Feng Shui: Xun Taizhi

Archetype: Killer
Home Juncture: 1996

Melodramatic Hook: Revenge on No-Moon Dragon for her father's murder.

Attributes:
Bod 5
Chi 2
Mnd 5 (Per 6)
Ref 8

Skills: Deceit +4 (9), Driving +3 (11), Guns +7 (15), Info/Gangland Politics +4 (9), Intrusion +2 (10)

Schticks: Carnival of Carnage x2, Hair-Trigger Neck Hairs, Lightning Reload, Signature Weapon

Weapons: Xun Qiangchao's Norinco Type M1911 (signature weapon), Beretta Model 950BS Jet Fire, Heckler & Koch MP5 K, Franchi SPAS-12, K2

Wealth Level: rich

Story: The gangland thug-prince-wannabe known as "No-Moon Dragon" achieved his position - independant of triads or tongs, but allowed to go unmolested regardless, and indeed approached on an equal level by both - by virtue of his two lieutenants. The first, "White Snake's Tooth", was considered one of the greatest killers not only in Hong Kong but in all of Asia. The only assassin widely recognised as being better than White Snake's Tooth was the second lieutenant, "One Hundred and Eight Man", or Xun Qiangchao to those who knew better. With them serving him, No-Moon Dragon needed only to give the order, and any one of his foes would be dead. It was a good life for a gangland tyrant.

Over the years, however, No-Moon Dragon started to worry. Xun Qiangchao had custody of a daughter from a broken relationship, and as the girl grew the feared One Hundred and Eight Man was starting to soften, and to consider a retirement from the dangerous and immoral lifestyle he led. If No-Moon Dragon's prime killer were to leave the business, he might share any number of unpleasant secrets, and No-Moon Dragon would have no reliable avenue of reprisal. For the first and only time, No-Moon Dragon made a deal with an enemy gang, so that both of them could remove an irritant in their ranks. He ordered the One Hundred and Eight Man to track down an enemy hatchetman, who was hiding out in a Wanchai strip-club. The place was, unbeknownst to either combatant, rigged with explosives. Neither man survived.

White Snake's Tooth, as Xun Qiangchao's brother-in-arms, managed to take custody of his daughter Taizhi. The girl had been only thirteen at the time of her father's death, and the tragedy broke her heart; as White Snake's Tooth had considered his fellow assassin a genuine blood brother, he was also shattered, and the new, small family bonded in the face of their mutual loss. White Snake's Tooth knew, however, that No-Moon Dragon was unlikely to consider the deal done, and all safe; the kingpin was lapsing into paranoia, and both White Snake's Tooth and Xun Taizhi were endangered. Any overt move by White Snake's Tooth would be fatal, and so he turned back to his business with will and obedience - but silently and on the side, he began to quietly teach Xun Taizhi her father's skills.

That was 1992. It is now four years later. Xun Taizhi is seventeen and every inch as dangerous as her late father. White Snake's Tooth has died, of an extremely suspicious poisoned dish of char siu. His last letter to his adopted daughter has given her access to all of her father's accounts and resources, and the last gift he could give her; her father's automatic pistol, his most reliable sidearm. Xun Taizhi is now the only thing between No-Moon Dragon and the fulfilment of his paranoiac elimination fantasies. Just as he does not expect, though, Xun Taizhi has her mind set on some elimination of her own...

* * *

I am not a gun fetishist, but the very little bit of me that wouldn't mind being a gun fetishist gets its brain part tickled pink by the guns section of the Feng Shui rulebook. There's any number of ways to customise one's pet murderer. I'd decided to go with mostly Chinese guns for this character, to fit her origins, but despite the wide range offered in the Feng Shui rulebook, there are only a few actual Chinese guns there. However, the signature weapon her father left her is definitely a Chinese gun; wouldn't have it any other way. (Due to it being a signature weapon, Xun does the same damage she'd do with a shotgun with that pistol, and she can't lose it unless it's part of the plot.) The Beretta's much more concealable, which was important for all of her guns. The K2 is about as concealable as a rifle can get, after all; it also comes from South Korea and takes out unnamed characters easily, which fits with her Carnival of Carnage. (More on that later.) As for the Franchi SPAS-12? That's not concealable at all. It just looks incredibly nasty and you can shoot people with it. Also, if she later gets the Both Guns Blazing schtick, it has a pistol grip that will allow her to use it akimbo with any of her other weapons. (Except the rifle, of course.)

See? I know nothing about guns and I just blathered on about them for more than 200 words!

The only things that won't be too clear about Xun up there are her schticks. Signature Weapon gives her one particular gun (although it can be a sword) that's important to her; it does extra damage and can't be lost or destroyed outside of deeply important plot events. Naturally, that's her father's prized sidearm, which she plans to dramatically fire into her nemesis's head. Lightning Reload lets her reload her guns faster; for the autoloaders, the Norinco and the Beretta, that means she never has to spend time on reloading - she's considered to be reloading while she shoots, essentially. Hair-Trigger Neck Hairs gives her a shot to use her enhanced Perception to tell when she's about to be put in danger, and gives her an Initiative bonus if she reacts to said danger by immediately pulling a gun and firing. Carnival of Carnage, quite apart from having the best name of all gun schticks, also shortens the time it takes to put down an unnamed character. Normal attacks take three 'shots'; with her two Carnival of Carnage schticks, Xun can attack an unnamed character in a single shot. With the K2's bonus against unnamed characters, Xun can do the 'badass hero enters enemy fortress, not even breaking stride as she picks off every single mook in her way' walk quite easily.

Everyone in Feng Shui needs a melodramatic hook. Xun's is pretty easily explained, I think.

Dark Heresy: Quintos High-Eagle

WS: 28
BS: 32
S: 31
T: 33
Ag: 32
Int: 29
Per: 26
WP: 30
Fel: 32

Wounds: 15
Fate Points: 2

Career Path: Guardsman
Rank: Conscript

Home World: Imperial World
Planet of Birth: Paradise Planet

Imperial Divination: "Be a boon to your brothers and a bane to your enemies."

Height: 180 cm
Weight: 100 kg
Age: 29
Skin: Dark
Hair: Dyed blond
Eyes: Blue
Quirk: Duelling scar

Traits: Blessed Ignorance, Hagiography, Liturgical Familiarity, Superior Origins
Skills: Speak Language (Low Gothic) (Int), Drive (Ground Vehicle) (Ag), Awareness (Per), Swim (S)
Talents: Melee Weapon Training (Primitive), Pistol Training (Las), Basic Weapons Training (Las), Basic Weapons Training (SP), Sound Constitution x2

Gear: Sword, las pistol with 1 charge pack, lasgun and 1 charge pack, shotgun and 12 shells, knife, guard flak armour, uniform (Common quality clothing), 1 week corpse starch rations, Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer, 77 throne gelt.

Story: As a young nobleman on the paradise planet of Risius, Quintos never really fit in. His family were desperate for him to accept the precepts of noblesse oblige, to have dignity and respect, to walk slowly and smile often, to appreciate fine things, to patronise the arts and take a superficial interest in his people. Quintos did none of these things - instead, he ran the streets hell-for-leather, drinking, whoring, carousing, and always fighting. Quintos's life was one of binges on all kinds of substances, anonymous orgies, riots, gang battles, mayhem, and duelling in the streets - which led to the signature scars over his face. While certainly his best-remembered stunt was challenging a visiting Space Wolf librarian to a drinking contest (the librarian later shaking his head and saying that honestly, the boy had done surprisingly well), it was his sleeping with an Inquisitor's bodyguard who thus ended up missing the trip off-planet that brought him low. His family, desperate for options, disowned Quintos and sent him packing into the Planetary Defence Regiment that Risius contributed to the Imperial Guard.

This was by way of a revelation to Quintos, who felt he truly began to blossom with a lasgun as he never had with a bloodline. The discipline of the Guard sunk in as the discipline of his family never had, and he wasn't just allowed to blow things up, it was openly expected of him. The money his family had provided was very little missed, as one could still get all the booze one needed from trading with other Guards. Quintos thought he'd lucked into Heaven.

That was until an Inquisitorial appointment showed him that life could get all the better.

When the Planetary Defence Regiment went out in their swarms to repel an Eldar invasion (they claiming that Risius was one of their maiden worlds to be protected by the Eldar people, and the Imperium responding with the ancient law of finders-keepers), Quintos acquitted himself with honour, shooting down two Aspect Warriors and pulling a wounded comrade into cover while taking fire from their bizarre shuriken cannon. Perhaps it was destiny, far more likely it was luck, but the Ordo Xenos Inquisitor who'd been assigned to assist the resistance noticed. He came to find Quintos and his superior with an offer: to come serve the Emperor more directly, while having exactly the same expectations of shooting but with more freedom. It's very little surprise that the man said "yes".

* * *

Almost completely a 'rolled' character. Where did I do other than rolling? ...Well, the career path, for one thing. I got 'Scum', where (then) average Fellowship and poor Willpower would have let me down. So I picked 'Guardsman', to bring that lovely Ballistic Skill, Strength, and Toughness into play. I rerolled his age - the original had him in his 40s, which didn't fit the character concept I was developing.

(As a side-note, when I added the bonuses for his Superior Origins trait and his Divination, Quintos would have made a fine Scum. But likely a better Guardsman, so I regret nothing.)

I do find it fascinating that you can generate a character in Dark Heresy purely through rolling, with almost no pauses for breath. Even his name (his first name, anyway) came from a table. With the stats in order, the evolution of a hulking exiled nobleman with more explosions than sense came quickly into being, as if it had been there all along.

...Halfway through I realised that I could work in the Eldar, and that made me happy. It made sense that the Imperium would never manage to get a paradise planet of their own without it really belonging to the Eldar.

Cartomancer: MOTRAN Fixbot 127-Space-AATX-1601-4T6H

Campaign Setting: Fantastic (Hand Rank 7)

Knowledge: 5 (Experienced)
Strength: 5 (Olympian)
Finesse: 5 (Agile)
Psyche: 1 (Naive)

Willpower: 6
Endurance: 10
Health Levels: 15

Virtues: Ambidextrous, Courageous, Internal Compass, Patient, Photographic Memory
Vices: Unattractive Appearance

Skills: Repair 3, Repair: Spacecraft 3, Navigation 1, Navigation: Space 2, Firearms 2, Engineering 3, Mechanics 3, Mechanics: Repair 3, Intimidation 1, Computer 3, Computer: Repair 1

Extraordinary Abilities: Body Armour Level 1, Flight Level 1, Night Vision

Equipment: Inbuilt laser gun, repair tools, communicator, MOTRAN robotics programming

Story: When it comes to robotics, there's really no company that does it better than MOTRAN - company name in all-caps for the aesthetic value. While some screamed about the danger of a robot uprising when the 125 models came out with "limited independance protocols" that allowed them to act without direct instruction in crises, only one case of a 125 model endangering humans ever came to pass, and it turned out the humans were saboteurs, and the worst any of them got was a bad burn on his leg. With the increased safety of the 126 and 127 models, no vehicle worth its insurance costs would dream of going out without a MOTRAN fixbot. 127-Space-AATX-1601-4T6H (1601 for short; it's easier than AATX to say as a single word) was one of three fixbots on the luxury liner Red Hook, which came across the bad side of a Cthulhoid star-spawn and has now crashed on the planet Danforth. 1601's limited independance protocols have informed it that repairing the spaceship itself is impossible; its task, therefore, is to protect and obey the surviving passengers, and try to build a craft that can take them offworld!

Description: A boxy, four-legged robot with a one-eyed horse-styled 'head', and a package of tools and manipulator arms in a blister on its back. The laser gun is, strictly speaking, a surprisingly long-ranged spot-welder, but there have been many, many ships whose captains have used their MOTRAN fixbots to help shoot down space pirates...

* * *

Mostly pretty easily described, this one. I decided I wanted to make a robot.

Yes, there are a few redundant skills in the Skills area. Honestly, single-purpose robots don't get much chance to diversify, skill-wise, but it's also a flaw of the system.

Bliss Stage: Catherine Streicher

Template: Eager Young Soldier
Age: 14

Trauma: 0
Bliss: 14

Relationships
Nick Carlson (fellow pilot): Intimacy 4, Trust 1
Emma Danforth (anchor): Intimacy 3, Trust 2
Maria Campbell (authority figure): Intimacy 2, Trust 4
William Steed (stepbrother): Intimacy 2, Trust 2
Jason Campbell (Maria's son): Intimacy 2, Trust 1
Calvin Welbern (nurse-of-sorts): Intimacy 1, Trust 4
Everyone else: Intimacy 1, Trust 2

* * *

And that's all you get. Seriously.

You're not even meant to get that. All those relationships? I had to make up those characters myself. You're meant to do that as a group. Even the pilots, really. That Trauma and Bliss total? You're not even meant to think about those until the game starts. (Bliss, by the way, is a bad thing. Get to 108 Bliss - 108 being a very important number - and you're out. Dead, permanently asleep, insane, joined the aliens, or in some other way out of play. Best case scenario: your pilot replaces the authority figure of the group, and you replace the GM. Yes, you can do that.)

It's all pretty cut-and-dried up there, isn't it? Intimacy relates to the intensity of a relationship, Trust to its endurance. You level up your Intimacy by becoming closer to the other person, you level up your Trust by not taking advantage of them. As you might have guessed, sometimes one kind of damages the other, as we can see with Catherine's relationship with Nick. Intimacy 5 is reserved for blood relatives or sexual partners (the game makes a point that if you have sex with your blood relatives, it still tops out at 5; you don't get Bonus Incest Points), so at 4 they're obviously deep inside one another's skin. Indeed, qualifying factors include kissing, sexual touching, and seeing one another naked; if you're currently thinking back to that "Age: 14" line and covering your ears while saying "la la la I can't hear you", there's also options for "exchange blood" and "physically fight for real".

If Nick and Catherine are in some proto-sexual relationship, which seems likely, it's balanced out by the fact that they obviously don't like each other that much. At Trust 1, one or both of them obviously thinks the other one will dissolve the relationship - or do something to deserve the dissolution of the relationship - at the drop of a hat. And that would be bad, because if that relationship breaks, Intimacy 4 means they both get 12 Bliss, and Bliss - again - is not a good thing.

Normally you'd want particularly high Intimacy with your anchor - Mission Control, who guides her pilot through the dream world. But that low Trust was a killer. Possibly literally. If your relationship with your Anchor breaks while you're on a mission, one of you is almost certainly going to die. So I gave Catherine Emma, at lower Intimacy but less likely to EXPLODE.

The Eager Young Soldier template allows the character to add 1 to either Intimacy or Trust with the authority figure. I picked safety (Trust) over power (Intimacy) because 1) no one wants their pilot to Bliss out after the first mission action, and 2) frankly the demonstration is probably squicky enough as it is. Catherine's high Trust with Maria and Calvin gives her two solid relationships that she can rely on in battle. From a tactical perspective, she should probably start shagging one or both of them.

Yes, you just read about a fourteen-year-old who is either having sex or soon to have sex with another fourteen-year-old who she doesn't actually like and who gains tactical benefits thereby. WELCOME TO BLISS STAGE. Is the Evangelion influence clear yet?

Ars Magica: Imad, the Fat Moor

Male grog, 28
Origin: Ribatu I-Fath, Morocco
Vocation: cook

Characteristics: Intelligence: +2 (wary); Perception: +1 (focused); Strength: +2 (bulky); Stamina: 0; Presence: +1 (looming); Communication: -1 (curmudgeonly); Dexterity: +3 (nimble-fingered); Quickness: -2 (lumbering)

Virtues and Flaws: Social Class: Standard Grog; Weather Sense; Well-Traveled; Obese; Soft-Hearted

Abilities: Folk Ken 2 (townsfolk); Concentration 2 (cooking); Awareness 1 (corner of the eye); Brawling 2 (knife); Bargain 2 (food); Survival 1 (desert); Chirurgeon 1 (amputation); Craft 5 (cooking); Speak Spanish 4 (specific food vocabulary); Speak Arabic 5 (local Moroccan dialect); Weather Sense 1 (storms)

Reputation 0

Personality: curmudgeonly +2; generous +2; wanderlust -1; romantic -2; stormchaser -3

Quirk: clothes always filthy, hands always clean

Personal History: Imad was once an apprentice cook on a trading vessel that sailed between the Arab countries and Spanish ports. When a storm sank the ship (as the captain's desperate efforts to get into port before the storm, while failed, brought them close enough for most on board to survive), Imad decided that sailing the seas wasn't for him any more. Honestly does have a surname, but since no one he meets seems able to pronounce it, he has reluctantly accepted "the Fat Moor" as a descriptor. It's accurate, anyway.

Appearance: Imad is a tall, corpulent Arabic man, with lustrous skin, deep brown eyes, and a prize-winning soup-strainer of a moustache. He has short, very glossy black hair, that seems to behave itself pretty well no mater what Imad ends up going through. His face is rather slender for his size, though the extent to which Imad shaves his beard only goes to prove that he has neither chin nor neck; his head essentially rests perfectly on his shoulders, and his face is dominated by his wide nose (when teased about this, Imad boasts that he can tell the difference between several hundred different kinds of herbs purely by scent, which the most patrician European would find it hard to manage - and then he gives the person who teased him half the normal serve of dinner). He tends to dress in white almost exclusively, which makes both his massive size and the filthy state his clothes tend to end up in very, very apparent.

Confidence: 3

Size: +1
Body levels: Unhurt, Hurt, Hurt, Light Wounds, Medium Wounds, Heavy Wounds, Incapacitated
Fatigue levels: Fresh, Winded, Weary, Tired, Dazed, Unconscious

Equipment: apron, cleaver, cooking pot and implements, waterskin, flavouring herbs, single bottle of Moroccan wine
Encumbrance: +2

Combat Scores: Initiative +3, Attack +7, Defence +2, Damage +5, Soak +1, Fatigue +4

* * *

Couple of things that can be said about Imad here.

He's a "grog", not a "companion" or a "mage", simply because grogs - as the low-rankers of the covenant, who would mostly stay at home - seemed a lot simpler and easier to make than either of the other two. Magi would require, you know, magic. That said, I came to really like Imad. In a hypothetical gaming situation, I'd probably play him far too often, either slowing things down if he was simultaneous with my mage and/or companion, or making the rest of the group angry if he was alone (because instead of a valiant knight or magical apocalypse, they'd ended up with a curmudgeonly cook who's scared of storms).

The bits in brackets after his Characteristics and Abilities are specialisations: they have no effect but character-building on his characteristics, but if he behaves within his specialisation on one of his abilities, he gets a bonus to his roll. So he can still bind your wounds if necessary with that low Chirurgeon skill, but he gets a bit better at it if he has to cut off your thumb. Which is doubtless not much consolation, considering, thumb.

His Personality scores also have no in-game effect but character-building. When it's a positive, he is like that. When it's a negative, he is not like that.

While I have no point of reference, those combat scores actually look pretty good! Mostly it's because you add Encumberance, which is a good positive score for Imad. He's unarmoured and has a reasonably high Strength. I mean, if he was carrying the cooking pot into battle, maybe we'd be talking about a different kettle of fish (literally! hah!), but I presume that a +2 intelligence makes you smart enough to put the big pot of wrought iron down before beginning combat.

His size is +1 because he's Obese. Most humans are 0. He can take more damage before he goes down - see how he's got two body levels that both say Hurt? one of them's because he's a beefy bloke - but he takes -1 to moving quickly or gracefully, and -3 to all fatigue rolls. Really, he should stay at home and make dinner for the covenant, so that he doesn't slow Her Highness the Mage down. But if demons invade the covenant, oh man, Imad is so going to hit them with his cleaver.

Yes he was on a trading ship between Spain and Morocco in 1220 or so. Even if there was a Crusade on at the time, someone's still going to pay for smuggled silks or whatever.

Hi There, Friends!

I just needed the webspace to put up a bunch of character sheets for a post I'm making. Don't mind me.