#5 War-Maker

Today’s 30 Character Challenge character is War-Maker created by Vito Delsante. I had a tough time with this one.

Personality: Reluctant Warrior

Vito’s original post mentions WM being on the side of the angels “this time,” and that the character is kind of about how a War-Maker makes peace. That’s more of a With Great Power… issue, since Powers For Good doesn’t stress the personal struggles, so I boiled it down a bit. War-Maker knows what he does can have great benefits, but he doesn’t particularly want to do it. I think he’s semi-retired, but keeps getting dragged back in to help people.

Powers:

• Compassion (Innate, Social) d4
• Marine (Training, Combat) d6
• Combat Prediction (Modification, Precognition) d8

I decided to go with a three power array here to challenge myself a little. One and two were easy: he has the stated power to see what would cause a confrontation or combat, and he’s got military training. I would probably treat Combat Prediction as the ability to see what would cause a conflict as well as to see what’s next in any conflict, and I decided to give it the modification tag. Maybe War-Maker is the product of military experiments?

The third tag was interesting, and I decided to go ahead and give WM something that stretches the character a little bit. Since he can always see all the ways everything could go wrong, he’s also very compassionate, and that works to his advantage. If you were at dinner and could see every way the romantic couple at the next table could end up fighting, you might feel some compassion for them too.

Relationships:

• Pax Mundi (Organization, Weapons) d6
• Emperian (Science, Precognition) d10

Pax Mundi is actually another of Vito’s creations, and I saw a good way to weave the two together. You’ll hear more about them later, but basically they’re the peace-at-all-costs crew. Naturally they have an interesting relationship with WM, who generally shares their outlook but mostly works with them through threatening to use his powers if they don’t cooperate.

Emperian is the guy that keeps draggin WM into the superhero game (assuming that’s not another player character). I’m imagining him a bit like Superman, coming to WM and telling him he’s needed.