(Wow, I spent three days trying to register when it turns out I *mysteriously* already have an account. Hmmm....)
I understand that this is potentially not the correct place to post this, but it is somewhat relevant, so... yeah.
Hi! I'm... well, me. I'm new, I'm present, yada yada yada, and considering I currently am not signed up for anything anywhere, I thought it best if I make a pitch involving my first character on this board- His name is
WARREN KANE!!!! *dramatic noise!*
*Dramatic pause!*
*ahem* Warren Kane. Yes. Anyway, since he doesn't have any combat abilities whatsoever, I'm not sure if I should make a Philsys sheet of him, seeing as how the majority reason these exist appears to be so that characters can fight.
Warren is a mystic artisan- He makes things. He's also pretty good at it, and potentially as time goes on his items might become famous if he gains enough skill and notoriety in his craft. But for now, he's just one of many hundreds of craftsmen who make magical items. He's currently traveling, looking for a new place to set up shop, and he won't stop until someone makes a pitch at him. I put his current position at... A few miles down the road from Baron, the last place he tried to find work (and failed miserably.)
Short, red hair, green eyes, and a pale complexion, average height with a slight build, he's walking around with a larger-than-average pack on his back with a few tools and some travel necessities.
Anyway, there's my pitch. If I was wrong in assuming that a character who has no ability to fight whatsoever does not need a Philsys sheet, someone please say so.
Thanks in advance, and toodles!!
Edit- Finally got around to doing this. Anyway...
Name: Warren Kane
Age: 29
Height: 5'8''
Weight: 145lbs
Build: Slim and lanky (much like almost every character I make... hmmm...)
Hair: Dull red, short length
Eyes: Emerald green
Skin: Reasonably tanned, normally pale caucasian without tan.
Handedness: Left
Nationality: *Shrug* Naturalized Doman
Class: Mystic Artisan/Magic Researcher
Appearance:
Warren Kane can usually be found doing SOMETHING around Doma City. Thus, he has a couple of leather aprons and smocks that have a variety of scars and discolorations on them. He's also got a bunch of protective gear, like goggles and work gloves, and he is usually wearing some form of clothing designed to keep chemicals at bay. He also has a handkerchief that has an ever-increasing number of permits and liscences issued by a variety of branches of the Doman municipal government, and sometimes it's pinned very proudly(though not wisely) to the front of one of these aprons. He also recently got a court decision overturned which dictated he had to wear a warning sign stating "Flammable" in large, block letters sewn into his shirt. He carries scientific and intellectual exuberance around with him like a bright beacon.
Persona: Warren Kane is persistantly in his own world ruled by numbers and incomprehensible theory. He has ideas pop into his head much faster than he can ever hope to accomplish any of them, but thankfully more than half of these ideas are rubbish anyway. Whenever he learns something new or sees something he's never seen before, it completely and utterly destroys any thought process he's going through and he becomes bitterly obsessed with discovering all of the new phenomenon's secrets. Frequently he runs out of interesting material on this subject in a couple of days. He also has a miserable tendency to go philosophical at the wrong times and might get very introspective about the oddest things. He's also very, VERY careful about not breaking the laws of Doma. His first two years living there taught him enough about THAT.
Warren is a creative man with a strong background in engineering and physics, as well as aetheric and mystic theory. He has an innate talent for magic that he never cultivated into any form of combat prowess, and used it instead to expand his understanding of the world. These qualities, combined with a reasonably fit body, an insatiable curiosity, and a willingness to poke at the universe make him a very good researcher. The side effects of his research can periodically be sold very widely and very cheaply by enterprising businesspeople, which Warren is not. However, now that someone else is managing his business affairs, he's enjoying a fair amount of success and has more than enough money to continue researching whatever he likes.
Warren's History!
Warren Kane is the child of a curiously cursed upper-class family in the more fashionable district of Baron City. One of his female ancestors was so entranced with her own beauty that she hired a team of sorcerers to make her beauty last forever. One of these sorcerers got so fed up with her that he placed a curse on her bloodline that every single child had by her or any of her descendants would have extremely similar physical features, no matter who or what their other parent is. Thus the curse of the clan of Kane: All Kanes have the same bone structure, the same base hair, eye, and skin color, generally the same height and build, and a great many other features- most Kanes look almost exactly the same if they do nothing to alter their appearance. Still, though they LOOK the same, they carry the genes of both their parents- each child is not an exact copy of Lady Margolotta Kane. The funny part of this curse is that Lady Kane, in her time, found this extremely funny and innovative. The story goes that she decided that the sorcerer had done his job, paid him for his services, and dismissed the whole team. After all, she had never said that SHE had to be preserved for all time- just her beauty.
Warren, as a child, was educated by tutors and went to a variety of academies where he frequently graduated in record time without actually realizing it. Eventually it was decided that, with both his innate mental brilliance as well as his above-average magical talent that the entire point of schooling him continuously in the lower levels, thus he wen to the Gunnir Magical Academy for the Arcane Arts and Sciences and was accepted at the age of 17.
The unfortunate side effect to this is that ideally, he SHOULD have started three years earlier and in the meantime began something that would forever cripple his potential career as a mage-adventurer: he discovered Engineering. He began to pick up tricks of the trade from the workers of the Cidolfas Airfield, and soon his head filled with the magic of the mundane, forever shutting out the possibility that he would take magical knowledge and use it for fame or fortune.
When at Gunnir, on the far side of the continent from his family, he began a course load that, according to his advisors, was a very bad idea. However, his thirst for knowledge as well as practical applications of the arcane sciences was not to be quenched: He graduated by 19 and began graduate work in a field of highly theoretical magic: Crisis Theory.
The short version of Crisis Theory: There is a parallel existance to ours where there exists nothing but potential that is otherwise unreachable by people outside of extraordinary circumstances. This realm, however, crosses over into ours at points of crisis, where someone really, really needs a sudden, temporary boost to their stamina or other abilities in order to accomplish something glorious/overcome adversity/stop the world from ending, et cetera. When this crossover occurs, this otherwise unreachable potential enters our reality for a very short period of time and provides this great advantage, then disappears whence it came.
The practical application behind Crisis Theory is to try to tap into this parallel existance outside of really dire or unlikely circumstances and use this otherness-potential as a power source for any variety of exertions that would otherwise be too much for someone to accomplish. This is, of course, impossible without the right tools which up until the idea occurred did not exist and could not be made. The moment the idea of using this alter-existance in a practical fashion happened, the outlandish chance that the tool needed would suddenly be there (another aspect of Crisis Theory) once again was satisfied and the first Crisis Orb was discovered falling from the sky about a hundred yards west of where the person thinking about it was sitting.
The strange part is that Crisis Orbs are impossible to make without other Crisis Orbs, and the Crisis Orb is such an artificial phenomenon that it's just ludicrous that one could occur naturally, so no one has any idea where this one came from. However, since then, they have been used to make more. There are now about 300 in existance, and it's unlikely that they'll be gotten rid of: They're really damn durable for something that looks like it's made out of a hollow glass bubble, disenchanting them is a pain in the ass (though not actually difficult) because you need to use ANOTHER Crisis Orb to do it, and there will always be someone in the world who's willing to play with something they don't actually understand just to find out what happens.
Gunnir Academy has seven of these three hundred orbs kept in a special building they reserve for people who are likely to unmake themselves with their own curiosity and willingness to mess with stuff they don't understand. The actual use of a Crisis Orb is really kind of simple; so simple no one has got a good grip on why it works. The leading theory is that the Crisis Orb anticipates what is going to be asked of it and thus does what is going to be tried to accomplish using it on its own (which is actually applicable to the sudden appearance of the first Crisis Orb).
Practical and Theoretical Crisis Theory isn't something that draws many students; there's only money in it if you manufacture trinkets using this complex magical process and even then it requires a LOT of mathematical computation in order to execute correctly. So much that most students apply themselves to fields of research that likely have futures for people who don't love to watch endless columns of equations form up to generate an effect as simple as warming a cup of coffee.
With his background in Engineering, Warren found the endless puzzle of Crisis Theory absolutely fascinating. He applied himself religiously to his research at Gunnir for three years, until he decided that the best place to experiment with Crisis Theory is in a much more population-rich area; only sentients appear to be able to call upon the alter-existence and thus having a big group of them together in one place makes the entire process easier. So, Warren applied to recieve a Crisis Orb, bought it from the head of Practical and Theoretical Crisis Theory, and headed back home, to Baron City.
His life got kind of wonky since then, since not everyone (especially not government officials) has the same unquenchable thirst for knowledge combined with a complete disregard of danger that Warren has in great, great quantities. Since his return to Doma City, he has started a workshop and now employs an assistant (who finds himself running a lot of errands) and is a "business partner" with one of his old acquaintances from Baron City. If all he has to do are sign some papers to get someone to make the guard stop bothering him, he'd do it in a heartbeat... and he did. Thus, he now is the proud owner of 1% of Warren Kane Enterprises, Ltd. LLC, with the other 99% being disbursed out to a reasonably-sized number of investors who now have a lot more money than they put into the venture.
Still, he has all the money he could ever need for experimenting, he writes monthly reports of his progress back to Gunnir, and he has recently starting taking commissions for specialty gear or services. For Warren Kane, life is good.
Edited by: The Great Nevareh at: 11/11/05 19:06