Sunday, 22 March 2020

324 - Morlock, Subterranean Hermit

GMC: Morlock, Subterranean Hermit

Morlock was once like you. Morlock had a family and a house and owned a successful practice. Morlock was a dentist, you see. Morlock kept in shape by cycling in marathons, took three weeks vacation with his wife and kids at their lake cabin every year, and was fooling around with one of the nurses at work. Morlock had a name he now only remembers in nightmares.

All of that is desperately forgotten in the face of keening existential dread. Morlock is aware, achingly aware, of geological processes and timescales. The shifting of tectonic plates and accretions and erosions of the Earth. A growing, nightmarish perception which overrode his dreams and spread to waking hours. Crippling his ability to interact with the chattering, ephemeral people around him. It would be the usual story of nascent mental illness destroying lives, if it wasn’t for the fact that his dreams are real.

Unable to cope and at threat of involuntary committal or incarceration he retreated, first into homelessness and then underground into the spaces beneath his home city. He tunneled and built and scraped out a new home in the womb of the ground. He lives down there, in the dark, changing and hibernating in vaunted isolation.

People know about him, they’ll spelunk the depths of the city to find him. He hates that. He'll trade glimpses of the distant geological future to people who seek him out for the one thing he prizes, more solitude. If you can tell him how you found him and got to him, how you evaded his traps and found your way past his mazes he’ll lay terrible visions of distant futures on you for the chance to redouble his locks and pitfalls. He wishes people would leave him alone even as he encourages them.


His ex-wife hates the memory of him. So do his children. Except for his eldest, whose first year at college has been punctuated by recurring dreams of frozen magma flows and crystalline caverns that she just can't shake.

STATS
Personality: Feral and vicious. Morlock maintains just enough civility to get what he wants and only does that under protest. If you can’t give him that he’s happy to dump you in a dark pit.
Rage: Inane chatter.
Noble: Solitude.
Fear: Returning to his old life (Self).
Obsession: Cutting himself off from humanity.
Wound Threshold: 65.

Rusty Dentist 25% (Substitutes for Knowledge, Medical, Coerces Helplessness.)
Hardened Recluse 65% (Substitutes for Struggle, Provides Wound Threshold, Protects Isolation.)
Geomantic Dreamer 30%* (Specific Information: Geological Precognition, Casts Rituals, Use Gutter Magick.)

Shock Gauges

Notches
Violence
Unnatural
Helplessness
Isolation
Self
Hardened
7
5
2
6
5
Failed
1
5
4
3
4

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