Heart: The City Beneath Character Concept: Gnoll Vermissian Knight
Trying out actual character creation over here. And I really want my train knight, my armoured paladin of a warped subway network that got hooked into a vast, reality-breaking eldritch thing.
Character creation in Heart is pretty easy. Pick your ancestry, which has no direct mechanical impact. Pick your calling and record the core ability from it. Pick your class and record the core ability from it. Pick 1 major and 3 minor abilities from your class. Pick your equipment. Pick two starting story beats from your calling. Fill out the details around the mechanical core, including answering the questions from your ancestry and calling. Voila! So:
Character Sheet: Ahkoura Roselight, Vermissian Knight
Name: Ahkoura Roselight
Ancestry: Gnoll
Class: Vermissian Knight
Calling: Enlightenment
Skills: Discern (Enlightenment), Delve (Vermissian), Endure (Steelbones), Hunt (Phantom Lens)
Domains: Technology (Vermissian), Warren (Tunnel Rat)
Active Story Beats: Gain favour with a faction that can help you learn more about your goal. Find a helpful text.
Equipment: Scrapsword (kill, d6), Magelight Rig (delve, d6).
Resources: Spare Wires & Capacitors (technology, d6).
Trinkets: Small sphere with a southern star map on it (Gnoll). Brass-inlaid tin half-filled with brown, gritty stimulant (Gnoll). Book of handwritten theories and observations (Enlightenment).
Abilities:
Core Ability (Enlightenment): “UNORTHODOX METHODS. You blend together method and madness in pursuit of your goals. Gain the Discern skill. Once per session, before you roll dice to resolve an action, instead state that your result is a 6. You succeed but take stress.”
Core Ability (Vermissian Knight): VERMISSIAN PLATE. Your armour is made up of scavenged, barely-understood technology from the alternate realities inside the Vermissian network. Once per session, when you consume a resource with the Technology or Occult domains by augmenting or repairing your armour, roll the resource’s dice and choose one of the following:
• Remove stress marked against Blood, Mind or Echo equal to the amount rolled.
• Inflict stress on a delve or adversary equal to the amount rolled.
• (D8 resource or higher) Gain access to a skill or domain for the rest of the session.
• (D8 resource or higher) Increase your Blood protection by 1 for the rest of the situation.
Major Abilities (Vermissian Knight):
AETHERIC FIELD. Your armour buzzes with static that makes your hair stand on end; this discharge can keep you safe from the body-warping effects of the Vermissian. Once per session, activate this power. You gain +3 Echo protection until the end of the current situation.
Minor Abilities (Vermissian Knight):
TUNNEL RAT. You have performed the Rite of Suffocation, and know ways of slowing your breathing to survive longer. Gain the Warren domain. You can hold your breath for a very long time, allowing you to stay underwater or in toxic areas for extended periods.
STEELBONES. Your armour bolts onto special implants that absorb harmful energy and distribute it through your body. Gain the Endure skill. You can fall distances of up to 3 storeys without taking damage.
PHANTOM LENS. Various blood, ichors and spittles have been used to treat these lenses, allowing you to see into dimensions other than the material. Gain the Hunt skill. While you wear these lenses, you can track anything – even if it doesn’t leave a tangible trail.
Character Concept:
I wanted the Vermissian Knight:
“The Vermissian is a cursed, centuries-old mass transport network that the people from the City Above built to get from place to place quicker. To power it, they tapped into the wellspring of potential that is the Heart, and damned every single tunnel and station to eternal weirdness. The Vermissian never officially opened. Now, desperate people, fringe historians and heretic cults hide in the infrastructure, using the strange unreality within to further their own ends. Using barely-understood technology and living in the space between worlds, the Vermissian Knights do their level best to understand the parasite reality and protect others they find there. They are in high demand as companions on delves: they have an understanding of the Heart, a good sword arm and a suit of powered armour built from scavenged train materials that helps keep them (and their allies) alive. Knights will inscribe the names of landmarks that they have discovered, or found stable routes to, on their armour – it is as much a research project and an advertisement of their prowess as it is a means of protection. Each knight’s suit is utterly unique, using technology taken from a dozen different places: different gauges of steels, different weights and levels of protection and flexibility and controls that are often inscrutable to anyone but the creator themselves.”
I love them instantly and completely. I’m gonna be a train knight and explore a cursed mass transit system.
And because most of what I want to do with this character is explore a cursed mass transit network, I had two main callings to choose from: Adventure and Enlightenment. Adventure because exploration is half the goal of that calling, and Enlightment because I don’t just want to see things, I want to know how and why they happen. I did go for Enlightenment in the end. I don’t just want to explore the Vermissian as it is now, I want to seek forbidden, dangerous knowledge on how a fuck up this titanic and massive happened. And, possibly … could it be fixed? Or used?
And. With that in mind. Ancestry has no direct mechanical benefit in Heart. But. The gnolls. See, humans are the tinkerers of the setting, they’d have reasons to want to unravel the Vermissian. The aelfir, high elves, the ones who built it, might want to know how they’d botched it. But the gnolls. The gnolls are currently at war with the aelfir and the City Above, Spire. They’re the enemy. And the gnolls come from a techno-occult culture:
“The gnollish empire (and its capital city Al’Marah) is founded on their advanced demonological and mechanical abilities; there are tales of djinn being bound into brass spheres to power uncanny devices. In the confines of the Heart, where the gaps between realities are thin, they can achieve unthought-of results in mechanoccultism – and great machines from ages past thrum and whirr in the hidden depths, just waiting to be found.”
“Al’Marah, the capital city of the southern gnollish desert kingdom, has no state religion. The government there dictates that the souls of all people who die within sight of the central ziggurat of Al’Marah are absorbed into the Source: a coruscating realm of energy from which djinns and ifrits are drawn to power gnollish machinery. They know this to be a scientific fact because specially-shielded teams have braved the depths of the ziggurat, found heaven and reported back on it with first-hand eyewitness accounts.”
The Vermissian was an attempt to run a mass-transit system off occult energy bored from the core of an eldritch extra-planar nascent god/reality seed/parasitic reality/thing. And the gnolls. The gnollish capital city is powered by their heaven. They hooked up their machinery to their afterlife.
Can you imagine a gnoll coming to the Spire, looking at the massive fuck up that was the Vermissian, and just going … How did you all fuck up this badly? This is basic occult power transmission! What did you do, or what did you plug into, that managed to do this?
One of the options for how you, as a gnoll (who are, again, currently at war with the City Above), even wound up in the Heart in the first place is that you are an escaped prisoner of war. And I was thinking. She escaped through the Vermissian. She ran into the weirdness of the tunnels, and no one followed her, and it turns out there are good reasons no one followed her, and she nearly died (or worse than died), and the only reason she’s alive now is that the Vermissian Knights pulled her out of the mess and got her to Derelictus. So she’s washed up in the undercity, very battered, very confused, and maybe she should be thinking about how to continue escaping and get home, but …
What was that? What she saw in there. How do you get that? What has to happen?
And the Knights. The Knights helped her. They pulled her out of there. They looked after her.
And just. The Vermissian. How do you manage to get … What has to happen? What did you plug into? How did you do it so badly?
So she decided to stay. Nascent loyalty. Raw fascination. She decided to become a Vermissian knight, and work her way up the order, and somehow get to a point where she can find the original plans for the system, and figure out what the blue bloody hells went wrong.
She can justify it a bit. If this went so badly wrong here, will the ziggurat back home eventually go wrong too? Her people need to know. Maybe the enemy, the aelfir, just fucked up on a titanic scale, maybe the gnolls won’t ever have to worry about this happening because they’re not incompetent, but … just in case. What if it was something else? Is it just the nature of the Heart? What is the Heart, and how does it compare, technologically, with the Source? Was it a fuck up of method? Did the aelfir do something very silly with their couplings? What happened, and how replicable a mistake was it?
So. Her calling questions: What impossible thing is she hoping to achieve in the City Beneath? What’s the first step on her journey?
She wants to find the original blueprints for the Vermissian network. She wants to find the original insertion point, where the aelfir ‘dug deep into the City Beneath and pierced the Heart Itself, seeking to use its unimaginable energy to bind each station with one another on a mystical level’. She wants to find out what went wrong.
And her first steps there are to ingratiate herself with the Vermissian Knights, to join them, work for them, build up trust within the order. And to search for documentation that could give her hints towards what she seeks. Hence our starting Enlightenment story beats: “Gain favour with a faction that can help you learn more about your goal. Find a helpful text.”
For her Vermissian elective abilities, I kitted her out for exploration and tracking, mostly. I was tempted to give her ‘Black Knight’ to get the Occult domain, which would make sense from her backstory, and if I was actually running her I’d talk with a GM about that.
I also took no abilities that would actually give her any protection, aside from Aetheric Field. I probably should have. I was tempted by the Arcane Rebreather for permanent echo protection, or the obvious Armour Plating or Stalwart. But. I just want her to poke around? No fall damage. Ability to hang around underwater or in toxic locations. Tracking ability. I want her to look for things, not necessarily survive them. And, I mean, Vermissian Knights are fairly tough from a standing start.
So yeah. There’s Ahkoura Roselight. A gnoll Vermissian knight who just really, really wants to know, in exacting detail, how the hell you manage to fuck up this badly. Heh.
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SEVEN : Division United
This story is the one I currently focus on.
SUMMARY
It follows the Seventh Division, a dysfunctional superheroes team protecting a fictive, slightly futuristic version of the USA ruled by a martial law. Most of the plot revolves around them and the teenage MC Erwan fighting different antagonists with or without special abilities, while trying to handle their chaotic daily life together.
Created circa 2019.
CHARACTERS
Protagonists :
ERWAN (R-0)
he/him
A teenager with a mysterious power who meets the 7th Division after a terrible misunderstanding.
ROXANNE (Chlorine)
she/her
A superheroine of the 7th Division who will become Erwan's best friend.
ALOÏS (The Clockworker)
he/him
The leader of the 7th Division.
EZRA (Queen Elizabeth)
he/she
Aloïs' twin brother and the creator of the Division.
ARTHUR (Day Bird)
he/him
The only member of the team not to have a surhuman ability.
GRACE (E-DEN)
she/her
A superheroine and member of the 7th Division.
MYKO (Nuclear Blast)
they/them
The latest hero to have joined the team.
RUBY (Dead Whispers)
she/her
Arthur's teenage daughter who has psychic powers.
Antagonists :
LILYAS (Reborn 7.0)
he/him
A man who was genetically modified in order to bring Roxanne back to the mafia.
KREATOR
he/him
A mad scientist who creates giant chimeras to eradicate the human race.
JORDAN (Gambling Joe)
he/him
An animated skeleton controlling fired, eternally cursed after selling his soul to a vampire.
ARISTIDE (Ariki)
he/him
The vampire Jordan sold his soul to.
LEANOR (Red Velvet)
she/her
Ezra's former best friend who resents him and aims at his downfall.
THE PURGE:
GINGER
he/she/they
The leader of The Purge, an antagonist and rival group of superheroes.
THEO (Motionless)
he/him
A member of The Purge.
HA-YOON (Steelboned)
she/her
Another member of The Purge and Theo's best friend.
RAVI (Thunderstruck)
he/him
Ginger's boyfriend and teammate in The Purge.
MILDRED (Krystal Klear)
she/her
The youngest member of The Purge.
Minor characters :
LOUISON (Mimesis)
she/her
A young freelance superheroine who admires Roxanne and tries to look like her.
SAMIRA
she/her
Grace's wife.
RONNIE (Dark Eagle)
he/him
Arthur's close friend, an influent informator and occult expert.
LYSSANDERA
she/her
Erwan's biologic big sister from another planet.
NA'WËNN
she/her
Lyssandera's childhood friend and ex lover who's forced to fight her.
SELGAR
he/him
A giant harpie, originally one of Kreator's failed experiences.
CAT
she/her
Aloïs' girlfriend/lover/crush.
CHARLIE
he/him
Ezra's personal secretary.
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