[OOC] Dawn Beyond Tomorrow: A Magitech distant postapocalyptic action-adventure RP

[Raineh Daze]

@Dark Cloud Hmm... I think the obvious thing to point out is that this doesn't appear to be a setting where magic is neatly compartmentalised into fields and categories; being an amateur at ''everything'' is a bit like saying your character knows how to do every job in the world.

[CitrusArms]

Hello, good evening, good morning. This sounds pretty interesting, lemme see about putting something together.

[VitaVitaAR]

@Searat: Alright, this looks pretty good. Just want to make sure, before I accept, that it's clear this setting is not much like Fallout, with the plentiful magic and magitech elements, the widespread forests and some quite advanced cities, and literal sky whales.

Since I can see there's some inspiration here, and just wanted to make sure you knew what it was going to be like before we got going so as to avoid any confusion.

With that in mind, accepted.

@Dark Cloud: @Raineh Daze covered it pretty well.

[AzureKnight]

Color me intrigued. I'll pump out a char sheet.

[Dark Cloud]

What about being able to use fire, earth, water and air magic? Like an elementalist.

[ERode]

Thinking of making a faction of Trailblazers, who make their income from mapping out the features and dangers within new high-traffic areas using spray paint and such. Probably a loose organization of dumbasses who get a thrill off being the first to reach a certain place, rather than actually grab and sell artifacts or whatever. Like a buncha 'I wuz here' punks.

[VitaVitaAR]

@Dark Cloud: That would be fine.

@ERode: This is a pretty interesting idea, I like it.

[CitrusArms]

Hmm... Freelance artifact hunter that uses remote control drones to do her hunting from a safe distance?

Edit: oh yeah, and have we any foxkin yet?

[Dead Cruiser]

@VitaVitaAR The only thing I wanted to mention is that I did not "shift" anything to my snake summon; both it and all the verbiage surrounding it was in the very first draft of my CS. It's fine if you don't want that character, just don't imply that I'm being dishonest when I'm not.

In any case here's a totally different character. I only ask that you read her CS all the way through before asking me to change anything, and be as specific and clear as possible.

Zera, Electromagus

Name: Zera Rallephoron

Age: 29

Gender: Female

Appearance: Zera is an experienced and professional young woman, tall and with strong, long limbs that give her a somewhat masculine silhouette. She has dusky skin, expressive brown eyes, and dark hair in tight ringlets, though she usually keeps her hair tied back while she works. Zera typically wears her magineer's uniform, a red and blue utility jumper, soiled with oil stains and other workplace hazards as it is. She has a tattoo of a dragon coiled around her right forearm, though it's usually covered by her uniform or engineering equipment.

Personality: Somewhat mercurial and unpredictable, Zera can flit through a variety of moods very quickly. While one moment she can be deadly serious and focused on her work, the next she can be bubbly as she excitedly chatters about her current project or research. She's extremely passionate about whatever she chooses to throw herself into, though that passion sometimes expresses itself as days of tireless work in a manic state without food or rest. Her other emotions are just as wild and sometimes explosive, as those who have gotten on her bad side have found out. Truly in love with her work, Zera loves machines and is deeply curious about engineering principles she is not yet familiar with. Though she usually sates this curiosity by disassembling anything she doesn't understand, most of the time she can also put it back together. Despite her mood swings, Zera is very intelligent and knows is one of the best in her field, adept at thinking on her feet and coming up with unorthodox solutions to difficult problems.

Brief Backstory: Zera was born to two loving parents in one of the largest and most advanced settlements in the new world. While she grew up fascinated with tales of adventure outside the city, of artifact hunters and strange monsters, her parents forbade her from leaving the safety of their settlement, and once she came of age she signed up for the city's engineering corps. Zera showed amazing promise, rising steadily through the ranks, and eventually her aptitude for magic granted her training and a position as a magineer, responsible for overseeing the magitech within their settlement's infrastructure. A vital part of what keeps modern-day life civil (for those that live in the cities), magineers ensure that elemental boilers, levitating platforms, and other magitech conveniences continue to function smoothly.

After years of work as a respected magineer, Zera once again began to crave the excitement and adventure that she fantasized about as a child. Years of working in the bowels of cities repairing water mains and flux-power generators had left her longing for the freedom she was sure existed outside the cities. While she merely ruminated on these desires, too set in her ways to act on them, a mysterious discovery in the deepest and oldest foundations of her settlement turned her life on its head. She found an artifact, seemingly discarded in a sub-sub-sub-sub basement, and took it for her own. Seeing this as a sign that she should pack up and start a new life of adventure, Zera submitted a leave of absence to the engineer corps, kissed her mom and dad goodbye, and set off to join up with a band of freelance artifact hunters.

Skills: Zera is a highly skilled and experienced magical engineer. She has comprehensive knowledge of a variety of forms of magical technology, though this surely only scratches the surface of all that exists in the world. While her specialty is civil engineering, particularly electrical engineering, her talents and knowledge are applicable to a variety of different situations, as Zera is adept at improvising and substituting as needed. While her survival skills are admittedly limited, she is a fast learner and is no stranger to uncomfortable or even dangerous situations.

Abilities: As a magineer, Zera is of course capable of using magic. Most of her magic has to do with generating, containing, absorbing, or redirecting electricity, as her engineering specialty was working with the power generators and regulators of her settlement. However she has quite a few other tricks she's picked up in her time, such as having some minor control over metal, heat and fire, sound and thunder, and some light telekinetic abilities.

Equipment: Zera's primary piece of equipment is her magineer's apparatus, a standard-issue device given to each magineer in the engineer corps in her home settlement. Over the years, Zera has customized her apparatus to better suit her needs, and has nicknamed the equipment, "Maverick," and emblazoned it as such. Maverick consists of a copper-alloy gauntlet, and various tubing that connects it to an electro-magical energy tank strapped across Zera's back. The apparatus gives her extremely fine control over her electrical magic, somewhere she can store excess magic energy, and a wellspring she can tap into it as needed. Zera carries a variety of other engineering tools as well, such as spanners, torches, and so on, some of which having been directly incorporated into Maverick.

The artifact Zera found is known as Chemister's Wand: Draconium, and she has yet to entirely figure it out. It resembles a forked staff inscribed with strange runes and gemstones, and as far as Zera can tell it has something to do with elemental magic, or the transmutation thereof. The only function Zera has managed to reliably activate allows Draconium to change one form of elemental magic into another, but its trasmutation only works on fire, ice, and electrical magic. Zera intuits that there are functions to this staff that she has not yet unlocked, but she has not had much time to work on it.

Faction: Though a bonded and unionized member of her home settlement's engineer corps, Zera isn't part of any formal adventuring or artifact hunting organizations.

[Bartimaeus]

Seeing as a Snake Beastfolk is no longer being pursued, I reckon it couldn't hurt to post my take since I made the sheet anyways ^^

...hiss.

Vesper Romilly

Name

Vesper "Briar-Eye" Romilly

Age

Twenty-One

Gender

Female

Appearance

Vesper's most marked feature at first glance would definitely be her short, carmine-colored hair, which almost always falls unkempt over the right side of her face. This, in combination with her usual tattered-denim and leather wardrobe, gives a bit of a punk/street-esque look to her. Her expressive, rosy eyes compliment her slightly darker hair, and make her neutral expressions seem softer than she'd like.

The girl's physique itself is clearly rather toned. She's more than okay with showing off her lean musculature - and the sleeveless shirts she wears make this easy. She stands at a decent 5'8", making her taller than most other girls, but even this doesn't betray the true strength of her figure.

Notably, she possesses an ornate tattoo on the uppermost part of her left arm, and a wicked, briar-like tattoo over her right eye.

Personality

Vesper is a little bit of a mixed bag. She's a very rough'n'tough-type gal, and makes sure everybody knows it. She doesn't hold her tongue, and has the strength of character to match her muscles. She's a bit of a troublemaker in that she doesn't particularly adhere to rules, having a sort of "rules are meant to be broken" viewpoint, and goes about things the way she personally wants to.

In the same hand though, she's not a malevolent individual. She can be abrasive and tease others, but she'll help those in need should they seem unable to help themselves. She's definitely not a goody two shoes, but she's capable of performing selfless acts, rarely.
If you tell anybody though she will break your spine.

Brief Backstory

Vesper comes from a substantial ancestral line of artifact hunters. On her father's side, a long line of hunters with their own personal goals. On her mother's - people dedicated to the benevolent Burial Agency. This history of artifact hunting made it pretty likely that the girl would be shepherded into a career as a hunter. But she definitely didn't mind.

Even from a young age the girl was intrigued by the idea of being an explorer and hunter of powerful artifacts. It was maybe a bit of an odd thing to want as a child, but adventure was in her blood. And it showed.
The girl caught on fast as she grew. The tales and various things her parents and grandparents told her of got her so excited she felt like she couldn't even wait to get going. Of course, she had to. But when she became old enough, there was no stopping her - she was almost a prodigy of sorts.

Her parents hardly even needed to help her step up into her place as the latest generation of Romilly-family Hunters - a family that wasn't too well known, but respectable enough in their accomplishments. The fact that their DNA gave them Beastfolk features was measurably helpful, even if some disliked them for it. Despite the discrimination they faced, the Romillys were never ones to shy away from conflict - and that same fighting spirit is what runs through Vesper.

She has been hunting artifacts as a solo hunter for a bit over two years now, and has so far made her family proud. But she wants more. She wants something bigger. And she will get it.

Skills

𝓢 - Martial Arts [Pugilism, MMA, BJJ]
𝓢 - Rural/Urban Traversal [Parkour, Spelunking, etc.]
𝓢 - Dope Motorcycle skills
𝓢 - Proving you don't need magical abilities
𝓢 - Spooky fangs

Abilities

𝓢 - Snake Physiology:

- Vesper possesses physiological features attributed to many types of snakes. Not only are her muscles particularly dense and very efficient at storing energy, providing her explosive strength, she is also surprisingly flexible.
- She boasts an enhanced sense of smell that is extremely sharp, and special enhancements to her biology allow her to detect extremely minute changes in the temperature of her surroundings.
- The inner structure of her skull has been altered by her mutated DNA, and allows her brain to sustain much higher levels of G-forces than a regular human.

Equipment

𝓢 - Vesper possesses an artifact by the name of |Endless Grasp: Voidelash|. This artifact isn't particularly powerful, but it does have measurable use. Not only is it fully prehensile in the hands of the user, it is also incapable of being severed, and can stretch to about 20 feet. It is also capable of storing physical (non-artifact) objects within itself, up to about a quarter of a ton in weight. Simply touching the whip allows one to summon items from it.
𝓢 - Vesper arms herself with a magitech-powered revolver that has both a lethal and an incapacitation mode. It can also fire flares and pitons, and probably other types of ammunition if it is tweaked a bit.
𝓢 - Vesper owns what would be a rather antiquated motorcycle that was passed down to her by her grandparents. It has, over the years, been upgraded and modified with more and more modern faculties, but there are a couple bits and bobs left from the more ancient years that one wouldn't notice if they were unfamiliar with the vehicle.

Faction

Independent

Edit: Blegh, decided I may not jump in afterall uwu

[Searat]

Noted, GM.
Will be moving Leo to characters

[ERode]

How powerful are PCs going to be at the start? Are we looking at being able to singlehandedly beat up house-sized monsters and such?

[CitrusArms]

I imagine power levels, as you might call them, will vary. Agency and power are a thing to balance against each other, as well. How likely is this character to upend things vs how strong are they.

[VitaVitaAR]

@Dead Cruiser: I'm going to be honest here.

I wanted to avoid causing further drama, but the concerns I've received were not only about your second character but about you as a player as well. Considering I received them from multiple other potential players who I will not be naming as that will only feed more drama, I have to keep this in mind as well.

After receiving these concerns, I am going to have to ask you politely to leave.

@Bartimaeus: While she mostly checks out, I'll point out not everyone needs an artifact. So if it's weak for an artifact it doesn't need to be one.

@ERode: Power level will vary a bit, but I'm intending for monsters of that caliber to be a significant threat that will take most of the party to take on to start with. Character progression will very much be a thing.

[Dead Cruiser]

@VitaVitaAR Figures. You know you could just ask me to bounce in a polite PM instead of carrying out this farce about "potential players."

[ERode]

Right, so Vita, what are the limits of a character's capabilities at the start? I'd like to have a relatively clear image of what's considered normal and what's considered impressive, especially because such qualities vary a lot from anime RP to anime RP.

Like, is the average PC artifact hunter capable of deflecting bullets with their sword? Can they run fast enough to outrace a car? If they take a knife into their gut, are they dead or do they shrug it off with a 'teehee'?

[VitaVitaAR]

@ERode: Your question is very valid.

Exactly what kind of damage characters can take is expected to vary, I suppose. Getting stabbed might not be an issue for our robot catgirl, but if you're human without some sort of healing magic it'll be a big deal.

Your average artifact hunter is generally a fairly skillful human. They maybe know magic, they may not. They're typically good at fighting or escaping from danger. For feats of superhuman capability... I'd expect some ability to dodge bullets, and definitely deal with bandits and your more standard creatures very effectively. Additionally, fighting some of the more "regular" named opponents should be plenty possible. But when it comes to more substantial threats I expect people to need to work together for now, until things start picking up in terms of character progression.

And we have some individual capabilities such as Rune's character who can demolish undead and deal with ghosts very effectively.

I feel like I'm not doing a very good job of explaining this, and unfortunately when I do get my bio up her complete lack of combat ability won't be able to give a good idea of what I'm expecting. But to put it in a little perspective, before putting this RP up I originally have a much stronger character in mind who could freely deflect a hail of bullets and clear bandit camps by herself, but I decided to split her plotline off as I concluded she was far too strong(and would steal the spotlight way too much) for the vision I had for the RP to begin with.

[ERode]

Gotcha, that's helpful enough.

[Raineh Daze]

Kitty's current status: running away from large monsters.

[AzureKnight]

@VitaVitaAR

Done

Ex Alhein Soldier

"From Dusk til Dawn, I'll never stop searching for what lies beyond the leaf~"

Name
Turel Valsyar

Age
28

Gender
Male

Appearance
Turel is a tall young man, standing at around 6'1''. He is fair skinned with slightly spiky white hair, and his eyes are of an almost crimson hue. While he's no bronze god, he has a shapely body sculpted from his combat training. A man who wants to enjoy life to the fullest, he is often seen with a smirk on his face.

Personality
Many would describe Turel as a reckless thrill seeker; someone blinded by whimsical fantasy who spends too much time chasing fairytales. However, his youthful vigor belies an intelligent man who's desire to learn lends him a deep appreciation for the mysteries surrounding the world. Perhaps due to his skill and experience, there is a quiet confidence in every endeavor he undergoes, overlaid by his seemingly brazen demeanor. Also as a tinkerer, he is a problem solver who approaches situations methodically and with conscientious actions.

Brief Backstory
Turel was born in the shining city of Albion, as such he naturally had heavy exposure to magitech and sorcerous academia. Having proven even in his developing years that he had a natural aptitude for magic, he was selected to be enlisted in the Alhein military force. After passing multiple training regimens and magical aptitude tests, he was soon cleared as an active officer and assigned to a commando unit. The unit specialized in surveying unexplored territories ravaged by The Cataclysm and searching for rare artifacts, and due to the valor he displayed Turel quickly made a name for himself: The Twilight Seeker.

While he felt pride in the work he and his unit accomplished, he couldn’t help but feel that something was missing in his life. As it seemed that the Alhein organization’s top brass were often praised for the efforts of the foot soldiers, Turel began to develop a sense of emptiness and began to question what he really wanted out of this life. In his time of service, he was also exposed to the mixed feelings other territories held for Alhein, which further sowed his doubt. Eventually, after six years of dutiful service he ultimately resigned his station and even left Albion behind him.

Since then, he has become a freelance artifact hunter. As opposed to selling his soul to a cause for someone else’s benefit, he has found meaning in the freedom of his new life. To sustain himself he also runs a magictech repair gig where he also sells device parts and basic blueprints.

Skills
Thanks to his military training, Turel has become quite the combatant. Adept with the two-sword style, he wields blades with terrifying precision. In addition, he is trained in a martial arts style that resembles Tae Kwon Do, Wing Chun, and Shaolin Kung Fu. He’s also quite the handyman, being very familiar with magitech gear and knowing how to fix devices with but a short glance.

Abilities
The name ‘Twilight Seeker’ isn’t just for face, Turel earned the name due to his sorcery. Perhaps due to the effect of the Cataclysm, he has the ability to utilize Twilight magic. It is a unique energy that has the properties of both light and shadow, usually manifesting itself with a deep vermillion hue. He can use this energy to obscure vision, shoot out projectiles, and cloak his weapons and fists in it for an added boost.

Equipment:

Yoake Mae

- A magitech weapon of Turel's own personal design, it is a double sided sword with a black handle and red underlying the bottom of the blades. The blade can be thrown like a boomerang and will always come back to the hands of the wielder unless otherwise inhibited. The handle and also be split, allowing the user to make use of a sword in each hand. The metal used to forge the swords can also easily channel energy, allowing the wielder to shoot out snd deflect projectiles.

Duffle Bag - A mid size bag that Turel always keeps on him. It houses his toolset along with some essential items and other knickknacks he’s collected in his travels.

Dog Tag - While he decided to ultimately leave the service, he still looks back fondly on memories of his comrades. It isn't a good idea to mess around with this trinket.