Rip It & Run! Super-Powered Characters...

If you look at pulp fiction and its various tropes, you’ll see that, every now and again, there’s a character who has supernormal powers, abilities beyond the strictly normal, which help push forward the stories in which they’re involved. Characters like this aren’t a bad thing: they’re usually gateways into the extra-natural and often, value-added members of a campaign. In my career as a Call of Cthulhu Keeper, I’ve run supernaturally augmented characters and they’ve been a boon every time. Here’s how it’s done...

Each of these character types has been brought to me by my players. They’ve asked for characters who have some unquantifiable talent that would give them an edge in the story to come. In each case, we discussed what benefits the character would have and all of the possible side-effects such ‘powers’ would entail. In every instance, the players were willing to take the rough with the smooth. For every ‘power’, we defined the extent of the character’s abilities together – this is crucial: each side of the equation has to know the rules in order for this to work. In each case, the extra rules and their special effects meant that the overall story was enriched and made that much better.

Character Number One – The Psychometric Character

This character is one who can “read” objects to work out the motivations and objectives of those who own - or owned - them. Fundamentally, this is a gift to the Keeper: the information doesn’t have to be literal; it can come as random images which the player has to interpret, or it can appear as symbols. The object should be defined as being emblematic of the person being targeted, something that they carry with them constantly, or which is significant to their worldview – a scrap of paper that they just happened to have touched is insufficient.

When I had this character to work with, I made the information appear as images which the player then had to interpret, often with the help of their fellow party members. It worked a treat. It was especially cool when, having gotten a flash of some strange vista that meant nothing to them at the time, they encountered the same scene at a later moment and information fell suddenly into place, often giving them a warning about imminent danger. This is the sort of thing that makes your gaming great!

Mechanics: Give the player ‘Psychometry’ as a skill. A successful roll will let them know what object will give the best results when evaluating a target; touching the object will give them a vision (as the Keeper decides, depending on the success of the attempt) and re-rolling the skill will prompt them, or give them results in much the same fashion as a successful Library Use roll. As the Keeper chooses, use of this power may require bed-rest - or some other kind of recovery - on the part of the character afterwards.

Each attempt to ‘read’ an object should take at least 10 minutes, with time to rest and clear the mind in between. If the Keeper allows, the Investigator can halve or even quarter their skill value, in order to make a hurried evaluation, where time is of the essence.

Character Number Two – The Lucid Dreamer

A character may wish to be a practitioner of the Dreaming skill and actively bring this power to bear on the party’s Waking World investigation. This, of course, requires the character to have a significant Dreaming and/or Dream Lore skill. The character is able to use their Dreaming skill to gain insight into their Waking World investigation. This may require them to sleep in the place where the cause of their investigation occurred, or to hold a significant piece of evidence in their hands as they sleep (something that the legal powers may frown upon). Roaming in the resulting dreamscape may be cryptic, or blatant, as the Keeper sees fit, but shouldn’t detract from gameplay: the Keeper may embroil the other players as Dreamlands-based characters to give them something to do as the Dreamer wanders aimlessly. Making these alter-egos relevant to their Waking World counterparts has extra value in such a game.

As an extra feature, the Keeper may allow the Dreamer to be aware of what’s going on in the vicinity of their sleeping body, possibly through omens appearing in the dreamscape around them. This ups the ante, especially if their somnolent corpus is being threatened by Waking World enemies. Again, as the Keeper decides, the character may be able to communicate what they’re seeing to the rest of the party, possibly while Dreaming under hypnosis.

The trick here of course is to make whatever goes on in the dreamscape pertinent to what’s going on in the Waking World. It’s especially nifty if the party are pursuing an enemy who has the ability to pass over into the Dreamlands, like a ghoul for instance. It also allows the party to gain access to libraries and similar lore even while they’re far out in the Back of Beyond without a bookstore in sight – after all, it’s only a short hop to the libraries of Ulthar when you’re sleeping out in the Congo jungles!

Character Number Three – The Fated Adventurer

This permutation is easiest of all: have the player pick a doomed bloodline from which their character is derived. The player then knows that anything to do with their fated family is going to be problematic – even if, in actual fact, it isn’t. In one of my games, one character was related to Elisabeth Bathory – “Countess Dracula” – and his immediate forebears had done their darnedest to distance themselves from all connexions. Any reference to vampires sent this character into a wheezing fit. I didn’t even need to build vampires into the campaign – each vague reference to blood-suckers or Romania made the player hyperventilate. Cool.

Ways to make this ‘power’ work are as follows: the character’s family might have been the source of a terrible scandal which automatically puts them at odds with another family, or families; being called out in a duel, snubbed in public, or targeted in a vendetta, are occurrences which could definitely liven-up a player’s day job! Some blemish on the family escutcheon – being related to Lord Byron for example, or being Aleister Crowley’s cousin - might dramatically affect a character’s Credit Rating at the most inconvenient time. Finally, the evil fate might be an inherited curse, such as the male heirs to the family estate never outliving their 30s, being destined to die in a horse-riding accident, or being fated to die should they ever set foot in Lisbon – watch them blanch with fear when the ship they’re on has to make an emergency stopover in Portugal!

Character Number Four – The Ghost Magnet

This works best when facilitated with a character who has a grand estate. The deceased forebears of this character have a vested interest in their descendant maintaining their reputation. To this end they show up – usually unannounced – and offer advice about the situation at hand. This may be useful, or anything but, depending upon the malicious nature of the Keeper. Ghosts tend not to think about the effect their appearance has upon the living, and so those SAN rolls will soon start to have an impact. Even if the advice that the ghost offers is useful!

Such familiarity with the undead might have other side-benefits as well. The character might only have to make a Spot Hidden roll in order to determine if a building is haunted, and a similar roll might well be all it takes for this character to see through a fake. The character might become the focus of a poltergeist, or get randomly taken over by ghostly entities on a successful POW vs. POW contest: not especially positive powers it must be said, but “seeing dead people” will certainly take your story to interesting places!

Character Number Five – The Snake Charmer

This character works best as an Oriental, or one born in India, or some other part of the Sub-continent. Due to their upbringing, the character has uncanny powers over elapid reptiles – that is, snakes with aggressive, poisonous tendencies, such as cobras, kraits and mambas. Using their training they can bend certain snakes to their will, force these snakes to assume rigid postures for indefinite periods, or cause them to flee in fear.

Mechanics: in every instance, the power requires an expenditure of 5 Magic Points per snake and the character’s POW is compared to the POW of the particular snake on the Resistance Table. Snakes can be made to attack specific individuals, search areas for specific items, assume the form of a walking-stick, or bangle, for up to six months, or flee in fear of the character, as they see fit. POW must be divided evenly (round down) between the reptiles if more than one is present – try controlling more snakes than you can handle and things might get tricky!

Snakes don’t need to eat often, so causing them to become rigid is not too problematic an option. When the character uses this power on a snake to make it appear as an ornate walking, or swagger, stick, bangle, armband, or necklace, the Keeper should roll 1d4+2 to see how long the the reptile will maintain this rigor. Obviously, this information should not be made available to the character casting the effect! If the snake is attacked while holding its form, the creature is killed instantly.

As a nifty side-effect to these various options, the Keeper might allow the character to be immune to (normal) snake venom, although this would make them a definite target for Yig and its worshipers!

Character Number Six – The Berserker

A weird fiction stand-by: this character can call upon mystical powers to increase their combat skills – at great cost to their usual ability. This is best done with characters who have had some kind of mystical martial arts training in Shambhala or similar. It’s also a useful power for NPCs to have – especially such pulp-fiction stand-bys as Sikh bodyguards or Chinese batmen – and can be a Keeper’s secret weapon if the party gets into any serious biffo.

Mechanics: By spending one point of CON, the player gains the temporary skill of Martial Arts and gains two attacks a round, one at the beginning and again at the end of each round, for the rest of the combat in which it is initiated. They also gain an extra 10 hit points below zero, which means they survive even after they should be dead – and, unless healed up to 0, or higher, before the end of the fight, they definitely will be – no exceptions. This power is very useful if extra damage rules for Martial Artists are also used. The expenditure of CON happens at the end of the fight, to reflect the permanent physical impairment that ‘going into overdrive’ incurs.

If the Keeper desires, the character might also gain access to other Martial Arts manoeuvres or even spookier combat powers, such as invulnerability to fire, or an inability to be damaged by edged or Impaling weapons. The rationale behind the power is everything and should inform specifics.

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A little thought can come up with many other variants on these basic models. Just remember that both the Keeper and the Investigator need to be completely au fait with the limits and advantages of the ability and be willing to wear the results – it’s always possible to overlook a glaring loophole that gives one side of the equation an unreasonable benefit. If this happens, take the concept back to the drawing-board, talk it out with your team and bash it into some other shape until it works properly.

Remember too, that a little goes a long way. If every Investigator in your team has a ‘superpower’, that might well be the rationale that keeps them together – kind of like The League of Extraordinary Investigators. However, it’s best to keep such characters few and far between and make them a true rarity.

Oh, and don’t let it stop you arming your party’s enemies with similar abilities either...!