{"id":2091,"date":"2013-10-21T04:48:25","date_gmt":"2013-10-21T11:48:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/?p=2091"},"modified":"2013-10-21T07:02:11","modified_gmt":"2013-10-21T14:02:11","slug":"kid-hell-and-vicicle-erstwhile-enemies-for-better-angels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/2013\/10\/kid-hell-and-vicicle-erstwhile-enemies-for-better-angels\/","title":{"rendered":"Kid Hell and Vicicle: Erstwhile Enemies for BETTER ANGELS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cKid Hell and Vicicle\u201d is the closing short story in Better Angels<\/a>,<\/em> where the two erstwhile enemies find common cause. Here they are in game terms, ready for your campaign.<\/p>\n

Written by Greg Stolze and illustrated by Kurt Komoda, \u00a9 2013 respectively.<\/p>\n

\"Better-Angels-Kid-Hell\"<\/a>Kid Hell<\/h2>\n

CUNNING<\/strong>\u00a02,\u00a0PATIENT<\/strong>\u00a01
\nGreed<\/em>\u00a02,\u00a0Generosity<\/em>\u00a02
\nEspionage<\/em>\u00a00,\u00a0Knowledge<\/em>\u00a01<\/p>\n

SLY<\/strong>\u00a01,\u00a0OPEN<\/strong>\u00a03
\nCruelty<\/em>\u00a04,\u00a0Courage<\/em>\u00a03
\nCowardice<\/em>\u00a01,\u00a0Endurance<\/em>\u00a01<\/p>\n

DEVIOUS<\/strong>\u00a02,\u00a0INSIGHTFUL<\/strong>\u00a01
\nCorruption<\/em>\u00a00,\u00a0Nurture<\/em>\u00a01
\nDeceit<\/em>\u00a02,\u00a0Honesty<\/em>\u00a00<\/p>\n

POWERS<\/strong>: Dominator Strike (Hot), That Hideous Strength<\/p>\n

ASPECTS<\/strong>: Wings, Invisibility<\/p>\n

PRIMARY SINFUL STRATEGY<\/strong>: Devious<\/p>\n

Kid Hell is a rangy, skinny teenager in a garish red-and-yellow costume with fractal-inspired flame patterns on the forearms, ankles and waist. His real name is Stanley Prentice, and he\u2019s a privileged kinda guy.\u00a0 (Some demons look for folks like that, the same way some people just get all giggly and flustered around skinny redheads.)\u00a0 His mom\u2019s a doctor, his dad\u2019s an expert in medical insurance payment mediation, and he\u2019s supposed to go off to college in the fall on the East Coast.<\/p>\n

But Stan\u2019s always had a wild streak, and a summer job in Peru helping his archaeologist uncle unearth and preserve Moche artifacts went all interesting<\/i> when they ran afoul of local antiquities thieves.\u00a0 (Moche artifacts are highly sought on the black market, for a variety of reasons including \u201cthey are often made of gold\u201d and \u201cthey feature badass spiders and screaming monkey faces.\u201d)\u00a0 When the looters tried to muscle him and uncle Oscar, Stan instinctively used a golden statuette (depicting a sort of crab-gnome) as a bludgeon and broke a grown man\u2019s arm with one swing.\u00a0 Oscar was genuinely upset that he\u2019d risked the idol, and Stan immediately lost all respect for his uncle.\u00a0 If Oscar couldn\u2019t appreciate that his nephew was a badass who stood up for himself<\/i>, then Stan was done with him, and he didn\u2019t even resist when his parents insisted that he return home where it was safe.<\/p>\n

He had to leave the statue behind, of course.\u00a0 That\u2019s fine.\u00a0 His demon\u2019s amulet was a little ceramic spider-bat that his uncle had identified as being largely worthless and given Stan as a keepsake.<\/p>\n

Spurred by dreams of greatness, Stan awoke to find he was soaring, unseen, over his hometown. He didn\u2019t know what had happened to him, but he felt it was his duty (as a courageous badass) to protect those lesser souls who couldn\u2019t fly and fight like him.\u00a0 He really wants to have a proper nemesis\u2014someone he can reliably beat up, unlike Vicicle.<\/p>\n

\"Better-Angels-Vicicle\"<\/a>Vicicle<\/h2>\n

CUNNING<\/strong>\u00a03,\u00a0PATIENT<\/strong>\u00a01
\nGreed<\/em>\u00a02,\u00a0Generosity<\/em>\u00a03
\nEspionage<\/em>\u00a03,\u00a0Knowledge<\/em>\u00a01<\/p>\n

SLY<\/strong>\u00a04,\u00a0OPEN<\/strong>\u00a01
\nCruelty<\/em>\u00a03,\u00a0Courage<\/em>\u00a02
\nCowardice<\/em>\u00a02,\u00a0Endurance<\/em>\u00a03<\/p>\n

DEVIOUS<\/strong>\u00a04,\u00a0INSIGHTFUL<\/strong>\u00a03
\nCorruption<\/em>\u00a04,\u00a0Nurture<\/em>\u00a02
\nDeceit<\/em>\u00a04,\u00a0Honesty<\/em>\u00a02<\/p>\n

POWERS<\/strong>: Dominator Strike (Enervating), Impossible Beauty<\/p>\n

ASPECTS<\/strong>: Carapace, Ice-Wreathed*<\/p>\n

PRIMARY SINFUL STRATEGY<\/strong>: Devious<\/p>\n

* This works just like Flame-Wreathed, mechanically, except that instead of setting everything on fire, it makes things slippery or wet.<\/em><\/p>\n

Keith Simmons scraped and scrimped and schemed for everything that he\u2019d gotten by the time he picked up his demonic parasite in 1977\u2026 at least, that\u2019s how he sees things.\u00a0 An equally valid argument is that he\u2019s gotten where he is on the backs of others\u2019 labor, and that those others mainly performed those labors on their backs.<\/p>\n

Keith, now known as Vicicle, known as \u201cKeith the Chief\u201d in the late seventies, is and was a pimp.\u00a0 He grew up in dire Indianapolis poverty, the son of a hard-working, bitter alcoholic father and an equally bitter, equally alcoholic and equally hard-working mom.\u00a0 Despite all they had in common, Keith\u2019s parents loathed each other and Keith sided with his dad in the inevitable breakup.\u00a0 He imbibed a deep draught of misogyny from his family of origin, and that lets him treat women as objects to be manipulated for his profit.<\/p>\n

If you ignore his absolute contempt for 51% of humankind, and his lifelong pursuit of criminal vice, Keith isn\u2019t such a bad guy.\u00a0 He works hard.\u00a0 He keeps his promises, even to his prostitutes.\u00a0 He won\u2019t back down from a challenge.\u00a0 He has a spectacular sense of fashion, and (to keep things in perspective) he hasn\u2019t killed anyone in 40+ years of demon hosting.<\/p>\n

As Vicicle, he looks like a blue-suited 1970s pimp covered in the ice that his superpowers control.<\/p>\n

Better Angels<\/i>\u00a0is now available from Arc Dream Publishing.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cKid Hell and Vicicle\u201d is the closing short story in Better Angels, where the two erstwhile enemies find common cause. Here they<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2093,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[144],"tags":[142,11,220],"class_list":["post-2091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-better-angels","tag-characters","tag-greg-stolze","tag-kurt-komoda"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Better-Angels-Vicicle-featured.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1wrNI-xJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2091"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2112,"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2091\/revisions\/2112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcdream.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}