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GameNerd: 'Tis the season
Because ACUS always gets my brain going in a nerdly direction;
An idea for a character that would work either in an Amber game, or a superhero setting. Or, you know, the space opera she comes from.
The basic set up is a doctor in a far future space opera type setting - Star Trek, or Beta Colony from the Miles Vorkosigan books would work as a model. The Doctor (who I can't help but visually model on Promethea) is one of the galaxy's best physicians. While on a deep space mission of some kind, she encounters the Symbiotes. They're the larval stage of some sort of cosmic space wyrm - massively intelligent, god-like beings. In their larval stage, they bond with lower level intelligences to learn.
So, our doctor now has two of the things bonded to her. She needs them and they need her. They're shaped by their host, so on the doc, they become healers. They manifest as serpents of glowing light, and grant her the power to heal, but they have to feed on her life force to do it. They're intelligent, weird, and see the universe in odd ways. Fortunately, she's tougher than she has a right to be, due to the Futureness - in her time, old age and the diseases of cellular dysfunction (like cancer) have been cured by the simple expedient of making error proof cells - and mankind has been that way for generations in her time.
Given the future setting, I figure she'd have a name like Joon Singh O'Malley - she'd come from a post-racist, post-feminist, post-discrimination world. (and yes, I am aware of how problematic that is, but it's a trope) We then transplant her into an Amber game, or to modern Earth to play with the guys in spandex. Either way, she's still a genius physician who holds to her version of the Hippocratic Oath.
As an ADRPG character, she gets a high endurance to account for the toughness. Then she buys the serpents as named and numbered intelligent, slightly psychic critters with at least one alternate form. One of the snakes gets extraordinary psychic sense, the other gets confer regeneration. If there are enough points to go around, throw in sorcery (aka "sufficiently advanced technology") and make the psychic snake a 4-point spell-hanger. The super medical skills don't enter into the points part of it.
As a supers character, she gets something to cover the agelessness and immunity to disease, and maybe low-level regeneration. She gets some points in Science! to cover the future medical training. Then add in the snakes, which provide healing and a degree of Magic! since what they do is beyond science. That gives her two pools of MacGuffin power to throw around - one for medical stuff, the other for "psionic impressions" and "quantum observer effects" and the like.
In the silver age, she'd be called Dr. Caduceus. In the modern era, she'd lose the Dr. part of the name first, then eventually just go by her actual name. Definitely a low spandex factor. In the Amber version, the white lab coat is inevitable.
An idea for a character that would work either in an Amber game, or a superhero setting. Or, you know, the space opera she comes from.
The basic set up is a doctor in a far future space opera type setting - Star Trek, or Beta Colony from the Miles Vorkosigan books would work as a model. The Doctor (who I can't help but visually model on Promethea) is one of the galaxy's best physicians. While on a deep space mission of some kind, she encounters the Symbiotes. They're the larval stage of some sort of cosmic space wyrm - massively intelligent, god-like beings. In their larval stage, they bond with lower level intelligences to learn.
So, our doctor now has two of the things bonded to her. She needs them and they need her. They're shaped by their host, so on the doc, they become healers. They manifest as serpents of glowing light, and grant her the power to heal, but they have to feed on her life force to do it. They're intelligent, weird, and see the universe in odd ways. Fortunately, she's tougher than she has a right to be, due to the Futureness - in her time, old age and the diseases of cellular dysfunction (like cancer) have been cured by the simple expedient of making error proof cells - and mankind has been that way for generations in her time.
Given the future setting, I figure she'd have a name like Joon Singh O'Malley - she'd come from a post-racist, post-feminist, post-discrimination world. (and yes, I am aware of how problematic that is, but it's a trope) We then transplant her into an Amber game, or to modern Earth to play with the guys in spandex. Either way, she's still a genius physician who holds to her version of the Hippocratic Oath.
As an ADRPG character, she gets a high endurance to account for the toughness. Then she buys the serpents as named and numbered intelligent, slightly psychic critters with at least one alternate form. One of the snakes gets extraordinary psychic sense, the other gets confer regeneration. If there are enough points to go around, throw in sorcery (aka "sufficiently advanced technology") and make the psychic snake a 4-point spell-hanger. The super medical skills don't enter into the points part of it.
As a supers character, she gets something to cover the agelessness and immunity to disease, and maybe low-level regeneration. She gets some points in Science! to cover the future medical training. Then add in the snakes, which provide healing and a degree of Magic! since what they do is beyond science. That gives her two pools of MacGuffin power to throw around - one for medical stuff, the other for "psionic impressions" and "quantum observer effects" and the like.
In the silver age, she'd be called Dr. Caduceus. In the modern era, she'd lose the Dr. part of the name first, then eventually just go by her actual name. Definitely a low spandex factor. In the Amber version, the white lab coat is inevitable.
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Now you've got me lusting to start a campaign.