Here's Taylor.

I felt like she deserved more skill points than I could offer...might have been a good idea to kick her up to Scuba Diving level. She could use the extra FP, too, with the stuff she pulls.

Her ability to make spidersilk armour is covered by her Incite Effect and her Craftsmanship skill. Some GMs might not allow that, so if you want to play her you might have to use her last spare Refresh on some kind of silk ability.

(click to show/hide)

Taylor Hebert (Snorkelling)

High Concept: Insect-Controlling Superhero
Trouble Aspect: Issues With Authority
Other Aspects: Former Leader Of The Undersiders, Extra-Strength Passenger, Former Social Pariah, Doing The Wrong Things For The Right Reasons, Unhealthy Determination
Skills:
Superb: Discipline, Endurance
Great: Alertness, Scholarship, Athletics
Good: Conviction, Craftsmanship, Intimidation
Fair: Lore, Investigation, Empathy
Average: Presence, Weapons, Rapport
Stunts:
Tough As Nails (Endurance): Opponents who tag physical consequences on attacks against Taylor only get +1 or reroll 3 dice.
Keep Calm And Strategize (Discipline): Use Discipline +1 for Assessments and Declarations related to making clever plans when a normal person would be freaking the hell out.
Into The Eyes And Down The Throat (Discipline): Incite Effect attacks inflict 2 additional stress to people without Toughness or face-protecting armour.
Powers:
Supernatural Senses [-3] (See, hear, taste, and feel everything within a few hundred metres)
Incite Potent Physical Persistent Selective Mass Effect At Range [-7] (Insect Control)
Limitation [+2] (Needs to have bugs to use Powers)
Total Refresh Cost:
-11
Refresh Total:
2

Should probably be something in there that covers her frankly ludicrous multitasking ability. Other than that, it's a stat-up; comprehensive yet compact.

I've been reading the Dresden Files books, following the threads here with great interest and am now ready to try statting out characters. I've had my fill of wizards from the books and am more interested in the magical one-trick ponies and mercs like Binder, Kincaid or Tam Veda (artifact dealer from one of the better Dresden Files fics). I like the sandbox but want to import stuff from outside it.

In that vein, I'm going with Tito from William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy, specifically the second book Spook Country. I've been fascinated with the character since I read it back in 2007. This gives me the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by experimenting with DFRPG character creation and doing it with a non-DF character.

Here's my (somewhat confused) attempt at statting him out:

Name: Tito
High Concept: Semi-reluctant Santeria Superspy
Trouble: Wanted by the US Government (?)*
Other Aspects: Loyal to the Family, Never Without a God, Soldier in the Cold Civil War, The Journey is the Destination, My Music is a Comfort, Doesn't Like to Fly, Large Family No Surnames, Beautiful in Motion, In Between Everything, Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane(?)

STUNTS AND POWERS
-1 Marked By Power** (Initiate of the Guerreros)
-1 Inhuman Speed (Limitation: when channeling the Guerreros)
-1 Martial Artist
-1 Tradecraft
-1 Not Entirely Unlike Parkour
-2 Perfect Aim (Limitation: when channeling Oshosi)
-1 Crypsis By Perpetual Motion (Tito's training and the gifts of the Guerreros let him blend into crowds)
-1 The Street As One Animal (The Guerreros grant Tito a kind of enhanced pattern recognition, letting him spot tails easily; when channeling Oshosi; can be used in conjunction with Crypsis By Perpetual Motion)

Firearms - he should have decent Firearms; he's well-trained but hasn't had much occasion to actually shoot anyone
Athletics - his greatest talent, he backtucks and monkey-vaults like the rest of us breathe
Contacts (intelligence) - his Contacts are the rest of his family and their Contacts are vast and deep.

Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer. He's pretty in an almost feminine sort of way, agile, quick hands, looks like a very serious fifteen-year-old. He belongs to a multi-racial family (Cuban-Chinese by way of Russia) that are variously referred to as illicit facilitators, freelance spies and the world's smallest crime family.

Among other things, they use one-shot pneumatic pistols (hand-made by a long-dead Bulgarian) that shoot salt cartridges. When they move house, they scrub everything forensically speaking. Mattresses, presumed to contain skin flakes and DNA traces, go to the landfill. It's funny how there are so many parallels between the tradecraft of espionage types and supernatural countermeasures. For the purposes of the Dresdenverse, we can make his family supernaturally clued-in.

In addition to his "systema" (as it is referred to within the family) which is a combination of pseudo-parkour and Cold War-era tradecraft (both of which he was trained to from a very early age), Tito practices Santeria, one of the many Afro-Caribbean religions that merge Yoruba traditional religion with other stuff (in this case, the veneration of Catholic saints.) The gods or orishas (Tito follows the Guerreros***) mount/possess their more worthy initiates.

The way the book is written, the orisha may be geniune supernatural entities or just a form of deliberately-induced DID that helps Tito better focus his skillset.
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So. What am I missing? I don't have the PDFs or anything; I'm basically doing this using other people's character sheets as templates. The numbers are almost certainly wrong and so forth.


*_{As he currently stands, I can't quite figure out a decent Trouble for him yet; Spook Country was a very low key book that way.}
**_{I'm undecided as to whether to keep this at all. Not reflected in the original text but might make sense when porting him here. Is it possible for Marked By Power to be behavioral instead of literal i.e. no glowing facial tattoos?}
***_{THE GUERREROS
Eleggua: Opener of the ways, lets you access the others, precognition apparently (that business with the ICE badge)
Ogun: As Eleggua opens every road, so Ogún clears each road with his machete. God of iron and wars, of labor; owner of every technology. The number seven, colors green and black,
Oshosi: Hunter and scout of the Orishas: the colors blue and yellow, the number three and seven
Osun: whose role was mystery}

Hmm.

So, to extrapolate, ghouls can hop into the NeverNever via mass graves? Butcher shops? Deserts (they do originate in pre-Islamic Arabian mythology)? Maybe the Alphas might learn to do so via "wild places?"

Yeah, it would definitely have to be Sponsored Magic and Feeding Dependency.

Might even work it as a pay up front version of sponsored magic.  I could see some entities demanding their payment first rather than allowing debt.

Actually the up-front model seems to be canon for DtB, in the sense that Contractors seem to be able to perform Remunerations before, during or after the use of their powers. Wei (the explosive blood guy) pays his remuneration at the same time as he uses his powers (surprised it doesn't turn into a feedback loop though) as does the teleporter Brita (her remuneration is to kiss people on the cheek. She can teleport people if she's touching them. 1 + 1 = 2)

Then there are the characters who were able to pay off their Remunerations permanently (in effect, paying the mortage on their powers in full) like the body-hopper whose original body died. Wonder how to model that? Probably with a change in Aspect and Refresh.

Harry is a self-flagellating martyr. He seems to think that "having hot showers" is the top of a slippery slope that terminates with "AND NOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!!!!!"

Whedonverse magic is also an issue.  Given that Willow was a hacker aand Jenny/Jenna Kalderash/Calendar was some kind of technopagan, it doesn't fry tech. Will this be afactor or will you just airbrush it out?

No one seems to have mentioned thresholds. A nice threshold would boost the functionality of the rest, no? So, throw lots of parties, adopt a few kids and raise them right

That is, of course, in addition to the leylines and the explosive wards and self-destructs.

Yeah, that's a good point. Use wind or force to throw an object forcefully. Alternatively, if you're Ramirez, just lob a regular old grenade in there.

I wonder how thresholds fare against stuff like Harry's Gravitus spell. I'm guessing no more threshold ... because there's no more house.