Friday, May 21, 2010

Furor: The Prophet of Punk



Name: Henry Caufield
Motivation: To create anger and hate wherever he goes.
Fight: 14 (increases with Signature Stunt)

Qualities:
Excellent [+2] Taunter
Excellent [+2] Scrapper

Weakness:
Addicted to Rage (can't resist creating anger around him)
Sociopath (has no empathy for anyone else and sees everyone as someone to manipulate and/or hit)

Powers:
Incredible [+4] Inspire Rage: inflicts Failure Ranks, targets composure Qualities or inflicts Weakness: Rage
Incredible [+4] Emotional Feed (Rage Only): recovers 4 Ranks of Damage/Failure each Turn in which Rage is present within 100 yards OR gains 4 HP

Signature Stunts:
Super-Quality (from Emotion Feed): gains ranks in Super-Strength, Super-Agility, or Invulnerability instead of recovery or HP. Maximum rank of Incredible.

Origin: Henry Caufield was always angry, even as a child. As a young teen, he embraced the punk movement that was rising in his native London. He seemed doomed to a short life as a petty thug, until the nice people from the Church of Universal Harmony showed up at his parent’s doorstep. They seemed to have some calming influence on young Henry and, before they knew, they had sent their son off with them. However, the Church was really a front-organization for Imhotep the Immortal. The ancient sorcerer saw potential in Caufield and performed a ritual that allowed the boy to manipulate raging anger as an energy: able to fan the flames of hatred that lurk in all men and then to siphon off that anger to boost his own physique.

Tactics: Furor isn't that powerful one on one. His metier is in crowds and the bigger, the better. If he can enrage large groups of people, he can quickly power up into a super-strong, super-agile, invulnerable fighting machine with maxed-out Villain Points and recovering damage all the while. Fueled by anger, he jumps into the fray, both fists swinging and being as obnoxious as he can. The difficulty for heroes is that while Furor is trying to beat them up, the crowd is also going berserk and will be attacking each other or even the heroes themselves.

Super-powered or not, Furor loves to taunt and irritate the people around him and he's good at it. And if they gets upset, all the better for Furor.




Commentary: Furor is based on the character Temper from the module, "There's a Crisis at Crusader Citadel" by Jack Herman and Jeff Dee. I always liked the idea of Temper, but I could never work out how to use him in V&V. His power let him absorb "Power Points" from his victims; Power Points are essentially fuel, but Temper had no powers to fuel and so, basically, had to hide from all the people he had pissed off lest they hit him. Maybe someone else figured out a better way to play him in that system, but I couldn't.

Therefore, I changed him so that instead of stealing the fuel of enraged folks, he could use that anger to make himself tougher and get in on the fight himself.  He's kind of a transitive Incredible Hulk using someone else's anger.

Since my game is set in the 1970's, I figured a British punk would make a nice choice of background. In my head, Furor's personality is heavily-based on Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (far and away my favourite character from that show). As implied by the illustration above, and unlike STRIKER or Ms. Anthrope, Furor should be a villain that everyone hates for he lacks any redeeming features whatsoever. Therefore, as in Buffy, you should probably force the characters to team up with him at some point and see how long they can swallow his obnoxious behaviour.




Illustration by Jeff Dee. Use here does not constitute an attempt to infringe upon his rights.

2 comments:

  1. Good post. More V&V goodness--though the thing I like best is "transitive Incredible Hilk" as I think it encapsulates geek culture is a way almost sublime. ;)

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  2. I must blushingly admit to be very fond of that line myself.

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