Howler

There Are No Heroes [Revamp]

Name: Michelle Darrens Gender: Female Age: 18 Lineage: Caucasian Zoanthrope - Wolf(?) Fate: 2 Relationship Status: Single Occupational Status: Employed as Remote Data Entry Professional for Markone Staffing. Previous Occupation: Waitress Physical Description: Michelle could have been, and in some ways still is, quite pretty. If things had gone differently she might even have been unusually so, but these days it's hard to tell. Standing just shy of 5'9'' and weighing in at around one hundred and thirty five pounds, she's a lean little whip of a girl on the cusp of being a young woman and would have done well for herself if things hadn't gone to hell. A year and a half ago she was all lips, hips and athletic physique, shooting for a varsity track, but that year and a half has been a doozie. These days she's the kind of girl you'd have a hard time sitting across the bus from and not staring at. Her dirty blond hair, long enough to hang down to the middle of her back, is shaved on one side in the style of the time, the visible ear lined with rings from top to bottom. Her lips--her favorite feature, if she was ever being honest about it--now sport a dandy trio of thin scars along the left hand side and she has a truly heinous ink-pen tattoo across her throat that nearly cost her voice a while back. Her eye are sleepless and dark, bloodshot, and have an unfortunate tendency to catch light like an animal's might. She is almost always seen wearing a massive black hoodie, second hand and touting some slightly indie hard rock band, unceremoniously over a pair of black tights. On very rare occasions, when she wants to feel pretty, she changes it up and wears a black sun dress instead. Never around other people, though--her wrists are a mess. Kids these days. Alternate Physical Description: There are monsters, and then there are real monsters. The kind you don't forget seeing, the ones that make you remember what it's like to be prey and wake you up at night, and when Michelle wolfs out she's very much the latter. At just shy of nine foot tall anthropomorphic terror, she's the big bad Wolf every Red Riding Hood wishes they could be when they grow up. Her normally wiry figure explodes into dense mammalian muscle, knotting and curling over a lupine frame equally at home lunging on four legs or stalking on two. Bristling with wiry grey fur, it's when you get to the business end of things that she really gets wicked. Michelle's got a wicked tongue at the best of times these days, but it doesn't hold a candle to her teeth. When she lets loose and the wolf takes over her fangs are as long as fingers, strong and interlocked to rip and tear. Her eyes are blood drunk gold saucers blotted with a swollen black pupil, shark-dark, and her fucked up finger-paws tear up ground and flesh with inches-long claws. All werewolves are scary, but most of them have nothing on Michelle. Psychological Profile: Michelle would very much like to be a normal, pretty girl. She would like very much to finish highschool, pay lip service to her parents and sneak out to parties with her friends and somehow manage passing grades. Theoretically she'd have liked a boyfriend, though not quite so much these days, and to sit around and smoke pot and do stupid teenager things. She would also very much like to not be a horrible psychotic cannibal-monster, but is pretty sure that what she would very much like means jack shit these days. Michelle is not a happy camper. She remembers the before and can't really imagine living with the after, so she doesn't. Imagine it, that is--she's tried suicide and it doesn't work out well for anyone. It hurts to think about things like why she feels so angry all the time, or why she putt-putts her way through her life, or what the point of any of this is, so she doesn't. She lives by doing, not by thinking--it's easy to be fearless when you don't care, and it's easy not to care when any semblance of a real life you might have had went down the toilet along with the bits of your step-dad's zyphoid process you couldn't keep down. Much as she tries to bottle it, ignore it or kill it, however, there is always that lingering, smoldering, boiling hate just ready to bubble back up. For herself, for the world, for anything and everything. So don't make her angry. You wouldn't like her when she's angry. Alternate Psychological Profile: At the best of times, Michelle is a tad mopey. Sometimes kind of cheerful, in a sad-puppy kind of way, but she's really just kidding you. Because when push comes to shove, when things get to be too much, she's not mopey. She's not sad. She's absolutely fucking furious. She didn't deserve this. She didn't deserve any of this. She never wanted to cause trouble, make enemies, hurt anyone. She never asked to be a giant monster, but goddamn now that she is does it feel good to be one. When she transforms, it's all that impotent rage that a skinny little high school dropout buries under pussy emo bullshit can muster turned up to eleven and given claws the size of steak knives. The funny thing is that wolfing out is the only time she feels like she's in control. The bomb already went off, the worst case scenario already happened--she doesn't have to pretend to be something she's not anymore. She can admit that she's a savage fucking animal and go. To. Town. And that terrifies her. Vices: Michelle smokes cigarettes, marijuana and does heroin when she can get her hands on it. Background: Michelle's mother was a gold digger, plain and simple. She was pretty enough and smart enough to realize that the easiest path to a good life was to find someone going somewhere and get pregnant, which is exactly what she did. Nine months later out comes Michelle, as cute and squalling a baby as ever one did see and her mother promptly traded in the full time job of being pregnant for the full time job of looking for a better meal ticket. Michelle was on step-father three by the time she was going into high-school and liked to think she was relatively well adjusted for it. Yes, it left her with the odd sensation that men were both gullible and disposable, but there was also a sort of benign indifference to the men her mother snagged. They were always polite enough to her, relatively mild mannered and pretty benign. Her newest step father was the best yet, and even something resembling pleasant to her. He didn't mind when she snuck out late, made enough money accounting for some significant corporation or another to keep her and her mother well off in their respective social groups and wasn't bad to stay up late and watch shitty television with. And then she went to the wrong party and everything went to hell. Date rape happens. Its worse when it happens to you. Its worse still when it sends you to the ER. Its worse still when, even when all the tests come back clean and everyone is whispering how it's going to be alright, you know something is wrong. So if Michelle was angry and hurt and upset, she thought that was a pretty reasonable reaction. What was not a reasonable reaction was walking in on her step-father a few nights later watching some particularly inappropriate material of questionable moral character. Nothing illegal, just the usual male power trip bullshit, but having just been power tripped herself and not feeling very accommodating, well... It was all a blur from there. A messy, red, tear-stained blur that ended on the other side of the city spewing into a dumpster. Everything after that--the police, her mother, trying to go back to school and failing...miserably... Well. What's a girl to do. Recent History: Michelle fell in with a bad crowd. A very bad crowd, the kind that knew what she was and liked it and liked that she was too new to the scene to really resist. Wolves run in packs, and being low girl on the totem pole was not a party, but by the time she started getting the picture so were they. There are monsters and then there are monsters, and when she cut loose she was far and away the second of those. It wasn't long before ties were cut and she was alone again but, in her eyes, that was the best thing that could have happened to her. She wasn't fit for public consumption and she knew it, so she took herself out of it. It was hard. She was cities away from anyone she ever knew, left crashing on the couch of people who were half terrified of her, half stoned assholes, but it only takes one good friend to get up and running. His sister worked at a staffing company and got Michelle the kind of job she could do on her friend's laptop until she got on her feet. Determined to regain some semblance of a life if only so she could withdraw from the lives of others, she managed to do decently in spite of herself. She saved up enough money to get herself a shitty laptop and a shitty apartment on the shitty side of town and, well... There she was.

Falling Skies: 7th Mobile Armor Suit Team (Sci-fi, Mecha, Space Odyssey/Opera)

Still have room?

A Sea of Stars [Space Opera Military RPG]

Color my interest piqued.

Reaching the War (Naruto Universe RP)

It's been a while since I did anything with Naruto. I'll give it a go.

[Revamp] The Are No Heroes [Modern, Supernatural, Survival]

I'll see if I can get something up for this, why not.

Black Cross, Red Beast: A Transylvanian Affair (OWoD VtDA)

If you lot are more interested in a Roman game I could make that work, but it would take more research on my part and I'd have to make more adjustments to starting rules. The Transylvania plot was as much in response to the only suggestion I received. That being said, I am still limiting characters to one per person for sake of focus and to encourage depth. If everyone wants I could be persuaded to up the game to ancilla, but I'd prefer for advances like that to occur over time.

The Heavens Aflame - A Civil War Among Deities

I'd be all over swinging a knife, but unfortunately poor Moly wasn't born yet. He'll have to find some other god to stab. <3

Black Cross, Red Beast: A Transylvanian Affair (OWoD VtDA)

Plenty of time, gentleman. If you've a character you really want to use then feel free to pm me about it and we can try to hash it out, but I do want to start us at a reasonably beginning point for the moment.

Seeking Old World of Darkness Storytellers and Players for Vampire: the Masquerade or Vampire: the Dark Ages.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, I have not abandoned you. It's late. I wish it was to the quality that I'm hoping to achieve, but I'm dog tired at the moment. Here's a skeleton of what will soon be an honest to God OOC thread.

Black Cross, Red Beast: A Transylvanian Affair (OWoD VtDA)

It is the year 1227 in Transylvania, and the the storm of war has blown through and left devastation. The Teutonic Knights have marched up through Transylvania, claiming territory in the name of Christ from the pagan denizens of the Carpathians. Unbeknownst to all but those of the inner circle, the Order of the Black Cross, it is not Christ they serve but the whims of Lord Jürgen. A creature of the night and vassal to the powerful Lord Hardestadt, the powerful vampire of Clan Ventrue has pushed forward for several years against the Fiendish Clan Tzimisce and their serfs and servants. But with the order from the mortal King Andras for the Germanic knights to leave his lands a year ago, Lord Jürgen and his nemesis, the Voivode of Voivodes Lord Vladimir Rustovitch met for a final confrontation that devastated both forces. In what seemed an impossible chance to claim a piece of Transylvania for himself and prevent total war from rendering the land barren, a Tzimisce scholar by the name of Myca Vykos arranged for peace between the two parties. Swearing a lip-service oath of fealty to Rustovitch and preventing the demise of Lord Jürgen in the process, he established a buffer using his resources and connections between the two forces at the city of Balgrad. Both Ventrue and Tzimisce have slunk back to lick their wounds, but the retreat of both sides has left something of a vacuum amidst the Carpathians. As Vykos retreats for other ventures and leaves the city for his uninterested cousin Iszak to rule, the balance of power is shifting once again. It is here that we will begin our tale. --------------- There we are. A sufficiently dramatic opening. For those of you from the general interest thread, thank you for your patience. For anyone stumbling across this and finding themselves interested, welcome. Before beginning proper, I should make a few things known:

• This is an Old World of Darkness Vampire: The Dark Ages game in spirit. There is an existing lore surrounding the situation that is, frankly, too complicated to explain in its entirety. For veteran players this can be enticing, as it allows a great deal of intricacy--for new players this can be Hell, as it seems like everything is enmeshed. Due to my availability, I am forced to assume a degree of familiarity that may not exist with new players--I will do what I can, but I cannot be there to explain it all to you. I invite you to explore OWoD books, the White Wolf Wiki (link to come) and most importantly your knowledgeable fellow players to explain the basics of what I can't.
• As with the best of such games, I will be attempting to maintain canon background but there will be alterations. It has also been some time since I was really hardcore about the lore, and so I may not get everything precisely right. You're going to have to roll with it.
• While I will be using the character generation and progression rules as a guideline, I will not be using die rolls. I am using narrative mechanics to decide actions based on the real world comparative benchmarks that exist within the system and will arbitrate any arguments that arise if people can't place nicely. Which leads me to my next point...
• Play nicely. We're all at least some degree of adult here, which means that we're going to be civil about this. We're here to tell a cool story, not bicker and squabble and throw hissy fits. Standard roleplay etiquette applies--I trust that I don't need to explain what that means.

Now that we've got much of that out of the way, let's get the ball rolling and give you lot something you can work with: Character Generation rules. As said, we'll be using Vampire: the Dark Ages as a base. I highly recommend that you all acquire some copy of the character generation rules for it, as the starting character generation rules are what we will be using. I appreciate that you have your ancient vampire lord that you've been drooling over, but for the meantime you're going to have to suck it up as a neonate. We will be using this sheet as our basis. Please use it to get your character in order--I will have a formatted character sheet set up shortly, but in the meantime this will at least whet your whistle. As I am running this primarily by request, I will reward players that assist others and make my life easier. Help out your fellow players, do cool things that help my book-keeping, etc. and I will do my best to make sure it comes back to you. Some people have already done so without motivation, and I am deeply appreciative of that--your contributions have not been forgotten. Finally, it's late. This thread is a work in progress. I appreciate your patience.