The last of the character backgrounds, in preparation for our upcoming Hero System campaign. Tarot is the mentalist of the group, a charlatan fortune teller before gaining true abilities to predict possible futures and manipulate the minds of other people.
For each character, these are drafts, some of the details may change before the game actually starts as I continue to fine tune.
Ryan McFadden never really amounted to much in life. He was in constant trouble in school and ended up dropping out of high school during his sophomore year. From there, he got in trouble with the law, for the usual delinquency issues. For Ryan, it just never really seemed to matter. After the destruction of The City in 2000, and the resurgence of crime, growing up in a lower middle-class family was hard enough, and his lack of prospects told him that there simply was no future.
By the time he had turned 18, Ryan had taken in with a small time hustling gang, and had learned to con tourists out of their money by pseudo-nonsense fortune telling. All show, and very little substance, the travelers that regularly visited the beaches of The City ate it up, and Ryan showed a real talent. Enough of a talent that he managed to save enough to break away from the gang, and open his own shop, where he could attract regular customers.
Over time, although he never really got rich, Ryan managed to make ends meet. Despite numerous run-ins with law enforcement, they could never get the fraud charges to stick, and his regulars believed in him enough to not care.
That all change one night though on Halloween, after staying out perhaps a little too late in a rather rough neighborhood. Almost believing his own sales pitch, Ryan believed it would be a safe night, since he had a good feeling. However, when his old gang surprised him in the alley way, the night turned sour fast. They left him in the gutter, bleeding and suffering from several broken bones, and a concussion, and it was only by luck that a passerby noticed him and cared enough to call an ambulance.
Since that night however, Ryan life has been changed. Before, the fortune telling was all an act, perhaps with a slightly higher than average sense of luck. But after the attack, he started receiving visions of the future. Most of the time, they are mere glimpses into the near future, but he is also haunted by dire predictions from the more distant future. In addition, he developed the ability to reach out into the minds of other people, reading their thoughts, and in extreme cases even controlling their actions.
All of this of course renewed his fortune-teller business, and for a time, things improved. But as time went by, the visions worsened, revealing a dire threat approaching. The visions also directed him toward a collection of outcasts, would-be heroes that would play a vital role in the events of the future. Keeping his business as a cover, he adopted the persona of Tarot and set out to gather the outcasts, to pull them together as a team.
