Li Zhiwen (Leadger Wynn) 李智文 the jiangshi alchemist
GURPS Character Sheet 1
GURPS Character Sheet 2
GURPS Character Sheet 3
Meta:
Li Zhiwen is an Eastern-style vampire with a breathstealing curse. I also made use of the Chinese Elemental Powers supplement for Thaumatology (water and wood only), and some alchemy and gadgeteering. Because his powers have a different focus (qi instead of arcane power) he can travel abroad to lands where mana is low or nonexistent, and his qi powers will still continue to work.
Backstory:
Li Zhiwen came to the Core as part of a trade delegation in his youth, but lost his memory upon entering Darkon. He worked for many decades as the herbalist for the treacherous Agence d'Affaires. When he finally escaped Darkon and rediscovered his past, he realized that his herbal research had allowed the Agence to export a ruinous drug that collapsed many foreign economies, including that of his distant home port city. He gradually regained two of the five elemental texts, and underwent the Change from the Kargat in order to wreak his final vengeance upon the principals of the Agence. By the time he was done with them, the Agence had become a subjugated front organization for the Kargat.
Appearance:
Li Zhiwen differs from the traditional Jiangshi in Earth’s legends. Instead of a Manchurian-style civil servant, he appears as a Ming dynasty scholar or skilled expert: he wears his hair long, wrapped in a jade pin, with no forehead shaving or braided queue, and wears flowing robes with decorative sweeping sleeves to denote elevated social class. He continues his expertise in botany, alchemy, and various traditional body exercises as a personal code of behavior since adolescence. His clothes are mostly earth-tone brown or black, the better to hide the stains and spillages of his herbal and alchemical work.
Personality:
Li Zhiwen is filled with shame at the decades of his neglect of the ancestral rituals, as well as his own unwitting contribution towards the opiate collapse of his homeland. He is driven by a desire to regain all the knowledge that was lost to him, which now includes hunting down the three lost elemental scrolls of fire, earth, and metal. On a higher level, this serves the goals of the Darkonian king well, as he seeks to collect experts across a wide range of supernatural disciplines.
Telltale signs:
Li Zhiwen's fingernails can extend instantly to dangerous claws, and the smallest finger cannot retract the nail, which always appear to be several inches long. Li Zhiwen also cannot abide the smell of a certain type of drug plant, as he worked with it for decades before realizing he had poisoned his own homeland with his labors. More esoterically, he is repulsed by any Daoist scripture intended to ward off undead, but in the Westernized Core this is hardly a frequent phenomenon.
Invisibility:
As a jiangshi, Li Zhiwen can fade from sight at will, giving all stealth rolls a +9. A metal surface will reveal the opposite of his chosen state: When visible, he casts no reflection in metal surfaces. While invisible, he can be seen plainly in metal surfaces.
Sustenance:
Like any jiangshi, Leadger Wynn sustains himself on the Qi (breath, air, spirit) of the living, and must fill his undead lungs with the dying breath of living creatures at least once daily. If he has access to small vermin or passing birds, this can usually be accomplished slowly without drawing undue attention, but in less patient moods he has been known to snatch sailors or rivermen to kill and leave their bodies in the water (where evidence of their death by asphyxiation becomes obscured by their waterlogged condition.
Sleep:
Li Zhiwen must spend at least one hour each night in meditation and rituals to propitiate his ancestral spirits. Failure to do this will result in disruption to his own link to the land of the living, and he will begin to fade away - potentially to an eternal afterlife of torment and punishment.
Movement:
Li Zhiwen's Qi mastery means that he floats gently downward from a leap, making falling damage impossible. His affinity for water makes him immune to most natural fire damage.
Chinese Elemental Powers - water and wood
Li Zhiwen can temporarily blind opponents by blowing leaves around them. Provided that he has advance notice and is conscious, he can harden his body to wooden toughness, reducing all injury that penetrates his DR by half. Finally, his Skin of Oak power allows him a flat DR 3 all over his body while conscious.
His water powers can produce a jet of water at short range from his mouth. If this successfully strikes a victim’s face (range C or 1 yard at -5) it immediately deals 1D fatigue damage, halved if at range. He can also inflict fatigue damage by merely touching a person using his Touching the Heart attack, which deals 4D fatigue damage. Any creature that succumbs to fatigue can instantly be a target of his leech Qi attack, satisfying his daily hunger for living breath. Perhaps most insidiously, the victims are hard to distinguish from drowning victims. Finally, he can also contort and compress his body to an extreme form of double-jointedness, squeezing through passages that would be impassable for most humans of his size
Mind Control:
Although Li Zhiwen has no supernatural means of mental control, he does brew potions that result in stun, confusion, and suggestability conditions in his victims.
Equipment:
Li Zhiwen has no magically enchanted equipment, though he carries a pair of flintlock pistols and a mastercrafted jian sword (with modest skills for using both). His true combat danger comes from his potions, which include flammable and contact poison attacks, and from his close-up qi powers, which can drown a man's lungs in an embrace.
Combat:
Common concoctions in his possession include: invulnerability (for 3 DR additionally), Magic Resistance for +5 on opposed magic rolls, and True Sight; weapon grenades include Naphtha to burn things, Death concoction to damage them, and Forgetfulness to confuse and distract his opponents. Leadger Wynn has a Wood elemental power, Catapult Hand, which allows him to throw light objects a truly prodigious distance with uncanny accuracy.
Death:
Li Zhiwen can be immobilized by a peachwood stake through the chest, but he will remain alive until his ancestral artifacts in his lair are destroyed. These include a few engraved bronze plaques, a calligraphic family tree scroll, and a set of incense burners carved with exhortations of vengeance:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by 李智文
家乡孕育仁善德 Home town taught me: virtue, kindness, morality
洋岸山川隐祖国 But foreign shores and hills block my homeland
杀杀杀杀杀杀杀 Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill
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For PCs:
Li Zhiwen can boast several (modest) combat abilities that cannot be deactivated by antimagic. He also throws around grenadelike bombs and can shoot people with his pistols. Up close, this build is not particularly strong in swordsmanship or martial arts, but the drowning qi power is especially dangerous.
His mission profile is specialized enough that Li Zhiwen could also be a neutral or allied party to the PCs, if he needs their help in obtaining the three missing scrolls.