Bork

Road Warriors - A survival adventure set in the world of Mad Max

Summary of the Mad Max Series

Road Warriors - A survival adventure set in the world of Mad Max

SawBones

Sawbones

" And thus, The Great Hippo did verily decree to all Organic Mechanics the sacred vow: Do Know Harm"

Appearance
Most wasters that encounter Sawbones assume that his clothes are in fact his skin. Sawbones typically wears a brown patch-work laboratory coat over a set of linen slacks, outfitted with leather hoops, belts and pockets to keep his vast collection of 'medical' knick-knacks on his person for easier accessibility during his work. His face is covered with a series of rags and a set of swimming goggles to keep him protected from the sun-light.

No one never knows what Sawbones true face looks like. Is it a bald man? Is it a woman pretending to be a man? Is it secretly a handsome warlord?

Role/Skills

Role: Blood-Boy (Organic Mechanic/War-Boy)

Path

Blue Path with a tiny sliver of Green when it's beneficial for him.

Equipment

The Panacea

The Panacea is a rudimentary ring journal made out of stained brown paper that contains anatomical diagrams and medical notes accumulated during Sawbones journey through the wastes. Each note and diagram is painstakingly scrawled with a mixture of what's avaliable on-hand for Sawbones include plant pigments, ink, pencil lead and blood in order to conserve the small amount of paper that Sawbones has access to.

The Hippo's Chariot

The Hippo's Chariot is a bastardised dune buggy scavenged from the remnants of a golf cart and the frame of an ambulance. It is outfitted with a small V6 Engine and its wheels had been modified for efficient travel across desert terrain. It is mainly used as a storage vessel for the vast amount of human body parts that Sawbones uses for his personal experiments.

Scapels

In close quarters combat, Sawbones uses his vast array of jury-rigged scapels of sharpened scrap metal, human bone and petrified wood for both medical examination and disembowelment of the enemy.

Syringes

Notwithstanding the issue of tetanus or rickets, syringes are an Organic Mechanic's best friend. Used to deliver a highly toxic chemical payload to his enemies or a highly questionable beneficial chemical payload to his allies.

Personality
If a real doctor from before the Fall were to analyze Sawbones, several phrases would be used to describe him. "Medical malpractice", "quack" and "Human Rights Violation" are just the surface. Sawbones is a highly ardent believer and follower in the ways of the Great Hippo, a legendary god-like figure amongst all Organic Mechanics who believe the Great Hippo to be the patron saint of all Organic Mechanics in all of their 'medical' endeavors. Sawbones has a single-minded obsession with a badly butchered historical phrase from the questionable book compiled by various Organic Mechanics with the help of a History Man known as " The Hippo's Oath". This phrase is known as "Do Know Harm" which Sawbones believes to be divine permission from the Great Hippo as a means of expanding his 'medical knowledge' no matter the cost. Sawbones goes from enclave to enclave in the wastes, offering his services to war-lords for a period of time in exchange for a safe shelter with an access to a large supply of 'patients' to expand his glory in the name of the Great Hippo. Sawbones also regularly participates in war raids and parties for the purpose of testing his new experimental drugs as a means of worshipping the Great Hippo and to restock up on 'material'.

History
Sawbones was once an ordinary nameless test subject born as part of an 'medical' experiment in pregnancy by a rovering group of Organic Mechanics known as " The Abattoir". The purpose of the experiment was to form a reliable method of pregnancy in the wastes in order to increase the survival rate of children in enclaves. An Organic Mechanic took pity on Sawbones and raised him in the ways of the Great Hippo. With nothing else to turn to, Sawbones earned his nick-name from his very apparent enthusiasm in the operating room with surgery.

When Sawbones accidentally injected himself with an unknown chemical composition one day, he claimed to have received an hallucinogenic vision of the Great Hippo, who had blessed him as his emissary and to go spread the good word of the Great Hippo to all other wasteland settlements. Sawbones immediately packed up whatever belongings he had and much to the complaints of the other Organic Mechanics, dissapeared without a trace.

Sawbones now wanders around the wastes to spread the good word of the Hippo to all heathens and unbelievers.

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Tackett Farmstead

Date: 09/23/24

Location: Stables/Coloured Barn

Stumps briefly ran the dried pads of his fingers through the thin, trickling stream of water that dripped out from the pump into the pail, sighing in relaxation as the liquid cooled his fading blisters. He stopped the pump, the level of water in the bucket near the edge of the brim. He ran his damp hand through his sun-singed hair, eyeing his blurry brown reflection on the water’s surface before grabbing the thin handle of the bucket, a brief grunt as he pulled it upwards. He found himself missing the benefit of having two hands as he struggled to lift the pail by its handle, his muscles taut and tense and his knees almost buckling at the sheer weight. The pail became heavy as a sack of bricks, yet, he could still take it. As he walked back to the inside of the stable, the glowering sun was in the middle of its long journey westwards, the long shadows of the building stretching further by the all-seeing light that the sun casted overhead.

His right hand was aching hard once he’d made it back to the horses, the steeds not paying him any notice whatsoever. MJ Tackett was waiting for him to fufill her request, a nasty expression on her sun-tanned face as she regarded him with contempt. The scars on his back began to throb again as he noticed her fingers slowly inching towards her personal riding crop. Well, that was an improvement if he ever saw one. The old man’s daughter was usually more foul-mouthed with negroes like him. He placed the heavy pail of water down besides MJ, ignoring the withering gaze she sent his way. He’d given up on hoping for a simple thank you from people like her already.
“ You’re welcome,” grunted Stumps before he retired himself to the relative sanctity of his bunk.

He continued to walk into the inside of the dilapidated barn, rags of cobwebs hanging in the rafters of the wooden ceiling. It was more sparse than usual. Most of the other Negro farmhands were outside behind the coloured barn, the aromatic scent of spice and shrimp the only clue to the nature of what they were exactly doing. It was designed to be efficiently crammed as possible, the bedframes placed next to each other in an orderly fashion. The walls had seen better days, flakes of white-wash beginning to peel off like a scab, revealing the moth-eaten wood behind. Sunlight sneaked through the slits between the walls, small pinpricks of dappled yellow visible in the gloom of the barn. His own bed was at the bottom of the bunk bed. The blankets were folded haphazardly on top of the linen sheet with a canvas bag filled with sand poking out from underneath the bed frame and a small box-shelf to the right of his mattress. The rickety wooden supports creaked dangerously underneath his weight as he considered what to do next. It was a lazy Sunday. There was no barley-bucking, cotton-picking or work that needed to be done out in the fields today. He sat silent for a while on his bunk before leaning down under to the bottom of his bed and procuring a roll of white gauze, tossing it up and down in his single hand.

He needed to relieve a little stress anyway.

Stumps bit on the end of the gauze wrap with his teeth as he began to wind it around his right palm in an awkward motion that was practiced after months of fervent frustration. The band looped around the palm of his hand several times before he began working tightening each knuckle. He then lightly tapped the back of his right hand against the stilted frame of his bed before dragging out the canvas bag from underneath his bed. He hoisted it up on his shoulders along with a coil of rope as he climbed up onto the top bunk. The door to the colored barnhouse creaked open as Stumps was hooking the canvas bag onto one of the many wooden support beams that criss-crossed across the ceiling with the help of a hemp rope. Stumps squinted his eyes to see who it was, the gloomy darkness of the bunkhouse making it hard to discern the appearance of whoever entered.

It was Alice Hallark. She was a recent arrival onto the barn, relative to Stump’s time spent working in the Tackett farmstead. He didn’t know much about her except that she worked with the doctors and that she didn’t say nigger every time she saw a black skinned person. Stumps absentmindedly answered her question as he managed to secure one of the ropes around the beam, leaving the canvas bag aimlessly swaying a few feet above the ground.

“Last I heard, most of the guys in here were cooking sumthin’ good outside at the back for grub. Can’t say about the rest though. ”

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<Snipped quote by Stitches>
Was Stumps the farmhand who just helped MJ in the stable? She didn't bother to ask his name.

@Genni

I'm okay with Stumps being the farmhand who interacted with MJ.

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@DeadbeatWalking

Is it confirmed that my character sheet has been accepted?

The Book Club

Book Recommendations

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea - By Yukio Mishima
This is a very enrapturing novel that you will simultaneously detest and adore at the same time for the ideologies represented in the novel and the almost poetic writing. Sailor is an exploration of multiple themes that are all situated around the duality between old and modern Japanese Culture after WW2. The ending, in particular, is one of my favourite endings to a book ever because it's very subdued in how it occurs and the foreshadowing and imagery presented by Mishima during the end is appropriate for the big twist.

Dark. Twisted. Most detractors of the novel state that it's a disgusting piece of shit that purports a reprehensible ideology that seems oddly alien to mainstream culture but if you know the context behind the novel and read it with patience, Sailor will question you and do what a work of good literature is meant to do.

61 Hours - By Lee Child
Jack Reacher is ultimately a thriller novel but I solidly recommend 61 hours for anyone starting new in Jack Reacher. I think it's honestly one of his best entries in the series and there are several reasons for this. First of all, the environment portrayed in the novel is just unique compared to most of the enviroments that have been explored in the other Reacher novels. The snowy blizzards create this odd desolate cold atmosphere that is just chilling throughout the novel.

Second of all, no sex scenes. Jack Reacher is like James Bond in the fact that nearly every woman that Reacher encounters requires to be shagged but there is no shagging in this novel.

Third of all, great action for a thriller. There's a way that Lee Child just grabs you by the throat. The prose is written in such a clean and methodical manner, almost clinical, which is a idiosyncracy of Lee Child. Every word is used to its fullest potential and the description of the action scenes reflect Reacher's mindset.

Anyway, that's enough from me.

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Joseph Chester
- If you were wondering why you don't see many centered sheets, it's because they're hard to read.
- Consistently getting the farm's name wrong in the second half of your sheet and the too-many traits makes me a sad panda.
- Stumps is not one of the only colored men working on the farm. There is an entire barn for the colored workers, which probably outnumber the white ones.
- The first half of his history doesn't make a lot of sense applied to the real-world scale of segregation, but I can forgive that for someone unfamiliar with US history.
- Unless he's contracted the world's slowest-moving gangrene, his arm isn't scabby/gauze-y anymore, it's a fleshy stump. He's more likely to experience phantom pains than he is to still be treating an injury, even of that scale, after two years.

@DeadbeatWalking

Thanks for the feedback. I took account of your criticisms and your suggestions in the revision of the character sheet and also updated Stump's history so that it makes just a little more sense. The revised character sheet of Stumps is in the characters tab.

Anyway, no need for the apologies. I'd rather have a GM who's willing to take time to make quality posts rather than a GM who rushes posts. It's rare to find a GM like you these days who's willing to reject character sheets and give valid reasoning for that rejection.

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Stumps

Name: Joseph Nicholas Chester

Nickname: Stumps

“Whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.”

Age: 23

Appearance
Every scar on Stumps can be traced back to the handiwork of a lynch-mob. Raw-red imprints of flaxen ropes and chains around his neck during a stay in Missouri. Burns on his hands and feet from Georgia. Healed cuts from Louisiana. He sometimes jibes that he’s the only Negro alive to have gotten scarred in all 50 states in America, which is heavily subjective to claim.

Perhaps the most defining physical characteristic of Stumps isn’t the heavy amount of bruises and past scars that appear to be on his black skin nor is it his small frame that belies his stout strength, it’s his left arm or rather, what remains of his left arm. Stumps left arm has been completely amputated from the elbow up, leaving only a bare grotesque stump as a grim reminder of the incident that crippled him. His former background as an amateur boxer have conditioned his body for the many trials and tribulations of working as a stablebuck in the Tackett Farmstead. His paunchy face remains solemn and stoic as always, only cracking up with a crinkled smile in the presence of the farm’s horses. His soft brown eyes conceal a maelstrom of anger and fury that he has resolved to keep locked inside him, until he gets back to the stable to practice boxing as the blistered knuckles on his fist can testify.
Personality
Like everyone in the farm, Stumps works hard without complaint in order to maintain his usefulness and position of stable-hand to the Tackett Family, no matter how unfair the conditions are or how low his pay is. Due to his position as one of the only Negroes working in the farm, he is perpetually stuck in a quagmire of loneliness and solitude, only having the horses to converse with. His desperation for social interaction is buried underneath the fear of being kicked out of the Tackett Farmstead or attracting too much attention to himself. Stumps wants nothing more than a relatively safe and somewhat secure life in order to avoid the possibility of being lynched. Thus, he acts completely subservient to the demands of farmhands, no matter how absurd their requests are.

However, Stumps is an ardent pacifist at heart who is sometimes too kind for people who are prejudiced to Negroes to bear conversing with, sometimes frustratingly so. Despite his frustrations with the current status of Negroes in the USA, he remains indifferent and stoic towards the disparaging and demeaning comments of the other farmhands, only replying back with tacit comments. He never bites back. He never retorts. He never punches back. Above all, he never kills another person, no matter the race or background of the individual. This pacifism has stemmed from observing the horrors of lynching on fellow African-Americans such as him along with bearing the grief of being responsible for the lynching and death of his entire family in the first place. Furthermore, Stumps privately believes that the recurrent periods of agonising pain within his amputated arm are a punishment from God himself for his own sins and that working in Cypress Hollow is atonement for his supposed sin.

Stumps has been willing to bend the rules of his pacifism though, as observed with his love of boxing, admiring both white and black fighters alike such as Jack Dempsey and John Johnson. Stumps mainly uses his passion for boxing as a means of releasing his anger and stress from the world that he lives in and as the only aspect of his life in which he has some tangible sense of control and choice in.

History
Stumps, before he was granted his present nickname by farmers of the Tackett Farmstead, was born as Joseph Nicholas Chester in 1911,March 16th, in the urban environment of Houston, Texas in a family of former slaves who formerly worked as cotton pickers in Mississippi. His father was an amateur heavyweight boxer who regularly fought matches to feed the hungry crowd of boxing spectators and his mother, a worker in a dairy factory. Their family struggled to live a comfortable life in a hostile neighbourhood that seemed to outright reject their presence with young Stumps constantly wondering why he had to use a different bathroom compared to all the other kids in school.

Beginning at the age of 16, Stumps grew up in an African-American segregated boxing ring, aspiring to become an amateur boxer just like his father and was his only source of pride in a neighbourhood where black kids like him were picked on every day in the playground by other white kids. Stumps eventually rose to the ranks of one of a proper boxer for the African American crowd in Houston. Stumps eventually earned the nickname ‘The Rifle’ for his ability to deliver lightning quick jabs in the blink of an eye.

In 1932, after critically injuring a white boxer, Billy Barnes, in response to a racist jibe, Stumps and his entire family were lynched by supporters of Barnes as a means of revenge for beating the boxer, breaking his left arm in the process and the entirety of his family including him being hanged under the shade of an oak tree. By some miraculous chance, Stumps managed to escape from the noose, running and hopping onto a train that was leaving Houston by the skin of his teeth, adopting a stalwart pacifism in order to never repeat the same order of events again. Stumps eventually amputated his mangled left arm with the help of a black physician in Louisiana before being ran out of the state as well. No boxing ring accepted his offers of fighting in their ring, a Negro, much less a crippled Negro, and Stumps continued his country wide trek of searching for viable employment.

After travelling from state to state in search of a job that would offer employment for a Negro, Stumps eventually found himself in the town of Cypress Hollow, securing a job as a stable-hand in the Tackett Farmstead amongst the dozens of Negroes that had been employed in the barn. He eventually grew into the role of being a stablebuck, being tutored by the one of the eldest Negro stable-bucks, Lewis Barrett, before his untimely passing. Nowadays, Joseph endures the conditions of working as a Negro on the Tackett Farmhouse whilst hoping for a better future.

Traits
Positive
Pugilist (+2) " Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."
Prize-Fighter (+3) " Only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone and hospitalized a brick"
Hardy (+1) " It's about hard you can get hit and keep moving forward"
Agile (+1) " You can't touch what you can't see."
Rider (+1) " Ride the horse in the direction it's going"
Negative
Church-Going (-2) "I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear."
Maimed (-4) "Disability is a matter of perception. If you can do just one thing well, you're needed by someone."
Unlucky (-2) " I'm the luckiest unluckiest person in the world"
Sickly (-2) " It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality"

Skill Value: -2

Speech Color:Maroon

Inventory
- Roll of Boxing Tape
- Horse-Brush
- Personal Comb
- Lucky Horseshoe Necklace
- Bag of Sugar-Cubes

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Dead has not accepted any sheets, so there aren't any character slots taken yet.

@Inkarnate

He hasn't even provided any tangible answer on how many characters he wants in this RP or how many members he wants.

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<Snipped quote by DeadbeatWalking>
MJ certainly enjoys all the extra snacks she ends up with.

@Genni

Master - You have some particular talent in which you are an absolute expert. Please specify exactly what this is when you choose it, e.g. "Master Baiter". +5

@DeadbeatWalking

Well, at least, the one above is more subtle than the one down below.