The Orphan Of Ages:Character Creation

Character Creation

Phase One

GM: Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception It is the largest Catholic Church in the United States, second largest in North America, with over 70 chapels dedicated to Mary herself.

Connection: Morgan has connections with a mother cult that snuck the bones of their deceased founder into the Basilica's Crypt three years ago. The group sometimes sneaks in to conduct rituals to this day.

Mr. Prim:

Morgan Hart Williamson

Identity: Sociomancy

Obsession: Becoming a Mommy

Unnatural: 2

NPC: Shana Gyllenham, writer of "The Mommy's Guide to Living" - a self-help guru charger.

Meriss

Emily Reed

Obsession: Become the Mother Humanity needs to improve themselves

Unnatural: 3

NPC: Mark Thompson

Mark is Emily's college boyfriend. He was a film student and heavily into tropes. They drifted apart after college. He's probably a Cinemancer now.

DannyK

Erica Raynor Identity: Vestimancy

Obsession: Becoming the best women’s doctor in the country

Unnatural: 5

Location: Maman statue

Randall Thompson

Randall seemed to have it all going for him, a good job, a healthy toddler and a wife pregnant with another child. Then something awful happened, and his family died. It seemed like an awful accident, maybe a grisly car wreck or random assault in their home. Randall saw it, and it seemed to break his mind. He insisted it wasn't something simple like that, but something unnatural. He left everything behind to try to run it down, and dropped away from everything that had seemed to matter in his life.

Identity: Detritomancy (possibly cryptomancy if we want to switch him away from a broken vagabond living rough)

If detritomancy he is living on the streets, probably squatting in an abandoned building, and sorting through things to sort it out.

Secondary Identity: Detective

Obsession: Preventing what happened to his family from happening to someone else (and sorting out what it was). This could hook him in easily to a search for the child, to protect it.

Phase Two

Morgan Hart Williamson

Relate to a PC

What if Erica is Morgan's pregnancy doctor and also her Guru? Feels like a very clingy Sociomancer situation.

Add Another Identity

I think Friendly is a good choice for who I am.

Link Two Elements

The Maman Statue is connected to Morgan. She's been dreaming about it.

The Dream:

A dull perception of the world around as you dangle in the egg sack of a sleek and monstrous metal spider, life throbbing in her. It is warm and comforting and as it should be. But the spider crawls over the bones of countless humans, small and pitiful below. The bones of adults and children, fading slowly to dust.

And with her, in the egg sac, eyes closed and oblivious, are other women, each large with a child of her own. United.

The dream used to be a reassuring thing. The bones were creepy, but they were always distant. It was safe inside the great spider. Inside Maman.

Then things changed. The women inside the spider woke up. They started fighting with each other. Their labias peeled back to reveal pedipalps and chelicerae of a spider, as well as a horrible phallic spike that emerges. They fight until is in position, and then that hairy arthropodal spike bursts into a rivals womb, and drinks the child within. There's no escape, just struggle and infantophagy.

In the center of it all is a dead woman, her face no more than a skull. Within her body a child laughs, a horrible hyena cackle, but no one has yet laid their pedipalps upon it.

Relate to the Cabal

The Cabal is probably my Mentor, I'd think.

Create Clout

The Sh!t Noone Meant to Tell You: A baby book enchanted with infinite use Crowd Source.

Emily Reed

Relate to a PC: Responsibility: Morgan

Add Another Identity: Alpha Bitch

Relate to the Cabal: Guru

Link Two Elements: Shana Gyllenham, is or was part of the cult that snuck it's founders bones into the shrine of the National Basilica.

Clout: The Coffee Klatch ritual This ritual is designed to help the caster gather information.

The caster and at least two other participants must be biologically female. Men may participate but may not cast the ritual.

The caster must announce to at least two non participants that “I'm going to have coffee with the girls”. This statement may be repeated by any other participant to strengthen the ritual.

The participants (who do not all have to be chargers) must meet in a single family home that has been occupied for at least five years. Apartments are also acceptable provided they meet these requirements.

The ritual must last at minimum one hour.

During the ritual the participants must consume at least three cups of coffee and at least two alcoholic beverages. A participant may announce to the others “I'm pregnant” to avoid this requirement. (A non pregnant participant who uses this caveat more than twice in similar rituals will shortly find out they are pregnant. Despite any birth control or gender requirement)

During the ritual the participants will engage in small talk and gossip of a general nature. As the ritual reaches its peak the participants will begin to dispense news of an occult nature. This is often without any previous knowledge of the situation.

The ritual ends when one or more of the participants announce “I have to go fix dinner”

The caster must prepare a single course meal and serve it to another person within one hour of the ritual's end or roll a memory test to retain any information gathered.

Erica Raynor

Relate to a PC: Favorite: Emily, former roommate and only confidante.

Another Identity: Women's Doctor

Link Two Elements: Mark Thompson, Emily's ex, is making a documentary about Shana Gyllenham, writer of "The Mommy's Guide to Living" and it's getting picked up by the Lifetime Channel. This is a big break for both of them and it's so annoying.

Relate to the Cabal: Mentor: she has a million questions about how the occult works and how to avoid getting hurt and sees the Cabal as her little network of female energy in a harsh male-dominated world.

Clout: The Oracle Baby. This is one of the weird occult things she got involved with at work, a woman brought it in one day and wanted to know what to do with it. Erica knows perfectly well that a real doctor would know what to do with a tiny baby floating around in a big pickle jar, but she doesn't... and the baby talks to her sometimes, in a tiny little voice in her head. It knows things! A charger she showed it to once told her that it was called a Tiresias Bottle, and that it was probably created unconsciously by someone with natural talent, but she just calls it the Baby. She hides it in the back of the fridge and keeps telling herself she needs to find a better place for it. It's saved her life at least once with a cryptic warning in it's tiny little psychic voice.

Phase Three

Morgan Hart Williamson

2 Notches: Helplessness 4/Isolation 6

Link: Let's say I'm connected to Emily. Probably because she is interested in my baby?

Identities: Sociomancy, Pregnant, Friendly

More Clout:

Emily Reed

2 Notches: Helplessness 7/Isolation 5

Link: ???

Identities: Nothing new, Occult Scientist is Obsession

More Clout: Co-Founder of The Daughters of Gaia

Erica Raynor

2 Notches: Violence 4/Self 7

Link: Morgan is my project. She's a friend, sure, but the whole pregnancy thing is something I really got into, kind of living it vicariously through her while acting as the pregnancy expert which I pretend to be. If her baby turns out to be the Messiah then everything will have been worthwhile.

Identities: Party Girl

More Clout: In keeping with the identity above, I'm going to say that Erica's got a lot of "friends", maybe just people that she went shopping with or did blow with in a night club bathroom, or somebody she treated for STD's or sewed up their knife wound. She's pretty indiscriminate and puts everybody in her Rolodex, never know when they come in handy later. (Without knowing the other cabals etc. in the game, it's hard to be more specific.)

Phase Four

Morgan Hart Williamson Element: Radio KEYE Radio KEYE (Key? K-Eye? Kiwi? They always spell it out) is a Charger radio station that broadcasts at 3:33am for 33 minutes each night on a hidden frequency (yes, it’s 3:33am in your local timezone, there are relay stations all over). They air phone interviews with nutters, loonies, and wackos and play music that some people claim puts them into hypnagogic states but is, probably, just normal every day smooth jazz.

Morgan tries to listen every night and has even called in to their monthly contests on occasion (she’s always just short of being the 3rd caller).

Final Clout: The Soccer Mom's Car It's an old, barely functional 1983 Dodge/Plymouth Vista. It runs okay, but the AC has trouble sometimes. Thing is, it's an insanely safe car. Like, impossibly so. Firstly, anyone who sits inside is compeled to put on a seat belt, if they don't they face a Rank 3 Violence check as thoughts of hideous crashes run through their mind. Secondly, the driver gets +20% to any roll to avoid the car crashing or getting damaged. Finally, if the car ever does crash anyone under 18 will be perfectly unscathed, no matter how bad the crash (well, technically they could be trapped inside and if the car starts burning they might be in trouble from suffocation... no one's tested that). Anyone over 18 is in the usual amount of danger.

Foil: Kang Juwon

This has got to be somebody Morgan abandoned when she switched Egregores, some person who trusted her and relied on her… and then she ghosted them.

Maybe it was someone who was working towards some grand project. Someone who had a plan to move towards apotheosis, an avatar of The Player working towards Godwalkerhood. Let’s call him… Kang Juwon. He moved heaven and earth to arrange for the fall of the extant Godwalker and was able to implement a game tournament for the seat among the various Players (including the now deposed former Walker. She was the key to his victory, his right hand in this big final move he intended… and then she just stopped answering his calls. Things did not go according to plan.

As a powerful avatar of The Player, Juwon can force people to play by the rules of a game of his choosing.

Emily Reed

Element: Thomas Draper, former lover. Copious GM notes for him.

Final Clout: ???

Foil: ???

Erica Raynor

Element: The Swan wine bar and spa, a female-friendly establishment founded by feminist entrepreneurs, a place where you can get a massage and a glass of wine, or go for happy hour, or have a serious business lunch in the wood-paneled back rooms. By design or accident, the place is full of positive mojo and the serious bouncers they hire make it a safe place for meetings. Also, cleanest bathrooms in the state. Erica calls the Swan her second office, organizes women's health events there, and is frequently found there after work with a glass in her hand.

Final Clout: The Kate Spade special

Foil: Priya Lamba is a fashion designer who went to school with Emily and Erica. She was always blisteringly ambitious and Erica and Priya for a while had ideas of starting a clothing label together as a way of developing their shared obsession with clothing. Adepts rarely get along together despite the shared obsessions, and this was no exception. After a intense affair where they lived together, wore each other's clothes and spent every waking moment sewing and modeling, they bounced hard off each other, going in nearly opposite directions, Priya into the world of fashion in New York or San Francisco, and Erica settling down as a local women's doctor. Erica has kept tabs on Priya's brilliant career and has noted that she's recently also gotten into the women's health racket, developing fashionable maternity clothing and doing fundraisers for Planned Parenthood.