I’m also thinking of playing a Spider.

I’m also thinking of playing a Spider.

I’m also thinking of playing a Spider. He would have a back office job in the Paving and Verge Department. An underclerk, really, immune to notice. Age has crept over his youth, infiltrating his eyes and tightening his mouth. He’s thin to the point of bleakness, fingers always stained with a bit of ink, so the quicks of his nails are gray.

He knows the bullies in the office, and he’s got a handle on them so he has but to mention a letter or date and they’ll do as he says and shut up about it, too. He uses them as spotlights to blind anyone looking too closely in his direction, their attention diverted by the much brighter lights.

In the meantime, before carefully choosing a nascent crew to support, he amused himself with contract work for some twenty years.

He comes with a gang that served him well through all that, well trained and efficient. No one knows his name, they all call him “Paving” because that’s who you call when you’ve got a problem to hide. Dead or alive, he can take your problem and bury it under the street. He has the permits, the sites. He can make your revenge exquisite if you wish to install certain corpses under your outdoor latrine, or under a crossroads, or mix their finely ground bone and ash into the mortar of your prayer shrine.

Oh, he has his contacts among the stoneworkers of the vast mortuary piles, and there are catacomb diggers that answer his call, and of course the many public servants who work on road maintenance have learned respect when they see his thatch of thick gray hair, his cold eyes, his tight mouth, and the amusement that sometimes colors the knobs of his cheeks.

Yeah. He knows where the bodies are buried. But he has tired of the hobby, and he’s ready to take a more active role in choosing who becomes a body.

First special ability, “Connected.”

8 thoughts on “I’m also thinking of playing a Spider.”

  1. See, it’s quite clever; bury the victim in a stone box, with enough air and water to survive a few days, maybe a week. Then, when the victim dies, the crows can’t find the body; it’s been under stone for a while, signs of construction cleared away. And if you want to keep the ghost contained, there’s paint and symbols and such for that, pay a little extra for the adepts to help out. And always bury victims with evidence to incriminate one of your enemies.

  2. See, you just need to PLAY (Instead of GMing) Andrew. I really dig the concept for this character. Is he in one of your short stories? You should at least make a NPC card for him to add to the blades deck.

    I still reckon that Blades ‘All-stars’ GM-full online game has to happen sometime soon!

  5. Have you read David Cornish’s monster blood tattoo series? I really like the idea of Leeches that transform with (and become dependant on) potives that give them supernal abilities. Hunting monsters in that series, but I could see it being used for scoundrelly activity (ghost busting) too.

  8. I love the Monster Blood Tattoo universe – it’s too bad that Cornish has been well, I guess blocked… he’s only started writing again, apparently, following the events with Europe post-exeunt of Rossamund.

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