For those interested: I've decided that I'm going to just put in an edit request to use my veteran rewards to get this on Strix's character sheet so it's active and available. If I wait to first run an origin story thread for his acquisition of it, then, at our current posting rates, it could easily be a year and a half plus of real-life time before we actually get to use the damned thing. I'll reserve the right to do a flashback thread at some point, but otherwise, I'd just like to get this into circulation, and I'm content to leave it as a Noodle Incident.
Anyone who wants their PCs to have been involved in the acquisition of the club and/or who wants to be a member, let me know, and be sure to buy the Benefit feat described below when you get the chance. (I think access to the club is worth a 1PP Benefit feat, and I don't think Strix should have to it since he's paying the Equipment cost.)
(@Dr Archeville, @Tiffany Korta, @Thunder King, your Bedlam PCs are particularly well suited to have been involved in such an effort, and Strix has already worked with most of them before.)
(@Dr Archeville, unless you have some other preference, I'd be fine with Dead-Head and Strix having met for the first time during that effort.)
I know edit requests take some time, so let me know as soon as you've submitted one, and I'll be happy to act as if you already have it on your sheet in any thread which might take place while you're still waiting on the edit.
Here's another pass at the HQ. Let me know if any of you have any final input, concerns, etc. before I submit my own edit request.
I made it a bit less malevolent and counter-productive for the designated members/residents, but still quite a ride for any "guests", invited or otherwise.
I voluntarily capped all the attack powers at PL10, since that's our Bedlam cap.
(And yes, I did steal a bunch of stuff from The House That Hate Built in Paragons.)
New Feat:
Benefit (Twilight Lodge Member)
Headquarters:
The Twilight Lodge [35EP = 7PP]
Power Level: 13 Size: Large Exterior (500ft, Mansion) / Huge Interior (1,000ft, Castle) [3EP] Toughness: 10 [1EP] (Magically Warded and Ectoplasm-Reinforced Structure) Features: [31EP]
Concealed 3 (+20 DC) (Magical Perception Filter, Unholy Aura)
Defense System 2 (Ghosts, Zombies)
Dimensional Portal (Hell)
Dual Size (Interdimensional Structure)
Feature: Secret Sewer Entrance
Fire Prevention System
Garage
Gym
Holding Cells 2 (Toughness 15, Nullify 10) (Magically Warded and Ectoplasm-Reinforced Dungeon)
Library
Living Space 2 (Masterwork)
Personnel (Undead Servants)
Pool
Powers 7 (182PP)
Power System (Hellfire Furnace)
Security System 3 (DC30) (Magical Wards)
Self-Repairing (Ectoplasm-Infused Structure, Undead Servants)
Workshop (Artificer/Ritualist) Powers: [PL13 x 2 = 26PP per rank, x7 ranks = 181/182PP] Concealment 3 (ESP effects, Mental-type senses, Extras: Duration [Continuous], Flaws: Limited [Observers outside the clubhouse can use ESP effects and Mental-type senses to perceive the exterior of the clubhouse, but not the interior, and vice versa], Permanent) [3PP] Features 1 (Temporal Inertia) [1PP]
Immunity 1 (Mister Strix's vampiric aura) [1PP]
Nullify 10 (Insubstantial, Super-Movement [Dimensional Travel], and Teleport effects of any descriptor, Extras: Action 3 [Reaction], Effortless, Range [Perception], Flaws: Limited [Only counters attempts to enter or exit the clubhouse]) [62PP]
Obscure 7 (Sense Types: All, Area: 500ft radius, Extras: Action 3 [Reaction], Flaws: Duration 2 [Instant], Limited [Machines], Partial Concealment, Range [Touch], Uncontrolled) [7PP]
Psychomancy 23 (46PP Array, Feats: Alternate Power 3) [49PP]
Base Power: Mind Reading 10 (Extras: Action [Standard], Flaws: Limited [Probe], Feats: Subtle) [11PP]
Alternate Power: Emotion Control 10 (Extras: Area [General, Burst], Mental, Selective, Flaws: Limited [Fear], Feats: Progression [Area Size] 3 [500ft radius]) [33PP]
Alternate Power: Illusion 10 (Sense Types: All, Extras: Selective, Flaws: Phantasm, Feats: Progression [Area Size] 6 [500ft radius]) [46PP]
Alternate Power: Teleport 10 (Extras: Duration 2 [Continuous, no action needed to keep portals open], Portal, Flaws: Action 2 [Standard Action to open or close a portal], Limited [Short-Range Jumps, 1,000ft], Limited [To/From inside the building], Feats: Change Direction, Insidious, Progression [Portal Size] 2 [25ft], Subtle) [25PP]
Super-Senses 13 (Normal Vision, Extras: Counters Concealment, Counters Illusion, Counters Obscure [All Descriptors], Penetrates Concealment, Flaws: Limited [Inside the building]) [7PP]
Transform 10 (Memory Alteration, Extras: Action 3 [Reaction], Alternate Save [Will], Duration [Continuous, Lasting], Mental, Range [Perception], Flaws: Limited [Memory alteration is limited to erasing or distorting memories of the clubhouse interior], Limited [The clubhouse will only alter a target's memory when they are leaving the building], Feats: Subtle) [51PP]
Description:
In the Greely Point neighborhood of Bedlam City sits the headquarters of the Twilight Club, a mansion built in the Beaux-Arts style popular among the wealthiest families of 19th-century America. Most people who walk by the mansion don't see it, or remember seeing it. They don't want to. They subconsciously recoil from the unholy aura surrounding it. The house is "on the grid", but nobody seems to notice. It has electricity and running water, but no one ever sends a bill or a meter-reader. No government agency ever tries to collect any property taxes. No property deeds, building permits, or other documentation seems to be on file anywhere, and nobody seems to notice or care. All the trees and grass near the house are dead, and nothing new grows. Most animals avoid the house, though bats, crows, and owls sometimes roost nearby. The whole structure is plagued by random electromagnetic interference. Phone and TV reception is unreliable, as are cellular signals and radio transmissions. Static and video tearing are common. Even the rare person with a will strong enough to defy the magical perception filter surrounding the house finds it impossible to penetrate the exterior with any sort of scrying magic or telepathy.
The interior of the clubhouse is furnished lavishly but anachronistically. Undead servants, both corporeal and incorporeal, maintain the house and attend to the needs of the members and their guests. There is a fully staffed kitchen, bar, and dining room, open all day and night, every day and night. There is always someone available to answer the door and take a coat. But the ghosts aren't always visible, and when they are, one might wish they weren't. They often have distorted bodily proportions or mortal wounds. The zombies run the full spectrum of preservation, from bare skeletons to dried out or bloated corpses missing half their flesh, to revenants so pristine they almost appear to be alive. Some of them have reclaimed their own bodies, but others are walking around in skin that does not belong to them. The staff have all chosen to serve the Club because it was a way out of Hell, but they wouldn't have needed a way out of Hell in the first place if they had been good people while they were alive. So while they serve voluntarily, they often act in a passive-aggressive, discourteous, or mischievous fashion.
Since the clubhouse spent over a century soaking up ectoplasm and psychic resonance, and now exists simultaneously in two different dimensions, its internal structure is malleable, and all those mental vibrations congealed into a sort of rudimentary and malevolent intelligence. The house hates everyone, but it is bound to serve Club members. So while it may occasionally trick a Club member or their guest with minor illusions, and it will wipe or scramble the memories of any non-members when they leave, the house can only fully indulge its sadism with uninvited guests. It invades the minds of any intruders, learns what they fear, and uses that fear to torment them, before its undead servants finally destroy them. The house can create portals which move an intruder from one room to another. It will open a trap door beneath their feat, or cause a door or staircase to open up onto the wrong room or a dead end, or make it appear as if hallways go on forever by imperceptibly placing portals in the path of the intruder which send them back to where they started.
The interdimensional nature of the house makes it almost impossible to access with teleportation, phasing, or any other means beyond actually walking through a door or climbing through a window. It also creates minor time distortions. Changes in the history of the mortal world do not affect the lives or memories of those inside the building. The food and spices in the kitchen never seem to spoil, no matter how long they are stored. There are "perishable" items in there older than any living human.
Even for the Club members, the interior of the house never seems to remain constant, and there is a malevolent atmosphere. Sometimes a room will be laid out differently than it was the last time it was entered, as though the furniture had all been moved around, or the window or fireplace was mounted into a different wall. There are dozens of paintings hanging on the walls. The scenes they depict seem to change with repeated viewing. An object held in one hand will switch to the other. A dress will change color. A face which was looking off to the side and smiling when first seen will change to be looking directly at the observer and scowling when they turn back to it. Every time the observer turns away, sometimes every time they blink, the face gets a little larger in the frame, as if the person in the picture was moving toward the viewer, getting closer. The bedrooms and bathrooms have mirrors, and sometimes the reflection is distorted, or has wrong-colored eyes (black, red, yellow, etc.), or bleeding eyes, or shows bleeding wounds the viewer doesn't have on their body. Sometimes a reflection moves slightly out of sync with the viewer, or the viewer sees someone else standing behind them (maybe one person, maybe a whole room full of people). Doors and windows sometimes randomly open or close by themselves, or will be stuck and immovable the first few times someone tries to open them, but after that person gives up, they'll open by themselves. Objects sometimes randomly move or get knocked off of surfaces by some invisible force. Gusts of wind may rush by, nowhere near an open window. Cold spots may appear and shift randomly. Candles and fireplaces may light themselves, or snuff themselves out. Sometimes shadows appear which are not attached to anything, or things and people which should have shadows don't. Sometimes disembodied whispers, laughter, screams, or howls will randomly echo down the halls, or seem to come from far away, maybe even outside the clubhouse. Sometimes the walls bleed. Sometimes the blood vanishes on its own. Other times, a zombie eventually shambles along with a mop.
History:
The Twilight club was built in 1880 by some of the wealthiest men in Bedlam City as a status symbol and an attempt to emulate their counterparts on the East Coast. The members engaged in every imaginable form of vice, including, eventually, the occult. The lives of countless innocents, mostly poor, many of them immigrants and/or children, were sacrificed to fuel amateurish rituals and petty pacts the club members used to coerce minor demons and spirits into helping them indulge their increasingly depraved tastes. In 1951, a summoning ritual went horribly wrong. The physical structure of the clubhouse had spent decades soaking up ectoplasm from tormented souls and psychic resonance from the terror, pain, and blood of the club's victims. One last summoning tipped the clubhouse over into a spiritual critical mass. The mental vibrations congealed into a sort of rudimentary intelligence, and the clubhouse itself shifted into a sort of dimensional borderland where it existed halfway between the mortal universe and some version of what most people would call a "Netherworld" or a "Hell". The club members did not understand why they could not control the entity they had summoned. They did not understand that they had brought themselves as much into its world as they had brought it into theirs. The thing they beckoned destroyed them, and their souls were bound to the clubhouse, joining many of their own victims. The outside world, meanwhile, seemed to mostly forget that the club or its members had ever existed.
For the next several decades, the clubhouse stood empty, save for the undead creatures bound to it, and the occasional hapless mortal too curious and strong-willed to be deterred from the house, who inevitably became another of its victims and then its servants. This state of affairs ended in 2019, when Mister Strix and several other Bedlam City vigilantes were drawn to the house. They endured the house's psychic assaults, fought off its undead minions, and penetrated to the "heart" of the mansion, finding and seizing control of the Hellfire Furnace, the unholy machine containing the portal to "Hell" which powered the building. Strix took ownership of the club and responsibility for the house, and he changed the "rules". He set free all the dead souls held captive by the house, and reconfigured the Hell portal. Now, every undead creature staffing the Twilight Club is a soul damned by their own foul deeds in life, who has been given the chance to leave their Hell and do penance by serving the Club. Each soul who does so will eventually be released to a more pleasant afterlife than they would otherwise have deserved. But until their penance is complete, none of them can leave the house, save to go back to their Hell.
Membership:
The Club president's office contains two seemingly indestructible documents: The ownership deed to the club, with the club president's name on it, and the membership roll, with the names of all other members. When ownership of the club changes hands, the old president's name spontaneously vanishes from the deed and the new owner's name appears in its place. Likewise, when a new member is confirmed, their name magically appears on the roll.
To induct a new club member, the president must shed their blood upon the new member's inner wrist. The new member then must place their hand inside the hellfire furnace which is the "heart" of the clubhouse. The hellfire transforms the president's blood into a magical tattoo. The tattoo is invisible under most circumstances. It only becomes visible when the member enters the clubhouse, or when two or more members hold their wrists close to one another.
Club members have full freedom of movement and use of the facilities, including lodging for as long as they wish. The undead servants will wait on them, fulfill any requests, and defer to their authority. They ignore the magical perception filter and bypass the defensive wards. The clubhouse will not use its powers to attack members. They will not be psychically tormented or teleported from one part of the clubhouse to another, and they will retain full memory of their experiences in the interior of the clubhouse upon exiting it. Members are also allowed to bring guests into the clubhouse. Guests will not be harmed by the clubhouse or its staff, but they do not receive the same deference as a member would, and they will not retain their memories upon leaving the building.
