powersthatbe | Red Dirt plot role info

Red Dirt plot role info

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You have a record as long as your arm - disturbance of the peace, unregistered horse distribution, more general smuggling, you name it. It’s all to enrich the lives of Ridge Rock, the only town you’ve ever called home, and get one over on Erebus for trying to squash the majority of the colony’s population. They love you for it, and have your back no matter what fine mess you get yourself into.

This is your most daring heist yet. You’ve had the opportunity, through both legit work and community service for some of your many infractions, to examine the temporary holding pens in Jonestown; you know how to get past the guards; you think you’ve figured out the best path between there and Ridge Rock; and - and this is important - you even have trucks to clean up the cow pats arranged for. (It both covers your trail and gets the town a bunch of free fertilizer!)

On the other hand, this is the biggest cattle heist you’ve planned to date (35 pairs of cattle, for a total of 70), and between here and ‘profit’ are so, so many question marks…

Destiny: Get as many of these cows home as possible, or die trying.

Connections: The Sheriff - The Nottingham to your Robin Hood, the Zenigata to your Lupin, the Javert to your… well, you get the picture; Ridge Rock Mayor - You and they both know that if they want to win reelection they need to work with you

Skill: Hollywood Escape - You’re remarkably difficult to keep contained. You have a knack for picking locks, hiding lockpicks about your person, untying knots, memorizing guard patrol patterns, digging holes in just the right spot, everything you’d need for a low-tech prison break. This skill will not at all help you if someone uses, say, magic on a lock, any kind of containment field that’s more high-tech than the Jaunt’s level of tech, or any sort of Liminal skill that would be designed to limit someone’s movement.

You are in charge of keeping the peace in Ridge Rock, and you’d like to think you’re good at your job. You tend to approach situations by the letter of the law, and you’re always busy, always going after the next outlaw, and the next, and the next, and you wish these damn kids would just toe the line and start following the damn rules already. You don’t care about Erebus; you just care about the law. And the law just so happens to be very heavily weighted in Erebus’s favor. There is no discussion about right or wrong here, as far as you’re concerned--the only right course of action is to follow the law.

Unfortunately, you’re starting to suspect that you’re the only one who feels that way, or at least, one of the only ones. Even the mildest-mannered townspeople never seem to see which outlaws have run off with what livestock or which truck of Erebus’s, and you are starting to suspect that the entire town is in on this whole “hide the outlaws from the law” game you’ve been playing. It’s maddening, and you’re trying to get the town to see that the outlaws are dangerous and that arresting them is clearly in the best interest of everyone’s safety.

Destiny: Put a stop to all this reckless law-breaking that is endangering far more people than it could ever help.

Connections: Heist Ringleader - You'll catch them if it's the last thing you do; Ridge Rock Mayor - A friend. You'll be disappointed if they're helping the outlaws like the rest of the town.

Skill: Quick Draw - You are effectively the fastest gun in the west. If it comes down to a contest of reaction times, you’re going to win--at maximum human speeds, anyway. (You’re not going to be able to, say, outspeed The Flash.) Outside of the Jaunt, the skill adjusts itself to whatever species your character may be normally; you’d be at the maximum of that species.

Edited 2018-07-02 20:42 (UTC)

You’re new to Ridge Rock, and to Mars in general. Family brought you out here in the first place, but you liked the charm of the small towns as opposed to the shine of the big city, and the care packages your relative sends your way make it worth the trouble, especially since having cheese to share means you made friends quickly.

Here’s the thing, though: That relative? They’re around midway up in the Erebus food chain. And Erebus has heard rumors that the towns are planning Mischief. And you’re expected to report back on whatever Mischief you hear about, or your relative loses their cushy position (and you, by proxy, lose those friend-making care packages). You’re not at all keen on spying on your new friends, but right now you don’t see a choice. This is about family, so they’ll understand why you’re passing on intel, right?

Destiny: Break free of these chains on your actions and make the best choice for you.

Connections: Erebus Corp Rep - You aren't sure if they're here to keep tabs on you and you really don't want to blow either of your covers. At least that's why you tell yourself you haven't tried to contact them yet; Amateur Outlaw - They’ve glommed onto you, as the other person around with no apparent idea what they’re doing. You can only hope this won’t end in tears.

Skill: Gastronomic Luck - Somehow, some way, you’ve got a knack for always ending up with better food than anyone else. If you’re foraging, you’re going to find better roots and berries than anyone else. If you’re eating at a restaurant, your food’s always cooked perfectly and somehow your order turns out better than anyone else’s. It’s weird how these things work out.

You’re just a cog in a corporate machine, and you like it that way. You’ve got no wanderlust in your blood, no desire to get out there and make something of yourself. All you want to do in life is advance to a comfortable middle management position where you can pull down a nice salary, get a solid pension plan set up, and work towards an early, enjoyable retirement. So far, your life plan and business career advancement have been rolling along smoothly...until now.

Your boss’s boss was supposed to go to some thing in some Martian backwater that somehow manages to be the planetary capital. Your boss’s boss canceled. Your boss didn’t want to go. Now, Erebus has to be represented by someone, and that someone is you. It’s a potentially big opportunity for your career--and it’s also just the sort of thing you never, ever wanted to happen. You dare not turn it down because upper management would not be happy, and so you’re going to try to make the best of things, even when ‘things’ means ‘apparently getting drawn into a giant cattle heist’ and 'possibly taken hostage once they realize who you are.’

Upper management has also told you that they’ve got a spy on the inside, and as of now, they have not told you exactly who this person is. Charming.

Destiny: Get back home, get back to your job, never speak of this again...unless they give you a hell of a promotion for your troubles.

Connections: Fish Out of Water - Your supposed contact within the group. Now if you only knew who they were.

Skill: Put Together - No matter the circumstances, no matter how bad things get, you always, always manage to look your corporate best. Some may say the effect of your long practice at making sure you’re sharp enough to blend in when in the corporate world is unnatural, but you know the truth. You’re just that good.

You’ve done all of this before. Many, many times before. Yet you’re not the sort to let experience lull you into complacency--you know that it just takes one bad heist, one bad accident, to send things into a tailspin where everything goes horribly wrong. You’re not the one in charge of this operation, and you’re less than pleased with the fact that a lot of these would-be cattle rustlers don’t have a lot of experience with this sort of thing. You’re struggling with the fact that you can’t be everywhere at once to put out the fires that are inevitably going to spring up all around this operation.

Destiny: See to it that yet another operation is pulled off as smoothly as possible.

Connections: Washed-Up Outlaw - An old friend of yours; Amateur Outlaw - A dangerous idiot that you're harboring a not-so-small grudge against.

Skill: Measured Response - When presented with shocking or unexpected developments, your outward reaction is only what you want to show to others. You cannot, for example, fool anyone trying to use a psychic skill on you to gauge your reaction that way. You also cannot control your heart rate, and so someone trying to gauge a reaction that way would succeed.

As long as you’ve lived in this town, you’ve hated Erebus for being totally unfair to everyone except themselves. You’ve also wanted to do something about it, even though that’s easier said than done. Getting involved with the bigger groups relies upon a lot of word of mouth, and getting a lot of sketchy, distrusting people to trust you. You’re too earnest for them to buy that swagger in your step very readily, and you’re still trying to figure out how to get in with people who just don’t seem to want your honest help.

After your first spectacular failure, you’ve managed to pull off a few solo jobs here and there--nothing impressive, most of them only very slightly more difficult than stealing candy from a baby. (You would never steal candy from a baby; that’s just mean.) However, you’ve been slowly building up to bigger and bigger moves against Erebus, and that, combined with the fact that you’re really good with animals, has caused you to (very reluctantly) be brought into this plan. You’re going to try your damnedest to prove yourself and not to screw it up.

Destiny: Hit the big time, and become one of the greats.

Connections: Washed-Up Outlaw - Something went wrong the first job you tried to pull and it ended up with them severely wounded; Professional Outlaw - You try to tread lightly around them if possible; Fish Out Of Water - Oh hey, someone else here who’s new to outlawing! You can learn the ropes together!!!

Skill: Animal Whispering - You’ve got a way with animals. You know how to deal with them and how to gently get them to do what you want.

You used to be somebody, an outlaw with a record a mile long, accomplishments you could go on talking about for days...only now? Not so much. Your last job, however long ago it happened, put the hurt on you, bad. You suffered some debilitating injury you never really recovered from. Maybe your old gang dropped you after that. Maybe you rejected their offers of help. It’s up to you, but however that went down, you’re alone now. It’s entirely possible that you’re coping with this--for lack of a better word--through the heavy use and abuse of one or more substances that really shouldn’t be used so heavily or so often.

Big things are happening in this town, and people could use help from an experienced outlaw like you. The thing is, you might not be able to pull yourself out of the lonely hole you’ve dug for yourself in time.

Destiny: Find your feet again, or maybe go out in a blaze of glory. Either way, make all this have some kind of meaning.

Connections: Professional Outlaw - An old friend; Amateur Outlaw - Your attempt to help them on their disastrous first job left you wounded.

Skill: Toxic Filtration - You’ve been so hard on your body in the past few months/years/whatever you go with backstory-wise that your body has adapted to all sorts of things that are not good for it. It takes more alcohol to get you drunk, more medicine for you to feel any sort of relief...but it also makes you remarkably difficult to poison and it makes it easier for you to survive in inhospitable environments.

You’re a low-level career politician in a high-level position in a harsh, unforgiving landscape. You’ve managed to eke out a comfortable existence here, and you like it that way. Under the circumstances, you’re doing well at managing the people’s needs versus what Erebus wants, but a good thing can only last so long. It doesn’t take a skilled political analyst to tell that there’s tension here, and that something’s going to give somewhere if things continue on as they are. The people will only handle so much abuse before they try anything bolder and more violent, and you know they don’t have the resources to stand against Erebus for long at all.

You’ve decided that your best bet right now, everyone’s best bet, is for you to simply pretend like nothing at all is going on, within reason. As far as Erebus is concerned, you don’t know anything about any heists that might be going on--and you don’t. If anyone comes and approaches you about it, you cut them right off for plausible deniability. You actually don’t care who wins or who loses here; you just want some sort of status quo to be maintained so you can continue about your comfortable life. If you’ve got to do a little political footwork to keep both sides in the dark, then so be it...so long as neither side approaches you with a hefty enough bribe.

Destiny: Kiss a few babies. Shake a few hands. Get your picture taken at local eateries. Win your next re-election.

Connections: Sheriff - A friend. It's really awkward lying to them on behalf of your constituents;. Cattle Heist Ringleader - Given how popular they are with the townsfolk, you've got no choice but to work with them if you want to be reelected.

Skill: Rubbing Elbows - You know everyone in town, you know just how to talk to everyone in town--or at least, you seem like you do. You’re very good at reading people to the point you know just what to say and when in order to get someone to start to see things from your point of view. You’re good at dealing with new people and making them feel like old friends.

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Cattle Heist Ringleader - Casper

Sheriff - Melissa

Fish Out Of Water - Ucchii

Erebus Corp Representative - Inigo

Professional Outlaw - Altair

Amateur Outlaw - Felih

Washed-Up Outlaw - Shiro

Ridge Rock Mayor - Gil