116 - Max McElhannon, Agrimancer Activist

GMC: Max McElhannon, Agrimancer Activist

In prehistory humanity lived in small, tribal groups. Work was broadly shared and specialized roles were limited by both size and complexity of these proto-societies. Then hunting gave way to farming livestock and agriculture which in turn allowed for the development of larger groups, more complex technology, conflicts and ideas. The early mastery of environmental ills allowed people to turn their back on the truth of their base needs. It built the city.

The city doesn’t need you know how to be a hunter-gatherer, it doesn’t need you to understand where your food comes from at all. It merely asks is that you be a cog in its system, a specialized part filling a need in the whole so that the machinery can function. It asks you to forget taming the chaos of nature and instead tames you. It’s this distinction that separates agrimancers from urbanomancers, to the latter the former are primitives - clinging to outmoded vestiges of ancient living - and to the former the latter are whipped servants of false idols who have given themselves away.

Max McElhannon has some different ideas, he picks around the edges of urban failure. In cities where the machinery of society has broken down and people either won’t, can’t or don’t understand how to repair it he offers an alternative. Self-sufficient living, vertical farming and raising social consciousness of how people control and exist in their environments, he helps people retake what he sees as the abandoned frontier of urban decay by hearkening to the past. In some places its caught on like wildfire, in others he’s run up against learned helplessness, city ordinances and occult opposition.

Before that happened Max wasn’t really aware that there was more magick out there than his own brand of adept sorcery, which he had simply taken as metaphysical support for his neo-traditional worldview. Running afoul of urbanomancers and true kings has stoked his resolve. As he sees it in the same way that urban living has failed the people he tries to reach these magi act as parasites who prey on the downtrodden and disaffected for their own power. Naturally this has earned him some enemies and he has to move around a lot to avoid trouble. It’s also brought him allies and relationships with people who are at least hopeful that they can use him in their own schemes.

For now he travels between the cities, where the co-ops and aid agencies he helped found and gave his expertise to are located, in his battered white van with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Mandy Wiggins. Mandy - a motumancer - admires his optimism and pluck in standing up against entrenched disenfranchisement but thinks he’s just shackling people a different way with all the old-fashioned living baggage. He adores her fighting spirit but thinks she strays too far into pointless, anti-social nihilism. They fight about it, a lot. In fact it’s this conflict that makes them so into each other. If either of them has a weakness it’s their connection and given their squabbling it’s only a matter of time until someone exploits it.

STATS
Personality: Hopeful, folksy and smart. Max has taken full advantage of the fruits of advanced education offered by civilization in the same way he asks others to value understanding things beyond their own narrow life-roles.
Rage: Parasites. It’s one thing to live off the land, it’s another to live off of people.
Noble: Teaching people to fend for themselves.
Fear: Replacement of people with inhuman machinery. Max can use technology but things like automated checkouts make his skin crawl (Helplessness).
Obsession: Carry the torch of humanity's birthright and spread the fire.
Wound Threshold: 50.

Self-Sufficiency Activist 70% (Substitutes for Connect, Substitutes for Knowledge, Protects Helplessness.)
Agrimancer 50%* (Adept, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

Notches	Violence	Unnatural	Helplessness	Isolation	Self
Hardened	4	3	2	3	1
Failed	1	1	1	0	0