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Friday, February 4, 2022

D is for Dominium (and Decius) in the 2022 Campaign Challenge

Samuel King was born an off the charts genius and realized very quickly life would be a lot easier if he didn't let on about it too much. He got an accounting degree, landed a job at a stable manufacturing firm, invested in painfully obvious to him stocks to make sure he would never need for money, and started tinkering with some of his interests: hypnosis and light. Eventually he found a way to merge the two, creating an palm sized disc capable of generating an instantaneous hypnotic effect. Samuel spent the next several decades enjoying himself at the expense, and deaths, of others, and in driving the occasional psychologist out of their practices.




That hubris eventually caught up with him when he volunteered for experiments with Dr. Hana Tanaka. When Tanaka's telepathy machine revealed Samuel's inner thoughts, he processed what was happening before she did and dispatched her – without any of his usual finesse. This triggered the chain of events that created Akuma, uncovered his long string of killings, led the press to nickname him Dominium, and eventually led to Samuel's imprisonment. 

Of course, with his intelligence prison couldn't hold him for long, and once he escaped he decided to improve his methods before wrestling with the Devil again. He vastly improved the light generation capacities of his palm disk, denying Akuma her shadows. He discerned that her mental gifts didn't extend to animals and got himself the biggest, strongest, attack dog in the world and built specialized hypnotic devices to let him dominate it utterly. Once he let Akuma track him down again, Decius caught her by surprise and mauled her. Samuel, Dominium, was concerned that she somehow managed to escape, but he knows the rematch will come eventually. 

Creation Notes

I got a standard set of rolls on this one- no 6 Strength – and knowing I wanted to keep the Akuma villains primarily device basis I split the rolls between devices and skills and got a power set that could have gone very flashy, but one thing I'm allowing myself is that age can either be 12+2d6+level or the more random NPC ages. The random NPC age was top of the charts, and the image of a creepy old man holding a hypnotizing disk in his hand just came to me. The rest of the character, his two encounters with Akuma, all came quickly. He nails down the creepy evil sociopath end of the super-villain psychology spectrum while the Crepuscular Man nails down the goofier side. 


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