#sewer workers

I’m going back to the Leech playbook, because it’s one of the two that immediately sparked multiple things for me. One of the template builds is a ‘sapper’, and the flavour text specifically mentions that ‘Duskwall is a city full of industrial machinery, spark-crafts, plumbing, and electrical systems for you to bend to your purposes or sabotage. Get out your tools and get your hands dirty’.

Plumbing. Getting your hands dirty. And, well. My VtM Nosferatu is calling again? I want a sewer worker turned criminal. Because the whole damn city is built over sewers and underground canals, and if you’re comfortable down there, it definitely might let you access certain places you’re not supposed to. (I swear I’ve watched a heist movie where they broke into a bank that way, but I can’t remember specifics).

So. Playbook is Leech. Background, again, we’re going to be local. Akorosi. And I want to tie her back to the City Council, not directly, she’s nowhere even close to noble, but I think I want her family to have been a long string of minor civil servants and clerks and assorted ‘civic helpers’ for generations now. Her talents proved to be a bit more hands on, but the family has ties into the nuts and bolts of city government. They tend to be employed in and around Charterhall. Hence her access to education for the more esoteric ends of the Leech specialities.

But her background is going to be a lot more blunt and mundane, because she’s Labour. She was a city maintenance worker, specifically the sewers and canals. She was down there unclogging sewers and shoring up walls and mapping flow problems and monitoring for illegal mushroom tunnels (sidenote, love that that's a thing in this city) and all the daily slog that goes into keeping the underside of the city in working order. Her family didn’t exactly approve, but at least it was still something approaching ‘civic service’? But it’s hard to have too many illusions about respectability and legality when you’re wading through the city’s filth, so perhaps it’s not surprising she wound up sliding sideways into another career before long.

For her action dots, she gets the two in Tinker and one in Wreck from Leech. For her heritage, we’ll give her one in Study. Should the opportunity ever have come up to write an examination to get into a slightly more respectable end of city sanitation and maintenance, one that came with an office instead of a sewer, her family determinedly made sure she could take it. For her background, we’ll give her a dot in Survey. You need to be able to diagnose problems underground. And then for her two free dots, we’ll give her another one in Wreck, to make her very good a breaking (into) things, and then … a dot in Attune, I think. There’s weird shit down there. She’s run into it a time or two.

Her special ability, as per sapper, will definitely be Saboteur. She can Wreck things quietly and efficiently, and keep the damage well-hidden from casual inspection. She’s been a damage inspector. She knows how to do things quiet and clean.

Friends and rivals. I do love this part of character creation, you know that? It automatically builds stories and connections for you. Her close friend is going to be Veldren, a psychonaut. AKA a drug addict with a slightly more eldritch bent. Because I think … He’s a cousin. Her favourite cousin. And another family black sheep. He started out an artist, already a more fanciful and flimsy career than the family approved of, but at least he was respectable about it. He was part of one of the artist colonies around the old city walls in Charterhall, he had a respectable patron and everything. But then his use of mind-altering substances made him increasingly more unreliable, and when his patronage was dropped because he flaked on too many commissions, he wound up evicted and in a Fogcrest flophouse over in Silkshore instead. (He might be the reason, along with subterranean weirdness, for her dot in Attune). She loves him, and she’s trying to look after him. He’s also another reason why she’s drifted away from the family’s zealous adherence to ‘respectability’ towards a more criminal outlook.

Her enemy is going to be Eckerd, a corpse thief. Because she was canal maintenance, and bodies get dumped in canals the whole time, which meant she got in the way of body acquiring/transport/disposal a non-zero number of times, and Eckerd holds a grudge about it. Since her more criminal turn herself, she’s been a bit exasperated by this, but fine. If he wants to be enemies, sure. She’ll be enemies.

Her vice is Obligation. She’s going to look after Veldren. She’s going to make sure he stays fed, and warm, and at least slightly tethered to reality, while also enjoying his company. He’s fucking weird, but he was a genuine artist, and he has genuine insights and a fun personality when he’s awake enough for it.

Then finally, Name, Alias, and Look. Her name is Thena Slane. She is extremely sturdy and almost aggressively practical in appearance, wearing plain and well-tended (and waterproof, I went on a research tangent here wondering if waterproof waders existed in the 19th century, and apparently they did, they might have been around as early as the 1850s in America) work clothes. She is, unfortunately, also perpetually followed by a faint miasma of canal-and-sewer, even now.

And her Alias … Again, a small research rabbit hole, I was wonder if there were old terms for sanitation workers or sewer workers, and I found this list of Victorian occupations. There are a couple of interesting ones, but scavelman was a term for someone who maintained and kept waterways and ditches clear. So her Alias, I think, will be Scavelman, gender notwithstanding, and if anyone has an issue with it, as a reminder, she has two dots in Wreck and is happy to respond in kind!

Romanian sewer workers accidentally discovered a cave which was sealed for 5.5 million years. Movile Cave is filled with evolutionary distinct exotic creatures (albino crabs, worms) which feed off sulfur-producing bacteria. source