![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Cosmographia App (WIP)
Dec. 8th, 2016 10:08 pmPlayer:
Name: Dray
Contact Details:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
drayma
Other Characters?: n/a
Character
Character Name: Jack Boyce, though he goes by his last name to most.
Canon: OC--Boyce's world is a mash-up of sci fi (a colony ship that landed to terraform a new planet), fantasy (said colonists were a fellowship of humans, dwarves and elves, and the technology-levels of the current day reflect a significant backwards leap from pre-landing technology) and horror (the colonized planet unleashed an infection upon its population in the form of a kind of lycanthropy). Elements of Boyce's story revolves around building up trust and belonging with something like a pack of werewolves on the outskirts of human civilization, exploring lost relics, and getting to the bottom of the origin of their werewolf curse. In his world, this curse is called 'hixura'--or rather the term is interchangeable with 'werewolf'.
Canon Point: Boyce is the year-round maintainer of a mountainside camp. Each year beginning in spring, he opens it up to a pack of young recruits, who gather together to fell trees, hunt the wildlife, and mine the near-surface entrance of a dwarven shaft. During the winter he closes the camp to maintain on his lonesome. It's from somewhere in the middle of a lonely winter stint that he's plucked, around the time that he begins to forget just how hard it is to herd a pack, and when he begins to feel a twinge for his makeshift family.
Type: OC
Age: 35; he's weathered enough to look older.
History/Key Points:
-Boyce was raised on the outskirts of the human capitol of Dasur. Here, untainted humans are given the privilege and security of ancient technology. Cursed humans, known as 'hixura' are kept in locked down shanty-towns, are heavily policed, and are often kept in miserable conditions.
-As a boy, Boyce received a better education than many born hixura: his father and mother were both first generation (they were infected later in their lives.) His father was a clergyman who studied the scripture of Landing, which meant he had a good understanding of advanced practical and theoretical mathematics. His mother was not necessarily well-educated herself, but was an advocate for hixura with an incredibly strong will. Her demonstrating eventually got her killed around the time that Boyce turned fourteen. When Boyce's father crumpled under the loss of his wife, Boyce found himself having to seek out work for himself.
-At about fifteen, Dasuran police raided his home for the last time, putting his entire neighbourhood to the torch. Boyce had just experienced his first shift and, not being properly registered, had not been forced to wait it out in confines. He'd done a considerable amount of property damage and was chased out of the city, managing to escape capture by the skin of his teeth.
-He travelled far in the next three years, drifting from job to job and, for a short stint between eighteen and nineteen, getting caught up in some extremely dirty work on behalf of some unlawful human employers. He discovered during this time that hixura in the area had formed a tentative alliance with the lawful townsfolk, trusted enough to keep themselves controlled during the full moon, and allowed their own freedoms. His hit-work was giving the hixura a bad name and destabilizing the relationships of the area. Turning on his employers, he removed himself further from human civilization and wound up on the frontier of human colonized land, in the mountains.
-From about nineteen or twenty, Boyce discovered crews of hixura that, like him, had gone far abroad to escape human treatment. He joined a logging crew of purely hixura, earning more than survival money for the first time, learning valuable lessons from the camp overseer of the day.
-As the overseer grew older, he began to cultivate Boyce to help him during the winter months to maintain the barracks and facilities of the camp. This led to some currying during the summer months, when it was demonstrated that Boyce not only worked diligently, but seemed intent on wrangling any other man (or woman) who liked to throw their weight around and stir up trouble. He was never a hands-on leader, but he believed in the kind of rights his mother had instilled in him, and worried about the kind of danger an uncontrolled hixura could get up to, if people like his shady employers enticed them into positions like he'd gotten into.
-Eventually, in his late twenties, the overseer retired and Boyce was shakily thrust into the leadership of the camp. He did well over the winter, while left alone, but was challenged time and again during his first year. He managed to rise to the occasion with stoic patience. He cultivated ties with the rest of the camp on one-on-one conversations, holding back during gatherings except during work, when he often pushed himself extremely hard. He eventually channelled the quarrelsome and competitive into games of one-upsmanship, which later solidified into more formal events... he also managed to achieve the friendship of the camp's recruiter, who began selecting new hixura she thought might work better under Boyce's kind of leadership.
-For the last five years or so, he's been refining his leadership and cultivating a close camp of almost-family: all other hixura from disparate walks of life, come together to make some honest money. His recruiter is a shade more amoral, and has been pushing Boyce to open up the ancient mine shaft near the camp to explore its depths. Boyce, resistant to the idea of stirring those resources due to his father's teachings on the lost species that created those mines, has been losing a battle of wills. This has been his last winter prior to a meeting with the recruiter who will convince him to take an unfortunate pack of new recruits into the mines. He's already developing a bad feeling about it when he is plucked to the central heart of the temple, his story diverted by the gem embedded in his chest.
Personality:
Boyce is a man who prefers to demonstrate his convictions through hard work and through setting good examples, but he is otherwise reserved before others, hands-off as a leader. He has strong feelings about his werewolf curse, and about the well-being of those who are like him, and those feelings are often in conflict with one another. For example, he has a deeply seated sense of internal self-loathing. Throughout his childhood it was made it very clear that he was a lesser person for being born hixura, and the first time that he transformed, it was outside the holding cells meant for his kind. He hurt a lot of people and caused a lot of damage. Throughout his teens and early twenties he bounced around some pretty awful jobs to get by that really affected his sense of belonging, his sense of self. While some of the people who damaged him were other hixura, by and large they were untainted humans. His mothers early training gave him that sliver of moral justice to keep him from sliding off the deep end, and his time under the tutelage of the older camp-leader helped to refine that from a boiling need to make up for his own deficiencies by lending a helping hand to others.
Usually Boyce will vet others for their potential--both their potential to harm and their potential for growth... unless they blatantly believe in superiority. He will accept a certain amount of abuse aimed directly at him, but not at those who's opted to take under his wing. His temper is very long, almost interminably so, though that doesn't mean that he will allow himself to be railed against if he feels the conversation is going to lead to violence. As far as dealing with conflict, Boyce has used violence in the past, and he doesn't enjoy it. He doesn't mind competition, or the kind of friendly antagonism that comes with high-running emotions, but because he loathes the hixura curse in himself he does his best not to give vent to any anger that comes a day or so before the full moon... and as for controlling the proper shift into a werewolf form, he is extremely diligent about keeping himself and his crew on lock-down. Boyce can be extremely methodical in situations with risky outcomes. Come prepared, suffer the worst with what dignity one can maintain, and then move on as though it didn't happen... that's been the way he's settled on getting through shapeshifting and it has bled to the rest of his doings.
Gem:
Howlite: Besides the obvious pun for a werewolf character, Howlite possesses qualities that help to calm and facilitate emotional and spiritual awareness. Boyce possesses the first quality, but he could learn to expand on the second two. Howlite is supposed to absorb anger, which is an interesting contrast to Boyce's hixura curse, which generates it. Because I'm interested in themes of healing a character who's already on that path himself--but who has largely put the worst of it on ice in order to help others--I figured Howlite would be a nice gem to allow some specific powers along those lines.
There are other qualities, too, such as being able to retrieve information about other lives through dreams... which while I don't see necessarily immediately impactful to Boyce's character arc, tend to be fun in terms of setting up threads and new CR. Memory and dream-swaps ahoy!
I'm also interested in applying some of Howlite's physical properties to Boyce's form: white skin with grey bands, silver-tinted 'blood'--this is because Boyce's experience with his werewolf curse has left him open to unwanted physical changes. His gem is able to affect more of its presence in his holographic makeup than it would be for someone who wasn't used to losing a bit of themselves every month. The silver-tinted blood is a representation of his struggles with his own self-loathing. The hixura virus is extremely reactive in the presence of silver, and having silver blood is a quick (if a little esoteric) way of representing that Boyce is uncomfortable in his own skin.
Power Considerations:
Shifting: Boyce will find his body wanting to transform with the cycle of the full moon, if only because he expects it and the trauma of it has been so deeply ingrained. Focusing on taking control of that will become a priority for him, first with learning to keep his mind when his body wants to swap out to the form that for all other intents and purposes would seem much like a corrupted gem's. Once he's learned that, he can begin to finesse, but this is a fairly integral aspect of his character that I'd love to explore.
Empathic Awareness: The ability to sense the emotions of others, which will eventually build into the ability to drain off anger and fear to bring calm. I would prefer to have this one take longer to master if he gets it right away, as tension can be a fun part of CR building... but I like the idea of him being able to tune in to close CR so that he has an overview on the morale of his friends and family. This will allow him to react more subtly to stressed out gems, which is how he tends to deal with his subordinates back home in any case.
Spiritual Attunement: I'm not entirely sure how to play this out in the game, but I think that if Boyce sticks around for long enough, and if there's a way to make it not game-breaky, this would be useful to track either the signatures of other gems, or eventually to discern hints from artifacts and other gem-related technology. If possible I'd prefer to take this power last because it's a subtle thing and while tracking is a great nod to werewolf/woodsman dynamics, I can't see it being super useful for attaining brand new CR unless under pretty specific circumstances. Similarly I wouldn't want to have Boyce be able to snag info about artifacts right at the beginning of his stay because I'd want to get him settled in first to see if he fits the game, and would feel ashamed if I got plot info that I couldn't pass on or act on if things didn't work out... but I'm open to really rejigging this one, so if you see potential for it that I'm missing, I'm all ears!
**Bonus Weapon Idea** I see Boyce's weapon being a heavy chain and hook, firstly because he uses these tools often to hoist and prep logs for transport when hitched to horse-teams (technology in his world is at about very early 1900's where the telegraph and other equivalents are just being explored, let alone engines and vehicles outside of horsepower!) Secondly, chains are pretty integral to self-restraining hixura practices: Boyce is well prepared and tends to use a chain to prevent himself from busting out and causing damage as a werewolf, and expects the same kind of discipline from other werewolves. Thirdly, a chain is a versatile tool that implicates his preference to bind rather than destroy. Lastly, I haven't studied the other gems in the game, but I imagine that utilizing a chain-weapon in a fusion could create some pretty neat combos!
Extra:
Objectives:
1) Learning to control his shape-shifting, learning to acceptance of the part of him that he associates with his curse, healing the trauma and coming to terms with self-acceptance.
2) Learning to reach out to others. He's good with camps-full of other vagabonds and outcasts, but he's never thought to knit together a family or friends group of his own for fear of his curse.
Writing Sample: Test Drive Writing Example
Name: Dray
Contact Details:
Other Characters?: n/a
Character
Character Name: Jack Boyce, though he goes by his last name to most.
Canon: OC--Boyce's world is a mash-up of sci fi (a colony ship that landed to terraform a new planet), fantasy (said colonists were a fellowship of humans, dwarves and elves, and the technology-levels of the current day reflect a significant backwards leap from pre-landing technology) and horror (the colonized planet unleashed an infection upon its population in the form of a kind of lycanthropy). Elements of Boyce's story revolves around building up trust and belonging with something like a pack of werewolves on the outskirts of human civilization, exploring lost relics, and getting to the bottom of the origin of their werewolf curse. In his world, this curse is called 'hixura'--or rather the term is interchangeable with 'werewolf'.
Canon Point: Boyce is the year-round maintainer of a mountainside camp. Each year beginning in spring, he opens it up to a pack of young recruits, who gather together to fell trees, hunt the wildlife, and mine the near-surface entrance of a dwarven shaft. During the winter he closes the camp to maintain on his lonesome. It's from somewhere in the middle of a lonely winter stint that he's plucked, around the time that he begins to forget just how hard it is to herd a pack, and when he begins to feel a twinge for his makeshift family.
Type: OC
Age: 35; he's weathered enough to look older.
History/Key Points:
-Boyce was raised on the outskirts of the human capitol of Dasur. Here, untainted humans are given the privilege and security of ancient technology. Cursed humans, known as 'hixura' are kept in locked down shanty-towns, are heavily policed, and are often kept in miserable conditions.
-As a boy, Boyce received a better education than many born hixura: his father and mother were both first generation (they were infected later in their lives.) His father was a clergyman who studied the scripture of Landing, which meant he had a good understanding of advanced practical and theoretical mathematics. His mother was not necessarily well-educated herself, but was an advocate for hixura with an incredibly strong will. Her demonstrating eventually got her killed around the time that Boyce turned fourteen. When Boyce's father crumpled under the loss of his wife, Boyce found himself having to seek out work for himself.
-At about fifteen, Dasuran police raided his home for the last time, putting his entire neighbourhood to the torch. Boyce had just experienced his first shift and, not being properly registered, had not been forced to wait it out in confines. He'd done a considerable amount of property damage and was chased out of the city, managing to escape capture by the skin of his teeth.
-He travelled far in the next three years, drifting from job to job and, for a short stint between eighteen and nineteen, getting caught up in some extremely dirty work on behalf of some unlawful human employers. He discovered during this time that hixura in the area had formed a tentative alliance with the lawful townsfolk, trusted enough to keep themselves controlled during the full moon, and allowed their own freedoms. His hit-work was giving the hixura a bad name and destabilizing the relationships of the area. Turning on his employers, he removed himself further from human civilization and wound up on the frontier of human colonized land, in the mountains.
-From about nineteen or twenty, Boyce discovered crews of hixura that, like him, had gone far abroad to escape human treatment. He joined a logging crew of purely hixura, earning more than survival money for the first time, learning valuable lessons from the camp overseer of the day.
-As the overseer grew older, he began to cultivate Boyce to help him during the winter months to maintain the barracks and facilities of the camp. This led to some currying during the summer months, when it was demonstrated that Boyce not only worked diligently, but seemed intent on wrangling any other man (or woman) who liked to throw their weight around and stir up trouble. He was never a hands-on leader, but he believed in the kind of rights his mother had instilled in him, and worried about the kind of danger an uncontrolled hixura could get up to, if people like his shady employers enticed them into positions like he'd gotten into.
-Eventually, in his late twenties, the overseer retired and Boyce was shakily thrust into the leadership of the camp. He did well over the winter, while left alone, but was challenged time and again during his first year. He managed to rise to the occasion with stoic patience. He cultivated ties with the rest of the camp on one-on-one conversations, holding back during gatherings except during work, when he often pushed himself extremely hard. He eventually channelled the quarrelsome and competitive into games of one-upsmanship, which later solidified into more formal events... he also managed to achieve the friendship of the camp's recruiter, who began selecting new hixura she thought might work better under Boyce's kind of leadership.
-For the last five years or so, he's been refining his leadership and cultivating a close camp of almost-family: all other hixura from disparate walks of life, come together to make some honest money. His recruiter is a shade more amoral, and has been pushing Boyce to open up the ancient mine shaft near the camp to explore its depths. Boyce, resistant to the idea of stirring those resources due to his father's teachings on the lost species that created those mines, has been losing a battle of wills. This has been his last winter prior to a meeting with the recruiter who will convince him to take an unfortunate pack of new recruits into the mines. He's already developing a bad feeling about it when he is plucked to the central heart of the temple, his story diverted by the gem embedded in his chest.
Personality:
Boyce is a man who prefers to demonstrate his convictions through hard work and through setting good examples, but he is otherwise reserved before others, hands-off as a leader. He has strong feelings about his werewolf curse, and about the well-being of those who are like him, and those feelings are often in conflict with one another. For example, he has a deeply seated sense of internal self-loathing. Throughout his childhood it was made it very clear that he was a lesser person for being born hixura, and the first time that he transformed, it was outside the holding cells meant for his kind. He hurt a lot of people and caused a lot of damage. Throughout his teens and early twenties he bounced around some pretty awful jobs to get by that really affected his sense of belonging, his sense of self. While some of the people who damaged him were other hixura, by and large they were untainted humans. His mothers early training gave him that sliver of moral justice to keep him from sliding off the deep end, and his time under the tutelage of the older camp-leader helped to refine that from a boiling need to make up for his own deficiencies by lending a helping hand to others.
Usually Boyce will vet others for their potential--both their potential to harm and their potential for growth... unless they blatantly believe in superiority. He will accept a certain amount of abuse aimed directly at him, but not at those who's opted to take under his wing. His temper is very long, almost interminably so, though that doesn't mean that he will allow himself to be railed against if he feels the conversation is going to lead to violence. As far as dealing with conflict, Boyce has used violence in the past, and he doesn't enjoy it. He doesn't mind competition, or the kind of friendly antagonism that comes with high-running emotions, but because he loathes the hixura curse in himself he does his best not to give vent to any anger that comes a day or so before the full moon... and as for controlling the proper shift into a werewolf form, he is extremely diligent about keeping himself and his crew on lock-down. Boyce can be extremely methodical in situations with risky outcomes. Come prepared, suffer the worst with what dignity one can maintain, and then move on as though it didn't happen... that's been the way he's settled on getting through shapeshifting and it has bled to the rest of his doings.
Gem:
Howlite: Besides the obvious pun for a werewolf character, Howlite possesses qualities that help to calm and facilitate emotional and spiritual awareness. Boyce possesses the first quality, but he could learn to expand on the second two. Howlite is supposed to absorb anger, which is an interesting contrast to Boyce's hixura curse, which generates it. Because I'm interested in themes of healing a character who's already on that path himself--but who has largely put the worst of it on ice in order to help others--I figured Howlite would be a nice gem to allow some specific powers along those lines.
There are other qualities, too, such as being able to retrieve information about other lives through dreams... which while I don't see necessarily immediately impactful to Boyce's character arc, tend to be fun in terms of setting up threads and new CR. Memory and dream-swaps ahoy!
I'm also interested in applying some of Howlite's physical properties to Boyce's form: white skin with grey bands, silver-tinted 'blood'--this is because Boyce's experience with his werewolf curse has left him open to unwanted physical changes. His gem is able to affect more of its presence in his holographic makeup than it would be for someone who wasn't used to losing a bit of themselves every month. The silver-tinted blood is a representation of his struggles with his own self-loathing. The hixura virus is extremely reactive in the presence of silver, and having silver blood is a quick (if a little esoteric) way of representing that Boyce is uncomfortable in his own skin.
Power Considerations:
Shifting: Boyce will find his body wanting to transform with the cycle of the full moon, if only because he expects it and the trauma of it has been so deeply ingrained. Focusing on taking control of that will become a priority for him, first with learning to keep his mind when his body wants to swap out to the form that for all other intents and purposes would seem much like a corrupted gem's. Once he's learned that, he can begin to finesse, but this is a fairly integral aspect of his character that I'd love to explore.
Empathic Awareness: The ability to sense the emotions of others, which will eventually build into the ability to drain off anger and fear to bring calm. I would prefer to have this one take longer to master if he gets it right away, as tension can be a fun part of CR building... but I like the idea of him being able to tune in to close CR so that he has an overview on the morale of his friends and family. This will allow him to react more subtly to stressed out gems, which is how he tends to deal with his subordinates back home in any case.
Spiritual Attunement: I'm not entirely sure how to play this out in the game, but I think that if Boyce sticks around for long enough, and if there's a way to make it not game-breaky, this would be useful to track either the signatures of other gems, or eventually to discern hints from artifacts and other gem-related technology. If possible I'd prefer to take this power last because it's a subtle thing and while tracking is a great nod to werewolf/woodsman dynamics, I can't see it being super useful for attaining brand new CR unless under pretty specific circumstances. Similarly I wouldn't want to have Boyce be able to snag info about artifacts right at the beginning of his stay because I'd want to get him settled in first to see if he fits the game, and would feel ashamed if I got plot info that I couldn't pass on or act on if things didn't work out... but I'm open to really rejigging this one, so if you see potential for it that I'm missing, I'm all ears!
**Bonus Weapon Idea** I see Boyce's weapon being a heavy chain and hook, firstly because he uses these tools often to hoist and prep logs for transport when hitched to horse-teams (technology in his world is at about very early 1900's where the telegraph and other equivalents are just being explored, let alone engines and vehicles outside of horsepower!) Secondly, chains are pretty integral to self-restraining hixura practices: Boyce is well prepared and tends to use a chain to prevent himself from busting out and causing damage as a werewolf, and expects the same kind of discipline from other werewolves. Thirdly, a chain is a versatile tool that implicates his preference to bind rather than destroy. Lastly, I haven't studied the other gems in the game, but I imagine that utilizing a chain-weapon in a fusion could create some pretty neat combos!
Extra:
Objectives:
1) Learning to control his shape-shifting, learning to acceptance of the part of him that he associates with his curse, healing the trauma and coming to terms with self-acceptance.
2) Learning to reach out to others. He's good with camps-full of other vagabonds and outcasts, but he's never thought to knit together a family or friends group of his own for fear of his curse.
Writing Sample: Test Drive Writing Example
