed me about the political and social interactions of the population, because in my games, at least, what people believe is directly related to, well, what they believe.
So the Beastial Society is less of a monolithic opposition and more of a collection of tribal entities. We have a collection of groups, run mostly by old women, who sometimes cooperate but more often spend their time and energy avoiding each other. Beastials tend to be nomadic in nature, though there are some permanent settlements now that the Imperial Legions aren't marching to and fro and burning down everything they come across and slaughtering tribes willy-nilly. It's much more likely that a Bestial settlement will be inter-racial in nature, especially including Wild Men as members of a given tribe.
A "typical" Bestial Tribe will consist of between one and five family lines, all descended from a particular mother. While all of the old women in a tribe are part of the council, the Mother-of-All (not to be confused with the All-Mother) is technically the head, heart, and soul of the tribe. A tribe will send out their males to other tribes, and accept other males into their tribes, but daughters are usually not sent away.
Whether or not a family line is of the same race as the mother of the tribe seems to matter very little. Traditionally, the Tribes are led by Orcs, but sometimes Wild Men, Gnolls, or even Kobolds will lead a tribe, at least for a time. Given the radically different lifespans and breeding habits of some Beastials, the Tribe system seems to be a good way of marshaling strength and safety without imposing any sort of "class" structure.
The one major exception to the Tribal system is the goblinoid family structure. There's a goblin/hobgoblin/bugbear progression that's just begging to be turned into a Pak-style race (which come to think of it I did before, but what the hell). Goblinoids live in entirely homogeneous settlements. They also tend to live in towns and civis that are dark-mirror-images of Imperium-style settlements; think of the hobgoblins as Spartans, and you won't be far off. The goblin is the child-stage of development, an r-selection strategy child which matures quickly from a nest-style birth with several dozen broodmates in large broodpits, which are traditionally fed by slaves (and that "fed by" is in both senses). Once the young (usually around 18 months) are old enough to make their way out of the broodpit (averaging about 1 in 35 or so), they are adopted by an adult-stage goblinoid, a hobgoblin. Goblins are then trained and nurtured until the age of 9, when they enter the Lodges and go through puberty, which in the goblin's case can be seriously debilitating and extremely dangerous, as the essentially sexless goblins enter an environment where they are flooded with both hormones and pheromones. After four months, the survivors emerge into society as adult hobgoblins, and assume the responsibilities of an adult: as females, they go into politics, and males go into the Army. Eventually, the males die. Political "marriages" are common, usually with the males coming to join the female's settlement.
The females, if they live long enough, then go through another change, and become bugbears, who are sexless but fanatically devoted to their familial lines and instinctive hunters and warriors. It is exceptionally rare to see a Hobgoblin army in the field without their Warmothers, who are both brilliant tactical commanders as well as dangerous weapons on their own merits.
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