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Jack (PL 10)

simplex409

By simplex409
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simplex409 Newbie

simplex409

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Players Name: Simplex409
Character's Name: Jake
Power Level: 10
Power Points: 150/150

 

In Brief: Free floating ghost of a hanged man with ghostly powers. ooOOOoooOOo

 

Alternate Identities: None
Identity: Secret
Birthplace: London
Occupation: Indentured Haunter
Affiliations: Hereafter Scare Inc.
Family: None living

Age: DoB 1560, DoD around 1590
Apparent Age: About 40. Not really sure because of the bag
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Height: 6'0"
Weight: looks about 180 lbs, actually weightless
Eyes: Yellowish green fire can be seen through holes burnt in the sack.
Hair: Unknown; he wears the burlap sack on his head - it doesn't come off (he's tried).

 

Description: When visible Jake is a human male floating in the air. He wears old style pants long since frayed and torn with patches here and there and a burlap sack covers his head. His only other clothing is a hangman's noose that is still tight around his neck, the long rope floating around him as though underwater.
His skin is pale white mottled with grey, and there are numerous cuts and gashes covering his torso. From his hands and feet strange glyphs have been carved into his flesh and they trail snakelike up his arms and legs respectively, glowing with the faintest of green lights.
The burlap sack covers his head entirely and it is matted with dirt and dried blood. There are a few burn marks on the material and two holes have been scorched through the material where eye slits would be and from within all that can be seen is a burning yellow green light that flickers with a hateful intensity.
His posture is wracked and tortured, writhing slowly with crooked arms and bent legs as though in perpetual pain on some sort of rack. This doesn't seem to be particularly bothersome to him however as he's usually chipper even while curled back against his own spine in seeming agony.

 

Power Descriptions: Jake is a ghost, with all the powers and complications which come with that particular state; insubstantial, floating, hard to kill, and mindless of most things the living find important such as breathable air.
He has a selection of supernatural abilities at his disposal for terrifying and combating the forces of darkness. Well the forces of darker-than-him-ness. These are again the pretty basic suite of ghostly abilities; possession of the living, poltergeist activity, draining away life forces, and projecting his suffocating noose around the necks of those who are particularly troublesome.

 

History: Jake was born "James Marcus Wilson" in the London borough of Whitechapel in 1560. His parents were not particularly well off nor were they living on the street but rather that happy middle ground so admired by the middle classes. His childhood was one of much excitement and adventure as a small boy - since small boys find excitement and adventure in the simplest of places, and while he was perhaps a little unruly it was nothing out of the ordinary for the time - playing games of pirates and sailors, skipping school, and coming home covered in mud being the usual causes of a hiding.
As he grew into adolescence he took work as a carpenter and studied hard at architecture - most decidedly the construction of wooden homes in the form of cabins, and how they may be easily erected with the minimum of effort. Everyone knew of the magical new land discovered far to the west and already there was talk of settlements to be founded and brave adventurers needed to face the perils of the untamed frontiers.
Raleigh, the famous seaman, declared his plans to found a settlement across the sea in the early part of 1585 and though Jake submitted himself for the voyage he was deemed too inexperienced for the trials ahead. Downcast he watched the hulking ship leave the London docks and swore he would be a part of the next ship to leave.
He continued working and studying for several more years - long enough to see the return of the failed expedition funded by Raleigh - and took himself a young wife who shared his dream of the far frontier.
When Raleigh announced another attempt - better supplied and funded - to be departing in the spring of 1587 Jake again applied with his wife's full approval and they were overjoyed to be accepted. They packed, bid their families a tearful farewell, and boarded the ship heading west.
The journey wasn't pleasant for anyone, especially the untraveled pair, but they made it to the shores of America still in fine spirits and the whole of the expedition worked well together to unload the ship and begin making a base camp. The captain of the ship, John White, stayed on for some weeks as he and the crew assisted the settlers in founding the new colony before they boarded their ship and, with cheerful farewells to the new settlers, set off back for England where they would retrieve more supplies for the colony they had helped found. The trip should have taken less than a year.
But it didn't. War broke out between England and Spain and in the midst of the bloody conflict no ship was to set sail for the west when the Spanish galleons were so close to England's border.
The war was, for the time, short - finishing by 1590 and John White wasted no time in loading up the ship to return to the colony. He wasn't worried about the long absence - the colonists were well supplied, they had already begun tilling the land, houses and shacks had already been springing up, and the natives of the land were on friendly terms.
It was late in the year of 1590 when John White set foot once more into the settlement of Roanoke. Nobody was there. Not a living soul and no sign of any disturbance. Everyone had just... gone. Everyone, that is, except for Jack, whose body swung quietly in the breeze from the town hall beam.
(This is a basically true story, look it up! Although Jack wasn't there)
Jack has no real memories of the Roanoke colony after John White's departure - a few fragments of working hard and forming a town but no indication of what happened or why his was the only body left. And certainly not the faintest idea of what all the strange glyphs are about. A few years after his death is when he was recruited into Hereafter Scare Inc. They told him that he wasn't able to move on into the great hereafter until he'd worked as a Haunter long enough to clear his karmic debt. It sounded like nonsense to Jake but since he was unable to move on anywhere and sitting around doing nothing for eternity didn't seem like much fun he agreed to do as he was told. Since then he has been a rather pathetic excuse for a ghost - he doesn't like scaring people and he's more likely to fetch a sleepy child a glass of water than to leap out from under their bed shouting Boo.
He's been a haunter for hundreds of years and he hasn't any idea how much longer he has to keep doing it - maybe forever for all he knows, especially with his poor track record for frightening people. Still, he gets on with it and occasionally meets someone who isn't terrified of him so he has a friend for a few years.

 

About Hereafter Scare Inc;

Spoiler

TLDR : Think Monsters Inc and you're well on the way to what it's all about. The rest is part of Jack's entrance interview to explain the reasoning behind Hereafter Scare Inc.

 

Jack didn't really sit down on the chair because, when you're an incorporeal ghost, such things aren't all that easy to manage. Instead he floated in a mostly seated position where the chair was and tried not to wriggle around too much. From the expression on the suited man's face sitting opposite, Jack's efforts were going to waste and he may as well have dangled from the ceiling by his ankles. The man in the suit conferred with his notes before placing them down and leaning forward, elbows resting on the desk and fingers steepled.

 

"So, Jake..." The man began.

 

"Jack."

 

"I really don't care. Now, you're what we call a free floating spirit unbound by a locus. And so, with that in mind, we've decided that your karma can be best worked off by, well, working. For us."

 

"And I'll get paid?"

 

"In the sense of a shortened eternity of torment and a feeling like you're doing the right thing? Of course you will."

 

"And in the sense of getting paid?"

 

"Not so much, no. Do you know what we do here?"

 

"Yes; you look officious and shuffle papers in an overly threatening manner."

 

"Other than that I mean. No? Well we're in the business of belief. Do you know the Pratchettesque theory of belief?"

 

"That's a real word?"

 

"Ah, of course. No, not yet. You're still looking at time like it's a river - point A to point B. In actual fact time is more like a ball of timey- well nevermind that, I can see you're starting to glaze over. In a few hundred years a philosopher called Terry will point out that Gods are fuelled by belief - the belief of mortals is what keeps a god alive. The Hereafter is little different; mortal belief keeps the Hereafter going. It powers our world and lets us continue. Do you understand?"

 

"Uhm, I guess so. So you go around introducing yourselves to people and making sure they know we're around?"

 

"No! Don't be stupid. If we reveal ourselves to people then they will Know we exist. Do you Believe in people that you know? Of course not! That would be like believing in your next door neighbor! Belief is an effort of will and so we need to infer our existence by means of hauntings - we scare people and, in being so emotionally motivated, they expend the willpower in belief of our world. The Hereafter."

 

"What, so we're living in an imaginary world fashioned by their fear?"

 

"Quite so! I must admit I didn't expect you to be quite that quick. I hate you slightly less than I did a few minutes ago."

 

"Oh. Uh, thanks I think..."

 

"Think nothing of it. Anyway, we need free floating spirits who can make house calls - drifting in, shouting 'Boo!', and then drifting on to the next house sort of thing. Generating plenty of belief so our world can continue to function. It's a terribly important job. So what do you say? You'd be shortening your own karmic eternity and, at the same time, doing important work for the whole of the Hereafter. Letting the people here continue about their lives happily and expanding their universe with every scream. What do you say?"

 

The interview and cajoling continued for a while and Jack eventually said yes - it wan't Really hurting anyone after all, and it Was important work...

 

 

Personality & Motivation: Jake looks like he should probably be a particularly creepy villain or at least a brooding anti-hero. The actual fact is that he's really quite happy go lucky and upbeat about most situations. After all - he's dead - how much worse can his day get? The other proverbial shoe has already dropped and he's glad to be still around.
He understands that his appearance is quite awful and is usually shy and invisible around new people, apologizing and trying to be nice to them in order to lesson the impact of his popping into being and making them shriek.
His job isn't rewarding for him in the least - having to go house to house scaring people in the dead of night by shouting "Boo!" in their closet isn't what he signed up for when he entered the afterlife, so through the night when he's working he can be a little disconsolate, but this fades as soon as he starts chatting and being friendly with people.
His motivation primarily stems from the fact that he's quite a nice guy who has a lot of power and likes people. When his nightly hauntings take him through the darker portions of the city he makes sure to go to each job the long way around and ensure that nobody is being unpleasant to someone else for the sake of a few dollar bills. 

 

Powers & Tactics: Usually, Jake finds that a good scare is all it takes to make most villains forget what they were doing and search quite urgently for a public restroom where they can sit and rethink their life choices. If that fails, he uses his suite of ghostly powers to combat his enemies in whatever way seems most effective or amusing at the time - he relies on the fact that he's already dead and can't strictly be killed again to ignore attacks coming his way (perhaps unwisely, but he's still around so it's not that bad).

 

COMPLICATIONS

Working Stiff: While not a day job as such, Jake is still indentured to the company and has to go about his hauntings. If he starts falling behind, he is quickly teleported to The Office and given a dressing down for some time before being released again. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, and he has no control or say in when he is returned to the living world.

 

Working for "The Man": Some spirits and ghosts see Hereafter Scare Inc. as an evil corporation bent on taking over the afterlife (which may be true, but it's not polite to point it out) and thus Jake is just a tool of 'The Man', man! Some spirits may react negatively to him or actively try to undermine whatever he's doing just to stick it to the corporate scum!

 

AAAIIIIEEEEEE!: Jake is pretty gruesome to look at and many people seeing him for the first time (or the second time. Maybe a third time. Probably not more than the fourth time.) may react in the only sensible way they know how and run screaming from the building.

 

We ain't afraid of no Ghost: Sure the grey jumpsuits are stylish and the backpacks look great, but these guys need to understand that running around shooting lights at every ghost in the world is just plain judgmental. They seem to have more franchises opening up all over the country these days, and it's a lucky night when one of their white hearses doesn't try to chase Jake down.

 

Mysterious Past: Not really a complication I guess, but we'll pop it here anyway. Jake doesn't know why he was hung nor why his body has all the strange glowing glyphs carved into it. Somebody does though and whether they're alive or dead it probably won't stop them showing up at some point with presumably nefarious intent.

 

Consecrated Ground: Jack can't enter consecrated ground and, if forced to do so, loses access to all his Haunting powers and his Protection. Additionally he whimpers and cries and can't do much of anything.

 

He Slimed Me: An ectoplasmic residue is left behind wherever Jack uses his powers. This can make tracking him easier and there may be things a clever magic or science guy can do with it that would be bad.

 

ABILITIES: (-10) + 4 + (-10) + 2 + 4 + 0 = -10PP 
Strength: ---
Dexterity: 14 (+2) 
Constitution: --- 
Intelligence: 12 (+1) 
Wisdom: 14 (+2) 
Charisma: 10 (+0) 

  
COMBAT: 8 + 10 = 18PP 
Initiative: +2 

Attack Bonus: +4
Attack: +10 Ranged (+4 Base, +6 focus), +4 Melee 
Grapple: +4
Defense: +5 (+5 Base)
Knockback: -12
  
  
SAVING THROWS: 0 + 3 + 5 = 8PP 
Toughness: +15 (Impervious 10)  /  +0 (+0 Impervious)  Vs Consecrated/Holy (Pretty much a sitting duck if you have a holy sword/gun/pointy stick - intentionally as I thought it fitted thematically)
Fortitude: --- 
Reflex: +5 (+2 Dex, +3) 
Will: +7 (+2 Wis, +5) 

  
SKILLS: 40R = 10PP 
Diplomacy 4 (+4)
Intimidate 10 (+10)
Investigate 5 (+6)
Medicine 4 (+6)
Notice 5 (+7)
Search 4 (+5)
Sense Motive 8 (+10)

  
FEATS: 8PP 
Attack Focus (ranged) 6
Fearless
Startle
  
Enhanced Feats 
Fearsome Presence 10 (From Horrify)

  
POWERS: 8 + 31 + 21 + 2 + 13 + 3 + 2 + 36 = 116PP 
All powers have the supernatural and undead descriptors.
  
Flight 4 (100 mph / 880ft per move action) [8PP]
Immunity 30 (Fortitude Saves [Enhancement: Innate]) [31PP]
Insubstantial 4 (Incorporeal [Enhancement: Innate, Flaw: Permanent]) [21PP]
Invisibility 4 (Total concealment from all visual senses, [Flaws: Action 2: Standard action to activate, Duration 1: Concentration) [2PP]
Protection 15 (+15 Toughness [Enhancement: Impervious +10, Flaw: Limited (weakness to Consecrated/Holy)] [13PP]
Regeneration 3 (Resurrection3: 5 hours) [3PP]
Super Senses 2 (Darkvision) [2PP]
Haunting (36PP Array)
    Possession 10 ("Puppeteer" [Enhancement: Duration1:Continuous, Flaws: Action1:Full round to use, Range1: 100ft) [30PP]
    Confuse 10 ("Jacks Madness" [Enhancement: Duration1:Concentration]) [20PP]
    Drain 10 ("Weakness", Single Trait: Strength [Enhancement: Range: 100']) [20PP]
    Enhanced Trait 10 ("Horrify", Fearsome Presence 10) [10PP]
    Obscure 5 ("Darkness of the Grave", Affects Visual Senses) [10PP]
    Suffocate 10 ("Hangman's Noose" [Enhancement: Range 100']) [30PP]
    Telekinesis 7 ("Poltergeist" [Enhancements: Damaging, Perception]) [28PP]

  
TOTALS 
Abilities (-10) + Combat (18) + Saving Throws (8) + Skills (10) + Feats (8) + Powers (116) - Drawbacks (0) = 150/150 Power Points

 

 

DC Block

Unarmed      +4          Touch            DC 15 TOUGHNESS         DMG (Physical)

Posession    +10        Ranged         DC 20 WILL                       Assume body control

Confuse         ---          Perception   DC 20 WILL                        Confused

Drain              +10       Ranged         DC 20 FORT/STAGED      -1 STR per point failed (Max 10)

Suffocate       +10      Ranged         DC 20 FORT                       Suffocation

Telekinesis      ---        Perception   DC 22 TOUGHNESS          DMG (Physical)

 

 

jack-daw.jpg

Edited by simplex409
Added He Slimed Me complication (kept forgetting to do that!)
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simplex409 Newbie

simplex409

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Hi, AvengerAssembled,

 

I've changed the sheet to show the flaws and whatnot on the powers now, so hopefully it's a lot more legible.

 

Eventually yes, he'll most likely stop working for HereAfter but not right away - I was hoping to build up a good head of steam between him and the company first and possibly have an misunderstanding or two with some other nocturnal heroes who hear a scream and come running.

 

But yes, after a while he'll get out from under them and his complications and whatnot will undergo a radical change.

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simplex409 Newbie

simplex409

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I was thinking on the power as a whole - holy blessed type weapons would be kryptonite so to speak, and he'll have a rough time against any sort of holy man. He'd still be incorporeal at least but yeah; otherwise a sitting duck.

 

If this isn't in line with assumed power levels and stuff then I'll swap things around so the impervious is a seperate power with the flaw applied to that. ?

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  • 3 weeks later...
Fox Advanced Member

Fox

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Fluff

Gross! Neat.

 

Crunch

Combat

Please note the character's flat-footed defense (in this case, +3).

 

Powers

I'm assuming 'Enhancement' is a 3e term, or the like - in 2e, these should be noted as either Power Feats, or Extras.

 

I don't recommend the Concentration duration on Invisibility. Concealment (the core effect for Invisibility) is 2pp/rank; the Action flaw already makes that 1pp/2 ranks, so it's still just 2pp, and the Concentration duration would take up Jack's move action every turn to make a DC14 Concentration check...without any ranks in the Concentration skill.

 

The Haunting array line should read: Haunting Array 6 (30PP Array; Power Feats: Alternate Power 6) [36PP]

 

Continuous Possession is not generally allowed for PCs, since it allows you to permanently take any enemy out of the fight on a single slightly-failed will save (for much the same reason, we restrict other similarly-unbalancing uses of certain effects - continuous dimensional pocket attacks, attack teleports that send people to the moon, etc). The Ultimate Power book even explicitly cautions GMs against allowing this, and I'm afraid I'm inclined to agree.

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