Originally published at Musings of a Misfit Monkey. You can comment here or there.
… “I straddle the line ‘twixt discord and rhyme, I howl and I whine I’m after you. I smell like I sound, I’m lost and I’m found, and I’m hungry like the wolf” – Duran Duran, Hungry Like the Wolf (I hope none of you actually needed that attribution).
So there’s talk of an upcoming Rolemonkeys session where I get to PLAY a character in Spirit of the Century, and I am psyched. So, I’ve been dreaming up a pulp character that I will enjoy who also hopefully will fit with the other characters the guys have played in previous sessions, and here’s a basic concept of what I’ve come up with:
The character is a German scholar/explorer, Dr. Viktor Wulf. In pulp terms, he’s Doktor Wulf. He’s a centurion, like most SotC characters, but the twist is, he’s actually from the previous century. He was born in 1801. He became an adventurer/scholar with a focus on archeology and antiquities.
Now the interesting stuff. Somewhere in the time around 1825 or so, Viktor was on expedition to the Eastern Baltics and was bitten by a wolf. He is therefore – da-dum! – a werewolf. Very few people know about this of course. I see him as the type of werewolf where he can change whenever he wills it, although his primal pull toward the change intensifies near the full moon and he has to work to keep from changing during those times, especially if he gets emotional. When he’s a wolf, he still has a certain measure of his own identity and intellect and remembers himself, and thus he’s not just a murdering beast. However, self-control and human thought processes do become extremely difficult to maintain, again, especially if he’s worked up. So he can be brutal and primal, but generally recognizes friend from foe. Also, he’s the kind that sort of mystically just turns from a man into a wolf. No in-between monstrous transformations, no huge slavering man-wolf hybrid forms, just a guy who steps into a shadowy place and a moment later emerges as a wolf.
In human form he’ll have some heightened senses and be able to smell fear and strong emotion, and he’ll also have sort of an odd primal aura that makes him not quite fit in at a party. And the fun part of all this is we have a classic dichotomy between this guy’s civilized academic scholarly side and his primal inner beast. Could be lots of fun to play with. You have this very average scholarly looking guy and you think he’s a total wimp, but then if you make eye contact with him, and he stares at you, you totally crap your pants. He’s always trying to maintain his primal urges in civilized circles, and always struggling to not totally lose his human intellect and integrity when he’s in wolf form.
Okay, so, then in 1840 he goes on an expedition to the site of Delphi in Greece with his friend Karl Muller (a real person). At that time in history, the location of Delphi was known but no one had yet uncovered the temple of Apollo or the other structures around the site. It was all buried under fallen earth from the mountainside above. I think it was like 1890 or something in the real world when this stuff begun to get unearthed and studied in detail. There was a tribe of Greek people living in the area who had to be moved before excavation could begin. Anyway, Muller and Wulf actually found their way into the underground complex of the temple of Apollo in 1840. But tragedy struck – some sort of pulpish supernatural thing was buried down there – I’m not sure what yet, Whatever the cause, Wulf ended up being “frozen” in time in some sort of mystical crystal tomb in the bowels of the temple. Muller got out alive but immediately caught some kind of bad disease that seemed oddly like radiation sickness long before anyone knew what that was (that part is real history, by the way) and died of it just a couple weeks later, yammering madly and incoherently about the strange things they discovered and what he believed was the death of his friend Dr. Wulf.
Fast forward to 1921, just a few months before our current game continuity, and Max’s character, possibly with the aid of York or Shade, finds the block of mystical crystal that has Wulf’s body trapped inside, and frees him. The Rolemonkeys will talk about this and hammer out how it happens tonight before we start playing.
The angles I want to play up with this guy are the dichotomy between civilized man and primal beast, and the odd “man of another time” thing, where he’s a very capable scholar, but has little understanding of things that have occurred in the 80 years he was in the crystal. This will hopefully give him the ability to be intellectual and inquisitive but not step on Clay or Max’s characters.
It will also be interesting that he’s a German, but HIS Germany was a fledgling confederacy just beginning to come out from under the Holy Roman Empire and the conquests of Napoleon. The current Germany, the beaten-down “bad guys” of the Great War and the emerging National Socialist movement are totally foreign to him. He is, nevertheless, a German, and I imagine he will be treated as such by most people, and that could be an interesting challenge in itself.
Right now I have only a few Aspects chosen. The rest will come as I flesh this out.
1. Man of Another Time – Wulf is out of place and has a lot of catching up to do socially, culturally, and academically. He is a bit out of place and quaint in his attitudes.
2. Hungry Like the Wolf - He has to manage the primal aspects of his nature constantly, but it can also serve to help him sense things in ways that others can’t. This is certainly one of those great “pro-and-con” aspects.
3. Everyone I Knew Is Dead – Kinda self-explanatory. This is essentially saying he has NO contacts in this new life, no friends or family. It makes him feel like a loner.
4. Son of Germany – The Germany he experiences now is not the same land he grew up in, but he’s still a German, and carries that with pride. How might his brand of quaint patriotism play out in a world where Germany is generally looked upon with disdain and wariness?
5. I Can Smell the Fear - Viktor can smell when someone is afraid or agitated.
6. Don’t Make Me Ride in That! - Viktor can’t stand the newfangles vehicles like cars and airplanes. He hates riding in them, but of course, he sometimes will have to.
7. Aura of the Primal - Even as a scholarly man at a high-society suaree, Viktor still has that indefinable something of the wolf inside him at all times. People tend to just not feel right about him. Add that to his 80-year old social and cultural mores, and he’s an outsider on several levels.
I see him looking a lot like Anthony Head, the guy who played Giles on Buffy. And yes, if you do the math, he was about 40 years old when he was frozen. So, that’s his current age, perceptually. Of course he’s also gifted with the Centurion thing, so probably will look like he’s in his thirties for the next several decades.
More is to come, including Skills and Stunts, after I work him into his novels with the other guys.
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