Alternate Earth Characters #12

[farik]

Alternate Earth Characters #12

Your GM has announced he's going to run an alternate Earth game and he wants you to make a modified version of your character to fit his "Alternate Earth Setting. The GM is being deliberately unclear about whether you'll be playing your alt character or if your regular character will be facing them.

 

So what is different about your character from

Cave Earth

It's a world where shamanism is the most advanced form of magic and technology is limited to herbs and machines lashed together out of sticks and vines. Neanderthal and Pre-Humans battle for supremacy when they aren't being terrorized by dinosaurs and hairy mammals with overbites. The Glaciers are coming and the world needs some heroes. How does your character appear?

[Chuckg]

Starguard -- the wonder-child "Helene", found in the wilderness with no memory, rapidly became the tribal "angel" and immortal goddess-queen after her great and wondrous abilities were manifest. Human civilization eventually arises underneath the unifying rule of the all-benevolent Empress Helene(1), and takes a rather curious shape...

 

 

Dr. Pain -- Le-on, already the strongest man in his tribe and its champion fighter, was granted great strength and invulnerability by a strange bolt of magic from the gods(2). Using this obvious sign from the gods, as well as his own unstoppable might, he has made himself the king of the surrounding tribes. However, he tries to be a good king, who lets his people have food and clean water instead of gorging himself while they starve. A modest tithe is enough.

 

Besides, given that he can wrestle down even the great thunder lizard single-handed, it isn't like the surrounding tribes weren't *begging* him to become their king anyway...

 

 

Darien -- long ago, an evil spirit bit a great warrior, and made him its slave. The warrior broke free and slew the spirit, but knew that he could never go back to his people, as he was cursed forever by the mark of the Dead-Who-Still-Walk. For centuries he has lurked on the outskirts of the lands, slaying other Dead-Who-Still-Walk when they attempt to attack the people he is still loyal to, but can never rejoin.

 

However, Darien has used his long centuries of life to have time to think, and reflect, and he has eventually come to the conclusion that all men are equal, even if they come from another tribe. And that it is wasteful for the tribes to all war against each other, when if they banded together they could arrange things so that all could have enough food and the Neanderthals would be nothing to fear, and perhaps even the great thunder lizard could be tamed.

 

But how to teach his fellow men, when he is forever separated from them by his not being alive, and by the fires of the sun?

 

 

(1) In the game I play Starguard in, at least one of my fellow players has already started making Sailor Moon comparisions. And he's not joking.

 

(2) Dr. Pain's original meta-gene trigger was being hit by one of Pulsar's EBs. In this case, lightning serves just as well.

[farik]

Everyone thought Kin of Claw should be sacrificed to the Earth but the elders believed no life should be taken by the hands of tribe. Too weak to hunt Kin of Claw was forced to work with the women gathering food. He quickly realized better ways to find food and made poisonous plants edible as the women began to praise him the men insisted he should hunt after the first failed attempt with rock and stick Kin developed the bow and arrow and was elevated to the role of shaman through his intence study of nature and shamanism he develops the potion which allows him to become the Large Hairy Kin of Claw others try the potion but they become mindless animals under the potions influence. Kin of Claw loyally defends his ever growing tribe with pride and accepted the mantle of leadership when Kills with Hands died of old age..

[Stormraven]

Checkmate - Not going to happen. He's very much a tech person. He had to work in the normal world to get the physique he has - he wouldn't likely have survived long enough in a neanderthal world.

 

Guardian - Minor changes. She threw Goron the bold out of the village - literally - when he tried to pull her to his cave. Later, she found these wierd things of metal that let her do other things. Her tribe's now a Matriarchy, and the patriarchal tribes around them tend to leave them alone, for fear of a boulder larger than most of their villages being dropped on them. (She found it one day walking in a glacier's path, braced it onto her shoulder, and walked back to the village.)

 

Control - Not going to happen. Even if he could appear, without Checkmate as a father, his powers are too nebulous for a Neanderthal to figure out.

[McCoy]

Millennium: The Hero With One Face? As the first incarnation of The Hero With A Thousand Faces, he still embodies truth, justice, and so forth.

 

Dolphin: Can't the Cro-magnons and Neanderthals just get along? We need to cooperate to combat Global Cooling. If we're not careful, the dinosaurs are going to go extinct!

 

Cheetah never gains superpowers, probably becomes the best hunter in his tribe.

 

Iron Will does not survive.

 

Snow Leopard: worshiped as a goddess.

[Mayday]

Originally posted by Chuckg

However, Darien has used his long centuries of life to have time to think, and reflect, and he has eventually come to the conclusion that all men are equal, even if they come from another tribe. And that it is wasteful for the tribes to all war against each other, when if they banded together they could arrange things so that all could have enough food and the Neanderthals would be nothing to fear, and perhaps even the great thunder lizard could be tamed.

 

But how to teach his fellow men, when he is forever separated from them by his not being alive, and by the fires of the sun?

 

Darien needs to take in a follower, someone abandoned by a tribe or the last survivor who can take his teachings back to the tribes as his Prophet.

 

Mayday tends to the women's work until her psi abilities develop at puberty. Afraid to speak out about the voices in her head she gradually learns to control them somewhat, but it is the night the great sabertooth attacked their caves that the green fire came and made the predators run away. The shamans sacrifice an ox and read the entrails allowing her to stay with her tribe. They teach her the ways of the seasons and she begins to call the green fire often. Birds fall from the sky at her command. Even the great lizards and woolly beasts drop to their knees and are easy prey for the hunters. She becomes a great leader of her tribe.

 

Akhen'Isis while out gathering herbs finds a strange pretty rock. She returns to her people a day later possessed by a demon and teaches them to make fire with words, and words that kill. Words that heal. She becomes the high priestess of her tribe and leads them into battle over the next centuries. When she dies another girl takes her name and memories and the demon and leads the tribe.

[Chuckg]

Originally posted by Mayday

Darien needs to take in a follower, someone abandoned by a tribe or the last survivor who can take his teachings back to the tribes as his Prophet.

 

Possible... of course, since Darien's a vampire, he's got major problems there -- who the hell in a prehistoric culture goes alone into the wilderness at night? Especially in a setting where you have velociraptors?

 

(Addendum -- Your two suggestions might work... if he can find the guy before he dies. I get the impression that in this setting, the average life expectancy for a normal human alone in the wild is about 12 to 18 hours. No wonder Darien's been waiting centuries...)

 

And he damn sure can't enter the village(*), or wait to catch somebody alone in the daytime...

 

 

 

 

(*) Well, he can sneak into the village any time he wants, but he can't actually /talk/ to anybody, prehistoric living being as communal as it is.

 

Edit -- bugger, I forgot that "can't enter without an invitation" is one of the few vampiric weaknesses I still kept at his age. Forget entering anybody's hut.

 

Darien is really a tragically alone being. If he wasn't EGO 45, he'd long since have gone insane... correction, non-fuctional. He might very well /already/ be insane.

[Brandi]

Irving would probably look like this:

 

 

but as he'd be probably very small-- possibly as small as an inch and at most about a foot tall-- he'd be more of a conscience-spirit to the one who found him. A Stone Age Jiminy Cricket, as it were.

[Guest WhammeWhamme]

Note: Irving could be an animate mountain...

 

Stone Age Flippant would be interesting. He's a hunter, who 'went to strange place, was made strong by spirit people' and can 'go weird places'.

 

erb. Dunno.

 

Stone Age Wraith:

 

A Shaman. He can see the dead after all. He'd be a powerful being.

[Vex]

Hmmmm, let's see....

 

Adrenaline would be the leader of his tribe as his strength and combat skills should far surpass the others.

 

Realm would probably randomly open portals and would eventually kill most of his tribe on accident if he didn't get stuck in another dimension first.

 

Hecabus would run a large network of tribes and try to set up the first true kingdom. He would also take occasionaly tribes around the world painting random pictures (such as the Lascaux caves) and building pyramids and statues of himself. He would then try to use these to force people to worship him and increase his powers. Barring that, he would be quite happy knowing that 10,000 years later people would waste large amounts of time and money trying to figure out how the cavemen had such advanced relics.

[Fuzzy Gnome]

Seraph was an anthropologist. He'd scoped the primitive tribes out, then reported to his old buddy Prometheus on how the whole fire thing was working out.

Lin-Si would be a huntress in a primitive amazon tribe.

Ace and Plasma probably wouldn't exist. Ace might have gotten his powers from a divine artifact. On the other hand, Plasma needs to not only blow the alien berserker up, but understand the rubber science behind its Regen from Mushroom Cloud phoenix matrix and take it over so that she is the one reborn instead of the berserker. A neandertal wouldn't have the background.

[The Watcher]

Warp: The Wanderer was just an ordinary youth until the day when the Rain of Fire fell from the sky, decimating his tribe. In his panic he discovered he had a talent to go elsewhere by will alone.

 

His survival and discovery of power were marred, however, due to the fact that he was the only survivor of his tribe. Mourning his people, he vowed that he would uses any gifts he had to protect other people from the ravages of the wild and of brutal men.

 

He now roams wherever his whim takes him, gifted with powers which make him more durable, allow him to summon forces from beyond to strike down enemies, trap opponents where they stand, deflect attacks, and many other talents that he develops through the course of his adventures.

 

Spectrum: The Shining One was once just a man like any other. A brave one though, one of the best hunters of his tribe, he traveled far and wide to find the best quarry possible to feed his people.

 

One day on his travels he encountered a strange black monolith, which spoke to him in a way that did not use words. It also changed him, granting him the ability to soar through the heavens and gave him the powers of the Sun itself.

 

He now uses his new found gifts to protect his tribe from all dangers, be it from nature or other peoples.

 

Mystic: Once just a teller of tales, on one of his many walkabouts the one who would be The Shaman discovered the fetishes of The Great One, who when living was the most powerful of magicians.

 

Realizing from his tales that Men needed to be defended from evil spirits and monsters, he took up the mantle and learned the lessons the Totems and familiar spirits of the departed Great One gave him, so that he could stand against the Dark.

[Drhoz]

Re: Alternate Earth Characters #12

 

the Shaman Vtuss, half-rabid under his hyena-skin pelt, and master of the Secret of Fire.

 

"Vtuss have Fire! Vtuss am Leader!"

 

Dominating his tribe thru terror of his power, and fear of becoming another decoration in his Cave of Skulls.

[psychonaut_raz]

Re: Alternate Earth Characters #12

 

The tribe's shaman had known for some time now that changes were coming to his world, vast changes...rather than fight the inevitable though, he searched for a way to adapt to it. The shaman made contact with the spirit of the world itself, or some aspect of it at least, and the spirit of the world summoned him away from his tribe alone.

 

He left them at the start of the cold season, and was gone for months. His tribe assumed that he had died in the inhospitable wilderness, death being a common event in these times. They moved on and in time forgot about him. His son took his place in the tribe, and though he didn't have the natural talents of his father, he did his best with his position.

 

It was the worst night of their Winter when the new shaman's partner gave him their first child. The rains had been falling for days, the wind threatened to tear their homes down around them. Suddenly, out of the night an old man half-dead from exposure appeared. It was the old shaman, the one who had been gone for so long....he painted his newly born grand-daughter with a crystalline tattoo and then before he could explain where he had been or the things he had seen, he passed away.

 

That night was the worst storm anybody in the tribe had ever experienced, but the newborn child wasn't fazed at all. She grew up one with the cold and the dark, and she developed the power to freeze the air itself solid. The child predicted that an ice age would destroy their world, and she vowed to spend her life finding some way to tame the heart of Winter that breathed inside her before it could claim her people. Equally feared and adored by her tribe, she became their Icestar.

[BcAugust]

Re: Alternate Earth Characters #12

 

Cyrande...is still an alien princess, who becomes queen of where she lands, searching for those suitable to join her kingdom or her programs, an kingdom of impossible towers and beauty that will echo down through history...though history would not record the queen crying herself to sleep every night, mourning the lack of equals.(Though the fact she's actually practicing eugenics on the human race as well as technologically uplifting them...)

 

Artemis...Is still a child attacked by a bear when wandering outside the cave, and takes it's form itself. Though she is driven out, she learns the ways of plants and animals from them, soon becoming as uncaring of the weather as they are, changing to what she's needed, wandering, until adopted as a goddess by a tribe, when a shaman saw the human spirit in the animal form before him. She works to work them into the weave, the animals that should be taken, the plants that do well to harvest. Children don't die when she is around, as her touch heals the direst fever or poisoned wound. With her long, long life, and the likelyhood of "her" tribe defeating others, by the time she dies(Which would be thousands and thousands of years in the future), there's likely a thriving nation, civilized with agriculture that blends harmoniously with it's environment.

 

Nox...There was once a maiden, when there was an attack by the Snake Clan, merciless killers and slavers, who stepped in front of a spear to allow a mother to escape. Though, as her body lay there, it wavered, and a form of dark arose to fight off the Snake Clan, whose spears shattered on her armor, and minds fled from her eyes. And the maiden rose again, whole in body, to train under the shamen and warriors. For years this went on, her dark form at the head of clashes, until she, sickened with battle and it's toil on her soul, went to the heavens to beg a different way. And she changed again, for horror went from her as she faced it, and saw it as it was. Then she turned to the darkness, and saw it's loneliness, and swore to befriend it. And her body was remade into the images of the gods, and her sight rose from one Clan to many, as she stands now as the Guardian of Dreams, to protect where others will not see.

[Clonus]

Re: Alternate Earth Characters #12

 

Alternate Earth Characters #12

Your GM has announced he's going to run an alternate Earth game and he wants you to make a modified version of your character to fit his "Alternate Earth Setting. The GM is being deliberately unclear about whether you'll be playing your alt character or if your regular character will be facing them.

 

So what is different about your character from

Cave Earth

It's a world where shamanism is the most advanced form of magic and technology is limited to herbs and machines lashed together out of sticks and vines. Neanderthal and Pre-Humans battle for supremacy when they aren't being terrorized by dinosaurs and hairy mammals with overbites. The Glaciers are coming and the world needs some heroes. How does your character appear?

 

The Wizard of Oz Incorporated would be one of those Clan of the Cave Bear people who invent fire, the wheel, and the bow and arrow all in the same year. He has a particular genius for setting snares and other traps

 

Hellfire is worshipped because she can start fires for the tribe. They say she stole fire from the Thunder Spirit and carries it in her heart.

 

Riptide ain't so pretty since he's a scaley aquatic intelligent dinosaur.

 

Poet is a shaman.

[PhaseKitty]

Re: Alternate Earth Characters #12

 

Alternate Earth Characters #12

Your GM has announced he's going to run an alternate Earth game and he wants you to make a modified version of your character to fit his "Alternate Earth Setting. The GM is being deliberately unclear about whether you'll be playing your alt character or if your regular character will be facing them.

Time to pitch the table and walk. Make a new character and not tell me if I'm playing it? Unacceptable.

 

But my GM wouldn't do that, so no problemo.

So what is different about your character from

Cave Earth

It's a world where shamanism is the most advanced form of magic and technology is limited to herbs and machines lashed together out of sticks and vines. Neanderthal and Pre-Humans battle for supremacy when they aren't being terrorized by dinosaurs and hairy mammals with overbites. The Glaciers are coming and the world needs some heroes. How does your character appear?

Need long talk with GM about "what is shamanism, how does it work, what can it do." W/o that info, I can't do the charrie.

 

[Drhoz]

Re: Alternate Earth Characters #12

 

The Wizard of Oz Incorporated would be one of those Clan of the Cave Bear people who invent fire' date=' the wheel, and the bow and arrow all in the same year. He has a particular genius for setting snares and other traps[/quote']

 

have a look at Roy Ellis's The Evolution Man : Or, How I Ate My Father

 

you can probably find a copy in a good second hand bookshop. Very funny, and it's about as cave-man who DOES do all that