Building a sin-eater!

[*.*.*.*]

My character sheet was destroyed after the first session, which gives me a chance to retire my mask slasher. This will be my 1st time building a sin-eater and second time building a WoD character in general. I'm playing in a crossover game, which includes one of almost every supernatural.

Group:
Something Weretiger
Muse Promethean
Lucifuge Hunter
Mortal(took some kind of pyromancer merits from second sight)
Daeva Vamp

I was playing a mask slasher, which actually started putting me at odds with some of the others. Anyone have any tips for starting a sin-eater? I hear they are powerful late-game, but they seem a bit limited in the beginning. I know boneyard abuse is powerful due to dropping planes and such, but I'd like to do that *AND* be a credible melee threat.

[The Glyphstone]

Industrial Caul can make a Sin-Eater a potent melee threat - meld a sword or axe into your arm and add the Caul successes as bonus dice whenever you smack someone. Or do the same thing with a shotgun and be Megaman.:smallbiggrin:

[CN the Logos]

You want to optimize your sin-eater? Because you're probably going to be stronger than most of the PCs on that list without abusing Boneyard. If you decide to abuse Boneyard, you will render the rest of the group irrelevant. Unless the ST decides to fix Boneyard's range, which is entirely possible since you aren't competing with Mages that can do the same thing but better. In fact, even if the range is nerfed quite a bit, as long as it isn't totally reduced to uselessness you'll still be an ultra-powerful piece of supernatural artillery. A sin-eater with Pyre-Flame and Rage (let alone Boneyard) murders all vampires and Prometheans forever.

Note that you can't be a credible melee threat at the same time you're using Boneyard; you have no control over when you emerge from your trance, meaning that if anything actually reaches you, you will be hurting. Also the plane killing effect only happens at Boneyard *****, prior to that you're "just" killing anything within a half mile radius or so. So while it sort of breaks the game, making the solution to every problem "have the sin-eater astrally project, find the guy we want dead, and make him that way," you don't need melee if that's what you want, and that's good because you probably don't have the XP to spend on it anyway.

If you want melee awesome, Caul is your friend, or maybe Shroud depending on what Keys you have. I personally like Phantasmal Caul; just turn yourself into something out of H. P. Lovecraft's fever dreams and start eating faces. Learn a fighting style that lets you do lethal damage with Brawl for bonus face eating. Take dots in Shroud too to make your face harder to remember and ultimately gain Disguise Self (but worse) and Phantasmal Killer (but better) as bonus superpowers. Congratulations, you are now Solid Snake if Solid Snake were also Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Proceed to win at everything forever.

...Can you tell I really want to run this character? I have a backstory and everything. Shame I'm the only one in my circle willing to ST. :smallsigh:

[One Tin Soldier]

If you have Primeval Shroud, enough dots in Brawl, the Berserker fighting style, and use a lot of all out attacks, you can have a lethal Brawl diepool of 23. I know because one of my fellow Geist players had it in our game.

Granted, that was with starting XP and some pretty serious minmaxing, but still. Primeval Shroud works very well for melee combat.

[ToySoldierCPlus]

<snip>
Congratulations, you are now Solid Snake if Solid Snake were also Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Proceed to win at everything forever.

...Can you tell I really want to run this character? I have a backstory and everything. Shame I'm the only one in my circle willing to ST. :smallsigh:

I am now very curious to know this guy's backstory. Share, please?

*.*.*.*: If you insist on melee, Caul and Shroud are good, like the others have said. I would also like to point out the Phantasmal Marionette. A completely separate body, likely with more dots in its attributes than you have, that you can send out fighting with your compatriots, while your real body stays home safe and sound.

Though I'm curious to know why you want to charge into the fray. You already have a weretiger, a prommie, and a vamp, I think you're good for melee.

[CN the Logos]

I am now very curious to know this guy's backstory. Share, please?

Sure, why not? I'll repost the Ten-Minute Background I posted for the character in another thread (for a game that never got off the ground, sadly). Warning, it is a text-wall.


Alright, here's my fluff. Crunch to come later this weekend.

The Basics:

(Format stolen from Shadowknight.)

Name: Daniel Kaufman

Age: 39

Gender: Male.

Threshold: The Torn, Death by Violence

Keys: Passion, Phantasmal (may pick up Pyre-Flame and/or Stillness at some point).

Manifestations: Caul, Shroud.

Archetype: Necromancer

Virtue: Justice

Vice: Wrath

Appearence: Hale, but mostly gray-haired already. He was headed that way before becoming a sin-eater, but it didn't help; he is happy that he isn't bald. He looks like he's seen everything at least once, even when he hasn't. He's missing an eye from the fight that killed him (he prefers to wear an eye patch for this even though he has a glass eye) and bears a few scars from previous fights as well. Takes pride in appearing dignified, professional, and scary as hell.


Step 1: Write five background and concept elements that you feel are important to your image of the character. These can be a concept overview, a list of important life events, a physical description, a personality profile...whatever you need to get an image in your mind. Five is just a minimum...more elements are encouraged!

1. Daniel Kaufman was born at dawn on the Day of the Dead, and was able to see ghosts before he was old enough to talk. Before the age of five, he had no idea that most other people couldn't. After upsetting his mother by passing along something that his grandma said, he realized that he was special and stopped talking about it (except with his now-deceased wife, after the two of them had been dating for over a year), though he never stopped speaking to the dead when others weren't around, and he has used information from dead informants to solve cases previously (see #3).

2. When he was young, Daniel wanted to be an actor, and was quite good at it; he's since learned to channel this aptitude into a special talent for undercover investigation, which has only improved with his increasing mastery of the Phantasmal Key. He wouldn't mind being an amateur actor in his spare time, if he could find a local theater group.

3. Prior to being transferred to Task Force VALKYRIE, Daniel was an FBI agent. He was transferred to VALKYRIE shortly after discovering that the corrupt CEO he was investigating was... not entirely human. Despite his partner dying and him being badly wounded when the thing grew claws and attempted to gut them both, he managed to take it down (and then arrest it when it tried to get back up).

4. Following his resurrection after being murdered alongside his family by a few members of a fae drug cartel he'd helped bust, he attempted to resign from Task Force VALKYRIE. It was a year before they released him (having determined to their satisfaction that despite having become very, very hard to kill and being a medium, he was not possessed by Satan), though he doesn't blame them for their caution, and appreciates the fact that they were nice enough to give him the full retirement package. He still takes pride in his membership, and keeps his black suit around for when he wants to look professional/intimidating (which is often).

5. While his daughter has apparently passed on, having been too young to have formed many major attachments to the world, Dan still sees his wife sometimes, when he's alone. He wonders occasionally if she's a hallucination since she never shows up when other sin-eaters are there to confirm that she's real, but if she is, she's a very discrete one. She encourages him not to give into despair, and sometimes suggests that he start dating again, insisting that he needs to be with someone who is alive and "not creepy." He doesn't have the heart to force her to pass on. He does not talk about this.


Step 2: List at least two goals for the character. At least one of these goals should be one that the character has, while another should be one that you, as a player, want to see developed over the course of the game.

1. To keep his city safe from supernatural threats, especially those he can detect with his inherent abilities.

2. To see those supernatural beings who are not inherently predatory given better rights under the law.


Step 3: List at least two secrets about your character. One is a secret the character knows, one is a secret that involves him but that he is not actually aware of yet. This will help me in creating plots that center around your character. I will also be creating a third secret which you as a player will not be aware of, so expect some surprises!

1. Dan never actually left VALKYRIE. His chip is currently deactivated, he's listed as retired, and he rarely receives orders anymore, but his superiors were able to convince him that spending the rest of his life in hiding would mean that his family had died for nothing. He periodically sends reports to the organization about the ENEs he encounters. He has been allowed some discretion in dealing with his particular group of sin-eaters (i.e., as along as he doesn't reveal anything too sensitive, no one cares if a small group of people who are already aware of the supernatural know that the Men in Black exist).

2. In Norse religion, a valkyrie is a being that chooses which warriors will die on the field of battle and takes them to serve the Aesir in preparation for Ragnarok, when the Underworld will open and the souls of the dead within it will invade the worlds of the living and the gods. Dan has thought about this quite a bit, but he doesn't know the truth for sure. There are other sin-eaters in Task Force VALKYRIE, perhaps at the organization's highest level.


Step 4: Describe at least three people that are tied to the character, not including other PCs or your geist. Two of them are friendly to the character, one is hostile. If you like, you can include an enemy of yours here as well, so I have an instant NPC nemesis to throw at you.

Abigail Kaufman - Dan's wife, now a ghost. Held back from passing on by her desire to make sure her husband can take care of himself without curling up in a ball of misery and/or living on nothing but instant mac and cheese for the rest of his life.

Victor Ruthven - A mostly benign vampire who fought for the Confederates in the American Civil War (he wasn't rich enough to own slaves, but disliked those damn Yankees on general principles). He met Dan when the not-yet-sin-eater was a kid and his "dead person" sense started tingling in Victor's presence. For whatever reason, Victor seems to have moral objections to magically enslaving people, saying that to be free, one must allow freedom for others (note however, that his philosophical approach to freedom has much in common with George Carlin's; i.e., "you have the right to do whatever you like, and if I dislike it enough, I have the right to kill you"). Do not make fun of his last name. His grandparents were Scottish.

Julia Kincaid - The corrupt CEO whose arrest got Daniel into Task Force VALKYRIE. A sin-eater herself, of the Bonepicker Archetype, possessing the Phantasmal Key and the Caul Manifestation (she sent Dan a half congratulatory, half mocking letter when she found out they were both being kept in the same underground detention facility for being the same thing). Currently locked up, but might have allies on the outside, or hidden knowledge that could be useful to another sin-eater.


Step 5: Describe three memories, mannerisms, or quirks that your character has. They don't have to be elaborate, but they should provide some context and flavor.

Memories:

1. Learning from Victor that monsters were real, no matter what his parents said.

2. His mother's disapproval of his "morbidness" as a child, among other things. When he was underground following his death and rebirth, he did not ask to contact her once, and has not spoken to her since.

3. The terror he felt as he moved through his house in the dark, playing cat-and-mouse with the people who'd come to kill him, and the sickening realization that he was mortally wounded and that his family was already dead.

Mannerisms/Quirks:

1. He tilts his head to one side occasionally to compensate for his reduced field of vision. When asked about it, he says that being shot in the face is an experience he could have gone through life without having.

2. His previous work and death has left him with a innate distrust of the fae. He sometimes wonders if this makes him a racist/speciest. He's pretty sure that the law of averages means that there have to be some of them out there, not harming anybody, just trying to live their lives in a world that's more complicated for them than it is for normal people, just like he is. He's just never met one.

3. He dislikes organized religion, but for an entirely different reason than many people who share that feeling do. Mostly he dislikes the hostility towards mediums. He's made his own peace with the Powers That Be, though.

4. He loves his suits. It is only with great regret that he doesn't wear one for casual trips to the mall, etc... because it would make him stand out more than he'd like.

[The Glyphstone]

What about his Geist? At first I thought it was his wife, but she's apparently an ordinary ghost. The Geist itself I've always thought to be the most important 'companion' a Sin-Eater has, considering the nature of their bond.

[ToySoldierCPlus]

I like it, Logos. I agree with The Glyphstone that his Geist should be more fleshed out, but otherwise a believable, relatable character.

Would you be willing to critique one of mine? Something about it just bugs me, but I can't figure out why.

[CN the Logos]

What about his Geist? At first I thought it was his wife, but she's apparently an ordinary ghost. The Geist itself I've always thought to be the most important 'companion' a Sin-Eater has, considering the nature of their bond.

The game that was originally for was a variant where the sin-eaters were more ordinary revenants that had clawed their way up from the edge of death by virtue of being slightly supernatural and sheer stubborn refusal to be dead. So I never gave him a geist, but if I did, I imagine it would be either something really, really goddamn horrible (in appearance and demeanor, at least) to indicate how desperate he was in push came to shove, for a former Man in Black to make a Bargain with it, or else his own supernatural potential combined with his devotion to his wife and vice versa allowed her to become a geist within moments of her death. It would be very unusual, but I don't think it would be out of the question, given how vague the process of becoming a geist is left. Maybe in the later case, he doesn't even initially realize that other sin-eaters have to make bargains with geists that are no longer even remotely human.

...It's a moot point at this point since the game is deader than dead, but I'd be willing to revise it considerably if I had a regular game to put him in.


I like it, Logos. I agree with The Glyphstone that his Geist should be more fleshed out, but otherwise a believable, relatable character.

Would you be willing to critique one of mine? Something about it just bugs me, but I can't figure out why.

Sure. Can't promise I'll be quick about it because I'm currently working on something else, but I'd be glad to look at it and give a critique when I can.