Pregenerated Characters

The six characters in this chapter are complete and ready for play. Each one demonstrates a different faction, a different expertise lane, and a different relationship with the hidden world. They can be used as written, modified freely, or borrowed from for player-built characters.

Each entry includes the full character build (characteristics, skills, talents, equipment, and derived values), along with a short personal history and a What I Bring note describing the unique contribution this character makes at the table. No single character can do everything.

All six can be used together as a complete investigative team. When building the group, compare the What I Bring columns for overlap: two exorcists and no investigator is a bad combination worth catching before session one.

Father Daniel Osei

Composure Initiative: 5    Corruption: 0    Magical Tier: 1 (–1 permanent WP)

Faction: Order of Mercy    Passive: Rite of Office (+1 Boon on sanctioned rites; +2 Boon when ordained + Sacraments)

Background

Daniel Osei was ordained in Accra at twenty-eight, then sent to Rome for seminary. There, a senior Order of Mercy advisor sat in on one of his case consultations, said little, and returned two weeks later with an invitation to additional formation. Osei asked what kind. The advisor told him enough to make the choice fair, and he made it.

He works North American field assignment, where the case queue is longest and there is no home parish waiting between cases. He carries a mobile exorcism kit, a small collection of Mercy Archives case files on recurring entities in the New England corridor, and a clear-eyed sense of what formal Catholic exorcism can and cannot accomplish.

He looks unremarkable: deliberate, careful, competent without flash. The Order has assigned him to several cases where a previous exorcist failed, and each time the case still closed clean. He takes no comfort in the streak; he simply intends to keep it going.

Build

Background: Clergy    Career: Exorcist    Faction: Order of Mercy

Starting XP Spent: 110 / 110

Free Talent (Core): Steady Ground (Iron Will Tree 1): When rolling Composure to resist fear, supernatural dread, or panic, treat one Success as two.

Faction Starting Talent: Opening Rite (Exorcism Tree 1): You may lead a formal exorcism against an established possession (see Chapter Eight); without it you may assist but cannot lead. During Stage 1 (Diagnosis), also identify whether a possession is partial, full, feigned, or externally anchored. (Uses his Magical Tier 1 access.)

Equipment

• Formal exorcism kit: stole, holy water (consecrated by himself), blessed salt, oil of the sick, prayer book with personal annotations, crucifix on cord
• Sacramental supplies: Eucharist and anointing oil, for Last Rites, Confession mandate, and pre-exorcism preparation
• Mercy Archives field notebook: current cases and active entity cross-references, Class II document
• Ordained priest's ID and letters of ministry: sufficient for legal access to hospitals, prisons, and church sites; concealed Order of Mercy certification on reverse
• Concealed blessed knife: Class I relic edge, plain appearance, does not look like a weapon until it is used as one

Abigail Torres

Composure Initiative: 5    Corruption: 0    Magical Tier: None

Faction: The Watchfires    Passive: Passion (after seeing any roll made in direct service of Passion, suffer Strain to add successes: 3 for the first, then +1 each; cannot self-incapacitate)

Passion: "Where the vulnerable are preyed upon, I am sent."

Background

Abigail Torres is a lay Protestant deliverance worker: unaffiliated with any denominational hierarchy, working outside ordination and institutional sanction. She came to this work through her pastor, who recognized what she was and put her in a room with a situation he could not handle himself; she could, and has been on the road doing the same thing for six years since.

She spent her twenties in lay ministry: college campus pastoral work, hospital chaplaincy, a small Pentecostal church outside Nashville, before the pastor who changed her career trajectory found her. He is dead now, and the manner of his death still unsettles her more than she says; the road has been easier than sitting still with it.

The first case rarely comes up when she talks about the work. She knows where the exits are, and she always knows where the children are.

Full character creation walkthrough for Abigail Torres appears in Chapter Three.

Build

Background: Clergy    Career: Deliverance Worker    Faction: The Watchfires

Starting XP Spent: 110 / 110

Free Talent (Core): Steady Ground (Iron Will Tree 1)

Faction Starting Talent: Stand With Them (Deliverance Tree 1): When helping another character resist demonic influence with Deliverance, add 1 Boon die to their resistance check.

Equipment

• Personal Bible — heavily annotated, worn; she knows it well enough to hold the relevant passage in memory under pressure
• Iron cross — welded, worn under her shirt; she has used it in two situations she does not discuss
• Small vial of blessed water — refilled through contact in whatever community she passes through
• Watchfire Network contacts — not a phone book; a set of names and methods she can activate when she needs to find the others
• Unremarkable sedan — paid off, high mileage, equipped for long drives; her office and her home

Special Agent Petra Vance

Composure Initiative: 4    Corruption: 0    Magical Tier: None

Faction: The Lyncean Office    Passive: Impossible Evidence (once per scene, after a successful investigative check on a supernatural case, ask: what does the mundane explanation fail to explain?)

Background

Petra Vance spent seven years in the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit before the Lyncean Office pulled her file and made her an offer through channels official enough that she didn't think to question them until much later. What unsettled her in hindsight wasn't the offer; it was how quickly it moved.

She is skeptical by training and grudgingly open by experience. She still files her reports in proper federal format because it is the only way she knows to make sense of what she is doing and because if she ever has to explain any of this to a congressional committee, she wants her paperwork to be correct.

She has not yet decided what she believes about the cosmology. She has decided what she believes about the evidence. The evidence is unambiguous.

Build

Background: Law Enforcement    Career: Investigator    Faction: The Lyncean Office

Starting XP Spent: 110 / 110

Free Talent (Core): Scene Discipline (Investigation Tree 1): After any successful Perception, Inquiry, Forensics, or Research check during an active investigation, ask one additional narrow factual question. The GM answers honestly.

Faction Starting Talent: Blood Tells Time (Forensics Tree 1): On a successful Forensics check, determine whether a scene was staged before or after the death or injury occurred.

Equipment

• Federal credentials — Lyncean Office-issued; superficially reads as standard federal law enforcement; sufficient for crime scene access, witness compulsion, and most institutional cooperation without explanation
• Investigation kit — evidence bags, gloves, black light, camera, field notebook with case files
• Service weapon — standard federal issue; she is a competent shot; she prefers not to need it
• Secure laptop — Lyncean Office secure channel, case database access, Forensics research capability in the field
• Spare credentials (blank) — for the situations where federal authority needs a different name

Tomás Echeverria

Composure Initiative: 3    Corruption: 0    Magical Tier: None

Faction: The Black Road    Passive: Kill It Right (may act on a suspected weakness as if confirmed; exploiting a weakness gives +1 Boon die , target Resistance → 0, and bypass one Supernatural Defense for that action)

Background

His grandmother hunted in Coahuila. His father hunted the corridor between Laredo and San Antonio. Tomás hunts wherever the case takes him, and the cases take him far. He is the third generation in a family that keeps records in a ledger his grandmother started in 1971. The entries are specific: what he faced, what worked, what did not, what was lost, and who was saved.

He is quietly religious in a way that rarely comes up in conversation; faith, for him, is operational rather than theological. He knows what the things he hunts are, has drawn his own conclusions about what that means, and lets other people reach theirs in their own time.

Reliability matters more to him than warmth, and it shows.

Build

Background: Military    Career: Hunter    Faction: The Black Road

Starting XP Spent: 110 / 110

Free Talent (Core): Press the Advantage (Combat Proficiency Tree 1): When you have a confirmed positional, numerical, or informational advantage, add 1 Boon die to Melee or Ranged attack checks.

Faction Starting Talent: Know When It's Playing Dead (Hunter Tree 1): Add 1 Boon die to checks to confirm whether a supernatural creature is incapacitated, regenerating, or waiting.

Purchased Talent (10 XP): Salt the Door (Fieldcraft Tree 1): With a few minutes and common materials, create a basic precaution at one entry point; add 1 Boon die to the first check to detect or resist intrusion, ambush, or night attack there.

Equipment

• Iron-core rifle rounds (40) — hand-loaded; the cores were cast by his father; they work
• Silvered hunting knife — plain wooden handle, edge re-silvered twice; he uses it for close situations he did not plan to be in
• Field loadout — salt (three pounds, sealed bags), iron filings, ash, emergency ward kit, paracord, medical tourniquet
• The Ledger — his grandmother's monster ledger, continued by his father, continued by him; softcover, deteriorating, annotated in three hands across three languages; the Black Road considers it one of the most comprehensive regional field records on the southern corridor
• Truck — extended cab, high clearance, older than it should be for still working this well

Dr. Miriam Schalk

Composure Initiative: 3    Corruption: 0    Magical Tier: 1

Faction: The Lantern Index    Passive: The Older Version (once per scene, after successful knowledge check on the current supernatural subject: ask what did the oldest source get right that later sources got wrong?)

Background

Dr. Miriam Schalk spent thirty-one years at the University of Chicago teaching comparative religion and medieval manuscript studies: four books, nineteen doctoral theses, and a paper on a ninth-century Carolingian demonological text that reached the Lantern Index three years before her retirement.

Fieldwork at sixty-three was never the plan. Then she went into the field with the team's previous scholar, found an inscription the briefing materials had missed, recognized it, and kept the team from doing something catastrophically wrong. The Lantern Index started asking her along more often; she agreed on the condition that someone else carries the heavy equipment.

Build

Background: Academic    Career: Scholar    Faction: The Lantern Index

Starting XP Spent: 110 / 110

Free Talent (Core): Supernatural Perception (Occult Sight Tree 1): Perceive supernatural entities, active Wound sites, and ongoing rites without a roll; perceive spiritual residue on objects and persons with a Willpower check. (Uses her Magical Tier 1 access, unlocked for Occult Sight.)

Faction Starting Talent: Citation Trail (Scholar Tree 1): When a topic has any written record, reduce the time required for a Research check (from hours to minutes, from days to hours).

Equipment

• Research materials — personal archive on tablet and backup drive, offline; two physical reference texts she will not travel without; one text she carries because it is irreplaceable and she does not trust the Index to keep it safe
• Index Access credentials — physical RFID card and digital certificate; opens the Index's restricted catalog, interlibrary network with seventeen institutional archives, and classified case-file database
• Translation kit — reference grammar guides, a magnifier, photograph capability for inscriptions; she works with physical media because digital capture often distorts aged texts
• Small Tier 1 focus object — a sealed bone-box the Index loaned her for field use; she is still learning how to use it without her hands shaking

Noel Devereaux

Composure Initiative: 4    Corruption: 1    Magical Tier: 2 (–2 permanent WP)

Faction: The Candleless    Passive: Ugly Solution (once per session, declare that you already have a dirty solution in place; GM adjudicates what "in place" means and what it will cost)

Background

Noel Devereaux was ordained as a permanent deacon in the Archdiocese of New Orleans at thirty-one. He was excommunicated at thirty-five following what the Church's internal documentation describes as "unauthorized use of forbidden material in the context of a pastoral case." What the documentation does not describe is that he saved the person's life.

He kept working after that. What he stopped doing was pretending the work happened inside a sanctioned structure. The Candleless had already noticed him operating on their methods without knowing their name; they made an offer of better materials in exchange for worse company, and he signed on because the caseload was only growing.

He carries Corruption 1 from a choice he made two years ago. He calls it the right choice. He believes that more easily in daylight than at three in the morning.

Build

Background: Criminal    Career: Ritualist    Faction: The Candleless

Starting XP Spent: 110 / 110

Free Talent (Core): Call the Small Thing (Summoning Tree 1): Summon a minor spirit, shade, messenger, or local presence under controlled circle conditions; it may answer questions but is not compelled to be truthful. (Uses his Magical Tier 2 access; requires Forbidden Rites 1+.)

Faction Starting Talent: Read the Filth Correctly (Forbidden Rites Tree 1): Add 1 Boon die to Forbidden Rites checks made to assess whether a forbidden procedure is functional, a trap, or bait before attempting it.

Equipment

• Infernal text (Class II) — a demonological procedural he acquired through Candleless channels; it does what it says it does; he has used it four times; he documents the results in margins written in code
• Forbidden Rites kit — chalk, salt (configured differently than warding salt), iron powder mixed with specific mineral compounds, three items he does not show to the team unless necessary
• Infernal Contacts list — maintained in a coded ledger; fourteen contacts of varying reliability and price; none of them are friends
• A relic he should not have — Class III, acquired through means he does not explain; it is useful and he is aware of the cost of using it; he uses it anyway when the situation warrants
• Deacon's kit (vestigial) — he still carries a small portion of his original ordination materials; not for use, for what they cost him

The Six at a Glance

The team covers: formal exorcism, spiritual suppression, investigation, monster hunting, deep research, and forbidden solutions. No two characters occupy the same lane.

The gap: no dedicated medic or field tech. Characters with Medicine or Technology should add those skills during play if the campaign demands it.