Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Elendra
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Elendra

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Status: Recruiting! 0/12 slots filled.

Chapter 1: Introduction and Lore Archive.

It’s the Edwardian Era, the Hamburger Sandwich is a modern culinary invention, the Second Boer War has recently ended, and Archaeology is experiencing a rugged boost of attention from scouts, wildmen, and soldiers. However, with the unveiling and discovering of chambers long undisturbed, and ancient relics has unearthed dark secrets of what there was and is to come.

The Extraordinary Expedition is a RP about exploring the deep and the dark and the forgotten. Lovecraftian gods, strange animals, and temples. Undeath, and mythical and folkloric creatures. Warlocks and straight up tomb raiders. It’s a RP that is going to involve a lot of locales, a lot of fantasy and wonder, and a lot of pulp action.



Lore Archive: Your handy lil stop for information on things, for fluff and character creation purposes.







Chapter 2: Character Sheet.

Some Help

Name: Your character's name.
Age: Your character's age.
Sex: Your character's biological gender, typically male or female.
Appearance: Your character's appearance. A picture or description will do nicely. (Or a hybrid of both if you prefer.)
History Types: Defining moments or features of your character’s life and backstory. You choose one defining positive moment, and one defining negative moment.

Biography: Your character's history and personality. Two paragraphs required. Include how you came to be under the British Empire's employ. You are completely fine not being British, and this can even add interesting conflict! Just remember, they decided you were worth the money and force to make you work for them, and so note appropriately how they convinced you. That, or how the team itself convinced you. Feel free to work on this bit with other players.

Technical Information: This information is your character’s skill sets and inventory.


Career Path: Your character only has the time and resources to really devote themselves to one line of training to begin with. To start with you may pick from one of fifteen basic routes, which can evolve into specialities, cross-over into other fields, and more, as time progresses and your character’s skills grow. How you play your character will help determine how they shape out in what unique skills and items they accumulate, and what options you will be presented with later down the line. Essentially: Your actions will help dictate how your character grows in power and abilities.
















Specializations:
--
--

Inventory: Your character’s inventory. You may add as many miscellaneous items as you wish, within reason. There are some things added here already: You get to keep these unless they’re replaced by a different item based on your career path.







Signature: You agree to follow the rules, that the GM has final say on things. That some things will be random because of the background dice. That the GM has final say on if your character is killed or not.

Chapter 3: Class Specializations

Each class has five available specializations at start, only available to them. These take the form of either a skill, a bonus, an item, or a connection. You pick a combination of two specializations from the five. This may be any combination, or you may be required to take one of the five. They are listed in alphabetical order, and those that are both bold and underlined means you are required to take them.

















Chapter 4: The Mission Board








Chapter 5: Rules and Extras.

  1. The GM's word is law.
  2. Nobody is exempt from death. Not a plot NPC, antagonist, or player character. That's right; even you can die! Very quickly I might add!
  3. Make sure to denote in your history that you at some point began to work along with some other people of various levels of sanity and skill (the other PCs) in service to the British Crown after they somehow managed to convince you to work for them (probably with money and or threats). Denote in your history how they either bought you out or otherwise coerced you to work for them, even if it's only to a degree (like the Fixer).[*]I can and will add more rules in the future as they are needed, and reserve the right to do so without warning... Though I will try to at least make an OOC post mentioning it.
  4. Do not type “Ivan has Tuna” somewhere in your sheet to verify that you read the rules.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by ActRaiserTheReturned
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ActRaiserTheReturned

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Name: Colin Boothby
Age: 30 years old
Sex: Rooster (j/k) Male
Appearance:
History Types:
Secret Society
Colin Boothby was raised in a cult, called the Red Rose that was a mixture of the worship of both the Great Old Ones, old Pagan gods and Satan himself. Satan was seen as a benevolent deity, while the Great Old Ones were just given heed and worshiped for wealth, favor, etcetera. The Old Pagan gods were chosen for worship for numerous reasons. Colin Boothby didn't mind the existence of Pagan gods in his faith, but he found the Great Old Ones and the demonic worship and horrifying rituals repugnant and unacceptable. So Colin Boothby joined a similar group that split off from the cult, which is a deeply Occultic form of Gnostic Christianity. They believe that God is some sort of mixture of a Deist, kind of God, yet a God that sends messages and teaches willing listeners from somewhere out in the universe, or even somewhere outside the universe.
Colin Boothby's transition to the Pale Rose, the name of the other Cult, wasn't easy, but there's more on that in the next section. The Master of the Pale Rose, Lord Richard Denton, introduced Boothby to the Pale Rose some time after he was rescued from his family.

The Cult Family
The Boothbies were always respected on the island community which was nearby England in the British Islands. The eccentric, wealthy family were seen as a rare, almost non-existent link between the rich snobs of the early 19th century and the ordinary folk, even the impovershed. Boothbies have founded the local orphanage, as well as other such places, and charitable organizations throughout England. What the people of their island didn't know was that the Boothbies were "harvesting" children and women from these places and using them for sacrifices. Colin couldn't take it anymore once his sister was ritually murdered and he was next. He ran to the local Church and explained the situation. At first, the Priest, Father Kenneth Richardson, a distant cousin of the Boothby family just didn't believe it. He thought the boy had been through something traumatizing and wasn't making sense. As luck would have it, the Mayor's daughter, Emily, and a fatally wounded woman had also escaped her torturers and told the priest what Colin was just explaining.
Father Kenneth Richardson kept Colin protected from the Boothbies. He suggested they report the matter with the authorities. Emily's complaints to her father, the Mayor of the town, Dennis Stark, led the entire town towards the Boothby household and had them all put to death, vigilante style. Colin Boothby did not convert to Anglicanism because of his anger at God for letting his sister and innocent people suffer, but he agreed with the idea of a benevolent God, even if he didn't necessarily share the Christian theology that came with it.
Eventually he was asked to work for the British Crown, and met other people of various levels of mental stability. . . the odd warlock here and there, the archaeologist, and others. He didn't think it was that odd since he was somewhat of a magician himself, but since he was seen as an upstanding British citizen, he was offered a substantial sum of money for his services.

Specializations:
Fight Madness
Shadow Tome.


Weapons [+]
Ritual Dagger
Ritual Sword
1909 Colt 1911A. .45 cal Automatic Colt Pistol (ACP)

Armour [+]

Utility [+]
cocaine is a hell of a drug! (/just kidding)
Rations
Tea bags
cantine for water
metal pot

Signature
Yes. Elendra has final say on the destiny of my character.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Alphakoka
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Placeholder. I'll finish this after eating some tuna I got from Ivan.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Lukas Kelly
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Lukas Kelly

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See below
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Herzinth
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Herzinth

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Elendra said Force with Finesse: Sometimes time is of the essence, and you don’t have time to carefully pick and chisel and brush away an artefact. When you are in a rush and using or helping others use heavier tools to dig things out, you can reduce the damage done to the artefacts.


Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Alphakoka
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Herzinth said



That....is surprisingly fitting. o.o
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Corporal Lance
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Corporal Lance Devil Dog

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Name: Gregori Ostrovsky
Age: 43
Sex: Male
Appearance: Gregori is a colossal beast of a man, standing just shy of 6'9" and weighing just shy of 270lbs, quite the hefty fellow, although not all of it is muscle. His biceps are as thick as tree trunks with shoulders as wide as an automobile, but his gut has a bit of a barrel shape to it. His skin is healthily bronzed from the outdoors, with the clear tanline of an undershirt present on his massive chest and torso. Atop his veiny neck sits a thick square of a jaw holding up his round head. His hair is short and blond, slicked back with pomade by morning and soaked in sweat and falling over his forehead by dinner. His eyes twinkle a light blue, and his hair comb mustache is bushy and full, like straw. An obvious scar runs down the center of his face, tilted slightly to the left, a memento from when a ladder fell and struck him on a job site.
History Types:
Positive: Frontierman. Gregori survived his youth in the frozen, unforgiving lands of Mother Russia, doing what was necessary to get by and avoid a cold, hungry death. He continues to brave the elements with his work quite often, finding himself far from creature comforts.
Negative: Child Labourer. Gregori was never afforded the opportunity for an education, and instead had to work the fields or chop firewood or hunt and trap in his youth to ensure that his family could survive the winters or prepare for the next one.

Biography: Gregori Ostrosvky was born to a carpenter and homemaker, the second of five children, all boys, in the tiny town of Zarinsk in the not so tiny Russia. His family never had much money, just enough to get by, and more often than not they had to go without, eating a single bowl of oats meant for the donkey that day instead of porridge or having to wear clothes filled with holes. It wasn't easy to have four brothers to share it with, either. The Ostrovskys could ill afford to send a single one of them to school, let alone all of them, and Gregori found himself working in the fields in the planting and harvest seasons, chopping firewood before and after winter set in, and in the shoe factory all summer long. It wasn't a happy childhood, but Gregori played the hand he was dealt. He could not place the blame on his father or mother for his situation and instead accepted it as a normal part of life. When he came of age, Gregori was not so much sent off from home than he was kicked out, and he traveled north to Berdsk in order to find work.

For a big brute like Gregori, work was plentiful in the field of labor. He was quickly chosen over other options for his size alone, which gave him a steady flow of work. It wasn't always good or easy work, but it put food on the table. Most of the time. He managed to see every sight there was to see in Mother Russia working on their rails, but was stranded in Yekaterinburg, north of Kazakhstan when the work dried up. He spent another year there trying to pass as a carpenter, but with little luck. After that harsh year he decided to travel south to look for more work, when he ran into some British folk near the border. Out on some kind of travels or some such. Their Russian wasn't the greatest, but they were offering work and Gregori was no fool to turn down free money. He ended up working and traveling with the Brits for that job and the next one, ending up in the African Savannah, looking for some kind of bad juju thingamabob. Couple of wackjobs, but the pay was damn decent. And so it went like this for the next decade or so, bouncing between rich British and American explorers and entrepreneurs that needed a steady and reliable hand searching for things that bordered archaeological gold mine and insane obsession with the occult, bouncing from mutual contact to mutual contact. He picked up a good amount of English, becoming nearly fluent, but never really learned to read the whole language. He never really found time for a wife and family, traveling around his own country and in others far too often. Which is not to say that he never found the time for a good woman.

For the past couple years he's been a hot commodity on some of the more dangerous digs, because the experts knew who to look for when they needed a reliable and strong worker who knew what he was doing. Not asking questions or being frightened away by spooks has its rewards as well. As hard as it was to believe, some people could make mistakes on simple tasks like laying rail or building tower rigs, and Gregori could not only lay that rail, but stop the idiots from laying it wrong. With his more well-known points of reference, Gregori could guarantee himself a quick trip, some hard work, and some good pay.

Gregori is the simple, good-natured sort, always with a story and one who enjoys a good drink at the end of a hard day. He's not particularly smart (he can't read, after all), but years of experience have taught him various lessons in common sense that do much more for him than schooling ever could. He's gentle in nature and generally compliant, following orders readily and easily, but is an incredibly powerful person with his great size and strength and booming voice. He knows to keep his head down, shut his mouth, and to rarely question anything that won't get him killed or injured if he wants to be paid for his skills. Gregori prefers to avoid confrontation of any sort, and will go to lengths to avoid interpersonal fighting. He likes telling jokes and gets along with most folks, and people call him a "living moral compass" because he tends not to like anyone who happens to be a bit lax on their morals. He's quick to forgive and doesn't hold a grudge, but one should beware the grudge he does hold. Such a man is no more a man than an infirmary visit waiting to happen.

Technical Information


Career Path: Labourer
Specializations:
-- Machine Man. Gregori is very strong and efficient, outlasting many other workers half his age in both speed and duration.
-- Wayward Friend. Due to his jovial demeanor, Gregori easily makes friends with other no-collar workers.

Inventory:







Signature: I, Corporal Lance, agree to follow all applicable rules of this RP, and understand that the GM's word is law. I also understand that my character may be killed for any or no reason at any time it is deemed appropriate by the GM. In addition, I will not mention anything about certain people claiming ownership of certain breeds of fish.
Background is unfinished, lacking cities and personality paragraph. I'll finish it once my internet decides to stop having a seizure.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Herzinth
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Herzinth

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Personal Information


Name: Isabella Savu
Age: 43
Sex: Female
Appearance: Linked for huge (Art credit to Virginie Carquin)
History Types:
Positive: Harrowing Journey
Negative: Escaped Asylum
Biography: Born and raised in the recently independant kingdom of Romania, Isabella married young at the behest of her parents. A well off professor at the newly founded University of Bucharest, he was a decent fellow, and was willing to use his position to give Isabella access to the university's library.

It was one night at this library, while reading exploits of those on the frontiers of the New World, that Isabella thought she caught a glimpse of a silent and transparent visage in the library with her. It disappeared behind a shelf before Isabella could get a better look, leaving her confused. Over time, confusion turned to curiousity. Curiosity to hunger. Hunger to obsession.

She began gathering as much as she could on the occult and supernatural. The supposedly fictional and the urbanely mythical. The university library wasn't enough to satisfy her newfound craving. She began prowling small back alley bookstores, and taking extended trips out of the city to visit small towns and passing gypsie caravans.

It was in one of these small towns that Isabella got her hands upon an ancient manuscript. A true grimoire, now hers. Her new obsession had, of course, not gone unnoticed by her husband, and in the end she disclosed just what she had been hunting down. Within the week, she found herself held prisoner in an isolated asylum. She spent nearly ten years in there, surrounded by both the falsey interned and the truly insane, in nearly equal measure.

Until one night, the asylum found itself under assault. Not by man, but by ghouls. As everything fell to chaos, Isabella and a group of other patients managed to escape the asylum and trek across kilometers of infested wilderness, surviving due to Isabella's knowledge of their hunter's strengths and weaknesses.

While most of the escapees returned home, Isabella was convinced that doing so would put her in yet another asylum, if not jail. After all, the supposedly insane escaped from a slaughtered asylum doesn't paint an innocent picture. Along with the two remaining fellow women, she made for England. Only a few weeks after arrival, a representative of the British Crown came to her, and gave her a choice. Work for them, or be sent back home to Romania with as much incriminating evidence against her as they could muster. She chose the job.

Technical Information


Career Path: Occultist
Specializations:
-Shadow Tome
-Alien Tongues

Inventory:









Signature: I, Herzinth, agree that the existence of my character is temporary at best.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Zed
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Zed Known unto God

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Link to placeholder CS.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Jorick
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Jorick Magnificent Bastard

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Name: Florence Gauthier
Age: 23
Sex: Female
Appearance:

History Types:
Positive: Secret Organization: How you gained access to the organization is not so important than the fact that you did. Through it, you have more familiarity with the occult and the dark than you would otherwise.
Negative: Sickly Childhood: When you were far younger than you are now, you were constantly bedridden, and ill. You were unable to work your body in any way for very long, and for some time you were thought to die. You didn’t.

Biography: Florence was born into a moderately wealthy French family, which was rather lucky for her. She was rather sickly as a child, so much so that multiple times doctors said she would likely be dead soon, yet she lived on somehow. This bedridden life left her with only books and school work (provided by a private tutor, as her parents felt that she was incapable of withstanding the rigors of a traditional school) to keep her company, which in turn led to her having no friends and a very reclusive personality. By the time she was in her middle teen years and no longer fell sick every few months, the various illnesses had taken a very visible toll on her: she was rather thin, her hair had turned prematurely grey (though she liked to call it silver), she had lost some hearing in her left ear, the sclera of her left eye was permanently reddened (though luckily without any noticeable loss of vision), she heard strange voices (though she wisely kept quiet about this), and she had a variety of scars from falls and accidents related to her general physical weakness. Florence continued with her private tutoring until she was deemed ready for higher education at the age of sixteen (as her tutor said, all that time spent doing nothing other than reading paid off in the end), and her parents were rather happy to pay for it to get her out in the world for once in her life.

A couple years later, after Florence had taken up an interest in the occult, she was approached by a man who shared that same interest. A little while later (after they had started seeing each other romantically, though it didn't last long) she was invited to a gathering of like-minded people. They called themselves La Ligue des Mystères Occultes, though most often just La Ligue for the extra air of mystery. Many of the people present in the group seemed to think that Florence's sick childhood and subsequent physical changes were the result of occult forces trying to contact her. When she opened up about hearing voices telling her all sorts of strange things they saw their suspicions as being confirmed and suggested all sorts of things to deal with them, varying from ways to banish them to ways to make a pact with them. Though the concept of communicating with these mysterious voices both thrilled and frightened her, she chose to go ahead with it. She simply couldn't fathom living without the voices, so banishing them was not an option.

The others of La Ligue had wanted to aid her with her efforts to communicate with the voices, but she ended up doing it in private solitude. It took many days and many attempts, but as it turned out communication was possible and some of the dark forces were amenable to making a pact with her. Florence had used a variety of items and methods to try to make this contact, but in the end the object that seemed to draw their attention was a small piece of silver metal about the size of a ring that had been made in the form of a Moebius strip, which she had commissioned from a jeweler a year prior simply because she liked the design. She took to wearing the object on a silver chain necklace thereafter, partly because it felt to her like that was her link to the supernatural forces she now called her ally and partly because she had originally intended for it to be a piece of jewelry anyway.

When she was twenty, Florence set out to travel around the world and learn more of the occult. La Ligue was a great starting point, and a decent amount of what they said did not meet with contradictions from her new friends in her head, but even the most believing members couldn't begin to grasp the magnitude of the threat posed by the dire warnings of the Old Ones waking. To be fair, Flornce couldn't really grasp it herself either, but none of the others took it seriously and so she set out with two vague goals in mind: to learn more, and to stop the threat from coming to pass. The dark voices provided some guidance, but mostly she wandered around Europe visiting various libraries and book stores and talking to any occult-minded folks she could find. Eventually she made her way to England, where her interest in disturbing subjects was noted and reported to the proper authorities. The proper authorities approached her and offered money, information, and a chance to save the world from the occult dangers she feared (though they very easily could have learned about this being her goal and used it as leverage just to get her on board), to which she agreed and found herself working for the British Crown.

Technical Information


Career Path: Warlock

Specializations:
--Unholy Oath: You did it for the right reasons. It’s mutually beneficial. No one wants the Old Ones to wake. The voices are your friends.
--Shadow Nexus: More than voices speak to you. Lights, and touch swell in your mind. The voices call them friends, and when you open the door to them, you find yourself better at random actions according to their whims.

Inventory:





Signature: I, Jorick, hereby fully acknowledge and accept all rules, including but not limited to Elendra's authority, the authority of the hidden dice rolls, and the ultimate authority of death when it comes to claim Florence.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by The Imagination
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The Imagination

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Hm. Indeed. I plan on going for the professor journalist type, well educated and well determined for all of the answers. He will not settle for less than the entire full scope of what exactly is going on. He wants all of the answers. All of them.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Herzinth
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boop, cs basically done. Just want to think up a couple of misc items later.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Elendra
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Small BUT IMPORTANT update to rules and character sheet.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Jorick
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Jorick Magnificent Bastard

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Okay, biography added, my CS is done.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by ActRaiserTheReturned
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ActRaiserTheReturned

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Jorick said
Okay, biography added, my CS is done.


Hey Jorick. Want to argue IC like we did in the Spam forum? lol.
I'm the Occultist, you're a Warlock! Two arguing magicians.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Lukas Kelly
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Personal Information

Name: Samuel Gearheart
Age: 28
Sex: Male
Appearance: Tall and lean with a solid build. Blonde hair and stubble surround a youthful face, and his grey eyes suggest a lack of rest. He wears simple tan pants, shirt, and vest with his sleeves rolled up. Samuel also will generally wear a wide-brimmed hat, such as the one he's taking on this expedition,
History Types:
Former Soldier: Worked as a mercenary for the British South Africa company in the first and second Matabele wars. He became a scout for the Boers in the Second Boer war.
Self Destructive: His father and only parent died of Cholera at 17. Since then, his entire life has been a self-destructive streak. Anything that makes him feel alive with the possibility of death in a foreign locale holds strong attraction to him. Samuel lacks any sort of depression, but he has a marked lack of regard for his life.

Biography:
Samuel was born in America in [I can't find the current year]. His mother died in childbirth, so he never knew her and her death hasn't bothered him much since his early years. He grew up with his father on a ranch in Southern California. For years, they fought to keep the entirety of their land as a railroad sought to buy the southern half of the grazing land through any means available. His father died of cholera when he was 17 (as many of the Edwardian era were wont to do), leaving Samuel devastated.

He sold the entire ranch to the railroad company and moved into San Diego for a year to figure out what to do from there. Remembering stories of his father's military service and hearing of opportunities from two drunk would-be adventurers in the nearby cantina, traveled to Britian to join up with the British South Africa Company as a scout. Almost immediately, he was shipped off to South Africa to fight in the first, and then eventually the second Matabele wars.

When the second Boer war rolled around and he was called up to fight against what he saw as farmers protecting their land, he defected. Samuel had grown tired of the BSAC and figured it would be better to fight for the Boers this time around. He swore an oath to the South African Republic and for food and a weapon, scouted for the Boers. The war came to a close with a less than satisfactory end, so Samuel did his best to disappear. When looking for his next assignment, he came upon a listing for mercenaries needed for an expedition of sorts. He accepted the listing and brought another American volunteer and a Boer guerrilla, both of whom he had fought with.

Samuel is a man that's reserved at first, but very friendly once he has evaluated you. He's a little slow to trust a first impression, but then again how many mercenaries aren't? His superficially calm demeanor(expressions, speech, etc.) often leads to surprise when people find out how vivacious he is. He's a thrill seeker that's addicted to anything that makes him feel alive. He's done his fair share of drinking, fighting, and adventuring, but he hardly considers himself done. If something crazy needs to be done, Samuel is often the first to say "Fok dit" and jump straight in. He gives off no signs of depression, but his reckless abandoned has often been called self-destructive. It's hard to tell if he's looking to die, or seeking death for the ultimate fight. Nevertheless, there's rarely a dull moment around him.

Technical Information

Career Path: Captain
Specializations:
--Close Quarters Combat
--Fine Ass Gun: Standard Rifle

Inventory:








Signature: I agree to follow the rules and accept any fate given to me
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Corporal Lance
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Corporal Lance Devil Dog

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Okay, I think I'm good. CS completed. Luckily enough, Gregori's backstory already included how he began working for the Brits.

EDIT: Going to go ahead and throw up votes for Lost Cities and Revolutions, The Frozen Continent, and Lost Pyramids of Egypt.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Lukas Kelly
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Lost Cities, Lost Pyramids, Tomb of the Emperor, and Frozen Continent
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Jorick
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Jorick Magnificent Bastard

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Although I've already told Elendra this elsewhere, my top pick is The Frozen Continent and my second choice is Tome of the Jade Emperor.
Hidden 11 yrs ago Post by Herzinth
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Herzinth

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Mission votes:

Main vote: Lost Woods and Werewolves
Secondary vote: New World Men, Old World Problems
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