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Old 01-09-2019, 02:03 PM   #62
Icelander
 
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Roll of Honour

It's been established in play that mercenaries fighting for Kessler first engaged something paranormal in combat in the year 1986. At that point, they were acting as bodyguards for Kessler in Mali, not actually serving as 'Monster Hunters', but we'll start our history there.

Kessler spent the next several years setting up a team of mercenaries he knew and scholars he recruited to investigate reports of the paranormal. The mercenaries and security personnel were most necessary when the scholars investigated something in the Vile Vortices.
  • The first death of someone who went out as a Monster Hunter occurred in 1994, on Haiti. Two Hunters who were there also retired in the aftermath.
  • In 1995, a very large field team of scholars and their security personnel was lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Sixteen people went out and did not come back.* It took a very long time for Kessler and his people to recover from that disaster and there were few expeditions for years after it.
  • A hunter was killed in Gyuana in 1999 and another died on the US Virgin Islands in the same year.
  • In 2002, two hunters died and three were injured enough to retire, on a mission in Puerto Rico.
  • 2004 saw a lot of injuries and trauma among hunters, though no one died in the field. Four hunters who were injured or burned out in 2004 retired from active duty, two of them hunters who had been arrested in Cuba and severely beaten in prison there.
  • Three hunters were killed and five wounded badly enough to retire from active duty in the year 2005, in several separate incidents, in the Caribbean, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi.
  • In 2006, a hunter died in Jamaica. One of his team retired after the mission.
  • Two hunters died in Galveston in 2008. Also in 2008, over twenty people who were contractors, consultants and informants for Kessler died or disappeared in Honduras and Nicaragua. Hunters who investigated found evidence that some had been killed by magic and others by various supernatural creatures. A four man team of hunters disappeared in the jungles of Nicaragua over New Year's 2008-2009, presumed slain by the 'snake-like vampires' they were hunting.
  • A team of four hunters disappeared without trace in Haiti during the earthquake of 2010. Two others, among those sent in to look for them, later retired.
  • A hunter died in the Florida Everglades in 2011.
  • Another hunter was murdered the year 2013 in Freeport, Grand Bahama, in what appears to have been a random shooting.
  • In 2014, a hunter team on St. Kitts and Nevis suffered two deaths and four severe injuries, with two of the four later retiring.
  • In Belize, in 2017, a well-to-do Canadian woman who apparently retired before she was fifty and her 36-year-old, 6'6", USMC veteran boyfriend were killed in Belize. With them was a former sheriff's deputy from Georgia and a 'few other friends', not named. I can't help but feel that this sounds like they were either Monster Hunters or at the very least occult informants and investigative contractors, complete with security, investigating something in Belize.
  • Hurricane Maria hit Domincia in 2017 and during the storm, three senior hunters were killed, including the team leader of the Penemue team. Three others retired, with one of them being institutionalized at Rebecca Sealy Hospital, where he remains.

Questions?

Comments?

Suggestions for names on the Roll of Honour?

Or tales on how these hunters met their deaths?

Aside from the hunters who've met their deaths in teams, going against preternatural threats prepared and aware, many, many more of the consultants and informants Kessler employs have also died. I imagine that some of these are honoured in the same manner as hunters, but for others, secrecy over their connection to Kessler continues after their death.

*Actually, in 2018, it seems that four of them have come back after all. One is catatonic, one is a raving lunatic who shouts and screams in a gibberish language and one has serious psychological issues, including paranoid delusions. The fourth is Edward Alvin Smith (PC), who seems mostly functional.
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Last edited by Icelander; 01-10-2019 at 05:47 AM.
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