@themaybreeze Oh man thank you so much. I have good news then. Before this went public I hit up a few trusted colleagues with a more personal solicitation. So there are more interested parties than the thread lets on.
@themaybreeze Oh man thank you so much. I have good news then. Before this went public I hit up a few trusted colleagues with a more personal solicitation. So there are more interested parties than the thread lets on.
This pleases me greatly⦠It deserves the interest!
Shall I put together a slightly off-the-beaten-track character sheet? One thatβs based off the touch points in your IC?
@themaybreeze You may absolutely co-opt one of those stories if it's similar to what you would have wanted to play. Any that don't get commandeered i will be running as a kind of sidequest-cum-environmental-storytelling: principally serving to make the setting feel like it's still turning and evolving even when players aren't out there making choices; but also allowing you to know other people in the city by name, call on them for favors, develop a network of individuals your character trusts. And obviously too, developments in their plots can intersect with and complicate yours.
And no, I'll happily overaccept by one or two slots with the expectation that someone will have to drop. Especially because this is a 21+ game (25+ preferred) and we old people all got jobs n husbands n shit.
Since a few people are raring to get started already, and because collaborating to converge our storylines will be very important to our success, I'm gonna go ahead and work on the character sheet before all else and post it here. Having already started on a concept is perfectly fine, but there are some quirks to expect with this application, so don't go off and try to finalize anything quite yet. (For instance I'm placing more emphasis on character historyβboth the true version and the word-on-the-street oneβthan personality, as i would rather we "meet" our characters IC.)
(For instance I'm placing more emphasis on character historyβboth the true version and the word-on-the-street oneβthan personality, as i would rather we "meet" our characters IC.)
Oh, thank God. I usually lose interest when a characterβs personality doesnβt match their sheetβs explanation and becomes a mechanism for protecting the ego of his or her creator.
Gimme all the gray and quirky nuances of misshapen characters.
Oh, thank God. I usually lose interest when a characterβs personality doesnβt match their sheetβs explanation and becomes a mechanism for protecting the ego of his or her creator.
Gimme all the gray and quirky nuances of misshapen characters.
Plus how often do you think you know the character, only to get three posts deep and find her basically writing herself because what she would do in a situation, and what you anticipated her to do, don't align at all? I love that feeling actuallyβof my own character surprising me like thatβas I'm sure you do, tooβbut this will avert CS misrepresentation, like you say.
Character creation begins with the title of your PM (or, if you intend to petition publicly in the OOC, an analogous header). You have the span of a single sentence in which to summarize your character's personal plotlineβpressure-testing your ability to hook readers, roadmap story, and build interactive/collab anticipation all while operating within a stringent word economy.
Name
β
Self-explanatory.
Age
β
Self-explanatory.
Sex
β
Gender too, if not apparent.
Business
β
Maybe you're a normal Joe, with a normal job, just swept up in a shitty circumstance. Maybe between the nine-to-five and all the shady side hustles you barely get to sleep anymore. Maybe you're all-in on The Life; have been since your first street brawl as a troubled kid in a dirt-poor family on the bad side of town. Choice and coercion, desperation and drive. In this section, clarify your character's relationship with work: legal, extralegal, over the table and under it, public and moonlit. Both what your W4 says you do and what your fellow dirtbags actually use you for.
Savvy
β
You're assumed to be baseline-competent in most the skills you need to function within your criminal niche. (No need to expound that your mafia soldato is, in fact, talented with a handgun.) In this section outline your more surprising proficiencies: rare, high-demand specializations like hotwiring, gunsmithing, cracksmanship; or simply more unexpected ones, such as Michelin-grade cooking, car chopping, cobbling, poetry. In the case of the former, justify. Where and how and whom-from did you procure this valuable knowledge?βwhat did it cost you?
Ruin
β
A brief word on upbringing if you wish, segueing succinctly and summarily into the far more pertinent context of how and why a once-decent kid, mommy's little angel, degenerated into the lowlife we see today. Then, a typical day in the life in the now-and-present. May be written as a biopic, a confessional, even an epistolary. Any person, any tense. Far more interesting than an objective sequence of events is a personal romance colored by hearsay and contradiction; bias and prejudice and ulterior motive. Unreliable narration welcome. Misinformation encouraged.
Cred
β
The word on the street; others' estimation of you; your last defense against the fate which catches up to every snitch and every candy-ass and every flake eventually. How competent are you? How reliable? Do jobs go well when you're on the crew, does everyone get away in time when you're behind the wheel of the getaway car? Is someone serving time on account of something you've said to somebody? Do others in town have an accurate measure of you, or has something (someone) botched your reputation? Are you the Sun Tzu of the streetsβunderestimated at every turnβor do you puff and posture and throw your weight around? In this section, describe how people talk about you when you're not around to hear. What they know, and what they hunger to know.
Ilk
β
Choose one. If you want the GM to really, really like you, you may optionally choose a second. Overlap with one or two other players is fine but I will veto if any one Ilk is becoming too popular. Do not choose two Ilks which directly controvert each other (e.g. Real Clean, Like My Conscience and This is Business, Not Personal).
Custom Ilks, if you wish to submit one, must contain concrete, unambiguous trigger conditions; must beget indelible IC consequences when triggered; must foment conflict and drama.
THE ACTION IS THE JUICE
What the capos call "caution" you call spinelessness. What's the point in becoming a gangster if people still get to tell you what to do, if you still got to follow the rules, if you can't let loose once in a while? You don't need the money; you're here for the power, the good time, and nothing gets your dick hard like stomping the gas pedal to the floor, squeezing off shots, and watching it all burn, and bleed, and die. Agitator that you are, you can't help but lay waste to your crew's best-laid plans. And you will personally see to it that when all this is over, you and all your accomplices are looking at twenty to life for murder-two. ("But only if we get caught," right?)
THE BAD BLOOD
When your employer described the job it sounded too good to be true, too opportune of a coincidence to ignore: your last big chance to settle the score against someone who burned you in the recent past. Choose a character who will feature prominently in your story: preferably a PC, but the GM can sign off on a prominent NPC also. If you see the opportunity to hurt this character as they once hurt you, you will take itβin the process sabotaging the job, endangering people you'd sooner not, and/or being marked AWOL.
BELIEVE ME, RICH IS BETTER
All in all it was a pretty good takeβwell, before the getaway driver got his cut. And the extra gunman on the roof. And the fences...Could be that someone on the team's not picking up slack, could be that you plain and simply need the money more than they do, either way, you're dissatisfied with the present arrangement. So while the bosses are counting up the loot and divvying it into envelopes and mapping out the dead drops, you'll be cooking up another one of your schemes. To poison the others against the "dead weight." To cut him out and have his slice of the pie to yourself.
COULD'A HAD CLASS (or, YOU THINK I'M FUNNY?)
You've been a loser for as long as you can remember. You know it, your old man knows it, the local parishioner knows it, but you'll suck a barrel before you let any random schmuck on the street know it, too. Extremely sensitive to being dismissed, underestimated, condescended, ball-busted, you've got something to prove, and stashed in your waistline or your ankle holster or your coat pocket is just the right tool for the task. In your perpetual quest to prove you're tough (valuable, respected, &c.), someone always, eventually, either puts you up to a challenge from which you cannot back down, or levels an insult you don't have it in you to ignore. You will escalate; you will go too far; and what could have been solved with some slick words and a few greased palms you will instead solve through disproportionate violence. You're the closer of doors, the burner of bridges, and the kicker-off of monstrous, deadly vendettas.
GONE FAGGOT
Push comes to shove there's only two people a man can trust; and his mother ain't around to save him every time the troubles come knocking. Not a coward per sΔβyou prefer self-preservationist, or maybe good-old not a fucking idiotβsooner or later you will intuit when the ship has started to take water. You will jettison to save your own skin. And while some people take umbrage with that easily enough as it is, others will wonder what else you're willing to do to keep yourself outta the clink and off the mortuary table. Who you been talkin to. What kinda backroom deals you've made to keep being so lucky, always out the front door a few minutes before disaster hits...
A HARMLESS VICE
Whether it's a pill, a powder, or a needle, you're hopelessly and viciously hooked on one or another chemical. A chemical which doesn't sharpen you up anymore the way it used to. A chemical which makes you paranoid and antsy and irritable at the best of times. You're off the job for sure if the bosses find out. Maybe you'll O.D. before it gets to that, but likelier there will be others counting on you to hold steady, and instead you'll crack like a dinnerplate, sweating shaking panicking all the while.
I STILL LOVE THE LIFE
Death by a thousand cuts. Gambling debts, drug habits, a need to impress, or plain-and-simple expensive tastesβsomething, or a combination of things, puts a continual drain on your resources, ever threatening your precious high-roller lifestyle. You don't simply want the plan to succeed; it has to, or you can kiss the fast cars the slim girls the fat diamond rings goodbye (those and whatever else matters). This addiction will noseblind you to risks the others can smell from three miles off. And where they've hedged and folded and tactically retreated, you'll alwaysβalwaysβgather up your dice to triple down.
MAYBE IT'S A MANNERISM
You might have an unfortunate and incorrigible sense of style, a reason for leaving a deliberate calling card at every crime scene, maybe an unforgettable face; or you might simply refuse to part with your favorite heater. Sentimental reasons. (You know, that nickel-and-ivory beaut with the polished trigger and the engraved housingβthe one that takes a proprietary caliber used by fourteen people in the whole damn state.) Every peanut-counting bookie schnook knows to take a twenty-dollar snubbie and wipe it for prints afterward and throw it in Lake Michigan before the barrel's even stopped spitting steam, but not you. Not you, autographing every alley, every dead-drop, every body with your trademark. When the fuzz (and anyone else wise enough to care) investigates a crime scene of your making, evidence will line up faster. Methods, motives, cases will come together cleaner, knotting seemingly unrelated crimes into an inexorable web of pathology: yours. You made yourself legible, and youβout of everyone else in the family, they'll read you like a bodice ripper.
PERMANENT GODDAMN FINK
Maybe the cops got to you first, laying down the squeeze until you "volunteered" to turn informant. Maybe the competition wants your crew off the streets and has deemed you the weakest link; the shortest and straightest throughline right to all your boss's blind spots. Hell. Maybe they'd rather pinch you for their own operations. One way or the next, the others don't knowβyetβthat you have a second motive. Someone will find out, of course (as someone always does). You will plead that you were just going along with it, just waiting for an opportunity to get out; that you "had no choice." Whatever makes them hesitate. It might even be true. Unfortunately, not all of your friends will buy it.
REAL CLEAN, LIKE MY CONSCIENCE
There's a voice. Might sound like your mother's, your old drill sergeant's, a certain schoolteacher's. Somebody who once believed in you whatever the case. Used to be louder but now it's just a ghostβa pathetic, mewling thing stowed in the back of your skullβshy, real shy; and small, only really audible in that razor-space between the three clicks of the hammer and the one of the trigger. But the voice still enjoys rationalizing. It humanizes the enemy and offers excuses for the guilty. It explains how causality is complicated and how context matters. It gives pretty names and pitiable faces to the wives, the daughters whose lives would never be the same. It mounts a nobler defense than any dirty lawyer cold, hard cash can retain...and its closing arguments always, without fail, cause you to hesitate when you shouldn't.
SHE WAS MINE, TOO
You're fecklessly in love with another PC, or with (pending approval) a prominent, oft-appearing NPC accomplice. This overwhelming affection need not be reciprocated. When this person is put in dangerβwhich they will beβthe plan be damned, great big melting puddle that you are, you will cast anything and everything aside to keep them safe.
THIS IS BUSINESS, NOT PERSONAL
No hesitation. No more chances. No regrets. You didn't come this far and commit all these three-point felonies to get caught now, just like you didn't strike all these deals just to get stabbed in the back, so here you are, clearing the denominators, eliminating variables in your sick little street-math. Allies might appreciate your decisiveness in the momentβyour ability to keep calm and execute amidst the chaosβbut back at the safehouse they'll start to wonder what little mistake will put them in your crosshairs...and whether that girl back there really was as guilty and as treasonous as you said.
THOUGHT I WAS OUT
Someone from your criminal pastβa former crime boss, a parole officer, an old associateβstill has you on the books. They say you owe them big, and you're in no position to dissent. (Work with the GM to determine who this person is and your exact relationship therewith: do you help grudgingly or eagerly? Because they're levering rock-solid blackmail or because they once pulled your ass off the fire big-time? Is thisβon paper, at leastβa mutually beneficial business arrangement, a debt not yet conciliated, or more akin to good old-fashioned coercion?) This person has a habit of asking for a costly favor at the most inconvenient possible time. You always tell them this is the last time. But you already know they'll keep calling. And god damn you, you'll keep picking up.
1x Thank
