Quote: *whispers of laughter* “Fuck it, shoot ‘em all!”
Description: On the very rare occasions the ghost is forced to manifest it looks like one man with a head that flickers between two faces. The body is clad in Vietnam era BDUs, which appear to be drenched in blood. The eyes of whoever’s face happens to be pres-ent are black and soulless, the mouth frozen in a rictus grin. The ghosts remember next to nothing about their mortal lives before Vietnam and only respond to their old call signs.
Durability Size Structure Acceleration Safe Speed Max Speed Handling Occupants
6 21 27 19(26 mph/turn) 257 (175 mph) 330 (225 mph) 3 2
Weapons
Type Damage Ranges Capacity Primary Effects
Minigun* 5 (9 again) 250/500/1000 750 AP 6, Autofire
M158 Launcher –2(L)+10 125/250/500 7 Blast Area/Force 3,
Knockdown, AP 12
*Multi-barrel Miniguns are Damage 6 (8 again); all other stats remain the same.
the hognose
Storytelling Hints: For all intents and purposes, Rat-tler and Python are a single entity. By binding their souls so tightly together with the Hognose they have become inseparable. This has the effect of creating a more pow-erful apparition than would normally be the case given the age of the lost souls, but it does have its drawbacks.
Anything that affects one of the ghosts affects them both.
If either spirit is driven from the physical anchor of the Hognose (or destroyed), both are. Of course, attempting an exorcism on a machine designed to kill is no laughing matter. See the World of Darkness Rulebook, p. 208 for more information about ghosts.
Attributes: Power 5, Finesse 5, Resistance 6 Willpower: 11
Morality: 1 Virtue: Fortitude Vice: Gluttony Initiative: 11 Defense: 5
Speed: 20 (species factor 10) Size: 5
Corpus: 11 Essence: 15
Numina: Compulsion, Ghost Speech, Horrific Re-newal, Possession, Telekinesis
Rules for the majority of Numina available to Rat-tler and Python can be found in the World of Darkness Rulebook, p. 210. The Horrific Renewal Numina is outlined below:
• Horrific Renewal: The Hognose has survived decades of use in a surprisingly pristine condition. The secret of its longevity is the ghosts that hide within its shell. Even while alive, Rattler and Python fed on human pain and misery. In death they’ve found ways to put those emotions to work for them. Mortal crews fear piloting the copter for good reasons. The whispering and cajoling of Rattler and Python to kill infects the crew with unease and the compulsion to kill becomes overwhelming. The ghosts seek to cause despair in the humans that pilot the Hognose, to taint the crew’s moral compass. Each time a crewman on-board the Hognose fails a Morality degeneration roll, Rattler and Python funnel the power of that anguish into the machine. Ten points of Structural damage is instantly repaired each time a pilot or gunner loses Morality while in the Hognose.
Story Hooks
Normally we’d offer a few ready-made hooks for incorporating the Hognose into your chronicle. In this case, general story hook ideas don’t really work so well. How often does the average troupe run across an attack helicopter? A helicopter with such an obvious a military profile is unlikely to fly below the radar (so to speak) for long in most places. So here are some ideas about how to introduce the Hognose into your games (including one standard hook at the end as an example).
• The Training Accident. The training accident can be used in a few different ways. A friend or relative of one of the characters could have been training for full flight status in the Hognose when Rattler and Python decided to have some fun or a live-fire exercise could quickly turn lethal and the friend/relative is blamed when no one will believe the copter fired on its own. Another option is to have the troupe near by said exercise and witness (or be targets of) the attack firsthand. In either case, the characters would likely feel compelled to investigate when they heard the pilot claim he heard voices that made him attack.
• The Military Campaign. This type of chronicle is tailor-made for including the Hognose. Assuming they have the appropriate skills, the characters could be on the receiving end of Rattler and Python’s trickery. This should be played out slowly, with the ghosts subtly influencing the characters and biding their time until the characters are in a position to inflict maximum carnage. Alternately, the characters could call in for air sup-port only to have the Hognose spray the area with fire, killing friend and foe indiscriminately.
• The Lunatic/Terrorist. This is the least subtle option. In this type of story the crew of the Hognose has either willingly joined forces with Rattler and Python or they’ve become so deranged it amounts to the same thing. The Hognose stages hit-and-run attacks on civilian targets and always manages to elude capture or de-struction by police or security forces. The characters could be drawn into dealing with the helicopter either out of a sense of civic duty or because they seem to be the primary targets of the attacks.
• Making History (standard hook). You are visiting an aviation museum with some of your friends when you see a kid sneak under the ropes and hop into the pilot seat of an attack helicopter. The kid grins mis-chievously for a second, then cocks his head to one side as though listening to someone speak. His face going oddly blank, the kid flicks switches and, to your surprise, the helicopter roars to life.
37
Injustice
Type of Weapon: Mace
Other Names: Beatdown Stick, The People’s Champion
Description
Injustice is a three-foot long pipe about an inch in diameter made of old steel. The pipe is scratched and worn, and only two rings of chipped paint—one blue, one yellow—surround the pipe at one end. That end is flanged, betraying the weapon’s origins as a pipe taken from some scaffolding. The other end has been repeatedly dipped in concrete to create a mace-head. The head used to have shards of broken glass and nails embedded in it, but they snapped off a long time ago and were more likely decora-tion than an attempt to increase the weapon’s lethality.
Around the flanged end, just below the two painted rings, layers of worn electrical tape mark the weapon’s grip.
Along the weapon’s length, the word “Injustice” has been carved into the steel. Occasionally, one owner or another paints the word for added effect, but the paint never seems to last; it flakes after only a couple of days, and is gone in under a week.
Though it’s very heavy, Injustice’s weight is a comfort to those who lift it. Whether through accident or design it feels perfectly balanced. The weapon has a solid heft to it, like an honest weapon—a sword implies nobility and a gun implies privilege, but Injustice is something anyone can use. Small flakes of the concrete head break off with every swing, releasing a smell of sweat and blood and smoke. Every hit crushes flesh and pulverizes bone, and the sickening crunch that accompanies a strike makes sure that everyone in the area knows precisely just how dangerous the weapon is. Though no sheath can contain the weapon, when it turns up on the black market it’s usually wrapped in a battered leather jacket festooned with punk and heavy metal patches—supposedly the jacket of the Ian Price, the man who made Injustice.
History
There’s no mystery involved in the creation of In-justice. Anyone who wants to know can find out all they want—the mace is mentioned in everything from official documents to Wikipedia entries. In the 1980s, race riots swept through the United Kingdom as the police used laws that allowed them to search people based only on suspicion to target black youths and disaffected urban poor. The first notable riot occurred in the St Pauls’ area of Bristol in early April 1980, when the police staged a raid on a suspected drug den. A year later, a police patrol in Brixton, south London, stopped a black youth and dragged him towards a waiting vehicle. Locals threw bricks and bottles at the police, and the riot soon spread. The heavy-handed police tactics didn’t help the antagonistic attitudes between police nationwide and the predominantly black urban poor.
the hognose-injustice
Ian Price was just another black youth, his parents hav-ing moved to the UK from Trinidad. Unlike all the others, he wasn’t about to let the police get away with abusing their power. He was living in Liverpool at the time and had heard reports of the riots in Bristol and London. Headlines like
“19 Police Hurt in Black Riot” characterized the attitude of the press—the riots were “black trouble,” only notable for its impact on “normal people.” Working on a building site, Ian had no problem stealing a length of scaffold pipe to ensure that he could give as good as he get his own back if the police tried anything. He coated one end in layers of concrete and kept it in a bag, ready for use. He didn’t have long to wait.
In early July, the police arrested a black man in the Tox-teth area of Liverpool. Ian was in the crowds watching the police. He didn’t attack, but when the police tried to break heads, he was ready to give as good as he got. After repeated clashes with the police, Price was just one man amongst the five hundred arrested. He didn’t have his makeshift mace with him when the police bundled him into a van, and most people thought it lost after the riot. They were wrong.
One of the other rioters had taken the weapon from Ian. Nobody knows quite what happened then. Some people say that the woman who took the mace was some kind of oc-cultist, channeling the disaffection of the British underclass into a symbol of the tension. Others don’t believe a word of it, preferring to believe that the photocopied pamphlets and disturbing tales of the weapon that circulated in the aftermath of the riots were just propaganda by far-left
orga-nizations. Whatever the truth was, few people saw Injustice for nearly nine years. Over that time, it had changed. It’d obviously been used, and the concrete head had been re-done many times, but it was still the same weapon.
Injustice next surfaced during the Battle of Trafalgar Square, the largest of the riots against the British govern-ment’s plans to institute the Poll Tax. Over the course of the chaos, at least three different people used it. Every one of them charged the police lines, swinging wildly. Nobody cared that the individual went down under a wall of batons and riot shields, Injustice always escaped. The weapon seemingly sought out areas where the police were winning and gave someone a chance to turn the tide. Though the riot eventually died down, most people who were there remember seeing Injustice in action.
From there, Injustice became a symbol of the disen-franchised underclass who don’t have anyone to fight their corner. It turned up at both the Brixton and Bradford riots in 1995. After that, someone brought it to the United States where it first appeared in the hands of protesters at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle at the end of November 1999. A series of photographs of the events show someone in the background attacking a policeman with Injustice. It’s then that the mace had its name carved into the steel. After the fact, a number of protestors posted images and accounts on the Internet as part of their efforts to document what really happened.
From there it didn’t take long for people to recognize the weapon. The far-left groups in the UK had set up a web presence,
Story Hooks
• When Injustice shows up, there’s a damn good chance that the shit’s about to hit the fan. While nobody would claim that the weapon causes riots, it’s a good indicator that there’s a storm brewing. Characters active in the political underground might notice that one of the militants they sometimes see has a new toy, or maybe one of the gangbangers on the other side is showing off. Whatever the case, the clock is ticking until someone incites a riot and part of the city starts to burn. If the characters are already on one side or another they can’t help but get dragged in, but they could be caught in the middle—or worse, if they’re government employees caught up in the middle.
• Injustice turns up in the unlikeliest of places—people have found it in dumpsters or abandoned lots. How it gets there is anyone’s guess, but it’s quite possible that anyone could pick it up. When it drops off the radar, it seems nobody can track it down. Some use the weapon to carve themselves a niche on the streets, break-ing the legs of everyone who gets in their way. Others join radical political groups and push them to become more radical. Still others resist the urge to get too involved, instead relishing the power that the weapon has to strike at law enforcement without any underlying ideology. What a character chooses to do with it will likely reveal a hidden side to his personality.
• Carrying Injustice is dangerous—most policemen won’t look too kindly on someone toting a lump of concrete on a steel bar—but the danger’s worth it for some people. He can rile people up, get a mob started whenever he needs to. Most of the time, one mob leads to another which leads to utter chaos, but some people who hold the weapon know what they’re doing—creating immediate mobs of supporters by spouting a whole bunch of rhetoric, then setting them off against a target while the wielder looks on. One such man holds Injustice now, and he’s just enough of a cynical bastard to stir up a radical mob wherever he goes, choosing issues not that he believes in, but that he knows will rile up the most people. In his hands, the weapon has never killed directly—but he’s racking up quite the body-count by proxy.
39
including scans of old material where they could find it. Though scattered across a wide expanse of free web hosts, anyone who re-ally tried could track down photographs and pictures that proved that Injustice had started to make its mark on history.
Injustice found its way back to the north of England by July 2001, when the National Front and other far-right groups stirred up violence against the Asian population in Bradford. People on both sides held the weapon, in all cases lashing out at the police presence rather than either side in the running battles. In 2004, it showed up in the hands of rioters in Sydney, again striking out against the police.
Whilst most people who wield Injustice do so as part of clashes with the police, they’re just contributing to the weapon’s public face. Since 2001 it has killed at least seven people in the employ of various governments. These have in-cluded minor politicians, at least one off-duty soldier, and three people working for the New York City Sanitation Department.
These last murders happened in the tunnels beneath the city, and nobody’s yet sure who was down there, and why they had Injustice to hand when the city government came calling.
The Weapon
Injustice is a large, heavy mace made from scaffolding pipe and concrete. Its statistics are as follows: Damage 3B (9-again), Size 3/L, Durability 3. Injustice always hits with bone-shattering force; apply the 9-again rule to the attack roll, and if the attack connects it deals one extra point of damage. The weapon is well-balanced, enough that it doesn’t suffer the –1 penalty for being an improvised weapon, but requires two hands to wield effectively. Using it one-handed increases the Strength requirement by one.
Injustice wasn’t created to beat up on just anyone. It has a purpose, and whoever wields it becomes part of that purpose.
Though Ian Price made the weapon to fight what he saw as an unjust state, the weapon’s story wasn’t ever so specific. It’s got an almost palpable aura of pure revenge. A few people think that Injustice wants them to swing at agents of the govern-ment, but most people who have held the weapon deny that.
The weapon’s not alive or aware, but people who wield it do deal crippling damage to people who work for a government.
When used against an agent of the government, the lightest wound from Injustice deals painful wounds. Each successful attack applies a cumulative –1 modifier to the target, to a maxi-mum of –5. These penalties also apply to the target’s Defense, as she falls to the force of a self-righteous avenger.
When someone wielding Injustice is involved in a com-bat with people who are agents of a government, he has to directly act against them rather than taking any other actions.
While he doesn’t have to make an all-out attack, and thus retains his Defense and access to Fighting Styles, he can’t take any action that doesn’t involve directly acting against an agent of the government. This applies even if that agent is on his side—if he’s working with a cop to bring down a rival gang, he’s got to attack her rather than members of the other gang. The only way to avoid this compulsion is to spend a Willpower point in order to take another action. If the wielder
is himself a member of a government agency, he must spend a point of Willpower every turn just to use the weapon.
Injustice’s effects aren’t merely physical. It stirs up feelings of discontent in everyone near to it. Anyone within 50 yards of the weapon can feel their blood rise. Discussions turn to politics and controversy—anything that gets people thinking with their heart rather than their head. The player can make a Manipulation + Expression roll to encourage people who agree with an argument he makes on one specific issue. Success gives everyone who heard his argument a +3 bonus on all rolls to take direct action—usually attacks or acts of vandalism—until the end of the scene. An exceptional success also gives everyone affected a point of Willpower, while a dramatic failure instead inflicts a –1 penalty for the rest of the scene. Using this abil-ity costs the wielder a point of Willpower. The wielder has to choose his issue carefully, finding something that most people will agree with—if he takes an unpopular line, then few peo-ple are inspired. Worse, he could end up inspiring the wrong
Injustice’s effects aren’t merely physical. It stirs up feelings of discontent in everyone near to it. Anyone within 50 yards of the weapon can feel their blood rise. Discussions turn to politics and controversy—anything that gets people thinking with their heart rather than their head. The player can make a Manipulation + Expression roll to encourage people who agree with an argument he makes on one specific issue. Success gives everyone who heard his argument a +3 bonus on all rolls to take direct action—usually attacks or acts of vandalism—until the end of the scene. An exceptional success also gives everyone affected a point of Willpower, while a dramatic failure instead inflicts a –1 penalty for the rest of the scene. Using this abil-ity costs the wielder a point of Willpower. The wielder has to choose his issue carefully, finding something that most people will agree with—if he takes an unpopular line, then few peo-ple are inspired. Worse, he could end up inspiring the wrong