The Devil roams Los Angeles for the morally unwary… but John Fist can help you out if you’re hunting for gear… at a reasonable price.
JOHN FIST, OCCULT ADVENTURER
Personality: Aquarius; John Fist comes bearing gifts for a very reasonable price.
Obsession: Seeking out the hidden and selling it for a buck.
Rage Stimulus: Dishonesty and inconsiderate evil gets Fist’s hackles rising.
Fear Stimulus: Getting outsmarted by an opponent causes Fist’s low grade paranoia.
Noble Stimulus: Goodwill and charity are the two candles on Fist’s cake of happiness.
BODY 50
Athletically Trim 40%
Fighting Fit 40%
SPEED 55
Drive: 50%
Initiative: 35%
Two-gun Mojo 40%
MIND 60
Authentic Thaumaturgy 60%
General Education 50%
Ritual Hacking 45%
Ritual Hacking is John Fist’s occult savvy score.
SOUL 60
Honesty 60%
Avatar: The Merchant: 60%
Reputation: The Devil in Los Angeles: 60%
Sanity Gauge Fail/Hard
Violence 2/5
Unnatural 2/6
Helplessness 2/3
Isolation 2/1
Self 2/3
Selling Rituals
John Fist first considers himself an old-school sorcerer, before a trader. He meticulously studies and memorizes rituals and artefacts before selling them (if they’re safe).
Because John Fist knows these rituals by hand, he will write out half a ritual up front for half the cash. Fist does not sell artefact rituals, but makes them up himself or pays Jonny Aitchless to make them for him.
Fist will not sell rituals or artefacts with dubious or inhumane ingredients, such as the Pentecost ritual, although he memorise the ritual before destroying the original. Be assured, Fist will seek to obtain and destroy copies of those rituals he deems too dangerous or wrong.
Ten feet of Demon Stration Tape: $250.
Transcription Volume: $700
Poison Ward: $3500
Plague of Hiccups: $2000
Sorcerer’s Scapular: $50
Harmonious Alignment: $250 000
Scurvy Livestock: $3000
Create Homunculus: $1000 000
Mosey’s Storm: $10 000
Hex: $10 000
Medicine Bag: $1000
An extra year on your life: $100
Special Magick: Tools of John Fist’s Trade
These are special items Fist as accrued through the years of trading and wheeling. He considers these essential to his profession.
·The first channel of the Fool.
John traded this with Jonny Aitchless, when Jonny was still Fist’s sidekick.
·A clockwork revolver – functions as a normal 9-mm revolver, holds ten bullets, never jams and is self-cleaning and can fold up into a large time-keeping, music-chiming paperweight.
· Some Sure Things
These are two auto-successful matched pairs from the Washing your Luck ritual. It was the trade.
·Skipping Town
This is an ability to completely change his identity for twenty-four hours. This is a complete change. Fist becomes a different person somewhere else. When the twenty-four hours are up Fist returns and has some sort of missing time with vague recall – like a distant dream.
The Sleepers
· A huge favour owed by Graham Moscow of the L.A. Sleepers. Fist is protected.
The Devil
· Unfounded sinister reputations that will make someone really ponder long and hard about double-crossing him. The reputation is not unfounded; Fist is known as a shrewd dealer and is not a push over, especially if you stiff him – he’s very fair and very hard. Although not many people know Fist is the Devil, they believe the two are somehow connected.
Social Calls
Jonny Aitchless
Jonny has left the sidekick business and now dabbles in occult trading and ritual farming (he knows a lot of rituals and will sell you the complete ingredients for it if they can fit in a bag.)
Ulrich Steranko
The secretive cult with a thousand faces is the biggest repeat customer Fist has. The two trade rituals like old women swapping recipes. This is where Fist gets his custom-order unnatural phenomena from.
Graham Moscow
The merciless bully-boy for the Sleepers owes Fist a big favour and thus continues to spare his life. Fist and Moscow agree to keep quiet in their doings, and Moscow can call on Fist for consulting for a problem.
The Tin Soup Society
These avant-garde occult hobbyists are all professionals in various psychological and medical fields. The Tin Soup Society are in awe of the OU but do not venture into it, they skim the surface for little bits of weirdness that float to the surface. Most of what the Tin Soupers desire are the portable remnants of unnatural phenomena.
In order to protect them and score, Fist is the liaison for the Tin Soup Society. They trade for favours but mostly money.
Black Jesus
Fist has very little on the Black Jesus, and Fist’s preternatural reputation has soured Black Jesus’ opinion of him, Fist is looking for an angle to get in and prove his worth.
Sounds like a good outfitter.
What’s this about him being the Devil? He seems like a really nice guy; an honest kind of nice, not really the sort of “nice” that comes with being the Devil. Is it just a bad reputation, or what?
–Detective–
He is fairly ruthless, but he’s also very human. He has a balancing trick with his life.
He’s a combination of black-market magic and Indiana Jones adventure.
I made him as the antidote to the archetypal John Constantine bastard-magician.
Not only that he’s owed favours by the local Sleeper heavy. And being a merchant, he can torque your life until you cough up what you owe. Fair’s fair.
John Fist is not a new character, perhaps you’re all familiar with his other name, Johan Faust.
Ring any bells?
Cheers,
Chris.
Is it possible to buy avatar channels? Seems really strong – boon with no taboo.
Also, please clarify his Noble stimulus. Is it personal charity / goodwill, or the same in others? The former would be tricky, but by no means impossible, for a Merchant.
It might also be amusing to note in his appendices all the people he has hit with the Plague of Hiccups.
Just because you’re a Merchant doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly going sell drugs, weapons and child porn for a quick deal.
The Merchant is all about a good deal for both parties. If the client wants a dog rape on video, the Merchant has the right to see this as a bad deal based on bad taste.
Besides too many Merchants have this flavour of being ruthless swindlers. The merchant is all about the deal, the exchange of commodities.
Fist’s Noble Stimulus is that he sincerely wants everyone to be decent. And he admires charity in others, even though he’s not party to it himself (maybe a discount, occasionally)
The only trick is that no one knows where he gets all those “years of life” from.
As for people who’ve been hiccupped, your choice.
Cheers,
Chris.
As covered in the Gambler .PDF, you can’t trade for a channel, not continue the behavior, and expect to keep it.
The reasoning: the channel isn’t an Avatar’s to give, per se. They can trade their track record of steady performance, but if you don’t act the part as well once you land the role, the Archetype in question just takes it back.
Also, you can’t channel more than one Archetype at a time, the IC is just petty that way. If you win a second, the stronger of the two wins and that’s the one you keep.
Aside from that, not bad.