Mister Vampire OOC

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Tue Oct 01, 2013 1:20 pm

Omegonthesane wrote:The notes of Dr Steve Morituri

I laughed, and then I was sad that I had gotten the joke.

echo

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Tue Oct 01, 2013 1:21 pm

Okay, this is getting weird. I hit the submit button ONCE!

echo

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed Oct 02, 2013 12:22 am

It remains hilarious that Echo is so prone to double-posts.

@Whipstitch: People have worn much bulkier things than a pair of metal plates haphazardly strapped to a poncho into battle historically speaking, so having two of them would work out.

I've looked over the crunch on Omegon's guy but can't find anyplace it messed up, but I'm kind of new to all this myself so someone else might want to take a look at it.

Maxus hasn't posted in the thread for nearly a week so I think he's out, which means we're just waiting on Prak to begin.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Wed Oct 02, 2013 2:23 am

I didn't fine tooth comb everything, but at a glance it does look like people have shorted themselves a few skill points--J-Rock in particular looks like he did everything right and then simply forgot to tack on his 6 discretionary points at the end.

Also, I had a couple more skill points than I was supposed to, presumably because of herp and/or derp. I'll fix that and probably swap my highest priority from physical to social skills--I mean, ffs, he has Nimble Feet, Clinging AND Devastation, so shaving off a couple points there will hardly be enough to stop him from pulling off some serious parkour bullshit.

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Wed Oct 02, 2013 2:31 am

Whipstitch wrote:I didn't fine tooth comb everything, but at a glance it does look like people have shorted themselves a few skill points--J-Rock in particular looks like he did everything right and then simply forgot to tack on his 6 discretionary points at the end.

ffffffffffffffffffffffffff will fix this tomorrow.

echo

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Thu Oct 03, 2013 2:08 am

I tweaked my sheet so the skills add up properly and are more in line with how I revised his backgrounds. I also ditched Experimenter and the associated allergy because we're rolling out without any vampires or Gift of Blood.

Oh, and his Master Passion is Greed now. In retrospect, I'm not sure why it was ever anything else given the dude is literally a reincarnated claim jumper who decided to join the white collar witch mafia.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Oct 05, 2013 2:20 pm

So, still waiting on Prak, I guess. Seriously, what's up? It's been a week and a half, does it take that long to make a character?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Oct 05, 2013 5:17 pm

Sorry, been a bit busy with class, I'll get it made today.

Edit: Question-- How would Progress of Glass interact with pools of water? How would it interact with "mirrors" made using Water Prison? What happens if you make a "mirror" using Water Prison, store something, and then let the water prison mirror go back to being normal water, or water vapor?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Oct 05, 2013 9:28 pm

I've got attributes, skills and powers figured, but I have to leave for work soon. I'd hoped to get it done before that, but my time got hijacked. She'll get finished after I get off at 10.

Character History

Harley was born in the midwest, where there is fuck all to do but screw, listen to shitty music, and party. So that's what she did. After seven years of going nowhere in community college, a friend half-jokingly suggested she start selling ecstasy, and after a bit of consideration and research, that's what she did.
She actually did fairly brisk business using the sensibilities of her culinary arts training and providing a pure product. It also helped that she figured out a way to put it in cookies and candy along with ways to combat common side effects (basically just encouraging hydration and such).
Eventually she earned enough to move out westward to LA, where she figured she'd find an even larger opportunity for sales, and started branching out into other party drugs.
The Church of Set noticed her, and her facility for sales, corruption and drug production, and, rather than killing her, decided to bring her aboard.
Eventually they decided to promote her, by way of telling her they only way to stay in the group and not dead in the desert was to fuck herself for the group's amusement. They set up a show night, and provided her with a "special" toy--the "defanged" tendril of a triffid, which, while she performed, implanted her with the seed which became her dryad seed.

Since that, her role has enlarged, from just producing and selling drugs to being a general fixer, someone known to be able to get the strangest stuff in the strangest places.

Character Sheet

Harley
Dryad
World Crime League
Cult of Set


		Attributes
Physical	2+1	Social	4	Mental	5+2
Strength	2	Willpower	2	Intuition	5
Agility	3	Charisma	4	Logic	4

Edge	3	Potency	1	Power	13


	Skills
Physical 24+3	Social 14+4	Technical 19+1
Athletics 1	Animal Ken 5*	Artisan 2 (Baking)
Combat 3	Empathy 4	Electronics 2 (Hacking)
Drive 8* (Bad Weather)	Expression 3	Medicine 6 (Pharmaceuticals)
Larceny 5 (Concealing Goods)	Persuasion 6 (Sales)	Operations 6 (Piloting)
Perception 10*	_	Research 3 (Datamining)
Stealth 3	_	Rigging 1 (Gears)
Survival 7* (Gathering)	_	_
* includes bonuses from powers/sorceries
+4 Expression/Artisan with plant matter
+4 to argue against proposals, facts and courses of action


Backgrounds
Drug Culture	6
Club Scene	6
Faerie Circles	3
Blackmarket	5
Cybercrime	4
Gamer	3
Church of Set	3
Culinary Arts	4
Evil Plant Lore	1


Resources
Contacts	3 (A people smuggler)
Languages	2 (Spanish and Japanese)
Secrets	2 (A hideout in the Dreamland)
Assets	1 (A group of hackers and minor street criminals who will at least show up with guns)
Destiny	3 (A Faerie Circle Location)
Finances	2 (the drug business is good)


Obligations
Enemies	3 (the cops)
Stalker	2 (a Mulder-esque conspiracy theorist who noticed her disappearing from an alleyway one night)

Powers

Core Discipline- Coil of Thorns
- Bitter Fruit
- Grass Rope
Basic Dryad Powers
- Aura Perception (Disc)
- Rising Mists (CtS)
- Enchanted Slumber (VoM)
- Pain Drops (ToT)
Advanced Dryad Powers
- Puppetry (CoT)
- Telepathy (Disc)
Personal Basic Powers
- Distant Reflection (PoG))
- Tongue of Beasts (CotW)
Personal Advanced Powers
- Water Prison (ToT)
- Mirror Pocket (PoG)

Motivations

Master Passion Greed
Driving Passion Learning
Ethics Hacker Ethics
Ideology "Gentleman" Criminal and Individualist
- Honors Stylish crime, Victimless crimes, Non-violent crime, Loyalty to the group, Sharing Information, Hedonism
- Despises Rape, Cold-blooded murder, Violent confrontation, Telling people/being told what to do, Authority, Orthodoxy


Advantages	Disadvantages
-	Aimless
Experimentor	Prideful
Attractive	Red Taped

Backgrounds

Harley has spent the last few years making a living by making and selling drugs, so she has the Drug Culture background, which allows her to make and identify drugs and establish sales. She often does this in night clubs and raves, which she crawls virtually all night, so she has the Club Scene (party scene?) background, allowing her to find, get into, and move through virtually any party she cares to. After her initiation into the Church of Set, she started branching out and moving more contraband and black and grey market goods, giving her the Blackmarket background, using Maya to do so no small amount, giving her the Faerie Circles background. More and more, people are wanting her to flex her skills in the realm of data and information, to get them information that's hidden on some server somewhere, which she has eagerly taken to and blossomed doing, giving her Cyber Crime as a background. Her networking with other cyber criminals has led to a lot of socializing with them, which often takes the form of MMO raids and FPS Deathmatches over LAN or Internet, giving her the Gamer background. Her time in culinary school and use of the skills learned there in drug making gives her the Culinary Arts background. Her time working for the Church of Set gives her the Church of Set background.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Oct 05, 2013 9:40 pm

Prak_Anima wrote:Question-- How would Progress of Glass interact with pools of water?

Although I cannot remember exactly where, I am nearly certain I remember it being mentioned that pools of water count as reflections for getting in and out of Limbo. So for Distant Reflection and Deny the Gauntlet, water does count. For Mirror Pocket, though, it's less clear, so I'm ruling that if the reflective surface that connects to your mirror pocket is destroyed you have to spend the two power points to make an additional pocket to get to your stuff. As related to Water Prison: If the water evaporates, that counts as "destroyed" and you have to remake the pocket. If you just put the water in a bottle like you're Katara, it's not destroyed because water is inherently fluid in the first place and that's good enough for the arbitrary magic spooky supernatural stuff runs on. That said, Water Prison is typically going to be a pretty energy-inefficient way to do it, because just pouring the water into a bowl works just as well. Water-based mirror pockets are actually a pretty cool concept.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Oct 05, 2013 9:55 pm

Good point on the bottles and bowls.

I realized that what my character really wanted to be was a fixer.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sat Oct 05, 2013 11:47 pm

Two people with Tears should help monkey wrench attempts to pick on the witch/transhuman's traditional weakness. Mostly I plan on using my water bending to make things I can stab fools with.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 12:30 am

So, something I hadn't realized until I started doing some research: LA is fucking huge.

The state of California has 38,000,000 humans, which means that there's at least 38000 supernaturals in all of California. Probably more, since it is also a relatively wealthy part of the world. An estimate of the city-by-city distribution looks kinda like this:
15000 in the Wilderness
10000 in LA
2000 in San Diego
2000 in San Francisco
1000 in Sacramento
500 in Fresno
7500 everywhere else

Note that's 10 thousand supernaturals in the LA area. So another first-order estimation would put each of the major players (Pack, White Lotus, King, Lestrand) as having about 1500 supernatural creatures loyal to them and then have 2500 unaffiliated creatures sort of hanging around. A second-order estimation looks like:


Name	Vamps	Weres	Witches	Levs	Trans	Animates	Undead	Fey	Demons	Total
Pack	250	425	250	250	250	250	250	50	25	2000
Lotus	75	100	1000	100	100	100	10	10	5	1500
Lestrad	1000	100	100	100	100	100	100	50	50	1700
King	50	50	50	50	150	50	50	350	200	1000
"Unaffiliated"	300	400	300	700	400	700	500	300	200	3800
Total	1675	775	1800	1300	1000	1200	660	730	480	10000

Unaffiliated includes: Mister Vampire, the Silmores (who are like 50 people right now, even if they have a unusually high concentration of Elders), anyone in the WCL but not White Lotus, All the non-Pack Communes, all the Covenant who aren't working with Lestrad all the Makhzen, any Murdaks around and, of course, the people who are actually unaffiliated.

That is a lot.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 5:30 am

The sheer area of LA is pretty nutty too

i added a pic of some banderas looking asshole to my concept post as a character portrait. Also, either I drank too much or you've got some extra attribute points grek--fairly sure it's the latter 'cuz I skim that kinda thing by remembering the fact that media res characters can't get over 10 points in any single stat pair without having Strength points from clout

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 5:43 am

It's entirely possible I fucked up the math somewhere. Let me go check.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 6:13 am

So, I'm always somewhat lost on Backgrounds. Here's what I've got so far.

Drug Culture 6, Club Scene 6, Blackmarket 6, Faerie Circles 3, Cyber Crime 4, Gamer 4

Harley has spent the last few years making a living by making and selling drugs, so she has the Drug Culture background, which allows her to make and identify drugs and establish sales. She often does this in night clubs and raves, which she crawls virtually all night, so she has the Club Scene (party scene?) background, allowing her to find, get into, and move through virtually any party she cares to. After her initiation into the Church of Set, she started branching out and moving more contraband and black and grey market goods, giving her the Blackmarket background, using Maya to do so no small amount, giving her the Faerie Circles background. More and more, people are wanting her to flex her skills in the realm of data and information, to get them information that's hidden on some server somewhere, which she has eagerly taken to and blossomed doing, giving her Cyber Crime as a background. Her networking with other cyber criminals has led to a lot of socializing with them, which often takes the form of MMO raids and FPS Deathmatches over LAN or Internet, giving her the Gamer background.

Hows that so far?

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 6:28 am

Yep. I totally did fuck up the attributes. And the skills. I'm pretty sure I somehow moved points from one to the other while I was dithering on whether to get Clout or not. It's fixed now.

RE: Prak. Seems plausible. Other things that seem like they might make the list are: Church of Set, Culinary Arts Training, Midwest Culture, College Life and Evil Plant Lore.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 6:32 am

Cool, thanks for the other ideas. I was thinking about CoS, but wasn't sure. Hadn't thought about the culinary arts.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 8:17 am

Harley the Dryad is complete. Finally.

Backgrounds and Ideologies need some more exposition in the book...

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 9:43 am

@Grek: About 1/10,000 people are supernaturals of some kind. Which means your estimates are about ten times as big as they should be. Other than that (and the implication that even with only fifty dudes, Silmoore still probably warrants his own row on the table of where dudes are) it's about accurate, though worth noting that the King With Three Shadows has like ten thousand demons and fairies hanging out on the other side of the mirror (people who can see Shallow Limbo will not-infrequently see them around), which gives him very nearly infinite mirror goblins and means the limiter on how many asura and trolls he can bring through is mostly his ability to get all the weird materials and obscure texts required to prepare the mirrors for it.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 11:28 am

Chamomile wrote:@Grek: About 1/10,000 people are supernaturals of some kind. Which means your estimates are about ten times as big as they should be.

I based my numbers on the San Francisco by Night writeup. The reasoning goes that since San Francisco has 2000 supernaturals, then LA, with around five times the population, would have about five times that number. But I totally get if you think that is way too many, because I personally think Frank went crazy with how many vampires are supposed to live in San Francisco.

the implication that even with only fifty dudes, Silmoore still probably warrants his own row on the table of where dudes are

Since Silmoore's faction has a small enough number of people that it would be reasonable to list them all by name type and mailing address in a single forum post, using demographics to guess at what the distribution of supernatural types would be really dumb. I agree that it is a row that should exist, but it is not one that I could fill in.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 3:15 pm

Keep in mind that the San Fran writeup seems to focus on the entire Bay Area, and that Frank thinks people with magical powers and connections to secret societies and shit tend to congregate where the wealth, power, and feeding grounds are--there's exceptions of course, but virtually by definition you're talking about hermits and people who want to be big fish in small ponds, so they don't impact the census much. So it's a stretch, but I do think you could make an argument for L.A. and the Bay Area clocking in with around 10,000+ supernaturals between the two of them, but that's with the explicit understanding that vampires often don't live in Utah or Iran* if they can help it, so there's no way that there's like another 20,000+ supernaturals out in the boonies.

*Fun Fact:L.A. has around 800,000 former Iranian nationals living there due to fallout from the '79 Revolution, leading to some areas being nicknamed Tehrangeles. So something like 20% of the people in Beverly Hills are of Persian descent and that probably has something to do with why Frank made an offhand comment about L.A. being one of the Makhzen's NA power centers.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 5:30 pm

Yeah, the 1/10,000 is the average from the section on supernatural politics. It's also mentioned that wealthier areas will have a greater density of supernaturals and impoverished areas will have less, so Canada's supernatural population is way higher than you'd expect from simple demographics, and India's is way lower. For the sake of simplicity I decided that LA's unstable political climate drives exactly as many supernaturals away as its wealth and power attracts.

EDIT: Oh, also, now that we have a full set of characters, it's probably time to get stuff organized and figure out how people know each other and stuff.

J-Rock is an android not directly affiliated with any supernatural organizations, but he's still got contacts with the LAPD and has had run-ins with the Ulmi before.

Adel is a Mi-Go who's got an antagonistic but not immediately hostile relationship with the Hashshashin and has been taken in/drafted by Martinez and the Covenant proper, which in turn means that to Lestrand he is both a potential pawn he can likely convince the Covenant to loan to him and a dagger pointed at his heart in case the Covenant decides they don't want to put up with him anymore.

Marco is the reincarnation of Joaquin Murrieta's sidekick and politely declined the offer to join the Guardians' doomed last stand, and shacked up with the Ulmi instead. It has been suggested but not confirmed that Marco is one of Adel's underworld contacts.

Andrus is a Nezumi with the Cauchemar Communes. No affiliations with the others have been suggested yet.

Likewise, Harley is affiliated with the Church of Set and hasn't had any affiliations suggested, however as a drug pusher she could reasonably be connected with both J-Rock as another underworld contact or Marco, who represents the Ulmi interest in the drug market.

Any of these characters could reasonably just be incidental friends with one another, as the tensions between factions aren't great enough that you'd be exiled for hanging out with the other guys (yet). I have a couple of ideas as to how to assemble the team as it is, but if you guys want to figure out pre-existing relationships that would be neat.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 6:26 pm

J-Rock might know Harley from when he was still on the force. They were on opposite sides then, but Harley knows how it goes, they were both doing their jobs, so wouldn't harbor any real hard feelings (though she might bring it up in jest).

Through the party scene, she might have run into the Mi-Go showman, especially if he has any habits himself, or even if he just has assistants or hands who do.

Harley and Marco knowing each other from the drug market, and possibly even having worked together makes sense.

She might know Andrus from having run into him when she was learning Progress of Glass.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Sun Oct 06, 2013 7:32 pm

I'd stress that Marco is the very definition of a punch clock villain in many ways. He doesn't respect human authority and he can be a selfish bastard, but ultimately he isn't particularly "deviant" and his powers aren't even contingent on hurting anyone. Meanwhile, his Cult's business involves making a tidy profit by way of reducing the bureaucratic friction other supernaturals face in their daily lives--in short, he and the Ulmians understand that the path to power often involves becoming indispensable to the community. So I could easily envision him and J-Rock having a ritualized working relationship--Marco's good at following money trails and thinks it's cute that J-Rock still thinks like a cop even though there is no way in hell that illusion can survive for very long. I can easily imagine half-hearted debates concerning the relative virtues of snitches and pigs over cups of coffee and thick envelopes of financial records.

As far as Harley is concerned, Marco's a bit of a traditionalist in some ways, but he'd be very interested in pushing her towards a "higher class" of client and maybe even developing a performance enhancing drug of some kind--you know, something along the lines of magic Adderall.