Golden Lore OOC - New Beginning (Open)

Tirin

God-Emperor of Tealkind
Moderator
Man, motherfuckers bringin' out all these fancy fucking power names and shit. I might actually have to touch up and expand on Kanin now, particularly re: the nature of his powers (and possibly some dope life history, as well).
 

Requiem

Well-Known Member
Member
I'll be editing this in the future further, but for now, here are the names of the different countries/the name of the major city on each continent.

Let it be known, Clord was renamed to Begroulious.

 

Requiem

Well-Known Member
Member
Man, those names don't look nearly as readable on my phone as they did on my computer. I'll edit it again in the future to better fonts and post it again later today.
 

Tirin

God-Emperor of Tealkind
Moderator
I've edited Kanin to add the double punch of additional edge and trauma with being significantly more sympathetic. Hope you all enjoy!
 

Easy

Right Honorable Justice
Member
I did not mean for this to be so long.

Name:
"Fortune" Poi, King of the Rats, AKA "Barberlord," AKA "Sevens," AKA "Pig-King Poi," AKA "Gobnob P," AKA "Wanted For Questioning"

Gender: Male, Scruffy/Bad Boi

Age: 35

Race: Goblin

Appearance: Lean, green, and very mean, with the top-left of his face intermittently scarred from splashes of burning liquid and a piece of the ear torn off from the same side. There is little point in describing the rest of his immediately visible scarring, because a full-body visual record of various knifings, beatings, and otherwise miscellaneous violence-related collateral damage over time is a feature too ubiquitous and ever-evolving, among East Poria street trash, to be of any real use in distinguishing one from any other. Nor is his clothing any help in this regard, since the rags he wears around are constantly exchanged for different sets at one of the multiple slum-adjacent second-and-thirdhand clothing shops he owns, meaning that what this particular individual is wearing one day could very well be seen around town on a very different individual the next day, and vice versa.

In fact, investigators assigned to shadow Fortune are generally told to make note of the fact that he has no known tattoos and a perfect smile, (for a goblin), with no sign of any rotting, metallic, broken, or missing teeth, because it's been actively demonstrated that even a goblin detective couldn't pick him out of a lineup otherwise. After adjusting for the teeth and tattoos, the same goblin detectives could do so at a success rate of nearly forty-two percent. (Sadly, this says a lot about the general state of goblin society in Poria nowadays.)

Personality: As a child, Fortune was mean, cunning, cynical, and ruthless. He's matured a lot since then, of course, and like most people, he got to be a lot more mean, cunning, cynical, and ruthless as he went along. Fortune is also patient and slow to anger, but the latter part arguably doesn't mean all that much because he's gone through with killing plenty of people who'd never even made him angry at all.

It's hard to pin down exactly what it is that motivates this little goblin to do what he does, but one prevailing theory is that he’s simply missing whatever part of the genome it is that codes for a creature’s instinctive aversion to certain danger. Where most animals have some basic sort of “fight or flight” response to immediate threats, with varying amounts of tendency towards one choice or the other, Fortune just has a built-in violence accelerator. This school of thought thus follows that he’s just been following his nature since back when he was first confronted by the criminal world, which was to carve himself a path through and deeper into it.

History:
IT'S SO LONG I'M SPOILER'ING THE INTRO HISTORY
Fortune was raised from infancy within the famous and well-respected Farros cartel, within the household of dragonborn Godfather Vincenzo Farros himself, though he was never formally considered part of the family.

Farros’s men had picked him up thirty-five years ago while ‘conducting investigations’ into a troublesome new humanoid trafficking operation - the so-called “Elzebal Area Concerned Citizen’s Club, named for the nearby Elzebal Projects housing district - that had allegedly grown bold enough to have started conducting their “business” on various parts of Farros turf. One lead in particular had pointed to a subterranean address thought to be connected with a suspected EACCC associate, and the team Vincenzo sent there to investigate found a bunch of fanatical Drow extremists become mad with religious fervor - plus the traditional sacred psychedelics - and in the midst of a ritual sacrifice to Serchë, the old Forsaken Church’s revered Goddess of Chance and Entropy*.

Since some of the Farros hitters were understandably somewhat spooked by this development, and the perps immediately turned screeching to attack the armed intruders, the situation got out of hand pretty quickly. That is to say, they ended up killing all the cultists in the resulting chaos. When a subsequent search of the apartment turned up nothing more of interest beyond pornography and assorted religious paraphernalia, they took the ugly, cut-up infant goblin from the makeshift altar and brought it back to Vincenzo instead, for lack of a better idea, and because they weren’t sure how the new Don would feel about them just leaving it there.

Vincenzo hadn’t quite expected to have to deal with this kind of thing himself, but at the same time, he couldn’t risk alienating the family’s political contacts with the kind of embarrassing questions that would come up if the authorities got involved in the matter. With the family’s long-time reputation for good faith and honorable practice to maintain, he nonetheless accepted the headache that came with it, and had his household staff look after the little goblin temporarily, until they could find out where it came from.

After months of fruitless searching failed to turn up anything more about the goblin itself or the CCC in general, the child had already grown big enough to waddle around and start mimicking people’s words, (goblins grow up fast), so he finally gave up and decided to just take the little bastard in. The task of raising and educating the kid was left to Lucci, the Farros’s human consigliere, who named him Fortune, on the basis that he was a lucky little bastard to have avoided all the myriad horrible fates that could have awaited him but for Vincenzo’s intervention.

Although initially somewhat resigned about the whole affair of having the boss’s adopted goblin baby thrust upon him, Lucci slowly began to develop an interest over the next couple of years. Unlike Vincenzo’s own children at the time, Fortune started showing signs of promise almost right away. He learned to read and write and had mastered basic arithmetic by the age of three, proving a quick study when presented with new concepts and challenges, and often working them out for himself before anyone had told him how to.

But perhaps, in retrospect, the speed at which young Fortune matured was rather more to the detriment than to the benefit of his upbringing. Although a lot of the syndicate’s members thought of the goblin’s existence in such esteemed halls as an affront to the dignity of the proud Farros name, a lot of the other men (and especially women) in the cartel found him amusing, and grew quite fond of the ugly little bastard. They’d often take a few moments to stop and play with him on their trips inside the grounds, cheerfully regaling him with anecdotes about the gangster life and mock predictions about what a tough guy he’d grow up to be. (It was these very people that first endowed him with the surname “Poi” in jest, talking up what a Person Of Interest he was sure to be. Little did they know...)

Regrettably, as it turned out, the young goblin took these lighthearted antics a bit more seriously than anybody realized. By the time Lucci had begun to consider training him as a successor, rather than another regular assistant or enforcer of some kind, the six-year-old (adolescent) Fortune was no longer interested in learning the ways of soft persuasion and gentle diplomacy. Nor was he keen on applying any such principles in his own day-to-day, and his ever more frequent ventures outside the Farros manor grounds had him coming back more often covered with scrapes and bruises from fighting with the human and dragonborn boys and girls.

Hoping it was just a phase he would get over, Lucci tolerated this for another few years, all the while persistently trying to coax the boy around to his more reasonable point of view - but the only change was that Fortune grew less and less receptive over time, and more likely to actually win the constant fights he got into. Finally he’d had enough, and when Fortune was roughly fully-grown (thirteen years of age), he threw him out of the house and had him put under the charge of Sergio Arrezi, one of the boss’s top lieutenants.

Surprisingly enough, a few months working at street level seemed to calm the goblin’s loose-cannon temperament a great deal more than several years of Lucci’s reasoned guidance and numerous severe beatings ever did. Arrezi’s training taught him not only the more… intimate aspects of running the business, but also discipline and restraint, and the importance of keeping a cool head in tandem with a decisive manner.

Fortune took pretty well to the line of work. The next few years saw him becoming increasingly more well-respected, goblin or no, among both the higher and lower elements of the cartel alike. He also learned that he was essentially unbeatable in dice and blackjack, lending yet another layer of weight to his adoptive name… as well as coming to appreciate the significance of the fact that he was not now, and never would be, one of The Family.

As much as he showed good competence, judgement, and initiative on the job, and the higher-ups became more and more prone to seeking out his advice and opinions on various situations, it was becoming increasingly clear that Fortune would never rise above the rank of caporegime in the Farros Cartel. Lucci had not yet forgiven him his earlier indiscretions or even thought them to be over with, and this was in part due to the philosophical differences Fortune continued to maintain with Don Vincenzo’s way of running things. As much as he now respected the importance of restraint and patience in times of conflict, one thing that always stuck with him from always brawling against creatures twice his size was an ingrained appreciation for the open-minded approach to dirty tricks and well-directed brutality.

Vincenzo Farros and Lucci, on the other hand, put great stock in the values of honor and reputability. It seemed that there was always a reason they would prefer to spend a hundred years engaged in fighting a minor conflict than two weeks in all-out war, and Fortune grew more and more frustrated with having his advice rejected or ignored. Finally, he had enough.
Soon after turning twenty-one (by a best-guess of the birth date), he tendered his resignation to Don Vincenzo and turned over the bulk of ten year’s savings in payment for the years of his upbringing. Thus securing a departure on amiable (if not quite ‘friendly’) terms, with just a few hundred crowns in his pocket he took off to seek his own… uh, thing of sorts.

Over the next couple of days, Fortune hit every casino in Poria. At one after another, he showed up, rolled dice, played blackjack, and exponentially grew his chip pool until he was forcibly cut off, cashed out, and obviously, banned for life. By moving quickly and making sure to do all the establishments with common owners in immediate succession, so word wouldn’t spread before he got there, he became a millionaire within the week. He bought a nightclub and several expensive, unscrupulous, and very able lawyers and accountants as his first investments, and so began the reign of Pig-King Poi. In the years since, he has…

(Age twenty-one, later the same year): Fortune didn’t choose the location of his nightclub at random. The somewhat inner-city North Side territory was largely ignored by major syndicates due to its lackluster dockside and border proximity, with just the small-time elvish Sylvan Brotherhood actively operating in the area. What everyone else had been overlooking, however, was the extensive subterranean highway access that made it extremely convenient for bringing in products - certain regulated and desirable plants, for example - from outside the urban sprawl of metropolitan Poria.

Fortune deliberately kept most of the soldiers he hired on as a secret from the start, making it appear as though he had far less muscle behind him than he actually did when he first started conducting miragebud sales on Sylvan turf. And sure enough, when they responded by send out a team to punish him, as expected, they heavily underestimated the kind of numbers they’d be up against, and sent just half of the troops they had available. The elven strike team walked right into an ambush when Fortune finally revealed his hand, and were slaughtered to a man. Then he moved on to the attack, and wiped out the remaining Sylvans in their homes before they even knew it was coming.

While the details of how it was conducted are relatively unknown to most, the overall effects are not. The overnight disappearance of an entire cartel, apparently without even a single man lost on his own side, is a story that’s still brought up in many circles whenever the subject of Fortune Poi is brought up. After all, - they’ll tend to say, - back then, he was just a goblin with a nightclub.

(Age twenty-eight): After several years of expanding with little to no competition or interference from outside interests, Fortune’s business had grown to encompass a dairy chain with several pig farms (goblins prefer pig’s milk to cow’s), a couple of used clothing stores, roughly a third of all miragebud that came into the city (mostly by way of milk trucks), and a small but significant stake in trade of Eye Scream (a synthetic stimulant known to cause bloodshot eyes in those intoxicated).

By this point, Fortune had become more than big enough to draw the attention and ire of the Duende, an all-goblin group that ranks among the largest syndicates in Poria. The tale of the Sylvan Brotherhood lives on, however, and hostilities are limited to occasional threats and formal reminders that it was a weak goblin who relied on other races to protect him (this in reference to Fortune’s indiscriminate hiring practices, which often extend to urchins of both sexes as well as adults and children of other races). More concerning is an ongoing police presence at his establishments, making it harder and harder to conduct his business under the radar.

(Age thirty-five): Current. Tensions with the Duende finally reached boiling point this year when one of the three bosses, George Tomakaiei, finally took action and had some of his police contacts hit one of Fortune’s shipments in the guise of a traffic stop gone wrong. Betting that Tomakaiei acted on his own, and without consent of the other two Bosses, Fortune hired the renowned hitman Kanin Vikona to have him killed in such a manner as to leave the remaining Duende free to interpret the perpetrator as they wished - and sure enough, they swiftly responded by declaring war on the fairly small-time Drow outfit known as Fingers Four.

Although this latest incident rather well affirms that Fortune maintains his status as someone feared and well-respected throughout the greatest depths of Poria’s underworld, the fact remains that his options are greatly limited by all the police attention his operations have drawn to them. No matter how much money he brings in, it doesn’t buy him reputation. What soldiers and underlings he can hire, they work for him because pays them generously, and for no other reason.

More than one employee has had to ‘mysteriously disappear’ because a rival syndicate offered to pay them even more, and they were foolish enough to accept it. Additionally, any and all attempts to gain the ear of a ranking police chief or politician have been met with firm, unequivocal rejection. Fortune’s business has been stalling in recent years, as surveillance on him has grown so heavy that he will often change clothing several times a day to throw a tail, or burn multiple prepaid cell phones in a single week. As much as he hates to admit it, unless he has a major breakthrough sometime soon, it might be best that to just cash out and retire altogether.

Magic: Fortune has an unnatural and disturbing tendency to always roll sevens with dice, and so most people assume that’s what his magic is, but really that has nothing to do with it.

The truth is that Fortune’s magic manifests itself in dreams, and those dreams show him part of the previous day in the life of someone else he’s had contact with before sleeping. Oftentimes, they’re simply mundane interactions the subject had with other people; checking out groceries, buying a newspaper, that sort of thing. At other times, they’ve featured confidential discussions between Lucci and Don Vincenzo, or (in later years) a rival cartel boss and one of Fortune’s own employees (who would generally disappear after a long, hard, and very painful conversation the following day).

While Fortune is genuinely rather clever, and always has been, this is a major reason why so many people have thought him preternaturally insightful over the years.

Misc.: What most people assume to be a magical ability on Fortune’s part is, in fact, a side-effect of the incomplete ritual performed upon his person in his infancy. The seven-pointed star carved into his chest (of which no scarring remains easily distinguishable) is the site of a link that was drawn between dimensions, through which the drow had intended to tap into the domain of their exalted goddess.

Fortune himself isn’t entirely convinced there’s a relation, but the truth is that this ‘tap’ of sorts is incomplete, and subtly leaking. This is the reason that he always rolls multiples of sevens with dice, or draws them with cards. The effect is “divine,” which is to say extradimensional, in origin, and as such, is not negated by magic-suppression or negation mechanisms short of a full dimensional area-seal - or short of that, in keeping with drow mythology on the subject, direct natural or artificial sunlight.

Equipment:
Like any street goblin who's made it this far, (and much more so than most), Fortune is no stranger to violence. Even though he rarely has the need or the occasion to do it in person these days, rather than paying a cleaner to take care of it for him, Fortune's about as tough, quick, dirty, and experienced a fighter as ever a goblin was who wore steel-toed boots and held a knife or a set of knuckle-dusters.

Fortune's outfit for any given day will generally contain enough pockets and be loose-fitting enough to easily conceal: A 9mm handgun, a couple of extra magazines (silver-jacketed bullets); switchblade, straight-razor, claw hammer, steel-toothed comb, lockpicks (a memento from his well-spent youth), a cheap burner phone, cheese wire (just because), spiked kuckle-dusters, a pair of perfectly ordinary six-sided dice, silver hip flask filled with finest brandy, matches, nickel-plated cigarette lighter, white gold cigar case filled with fancy imported cigars, and a mouthguard such as boxers or other professional fighters might wear. (When you see him pull that mouthguard out of its casing and stick it in his face, it's time to clear out, because although he weighs less than eighty pounds in full attire, the little goblin's hard as a coffin nail, and hits back a hell of a lot harder than that.)

As to the handgun, many a rival gunman has found out the hard way that Fortune's size just made it harder for other people to shoot him; it doesn't work the other way around.

Fortune’s nightclub remains the base of his operations to this day. It’s called Fortuna Renji, and is famous (and sometimes infamous) for hosting spontaneous, unannounced drow-themed nights with extra strippers on occasion. Catching these events has become something of a hobby among parts of the clientele, with some even going so far as to hold betting pools on when the next one is going to be.


*T/N: From the Awakening-era dialect term, ar enji. While most drow today no longer practice the traditional faith of the original tribes, and modern Forsaken has incorporated a variety of foreign loan-words into the language that serve this function, Early Modern and post-Awakening era texts have no distinct term for the concepts of ‘luck’ or ‘randomness’. Instead, uncertainty and unpredictability are represented by the Three Forms of Chaos:
  • Ar enji, literally “the chaos that brings opportunity,” is often referred to as the ‘purest’ of the Three Forms, and is the most commonly invoked; to say that someone “creates” ar enji (ar enji’zuss) is a common idiom that is exactly equivalent to either “sows chaos” or “makes her/his own luck,” depending on context.
  • Na tuentti, or “the chaos that promises,” is used for unforseeable events that have aligned themselves in such a way as to assure the subject’s success in her endeavor.
  • Na tuann, or “the chaos that betrays,” is the direct counterpart to na tuentti, and often associated with the pursuit of the latter. Those who experience it are marked for certain and total failure. The Cult of Serchë believes that there can be no na tuentti without na tuann, but ar enji is always present and inescapable.
 
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Easy

Right Honorable Justice
Member
And yeah Easy, obviously that's why it's called the second option. Didn't I mention before that I'm a viciously enthusiastic scatophile?
Wait... so wouldn't Number Two have been your first option, then?
 

Requiem

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Requiem

Well-Known Member
Member
Blooky, Kratour, and I will specifically be starting at a place called the Seat of Power, the building at the very center of Poria, specifically within Inner Poria. Kratour, you will be sitting up on the stage with Laurence and Althea. Blooky, you will be down on the ground floor in a seat at the front row.

Tirin and Easy, you already know what you're doing. Easy, go ahead and set the scene up how you like and I'll take control of the NPC you make that Fortune is dealing with unless that person is important. Just message me and we can figure that out quick if it's an issue.

Jeroth and Shizno, you guys are starting in the bar. Do some bar stuff, watch the TV. You got this boyos.

Pony, Dunsparce, and Coolpool, you guys will be starting in a grocery store. Just a random grocery store, going about your normal daily lives. If that's not something you want to do, you can start in the bar with Jeroth and Shizno. If that's not an option either, let me know and I can give you something.

Again, if you have any questions, just message me and we'll solve them together. The actual post will go up sometime tonight. I have the first half written and the second half shouldn't take much time at all, but I wanted to make sure we had things figured out before posting it. Instead of posting it now, it'll go up tonight after I get off work. Again, any questions or ideas, shoot me a message.

Let's do this, folks.
 

Requiem

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Game posted, everyone! Sorry for the @everyone yesterday, but yeah, game has started!
 

Requiem

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For those who would like it, it's the middle of the day, a Wednesday. The empire has been at war with the rest of the world for centuries. After forcefully claiming or peacefully annexing the rest of the world, the Mistlord continent was the last land free from the empire. They fought the entire empire (essentially the rest of the world) effectively for about 80 years. After those 80 years have passed, the two sides are signing a treaty turning Mistlord into the Mistlord Republic and officially bringing it into the empire.

Since there is some confusion: you are responding to the treaty signing in this opening post. You are RPing your character's reaction to it. You are having them do something, talk to fellow characters around them, lay out their personal life as it is right now, whatever you can think of. Characterize them, humanize them, let us know what they're up to in their life as of the day of the treaty signing.

There's not really a goal or a plot point I'm pushing you towards, you're just... writing about your character's actions as of the moment of the treaty signing and having them respond to the treaty signing.
 

BlookyHannah

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Drew Eystin! Added him to my character sheet.
 

Requiem

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Oh and since I forgot to mention it, the government works like this:

Local government handles, well, local stuff.

State/regional government handles somewhat bigger things.

National government handles stuff for the whole nation (as in, for Mistlord, they're still one whole country, so they govern themselves still, just as a republic).

World government handles the affairs of the entire empire. It's a hegemony.
 

Requiem

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So most of you should remember this, but for those that don't and didn't know, to begin with, Poria is a lot like New York City, but it's also got a specific character to it that everyone should know before we go any further. The city is broken up a bit in certain ways detailed below.

The big red square is the docks. It's not an actual big red square, it's just an idea of the dock's size. The city itself is separated into two specific sections, Outer and Inner Poria with the Seat of Power in the center of Inner Poria (the Seat of Power building is not actually that big, it's the size of something like the Capital/Congress building in Washington D.C., but I blew it up to make it easier to see). The walls separating the different sections of the city are mostly for show now, left over from early on in Poria's construction. Citizens can come and go as they see fit between the different sections, though there is still a clear gap in wealth between Outer Poria and Inner Poria. The elite usually live within Inner Poria, with the middle and lower classes living in Outer Poria.

Outer Poria is split into four different ends. Each end does what the map says, on top of housing people in apartments, some suburban neighborhoods on the outskirts of Outer Poria (with more suburbs outside of the city as well). More people live in the South End than most other Ends. East End brings in good from the docks which get distributed to the Merchant District in the North End, as well as whatever goods need to go to the other two Ends (like the minimarts, various grocery stores, fast food places, restaurants, etc). The lines between the different Ends are more or less unofficial lines between the different Ends. They all sort of blend into each other.

From there, Inner Poria itself has a lot of skyscrapers with the Seat of Power sitting on top of a big hill in the center of the skyscrapers. There are no skyscrapers within about a mile radius outside of the building, leaving a lot of grassy, somewhat forested area around it, like Central Park with an extremely important government building in the middle of it (and circular instead of square, unlike Central Park).

One last thing, the brown lines are "roads" but they're not dirt roads or anything like that. I just don't really know how I'm gonna do stuff like that mechanically but assume that there are freeways leading out of the city and into it as well. The brown lines are sort of placeholder images to let you know that's what's going on.

If anyone has any questions or even things to add, let me know.

quick poria sketch.png
 

Requiem

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Everyone should tag their posts with where your character is/an identifier of their physical location if you don't actually have a name for where you're at.

I've also decided that with this many players and characters, we should use the TAG system. It's stupid easy.

At the end of your posts, just write down TAG: followed by who should respond to your post. Helps keep things organized for everyone while we have so many different scenes happening (which is fine, no worries everyone). But yeah, an example TAG looks like this:

TAG: @BlookyHannah, @Kratoury, and @coolpool2
 
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