Image “2013-12-24 Mictlantecuhtli anagoria” by Anagoria – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Click on image to view license.

The last installment of The Great Character Giveaway features another villain from my Zenith-3 campaign, who could easily be adapted for Science Fiction or Cyberpunk use. It would take a bit more work to convert to a D&D/Pathfinder application, but the results – a living flesh Golem held together with healing potions – would be so interesting that it might be worthwhile.

The primary use to which this character was put in my campaign was as the villain in a locked room mystery. I’m going to avoid going into that too much – it’s too campaign-centric to be of much value to anyone else – but some description of it will be necessary.

I want to start by acknowledging my sources. Mictlan-tecuhtli is heavily derivative of the antagonists of the first two Novellas in Larry Niven’s “The Long Arm Of Gil Hamilton”, “Death By Ecstasy” and “The Defenseless Dead” which was later expanded into a larger collection of Gil Hamilton stories, Flatlander. Mictlan-tecuhtli combines the illness and need of a Loren with the rejection factor of an Anubis.

Okay, to the locked room mystery…

The Mystery (in brief)

The earth in this campaign world keeps its convicted criminals in a teleport beam, perpetually bouncing them between The Moon and Alpha Centauri. While in this state, if there is an energy shortage, an individual can be randomly tapped for energy, aging them – so the longer you stay in the beam, the more you age, and the greater the chance that you won’t survive the experience. For these reasons, sentences tend to be about 1/5th the duration we expect in our culture. Instead of 20 years, you would get 5 years in the beam – and would emerge 20 years older. There is no biological decay while in an energy state, and the energy state doesn’t experience perceptible duration, so for the criminal, no time seems to have passed – he’s just instantly older. The world won’t have changed very much, which is believed to help the ex-convict reassimilate into society, and he certainly doesn’t get to interact with harder criminals or become ‘big man’ within his cell block. There’s absolutely no romance in a conviction, it’s all been squeezed out.

Bureaucracies are the same everywhere: no matter how much you protect against it, mistakes still happen. One such mistake led the Lunar Authorities to release the wrong prisoner – instead of a British Shoplifter who had completed her sentence, they instead retrieved Julian Greco, an Italian art forger, who wasn’t scheduled for release for another 7 years, real time. However, the body that came out was not that of Greco, but was rather that of Enrico Garcia-Finch, a Mexican engineer from the equivalent of NASA who had disappeared 7 months earlier. What’s more, Enrico’s body had quite clearly been deceased, with most of his organs removed, prior to his being inserted into the beam. Earth now had minimal holding capacity for prisoners, barely enough to hold those coming and going; they didn’t have the capacity to house even the convicted murderers in the beam, never mind the thousands held for lesser offenses. So they needed answers, fast, before public confidence in the criminal process was completely undermined, forcing the release of tens of thousands of convicted criminals back onto the streets.

The mystery was how someone had breached the most secure facility in the solar system to implant the body without it being noticed – and how many more were there?

To cut a long story short, the criminals used a very clever dodge. There were always ways to insert someone into the transport beam, if you were clever enough, but not without leaving a telltale energy trace. The only way to prevent the total energy being held by the system from increasing by 2 million Gigawatt-hours – the equivalent in energy of a 180-lb man – was to firstly remove the person who was supposed to be there (Greco) and replace him, then doctor the records of the incarceration. In fact, the criminals were even cleverer than that, building a fake set of the materialization room and putting their victim into the beam instead of the criminal who was supposed to be incarcerated in the first place, using the stationery supplier’s website to replace the official footage with their fakes.

For a while, the PCs thought that whoever was behind it had discovered a novel way to hide the remains of their organlegging operation, selling get-out-of-jail-free cards to anyone wealthy enough to afford one as a side-benefit – and well-connected enough to know of the opportunity. The criminal never advertised the service. In fact, the ‘rescued’ criminals also went into the Organ Banks – ensuring their silence forever; there was sufficient money in Organlegging that there was no need to take the risk. Similarly, it was cheaper and safer to bribe a corrupt judge than pull off any technical jiggery-pokery with the teleport beam.

And that is the defining trademark of our villain – maximum return and security for minimum exposure through finding and exploiting the gaps and seams in the system.

Mictlan-tecuhtli (Pavel Dimitri Chirkhov)

Pavel is a Russian man, exposed to contamination from the Chernobyl meltdown while in the womb [the Campaign is set in 2055], causing multiple organ failures over time, saved by transplants in the early 21st century. Became a doctor/bionanotech programmer through his fascination with what was happening to him. Developed pioneering new techniques as his replacement organs began to fail, contaminated by the radiation still within his system, especially the cesium and iodine absorbed into his bones. which enabled his life to be saved once again, but had to borrow money from the Russian Mafia to pay for the surgery.

Became addicted to painkillers, which cost him his job and medical license in 2035. With no other way to repay his debt, he went to work for the Russian Mafia in 2036, but the income he received was a pittance compared to his debts, which compounded monthly. Debts – and threats – began to pile up.

In 2045, his organs again began to fail, and as he was now a wanted criminal, he could no longer seek legal transplantation, and couldn’t afford it anyway. Resorting to Organlegging, he hacked the Civil Service database and identified a number of potential donors. He then discovered that his pre-natal radiation accident had given him abilities which could be used to subdue potential victims, enabling him to test their rejection profile for positive organ matches. When he found a suitable donor, he removed their organs, finding innovative ways to dispose of the bodies such that it would be years before they were discovered, but was never completely satisfied on that front. Because these activities were not authorized by his Russian employers, he adopted the nom-de-guerre Mictlan-tecuhtli, after the Aztec god of death. He also had his skin tattooed to hide his identity and his surgical scars.

Over time, he developed an elaborate costume to further confuse his identity, based around a skull-and-headdress mask and body armor, which helpfully concealed various external assistants for his still-failing organs. From the Russian Mafia, he gradually recruited a gang of thugs who he enhanced with transfusions of his own blood and with surgical implants. These fanatics half-believe that he is the real Aztec deity because of Mictlan-tecuhtli’s powers. They wear elaborate death-paint when operating in the field and have Aztec-style tattoos somewhere on their bodies. In particular, he recruited those who were suffering from organ failure and whose life he could save with illegal transplants – because he controls the supply of the transplanted organs, they need to remain loyal or die. This also confuses the trail because it means that there are multiple rejection profiles in operation, protecting his identity at the expense of making his operation more prominent.

With the proceeds from the organlegging, over the last 5 years he has been able to pay off his original debt to the Russian Mafia. They don’t know where the money is coming from and don’t especially care.

Powers:

Mictlan-tecuhtli has learned to grow brain cells from stem cells which he creates by inserting extracted DNA from other individuals into empty cells. By injecting these into his cortex, he now has approx 1,000 “shadows” of minds within his own brain, managed and kept in line by nanotechnology. He can use these as subsidiary brains like a second processor in a computer, handing them a task and doing something else while he waits for an answer. Because these shadows are in total sensory deprivation, they never get distracted and focus exclusively on the task in hand. This also means that any psychic phenomena that are applied to him have to affect all 1,000 minds. He can even use this to put his body on “autopilot” if his main cortex is KOd somehow, essentially operating on instinct even when unconscious. This gives him the reputation and nickname of the man who never sleeps, “el hombre que nunca duerme”.

On addition, he has the following abilities:

• Low level martial arts, Gets 3 actions / rnd instead of the usual 2
• Spiderman-like Agility 75
• Strength 75, usable at range, inanimate objects only
• Superleap x3
• “Death Burst”, turns 50 mana into 5d6 NND Explosive
• “Soul Drain”, reduces active Chi of the target by 10d6 and redirects it to (a) END 1:2 (b) STUN 1:6 (c) HP 1:10 or (d) Chi 1:1
• “Tijera”, divides a being into two halves which fight each other
• “Electrical Touch”, 3d6 RKA + 5d6 EB linked, continuous for 3 rounds
• “Muerte eye”, 10d6 Mental Attack forces target to witness death of loved ones and friends, 1 round, diminishing 1d6/round
• “Anicos Fantasma” 1d6RKA + 5d6 Transform, shatters forcefields turning half the active points into Zero-Range EB, usable at Range
• “Imbue”, grants 6 followers 25 STR 25 AGIL 2d6 HKA +50HP STUN
• “Steal Life”, Drains followers HP by 5d6 and redirects it to (a) END 1:5 (b) STUN 2:1 (c) HP 1:1 or (d) Chi 10:1

Conversion

Most of those powers are unnecessary. In fact, the only reason I gave him powers at all was to justify his followers fanaticism and make sure that the Psi on the team didn’t solve the mystery too easily; beyond that, he needs only some means of stunning his victims. The central premise of the character is someone who needs to perpetually steal body parts in order to keep himself alive, and who is incredibly clever at discovering the weak points in systems and exploiting them. It follows that conversion is not so much about his powers and abilities as finding some analogue for the skill at, and use of, transplant surgery.

For that reason, I don’t think it necessary to explain too much about the Game Mechanics involved; you can get the gist of what they do, and that’s all you really need.

Appearance

I used an edit of this image by Alvarez Tequihua to illustrate Mictlan-tecuhtli to my players – essentially removing the parts that showed a human body. I used this image from tattooshunt to illustrate the gang tattoos. And I represented Mictlan-tecuhtli under the mask with a photograph of a criminal with a tattooed eye which I think I found by searching for “tattooed face”.

About The Name

I inserted a hyphen into the name to make it easier for me to pronounce. The actual Aztec Death God’s name is the same but without the hyphenation.

I hope my readers have enjoyed the Great Character Giveaway, which is largely an excuse to share the best creations from the last year within my games. As content from a working game, with real, practical limits on the GMs prep time, it also gives me a chance to demonstrate some of the advice and techniques that I have offered here. Starting next week – if all goes according to plan – this Thursday will revert to standalone RPG articles, vacating Mondays to make room for the continuation (on a fortnightly basis) of the Basics For Beginners series.