| Name: | Liam O'Farrell | Nature: | Caregiver | Generation: | 8th |
| Player: | Caduceus | Demeanor: | Deviant | Sire: | Judas |
| Chronicle: | Verdant Falls | Clan: | Gangrel | Concept: | Working Class Labourer |
| Physical | Social | Mental | |||
| Strength: | ●●●○○ | Charisma: | ●●○○○ | Perception: | ●●●○○ |
| Dexterity: | ●●●○○ | Manipulation: | ●●○○○ | Intelligence: | ●●●○○ |
| Stamina: | ●●●●○ | Appearance: | ●●○○○ | Wits: | ●●●○○ |
| Talents | Skills | Knowledges | |||
| Alertness: | ●●●○○ | Animal Ken: | ●●●○○ | Academics: | ●●○○○ |
| Athletics: | ●●○○○ | Crafts: | ○○○○○ | Computer: * | ○○○○○ |
| Brawl: | ●●●●○ | Drive: | ●○○○○ | Finance: | ○○○○○ |
| Dodge: | ●●○○○ | Etiquette: | ○○○○○ | Investigation: | ○○○○○ |
| Empathy: | ●●○○○ | Firearms: | ●●●○○ | Law: | ○○○○○ |
| Expression: | ○○○○○ | Melee: | ●●○○○ | Linguistics: | ●●○○○ |
| Intimidation: | ○○○○○ | Performance: | ○○○○○ | Medicine: | ●○○○○ |
| Leadership: | ●●○○○ | Security: | ○○○○○ | Occult: | ●●●○○ |
| Streetwise: | ●●●○○ | Stealth: | ●●○○○ | Politics: | ○○○○○ |
| Subterfuge: | ●○○○○ | Survival: | ●●○○○ | Science: | ●○○○○ |
| ○○○○○ | ○○○○○ | Research | ●●○○○ | ||
| ○○○○○ | ○○○○○ | ○○○○○ | |||
| ○○○○○ | ○○○○○ | ○○○○○ |
| Backgrounds | Disciplines | Virtues | |||
| Generation | ●●●●● | Animalism | ●○○○○ | Conscience: | ●●●○○ |
| Age | ●○○○○ | Fortitude | ●●●●● | Self-Control: | ●●●●○ |
| Resources | ●●○○○ | Protean | ●●●●○ | Courage: | ●●●●○ |
| ○○○○○ | Potence | ●●○○○ | |||
| ○○○○○ | ○○○○○ | ||||
| ○○○○○ | ○○○○○ | ||||
| Merits & Flaws | Humanity/Path | Health | |||
| Anachronism | -2 | Path of Humanity | Bruised | ||
| Clan Enmity (Brujah) | -2 | ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ○ ○ ○ | Hurt | -1 | |
| Clan Friendship (Nosferatu) | +2 | Injured | -1 | ||
| Ruse of Wolf's Clothing | +2 | Willpower | Wounded | -2 | |
| Gift of Proteus | +4 | ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ○ ○ | Mauled | -2 | |
| Crippled | -5 | ||||
| Incapacitated | |||||
| Blood Pool | |||||
| Clan Weakness | |||||
| Frenzy Transformation | |||||
| Rituals | Experience | ||
| Name | Level | Total: | 0 |
| Spent: | 102 | ||
| Spent on: | Fortitude +1, Occult +1, Empathy +1, Research +2 | ||
| Occult +2, Fortitude +1, Protean +2, Merits +6, Animal Ken +1 | |||
| Potence +1, Fortitude +1, Potence +1 | |||
| Derangements | |||
| Name | Discipline | Roll | DC | Spend | Effect: |
| Feral Whispers | Animalism 1 | Manipulation + Animal Ken | 6-8 | May speak with an animal once eye contact is made. No roll to converse, but must roll to issue a command. | |
| Eyes of the Beast | Protean 1 | N/A | Auto | After one full turn, can see in perfect darkness. DC penalties in darkness are removed. DC +1 to all social rolls while active. | |
| Feral Claws | Protean 2 | N/A | Auto | 1 BP | After one full turn, brawl attacks inflict Str + 1 aggravated damage. DC -2 to all climbing rolls. |
| Earth Meld | Protean 3 | N/A | Auto | 1 BP | After one full turn, blend into any solid earth. Must roll humanity DC 6 to rouse oneself before planned time. -2 to initiative if roused violently, but those close to the vampire suffer +2 DC blindness. |
| Shape of the Beast | Protean 4 | N/A | Auto | 1-3 BP | Takes 4-BP turns to transform. May still use
disciplines in animal form. Clothing and possessions transform with the
vampire, and are unusable while changed. Perception rolls for one sense
group are -2 for duration. Fight Form: Grants five additional points to be split between Physical Attributes, and must encompass at least two categories. i.e. Wolf: Str +1, Dex +2, Stam +2; Bear: Str +3, Stam +2. Subject to form and storyteller discretion, bite inflicts Str aggravated damage, and claws inflict Str +1 aggravated damage. Running speed usually doubled. Flight Form: Str reduced to 1. Grants flight speed equal to running movement rate, or if form incapable of flight receive +2 bonus to Dex instead. Attacks against the Gangrel are made at +2 difficulty due to size. |
| Extended Merits & Flaws | Blood Bonds / Vinculi | |||
| Name | Effect | Description | Bound to | Level |
| Anachronism | Roll Int DC 6 when using a complicated device. All failures reduce die pool | Liam is behind the times, both in the Kindred world, and the tehnological world. He has trouble working any complicated devices. His lack of a cell phone alone has already irked his friends. | Hasan Al-Rashid | 1 |
| Clan Enmity (Brujah) | -2 to social rolls | Although the local Brujah have yet to discover the reasons behind his alienation from their Halifax brethren, his dislike for them shows. | ||
| Can Friendship (Nosferatu) | +2 to social rolls | The Nosferatu in Halifax worked with him for some time, and he has earned their respect. He is currently a guest of the Verdant Falls Nosferatu. | ||
| Ruse of Wolf's Clothing | Lifelike smell & features in animal form | For the purposes of earning the respect of his love's clan, Liam had to look and smell the part. Having a living wolf to draw upon while learning to change shape certainly helped. | ||
| Gift of Proteus | Multiple animal
forms Finer control of shapeshifting |
Liam is a naturally gifted shapeshifter, and is able to hold a larger degree of control over his transformations than Gangrel twice his age. | ||
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| Gear (Carried) | Possessions (Owned) | Vechicles |
| Black trans am. Badly moosified. |
| Havens | Feeding Grounds | ||||
| Place | Description | Name | Hunt Type | Hunt Roll | DC |
| Fishery Safehouse | While this is in reality a Nosferatu base, Liam and Tim live in it and protect their senstive equipment from harm. | The Fisheries | Hunt | Str + Stealth | 4 |
| Allies | Mentor | Contacts | Resources |
| Herd | Status | Influence | Other |
| Sex: | Male | |
| Age: | 112 | |
| Apparent Age: | Late Twenties | |
| Date of Birth: | May 24, 1896 | |
| RIP: | November 1917 | |
| Hair: | Brown | |
| Eyes: | Blue | |
| Race: | Caucasian | |
| Nationality: | Irish | |
| Height: | 5'11" | |
| Weight: | 173 |
| “Do
you like poetry, Mr. Bronson?” Liam O’Farrell sat pensively at one end of a plain metallic table in a barren concrete cell. On the table was a digital recording device and a brightly glowing LED on its face suggested that it was on. All of the furnishings, the remainder of which consisted of the chairs occupied by himself and his interviewer, were bolted to the floors. A rather foreboding reinforced door interrupted the wall furthest from his seat, and a large mirror reflected the conversation in profile. Naked halogen lights cast the chamber in a bluish artificial glow and the whole place smelled vaguely of chemical antiseptics. The odor was most intense around the single overflow drain in the floor, and Liam regarded this as an ominous sign. Liam was not a big man, nor was he particularly remarkable on first appearance. In fact he was a rather nondescript man of about twenty-one, clean shaven with close cropped brown hair, kindly, if perhaps indifferent blue eyes, and features that one might easily overlook in a crowd. At the moment he wore only a pair of faded blue jeans, a fitted black t-shirt and a set of worn running shoes. His pockets were uncharacteristically empty because on this particular day he had come to make a deal with the devil, and in the devil’s house one must bargain by the devil’s rules. “Pardon me?” Mr. Bronson by contrast was a man one would find most difficult to forget. Sitting across from Liam he looked almost comically gargantuan. Had he been standing he would have towered over most men’s heads, and his build suggested that he had invested great effort into achieving it. His clothes, though simple and conservative, were the most expensive money could buy, with black silk slacks, gleaming leather shoes, and a black silk tie meticulously swept over a crisp white collared shirt. But it was his face that set him apart. Indeed it set him apart altogether from the ranks of mortal man. No burn survivor or victim of the most brutal mutilation could ever look like this. This was a man who had stepped out of a nightmare and become flesh. For all intents and purposes, this was the devil himself. “I asked if you liked poetry, Mr. Bronson.” “I do enjoy it in my spare time, yes.” “There’s a fellow by the name of Sasson who wrote a poem that I would like to share with you. It reads: I died in Hell (they called it Passchendale); my wound was slight and I was hobbling back; and then a shell burst slick upon the duckboards; so I fell into the bottomless mud, and lost the light” “That’s very interesting Mr. O’Farrell, but I don’t see how this relates.” “I also died in Hell, Mr. Bronson. The year was 1917, and it wasn’t a shell that felled me but a bullet. The mud never claimed me however. Something far darker did. If it pleases you I would like to start at the beginning.” “You have my attention.” “I was born in Ireland in 1896. My town was a little spit of land in Cavan county hardly worthy of the name. For generations the O’Farrell men had carved a meager living from the coal mines. My father was a miner. His father was a miner. I think every O’Farrell on up to Hadrian’s times had given the better part of their lives to the bloody pits. Many gave everything. “Like all boys in the community, I was to live with my mother till my fourteenth year, and then I was to pick up a shovel and join the men below. But a month before my birthday came around there was an accident in the mines. Twenty-seven men were killed; among them my father and two of my brothers. My mother vowed that she would never loose another son to the pits. We sold everything we had to our name, and the family sailed aboard the next steamer out of Cork for North America. “The final port of call was a city named Halifax. With nothing in our pockets and no destination in mind, we made to settle down. I got a job at the docks loading and unloading the freighters. My other siblings did what they could. For four years we lived in the same poverty that we had always known, but at least our lungs were clean and we saw the sun everyday. “I met a girl at seventeen, and we married in a traditional catholic service. She moved in to our already crowded house and for a while I was happy. But the world cares nothing for the happiness of individuals. Within months the world was at war. Like a great many young men at that time, I enlisted to serve my new found country. I was just eighteen, my wife was pregnant and I was a fool with more pride than brains. My family has a bit of a stubborn streak as well. The name O’Farrell comes from the Gaelic for ‘man of valour’ so I suppose I might have been born to it. “I was assigned to the Royal Canadian Regiment, shipped half way round the world and taught how to fight men that I might have very much enjoyed the company of under different circumstances. War was a very different construct back then. We would sit and wait while the bombs rained down upon our heads and pray that none had our names written on them. When the shelling stopped we would surge out of the trenches like ants provoked out of their nests. Most of the fighting was hand to hand. We had our rifles of course. I was even considered a fair shot back then, making the grade of company marksman. But they didn’t have much place in the trenches. Remarque had it right in his book, we put our faith in our bayonets. “I saw Ypres, the Somme, Arras and Vimy. I saw places that have no names on any maps. I saw the very worst of man’s sins, his darkest heart. And then I saw Passchendaele. Dante’s inferno was a pale reflection. Rodin’s gates, a mere glimpse at horror. In Passchendale the earth itself opened, and the devil walked with us on the duckboards. “The battle lasted slightly over three months, although we didn’t arrive until October. By then I was a sergeant with a chest full of ribbons and medals. All of us had them. But a fat lot of good they did. You couldn’t eat them, you couldn’t fire them and you couldn’t burn them. Every day in that mire was a torture. We were all already dead, we just hadn’t lain down yet. “The fighting reached a pitch in late October. I’ve heard it said that by then almost 1300 guns were trained on that area. Machine guns mind, the rifles numbered in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. The casualties would number over half a million. We were no longer men, we were statistics. And one day my number came up. My platoon came under sustained fire and we were pinned down away from the rest of the line. It was late. We had been fighting for hours and we were well past exhaustion. My lieutenant had remarked that every man Jack of us deserved the VC for that day, but the thing about medals is that dead men make poor witnesses. Our main gun had run dry and I was ordered up the line to secure additional ammunition. “The bullet must have found me blind; no sniper could have spied me on that miserable night. I don’t remember the moment of injury. My next recollection is of a dark figure silhouetted against the shell fire. There was a fire in my neck and another in my chest and I lapsed into unconsciousness once more. I awoke somewhere removed from the battle after what length of time I couldn’t say. There was a man with me. He told me his name was Judas and that he had been watching me for many months. He had rescued me, he said, but in doing so he had also damned me. “My stay with Judas was brief. He was a Gangrel through and through, and he vanished as soon as he deemed me able. You can probably imagine what I learned from him. He said he was as old as the stones of Jerusalem. Perhaps he was even the Judas of scripture, I don’t know. For two weeks he returned to me each day and we would speak. And then he was gone. I’ve never heard from him again. “I was twenty-one, alone, and my life as I knew it had ended. But the war yet raged, and for the first time in many months I was not without food. For you see, I still had a tangible enemy and my morals were not conflicted. I still hunted the soldiers who manned the front lines, only now my weapon was different. I ghosted through the battlefields of Europe; Amiens, the second battle at the Somme, the Hindenburg Line. I ambushed patrols, silenced snipers, waylaid messengers and wrecked bloody havoc on German morale. They named me Todeweiss, the white death, because of the pallor of my exsanguinated victims. I was an angel of mercy to the dying and an angel of death to the living. But even wars must end in time. “I have little to say about my life after the war. I drifted, lost, and alone, associating neither with Kindred nor Kine in as much as I was able. I never laid roots in any one place long enough to lay my hat down. I gradually lost sight of my humanity, of my purpose. I was becoming a predator, pure and simple. I might have ultimately yielded to the beast entirely were it not for the machinations of serendipity. “Decades had passed, and another war was declared in the ashes of the war that was supposed to have ended all others. Like a shark to the frenzy I resumed my old habits. Feeding was always plentiful along the front lines. After years of dissociation I had lost my qualms, preying indiscriminately on easy marks. Todeweiss had returned, only now everyone felt his bite. “I met up with him in Normandy. He was barely turned thirty, and though I had never seen his face before I knew him at once. Captain William O’Farrell. My son. He was an officer, which meant he had made something of himself back home. Gone to university and the like. Well at once I realized that I was staring my humanity in the eye. My legacy. “We never spoke, I don’t expect he ever knew me beyond the stories his mother must have told him, but I spent the next year and a half trying to keep him alive; God knows it wasn’t easy. I fought for my country again, one that had long remanded me to the book of forgotten dead. I saw Caen, Falaise, Scheldt and all the rest. And finally I saw peace. “My son went home, and I knew that I had to follow. I stole away aboard a freighter bound for Canada and made my way back to Halifax. Through stolen glimpses through backlit windows I rediscovered a family I had left behind. My widow had long since remarried and my son had brothers and sisters of his own. “It was a difficult time for me, living in the shadows. Harder than my period between the wars. I did my best to stay out of politics, after nearly half a century I doubt the prince ever learned my name. I did whatever I could for my family, anonymously of course. And I survived; a trait that has come to define my life. “Years went by in that manner, until eventually my wife’s second husband passed. I watched her mourn for a little more than a year and then I made up my mind to confront her. It had been over forty years since we parted ways, but she knew me at once. I think the shock nearly killed her. It was difficult for her to accept what had happened, but in time she did. She welcomed me back into her life although together we kept my existence a secret from her children. And she grew old with me, while I never aged a day. “I am one hundred and eleven years old. My wife has long since left this world. I have watched my son grow old and pass away. I have watched his children grow up and have children of their own. I am ready to leave that life behind. That’s why I have come to you, to a new city. It is time I find my place amongst the Kindred.” Liam fell silent at last, his story told. For a long moment neither man said a word, and then his interviewer spoke. “What is it you wish from us, Mr. O’Farrell?” Liam smiled wistfully and folded his hands together on the table before him. “I want sanctuary. A place to stay, a job to do, and a mentor to guide me. I have no wealth or belongings, I possess only what I came with today. In return I can offer only my loyalty and my person towards whatever aim the Nosferatu might require.” Mr. Branson grinned as well, but his hellish features distorted the expression such that Liam could not determine if it was in good faith or ill. “I must confer with the elders, but a man of your – shall we say talents is an asset to any sept. We will be in touch.” “You have my thanks.” |