A Test of Character - Tom Turner (For Call of Cthulhu)

It's been awhile since I've done a Test of Character article 'round these here parts, but I've finally again created a character that's hooked me. Inspiration has struck, and my character for Chuck's 1920's Call of Cthulhu campaign which we started just last Friday has got me excited to play in his campaign.

We've played 1920's Cthulhu before, but only in one shots, so when Chuck pitched the idea of a campaign of his own design that would take our charaters clear across the world, he had me right away. Of course it didn't hurt that he was going to pump our characters up a little bit to be able to survive even the most rudimentary encounters with a random mi-go or darkspawn.

Chuck went a step further when I told him that I didn't care if I was a powerhouse with a shotgun but rather wanted to be an English mystic. He agreed right away that this would be cool, and I began dreaming up a backstory for the character that would soon become Tom Turner. Tom was a British veteran of World War I. He was an officer that skirted his responsibilities more often than not. He survived the war and was shipped off to India to serve as a bureaucrat for the English occupation. Much like his time spent during the war he would often leave his post to explore the wonders of this foreign land.

He encountered many new experiences, but the one that stuck was with a group of shamans and charlatans who excelled in trickery and slight-of-hand and played it off as true mystical powers. Tom hung with the group, picked up some basic tricks, but soon grew bored when their actions led to little more than tricking his fellow countrymen out of a few Pounds.

He went digging to find the group's original founder and dug too deep. Instead of finding their former leader, he found the source of their power, and everything went wrong. Without speaking a word to his fellow bureaucrats or his conmen Indian friends, he fled the country and his service to the Queen. He roamed the American West, only barely civilized for a few years before feeling the call for his homeland and headed off towards the East Coast for voyage home.

Tom left India a changed man. Often referring to himself as a simple street shaman, he seems to be able to make other people see what they want to see. It's not that he makes the impossible appear. Instead he simply pushes people, coaxes them, toward seeing what they want to see. In addition he carries two Colt m1877 six shooters he picked up in his time in the Western frontier. Named "Smoke" and "Thunder" they speak to Tom's nature of putting appearance and assumptions ahead of actual physical effect. He's recently fallen in with a group of American street toughs, and after an unfortunate incident in the mountains of Vermont, he and his compatriots are forced to blindly flee the states.