Hot dogs are already cooked. Might as well just sear them to add flavor.
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7 yrs ago
I love it when I catch up on my posting.
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7 yrs ago
If you take college seriously, it opens doors. Harvard and Hopkins makes it easier, but you can do well anywhere.
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7 yrs ago
Prefer to brainstorm on Discord for that reason.
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7 yrs ago
Windows 10 is very much like a German prison camp guard, "Ah, I see you are tryink to escape work fifteen minutes early, Herr Colonel Hogan, here ist an update zat vill stall you!"
Also am willing to shift from 'alternate Baltimore' to 'alternate New Orleans.' The city of Richelieu or New Marseilles or something else French.
Edit: I tend to feel the best settings come out of cities I am very familiar with. This is a very good excuse for me to travel to different cities, like LA, soon.
Post is up. I've put some suggestions as to what people could do when the main battle starts and set the scene a bit. Didn't want to move things along too far. Let me know if anything needs changing!
Makes sense. Putting the more disciplined legionnaires on sentry-kill/patrol duty. Not sure if the Luna Wolves quite qualify, but willing to go with that thought. Someone has to take out air transport though.
Just like the real '60s! Actually, I like the idea of setting things in a time before the Internet was so prevalent and everyone had a camera in their pocket. I'd be fine with going with a late '60s vibe: we'd have sirens front-manning psychedelic rock bands, vampires sleeping in flower power coffins, and plenty of hippies for everyone to eat.
Although I'd fight for the '80s because just think of how good all the hair would be.
I have no objections to the 1980's, because this plot really is a cheesy John Carpenter movie with a slap-dash of paint on it and the 80's are kind of fun. We can have ski patrol douchebag vampires named Slick driving Camaros.
Rugged, unshaven. He is never entirely clean and is invariably clad in jeans, leather and motor oil. Rusty's getting on a little bit, but he's no pushover even when he's not in a wolf-man form. Oh, he's also got some tattoos, notably of the mudflap chick on a bicep.
Talents:
Rusty's definitely a scrapper born. Beyond that, he is the Alpha. There's only one that people know of and he's it. It's a werewolf thing, but it basically means that in addition to turning into a wolf, or terrifying man-wolf (or having to during a full moon), Rusty can make other werewolves (note: see bottom) and is their natural leader. There are groups of werewolves and then there is an Alpha Pack, a truly heinous-from-the-legends assembly of fur and fang that is way more vicious than the typical 'lapdog' werewolf working for scraps from a vampire, or other, master. The downside? Allergy to silver. Rusty's more allergic than other werewolves. Rusty also has a legendary ability to do lots of drugs, in varying combinations, and somehow come out alright. He's also prone to sniffles in certain seasons, but swears its cocaine use rather than hay fever.
History:
Short version: After many centuries, an Alpha werewolf is born. Werewolves, essentially, are the legbreakers of the supernatural world, working for other people and those employers aren't particularly keen to have some sort of dangerous revolutionary werewolf leader creating labor relation problems. Lucklily for Rusty, he's drafted and sent to Vietnam. He bites a couple of buddies, who turn into werewolves and proceed to tear Viet Cong into pieces in frantic, bloodsoaked, moonlit battles in 1968. No one's the wiser until he's back in the States and already has a werewolf pack. Call it luck, arrested development, prophecy or Murphy's law.
Rusty was born in Southern California after the War. His mother, Ulrike, fell in love with Roy McKenzie, a quiet fellow that didn't talk too much about his war in the Pacific. Ulrike's family, a werewolf bloodline, did not approve, but did not precisely act against her violently for this since she had never panned out as a werewolf. They just cut her off. From his mother, he learned some of the werewolf lore, but it was always in small bits. There were stories, legends really, of when Werewolves were not just someone's water carrier, but were strong under the rules of their alphas. During puberty, relatives of hers would drop in, as well as, once, a gentleman with a European accent that made Rusty's hackles rise -- everyone else deferred to him, waited on the bastard hand and foot. Then, after he turned 17, they stopped coming around. The family left them alone after that, but his mother stopped telling stories, too. Except for that brief period of family visits, Rusty grew up on the wrong side of the tracks as a result. He had a spotty schooling but learned, from his father, how to repair engines and farm equipment as they scratched out a living on the outskirts. During the War, Roy took a job as a factory mechanic and managed to maintain it despite being a werewolf, though hard times and cutbacks came after the war once more. Rusty, as a teenager, spent a lot of time in the shop class learning vocational trade type work.
When he graduated, it was safe to say that the draft board was waiting on the stage at high school graduation right behind the principal; he was practically inducted into the military from the moment he was eligible. Rusty's dad was not much of a talker, but he told his son a few things about the ugly fights on the islands, the impenetrable jungle, the savagery. He shook him when he said, "Survive." He was pretty drunk; he'd always had an alcohol problem.
And so he found himself doing basic in San Diego. Afterward, during AIT at Camp San Onofre, he had a huge fever and convulsions; the medics were about to send him out for good when he snapped out of the trance and the coma. All the same, he was kept on sick call for a couple days. During those days, a full moon period, he underwent his first change, out in the Louisiana swamps, without guidance. He managed not to kill anyone, though he did mangle a mountain lion. When he came to, he realized that he needed to sneak back in, clean himself off and present to be accounted for. After that, the dreams started to give him more information; it was jarring to have 'wolf hunting 101' taught to you by dream, or a segment on, essentially, mating and other things. But it expanded his self-knowledge. But then, if this was happening, why did his mother insist on passing down the lore?
After training he was assigned to 3/5 Marines as an individual replacement and found himself in B Company, which was deployed into operations in Phu Loc province in November of 1967-January of 1968. As things started to brew up at Firebase Paul, the support grew thinner and the attacks picked up, there was talk of what went on during the full moon when corpses would show up, animal and man. He tried to remember what his mother had told him, cataloguing it. He arranged ways to make himself scarce during the full moons and drew attention for that from one of the NCO's, but he was otherwise not a troublemaker. As things started to brew up at Paul, and the support grew thinner and the attacks picked up. He kept his mouth shut and his head down, even as he fought as a normal infantryman, not trusting the things that he dreamed of at night, not sure of any of it. Was he going mad?
As Viet Cong attacks intensified and they found more and more fresh Chinese gear among the troops, indicating resupply and stockpiling for an offensive, the mood got bleak. The men started talking among themselves about how the REMFs were leaving them out to die in the mud, and Paul was going to turn into a slaughter. Some of the guys that'd been in other fights, like X-ray, stated their fears, especially as the attacks stepped up against Paul. The dream that came to him in exhausted sleep after day two of the siege was about 'how to make someone else into a werewolf.'
That was strange, but useful. He was watching his friends go down, the platoon get whittled for nothing. The instinct was, of course, to go ahead and get the hell out. He could do it, all too easily. During the night, as his position was being overun, he got cut off from his squad and turned; he killed at a ferocious pace, turning back the Vietnamese flank that was supposed to overrun that portion of the base. He had shot and killed before, he had hunted, but he had never engaged in such a slaughter...or been shot before. He could tell, based on the shreds of his uniform afterward, that he'd been shot quite a few times, but nothing showed from it.
When he managed to get back into safety, he was confronted by his squad leader; he confessed to it all. He also made an offer -- he knew he could make others like him, and they could survive. He was bloody around the mouth, wearing shredded jungle fatigues and wearing jungle boots that had their uppers split from their lowers. But it was all someone else's blood.
The night of Jan 28 and morning of Jan 29 was when the Vietnamese really came out in at least battalion strength, but they weren't prepared for opponents that raked with claws and tore with teeth and did not die when shot. They had no response for a thing that could leap on a DSHk position and rend the crew apart. Paul stood by the time relief arrived on the morning of the 3rd, and the survivors were evacuated. Whatever the official reports, there were two things that happened as a result of the battle at Paul; reports popped up of man-eating tigers and the PAVN didn't assault Paul ever again, even after 2nd Platoon B Company moved on to fight in the Battle of Hue, where the nighttime acts of the pack were hidden from replacement platoon leaders and other Marines alike, covered in the fire, smoke and hell of the fight in that city. In the meantime, Rusty served the rest of his tour with other survivors of the platoon as it dwindled and some started to go home. He watched as the replacements came in and out, while the survivors of Paul learned to conceal themselves and control the change.
When he finally got back to the world, his tour done, he stayed in California with some of the others, out of instinct. One of them had a brother in the Wild Hunt MC, a small motorcycle club. It had a heritage back to WWII, but lost a lot of members along the way. They were looking for new blood and were friendly toward veterans. He became a prospect, along with some of the others from 2nd platoon, and earned his membership the hard way. Soon the old leadership stepped aside for the Alpha -- that was natural. Other clubs started to stay away, as the Hunt got a spooky reputation for ferocity. Mess with them and they came back, again and again, relentless and ferocious.
Through the 1970's, the Wild Hunt was a nomad club, never able to set up too long in one place because the Courts were ever-keen to maintain the balance of power among its constituents. They viewed the Werewolf bikers as a danger to the Concealment Edict as well as to the Courts, in addition to selling a staggering amount of drugs. There were other reasons of course -- Werewolves were considered cheap labor and legbreakers for more influential types and Rusty and the Wild Hunt were definitely screwing that agenda up. A couple cities went rebel because the MC backed this or that faction fighting against a Count that tried to make the MC pay their taxes and bit off more than they could chew. That other courts would send in the troops to restore order was part of what gave inner cities such an awful reputation in the 1970's, and inspired certain movies about streetfighting gangs.
Nonetheless, by the 1980's, the wars fizzled out because sensible counts stopped trying to just jump on Rusty's guys as soon as they came through town. A couple of them started doing business, even, by simply folding taxes into what was being bought and sold, rather than telling Rusty up front that he had to pay, to which he'd essentially tell them to fuck off. Ever the canny son of a bitch, Rusty was fine with playing along. It got to the point where a couple towns, notably Camden, rolled out a bit of a red carpet for Rusty when he came through; thus did Caradoc de Lacy avoid having his city get pillaged by angry werewolves looking to start another revolution. Maybe Rusty got a little too comfortable, he was hanging around Caradoc's court when Nemsemet came. De Lacy made the Club a hell of an offer in return for assistance in fighting Nemsemet. Rusty took the deal, and barely got out of that with his skin intact. Caradoc didn't.
Psychological Profile:
Always something of a simmering cauldron of discontent, Rusty is argumentative and contrary. He does things his own ways and hates people's rules, procedures, processes, minutiae, red tape and, inevitably, bullshit. As the club president of the Wild Hunt and the Alpha wolf, he is used to marching to his own drummer and being in charge of his own destiny. Suffice it to say, Rusty is a team player when he feels like it, but he runs hot and cold. Brooding and remote, or gregarious and charming, and no one has any idea which Rusty is waking up that morning. He's much better at improvisation than planning. End of the day, he believes that his kind have to carve out their own place in society, not play lapdog the way wolves have since, well, the last Alpha was cut down at the end of the 13th century, an act that factionalized the Mongol Empire, who lacked the werewolf leadership that ran the show from the shadows. All fine and good, but Rusty never quite lived up to the billing of a werewolf Alpha, bringing fire and sword to the old social order. Too easily distracted.
He started out in a time when there was lots of drugs, free love and loud music. The three things Rusty loves most in life are drugs, free love and loud music, which means that he never quite seems to get the uprising going...because someone's always throwing a party with drugs, free love and loud music. A person doesn't even have to plot to poison Rusty, they just have to say, "Try this, it's a really bitchin trip, dude!" Suffice it to say, impulse control issues.
Possessions:
Leather, bike (still has glittery exhaust), and some quaaludes for his old friend and favorite customer.
Yes, and:
Rusty was essentially working as a mercenary for Count Caradoc de Lacy, who promised him a place to settle in New Camden with his club if he helped put down the old mummy. Rusty only had a couple of packmates, but signed on. Rusty, used to fighting other supernaturals, dealing with prancing vampires claiming lordship and aristocratic sorcerors claiming divine right to rule such and such a city, was all too happy to get into a scrap with some dusty old corpse essentially commanding everyone to kneel. Unfortunately, he drastically underestimated Nemsemet, things ended badly, and now Rusty is regretting that he ever got involved. The rest of the club is all over the place, and nowhere near New Camden. He now has first hand knowledge of what a horror Nemsemet is.
Note:
In this setting, Werewolves come in two varieties; created or bred. Bred werewolves are the random descendants with a dominant gene that have a created ancestor. Only alphas can make a created, which is to say, Rusty. There is quite the contention involved there because werewolves are often found working for other, more powerful and influential supernaturals and are low men on the Court totem pole. But an Alpha can change that; werewolves under the Alpha are meaner, tougher and often smarter than their counterparts schlubbing for Vlad or Lestat.
Also, OOCly, I intend to have Nemsemet curse away Rusty's ability to make new werewolves. That is intended to help create game balance.
Also, why "Streak?" Because Rusty has been known to ride past gatherings of church ladies in the total buff.
Location of Note: The Museum of Outsider Art Notable Person: Sarah Calvert Rabinowicz, known for her avant-garde approach to art and museum curating. Also self-taught exorcist (See below) A fact everyone knows about this place:
The place is sitting on a ley line. Ever seen a demon take form from the world's largest ball of bras? That happened once. The place is decorated like Graceland, as an homage to the schlocky, 1950's culture that New Camden considers 'authentic.' Aficionados love the coffee shop as, for some reason, the remains of the demon's presence infuse the beans, which are artisanally roasted on site.
@HeySeuss Would you be up for a certain half-angel who didn't so much fall as take a vacation and never check back in with the powers-that-be all so he could enjoy fine wine, perfect fashion, and safeguarding adorable supernatural kids?
I like this art enough that I was like, "That's gotta be Nemsemet."
Instructions
Post your character sheet here (so I can approve it) using the template provided below.
Please do not post anything else here, all questions and comments should go to the OOC tab.
The history doesn't have to be long, the psych profile doesn't have to be long. Just get the character up with about a small paragraph to cover the answers.
Name: Age: Gender: Breed/Species/Type/Lineage: (such as, but not limited to 'magician' 'faerie' 'vampire' 'half-something' and so forth. This is more or less 'what' your character is.)
Physical Description:
Picture or description, I am cool with either.
Talents:
Talents one has either naturally or through education or training of some sort.
History:
Explain how your character got there -- no 'the story will come out in RP' lines, please -- I want a feel for where your character is coming from. Feel free to work up names and places and so forth. Be sure to mention arrests or feuds and debts and the such from mortal and supernatural authorities.
Psychological Profile:
An idea of how the character thinks and so forth; should be linked to the history.
Possessions:
Mostly list the useful stuff, including any magically empowered items, spell foci and other odds and ends, including familiar animals.
Yes, and:
This is a character exercise for how our characters know each other and relate a bit. See the OOC thread for more details. You can put "TBD" here for now, but you need to read the sheets above and add to the story the first person starts. If you are the first person posting, you get to explain your character's relationship to Caradoc de Lacy or another member of the court through a specific event thaat befell your character.
Location of Note: A landmark in Camden, of significance to mortals and/or supernaturals. Notable Person: A person that is famous at the landmark. Probably supernatural. A fact everyone knows about this place: A fact about the place/person that relates to the supernaturals.
Modern Fantasy; the supernatural exists, but hides itself from the mundane realm.
Set in the fictional city of New Camden, Northeastern United States in 1985.
New Camden's magical community, including vampires, monsters and a variety of other things, are ruled by a Court, and its current head is the Count Caradoc de Lacy of New Camden, along with his Lord's Council of representatives of the largest communities within New Camden.
Lord's Council representation includes the undead, goblins, and shapeshifters, others to be determined.
Across the world, no one's particularly in love with the Courts; all supernaturals are taxed, but some find it easier to pay than others. The inequities of the system, which range from currency payment to service to the Lord or their designees, create tensions; some benefit, some suffer under the pecularities of the system.
All the leaders were wiped out by an ancient warlock, an evil that has taken over the city with an army of supporters; some summoned, others recruited from those who felt discontent with the status quo ante.
Now the mortals are the targets of a new order that wants to come out of the shadows and rule. And this new order has a seemingly invincible leader.
The characters, from a variety of different backgrounds as magic users/supernatural beings, are fighting against this, and probably against some mortals too.
If you like adapting fairy tales and mythology to modern day settings and helping with lore creation/setting building, this is an RP for you.
In Character Info
Like many cities across the US, New Camden, when established, soon attracted a supernatural population that followed the mortal one; feeding off them, living among them, concealing themselves from them. But they were always kept in check and in line by the Concealment Edict, which was enforced ruthlessly by an alliance of vampire elders, wizards and others that had survived the purges of the Inquisition. And it was the Concealment Edict that established courts within the cities to see to it that the supernatural population hid themselves. Some could move about in plain sight, others were essentially banished to the sewers or whatever other hole they could find.
This system also imposed an onerous degree of servitude upon the members of the community; they paid taxes up to this system in a variety of forms, either by paying money up to the Court or through indentured servitude. Some beings are able to put their talents to use and quickly accumulate wealth, which makes payment of the taxes easy. Others struggle in the modern world, forced to hide or otherwise unable to accumulate much in the way of wealth to pay the tithe.
Until only couple days ago, the system functioned. However, a New Camden Museum of History exhibit that included an ancient Egyptian mummy arrived in town. A young mage that was studying the exhibit attempted, unwisely, a spell on the artifact, and the mummy, unknown to mortals and the magic community alike, revived, fueled by that magical energy (and siphoning the rest of the life energy off that hapless young mage.) He claimed to be Nemsemet the Terrible, and demonstrated powers of the sort only heard about in legend...only, there is very little to be gleaned about Nemsemet without digging – his name seems to have been deliberately eradicated from the histories.
Nemsemet quickly eradicated the Count Caradoc and his advisors, those who stood with him anyway, and proclaimed himself ruler of the city – not simply ruler of the city's underworld of supernatural beings, but its ruler entirely. It would seem a pompous claim, except for the way the sorcerer quickly eradicated those that faced him in open combat; many on one and he was still standing and practically unscathed.
In any case, Nemsemet quickly proceeded to rally many of the city's various undead into his cause, to take over the city and rule its mortals directly, unsubtly. Others, besides the undead, have joined him for a variety of reasons. Those that do not join his, at least for now, shadowy war against mortal government and institutions are considered foes and the ancient tyrant's minions are purging those individuals.
It is, perhaps, a hopeless battle, but there are a few willing to do what they can.
Out of Character Info
The RP is essentially about a shadowy war in the city streets that can easily become a terrible out and out war as the supernatural elements of the city. The characters don't merely have to discover how they can kill Nemsemet, and that's a tall order in and of itself, but they have to make some very hard decisions about who to save and when and where to fight.
The characters may well have reasons to not lament Caradoc de Lacy, but if they're in this group, they're at least somewhat aligned with those that do not agree with Nemsemet. As he is a brutal tyrant that uses raw power to eradicate foes, it's entirely possible that your character's motivation is revenge. Your character may also be part of the courts of another city, investigating the very disturbing rumors and phenomena present in New Camden.
Characters can be a variety of different types of supernatural being, so I am encouraging a degree of creativity. Lycanthropes, vampires, other undead, a variety of faeries, spirits and generally 'supernatural' types of beings (including half-angels or half-demons; come to think of it half-a lot of stuff... :) ) These factions all exist and individuals within these factions may well have their reasons to rally against Nemsemet...or to. It works both ways. Where there is civilizations, there are protectors of the status quo who benefit, and people who want to overturn it, who stand to benefit.
honeysweetestco,
Simple Unicycle,
Izurich,
Pachamac,
Pyrrhic,
Atalanta,
Byrd Man,
Jamesyco,
Sanity43217,
Lord Shaxx
