Tag: fantasy

This hasn’t been a very productive week by any means. I didn’t manage to do any actual work on any actual project – instead, I seem to have spent most of it inventing NPCs for my Mage: the Ascension game. Which I guess needed doing at some point, but still, my inspiration remains fickle and unreliable.

All that said, here’s what I’ve come up with for the Traditions in the San Francisco area:

• Cassie Moran – aging rock goddess and Cultist of Ecstasy. She uses her precognition and clairvoyance to play the entire underground music scene like an instrument, trying to build it up to a force for enlightenment, rebellion, and all-around grooviness. Anything she does is probably motivated by its sixth-level consequences.
• Jonathan White Eagle – life coach to the wealthy and Dreamspeaker. Is gruff and set in his ways, all the more so since he worries that his attempts to make rich people connect to their spiritual side is diluting his own ancestral ways. He’s the last Dreamspeaker in the area, and looking to take on an apprentice.
• Jeremy Linton – geeky pencil-neck and Virtual Adept. He messes around with nano-machine clouds and is enthusiastic about the idea of turning the Earth into “computronium” that will rearrange itself to the will of any human. Well, any human who’s good with computers, at least, but who cares about those other meat-headed jocks?
• Rosa “Rush” Martinez – tough biker chick and Virtual Adept. A “neo-nomad” who thinks that permanent residence is just something The Man has invented to keep track of you better. Part of a cabal with Jeremy and Ranjit, and tends to handle the rough stuff for them.
• Ranjit Morrow – a self-proclaimed “Doctor of Mesmerism” and Son of Ether. Practices hypnotic suggestion to manipulate “archetypes of the collective unconscious” and draw forth “unresolved defense mechanisms from failed stages of development.” Likes to stroke his beard wisely at people and puff his pipe. Tends to hang out with Jeremy and Rosa and handle all that nasty “people skills” stuff for them.
• Rowan Flynn – a “warrior bard,” a Cultist of Ecstasy who would probably have been happier as a Verbena. An erstwhile apprentice of Cassie’s, but seems to be having some conflict with her now. She can heal people through harp music, incense, and touches, or work herself into a berserker frenzy where she can feel no pain. Has some anger management issues.
• Aloysius Crane – a masochist and piercing enthusiast and Cultist of Ecastasy. Looks absolutely terrifying but is extremely soft-spoken and mild-mannered if you get to talking with him. He considers submission to pain to be the path to true enlightenment. He mostly backs up Cassie in whatever she does.

And for the worthy opposition in the Technocracy, without names as of yet but called by the names the Traditions give them:

• “The Nice Doctor”, NWO: A middle-aged man with long, wild-grown grey hair, usually wearing shabby clothes, cracked glasses, and untied sneakers. Despite looking like a crazy hobo, he’s a frequent visitor of city hall where he “consults” on details of policy being written, and a popular guest lecturer at USF within a surprising number of social sciences. His go-to apparatus is an innocent-looking device about the size and shape of a pen, which can emit high-frequency sonic waves that renders people instantly pliable to hypnotic suggestion. People who threaten to rock the boat in a serious way might be meet him, and the person who walks away from such meetings frequently has very different views than the person who came to it.
• “The Woman in Grey”, NWO: a prim, plain woman in her forties, always dressed in a grey business suit and with her hair in a bun. She is most commonly seen taking part in investigations of major crimes and threats to national security, with the other detectives and agents involved being under the impression that she’s from one of any number of alphabet-soup agencies, or possibly one that’s too secret to even have a name. Either way, her cases tend to get solved promptly and without her taking credit, but almost always in some way that demonstrates the reliability of public investigators and the absolute need to keep giving them any and all powers they ask for. If you have done something illegal in your life – anything – then she most likely doesn’t care, but she absolutely knows about it, and has a meticulously prepared dossier to present you with should she ever need to apply some pressure.
• “The Blank”, NWO: the Traditionalists are only mostly sure that this is a single person, and only because a number of people who seemed to have very different physical appearances have been noted as having suspiciously similar magical Resonances. Either way, the Blank kills people who the Technocracy regards as irredeemably disruptive to the Consensus; Marauders, Nephandi, terrorists, serial killers, the occasional non-human supernatural. When no one needs to be bumped off, the Blank is believed to be managing security at the San Francisco construct, but hell knows.
• “Ol’ Henry”, Void Engineer: not technically part of the NWO amalgam made up of the Nice Doctor, the Woman in Grey, and the Blank, but sort of loosely attached to it, Henry is a Void Engineer who’s been grounded for extreme uncooperativeness and set to track down and dispose of the hobgoblins, rogue spirits, or sundry creepy-crawlies that San Francisco has more than its share of. He looks like a scruffy man in a faded jumpsuit, with a pair of high-tech bracelets with a tremendous array of built-in weapons. The Paradox building up from his use of vulgar Effects (the Umbra is so much more forgiving of such things, and he’s too stubborn to change his ways) has caused him to develop some peculiarities, like nictitating membranes and odd subdermal tumours that sometimes seems to move across his body. He has been known to grudgingly team up with Traditionalists to take down his prey; he has no particular love for Reality Deviants, but then, he seems to have no particular love for anyone or anything.

• “Mr. Slick”, Syndicate: young, trendy, confident, and oilier than a can of anchovies. He firmly believes that what people want, really want, is the coolest and most expensive toys, and he’s got the personal collection of overdesigned bleeding-edge gadgets to prove it. He is also heavily into youth outreach, trying to mold the next generation into proper go-getters by showing them the benefits of a completely materialistic lifestyle; this has led him to both sponsor the Trinity Burning gang and to take promising young students from underprivileged backgrounds under his wing.

• “Numbercrunch”, Syndicate: a strange, autistic teenage girl who rarely ventures out of her den of a thousand monitors beneath the construct. When she does go out for a field investigation, she wears a hood and headphones to prevent sensory overload. Her Empowering came when she read “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and then spent the next forty-eight hours writing a new edition with another forty-two habits. She goes through media output and statistical data and predicting the future over the entire area, making the Syndicate amalgam very hard to take by surprise.
• “The Slav”, supposedly Syndicate but actually Nephandus: a surly, hirsute Russian who looks more like a janitor than the master of middle management that he is. He does consulting work for a number of R&D divisions, where he snarls at engineers until their output skyrockets. He also heads up the a reclusive team that produces experimental weapons for field testing. Unknown to his colleagues, the Slav is actually in league with Pentex, who supplies him with Bane-powered fetishes that slowly corrupt the mages who use them. In his youth, he was a fervent believer in the American Dream and the promises of capitalism, having been raised on horror stories of his grandparents’ time in the Soviet Union. However, he Fell upon realising just how amoral the Syndicate truly was and now works to make capitalism every bit as bad as its worst critics claim it is; a human race that can turn any and every economic system into a nightmare, he believes, deserves to suffer.