Okay, so after spending all of five minutes thinking it over while bored, I've decided to do a Trinity Continuum: Assassins character after all as sort of a mental palate cleanser so I don't spend all of my time thinking about Exalted. I'm going to hold off on TC: Anima until the PDF's been errata'd, which should be soon, and I think that's going to be my standard for doing these in the future barring any special requests or suggestions.
TC: Assassins is sort of (but not quite) an alternate setting for the Trinity Continuum core's 'modern day' setting. It's the same world, with a lot of connections back to the core material, but like the core book it's very broad enough to customize or tweak to your needs. And while you could do a stories like these perfectly well out of the core, TC: Assassins is intended/geared specifically for stuff like John Wick, Hitman, Kill Bill, Assassins Creed, Metal Gear Solid, and so forth. In particular, this game draws on a lot of inspiration from the underworld subculture seen in the John Wick series, with Hotels Asylia as neutral spaces where Assassins can safely take care of business, and the Service which preserves the peace and balance between the Societies by enforcing a strict Code these flux-empowered killers must follow.
And yes, flux is still a factor. While the game doesn't explicitly describe them as such, I think it'd be a reasonable shorthand to describe Assassins as something like an alternate form of Talent, exceptional people who can draw upon flux. But where a Talent might 'simply' be a legendary athlete or the best hacker in the world -- impressive but not shaking anyone's grip on reality -- Assassins' abilities border on the blatantly superhuman but are heavily specialized, and anyone whose worldview might be threatened by seeing them are almost always nudged away by flux for both their own and the Assassins' safeties.
There's some other relevant setting stuff to get into for context on the character I'm going to make, but I think I'll save it for below the jump cut this time, for readability's sake.
So the big thing that separates this game from the core setting is that Assassins see and interact with the world a little differently than mundane people, or even most Talents. For them, the world exists in three layers with fuzzy divisions between them:
- Daylight, the world that we know with jobs and groceries and taxes and what have you.
- Twilight, the underworld just out of sight where laws become guidelines, corrupt officials and executives reshape politics, where sometimes vigilante justice is the only justice. I like to think of this side of things as being the shady world of comic book vigilantes and crime bosses -- particularly as seen in the Marvel Netflix shows, or the criminal underworld of Gotham City. While some of his allies go a little 'darker,' Wilson Fisk as portrayed on Daredevil is a solid example of a Twilight figure.
- Shadow, the realm where Assassins operate and reside, and where masterminds hide away from the world and operate elaborate conspiracies just out of view where civilians (and sometimes even the vigilantes) can barely find them. Goings-on in Shadow are almost never seen or heard by those in Daylight, except as urban legends and conspiracy theories. In comic book terms, this is where you might find the machinations of the Hand, the League of Shadows, or the Court of Owls. Harold Meachum from the first season of the Netflix Iron Fist series and the BBC Sherlock series' version of Moriarty are both perfect examples of Shadow figures who are not Assassins themselves.
By and large, Assassins don't operate in Daylight -- they may have friends there, but doing so is dangerous. One of their biggest rules (part of their capital-c Code), barring exceptions so rare as to be mythical, is that they don't target people in Daylight. Lower-case 'a' assassins might, random hired killers and such, but people from the 'normal' world are either not worth an Assassin's time (after all, the sorts of people you send after John Wick aren't gonna be hired to kill the physical trainer your wife left you for) or they're so publicly-known that doing anything might risk exposure. That's where you find the line between Daylight and Twilight: A well-known CEO indirectly responsible for all manner of horrors might be out of the Assassins' reach, but the criminal contacts and fixers that actually do the dirty work and hide their money might not be. Even the worst dictators might be a little too public to hit, but the oligarchs in their inner circle or the people who run their spy networks and lead the PMCs doing their wetwork could find themselves facing an Assassin if the price is right. (And the latter example might be an Assassin themselves, or someone fully within Shadow)
Not that flux always perfectly hides Assassins or anything -- any Assassin could be caught out in the wrong place if they're not careful. But when Assassins gather, whether in private strongholds, or a dramatic meeting, or even possibly a duel where some effort's been made at privacy and decorum (like meeting at the baseball diamond after dark and not having the fight in your kitchen when your kid's on her way home from school), events conspire to nudge civilians away.
But anyhow, I'm here to make a character. In case it needs to be said, this post assumes you've at least skimmed my Trinity Continuum core character write-up for the basic structure.
Step One: Concept
So there might be some references to my other TC characters, who are sort of linked, but as TC: Assassins is a little separate, so's this character. Her name is going to be Makayla "Kayla" Merlin; she feels like a comic book character when she says the whole thing, so she just sticks with Kayla or sometimes tells people to call her Kay.
Kayla grew up in the Midwest, mostly bouncing around suburbs of Chicago as a kid, raised by a single mother after her father, a cop, was killed in a domestic call gone horribly wrong. Her mom worked a bunch of jobs to make ends meet, so she mostly had to fend for herself a lot of days. She didn't idolize cops as much as some kids in her situation did, but her dad was a cop and there were cops on her mom's side of the family going back to at least Prohibition, when they were the Callisons. So she definitely had an interest, and looked into following in those footsteps at the first good opportunity.
Her mom wasn't fond of the idea, and she knew darn well just how bad things could be, but she had an idealistic 'change them from the inside' view of things. That didn't last too long -- she noticed the way the mood changed the first time another cop offered her some ill-gotten gains and she turned him down. She didn't report him, just wanting to keep her head down until she had some influence in the PD, but it was bad enough that she was paying attention and honest.
There's a saying -- good cops either don't stay good, or don't stay cops. She wasn't given much of a choice in the matter -- her father had been an honest cop like her, and it wasn't an accident that domestic call went bad. Not that she was aware of that, but a couple of the older guys on the force assumed she knew something she shouldn't and/or was sniffing around, and decided not to wait for her to become a problem.
Which is how she got a call to check out an underground rave that was actually a tense meeting between two gangs that in turn was actually some crooked cops secretly teaming up with one of the gangs to eliminate or weaken the other. Which was also going to provide a convenient accident for Kayla... if only she hadn't Inspired.
Once the semi-planned shootout started, the adrenaline kicked in, everything blurred, and as she found a place where she could assess the situation, she became aware that it was another cop pointing the gun at her back. And then something clicked.
Kayla wasn't a violent person by nature, in fact quite the opposite. She was arguably a little repressed, having had to put up with a lot of crap in her short life. But when she needed to be, she could be determined. Decisive. And when Inspiration came for her, it didn't simply make her lucky, or boost her skill -- she was given a choice between kill or be killed, she chose the former, and Inspiration backed her play until everyone else in the warehouse was either dead or running.
She had a few minutes to herself -- long enough to put her uniform on a dead gang member, prop them up next to a car that was leaking fuel, and let a fire take care of the rest. She knew any tests on the corpse would take long enough she could vanish and figure out what to do next. Which actually segues nicely into Aspirations, but first let's summarize this concept: "Former cop, killer vigilante."
Her long-term Aspiration is going to be "Find out what really happened to my father." Even if she wasn't suspicious because of the murder attempt, this would be one of those cases where the sheet would have the Aspiration even if the character wouldn't be aware of it. Her short-term Aspirations would be "Find out who set me up," and "Establish a proper false identity."
Step Two: Paths
Okay, three Paths, let's do this. First, Origin Path -- Latchkey Kid, from Trinity Continuum: New Lives. So she gets three Skill dots, that are going one-each into Integrity, Larceny, and Survival. And for Edge dots... let's go with something a little out of the ordinary. Both dots will go into Free Running, a combination of tricks and athleticism she picked up literally running around as a kid, self-training for when she went into the police academy.
Now I determine a community connection and a Contact. Her Contact is gonna be her mom, Tina Callison (who kept her maiden name for safety reasons), who currently works as a cleaner in an office building. Despite the obvious danger in doing so, Kayla can't imagine letting her mom think she's dead. I'm thinking Tina's gonna have the 'Sneaky' tag, being able to get things that her daughter might need. The community connection is gonna be the people at the community center and gym who supported her when she exercised and trained. That said, this is a resource she may have trouble tapping for a while...
Which leads us into Stations of Darkness. Assasssins' Paths have to be contextualized in where they 'reside' and what they bring to the Assassin's life emotionally and otherwise. Kayla's Latchkey Kid Path is going to be in Daylight, representing a bright spot in her life, a warm fire she doesn't want to stray too far from. (It also gives her a bonus in covering her tracks as long as she doesn't call upon the Path for anything too blatantly criminal.)
Her next Path is going to be her Role Path, and I think that's gonna be Combat Specialist. She didn't want to become a cop just to bust heads, but she's more of a guardian than an investigator. So now we come to Skill dots... and I just remembered that Free Running has a Skill prerequisite, so I'm gonna put two dots immediately in Athletics and beg my hypothetical Storyguide's forgiveness rather than completely redo all that and jump through some hoops making it all come out the same with free dots later. (While there's a benefit to Path Edges beyond character creation, It's not my fault that Latchkey Kid offers an Edge that requiring Skills that it doesn't come with.) That third dot is gonna go into Aim, though. Her Edge dots are gonna go into Fast Draw (Pistols) and Hair Trigger Reflexes.
For connections, I wanna invoke the cop stuff but that is gonna be tricky in play because of her situation. Or maybe it won't be -- while she is gonna lay low, it's not like if she turns up alive someone's gonna complain to her superiors that they set her up to die and it didn't take. So her community connection is gonna be Internal Affairs, having certainly gotten on their radar (in a good way) even if she hadn't reached out yet. But it's gonna be a resource she can tap. However, her Contact is going to be one of her gang informants, a woman named Angela Tate who delivers/smuggles drugs for one of the gangs in town. Angela's going to have the... wait for it... 'Informant' tag.
(I feel like it's worth noting that, of course, once Kayla's dealt with who killed her father and tried to kill her, she may or may not try to go back to being a cop as a 'day job.' I can see her trying it and not sticking with it since once she starts taking Contracts, day jobs likely won't be necessary. But I can see her remaining as a 'consultant' to her cop life connections, which has a lot of really morally-gray implications that might be fun to explore in a story.)
And now I gotta choose a Station of Darkness for this. I could see interpretations of this as a Daylight or as a Twilight Path, but I think I'm gonna go with the latter because this is a case of Kayla being fully aware she was gonna be wading in the mud when she became a cop, even if she underestimated it. But when you have a transition of Station between Paths, that adds a little extra mechanic -- in this case, I choose what the transition is like, and out of the ones in the book that make the most sense I'm going to say she's 'transgressed.' Which means she gets an additional Contact in the form of a 'debt-holder,' who can threaten her in some way -- she can use them as a Contact normally, but they can contact her and make demands. I'm actually going to leave this Contact vaguely-defined as the crooked cop at the center of the web she's stumbled into, someone to be revealed later in her personal arc, and they have the 'Well-connected' tag. Also, as a Twilight Path, any time I use these connections I have to buy off Complications or else draw some unpleasant attention, but if I get enough extra successes I can get extra benefits by seizing a presented opportunity represented by those extra successes.
(On a semi-related note, if I wanted the dynamic this would entail and the work that would go into defining them, I could take a Nemesis Path in place of any Path. This would give me a recurring antagonist I'd be expected to struggle against, but I feel like Kayla's personal 'Big Bad' is someone she can overcome and move past, as opposed to a personal Moriarty who will never entirely go away.)
And now we come to the Society Path. Now, unlike the other Trinity games, some version of the Æon Society isn't an option in the book but they do have a rough counterpart... I came up with this before but saved fleshing it out for here, but as Kayla escaped the site of her attempted murder (and Inspiration), she was intercepted by someone from the Daughters of the Jacobins, a Society of Assassins that believes that killing is sometimes a necessary tool to change the world for the better. When words aren't enough, the Daughters accept the burden of doing dirty work that more peaceful idealists can't. They kill for justice, try to avoid collateral damage, and -- like the Æon Society -- are guided by leadership who seem to have unnatural knowledge of the future and can work towards those ends.
So now let's get into Skills and Edges. Kayla's Skill Dots are going to go into Culture, Integrity, and Close Combat. Her Edge dots are going into Small Unit Tactics, reflecting her cop training making her more efficient when working with a team (like, say, a handful of other player characters). Connections are a little trickier for Shadow Paths (which this absolutely is), but I'm thinking her Contact is going to be Cheryl Chambers, a middle-aged ex-military transwoman who opted, in the early 00's, to live honestly rather than continue her military career. She's not an Assassin herself (though maybe a Talent), but an anti-fascist activist unafraid of getting her hands dirty for the larger cause. Among other things she's a talented engineer who's good at jury-rigging unconventional solutions to unconventional problems, giving her the 'Tech Geek' tag. (I do really wish there was a proper expansion of the list of Contact tags, because I have no clue how to gauge appropriate custom ones.) Kayla's community access is going to be the antifa group that Cheryl informally leads, though Kayla's had an understandably-difficult time getting them to trust her.
Also, to reflect the transition between the Twilight Role Path and the Shadow Society Path, I establish that Kayla was 'recruited,' and thus has a 'handler,' an additional Contact serving as her link to the Daughters of the Jacobins. This handler is going to be Jennifer Hawk, a former intelligence operative recruited to the Daughters some years ago, whom Kayla stumbled onto (maybe literally) as she fled the battle where she was Inspired. As a Contact Jennifer can make demands on Kayla a little more severely than others, but she gets an extra tag. She'll have 'Investigator' and 'Influential' as tags -- she's good at learning things and using that information as leverage.
Whew, that's a lot. Before we continue, Kayla's Skill list is currently Aim 1, Athletics 2, Close Combat 1, Culture 1, Integrity 2, Larceny 1, Survival 1. Her Edge list is Fast Draw (Pistols), Free Running 2, Hair Trigger Reflexes, and Small Unit Tactics (2).
Step Three: Skills, Skill Tricks, and Specialties
Okay, so first I need to beef up some Skills. I get six Skill dots. (As an aside, the quick character creation reference in the Appendix erroneously says three and the guidelines in the proper chapter leave these out entirely, though the character creation example accurately reflects the system.) I'm gonna dump three of those into Aim right away, to beef up those combat skills, and one into Athletics as well. I'm going to put one into Humanities, and... hm... the last one will be in Larceny.
Now I pick a Skill Trick for a Skill Kayla has at or above 3, which is going to be Aim. I'm going to take Ricochet, out of the Assassins book -- it does what it says on the tin, lets her ricochet bullets off of walls and other objects to get around a certain degree of cover, though it reduces the maximum damage she can deal.
And now I get Specialties in any Skills at three or higher. For Aim that's going to be 'Pistols,' and for Athletics it'll be 'Chases.'
Final skill array will be Aim 4, Athletics 3, Close Combat 1, Culture 1, Humanities 1, Integrity 2, Larceny 2, Survival 1.
Step Four: Attributes
And now we get to Attributes, all of which begin at one. Kayla's gonna be a Physical character first and foremost adding 1 to Might, 3 to Dexterity, and 2 to Stamina. I think Mental for secondary with 2 to Cunning, 1 to Intellect, and 1 to Resolve, and Social for tertiary with a dot each in Manipulation and Composure. Now I pick a Favored Approach, which is going to be Force -- Kayla's a kick-in-the-door type, and while she can practically shoot around corners, she'd still rather take a stance and aim center-mass. So that's an extra dot in each of Might, Intellect, and Presence.
Before we go on, just for reference: Might 3, Dexterity 4, Stamina 3, Intellect 3, Cunning 3, Resolve 2, Presence 2, Manipulation 2, Composure 2.
Step Five: Apply Assassin Template
And now I officially establish the moment of Inspiration, which is going to be Bullet Ballet, which gives her a fifth dot of Dexterity.
(I know this is a short step, but obviously I already kind of fleshed this out when describing her concept and backstory.)
Step Six: Add Advantages
As that horse is already dead and flogged, I'll skip my usual tangent and just get to it.
Kayla gets four Masteries, which Assassins have instead of Gifts. These tend to be a little more 'superhuman' than Gifts, but there are also some more rigid guidelines on when they're deployed because they're meant to work within the framework of a Contracted kill (they're grouped into Preparation, Evaluation, and Execution categories). As I just mentioned, Kayla starts with four, and one of them must be one suggested by her Society Path.
Starting with the Society Path suggestions, I'm going to take La Prévoyance, an Execution Mastery which lets Kayla use her new training to get glimpses into the immediate future in combat. So this will boost her Defense actions and combat actions targeting the person she just defended against, based on her Intuitive Facet. Next I'm taking another of the suggested Daughters Masteries, D'invasion from the Preparation list, which helps Kayla study her targets to find out what they want. It's a social action, which isn't going to be something she's great at, but maybe it's a talent she'll grow into.
Next, I'm going to take A Long Walk in an Old Coat and Worn Shoes, from the Evaluation list. This lets me spend an Inspiration, and for the duration of the hunt, Kayla seems utterly non-threatening as long as she doesn't try to menace someone or assert any authority. It doesn't let her get into places she shouldn't be, but nobody will even consider that she could potentially be violent until and unless she takes action to dispel the facade. It also gives her access to a stunt called 'Clean Getaway,' which lets her spend extra successes when trying to avoid trouble or notice to just 'Batman' out of the scene. And finally, another Evaluation Mastery, Reveal All. It lets her immediately pinpoint anyone hidden within a certain range -- including seeing through disguises, or sensing them hiding behind objects. There's no roll or anything unless they're being hidden by a Gift or Mastery of their own.
And now, Kayla starts with a dot of Inspiration and I assign her facets. I was considering going with an even balance of all three, but I've got an Mastery that plays specifically off of Intuitive and there are other effects that play off of her highest facet, and it'd be nice if that was more than 1. So I'm going to go with Intuitive 2, Reflective 1, giving her a total of 3 Inspiration. (One to start, and then one for having a dot in each of two Facets)
Step Seven: Final Touches
And now we're in the home stretch. First, I distribute some bonus traits -- a free dot to put in any Attribute, which I'll put in Composure, since apparently she could benefit from a slight social boost.
This means a final Attribute array of Might 3, Dexterity 5, Stamina 3, Intellect 3, Cunning 3, Resolve 2, Presence 2, Manipulation 2, Composure 3.
Next she gets four more dots of Edges. So we're going to start with Safe House, which lets her find secure places to lie low for a bit -- I like to imagine that at the moment, her mom's helping her hide out in the office building she cleans. Next is going to be Tough Cookie, which gives her a level of Soft Armor which stacks with any other armor she's wearing -- this effectively increases the number of successes needed to hurt her, like increasing soak in a classic WoD game. And, for the last Edge dot, Danger Sense seems like a gimme. It does what it says on the tin, lets her sense danger.
This goes into a final Edge lineup of Danger Sense, Fast Draw (Pistols), Free Running 2, Hair Trigger Reflexes, Safe House, Small Unit Tactics (2), Tough Cookie (2).
Now we sort out her Health -- she's got the usual Bruised, Injured, and Maimed levels, plus an additional Injured for having Stamina 3.
And finally, we regard her Defense, in that she has that and can roll it.
Now let's top this off with a quick physical description -- I see Kayla as being of average height with a soccer player's build. She's got dark eyes and really short dark hair, but she used to grow her hair long so I think sometimes she moves to fidget with it before forgetting she can't. In my head she's got some mixed heritage but is kind of ethnically ambiguous -- I know it's a cliche to describe someone as olive-skinned to indicate that, but it's the best descriptor I've got in mind. Her hands are rough from the years of work and training she's put in to become a cop, and she's probably got a few scars from youthful shenanigans that she can't quite recall the origin of but isn't above making up a good story for one if it helps.
And, um, that does it. So let's go to the sheet.
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