Chantry Steelhaven Hall-Boston Mage PBP
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Jon Sherman — PC

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Jon Sherman — PC Empty Jon Sherman — PC

Post by The Tim Sat May 23, 2015 5:56 am

Character Name: Jon Sherman
Player Forum Handle: The Tim
Chronicle: Chantry Steelhaven Hall-Boston

Nature: Innovator
Demeanour: Activist
Essence: Primordial

Affiliation: Traditions
Sect: Virtual Adept
Concept: Quantitative investor turned agricultural hacker

Strength **, Dexterity **, Stamina ****
Charisma **, Manipulation **, Appearance **
Perception ****, Intelligence ****, Wits ***

Alertness **, Athletics **, Awareness *
Drive *, Etiquette **, Meditation **, Research **, Technology **
Academics **, Computer ***, Enigmas **, Finance ****, Politics ***, Science ****

Avatar ***, Contacts ***, Mentor *, Resources ****

Correspondence *, Entropy **, Forces *, Time **

Arete **, Willpower *******, Quintessence 3

Paradigm: Everything is a Prison
The world as we know it is a trap to make us our own jailers. Only by refusing to hold one another back and victimize each other can we all get out together.

Practice: Reality Hacking
Like all systems of control, there are rules. And like all rules, they can be exploited from within or modified from without.

Instruments:

  • Books & Periodicals
  • Computers and IT gear
  • Devices and Machines
  • Formulae & Advanced Mathematics
  • Meditation
  • Money and Wealth
  • Thought Forms

Step one is to understand the tools used to build the prison. Not just its substance but its procedures. Step two is understanding what they've done to you so you can act against them. Step three is to turn those tools against the prison by looking at both the tool and the prison differently.

Description:
Although he gave up the position, Jon still keeps the uniform: conservative tailored suits and silk ties. He looks like he might jump on a commuter flight at any moment to return to NYC as if nothing happened. When he's in downtown Boston he blends in with the executives of insurance companies. Mid to late 30s, in good shape, brisk walker, as likely as not looking at something on a smartphone.

Background in Brief:
Jon broke his first mentor's heart by abandoning pure mathematics for physics. He broke his second mentor's heart by taking his PhD out of academia and into the world of finance. For nearly a decade he cranked out beautiful math that meant amassing funds into singularities of wealth wherein normal economics broke down. The challenge and stress of it balanced nicely against the financial rewards, simple math for his own life. Except it became a repetitive blur, a grind that would end with him having left nothing behind but a lopsided global distribution of resources that would in time collapse on itself, but not before forgetting his contribution to it in its own crushing weight. He saw it in the numbers, the inevitable outcome of his work.

That's when he recognized he was trapped. Not just him, but everyone. Everyone was both jailed and a jailer, and the urge to become free was not just his, not new, but universal. It was just being turned back on itself by the prison system. He walked out of his job, his home, and into a new life trying to express the urge to become free safely and honestly by breaking down the prison.

* * *

That's the start, built as best as I can tell from the M20 guide to char gen.

I'm not 100% on his Spheres. I'm thinking that Forces will stay, but possibly only at * with Time or Correspondence being upped. He's still working on getting more viscerally involved in certain things, as opposed to simply reimagining and conceptualizing and deploying by releasing the plans / guiding others to implement the actual physical things.

EDIT: Did shift spheres.

EDIT 2: Added 5 Freebie points post Background / Paradigm


Last edited by The Tim on Sat May 23, 2015 10:15 pm; edited 2 times in total

The Tim

Posts : 20
Join date : 2015-05-22

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Post by Anja Rebekka Schultze Sat May 23, 2015 3:05 pm

I like him. Both having his Spheres as they are now and upping Time or Corr and lowering Forces works. I think this character will be allot of fun. If he get a bit more background and Paradigm he is good to go. Very Happy
Anja Rebekka Schultze
Anja Rebekka Schultze
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Post by The Tim Sat May 23, 2015 3:13 pm

How detailed a background are you looking to have posted up front?

Also tempted to have a mocked up LinkedIn profile as part of it.

The Tim

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Post by Anja Rebekka Schultze Sat May 23, 2015 3:18 pm

I generally say two or three paragraphs as a minimum for background and a good sized paragraph for Paradigm, if this is a problem then less is fine, do not worry about it, I know some prefer to figure out their character's background through play and that is fine.
Anja Rebekka Schultze
Anja Rebekka Schultze
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Jon Sherman — PC Empty Re: Jon Sherman — PC

Post by The Tim Sat May 23, 2015 9:26 pm

Extended Background:
Born 1% adjacent, Jon's parents had solid ambitions for him. They got a home where he could attend the best public schools, networked with people to help get him into Princeton—where they hoped he'd study something practical but consoled themselves that math gave a future in computer science as well. His success there and acceptance to MIT for graduate work in physics didn't settle their fears about his future. Not until he graduated and took a job at an investment firm did they feel like it all paid off. They still didn't understand anything he said when he talked about what he was working on, but at least they understood the money it brought in.

For Jon, math had prepared him for something new and so had physics. But working in finance just gave him a break at first. It gave him money and a way to be solidly rewarded for being the smartest guy in the room, and let him think about what he really wanted to do. Then it got more demanding as he juggled between managing a career and managing the markets. And it wasn't preparing him for anything, at least he didn't think it was. What it was doing was showing him the face of how things worked. An ugly, ugly face. He'd grown up going to school with kids who would never hurt for money. Who had trust funds that dwarfed even what he'd managed to earn for himself so far—in fact some of those funds were the ones he enriched with his work.

It was a meeting with a high school classmate that snapped things into place. She had just sold a start up and Jon's bosses wanted him to get her in as a client. They talked about her current net worth, how her investments were doing, and her goals, and he knew he could make her a lot more money. Crazy amounts more. And he knew where it came from. Not just in the abstract. He saw the way the system stretched across time and probability, producing a tool to translate misery into money. When he could see his surroundings again he thought he'd see his classmate as jailer, but even though she held chains and a key, she was tied up in it as well. He excused himself somewhat gracefully, and left.

He and the Virtual Adepts found one another online. Guided by a remote network of individuals to a Chantry in Boston, he settled in there, helping with funding and the business end of projects while continuing to focus on his own magical development. Once again he finds himself building up knowledge, grinding through basics in preparation for something. But he's got a name for that something this time. Ascension.

Extended Paradigm:
The world is a system, deliberate or otherwise, that sets those within it against each other. Everyone's impulse is to get free of the system, to pull themselves out into something truer and realer beyond. Except, because everyone is connected and the tools at hand are designed to be used against one another, those actions prevent others from realizing their attempts to escape. In aggregate, everyone keeps everyone else imprisoned by drawing the chains tighter and tighter. Or in a folksy New England rephrasing it's a bucket of crabs, and most think they can get free by making their claws bigger and better.

So instead of doing that, it is about understanding the systems of imprisonment and turning them against themselves. This involves understanding reality as it currently is conceived of, from physics to international finance to news, boiled together in a sort of mass traffic analysis to see the emergent patterns of the distorted impulse towards freedom. As part of that analysis, mindfulness is key to keep from trying to cheat your way out early and actually wrecking the project. From there, a solution that's similar enough to the current rules but actually meant to loosen the chains can be developed and deployed. Sometimes it is just a momentary slackening to let the pressure off someone about to be seriously harmed by the imprisonment, and sometimes it is a major victory and everybody gets a bit more breathing room.

What it actually looks like when Jon is doing magic is a whole lot of data crunching followed up by gaining insights that the unAwakened couldn't from that data and using those insights to write programs or build devices to alter the factors that lead to the current situation. For instance, controlling outcomes is generally a matter of altering the right factors to nudge them from their initial course so that your changes aren't swept up in a chaotic system while making it harder to see a particular moment in time is finding the most activate feedback loops and exaggerating them to produce meaningless noise that others can't cut through.

(I'm shifting one Forces into Time, he's more info focused)

The Tim

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Join date : 2015-05-22

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Post by Anja Rebekka Schultze Sat May 23, 2015 9:32 pm

Nice, I will give you five extra freebie points for the background and Paradigm. Your character is good to go, but I was thinking that I wait a few more days until more players have gotten their characters together before starting the game. If some players need more time at that point I will start the game but wait with any major plot before everyone is ready.
Anja Rebekka Schultze
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Post by The Tim Sat May 23, 2015 10:14 pm

Awesome. Added two dots of Academics and one of Avatar—I figure the urge towards freedom would be very strong from an Avatar *** Primordial Avatar.

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Post by Anja Rebekka Schultze Sun May 24, 2015 9:44 am

Yeah a three dot Primordial Avatar will have it's say and yes a urge towards freedom can come from it definitively. Awesome. I am looking forward to seeing your character in the game, I think he will be great.
Anja Rebekka Schultze
Anja Rebekka Schultze
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Post by Anja Rebekka Schultze Tue Jun 16, 2015 7:50 am

When Jon check his phone the next morning he will find a message from Adley saying that the Cabal have gone on ahead to the Hermetic Chantry and that they will catch up with him later.

Just drop me a note when you are back and I will write Jon right back in with the rest of the group.
Anja Rebekka Schultze
Anja Rebekka Schultze
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