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[Island] Pandora
Pandora
Cool=0, Hard+1*, Hot+2, Sharp+1, Weird+1*
Current Barter: [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
Current XP: [-] [-] [-] [ ] [ ]
A woman with a slim body, all slinky and handsome in scrounged (or gifted) luxe wear, with a beautiful face and cool green eyes.
A sleeve pistol (2-harm close reload loud), a skin & hair kit (applied valuable +1hot forward), and a pet (valuable alive).
- History -
Brick+1, Gabe+2, Merry=0, Pity=0, Sundown-2
Skinner special: If you and another character have sex, choose one:
You take +1 forward and so do they.
You take +1 forward; they take -1.
They must give you a gift worth at least 1-barter.
You can hypnotize them as though youd rolled a 10+, even if you havent chosen to get the move.
When you hypnotize someone, they become fixated upon you. Hold 3. They can spend your hold, 1 for 1, by:
giving you something you want
acting as your eyes and ears
fighting to protect you
doing something you tell them to
For NPCs, while you have hold over them they cant act against you. For PCs, instead, any time you like you can spend your hold, 1 for 1:
they distract themselves with the thought of you. Theyre acting under fire.
they inspire themselves with the thought of you. They take +1 right now.
On a miss, they hold 2 over you, on the exact same terms.
Brick: 3 hold [-] [ ] [ ]
Vega: 3 hold [ ] [ ] [ ]
An arresting skinner: when you remove a piece of clothing, your own or someone elses, no one who can see you can do anything but watch. You command their absolute attention. If you choose, you can exempt individual people, by name.
Infirmary: you get an infirmary, a workspace with life support, a drug lab and a crew of 2 (Shigusa & Mox, maybe). Get patients into it and you can work on them like a savvyhead on tech.
[ ] get +1cool (max cool+2)Lost: when you whisper someones name to the worlds psychic maelstrom, roll+weird. On a hit, they come to you, with or without any clear explanation why. On a 10+, take +1forward against them. On a miss, the MC will ask you 3 questions; answer them truthfully.
[ ] get +1cool (max cool+2)
[-] get +1hard (max hard+2)
[-] get +1sharp (max sharp+2)
[ ] get a new skinner move (breathtaking)
[ ] get a new skinner move (?)
[-] get 2 gigs (detail) and moonlighting
[ ] get followers (detail) and fortunes
[-] get a move from another playbook (infirmary)
[ ] get a move from another playbook (*)
[ ] get +1 to any stat (max stat+3)
[ ] retire your character (to safety)
[ ] create a second character to play
[ ] change your character to a new type
[ ] choose 3 basic moves and advance them
[ ] advance the other 4 basic moves
* in-brain puppet strings, merciless, norman
Comments
facilities: crew (Venom and Venom), drug lab, life support
When you go into your workspace and dedicate yourself to making a thing, or to getting to the bottom of some shit, decide what and tell the MC. The MC will tell you sure, no problem, but and then 1 to 4 of the following:
its going to take hours/days/weeks/months of work;
first youll have to get/build/fix/figure out ___;
youre going to need ___ to help you with it;
its going to cost you a fuckton of jingle;
the best youll be able to do is a crap version, weak and unreliable;
its going to mean exposing yourself (plus colleagues) to serious danger;
youre going to have to add ___ to your workplace first;
its going to take several/dozens/hundreds of tries;
youre going to have to take ___ apart to do it.
The MC might connect them all with and, or might throw in a merciful or.
Once youve accomplished the necessaries, you can go ahead and accomplish the thing itself. The MC will stat it up, or spill, or whatever it calls for.
3-juggling
Companionship
- profit: 1-barter
- catastrophe: entangled ... it should have been impersonal, but no, someones emotions come into play. The crews, the clients, or someones attached to the client. (Is it your emotions?)
- unworked: n/a
Pursuing luxury
- profit: beauty in your life.
- catastrophe: you wind up in a bad spot.
- unworked: your life remains ugly, inconvenient and unsatisfying.
Technical work (psychic services, a little medicine and engineering)
- profit: 2-barter
- catastrophe: shut out ... you've done your part, but some other asshole has undercut you and shut you out. Now youre stuck with the labor or the goods, and no buyer wholl make good.
- unworked: n/a
A hoarder:
Name
Pandora. I guess I'm taking from the Touchstone list, rather than the Hoarder list, but that's fine.
Look
A woman with a slinky body in luxe scrounge wear, with an eager face and big green eyes. She's roughly the same age as Rhyme (and I think Gabe?), 24 or 25, thereabout. Since she got tired of the beach and settled up in Georgetown, she's been comfortable, well-dressed and taken care of, embedding herself in the town's power structure. She looks good, happy.
Stats
Cool+1 Hard-2 Hot+1 Sharp+1 Weird+2
If she's going to hurt someone, she'd rather do it in controlled circumstances ... she's not very Hard at all.
Moves
I choose Acquisitive Eye, and then one more. If allowed, I think I want to take Hit the Books from the wurm ... ... because I think her hoard is partly/chiefly a collection of records and samples.
Otherwise, probably Sticky Fingers.
Gear
What gear? I've got a hoard, so what do I need with gear?
Hoard
My hoard contains:
- books, maps, drawings & photographs,
- plant, animal & human specimens,
... and something else. I'm not sure what. So far, it's fairly clinical and technical, so maybe more of the same: technology and electronics or tool and instruments. But maybe a different flavor instead, more sensual, like art and fetish objects or intoxicants and delicacies.
My hoard is also voracious, so that I have to act under fire when I ignore its demands. Actually, there is no difference between the hoard's demands and my own urges: the hoard is just my own subconscious magnified and reflected into the maelstrom. When it names a thing that is wants, it's not a whisper in the back of my head, it's simply a desire that I can't control.
My hoard may also be meticulous (anything I return to the hoard must be in perfect condition) or beautiful (NPCs who see my hoard envy and desire it). Not sure, and it's not necessary that it be either. It's certainly not independently conscious because see above.
Hx
I think I keep my hoard secret, so everyone would have Hx+1 with me, modified appropriately by their playbooks.
Then I need to judge each of you rich or poor in terms set by the qualities and substance of my hoard. Unfortunately ... yeah, you're all poor, I'm pretty sure. I'd like to judge someone rich, but man. You really aren't. So I'd take -1hx with each of you, and you'd each give me either Hx-1 or Hx+1, depending on whether we're acquainted or not.
I went up to Georgetown to find a more interesting, more beautiful place in the world. I wanted to leave behind the hardscrabble life on the beach, I wanted to learn, and to love, and to be comfortable and taken care of. I think my mother would have wanted that for me. And I did not think that my new family would begrudge me a good life. Well. Clarity did, somewhat, but she always was controlling, wasn't she?
I was ... sixteen? Seventeen? Young, pretty, and psychic. I played at fortune telling for a bit, and I toyed with the patronage of some of Georgetown's powerful men. I fared better than most, selling my services in exchange for comfort and security. They were happy to pay: I was special to them. I was something they had never seen before.
But that's not my life here. Early on, I found something so much better: I found the crypt.
But Jake was older, and more evil. Pandora's less interested in human specimens, at the moment. So that leaves Always and Brick both scrabbling around in the dirt, just with other people along for the ride. If they actually had servants, or something like that, it might be different.
Mainly, Pandora's interested in tangible knowledge (books, etc). If I dropped the 'tangible' from that, it might open things up a bit, but that doesn't seem to really fit the spirit of the hoarder. Also, I'm leaning toward taking art & fetish objects as her third item category, so also things of beauty. Or if I go for tech or tools, maybe that instead. Gabe is probably best in that, but I dunno. My impression is that he has a handful of books, which is respectable, but he's maybe not rich in them.
What does Gabe have? Books, records, art? I know he does art himself, so that's also something.
She's a lot like a kept skinner. She is involved in her patron's or patrons' lives as 'an enlivening presence', she entertains groups for them (in a conversation-and-service sense, not a music-and-dancing sense), and then sure, sometimes there's a night of intimate companionship.
Who's important in Georgetown, who might be a patron?
Her hoard is going to be fairly clinical. The books and specimens, and then I'll drop the thought of adding in art and whatnot. In that light, we'll say that the hoard is also meticulous: "when you return something to it, it must be in perfect condition". Everything's all neatly preserved and carefully filed, in archival condition. And I think I'll add "relics & waste of the golden age past" as her third category.
Whatever that was, there's no physical sign left: its handful of chambers were left bare, empty of all but the occasional bit of refuse. Still, there's been something strange about it as far back as the Georgies can remember. They talk about it like it's haunted, and people have been known to go in there and come out mad, or not at all. It's been largely left alone, though the dregs of Georgetown - the people with no other real shelter - would often huddle down there when the storms rolled in off the sea.
Pandora was one of those people, briefly, before she charmed her way into the town's graces. But coming from the beach, from the company of her family of weirdos, the crypt's strange reputation didn't frighten her. In fact, she found it fascinating, and she visited again and again - even after her fortunes began to improve.
Back then, it was a handful of rooms and short halls, a few heavy airtight doors, and a defunct mechanical room with a generator, plumbing, HVAC, and heavy-duty air filtration and water recycling. It was all empty and dusty, with animal traces in the corners and piles of rags in the first couple of rooms, where the vagrants would hide from the storms.
At one point, there's a concrete ramp down from the surface to a small loading dock, and there's also a separate stairwell access to the surface: a big, heavy, double-door hatch that now serves as Pandora's main entry/exit.
That was then. Since then, it has grown somewhat ... stranger. The handful of chambers seems to have grown, organically, into a somewhat larger complex. It seems as if for everything Pandora has added to the hoard, a half-dozen new items have appeared of their own accord. And except in just the first couple of rooms, doors do not always lead to the same place, and rooms and items appear and disappear.
Even Pandora can't freely navigate the crypt, and something that she files away may as well cease to exist, swallowed by the maelstrom If she really wanted to, she could possibly use the family's bond to isolate something from the hoard via augury ... but she generally doesn't want to.
The key to the crypt is the file room, one of the first chambers in the complex. It's a stark, pale room with smooth concrete, catalog cabinets in chipped grey steel, and a simple steel table in the center of the floor. The catalog cabinets line the walls, hundreds of drawers and racks that slide out to reveal card catalogs, file folders, racks of slides on illuminated backings, and even drawers and drawers of biological samples: spots of blood and bits of fiber mounted to glass microscope slides. Each file and slide is labeled with coding, directions that can be used to find a cataloged item elsewhere in the crypt.
The hoard has not yet accepted a human specimen. It's simple ... she just hasn't had sex with very many people, and sex is the only way for her to determine whether the hoard will accept a person, or not. The handful of people she's fucked haven't fit the bill, because of bad luck, high standards, or perhaps because she's subconsciously unprepared to feed a human being to the hoard. Or maybe it's just that she hasn't had much satisfaction in bed. *shrug*
Further, the hoard has never offered her a human specimen when she went looking for something useful. It could do that, since the hoard's contents don't necessarily have anything to do with what she's put into the hoard, but so far it hasn't. Maybe it needs to be primed with a viable human sample, or maybe it just hasn't come up yet.
As she explored, the crypt grew more complex, and she began to grow more obsessed, each working on the other, the maelstrom working on both, and they twisted together more and more tightly, becoming one, both a mind and a place. And then, one day, she found a room that had not been there before. It was the catalog room, the file room, and at that time it was empty and hollow. She saw it, and she thought that it was perfect.
Pandora hungers for books, maps, photographs, and other records of past and present. She files them away, carefully indexing them in card catalogs and taking slides of the maps, photographs, and similar visual records.
Pandora hungers for living things. She pins them to boards, preserves them in tanks and jars, secures them in cages, and locks them in cells. From each, she takes a drop of blood or some other sample, preparing the samples and mounting them on microscope slides.
Pandora hungers for the remnants of the past: documents, artifacts, even the occasional bit of weird psychic tech or other strange artifact of the end times. She stores them away, documenting them thoroughly and filing the records away in her cabinets.
A place for everything, and everything in its place: all meticulous, always precise. And once it is filed away, she moves on, forgetting, the thing's physical existence lost in the crypt and swallowed by the maelstrom. It's not really about learning anymore. It's about consuming, and hoarding.
Though, I'm finding myself in a place where I'm not sure that I want to start as a hoarder. I started out re-imagining a younger Jake with somewhat different obsessions, but I think what'd be more interesting me here would be if Pandora isn't so obsessed and controlling yet, but she's on the path to become so.
So I might want to start with another playbook and then play a hard downward spiral toward switching toward hoarder. Or not, I suppose, if something happens to put her in a sudden and drastic change of direction, but probably.
In that case, she might be in the crypt, she might have found the catalog room, but she hasn't crossed a line or hit a critical mass: the place is touched by the maelstrom, and she is collecting and filing and hoarding, but there isn't a "hoard" yet, just stuff.
She'd be either a skinner, or she'd be a savvyhead with a workspace down in the crypt. I'd planned to quickly pick up an infirmary in any case, more to study things than heal them, so savvyhead would work well with that. And she acts a lot like a skinner anyway, so there's that too. Both of those feel closer to what Pandora is like right now than a full-blown hoarder.
Still, this is somewhat playing the long game, which is against my general attitude for pbp. It feels kind of right, though.
Hm.
Skinner: Cool=0 Hard=0 Hot+2 Sharp=0 Weird+1; woman, luxe wear, sweet face, bright eyes, quick hands, young body; lost, an arresting skinner; sleeve pistol?, a pet, something else.
Or savvyhead: Cool-1 Hard=0 Hot+1 Sharp+1 Weird+2; woman, vintage wear plus tech, pretty face, quick eyes?, slight body; spooky intense?, reality's bleeding edge; workspace: a relic (archive), machining tools?, a darkroom; a piece of three of normal gear or weaponry.
Also, some way to covertly plant puppet strings? Maybe a variation of the move, or maybe I just roll twice, and the second time the command is "don't consciously remember that I told you to do that?" Not sure.
Also, does opening basic moves affect whispers or receptivity?
The hocus move seeing souls could be what you want. Roll+weird to interfere (or help), so you'd be very reliable at interfering with stuff (including reads).
Between skinner and savvyhead, skinner is more conceptually in line with my image of Pandora, but savvyhead might be a little more mechanically in line. I'll have to think.
I think going for a skinner is more exciting, so I'll do that. The savvyhead has a lot going for it (several useful moves, a sex special that blends really nicely into the hoarder sex special, a workspace as part of the playbook, a strong Weird), but it'd be a little utilitarian ... Lost and An Arresting Skinner are just more interesting, and being really Hot is more exciting than being really Weird.
So! Let's try this again:
Name
Pandora.
Look
A woman with a slim, slinky body dressed in luxe wear (gifted and scrounged), with a sweet face and cool, green eyes.
She's roughly the same age as Rhyme (and I think Gabe?), 24 or 25, thereabout. Since she got tired of the beach and settled up in Georgetown, she's been comfortable, well-dressed and taken care of, fixing herself in the town's good graces. She looks good, happy.
Stats
Cool=0 Hard=0 Hot+2 Sharp=0 Weird+1
Moves
We're taking Lost and An Arresting Skinner, and Arresting Skinner is explicitly a weird psychic move on Pandora, not just being sexy. She is sexy, but not that sexy.
Gear
A sleeve pistol (2-harm close reload loud). I'm not sure about my luxe gear. I'll work that out.
Hx
Alright! Skinner Hx. This is going to be tough to work, but I want to get as many of these as possible.
1) one of you is my friend
2) one of you is my lover
3) one of you is in love with me
"Lover" looks hard to justify, with this bunch of PCs. But I'd be glad to hear volunteers! That aside, anyone interested in any of those options? I can just pick, too.
Pity and Sundown, I don't think we know each other at all, so you'll each get Hx=0 with me (which you modify up to Hx+1, naturally). Unless you have some crazy explanation for why we're secretly lovers or something. I'd listen!
You're easiest, Gabe. I'm totally the hottest of your sisters, so of course it'd be funny if we were - even so - only friends. But it's also plausible that you're in looove. Maybe even lovers: if you haven't been back to the beach since recently, maybe you visited Georgetown regularly in your traveling years and things developed. This does seem to be a fairly incestuous family, after all.
Hm. I want to make you a friend, if only to buck the trend. My goofy, nice-guy brother-confidante. Though you could be my goofy, nice-guy brother-confidante who is, unfortunately for you, in love with me. I kind of like it being real, though, just brother and sister. That would be Hx+2, which your playbook would reduce to Hx+1.
I'd like to make you a lover, Brick. I like to form relationships with strong people, and you're one of them. I had a little thing with your boss (or with some gang boss) before the war, and I made some advances on you after, since you'd come out of the war in a strong place. You're tough, reasonably sane, kind of big and rugged (which I like), and it's good to have connections with raider gangs, since they come across things that might not reach me here in Georgetown.
It'd be like: every so often, you get a chance to visit me. When things are a little quieter, or when you're stopping by to trade or whatever. When you do, you bring me things I like, I keep you relaxed and happy for a weekend or a night, the sex is great, and I introduce a little beauty and calm into your vicious dog-eat-dog life. You're maybe not in love with me, but we're lovers, and it's a generally comfortable relationship. At least, that's how I like it to be with my lovers/patrons. It might be more complicated in practice, but that depends on you.
That would give you an anchor in Georgetown, and it'd give me a connection to the rest of the island, so it's kind of practical story-wise. Is this cool with you? You'd get ... Hx+1, which I guess your playbook would reduce to Hx=0.
Merry, would it make any sense at all if you were in love with me? It doesn't look like you're too shy about wandering up to Georgetown, so we could've had some contact since you arrived on the beach. Hm, actually, no: you've been there a couple times in-game, but you do mention not liking the place (due to what happened to Nbeke).
Or, hey, you were the gangs' sex pet. I mentioned to Brick having something going on with someone in the raider gangs before the war. Maybe that someone brought you along once or more than once, thought it'd be fun to share? That's over between us, since we never had a one-on-one relationship, but those encounters showed you attraction to something other than strength and force. I'm probably not even aware that you think of me like that.
Does that work? Regardless, I want to have somehow met you, interacted with you, and unintentionally hooked you, even if it's just a shallow sort of love. Can we make that happen? You'd have Hx-1 with me.
I definitely want to say that my "someone" in the gangs was a pre-war Nbeke, before she was big and then when she was still pulling things together. You were pretty attached to Nbeke, right? Did she fuck you much, along with the men? Or would this have been a special thing, like something she thought I'd enjoy? Interestingly, reading up on Nbeke, if Pandora is a well-situated skinner in Georgetown with a personal connection to Nbeke, that might contribute to explaining this:
Don't think I'd "fallen" for you emotionally, but sure could enjoy the sex.
What would Pandora have had to do (what would she have to be like?) to make Merry be in love with her?
-add-
Oh, and I was talking about the same sort of deal I'm describing to Brick, up there, where Nbeke was a patron of Pandora's, visiting Pandora for peace of mind and, sure, sex. But at least once, Nbeke thought it would be fun to bring Merry along for the ride, 'cause she makes such a nice sub or whatever. It wouldn't have been about sealing a deal or anything, since Pandora doesn't make deals.
Also, technically, the way Apocalypse World works is that Michael gets to say these things about the other characters and they set their Hx the way he says. Of course no one is required to play in a manner reflecting that. I really like that about the game, but I've seen it make people uncomfortable at the table.