Dan Champagne Born: 1974, Died: ???? Writer, Occultist, Dark Magician. A small, thin, but muscular bald man, with pale skin, and piercing hazel eyes, almost always dressed in black. [Note: All stats, GURPS® 3rd edition] ST:10, DX:12, Speed:5.75, IQ:14, HT:11, Move:5, Dodge:6. Advantages: Animal Empathy, Combat Reflexes, Eidetic Memory/1, Magical Aptitude/3 (Limitation: Black Magic only), Strong Will+1, Composed, Less Sleep/2, Versatile, Awareness, Racial Memory, Immunity (the negative effects of self-cast Black Magic). Disadvantages: Personal Code of Honor, Split Personality, Unluckiness, Secrets, Insomniac, Undiscriminating, Voices, Xenophilia, Divinely Cursed. Quirks: Loves foreign foods. Prefers his women heavy. Doesn’t care about nostalgia items like photographs. Talks to his cat like it’s a person. Skills: Thaumatology-13, Writing-14, Acrobatics-10, Brawling-12, Broadsword-11, Guns (pistol/rifle)-13, Karate-10, Climbing-11, Survival (northern forests)-12, Computer Operation-13, Ecology-11, Geology-11, History-11, Literature-11, Occultism-14, Psychology-11, Theology-13, Acting-13, Stealth-11, Tactics-10. Languages: English (native)-17. Equipment: Dan will nearly always be found with a knife somewhere upon his person, although he is usually careful to ensure that the item is legal for him to carry. Depending on the time period of his life in which he’s encountered, he may also be carrying other weapons, including, but not limited to: a pistol, pepper spray, a pressure baton, and perhaps a taser. Character Notes: This is Dan as he is most likely to be met in a contemporary setting. Note that this is a conservative, mostly realistic treatment of the author, which does not assume that the supernatural is either real or not. A cinematic treatment of Dan, especially one that includes the existence of supernatural elements, would have much higher skill levels, the addition of spells, and even other supernatural advantages and disadvantages, such as the ability to spontaneously cast spells, reputations among angels and demons both, plus allies and enemies among them as well. Dan was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1974. He showed aptitudes for art and language at an early age, but was always somewhat socially withdrawn. His earliest memories of interacting with other children were ones of alienation. By the age of twenty-one, he had been married and divorced, and events previous to that left him convinced that he was somehow fundamentally different from other people, and would never fit into contemporary society. At age thirteen, he received a copy of The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey. Upon first reading it, he became enamored with philosophy, but by adulthood he had abandoned the tenets of modern atheistic Satanism in favor of a more broad and personally-developed Left Hand Path philosophy. When he was a teenager, he became a ward of the state due to difficulties involving his home life, mostly surrounding his mother’s divorce from his father, who, while not being Dan’s biological, was the man who had mostly raised him. During these years, his anti-social tendencies deepened, but these feelings were somewhat lessened during his early twenties. Since childhood, Dan had been plagued by undiagnosed schizophrenia (reflected by the disadvantages of Split Personality, and Voices), which had served as the springboard for his interest in the occult and supernatural in his youth. The author made an unsuccessful attempt at a college career. While being a stellar student, his college aspirations eventually failed due to a combination of his worsening schizophrenia and problems financing his education. He managed a comic store for a decade, which coincided with his short college attendance. After this period of his life, and due to several hospitalizations from acute mental illness, Dan came to the conclusion that his best destiny was as a writer, and he increasingly concentrated his time and efforts to that end. Encountered: Dan can be socially abrasive, but how much of that is truly self-generated, versus being an understandable response to others’ negative reactions to his strangeness, is debatable. Due to his focus on his writing, he increasingly evaluates situations on how much they might help, or harm, his writing career. At times he can seem cold and distant, or even hostile, but this is another reaction to, and often even an anticipation of, the poor treatment generally dealt to those who are socially divergent. Despite the above, few people come away from an encounter with Dan without being left with an impression of the energy, intellect, will, and pride that form the core of his personality.