[Railstar]

Few problems, some interesting challenges.

The only time it felt like a problem was for my necromancer, who got some sponsorship on the basis of “you have spooky magic, we want to learn spooky magic from you”, and she had a hard time taking advantage of it because of the -3 to Teaching. Kind of got around this by having her broker deals between demons and her recruits, essentially outsourcing the Teaching to evil spirits for training apprentices. It had it’s limitations, but worked for someone who didn’t want to invest too much personal time into teaching magic.

Occasionally had problems when someone she’d used Intimidation on held a grudge, but the penalties from Callous never felt like they came from Callous… they felt like they came from mistreating the person, and the rules for Callous were just a convenient penalty that saved the GM having to calculate just how angry they were.

But I don’t often use Intimidation on people I plan on working with in future.

Other times, I invested a point in Acting to conceal how cold-hearted my character was, so she could form long-term relationships with people when it was important to her. Ultimately ended up spending more points in Acting & Teaching than she got from Callous, but I liked it because Callous meant something on the character sheet to say “she is willing to do horrible things when it suits her.”

Callous to me is the prerequisite to treating people as commodities. Keeping prisoners in Suspended Animation as living batteries for Steal Energy or Leech, using them as human sacrifices to demons once they started nearing death, and then animating the corpse as an undead servant (as well as binding the soul as another undead servant…). Efficient, but a level of thorough in-depth exploitation that is difficult to explain for a character without Callous.

I would certainly expect the reaction penalty from Callous to apply if someone found out about her “pantry.” Also to normal bystanders, not even victims, just witnesses, because as soon as an Intimidation roll sounds appropriate she went straight to the bad place.

One time a bunch of thugs attacked her girlfriend, and she managed to knock several thugs out, but one managed to take girlfriend hostage.

It was a tense situation, because the thug initially wasn’t willing to accept a “let her go and you can run” offer.

So she took out a large knife and began carving off the face from an unconscious thug, using First Aid to keep him alive. “I have enough medical knowledge to keep you alive for weeks. Knowing that, and seeing this.” *holds up Exhibit A, while licking off some of the blood from her other hand* “Do you want to be the guy who hurt my girlfriend?”

Good news: successful Intimidation roll.

Bad news: failed Fright Check for the girlfriend.

Their relationship took something of a hit because of it. Up until then said character had used Acting to fake being a halfway decent person. But now her girlfriend doesn’t trust her anywhere near as much, which is expected to cause trouble in the future. Still waiting to find out what the trouble will be...