Unknown Armies NPC - Peppino Spaghetti

By McPig

Serious occultists call the ‘03 conflict the Whisper War. For Peppino Spaghetti, it was the Pizza War. He was just some schlub working the kitchen at his dad’s restaurant. He wasn’t ready to take on Nico Ambrosio and his crew of Sicilian-American hoods when the Sleepers turned the Five Families loose on the mages of New York in a desperate rearguard action. He wasn’t prepared to fight his way up the Empire State Building and put the hurt on Death Wish, the last handful of Sleepers holding the line against a new generation of mages flooding into the city.

He hasn’t been right ever since.

Personality: High strung, swings quickly between terror and fury.

Rage: Having to deal with problems he already solved, again.
Noble: Peppino is generous with charges. What else does he have to spend them on?
Fear: Food that comes back to life (Unnatural)
Obsession: Cooka da pizza
Wound Threshold: 60

Gourmeturge 60*% (Gains Charges, Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick)
Sole Proprietor 60%: Of course I can run the kitchen myself, work the front and back of the house simultaneously, keep my business afloat with creative accounting (Subs Fitness, Subs Pursuit, Protects Helplessness)

Pizza War Veteran 60%: Of course I can grab a hot pizza out of the oven barehanded, go straight through drywall with a running start, react quickly to sounds outside my window at 1:00 in the morning (Subs Struggle, Provides Wound Threshold, Provides Firearm Attacks)

 

Notches	Helplessness	Isolation	Self	Unnatural	Violence
Hardened	4	3	2	4	5
Failed	3	2	1	3	5**

 **Peppino loses his power of speech in stressful situations like combat, he can only shout inarticulately and let his fists do the talking.

Appearance: Short, sweaty, little mustache. Long arms, protruding gut, stubby but powerful legs. Eyes that bulge and roll in their sockets.

Possessions: Peppino owns the eponymous Peppino’s Pizza, a hole in the wall nestled between a pawn shop and a porn parlor under a highway overpass. The thin-crust style pies are the bare minimum of what a pizza snob might consider edible, and the beer list consists of whatever taps the distributor couldn’t unload elsewhere.

He doesn’t carry a handgun, but Peppino keeps a shotgun in the store. A Remington 870 with two vertical lines scratched into the walnut stock.

Ibid

 

WHAT YOU HEAR

Peppino’s is a popular underworld spot because the proprietor loads the food with both physical and stress healing Gourmeturgy spells. After something horrible happens there’s always someone who staggers in for a slice of pepperoni and feta, with kalamata olives and roast garlic sprinkled all over, and a whole pitcher of the barely drinkable kumquat sour none of the bars in the city would take. Fights used to break out between rival cabals who both limped to the same place after a skirmish. That stopped when the proprietor hit a pair of scuffling dukes with violent intestinal distress.

 

Peppino cultivates a following among magick users and their sycophantic clingers-on because making pizza is what he does, and because it’s his only form of social interaction. His wife left him with the kids when she couldn’t deal with his panicked outbursts of barely suppressed violence. He can’t employ anyone else because he might put a foot through their ribcage when they startle him in the kitchen. Any day, the Camorra and the Costa Nostra will come after him again, or the dough will grow a pair of hands and pull him into the oven where his skin will burst with crispy black bubbles. And then he’ll be happy he has friends in low places.

Peppino is the victim of harassment by I Got Other Cash Slots, a cabal of Plutomancers who target supernatural businesses because they enjoy an “unfair advantage” over their mundane competitors. They backed off cursing Special Orders crews after the Cadre shot their leader Rent Seeker, and Peppino looks like easy prey by comparison. They’ve been chipping away at him with random magick and now they’re ready to drop a Finance Charges and bankrupt him. He could take them apart in a direct confrontation, but Peppino is so used to the neverending grind of skyrocketing commercial rents and declining foot traffic through the neighborhood that he doesn’t even realize he’s being fucked with.

The anti-magick Warrior Gravis survived his fall off the 51st floor of the Empire State Building 20 years ago. It took him a second to get back in business, but now the surviving Sleeper is going to finish what he started and rub out the pizza-faced guido who took apart his whole operation. Peppino knows his way around a scattergun, but he’s not going to win a gunfight with an invincible gunslinger wielding Mock Duck’s legendary pair of Colt Double Action Armies. He’ll need a little help from his friends to remind the fun police why you don’t disrespect the pizza parlor.