Free's Scattered Thoughts

[Curious Key]

I have ideas I am not always sure whether to act on. Sometimes, when the ideas have congealed into something coherent, it will occur to me that I should put these thoughts somewhere. This will be that place.

[Curious Key]

Character Name: ????
Power Level: 7
Trade-Offs: -3 Attack / +3 Damage, -3 Defense / +3 Toughness
Unspent Power Points: 0
Progress To Bronze Status: 0/30

In Brief: A mage of life and vitality that has seen too much.

Alternate Identity:
Identity: Jade Yadav
Birthplace:
Occupation:
Affiliations: (People and/or groups you work with)
Family:

Description:
Age: 29
Gender: Female
Ethnicity: Asian
Height:
Weight:
Eyes:
Hair:

(Describe what they look like!)

Power Descriptions:
(Describe what their powers look like, if applicable)

History:

It was a car crash. She was seventeen. There was a thin trickle of blood from a sliced scalp running over her eye as she crawled her way to the front of the car, saw her mother in the driver's seat, clutching, the metal of the car curled around her body, a long piece of steel burrowed into her torso.

Jade saw her mother's mouth move, but the words were noise without context in her mind. Her mother shook and shifted and gasped as she stretched over, stroking Jade's face with a trembling hand.

Her mother was dying, Jade could see it plain as the sky, though she could not say why. It was like light, but it was something brighter and lovely. Jade could feel it pulsing beneath her skin, could hear the songs of life from the man in the car opposite, from the crowds that gathered around them. And she could see the spark of life fading from a delicate ember to warm coals to cold nothing.

Jade said something soft and weak and pleading, crying cause she understood, crawling closer, put a hand on her mother's chest and power skipped from her fingertips.

It knited flesh and bone together around the metal rod that had pierced her body, but it healed wrong. trapping the metal inside her body, and the blood flowed around the wrong way, and the life still flowed out of Jade's mother's body while Jade clutched at her mother and wailed like a child.

And a narrow-shouldered old man in a long, flowing robe stepped out of a rift in reality, ripped the roof of the car off with a gesture and a guttural word and before Jade's eyes tore the metal pole from her mother's chest and chased away death with an arcane syllable. He frowned at Jade and offered a hand in invitation, offering a soft, urgent command. Jade took it, walking with him into the void of a portal to an elsewhere.

So began Jade's long nightmare.

~o~o~o~

 
Magicians tried to find where she'd been taken later, but they could not. No wonder. She had been stolen away into a fold in space, to a citadel like something out of Tim Burton's nightmares.

Ever wonder how a dark mages get their apprentices? It's a lot like usual. They approach a promising student and offer them tutelage and safety. The man who'd snared Jade called himself Alexander. And he told her to serve at his side as a grim apprentice, to partake in black rituals and follow his path to power. But she refused. So instead he made her suffer.

 

She had a long time to practice her own art, to remend her bones and flesh together and undo the damage that Alexander's awful lessons left. There was no rescue, for Alexander had built the walls of his world high and thick for centuries, and there was only one way in. Only one way out.

 

But the barrier was not so thick that whispers were barred from coming. They came to her in her dreams; we can't help you, they said. We can't save you. You must stop him, you must escape. There is a key, they said, around his neck, under his robes, the only way out, the only way in. One day soon, he came against her in person shook her while his magic ravaged her mind, asked commanded pleaded she say why she still resisted.

 

Jade did not tell him. She ripped the key from around his neck and spoke the words the dreams had told her, appearing in the mortal world, out of Alexander's clutches. And in the process, she locked him inside his own impregnable fortress.

For a while she cut loose, adrift in the world with nowhere solid to land on. She'd been gone long enough to be declared dead, and it wasn't until she happened across other magicians that she finally found root. She cured their ills for a price, aided them in the journey to longevity and profited from their lack of financial savvy. But it was an empty purpose, openly done for the money. She wanted to do better.

Personality & Motivation:
(Describe here)

Powers & Tactics:

Complications:

The Tell-Tale Heart
When she escaped from her master's clutches she knew she had to hide the key to his domain in a place no one would look, and that she could always protect. So she opened up her chest one day and nestled it right next to her heart. It seeps chaos, shadow and darkness, drawing strangeness to Jade wherever she goes like a magnet, complicating Jade's already difficult life. And if anyone who wanted to free her old master realized where the key was being held, well . . .

Life Comes From Somewhere
Whenever Jade heals anyone, the energy doesn't come out of thin air. Healing burns spare fat, even muscle, whether it's Jade's or her patient's. When she does her most dramatic work the subjects of her healing often wake ravenous and nigh-skeletal, often as crippled as they were before unless there is food on hand to help replace their reserves. If her magic doesn't have any reverses left to work with, the healing just doesn't work.

The Secret World
There is more to the magical world of earth than the Master Mage and guarding against the mystic beyond. There are others who turned their talents to enterprise instead of altruism. Alexander's other apprentices have scattered through their number, and Jade maintains contact with them to help reestablish herself in society and find work for her specific talents. And in exchange someone from that secret world often comes to Jade to ask a 'favor.'

Abilities: 0 + 0 + 8 + 0 + 8 + 0 = 16
Strength: 10
Dexterity: 10
Constitution: 18 (+4)
Intellect: 10
Wisdom: 18 (+4)
Charisma: 10

Combat: 4 + 8 = 12PP
Initiative: +0
Attack: +2 Melee, +2 Ranged, +4 Life Magic)
Grapple: +0
Defense: +4 (+4 Base, +0 Dodge Focus), +2 Flat-Footed
Knockback: -0


Saving Throws: 3 + 4 + 1 = 8PP
Toughness: +10 (+4 Con, +6 Protection)
Fortitude: +7 (+4 Con, +3)
Reflex: +4 (+0 Dex, +4)
Will: +4 (+3 Wis, +1)


Skills: 32R = 8PP
Concentration 7 (+10)
Knowledge: Arcane Lore 10 (+10)
Medicine 7 (+10)
Notice 8 (+11)

Feats: 10PP
Accurate Attack
All Out Attack
Benefit (Wealth)
Fearless
Luck 2
Power Attack
Ritualist
Trance
Uncanny Dodge [Mental]

Powers: 38 + 6 + 7 = 51PP

Life Magic Array (32PP Array: Alternate Power 6) [38PP]
BP: Life Control 10 (Flaws: Ranged, Feats: Accurate, Reversible) Life Mastery 32PP
AP: Damage 10 (Extras: Vampiric, Alternate Save [Fortitude], Feats: Accurate, Extended Reach) Life-Take 32PP
AP: Damage 10 (Extras: Ranged, Concentration; Feats; Accurate, Homing; Bacterial Scourge)
AP: Drain Constitution 10 (Extras: Ranged, Total Fade; Feats: Accurate, Reversible) Smother Life 32PP
AP: Healing 10 (Extras: Total; Feats: Persistent, Regrowth) Accelerated Healing 32PP
AP: Fatigue 10 (Extras: Ranged; Feats: Accurate, Reversible) Sap Vitality 32PP
AP: Paralyze 10 (Extras: Ranged; Feats: Accurate, Reversible) Muscle Seize 32PP

Protection 6 [6PP]

Super Senses (Detect Life 2 [Mental], Accurate, Acute, Extended [100ft], Radius, Ranged) 7PP

DC Block

(see below)

Totals: Abilities (16) + Combat (12) + Saving Throws (8) + Skills (8) + Feats (10) + Powers (51) - Drawbacks (0) = 103/105 Power Points

Edited April 20, 2013 by Freely Seek

[Curious Key]

The Monster Hunter

There are men who survive in the world of monsters. They are born no stronger, no more powerful, no more cunning. But they have learned a trick, to draw the monster’s power from their blood and use it as their own, and with it they have ruled as the lion rules his jungle; through blood and violence.

Her name was Sarah, she was their princess, and she lived in the shadow of her father; a hunter who had stolen his immortality from the blood of ancient monsters at the core of world and remembered what the world was like before they came and overran the world. Her father believed in his pride that his girl could defeat more monsters than any other, and she was forced to live to his expectation.

She learned to fight and loved to fight, and stripped the power from every monster that fell against her. Sarah’s life was conflict, and there was no one who doubted that she would rule by her father’s side. When the time came, her father called to her and demanded she win her right to rule in a battle to the death.

Her father had slain the last and only immortal monster on the planet; it only the blood that let live forever, and preside over their people, and now her father was the only man who did. But Sarah refused. When he threatened her life and mocked her skill still Sarah refused. When he drew his sword against her throat and demanded she draw; Sarah threw her sword aside and said that he could never slay his unarmed daughter. And she was right.

Instead he marked Sarah as a monster, and who she had once called friends hunted her, hungry to rip the carefully cultivated power from her corpse. They chased her across mountains, jungles and through the deep places of the world and still they did not stop. She sought out strange things with many eyes whose blood had driven all who had drunk it mad and asked, pleaded, begged for their guidance.

They did. But only in exchange for the lion's share of her power.

On their advice, with her family close behind, Sarah found the great door that the first monsters had stepped through, recited a series of dimensional coordinates and stepped through a veil of shadow. And appeared, just like that, in Freedom City’s streets.

Edited April 18, 2013 by Freely Seek

[Curious Key]

Urban Angel

Sera was a living, breathing human girl once. She remembers living without knowing the grip of a city on her soul, without feeling the masonry shifting and moving beneath her feet. Then she was bricked up inside the walls of castle Widder, still alive, in a ritual to give birth to a guardian angel. Eternities of pleading and starving, she died, her body and trapped soul swallowed by the stone. The ritualists realized to their great dread that it was the soul slain that rose as a guardian, and from that day forward troubled no one north of hell again.

They called her Widder's Seraph, for she had six wings and her wrath was fiery. She roamed the countryside, driven by the spells binding her soul to protect Widder, and protect it she did; as she saw fit, beholden to no lord, no bishop and no king. She hunted unnatural things, werewolves and vampires and more. She hunted slavers, bandits and cruel lords. For these things she was looked to as an angel and protector.

Time made Sera many enemies, in the natural world and magical world both, and the cleverist of them waited and plotted, planted a hint that sent her flying to face an imaginary den of vampires on the fringes of their lands while her enemies opened the gates to a waiting army and razed the castle stone by stone, and Sera weakened until she fell out of the sky, with only smoke in the distance to tell the cause of her doom before she closed her eyes and died again.

For hundreds of years that was the end.

The man who raised her from the dead was an innate sorcerer named Alexander who spent his life chasing myths of immortality, and found some truth of it in the story of a soul bound to the stones of a broken castle. He uncovered the stones that had served as the beating heart of Sera's unnatural life, sealed in secret places by cultists too afraid or incompetent to remake her; too greedy to destroy her. He used his vast fortunes to purchase a crumbling building on Lantern Hill's edge and demolish it, carefully overseeing the construction of something that made architects' heads shake and mystics' eyes widen. He placed the stones of her heart at its centerpiece and opened the Castle Widder renaissance club to business.

Lives and laughter rang through the halls, ringing along the edges, calling to broken bits of soulstuff that were Sera's remnants. She was pulled through the blood of the city into the heart of the club, shaped by their thoughts of what an angel should be and constrained by the limited power of this new Castle Widder. And in a surge of magic and a desperate will to live, the Seraph was born again.

Edited April 23, 2013 by Freely Seek

[Curious Key]

Sera Mercer

Abilities: 14 + 4 + 10 + 4 + 0 = 32 pp
STR: 24 (+7)
DEX: 14 (+2)
CON: 20 (+5)
INT: 10 (+0)
WIS: 14 (+2)
CHA: 10 (+0)

Combat: 8 + 8 = 16 pp
ATK: +7 Melee, +4 Ranged
DEF: +4 (+2 flat-footed)
Init: +2
Grapple: +14

Saves: 6 pp
TOU: +10 (+5 Con, +5 Protection)
FORT: +6 (+5 Con, +1)
REF: +4 (+2 Ref, +2)
WILL: +5 (+2 Wis, +3)

Skills: 15 pp=60 r
Acrobatics 8 (+10)
Stealth 10 (+12)
Knowledge (History) 10 (+10)
Knowledge (Arcane Lore) 5 (+5)
Sleight of Hand 8 (+10)
Intimidate 10 (+10)
Languages (Old English, French, Latin, English)
Notice 6 (+8)

Feats: 9 pp
Acrobatic Bluff
Attack Focus Melee 3
Fearless
Hide in Plain Sight
Move-by-Action
Power Attack
Skill Mastery (Notice, Stealth, Intimidate, Acrobatics)

Powers: 13 + 1 + 5 + 7 + 3 + 2 = 31 pp

 

Strike 0 (Extras: Penetrating 7; Feats: Mighty, Extended Reach [5ft], Improved Critical 2, Affects Insubstantial 2) 13pp

 

Regeneration (Reincarnate) 1PP

 

Protection 5pp

Immunity 7 (aging, disease, poison, sleep, starvation and thirst, suffocation) [7 pp]

Flight 2 [20mph] (Drawback: Restricable -1) [3pp]

Super-senses (Visual, Detect Magic 2) [2pp]

Drawbacks:

Vulnerability (vs. Silver; Frequency: Uncommon, Intensity: Major [*2 DC) [3]

32 + 16 + 6 + 15 + 8 + 31 - 3 = 105

Edited April 23, 2013 by Freely Seek

[Cubist]

Skills for the Urban Angel: I suspect the simplest, least expensive possibility would be to give your Angel the feat Jack Of All Trades, which would allow her to use any skill, including those which normally require a character to be trained in before they can use 'em.

 

Alternately, you could give the Angel a Variable structure (ULTIMATE POWER book, pp 113-115) that can only be used for skills. I'm not sure I recommend this, because a skills-only Variable structure is quite expensive for what it does, but it will allow you to have any skill you want at any time. So it's at least worth considering a Variable structure.

[Curious Key]

While it's fair to say that her skills would be more varied than they are at the moment, I can't say that it makes sense for her to be able to do all of them. And even the ability to do skills is kind of a mute point when your basic rolls for them are crap, which Sera's would be.

And considering how much a scrooge I had to be to even make her slightly viable for what she's supposed to do, I'm especially shy of anything expensive for her.

[TheAbsurdist]

I do believe she will need Additional Limbs for her Wings.  And to cut some cost, and considering you can play up how she is 'lessened' switch it to gliding (also... Gargoyles, so yeah).

[Curious Key]

I was basing her lack of additional limbs on several builds floating around, like AA's or TT's the thought I had was that if they're useless for anything but flight it might not need apply. Giving her glide does have some merit, but if I do that then I'd also want to give Sera some means of getting into the sky . . . so probably a bunch of leap. But those points have got to come from somewhere, and the one point I'll get by changing flight to glide isn't gonna cut it.

Edited April 22, 2013 by Freely Seek

[Supercape]

I think standard for this is that wings are based on the flight power, with a drawback 1 point (if wings bound). 

 

No need for additional limbs, unless you want them to serve some other function. Which is rather unlikely I guess but possible. M&M isn't hugely granular. I'm sure if you wanted to use wings to bash people when your hands are tied you could be allowed that with extra effort or an HP (effectively a stunt of the flight power).  

[KnightDisciple]

Additional limbs is a power for limbs that have at least some level of fine manipulation; arms, legs, prehensile tail, tentacles are the examples in UP. UP even says "wings are better modeled as flight". 

 

If you wanted them as an attack option (the picture makes them look like stained glass, and glass can be sharp!), I'd say put Flight in an Array with Strike. Bam, done. And then, like SC suggested, slap on a 1pp drawback of "not if wings bound" or whatnot. Or make it a complication!

[Curious Key]

They are sharp! It's where Sera gets her sword from, after all, but I think I'll refrain from adding an attack to it till there's enough points in her flight array to make it worth it.