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hexarchate_rpg2017-06-11 11:11 pm
yhlee) wrote in hexarchate_rpg2017-06-11 11:11 pm
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Character Applications
Please post character applications as comments here.
Edit: We're currently closed to new characters.
Edit: We're currently closed to new characters.
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How can we get in touch with you? (email, DW messaging, other): DW messaging will work
Character name: Liatris Alaric
One-paragraph (100 words) summary of your character.
A traveling natural philosopher, Alaric journeys from star to star studying and critiquing methods of maintaining a consensus physics package. He likes to style himself something of a scholar and teacher, offering advice even when it's clearly unwanted. He is literally heartless, due to an ill-advised graduating thesis involving a miniaturized reality engine, and he uses this as an excuse to claim to be academic and detached from mere emotions. The fact that emotions are not from the heart is irrelevant.
NOTE: In the following section, limit your answers to up to 100 words per question.
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How did your character first learn of the hexarchate?
He was traveling the stars and studying the different methods that societies use to harness exotic effects and create a stable set of metaphysics within their region of control. (Poetry? Really?) From a distance the hexarchate sounded particularly interesting. Calculating the desirable physics conditions and then using a mathematical calendar to create compliance sounded very logical, sensible, and sane. He wanted to see it was as clean and efficient under the hood as it sounded.
Why did your character join this rebellion?
It was a bit of a downer to discover that the cold mathematical calendar was backed by an unfathomably vast scheme of torture and murder. (Actually, he can fathom exactly how much pain is being administered to support it all, he just tries not to think about it too much.) He found both the nature of their remembrances and the hexarchate's hegemonic expansionism offensive. He strives to teach them that such crude acts are uncouth and unnecessary.
More personally, the Vidona get really upset when you call them a bunch of ignorant savages who can't do basic calculus without taking their shoes off.
What would make your character consider giving up the cause?
(Note for this and further questions: Tell me things that you're willing to have happen in the game. I may go this far with your character. I will not go further. What I'm asking for is story/character hooks.)
Ultimately, this isn't really his fight. He's just visiting. If he feels that reform is futile, he is likely to abandon that in favor of just burning it all down so that new seeds may take hold. Also, an offer of supreme executive power would be extremely tempting. He probably wouldn't take it and betray the entire rebellion, though, mostly out of paranoia regarding offers too good to be true. He's heard that particular speech before; it turned out poorly for everyone involved.
Name something your character does not want to lose.
Face, mostly. He has few physical possessions, and as a mere academic observer he has no emotional connections here. (Or so he says.) He can have trouble admitting that he is wrong, and will go to considerable and often unwise length to avoid doing so.
Name something your character would die for.
Alaric would insist that he would only die for some suitably grand gesture, like saving an entire world, or sparking a philosophical revolution that changed a million million minds. You know, the sort of thing that historians and bards and so forth would speak of as legend for the next thousand years. In truth, he would probably throw himself in front of a bullet for a friend. Fortunately mere bullets would mostly just cause him to brag endlessly about his selflessness.
Name something your character would kill for.
Alaric is more one for ironic fates than killing, because killing is pedagogically dubious. If he were to kill, though, it would probably be because someone was a threat to his students and colleagues. That, or an insult to his intellect; a few particularly uncouth individuals have met their fate spitted upon his sword Uncertainty.
Who is your character's best friend?
While he has no friends in the hexarchate (yet), he is engaged in a long-winded and often fractious exchange of letters and pointed journal articles with several colleagues across the universe.
Describe your character's perfect partner (romantic or friend or coworker, your choice).
Male. Scientifically inclined, perhaps in one of the more social-oriented fields that can compliment his more mathematical inclinations. Kitchen skills not required but certainly a plus.What part of heartless do people not understand?
What is your character's secret dream or desire, the one they've never told anyone?
He really does, in his heart of hearts, or at least the whirring sphere where his heart once was, want to fit in. He wants friends who he can hang out with as equals and do various generic friendly things with. The problem is that he's pretty much constitutionally incapable of admitting that anyone is his intellectual equal. He also has trouble doing any of that like a normal person, and the bemused reactions of his friends just make him even more grumpy.
How will your character die?
(NOTE: I will not kill your character unless you pre-arrange it with me, but I may put you in a dangerous situation based on this.)
Mere beams and bullets are too pedestrian to worry him; the empty vacuum of space has no effect upon one who has no heart. There are fates other than death, however, particularly from those with sufficiently unique and exotic technologies. For practical purposes, what difference is there between death and being sealed in the heart of a dead star until the memory of man fades into myth and legend? He has no intention of finding out, because it would really put a crimp in his studies.
Does your character have any powers that the hexarchate would consider "exotic" (magical)?
Alaric can manipulate local calendrical values, allowing for unexpected exotics to function - or alternatively nullify them. A favorite party trick is to methodically deconstruct some technology or concept to demonstrate how it works, and then put it back together again in a different, heretical way. He thinks of it as a teaching moment. This can have more practical uses, but a side-effect is leaving a wake of calendrical rot behind him as ripple effects from the changes spread.
What do you (the player) enjoy most in an RPG?
Collaborative story-telling, especially when character interactions lead to the plot going off in unexpected directions.
==
You have 500 words to tell me anything else you want me and the other players to know about your character. Do it here.
Once upon a time, a sun was murdered and a world was swallowed by primordial chaos, reality itself failing as the very concepts that made it drifted apart. If they knew about it, the Rahal would call it a warning about the dangers of calendrical heresy, as a well-ordered system prevents such excesses. They would be entirely wrong about the causes, not to mention hypocritical about world-killing, but the real reasons are not worth going into at this junction, nor is how this situation was fixed. Needless to say, the people of his world are quite keen on preventing any reoccurrences and trains scholars to study these things.
Alaric, in his pride, decided to transcend mere conventional academic study of calendrical math and sought tutelage at the Bleak Academy from the master of death's dominion; a decision that in retrospect he agrees was probably a bad idea. Now he travels the stars to examine other forms of maintaining consensus reality. A depressing number of them are, when you get got right down to it, really terrible in one way or another. The hexarchate is just the cherry on top of the scatalogical baking metaphor.
Alaric appears quite young, in his late twenties at most, and is tall but lanky. His black hair tends to be ruffled and flop in improbably directions. As is proper for a scientist, he habitually wears a lab coat and goggles, although he will exchange the coat for a sweater or other suitably professor-like attire (or what he think passes for that) when the occasion calls for something more formal.
Occasionally, if you happen to look at him just the right way, his eyes are full of an endless field of falling stars. It's probably an optical illusion. Probably.
(Inspired by an RP character previously created for Nobilis and Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, suitably toned down to non-miraculous levels. [And I'm happy to adjust that further.] I was a bit hesitant to do a hexarchate native because I've only read the books once and I'm sure I've missed a lot of detail, so being a bit of a fish out of water seemed easier.)
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(Sorry for the delayed response--we're in the process of moving house.)
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Maybe it would be better as more of a "White Rose"-style null, if you're familiar with the Black Company or 40k Blanks? Basically preventing exotic effects from working but not affecting invariant technology, in a limited radius. (Like a football field or smaller, unless there's extensive preparation; certainly not enough to affect space combat or things like that.)
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Anyway, we can hash this out--this looks pretty good, and welcome to the game! We are now full up for a starting roster of players.
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Does your character have any powers that the hexarchate would consider "exotic" (magical)?
One day, Alaric will be a certified master of calendrical manipulation, able to change local calendrical values at will so as to demonstrate how alternate systems might function to an enraptured audience. Sadly, he is still several graduate courses from getting that certificate. Oh, how he aches under these archaic professional restrictions!
He has, however, gotten pretty good at creating a calendrical null-space, where only invariant technology functions. He can turn this on and off as desired, in a space up to about a football field. (Usually as desired, at any rate. Occasionally there have been... mishaps. He blames the universe.) Mostly he uses this as a party trick to show how some piece of technology works.
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Well, strictly speaking the goggles are hanging around his neck, but otherwise it is safe to say that unless specified otherwise he is in the lab coat.