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Old 06-03-2011, 08:58 PM   #21
Adina
 
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Default Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
Of course he could be manically obsessed instead...

That was my initial thought. Although now the possibility of a manic version seems interesting. Given the same background Kurt Russel and Richard Dean Anderson played a melancholy and a manic Jack O'Neil(l), respectively. The manic version does seem less cliched, now that I think about.
I like the manic version myself. Lets the cynical pragmatist of a doctor say "When you hear hooves think horses, not zebras."
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Old 06-04-2011, 02:08 AM   #22
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Default Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
Good question. Do we want an Augustus McCrae or a William Call? Not sure really. Regardless of his approach (affable vs. unfailingly polite) he'll be good at talking to people. At this point I'm leaning more towards Call, to fit the backstory. Of course he could be manically obsessed instead...
Well, playing laconic, mission-focused characters does help bring their more light-hearted, social companions into focus. On the other hand, I wonder if you'd enjoy that? It can be frustrating to be unable to contribute much in the line of dialogue and for most every decision to be pre-made as 'I continue towards my goal, monomanically'.

Manic sounds interesting, but how do you plan to combine that with leadership, liaison and all the other tasks that require people to respond positively to you?

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
Still in flux, I think. What do you think?
I would very much prefer that at least two of the characters were friends with a long-term relationship. They could have shared the same supernatural experience or they could have gotten to known one another as part of their quest to get people to listen to their story.

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
That's easy. If he's a Ranger, he's a classic point-shooter. Definitely a Horseman.
My image of a Ranger has a lever-action carbine in addition to his pistol. And the carbine is probably a more effective weapon, as longarms usually are.

On the other hand, every other player has expressed a desire for a longarm of some sort. So Point Shooting is definitely something unclaimed. ;)

And as long as everyone has their shtick, there's no problem about the character being proficient with more than one weapon.

Do you have any preferences for a pistol of choice? Any weapon a particular favourite?

If you aren't up on all the types available, the major choices boil down to a loading gate revolver (Colt SAA ('Peacemaker'), Remington 1875) in a heavy caliver like .45 Long Colt or .44-40, a break-open revolver in a medium caliber (S&W Number 3, available in .44 American, .44 Russian and .45 S&W, also available in long barrel and short barrel) or one of the new-fangled double-action revolvers made just last year or the year before. There are more exotic choices, of course and then there are smaller calibers, suitable for backup weapons.
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Old 06-04-2011, 05:02 AM   #23
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Default Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents

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Originally Posted by jmurrell View Post
My first thought would be to play the doctor. Depending on the group dynamics he would be the cynical pragmatist. First draft I would pick wilderness survival and frontier culture, a small town/country doctor. For combat either the shotgunner, rider, or sharpshooter; preferably the sharpshooter.

Country doctor who hunts, in short.
What about medical skills? The vast majority of doctors in the US, particularly the ones in the frontier, will be TL5. This means that they are only marginally more likely to help than they are to harm. Germ theory is known at the time, but a doctor who was actually up on such very latest practises (New York hospitals are still not onboard with the new theories) would be a phenomenon on the frontier.

I would be inclined to allow a TL6 doctor, if only for PC survivability, but to justify that, it would be good if he had been in Massachusetts (to study under Oliver Wendel Holmes Sr.) or the UK (Dr. Lister) very recently. Some other European places might be possible, if less likely. Of course, if he had been trying to get people to listen to him regarding the supernatural, he might well have spent some years in Massachusetts lately, despite being otherwise a frontier doctor.

Would you be thinking of an older man?

Learning to be a doctor was not always an ardous process in the 1860s or 70s, of course. His studies would usually have been several months in university (if lucky) and some apprenticeship, maybe a couple of years. This makes it possible that he could have had a career before becoming a doctor.

If you want a true medical expert, however, maybe he learned for far longer than the bare minimum. Of course, many fine doctors had career as adventurers after embracing their profession, as well.

Where would he originally be from? Why did he go West? For doctors, there is less comfort, less support and less pay. Those who did go had their reasons, for course, ranging from not being able to compete back East (probably one of the most common), employed by the railroads, following family, troubles back home, pure altruism to going there with exploring parties or soldiers out of a sense of adventure.

Did you want military experience? Between Mexican War, Civil War and Injuns, plenty of that to go around.
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Old 06-04-2011, 03:37 PM   #24
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Default Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
What about medical skills? The vast majority of doctors in the US, particularly the ones in the frontier, will be TL5. This means that they are only marginally more likely to help than they are to harm. Germ theory is known at the time, but a doctor who was actually up on such very latest practises (New York hospitals are still not onboard with the new theories) would be a phenomenon on the frontier.

I would be inclined to allow a TL6 doctor, if only for PC survivability, but to justify that, it would be good if he had been in Massachusetts (to study under Oliver Wendel Holmes Sr.) or the UK (Dr. Lister) very recently. Some other European places might be possible, if less likely. Of course, if he had been trying to get people to listen to him regarding the supernatural, he might well have spent some years in Massachusetts lately, despite being otherwise a frontier doctor.
He could easily have spent time in Massachussets recently.

Quote:
Would you be thinking of an older man?
Around fifty or so.

Quote:
Learning to be a doctor was not always an ardous process in the 1860s or 70s, of course. His studies would usually have been several months in university (if lucky) and some apprenticeship, maybe a couple of years. This makes it possible that he could have had a career before becoming a doctor.

If you want a true medical expert, however, maybe he learned for far longer than the bare minimum. Of course, many fine doctors had career as adventurers after embracing their profession, as well.

Where would he originally be from? Why did he go West? For doctors, there is less comfort, less support and less pay. Those who did go had their reasons, for course, ranging from not being able to compete back East (probably one of the most common), employed by the railroads, following family, troubles back home, pure altruism to going there with exploring parties or soldiers out of a sense of adventure.
I am thinking he was originally a Southern gentleman from Louisiana(maybe?). In his early thirties with a wife and family when the Civil war started. He raised a company of troops and went off to war. Instead of glory and chivalry he found blood and filth and death. His family dead from an epidemic and his holdings ruined from the war he had to make a new start. He took up medicine as penance for what he had seen and done during the war. He went west to escape the memories of his family.

Initial thoughts anyway, subject to change to mesh with other players.
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Old 06-04-2011, 04:44 PM   #25
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Default Example characters

Just to provide an example of what kind of characters might be appropriate and how they might be contrasted against each other, here are a few random ideas for characters that would fit the game. Anything you like may be freely stolen from there, modified in any way you like or used as inspiration for characters of your own. Also, feel free to riff on themes suggested by this for what you'd like to see in other PCs to better bring out your PC.

Face (Urban survival, Celestial, Hand-to-hand expert):

'Jade Flower' (Song Cui Hua)

Bio: Jade Flower was born in San Francisco in the year of 1853. Her father, Song Han Wei, was an immigrant. Her mother, Susannah Taylor, was, as some bitter ladies of advancing years might put it, no better than she should be. Upon discovering, belately, that she was with child, Susannah might have elected to chance drinking the tea, even though more than four months late. Fortunately for Jade, Song Han Wei had noticed as soon as she did and perhaps even earlier. He offered to support Susannah financially and took to visiting his daughter periodically. When Susannah died three years later, he took the child to raise. He named her Song Cui Hua and she no longer remembers if her mother gave her another name.
Song Han Wei was a man of some standing in San Fransisco's budding Chinatown. He owned a small tea shop and was often visited there by his fellow countrymen, but did no apparent work of his own. Shortly after taking his daughter in hand, the first of a series of female servants who raised Jade appeared in his household. With everyone else, Song was strict, severe and unapproachable. With his dark-haired, green-eyed and beautiful daughter; he was affectionate, kind and playful.

Jade grew up happy, gregarious and irrepressable. She effortlessly added Taishanese Chinese to her early English and later, after the first of part-time tutors was found for her, learned Mandarin in addition to a wide variety of subjects more suitable for an aristocrat than the daughter of a working girl. She has an ear for languages and would continue to pick them up easily.

There was no one time when Jade realised that her father was not only respected in Chinatown, but feared. Once she was old enough to understand, she felt that she had always known. Some of the men who worked for him were big, muscular, arrogant men who carried large knives and razor-sharp choppers, quite unlike the typical mild-mannered labourer. Yet with her sweet nature and ready smile, the child made all of them, even the fiercest hatchetmen, her devoted servants.

She learned the etiquette of the gambling house at the kness of the dealers, the business of moneylending from stone-faced collectors and even, at a precociously early age, she learned what went on in the opium dens and pleasure houses. Jade learned all this not because she was deliberately taught or because she had any purpose in mind, but simply because of her wide ranging curiousity and inquisitiveness.

Jade also learned other things. She loved to watch her father's guards wrestle and spar and wouldn't accept their insistence that these sports were not for her. Since few could deny her anything, she soon had them teaching her their stances and forms; their boxing, locking and the use of their broad-bladed 'life-taking knives'. She learned both the rapid close-range boxing of that most of them favoured, ideal for brawls among boatmen, and the deeper stances and quick, rodent-like footwork practised by her father's most feared hatchetman, Wa Kai, said to be an assassin. When her father found out, he was not angry, but laughed and said that if she wished to dance, she ought to dance more ladylike steps. At the age of ten, therefore, her father engaged a man who called himself Yao Choy to teach her dancing, philosphy and fast-moving, kinetic style of combat. Yao Choy was obviously a man of property and learning, but had arrived in American without wealth or connections. Jade heard whispers that he had been one of the leaders of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and was living in American under an assumed name to avoid the vengeance of the Qing Dynasty.

Jade grew up, happy despite the rather odd existence she had been landed with, and before she was twenty years of age, she was a confident young women for whom San Francisco was a wonderful playground. She had friends from all walks of life, both white and Celestial, and a series of lovers and armies of aspirants for the position. This idyllic existence was shattered by a brutal event in 1874. A sudden nighttime attack tore through the guard and left her father and five of his bravest dead, torn apart. Many others were wounded and she caught only a glimpse of an assailant before a sharp pain and a gathering darkness took her. She saw nothing, really, but remembers it still. It was inhuman.

Her father's strong righthand man, Yue Shan, carried her out of the burning house. As Jade came to, she discounted her vision as being caused by her head wound and instead immediately suspected the hand of rivals of her father in the attack. Through Yue Shan, she attempted to marshal the forces that would have been available to her father. Only a few weeks later; Yue Shan disappeared. There were no witnesses and no clues. She could feel her grasp of the situation weaken. The men who loved her as a little girl were not prepared to follow her as they followed her father. When she was attacked by two hatchetmen, it was merely confirmation of what she had known for a while. She could not stay in San Francisco.
The two men found out that Jade Flower had learned her dancing lessons well. They both died, one with his jugular opened by tiny concealed blade, and the other hacked to death with his companion's broad knife.

Though Jade had not wished to leave, she was too wise not to have foreseen this need. A lover by the name of Desmond McCall takes her by ferry to Oakland and from there by train to Sacramento. In her luggage is a wealth of silver and gold coins. Evans was a professional gambler and for a year or so, she lived with him in Sacramento, living well of the proceeds of his winnings. Eventually, Sacramento paled and so did McCall. Jade went to Virginia City, Nevada, with another gambler the name of George Beauregard. George was more honest than McCall in his games, but far less prudent in other things. He taught Jade to shoot his Lefaucheux pistol, to ride and to swear like a cowboy. When he was killed by a drunken miner in a pointless brawl in early 1877, she was devastated. She murdered his killer the next night, felt no better and decided to return to her home by the Bay.

In Frisco, the men of quiet influence in Chinatown had become comfortably esconsed in a new status quo. Some of her father's old men now worked for his old rivals, but Jade had become too shrewd and too wordly to be offended at that. Some friends remembered her still and welcomed her back, but she was a threat to no one any longer. Her savings had been depleted Beauregard's poor run of luck before his death, but Jade nevertheless established a comfortable enough life with a circle of admirers. Her dreams, however, were dark and she began to sense an unfriendly presence. She started to consult herbalists, astrologers and priests to help her understand her growing sense of anxiety and dispel her fears. In 1878, she began corresponding with a man who claimed to know others with similar stories. Driven by her dread, she left San Francisco again, this time to cross the wide expense of the whole United States.

Personality: Jade Flower enjoys being around people. She is cheerful by nature, but is adept at counterfeiting whatever mood she believes will serve her best. She can be manipulative, but is not malicious about it. She simply usually ends up getting her way. She's perceptive and has grown to be a keen student of human nature. Fortunately, her familiarity with the antics of lovestruck men has not bred contempt, but amused tolerance. She likes to flirt with shy men and play aloof with those who pursue her, perhaps because she enjoys the games for their own sake. Jade has a lively sense of humour and is a sparkling conversationalist in three languages, quite adept in Spanish and French as well as having a minor facility with Yiddish, German and Italian. When danger threathens, the steely resolve and lightning calculation of her mind can surprise those who take her for a decorative flower.

Description: Jade has black hair, but a very light complexion for a Celestial. Her eyes are a vivid green, legacy of her mother and her fine-featured face usually wears an impish grin. She stands around 5'6" and weighs no more than a 110 lbs., but her muscles are finely honed and she can move with lightning speed and grace.

Skills: In additition to her linguistical gifts and social skills, Jade is a master of Wing Chun, Choy Gar and Choy Lee Fut. She is good at reading people and situations and can handle herself among the criminal element quite well. She can also play the part of an aristocratic lady, both among Anglos and the Chinese. Few men can deny her anything. She's swift with her derringers, deadly with knives and dangerous with most any weapon.

Outfit: Jade Flower has a variety of attractive dresses for all occasions, along with parasol and hats. She also has more practical riding clothes. She will usually conceal on her person two mother of pearl-gripped Sharps & Hankins Model 4D derringers in .32 Long RF and a jade-decorated hiltless small knife. She also owns a Lefacheaux Mle 1854 pistol and two wide-bladed fighting knives.
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Old 06-04-2011, 04:45 PM   #26
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Default Example character 2

Smith/Armourer (Exoduster, Frontier Culture, Shotgunner)

Mose Jefferson

Bio: Born a slave in Jackson, Mississippi in the year 1841, Mose worked as a blacksmith's assistant. He was a quick learner, an amiable fellow and his master had no sons. On his 18th birthday, he was freed and became a journeyman working with John Jefferson, his former master.

When the South began arming itself, he started building cannon, muskets and rifles. After hostiles started, John Jefferson, despite being well over fifty, joined the 5th Mississippi Regiment of the Confederate Army. Mose followed him to war, as a blacksmith and armourer with the Army of Mississippi. After John Jefferson fell at Perryville, Mose contrived to carry an Enfield musket for the rest of the war. The Army of Mississippi was defeated often enough so that the baggage train was no safe place to be and Mose fought in hand-to-hand combat with the Yankees. Under Gen. Johnston in the Army of Tennessee, he marched as a soldier in the ranks and no one thought anything of it. For one thing, Mose was a superlative soldier; stolid, uncomplaining, indefatigable and a fountain of strength to his companions. And in battle, he was a fearless, roaring giant.

Mose's courage and ferocity could not stave off the inevitable and he surrendered with the rest of the Army of Tennessee in North Carolina, in 1865. After the war, he drifted along doing odd jobs, trying to raise the stakes to start his own foundry and livery. Having little success, he joined with other defeated Confederate soldiers and stuck out to Montana, hoping to find gold at Confederate Gulch. He didn't find gold, but he did discover that an accomplish smith could earn good money there and quickly saved up enough to go into business for himself. The gold yield was already declining, so he took his pile and tried his luck elsewhere. Drifting West, he found himself in Bodie in late 1870.

Mose tried mining for a year and his sapper experience from the war enabled him to quickly adopt to the use of dynamite, but he failed to strike it rich. He did have enough money to start his own business and he founded a successful smithy in Bodie. When the Montana fields started failing, many old friends drifted West and Mose established an enjoyable life, despite the rough and tumble nature of the place. In 1877, however, Mose and his friend Llewellyn Evans saw the Badman and after that, nothing was ever the same for either of them.

Mose and Evans left the goldfields in haste and tried to come to terms with their experience. Religion was some comfort, but no priest seemed to have the answers that Mose craved. Mose talked with preachers of every denomination, in every town and city he came to. He even talked to medicine men, Chinese herbalists and heathens of every description. Llewellyn mostly drank, but with time and coaxing, Mose managed to get him to talk about his experience and feel better about it. They both determined that forgetting it was not an option.
Finally, late in the year 1878, the friends found some men of knowledge willing to credit their story. These fine gentlemen wanted the companions to travel East and help them convince the authorities of the existence of the Badman and others like it. They offerend to pay their railway fare and a generous stipend besides, but that wasn't why Mose accepted. He accepted because he hopes that someone will listen and that creatures like the Badman will be destroyed, never to trouble anyone again.

During his time in the East, in addition to meeting with a lot of learned men, Mose found the time to work Daniel LeFever in his Syracuse workshop for a few months and also met an Englishman named Robert Forsythe who had worked for W.W. Greener. Mose tinkered with some designs based on prototypes that Simon had tested and achieved satisfactory results after some weeks, though his design was both heavy and expensive. Mose's craftsmanship impressed LeFever greatly and when Postmaster General Keys made Mose and Evans Special Agents in August, LeFever was sorry to see him go. The two parted on good terms and Mose promised to visit whenever he was in New York State.

Personality: Mose is phlegmatic and radiates a calm assurance. He is not given to complaint or any kind of chatter, but is friendly and has a wry sense of humour. When others might make small talk to avoid the silence, he would rather sing psalms in his deep, rich bass voice. When Mose does talk, he is usually worth listening to, as he has a mine of common sense inside his thick skull. He also has a very strong sense of personal morality, but is not the sort to press his values on his companions, other than perhaps to chide them gentle and with good humour when they fall short and are heading for a fall. In times of danger, he is a pillar of strength and courage.

Description: Standing 6'6" tall and weighing 245 perfectly formed pounds, Mose is a splendid specimen of manhood. He has short, thick and curly black hair, a strong face lined with hard living and placid big brown eyes.

Skills: Mose can drive a wagon like an old hand, shoe any horse, no matter how wild and bang up a servicable tool from any old scraps. He builds beautiful, functional guns and is very interested in keeping up with the newest cartridges and actions. He can handle mining equipment, including blasting caps and dynamite. Despite his bulk, he is neither clumsy nor slow, but he's never been a very good rider. Mose is a very gentle man and doesn't like to fight. He did wrestle for fun in his youth and is adept at grappling men and subduing them with his size and strength. When roused, he can swing a musket with bayonet like a scythe through the ranks of the enemy and he is a fine shot as well.

Outfit: Mose usually travels with a bag of tools and wearing simple clothes that are clean and well cared for. He carries an eight-gauge shotgun with a 20" barrel that he built himself from an 1875 Parker barrel and stock, in addition to LeFever-style internal strikers and autoejectors modelled on the Greener design. Mose also carries a LeFever 1878 10 gauge with the barrel sawn down to 12" and a Dragoon pistol-grip fitted to it. Finally, he wears on his belt a Colt Dragoon he has converted to fire his handloaded 60 grain .45 Long Colt rounds, a LeMat converted to fire .44 Colt and with the 16-gauge smoothbore barrel rigged for side-loading using all-brass shells loaded with 21 pellets of No. 4 buck and a heavy charge. He also carries a heavy Bowie knife with a 15" blade that he made himself.
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Old 06-05-2011, 12:37 AM   #27
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Default Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents

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Originally Posted by jmurrell View Post
I am thinking he was originally a Southern gentleman from Louisiana(maybe?). In his early thirties with a wife and family when the Civil war started. He raised a company of troops and went off to war. Instead of glory and chivalry he found blood and filth and death. His family dead from an epidemic and his holdings ruined from the war he had to make a new start. He took up medicine as penance for what he had seen and done during the war. He went west to escape the memories of his family.

Initial thoughts anyway, subject to change to mesh with other players.
Very good.

What was his profession until his thirties/forties (end of war)? Plantation owner? Industrialist?

Starting his career in medicine in his late thirties or early forties is going to be rather exceptional. Would he have had any prior experience with medicine before that? Any role models for his choice? Reason why he didn't choose gold miner, cattle rancher, Pinkerton agent, lawman, bounty hunter or railroad executive? Or was he perhaps already a doctor in addition to a land-owner in the Antebellum South?
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Old 06-05-2011, 07:49 PM   #28
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Default Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents

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Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
Very good.

What was his profession until his thirties/forties (end of war)? Plantation owner? Industrialist?
Undecided. His family at least were major landowners.

Quote:
Starting his career in medicine in his late thirties or early forties is going to be rather exceptional. Would he have had any prior experience with medicine before that? Any role models for his choice? Reason why he didn't choose gold miner, cattle rancher, Pinkerton agent, lawman, bounty hunter or railroad executive? Or was he perhaps already a doctor in addition to a land-owner in the Antebellum South?
He could have already been a doctor, I suppose.

I was thinking that he had done or ordered done a lot of killing during the war. Afterwards he decided to become a doctor in order to heal instead of kill. Doing penance for his sins in a way.
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Old 06-05-2011, 07:51 PM   #29
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Default Example character 3

Indian expert (Wilderness survival, frontier culture, sharpshooter)

Llewellyn Evans

Bio: Llewellyn was born 1845 in a cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains, North Carolina, to an old mountain man, trapper and hunter and his part-Cherokee wife. By age twelve, Llewellyn was an accomplished mountaineer, backwood hunter and musket shot. At the age of fifteen, when his father died, he settled comfortably into the role of man of the house and provider for his mother.

When the Civil War broke out, Llewellyn hoped to remain neutral. For almost a year, he and many of his fellow highlanders managed to avoid the war raging elsewhere in the state. After having exchanged fire with a several bushwhackers near his home, however, Llewellyn felt compelled to join a local militia company, composed of both Cherokee and highlanders. Several such companies were then combined into a military unit in September 1862 and given the name Thomas' Legion after the chief of the Cherokee, William Holland Thomas, that was elected its Colonel.

Llewellyn was now a soldier of the Confederacy, without having given much thought to what he was fighting for, beyond defending his home from bushwhackers and Union troops. He was picked out to be a sharpshooter due to his woodcraft and uncanny shooting and received a two-band Enfield rifle-musket for that purpose. This was a great boon to him as he and most of his companions had been using smoothbore muskets. Later in the war he was given a Whitworth rifle with a four-power scope, an excellent weapon that he used to great effect. Llewellyn fought with the Legion through Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and North Carolina again, until it surrendered at the war's end, the last Confederate unit to do so.

Homecoming was melancholy for more than one reason. His mother had been murdered by a bushwhacker in 1864 and few of his friends had survived the war. Llewellyn made an attempt to track down his mother's killer, but soon found out that he had most likely been killed in a skirmish about a week afterwards. When a smallpox epidemic broke out in the neighbouring Qualla boundary, Llewellyn decided that he would seek out a more congenial climate and greater opportunities to the West.

He went to Kansas in early 1866, planning to become a homesteader. Once he arrived there, however, he heard about the opportunities to be had in providing the railroad workers for Union Pacific (Eastern) with buffalo meat. He signed on and worked for two years as a buffalo hunter. In 1868, the hard work and rough conditions convinced take a vacation. He went to the Indian territory and lived for a while with cousins on Cherokee lands. He married a Chickasaw girl and found work as an assistant to a clerk for the Indian agency. He took part in settling Cheyenne and Kiowa on their new lands and worked a great deal with Chickasaws and Chocktaw.

In the winter of 1871-1872 his wife died of pneunomia and Llewellyn decided that he was ready for another change. He went back to buffalo hunting, this time as a market hunter. He earned good money and bought himself a pair of Sharps rifles more suited for the mass slaughter he was engaged in than the muzzle-loaded Whitworth. When the northern herd started thinning at the end of 1873, Llewellyn went to Red River, Texas to continue his trade. He learned from Cheyenne friends to follow the fleeing herds on horseback and added a Sharps carbine to his arsenal to use at close range.

When Quanah Parker and his Comanches attacked Adobe Falls in 1874, Llewellyn offered to scout for the US army. He served throughout the yearlong campaign, but his initial anger at the attack on his comrades was short lived and he developed great sympathy for Quanah and his men. The market hunting that had so plumped his purse was striking at the livelihood of the Plains Indians. Llewellyn did not go back to his trade after the war was over, but went as a tourist on the Kansas Pacific trains to the Pacific coast. He enjoyed a long soujourn in San Francisco, but the high life and gambling that he learned to appreciate did not come cheap. He found his sizable savings depleted after only a few months. Nothing daunted, he spent the last of it on a prospector's outfit and went to Bodie to try his luck.

In Bodie, he met Mose Jefferson, a black smith and skilled armourer who had often been called to repair the rifles for the battalion-level sharpshooters in the war. They formed a fast friendship which was strengthened when they met the Badman of Bodie together. If not for Mose's kindly strength, constant good cheer and simple faith, Llewellyn might have descended into alcoholic depression. Instead, he joined his friend in seeking answers and ended up working for a very strange outfit under the Postmaster General.

Personality: Llewellyn is crusty, foul-mouthed and irascable. His sense of humour is rough and often offensive. He does not hold with social niceties and judges a man by his actions, not his clothes, wealth or status. He scorns the weak, but respects anyone, no matter his origin or breed, who can meet his standards of toughness. Llewellyn likes whiskey, tall tales and game meat grilled on the trail. When drunk, he'll often make up outrageous whoppers about frontier life or heroes to mock dudes and tenderfeet, but he never brags about his own accomplishments. Those who take the time and effort to earn his respect might discover that Llewellyn is fiercely loyal to his friends, stubbornly honourable and surprisingly tender-hearted behind his uncouth bluster.

Description: Llewellyn stands 5'8" high and weighs in at some 170 lbs. of teak-hard sinew. He has black hair, bushy black brows and beard and a swarthy complexion, but many men who work outside are similarly dark. His one-eight Cherokee ancestry is usually not apparent unless he happens to mention it. His eyes are his father's, gray and cold. Llewellyn usually dresses in buckskins, with bandanna and pork pie hat.

Skills: Llewellyn is a superlative rifle shot, woodwise, seasoned plainsman, intuitive tracker and splendid horseman. He can move silently and fast through almost any kind of natural cover and ride or walk for many days without rest. He speaks Cherokee as well as English, Choctaw and Chickasaw well and is fair in Cheyenne and Comanche as well as knowing a little Kiowa.

Outfit: Llewellyn has exchanged the tools of his former trade for a scoped Remington Number One Long Range Creedmoor in .44-90 Remington Special. He still owns his Whitworth, but more for sentimental reasons than anything else. He kept his Sharps Cavalry carbine in .45-70 Government, as his scoped rifle can be cumbersome. His friend Mose Jefferson has customised that carbine, cutting the barrel down to 16", shortening the stock and shaped the trigger guard to his hand. In his belt he has a Colt M1851 Navy converted to fire .38 Long Colt, a Bowie knife with an 8" blade and a steel tomahawk.
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Last edited by Icelander; 06-06-2011 at 08:27 AM.
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Old 06-05-2011, 08:00 PM   #30
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Default Re: [OOC] The Silent Service, Very Special Agents

Quote:
Originally Posted by jmurrell View Post
He could have already been a doctor, I suppose.
It is not necessary at all.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jmurrell View Post
I was thinking that he had done or ordered done a lot of killing during the war. Afterwards he decided to become a doctor in order to heal instead of kill. Doing penance for his sins in a way.
That sounds interesting.

So, we've got him down as one mean soldier and as a sharp doctor with no tolerance for the old and reliable methods whose only flaw is that they don't work. What else is he? He's a hunter, apparently, and a good horseman. How does his hunting mesh with his regret over the killing he has done? It doesn't remind him of taking human life?

Is there anything else you see him as being able to do? Something he learned during the first three decades of his life, presumably. Upper class Southern manners, I guess. Maybe managment of his estates, explaining how he took easily to outfitting a large number of men and commanding them.

How's his bedside manner? Courtly? Commanding? Gentle? Irascible?

Had you thought about his supernatural experience? And whether he knows any of the other PCs? Is there any particular type of character that you'd like to see in the group with him, for them to play off each other?
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