Unknown Armies NPC - Jamaldin

By Tim O'Brien

 

Jamaldin is a Neanderthal from the Caucasus. He escaped from a mountain game preserve where his tribe was selectively bred and hunted for thousands of years. He isn’t going back to help his tribe because he hates them. They were all cowards who never lifted a hand to fight the hunters who killed, skinned and ate them, but they eagerly ganged up to hurt him whenever they got the chance. He’s got a whole world to explore and he’s not going to waste a second thinking about people who don’t deserve his help.

Personality: Outwardly patient, inside he’s already bored and thinking about leaving. He likes being outdoors and could survive indefinitely in the wild, but likes visiting cities because that’s where all the people and exciting things are. He views Homo sapiens sapiens with a mixture of wonder and condescension. How could these people ever have exterminated his species?
Rage: Ghosts. The dead should stay dead.

Noble: Jamaldin is not precious about his possessions, anything he doesn’t want as a trophy he’ll give away without even thinking about.
Fear: His corpse being displayed. He doesn’t want his bones to ever be found (Unnatural)
Obsession: To stand in a new place and see something he’s never seen before.
Wound Threshold: 50

Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis 75*%: Of course I can survive outdoors, track anything anywhere, sing beautifully (Subs Fitness, Subs Struggle, Subs Secrets)
Caucasian 50%: Of course I can read Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic, use a dagger, drink a lot (Subs Knowledge, Protects Violence, Protects Isolation)
Fugitive (Avatar) 25%
J can only access the first level Fugitive channel, which lets him get brief impressions or snapshots of what his pursuers are doing on a successful Avatar roll. He taboos every time he kills someone chasing him. Which is why his Fugitive score never gets above 30%

 

Notches	Helplessness	Isolation	Self	Unnatural	Violence
Hardened	4	5	3	2	6
Failed	3	2			2

 
Appearance: J (which he pronounces “yay”) looks like a Yupik or Inuit, tough and short. An anthropologist could pick him out from a lineup of Cro Magnons, everyone else just thinks he looks funny. It’s hard to see unless you get close, but he’s got bad skin from drinking too much, and when his gout flares up he walks with a limp (but doesn’t slow down). In hot climates he wears excessively light clothing or goes shirtless. He speaks English (and other languages) with an accent that’s impossible to place, throat structured differently from anatomically modern humans.

Possessions: Jamaldin travels light, with little more than clothing, a lighter and a folding knife. He owns as much junk as any other person, but it’s hidden in the houses of all the people he occasionally stays with on his rambling journeys. Often without their knowledge. Among these are several trophies taken from people who tried to kill him.

• The plastic grip panel from a Makarov pistol, taken off the first man Jamaldin killed when he escaped the game preserve.
• An Air Force wing pin made of an unknown red metal that doesn’t ever heat up, no matter how long it’s left in sunlight or fire.
• A dried ear, tattooed with a little Orthodox cross. The guy didn’t have anything else worth taking.

WHAT YOU HEAR

J loves being hunted. He loves being chased around until he can devise a counterstrategy to kill his pursuers. There are a lot of people who want to kill the “last Neanderthal.”

• Flashpan, one legged sniper with a pouch of enchanted bullets for his flintlock.
• Ercole, an extremely Italian Culteurge who wrestles his prey to death.
• Rubaiyat the Pyromancer, keeps ashes of his kills in decorative urns he makes himself.
• The Great White Hunter, a shark headed carnivore who can “swim” through the earth.
• Boar’s Peer, avatar of the Warrior, dresses in Homeric panoply and fights “monsters”.

J’s most obnoxious habit is fathering children he has no intention of raising or supporting, then abandoning them and their mothers. He rationalizes this by telling himself he has a duty to repopulate his species, though the hybrids come out more sapiens sapiens than sapiens neanderthalensis. The truth is that it’s a twisted instinct he feels to leave a mark on the places and people he visits. Like an explorer carving a mark into a rock face. Some day one of the hunters is going to get wise and use one of his bastards as bait.

THE GATES OF HEAVEN

As a Neanderthal, Jamaldin is a great candidate for the empty First and Last Man spot in the Statosphere. The Human Eternal may have taken his duties, but the Comte’s actual position presiding over the Invisible Clergy is still unfilled. This makes Jamaldin a target not only for elite hunters, but for wizards who believe he’s their ticket to ultimate cosmic power.

J is already the First Man (an archaic human subspecies from half a million years ago), but not the Last Man (last surviving Neanderthal). Yet. That means the would-be King Of All Cosmos needs to head to the Caucasus and kill the rest of Jamaldin’s tribe. Which means fighting their way through the fortified mountain aul of The Gates of Heaven, the cabal running the hidden valley as a game preserve. It’s a bloodbath before the genocide even begins, the hillmen will defend their meal ticket to the death.

But let’s say a wizard kills the rest of Jamaldin’s people. He’s the last pure strain Neanderthal on earth. The First and Last Man. Now they just need to take his soul out of his body, and use it like a key to unlock the heavens.

But first, they have to catch him.

 

By Carla Speed McNeil

(If any of this sounds good, but you aren’t in love with Jamaldin, or with a series of events transpiring between NPCs on the other side of the globe, there’s an easy fix. Make the players the wizards pursuing ascension, the neanderthal tribe, or the game wardens).