Joe Louis and Deanna Carmen have both verve and mojo on their character sheets, so that it will be easy to use them as temporary player characters. If you’re using them as non-player characters, you can either use verve for them as if they were player characters or just roll up the extra dice they need for survival and ignore their verve. Deanna needs one more d10 for survival (for second level) and Joe needs two more d10 for survival (for second and fourth level). Don’t forget that each gets an Endurance bonus to survival.
Their mojo is in parentheses, because non-player characters never get mojo.
Deanna Carmen was born in 1947 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, while her family was playing the theater there. By the time she was eight she was warming up the crowds in the Moulin Rouge in Vegas. Here, she met Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. When the entertainers discovered the Insect Mesh in 1955, she ended up in need of protection; they provided it. Fourteen years later she is one of the Summit’s best agents.
This character sheet is Deanna in 1969, with a black beret, rainbow slacks, and a rifle slung over her shoulder.
Deanna wears a gold watch of the Summit. It keeps perfect time and negates the effects of the slo-time field on the wearer and on anyone within a two-yard radius of the wearer. The watch is psychically empowered.
If you use Deanna as a player character, raise her level appropriately. As a non-player character she will not take the lead. At best she’ll be a guide. Deanna will look up to the player characters as heroes, and follow their lead. She remembers them with a seven-year-old’s eye, as the great heroes who came out of nowhere to save the day--even if that isn’t exactly what did/will happen in 1955.
You’ll probably want the characters to see Deanna use her matchbook at least once, so as to show them what the Moulin Rouge looks like.
“It no longer exists. Chained and locked 14 years ago. But that’s where the Summit began.”
“The crossroads? You mean the symbol of the insects? It’s how they get into a human.”
“We don’t want to keep the insects secret. But if we start talking about them, we’ll get locked into the loony bin. Think about it--we’re killing these people because they have bugs inside them, bugs as big as a human. How far do you think that’ll get you in court?”
“The bodies melt. Yeah, they do photograph. We’ve leaked a few just to see the reaction. No one believes them. Those who do are treated as nut-jobs; mostly they are.”
Deanna recognizes that the Summit has been more successful in the street than in the back rooms. She’s not sure that Nixon is going to keep his promises about ending the war, and she’s not sure that it makes sense for the Summit to back Ronald Reagan (who is governor of California in 1969 and will be until 1975). He’s an especially sore subject between Deanna and the Chairman after Reagan called out the National Guard to end rioting during a Berkeley anti-war protest on May 15.
However, she doesn’t see an alternative. In 1969 the Democrats are not a reasonable second choice for youth activists. Democrat Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam war. The last election was between Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon, with once-and-future-Democrat George Wallace making a strong third-party showing.
While youth activists repudiated Wallace’s platform, they could agree with him that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties.” When Eugene McCarthy looked likely to turn the Democrats around in 1968, Robert Kennedy entered the race, a betrayal in the eyes of many youth activists. Kennedy might have been able to redeem himself in the eyes of anti-war activists, if he had not been assassinated. The Democratic Party wouldn’t fully differentiate itself in the eyes of youth until George McGovern in 1972.
While she disagrees with the Chairman and Father sometimes, she is extremely loyal and trusts them both implicitly. She has seen the Mesh and she knows what it has in store for the world.
Will Nixon make a difference? I don’t know. The chairman thinks he will. But the chairman thought Kennedy would make a difference, and Kennedy kicked us out and started this war. Then he was killed and LBJ escalated it. Nixon says he’ll end it, but we’ll see. I’m not sure the chairman chooses well. He thinks the governor will make a difference, and he speaks a good line overseas but here in California he instigates riots and then uses it as an excuse to call out the National Guard to cover Berkeley in barbed wire and tear gas. I can’t understand that that’s a difference we want.
The summit is a family, and Deanna is friends with Nancy Sinatra and other second generation rat packers. She helped write and produce Nancy Sinatra’s 1967 Movin’ with Nancy, specifically the music video of a San Francisco filled with mannequins, in which Dean Martin restored the mannequins to humanity with a magic wand. She’s also been in Vietnam, in 1966 and 1967, ostensibly as part of Nancy’s entourage, in order to undertake missions for the Summit.
The Summit is certain that Wallace’s near-successful bid to throw the election into the House was backed by the Mesh. At first they thought this backfired, as it split the Democrats and threw the election to Nixon, but Nixon continued to escalate tensions in Southeast Asia despite campaign promises to end the war. Deanna believes that by ensuring that the race was between Nixon and Humphrey, the Mesh ensured some level of victory for itself even if its full plan to divide the country failed. Because the Kennedys distanced themselves from the Summit, no one in the Summit knows if the Mesh killed RFK or if his death was a side benefit of Mesh-inspired violence in the Middle East. Deanna suspects the former.
Her world is falling, and she knows that the Mesh is responsible. There doesn’t appear to be anything she can do about it; they are outnumbered, outgunned, and confused. They win small battles, but always lose the war. Failure seems impossible to avoid. But if she doesn’t try, who else will?
“It is as if an invisible rope were giving way; ‘the blood-dimmed tide is loosed; the center cannot hold.’ As if the rope of the world were snapping thread by thread. I don’t even know what the rope is tied to, let alone how to keep it from breaking. All I can do is tie some strands back together while the rope continues to slip.”
Joe Lakono makes a very useful recurring villain. Among his aliases are Orlando Fontaine and the Hooded Traveler. He was the mysterious “goblin mage” from the goblin wars a hundred years ago.
Joe may use Home Rule to use matches in Highland.
He takes a small packet from his pocket and bends it open to reveal many teeth. He breaks off a tooth, and cracks it against the packet’s lower jaw. The tooth bursts into flame, and the whiff of sulfur slips past you.
Joe comes in many guises and names. The only one that is truly a disguise is Orlando Fontaine. He dresses in noble clothes while in Fork, and wears thick-heeled shoes to make himself look taller. As Orlando, he has infiltrated the power structure of Fork.
Joe also carries red and white spray paint. They’re pretty useful things to have. If he needs to delay someone following him, he may paint a symbol on the ground, and set up a spirit attachment either on the symbol, or on something in the symbol, such as a matchbook. Spiritual Hold is good at delaying pursuers for a few minutes.
Lakono gets money by counterfeiting Fork gambling chips in Vegas.
A seer, such as Red Jack, can provide some insight into Joe’s character and goal:
In the beginning there was Father Sky and Mother Earth. Sky lay upon Mother and from the Earth were all manner of creatures birthed. But Sky and Earth remained together, causing all who lived to crawl as snakes. Two children of Earth and Sky fought over this predicament. One fought to push their father away from their mother and give the people room to live. This was the dawn of Chaos. The other fought against their sibling to keep their Sky and Earth together as they had always been. This was the light of Order. The man in the dugout canoe worships the second god, and works to restore primal order to the worlds.
If Joe needs to throw people off of his trail, he’ll summon a waxen assassin while in the butterfly halls to take his place, and then high-tail it out of town. The assassin will likely come under the influence of Red Jack and be Jack’s serial killer in Fork, possibly being someone the players can chase through the doors into the other worlds.
