Millbrook is a quaint little town spared the rural decay of rampant poverty and urban migration. If anything more people move here every year, charmed by the rustic wholesomeness of the community. Good schools, a hospital, a feted local baseball team, everyone knows each other and rarely has much bad to say. It’s idyllic. Tyler Woodard, the town optometrist, has lived here his entire life and wouldn’t have it any other way.
People like and respect Tyler. He’s a broad-faced, grey-haired old man, mild and friendly but wind him up and he’ll stand against anything that threatens his town. He’s led the charge in council meetings and citizen initiatives against mass real-estate development, waste dumping and the destruction of historic landmarks. Ask anyone about him and they’ll have some story of neighbourly grace and charity. Not everyone agrees with him but he’s the public figure that represents keeping Millbrook’s small town charm and lifestyle the way it is.
There’s a pedigree to this attachment, the Woodards have provided seven generations of optometry to Millbrook. Before that they did the same in the town of Adelswig in their native Germany, where they went by the name of Vogt. The Vogts had always been lenscrafters and magick-workers, their secrets and their craft passed down from generation to generation. Tyler was told stories in his youth about fantastical telescopes that could pierce the veil of heaven and see the angels, the secret family origins of the Nimrud lens, and the mass-blinding of their enemies. He doesn’t know how true the tales are but one surviving practice was passed down alongside them.
There’s a room in the back of Tyler’s business, hidden behind the office bookshelf and locked with three deadbolts. Inside is an old metal desk pushed against the near wall - stationery and stamps, a stack of magazines and two duffle bags carelessly stuffed with cash on arranged on top - and a reclining chair in the centre of the room. Lining the walls of the place are spectacles, arrayed around the chair like artwork. Each of them is a labelled copy of a pair Tyler has made for someone and allows him to see through the ‘eyes’ of the original.
Historically the Vogts/Woodards used this power to spy on the well-to-do patrons who could afford their services, amassing a wealth of information and blackmail material that allowed them access to money and social power beyond their humble origins. Unfortunately they made the same mistake most wizards do in their position, they underestimated the ability of normal people to hurt them. Their retreat to America was tinged with bitter revelation. The story twisted over generations until it became a noble choice, a flight not from people who would harm them but from a decay of culture and society. The Vogts were right to move away from their enemies and as the Woodards would strike new ground in a frontier where virtue and community mattered. At least that’s how Tyler sees it.
Tyler doesn’t want money or power for himself. He only ever asks for cash to conceal the real motive of his blackmailing and uses the panopticon to monitor and put the fear of god into those who violate his small-town values. Half the local council and a pair of sheriff's deputies are only a fraction of the people that have been threatened by his anonymous notes at one time or another. Some don’t pay but almost all of them have swayed their course based on the secrets he knew about them. He sees the moral disintegration of the refuge his family took here as the last straw, if they were pushed to flee to this place then no one can be allowed to take it from him. He won’t stand for it.
STATS
Personality: Grandfatherly, in both the soft and hard aspects of the term. Tyler sees the entire town as his family and can’t stomach the idea of anything bad happening to it, the individual people in it not so much.
Rage: Transgression. It’s like littering, once it starts it’s harder to stop and signals to everyone else that it’s okay to do the same.
Noble: Manners. The benchmark of civilised living is minding your p’s and q’s.
Fear: Being cast out of his community (Isolation).
Obsession: Keep Millbrook "safe".
Wound Threshold: 50.
Pillar of the Community 60% (Substitutes for Status, Protects Self, Protects Isolation.)
Blackmailer 40%* (Substitutes for Lie, Coerces Self, Reads Fear.)
Panopticon Lenscrafting 40% (Specific Information: Eyeglass Scrying, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)
Shock Gauges
Notches
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Violence
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Unnatural
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Helplessness
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Isolation
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Self
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Hardened
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1
|
3
|
1
|
3
|
4
|
Failed
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0
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0
|
1
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1
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1
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