A Continent of Banalities

A change of pace. I'll try to make a supervillain organization, using B.A.S.H (ultimate edition). Doctors Without Boundaries is officially called the League of Crime, but since Krimson Karnage came up with the nickname, it has stuck. Because supervillains love to call themselves doctor this and that, right? No end of fun.  DWB is a group of supervillains who have banded together in the hopes of seeing more success in their dastardly endeavors. Strength in numbers and so forth. At the moment they’re debating what sort of dastardly deed they should commit, and why.  Doctor Sooth II (20 pt character) Marcus Aurelius Brown is the legacy supervillain Doctor Sooth. His father Julius Brown was the original, the grandstanding menace to law and order that people remember. At home Julius was a petty tyrant, moody and perfectionistic, demanding things he couldn’t live up to himself. Not in a million years. To be perfectly honest it was a relief when he was in pokëy.  He did do a few...

Another duo for By Dawn They All Were Dead. A youngblood and an old-timer out to get a delivery of oxy in rural Maine. Charlie Metcalfe Physical 0 Intellectual 0 Social +1 Knack “I don't need no makeup, I got real scars” When you get a +1 from a 6, you get to keep it for the rest of the game. You only have two failures in you though.   Charlie’s Blues: Getting old isn’t all it’s chalked up to be. You thought you’d grow old with your wife Jo. Go dancing on Saturday night at the rec center with the other old duffers. Go fishing whenever you’d feel like it. Real golden years shit. Of course none of that’s happened. Jo found a lump in her breast one fine morning, and you spent a year seeing her being sick on chemo as the medical bills piled up. The cancer had dug in too deep, and despite the jovially condescending doctors probably doing their best, Jo died. The only person you’ve ever truly loved. The brains behind Pa, like the song says. The hole in your life came with a side of deb...

I'm cheating a bit and posting yesterday's and today's characters together. They're made for By Dawn They All Were Dead, an entirely too rudimentary system I made for SHORT horror games. Claire and Sharona are college students, and they're on a road trip together. Sharona the Vet Student Physical 0 Intellectual 0 Social +1 Knack “Get me another body bag, the body bag’s full” If another Character dies, you get their +1. You can’t off them yourself. You lost Beignet when you were six. She was a mostly white mix of poodle and something else. She was your best friend, and in a lot of ways your only one. Beignet loved playing fetch, and on that fatal day her exuberance at fetching a clumsily-thrown frisbee overshadowed anything you had tried to teach her about the road. The driver of the Subaru was awfully sorry. He never had a chance to stop or swerve. Your father was busy with work. Your mother hugged you, and told you that you should have been more careful. That’s wh...

Zaspira Gentle was a happy woman. She had graduated near the top of her class and recently been engaged to her long-time girlfriend Minnea. The world was at her feet, and that was her undoing. Zaspira was ever so slightly arrogant, and had done the unthinkable and CORRECTED the elf sorceress Shastra Blum, a rich alumnus of the Skeelvader College of Arcane Arts. Now, Shastra is nothing if not petty, and Zaspira lost more than a few job opportunities from a few careless words. Her response was a little tinged by desperation as well as arrogance. She was going to make a small deal with a demon. “After all” she reasoned “I have demonic blood myself, and I am well-versed in the Seven Conjurative Frameworks of Gonlin, at least in theory”. The grimoire promised that Eligos “...also attracts the favor of lords, knights and other important persons”, and that sounded like just the thing. The grimoire was a tatty old thing, and like such books was woefully incomplete if not downright deceptive. ...

Eight generations ago the Landsman family was incredibly wealthy, owning trading vessels and warehouses and even a gold mine. Then disaster struck. Disaster took the form of the dragon Arxaxasz Septimus, scourge of the desert, the peacock king, green-fire-rains-down, and other epithets beside. It descended upon the gold mine, made light work of workers, foremen, and Landsman matriarch Prismilla. The remaining Landsmans swore long and heavy oaths of revenge, ones that reverberate even today. Then came the deroute as successive generations squandered the remaining fortune on increasingly convoluted schemes of retribution. To wit, Adulo's grandmother attempted to poison the land around the dragon’s lair, and his father believed that an air-duel with the vexatious reptile was the ticket to success. The last of the Landsman fortune was spent on a bespoke fighter plane that barely got off the ground. It did however hit a fueling station, and Papa Landsman died in a spectacular explosion...

Kalmos’ family had a farm on the verdant Martinean Peninsula, and Halkianne was a name practically synonymous with hard labor in the olive groves of since time immemorial. Kalmos was strong, even as a child, and he worked hard every hour Fair Helia sent. Kalmos was ten when he had his epiphany, not that he’d use a word like that. The old ox Noko had always carried whatever was fastened to his yoke, but now he was old. The faithful creature was sent off to the rendering plant with little fanfare. That, Kalmos realized, was his fate. He would work until he was clapped out like Noko. Kalmos held on for a few more years. Duty and family are strong after all. The ache in his muscles and little to look forward to but more ache won out though, and Kalmos stowed away on a grain freighter bound for the Maju. Due to his size and his aversion to manual labor, Kalmos often found work as a bouncer, debt collector, but he really felt like he hit the jackpot when he met Abelhanz and became a Runner....