Arriving a bit late to the party here but I had an idea for a character while tuning out a staff meeting the other day based on a GURPS character I played once. Nathan "Neurosonic" Springfield is a sound manipulation specialist who can mentally manipulate any sound to mimic any other sound (upper limit: if he tries to make, for example, a finger snap sound like speech it will sound broken and/or robotic). He can amplify a sound into sonic damage and can isolate any sounds within a crowd. I'm toying with the idea of letting him hover using sound waves too but I'm not sure about it yet. I doubt I'll ever get to play as him as, I too, will likely be GMing most of the time I play SCRPG but I like the concept here.
Hi! This thread has been dead for a while but I just came up with a great character idea.
So there’s this guy. He’s just kind of a normal guy doing normal things. And then one day he’s walking around and bam he get’s caught up in a cult of gloom ritual or whatever. And he somehow escapes, but now he has magic powers, but theres a catch. His powers feed on the suffering of others. But he’s a good guy, doesn’t really have it in him to be bad. Life’s treated him pretty well so he decides to give back. He calls himself Deus Ex Machina and he only shows up at the last minute when the heroes are at their lowest so that he can feed off of there suffering and use it to beat the bad guy who was about to lay them low.
I realize it needs some work to be actually useable in the rpg but I like the concept.
OK... I briefly referenced her back on page 1, but a conversation in the Realm of Discord earlier this week and the activity here made me realize I didn't do more than name-drop. So, here goes:
Christina Walker's family knew the Parsons pretty well. Unfortunately, Rebecca Walker was the kind of hell mother that can only be imagined by Southern belles who are transplanted to the New England aristocracy. She was determined to push Christina into being the image of a high society debutante... and so, naturally, Kit pushed back. The one thing she didn't fight on was her mother's choice of prep school, because it was time away.
Christina - or, as she pointedly insists, Kit if you care about her opinion of you - accidentally discovered her own powers one late spring afternoon. Kimberly, Angela, and Grace were supposed to meet her down the block at Pauline's, but she was being forced back to the piano again. She was tired of Beethoven and sick of Bach - not that you could ever say either of those things to Rebecca Walker, let alone call your friends by nicknames or middle names in her presence. But there she was, and not able to leave until that harpy was satisfied with the sound of things.
Kit stormed away from the piano for a few moments, because just before being almost shackled to the blasted thing, she'd been reading this book with a great song in it, written by a girl who was just a few years older than she was. And she'd almost been able to hear Menolly singing before she got interrupted. So she grabbed the book from the shelf and held it open at the piano, reading the words over and over as she tried to pick out that melody. After several long minutes, she could practically see the written music in front of her, just behind the page... and so she reached in and tried to take it.
The problem that most novice Libriomancers have is that their control over what they're doing is pretty non-existent. So, not only did Kit get the first couple pages of Menolly's "Fire-Lizard Song," but as she found what she was looking for, her arm went through part of a Threadfall, and she got Threadscored by it. The shriek of pain brought her mother running, and the growing welt the entire length of her forearm got her a trip to the hospital. She also got two weeks in a psychiatric ward, because who would believe she took the music out from the book, and grounded for a month for stealing from the music store even though she hadn't been in at least two weeks.
So, what can she do? When enough people read, and love, a book, their belief empowers that book with a reality of its own. Libriomancers can reach into those realities, and make manifest in ours what exists there. Although any Libriomancer can reach into any book, most have a first love genre - Westerns, histories, romance - in Kit's case, it's fantasy with a side of science fiction. She finished school a couple years ahead of Felicia, and had just wrapped up her college degree when all Hells broke loose across realities. And a great way to snub her mother, she thought, was going to be to spurn the MRS degree that Rebecca Walker had her daughter set on acquiring and instead putting in an application to that new Sentinels of Freedom initiative that was happening in Megalopolis. Certain that if she used her real name on the application, Mr. Parsons - yeah, yeah, he used to be Legacy, but to her he's always Felicia's dad - would rat her out to her mother and all hell would really break loose, she wrote in "Lacuna." After all, a Lacuna is a place in a manuscript where something is missing...
Oh damn.
I knew there was a reason I liked you.
(And Lacuna.)
I haven't read the Hines books, but libriomancy seems awfully powerful to me. What keeps a libriomancer from pulling out Aladdin's lamp, or a plasma rifle, or Shieldbreaker from Saberhagen's novels, or some other ungodly powerful object?
Short answer: Some books which contain those world-breaking kinds of items have been magically locked. If you try to reach into them, even if you aren't aware that's what's up... bad things happen. That didn't afflict Kit, but she'll make references on an off to her friend/mentor Isaac, who *did*. (He was bullied and tried for Sting; between the Palantir and the One Ring, all of Tolkein is pretty firmly locked.)
Independent of that, bad (psychiatric) problems tend to happen to folks who overuse their abilities. There's a reason that one of the cards in my attempt to make a deck for her is called "Hearing Voices?"
This power is great, you can make up all kinds of good things and come up so many interesting twists. Going to need to be creative to pull this off.
Yeah... that's part of why I had prepared a list of things she was likely to carry and what she'd be getting from them.
I've got some ideas but in requires a question answered or a GM call - are there merfolk in the Sentinel Comics Universe or other aquatic (non-Maerynian) super-races? I haven't seen any reference but my knowledge of the lore isn't as great as others.
I don't think they've mentioned any (maybe some random alien race in passing), but given the Nightmist's Little Black Book episode, there would almost have to be mermaids and whatnot.
RickJonzz In your game you can just add Mermaids. The key thing is to be creative and have fun.
It seems I never threw my hat in the ring. I doubt I will ever get to play due to always GM this system.
But if I do I wanna be a to play an apprentice of NightMist before Harpy time. Gifted with brilliance as a chick he could read and comprehend book at an amazing pace. Learning Magic though books and after a chance encounter with CoG and NightMist force himself to become an apprentice. After some time he left to travel the world, taking care of problems that NightMist could not do.
I’m tooling around with a few ideas for characters, to get the creative juices flowing I picked cool sounding words and then used their definitions to make charcters here they are.
Benthos- Maerynian- Electrokinesis- Barnacle Armor- following the example of M’kk Dal’ton he joined the sentinels of freedom to live among the surface world. seeking to distinctify himself from tempest he gathered and crafted barnacles and coral from the ocean floor and uses them as armor.
Zenith- Gravity control- mountain climber that found an alien cave on a climb and was exposed to mysterious substance
Breakneck-speedster, limited momentum based invulnerability- Genetic power that he discovered as a child now a hero who will run at anything he thinks he can tackle and away from anything he thinks he can’t
Sabreur- Swordsman and magic user- determined man who mastered all forms of swordsmanship and sought out training from Zhu long to increase his potential his sword is now enchanted so that if it breaks in battle he breaks too
A concept I had in mind was Amadeus Klein/Doctor Helix: A Frankenstein-like mad scientist who once tried to conquer the world with his own army of genetically engineered soldiers, but got redeemed through the power of a proper psychological treatment.
Now he fights evil with his inventions and intense knowledge of bio-chemistry and genetics, inserting himself with marvelous formulas and shooting villains with his tranquilizer-gun (which may be filled with different tranquilizers for all kinds of organisms, or just plain acid). Maybe even with some mutant minions left from the villain days.
He's still getting the hang of being a hero, and still trying to learn the exact difference between an ethical experiment and a crime against the very concept of humanity, but hes trying.
But in practice I'm probably going to wait til I see what my hypothetical group comes up with, and then make something that complements the group.
I would love to be able to play, and if i do I would likely make Blackstone (not very original, it's her last name lol). She's a hit woman (freelance) but gets roped into a series of hits that "hits" too close to home. So she tries to do right by faking the hits, til she gets found out and has to fight against once of her biggest "employers". Really her biggest, or one of her biggest challenges is the life she got used to working high priced hits. Being a hero doesn't pay much... unless you go the "hero for hire" route. SO yeah, she's a bit of a anti-hero/merc.
So, she likes her guns, and at times does some wet work (or did). But she also has a chaos aura. Where things randomly happen (for better or worse around her). As she ties to "clean up" her act, she tries to learn how to use her chaos aura... to varying degrees of success and failure. She's a deeply flawed character with a lot of addiction/behavioral issues.
I like a challenge. ;)
note: My avatar is her. Not the best drawing I've done of her, but one that wouold fit for now.
I know this thread's been quiet for a while, but I recently remembered an old hero concept that I'll probably want to put into my SCRPG Universe to either play as(If I actually get the rare chance to be an actual player in a Superhero theme'd game in my group) or maybe have as an NPC(The more likely option since I'm pretty dang sure I'll be the one running). And since the second season of Sentinels Comics Live started up, I figure now's the time to get a second wave of interest started up. :)
Lightning-Bug has been a hero since they were a teenager, having gained their powers from a mishap when they were an intern at the Megalopolis Museum of Art and Natural History. Cutting their hand on an anchient statuette of an unidentified insectoid god(which had previously tested 'negative' for any mystical power or enchantment), the younster soon noticed they had gained enhanced strength, speed and agility that far surpasses the limits of a normal human. A pair of antennae sprouted from their head(easily enough hidden by tucking them back into their hair), giving them a superior 'danger sense'. And perhapse the most 'shocking' development, they were able to generate a personal electrical field that they could not only use to generate 'lightning blasts', they can also generate a 'Static Field' around their body that let's them either repell or attract themselves to any surface(increasing their jump height, repelling physical attacks, and even sticking to surfaces and wall-walking).
They used their powers to stop muggings and petti crimes that would fall under the radar of bigger heroes like the Freedom Five, but as they got older they attracted the ire of many a costumed villain and armed thug. The likes of the Hippo, Tantrum, Revolt, Revenant and Equity are just a few of the larger names they've tangled with; but that's not to say they don't have a slew of other nemeses all their own. Doc Crainid, Komodo, Synapse, Wild-Card and Killer Stag are just a few villains that have gained a score to settle with Lightning-Bug over the years.
The young hero has kept fighting evil all the way through their highschool and college years, picking up a degree in Forensic Science and starting a fledgling career in the MCPD. Now in their mid twenties, Lighning-Bug has grown into a a fine hero. They may not be as well known as others in their field, but that hasn't stopped them from helping those in need, and enjoying the journey every step of the way.
What do you guys think? I know, I took alot of inspiration from a certain popular 'Aracnid-Based Hero', but hopefully I made enough of their story and powers different enough to build on and leave the archetype. I'm not married to the idea of them being from Megalopolis. They could easily enough be from any other city, but I'll proabably avoid Rook City this time, to keep things a little more positive.