View Single Post
Old 01-03-2019, 05:23 PM   #31
Icelander
 
Icelander's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Nobody Calls You That

Quote:
Originally Posted by mr beer View Post
I can't speak for Berkeley specifically, which may well have been ahead of the curve, but the new age movement in the 80s was big on things like Tibetan gurus*, crystal healing, reincarnation, meditation, incense etc. Of course, this is still true to a large extent.

As you know, pseudosciences tend to latch onto real science and rework them into the mythos. Chaos theory was popular science in the 80s, as was A Brief History of Time. I believe that profoundly misinterpreting quantum mechanics was a later innovation in the field (pioneered into pop culture by the fraudster Deepak Chopra).

I'd go with Acquarius, Rainbow, Dolphin or Lobsang myself.

* For example, a British plumber called Cyril Hoskin published a series of bestselling books 'authored' by a Tibetan called Lobsang Rampa.

EDIT

"Bodhisattva" is a good one, that reeks of portentousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhisattva
The person that the PCs have been referring to as The Man with the Unfortunate Look (casting photo if this was a TV show) was known to his circle of acquaintances as 'Crash' in college. It wasn't for any particularly cool reason, he just got really drunk at a freshman social and broke a table, but he kept the nickname, even as his university career extended long past the usual duration. Well, 'Crash' did actually try to get people to call him any number of other things, but such brilliant ideas as 'The Dark Man', 'Neo', 'Roland', 'Mr. Croup', 'Van Wilder', 'Shadow', 'Bodhi', 'Walter O'Dim' and 'The Raven King' all ended up consigned to the dustbin of history, as no one was willing to adopt the self-bestowed appellations.

'Crash' enrolled as a philosophy student around 2003 or so, but changed his major so often that he didn't graduate until 2009, despite a decent attendance record and good grades. As it happens, when he did finally graduate, it was as a philosophy major (again or was it the third time?), but he'd also read literature, classical studies, linguistics, sociology, mathematics and physics.

In fact, a year after his B.A. in Philosophy, 'Crash' got an undergraduate physics degree to go with his philosophy one. Graduate studies were about as focused as his undergraduate days, but after brief sojourns in such solid career choices as linguistic philosophy, psychonetics and philosophy of physics, 'Crash' settled down to pursue higher education as a theoretical physicist.

In 2013, 'Crash' altered course once again, this time to a staggering degree. He changed his field to geophysics and somehow got into an arrangement where he'd go as a research assistant to Vostok Station, Antarctica, working with AARI. With one thing or another, 'Crash' never resumed his studies at UC Berkeley, and, in any case, the age of 28 is pretty late to begin a whole new PhD program, as antarctic research was hardly relevant to his previous work as a theoretical physicist.

At the end of 2016, some of the people who'd known 'Crash' at UC Berkeley were involved in a tragic and senseless act of violence, where three students brutally murdered four of their fellow students. The scene was littered with what the media dubbed occult paraphernalia and Satanic symbols and USA Today reported that the seven students who died had been playing Vampire the Masquerade. Despite the inaccuracy of that report, it stuck in the public consciousness and the resulting legal costs were one of the contributing factors to the failure of White Wolf, the company publishing that game and the other World of Darkness games.*

By this time, the man whom they had known as 'Crash' had shed that appellation. He made a determined effort to get people to call him 'Darkwalker', but no one actually calls him that. However, leaving UC Berkeley meant leaving his parents for 'Darkwalker', ne้ 'Crash', so on the 21st of March, 2013, the paperwork finally came through to change his legal name to Janus Eremus. From Aquarius Love Dandelet-Tripplehorn, the son of Joseph Karma Tripplehorn and Sunshine Dandelet.

As yet, much of this history is unknown to my players, though one PC does remember him as 'Crash', a grad student who had been at UC Berkeley for about a generation and who hung around some of her older friends. She doesn't remember, and likely never knew, his actual name or who his parents were, beyond that they lived on or close to campus and 'Crash' didn't live in student housing, but still at home, even though he must have been almost thirty by that point (at nineteen, she felt that anyone over 25 was pretty damn old).

The PCs will find much of this background information out immediately upon the start of next session, as they've used contacts and their Patron's influence to request all data obtainable through legal and less than legal ways, through old friends in the police and paid private detectives. Good rolls and intelligent direction of follow-up research will yield more information, including, possibly, something which has some bearing on what he's doing in Galveston, TX, with a sad sack nerd who looks like a younger version of him and a glamorous Hispanic woman.

In light of the fact that there are no real spoilers for my players, just a preview of the start of next session, I thought there was no harm in posting the background and checking if anyone has suggestions on whether something needs changing, questions or criticism.

*There was evidence suggesting that some of the students who were killed had been playing a LARP based on Mage: The Awakening, but no motive for the murders was officially determined.
__________________
Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!

Last edited by Icelander; 01-04-2019 at 12:33 AM.
Icelander is offline   Reply With Quote