sup/tg/ - Articles

You know that guy who buys knives off the internet, shows off his katana and tells you how he hopes someone is going to try jumping him in a bad part of town so he can cut him up? Those are Heroes. They're basically your general wannabe-vigilante, so mal-adjusted they can't even hold down a job or a social life(except chatting with other Heroes about leads). Most of them have never even fought a mugger, much less a flesh-hungry ghoul.

PC Heroes, on the other hand, are actually the crazies who have saved some people while dressed up as Batman(really, it suggests vigilante costumes) and have somehow tumbled to the fact that there are supernatural threats to people out there as well. Some are genuinely crazy, some are desperate, most mean well, but some end up being the sort of people who cut off a purse-snatcher's finger with a bolt cutter and mail them to his family.

They also get some degree of supernatural power, either a magical familiar(cat, dog or horse), a high-tech device(that normal science says should just do nothing, or maybe explode), have occult training(wizard Batman!), got an inheritance meaning they can start off buying anti-tank missiles, have superpowers for another reason,

Shattered Person posted:

Shattered Person- Once the PC, or someone the PC was near, had an intense experience, one in which he or she felt both pain, pleasure, fear, hatred and joy all at the same time. Most likely the experience involved sex. Somehow the strength of this experience ‘broke reality,’ making the laws of physics go haywire in the surrounding area. Anyone nearby was killed and the PC survived only through extreme luck. Thereafter the PC found that his or her body warped the laws of physics around it.

have an enchanted SOUL MATE or some other such crazy shenanigans.

You get the dealy-o. These powers are made with a vaguely BESM-y "cobble shit together and fluff it as you please"-method, and as we have yet to actually know shit about the system beyond our stats and hit points, we can't really tell whether any of this rocks or sucks. Props for suggesting high-tech or secret-government-tech devices powered by MOON ROCKS, though, that's the sort of old-style comic book hilarity I approve of.

The Lost

Basically they can teleport. But only while drunk. Or possibly stoned out of their gourd. And they discover this power by getting crunk as all Christ, not giving two-shits and accidentally teleporting all over the place until a fellow Lost who's learned to control his abilities a bit tells them what the deal is.

quote:

At adventure one, the Lost has been experimenting with his or her powers for months and is starting to get a handle on what he or she can and can’t do. The Lost has wandered through a lot of interesting places and has even passed very briefly through a place that seemed unearthly: an eerie deserted city, a giant concrete space of unknown purpose, a space filled with endless bizarre machinery, a dark canyon filled with naked marching people, a place with a featureless black floor and sky, or a place that seemed like something from a children’s book.

Honestly? They seem kind of neat. They also learn how to bring friends along. This makes them kind of a great cornerstone for a party, especially as it suggests that these friends often come along to help them investigate the weird places they find.

This would be a great setup for the entire party just being a group of buddies checking out some cool shit, accidentally Lost'ing their way into Area 51 or extradimensional spaces, etc. etc.

This... this doesn't completely suck shit! They also learn to travel without being drunk, eventually, but it still helps.

There's also a random table for generating places to pop into, all of which could basically work as adventure seeds, and a sidenote on Lost combat, suggesting that when really experienced they can pop around a corner, into a gun store, grab a gun, pop out around another corner, unload on their enemies, and then disappear once more. Or possibly their very pockets just become handy, extradimensional spaces full of random shit.

These guys rock.

Outcasts

Outcasts are the poor people who see weird crazy alien shit and likely end up labelled as schizophrenic or something if they talk to anyone about it. Some learned to turn it off, at least some of the time, and the remainder usually goes completely fucking bonkers.

The book helpfully illustrates the sort of horrifying bullshit they can see and which normal people can't. Not all of it's that blatant, though, sometimes it's weird symbolic shit, like seeing human skulls on a part of a person's body and then it turns out they have a tumor there. So Outcasts spend a lot of time trying to find patterns and explanations for their visions.

A lot of 'em apparently also become hobos.

Their "What You Know" also suggests that Dances may be some sort of gestalt minds created by coalescing pools of memories in old places.

These guys probably have the most expansive What You Know section, really pointing out that they've done some research into the weird shit, see more than the other Secret Lives, etc. Mix a Lost and an Outcast in a party and you'll never run out of stories. The Lost takes them weird places, and then the Outcast sees some vague shit that starts them on the road to cracking the puzzle or just gets them more interested than the place alone. Or the Outcast sees something fucking weird, and the Lost gets them on the road to pursuing it or learning something more concrete.

Along with the whole SCIENCE IS FOR WESTERN IGNORANTS-thing, I'm getting a kind of... Scientology-ish vibe. I mean, we know from the Animists that most mental ailments are actually evil spirits, and the stuff about secret voices whispering to people from beyond the aether kind of reinforces that. Is it just me? Kind of a distrust of the psychological and medical establishment?

As for powers, an interesting aspect is that they get better at seeing supernatural shit if they deprive themselves of sleep. They also get to intimidate Dances, by threatening to burn down their buildings or get the police interested in them, meaning that the Dance will either send a Faustian servant to aid them or otherwise try to assist. That could actually be a decent hook to stitch a Faustian into a party, the Dance has him permanently assigned to help them out and be their gopher to get the Outcast off its back.

All in all, these three classes/archetypes don't seem too bad. Or maybe it's just that after the Androgyne, almost nothing seems that bad

~PurpleXVI

View All by Author

Comments