Joey Rose, My New GODLIKE Character (Patreon)

I have run TONS of Godlike games over the years at conventions, stores and game clubs, but I have been a player in a Godlike game exactly once: in a demo that co-author Greg Stolze ran at Gen Con 2001, when I was learning the game to help promote it. So it was exciting when Allan Goodall offered to start a campaign for our Monday night game. He's running Operation TORCH, which he's been developing forever based on early manuscripts that I last read about 10 years ago. So it's not really even like playing in a scenario I know well. There are bits of recognition but not enough to spoil the fun.

Torch follows two threads of action, each with its own band of player characters. They eventually come together at the end. The first thread features not soldiers but American civilians whose powers manifested soon after the appearance of America's first Talent, Clyde Moreland, the Indestructible Man. Whatever reasons they have for not already being in the war, these civilian Talents are recruited by the Office of Strategic Services before the FBI or the Department of War snap them up. The OSS sends them to a lightning-fast How to Be a Spy training course and then sails them off to North Africa. The OSS needs Talents on the ground who can identify enemy Talents that might interfere with a prospective North African campaign.

We're using the guidelines in the Godlike rulebook for custom character backgrounds. Our civilian Talents have no skills at all from military training but better stats and more starting Will Points than the usual Talent commandos. 

Any questions about Godlike or how Joey came together? Post em in the comments below.

A PHYSICAL MARVEL! A MENTAL WONDER! DESTINED TO RESHAPE THE DESTINY OF THE WORLD!

Israel Joseph Rosenski is short but powerfully built, 21 years old, a cheerful loudmouth from the Lower East Side with a a skyscraper of a chip on his shoulder. A Polish Jewish family and a mixed-race father. Seward Park High class of 1939. Tenements and Chinatown. Shooting dice in the alley with the boys. Katz's Delicatessen: "Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army." His folks run Cherry Street Five and Dime underneath the Manhattan Bridge, but it barely makes enough to pay their own bills. He works as a cabbie. He aimed to go pro as a boxer, "Joey Rose"  on the handbills, until his Talent powers emerged during a bout and he accidentally put Bill "the Bowery Bullet" Boldano in the ground.

Joey always loved swashbuckling adventure stories and was hooked on Action Comics and Superman from issue 1. And to think it was a couple of Jewish kids from Toledo who came up with that! Joey's Talent powers are so close to Superman's from the comics that Joey is convinced he knows where Talent powers really come from: the inconceivable scientific advances of another planet! 

That may sound crazy, sure. But so does a kid from Seward High lifting a five-ton truck over his head.

STATS

Brains 2d, Command 2d, Cool 3d, Body 3d+7d, Coordination 3d, Sense 1d+5d

Experience Points 3, Unspent XP 0

Base Will 14, Current Will 15

SKILLS

Athletics 1d, Bluff 2d, Brawling 3d, Dodge 3d, Driving 2d, Endurance 2d, First Aid 2d, Health 1d, Intimidation 2d, Lie 2d, Mechanic (Automobiles) 1d, Mental Stability 1d, Perform (Dancing) 1d, Radio Operator 1d, Stealth 1d

LANGUAGES

English (native) 2d, French 1d, German 1d, Hebrew 1d, Polish 1d, Russian 1d, Yiddish 1d

(Joey's ma and babcia made him talk all that Old Country lingo.)

EQUIPMENT

Suit and tie, fedora, a suitcase with spare clothes and packed full of Superman comics, a waterproof sea bag from the Royal Navy, binoculars, an M1911A1 pistol he doesn't know a thing about, passport, consular documents as a driver for the diplomats, local maps, local money, unearned confidence.

TALENT POWERS

Hyperstat: Sense +5d

• Base Cost: 2/5/10 per die
• -1, Only sight & hearing
• Cost per Die: 1/3/6
• Total Cost: 5 Will

Evolutionary advances granted by a people thought tragically extinct! Can see in the dark and can hear with preternatural accuracy.

Goldberg Science 1d

• Base Cost: 5/10/20 per die
• +2 No Upward Limit (spend 5 Will to halve the time required)
• +2 Fiddly Bits (make devices out of whatever junk is handy)
• -1 Must have comic books about alien technology as reference materials
• -2 Exhausting (take dice in shock to torso when he successfully creates a device)
• -1 Devices always fail for good on a roll of Height 1 or a failure with all low dice
• -1 Devices break easily
• -1 Devices’ effects last no more than width in rounds
• -1 Expensive (spent 1 Will to activate)
• -1 Full Power Only
• Cost per Die: 1/2/4
• Total Cost: 1 Will

The astonishing super-science of a planet destroyed long ago! It is extremely difficult to gain new powers in Godlike. I paid a point to sock this away as a placeholder that might get better. I imagine Joey holing up in a shelled-out basement for a week with a mountain of comic books and random Jeep parts, cobbling together something that looks like a mousetrap screwed to half a broken flashlight. A miraculous example of the technology of a better world! Every 5 Will spend with No Upward limit halves the time it takes to create a device.

Immunity to Kinetic Damage 3d

• Base Cost: 7/14/28 per die
• -2 Costs 1 Will *every time* 
• +2, No Upward Limit: ×2 Killing/5 Will
• -1, Must have a Superman comic for No Upward Limit
• -2, Perception-Based
• -1, Glows bright red for width in rounds
• +1, Unshaken (shuts down only from taking killing damage)
• Cost per Die: 4/8/16
• Total Cost: 12 Will

A physique wrought by science millions of years ahead of our own! Ignores all Shock damage and 3 Killing from an attack, then turns remaining Killing damage to Shock. Every 5 Will spend with No Upward limit doubles the number of Killing points blocked.

Extra Tough 1

• Base Cost: 4 per level
• -1, Must have a Superman comic
• -1, Costs 1 Will every time
• -1, Glows bright red for width in rounds
• Cost per Level: 1
• Total Cost: 1

An extra wound box on each hit location.

Hyperstat: Body +7d

• Base Cost: 2/5/10 per die
• +2, No Upward Limit, +2/4/8
• -1, Must have a Superman comic for No Upward Limit
• -1, Nervous Habit (loud & defiant)
• -1, Glows bright red for width in rounds
• Cost per Die: 1/3/6
• Total Cost: 7 Will

+1 wound box on torso and each limb. (Without the hyperstat dice, only on the torso.) All shock to each location heals after each fight. Unarmed and strangling damage: width+4 Killing with Penetration 5. Can breach up to Heavy Armor 10. Can shatter glass within sight with a shout. Can lift 5 tons without a roll or 10 tons with a Body roll.  Can run 20 miles an hour without much effort. Can leap 30 yards or 20 yards up. Every 5 Will points spent with No Upward Limit doubles lift amount, running speed, and jumping distance and adds +1 damage.

JOEY ROSE IN CASABLANCA

Joey's language skills are particularly useful to the OSS, and he learned early on how to talk his way out of trouble that he had talked himself into. But can he make himself keep a low profile when every instinct says to show those Nazis at the Anfa Hotel just what a kid from Cherry Street can do?

Joey's partners are:

• Frank "Gramps" Harper, a Los Angeles architect whose touch sometimes ages things and people catastrophically. Age 32 but he looks 72.
• Tommy "Fingers" Griffin, a skinny thief from White Plains who can palm even huge things from far away. Age 29.
• Owen "Double Vision" Kincaid, a Louisiana car mechanic and family man who can be two places at once and can literally dodge bullets. Age 28.

Joey doesn't have a nom de guerre like the others. He's trying to think of a good one. 

For Joey's portrait I use a photo of Victor Perez, a Tunisian Jewish boxer who won the flyweight world championship in Paris in 1931. French collaborationists denounced him as a Jew in 1943. In Auschwitz, the Nazis forced him to box to entertain guards and officials.  He survived two death marches. In January 1945, a guard shot him for trying to give bread from a kitchen to another starving prisoner. He was 33 years old.