AntiVehicleRocket/StandingStone
Kep-tah Standing Stone, Full Moon: Stat Block
Name: Kep-tak Standing Stone
Caste: Full Moon
Totem: Yeddim
Nature: Caregiver
Tell: Thick black hair all along his arms and chest, culimating in a shaggy, wild mane on his head
Attributes
Strength 4, Dexterity 3, Stamina 5
Charisma 4, Manipulation 2, Appearance 2
Perception 3, Intelligence 4, Wits 3
Abilities
Favored Abilities: Survival 3, Athletics 3, Endurance 3 (Enduring Cold +2), Medicine 3 (Herbal Remedies +2), Resistance 2
Non-Favored Abilities: Awareness 1, Brawl 1, Dodge 3, Linguistics 1 (Riverspeak and Icetongue), Lore 2, Melee 2, Occult 1, Presence 2, Socialize 1, Stealth 1
Backgrounds
Contacts 2
(As a sometime-wandering healer, Standing Stone has made some friends, and he has contacts in several barbarian tribes of the North.)
Heart's Blood 2
(In addition to his yeddim totem, Standing Stone has consumed the heart's blood of a polar bear, an eagle, a wild horse, a wolf, and a mammoth.)
Mentor 2
(Standing Stone's mentor is a No Moon named Fights the Unseen, another healer who wanders the North and Northeast. Standing Stone crosses her path rarely, but the two have a cordial relationship when they do meet.)
Resources 2
(Standing Stone's services as a healer have netted him a few worldly goods; by barbarian standards, he lives moderately well, and he owns a reinforced buff jacket and a greataxe.)
Virtues: Compassion 4, Conviction 2, Temperance 2, Valor 2
Willpower: 6
Essence: 2 (Personal 14, Peripheral 36)
Merits and Flaws: Legendary Attribute (Stamina) (3-point Merit); Pacifism (3-point Flaw)
Charms:
Finding the Spirit's Shape (yeddim)
Towering Beast Form
Hide of the Cunning Hunter
Deadly Beastman Transformation x2 (see Beastman statistics below)
Ox-Body Technique x3 (12 -2 health levels)
Pain-Numbing Prana
Will of the Stoic Warrior
In Deadly Beastman Form, Standing Stone is a hulking yeddim-man nearly ten feet tall. He has Strength 7, Dexterity 3, and Stamina 10, along with the beastman gifts Resilience of Nature, Rugged Hide, and Impenetrable Beast-Armor.
Equipment
Great Axe: +0 Speed (total initiative bonus 6 in both human and beastman form), +0 Accuracy (5-die attack pool, at +1 difficulty due to Pacifism), +7L Damage (total damage 11+S L in human form, 14+S L in Beastman form), -1 Defense (4-die parry pool)
Reinforced Buff Jacket: 6B/5L soak, -2 mobility, 2 fatigue
Soak: 11B/7L in human form; 18B/17L in beastman form. While in beastman form, Standing Stone entirely ignores attacks that would deal raw damage of 4L or less.
Health Levels: 1 -0 / 2 -1 / 14 -2 / 1 -4 / Incap
Background and Personality and Such
Kep-tah Standing Stone has always been something of an anomaly among conventional images of the Northern barbarian. While he certainly looks the part of a traditional barbarian warrior -- a huge and hirsute man, nearly seven feet tall and heavily-muscled, dressed in a heavy reinforced buff jacket and carrying an appropriately-large axe -- he has spent his entire adult life acting against violence, looking for some way of lessening the cheapness of barbarian life in the North.
The young barbarian called Kep-tah was born to the Bear Tribe of the Icewalkers, a people renowned for their size and their unshirking stubbornness against even the strongest foes. Kep-tah was no great chief's son, just the child of a weaponsmith and a gatherer of herbs, but he grew quickly and surprised his parents with his tremendous appetite. As a child, Kep-tah was often put to work by his relatives in moving things, chopping wood, and other such mundane tasks, and thus he grew to be even stronger and sturdier than expected.
As Kep-tah grew to adolescence, his family expected him to learn to fight and serve the Bear Tribe well in war. However, the boy had always had a kind-hearted streak, and watching his mother gather herbs and the shamans and healers of his tribe use them to save lives, he came away with a deep respect for the preservation of life -- and an abhorrence for the idea of taking it. While he learned the art of weaponry like any other barbarian, he also made a vow to himself that he would never lift a weapon or his fists against another, man or beast, unless absolutely required to save himself, a vow he took with all the ferocity of any barbarian code of honor. He resolved at the same time to learn the ways of herbs and healing, that he might save the lives of those around him.
Kep-tah grew into a man, and for a while he was content. He had a natural aptitude for medicine, and soon he was able to tend to the Bear Tribe's sick and wounded on his own, with some skill. In time, he courted and married Shiri-kel, a warrior-maiden whose heart was as fierce as Kep-tah's was tender and yet took to him with fierce devotion. For several years after Kep-tah came of age, his life was peaceful.
Then came the most brutal winter that any in the tribe had seen within Kep-tah's lifetime, a season of brutal colds, winds to drive even hardened warriors mad, and great famine. Even the best hunters and healers of the Bear Tribe could not entirely stem the tide of starvation and suffering that arose that season. Finally, the leaders of the Bear Tribe announced to a ragged, desperate people that a shaman had isolated the cause of the harsh winter as supernatural and that someone had to venture out into the cold and howling wind to find it -- but, with food so scarce, a full hunting party could surely not be spared, so someone would have to summon the bravery to go alone. The task tugged at Kep-tah's heart, and he knew that he would do no good hunting, so he volunteered for the duty and was sent into the winter, to save the Bear Tribe or to die.
Kep-tah used every instinct he had, following the wind and some inner urging of his heart; he wandered the barren, featureless ice plains for two days before a shimmering apparation appeared to him. Calling itself the Heart-Piercing Ending, the apparition -- in fact a minor but petulant air elemental, though Kep-tah did not know this -- announced itself as the cause of the Bear Tribe's great turmoil and demanded that, if Kep-tah wished to satiate it, it would demand a sacrifice. It demanded the carcass of the oldest male of a local yeddim herd, a massive and ancient black-furred beast that had long ago incurred the spirit's wrath. To know that such a sacrifice was necessary made Kep-tah's heart heavy and his resolve weak, but he nodded, paid the Heart-Piercing Ending fealty, and departed to find the herd and strike the sacrifice down.
Another day of wandering brought him to the yeddim herd the elemental had indicated, and Kep-tah was saddened but unsurprised to see that the yeddim suffering just as deeply as his own tribe from the spirit's cruelty. To his surprise, the black-furred animal at the herd's head ambled easily to Kep-tah's side and laid down, waiting for him. It knew its fate, he realized, and welcomed it; the beast showed the marks of great age and the gait of considerable pain. Nonetheless, Kep-tah could not bring himself to do what the yeddim welcomed... until he felt the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and whirled to see the figure of an ethereal silver woman before him, a figure so beautiful that he choked on his next breath. "Kill him," she said, "and through you he will live again. His death is survival and mercy both." She touched his cheek, and Kep-tah jolted to feel her understanding jolt through him... and at that moment, he was Exalted, and he found the strength to slay the yeddim and the resolve to drink of its heart's blood.
Kep-tah managed to drag the carcass of his totem back to where he had first encountered the Heart-Piercing Ending, and the elemental accepted the sacrifice, albeit with no small spite that the man before it had actually completed its task. Yet the elemental honored its bargain, and almost immediately the relentless winds began to calm and the merciless cold to break. Kep-tah bowed in thanks for the spirit's obesiance, and he began the walk home... only to find, a day's travel later, that the form of a monstrous owl-woman blocked his travels. She introduced herself as Fights the Unseen, of the Silver Pact, and explained that Kep-tah should follow her. The young Lunar was uncertain, but he followed Fights the Unseen willingly.
Kep-tah spent several months among the Silver Pact, being first tested and then trained for his new role. He was tattooed and fixed as a member of the Full Moon caste, a role which was well-suited to his strength and direct temperament but in many ways was contrary to his disdain for violence. Yet strength and directness were Full Moon virtues, even if directed towards healing and not destruction, and so Kep-tah found a place there. Upon his full initiation, he underwent a series of hallucinatory visions with Fights the Unseen, and at the end of them he named himself Standing Stone -- for, even if he would not fight, he would stand solid for his people, whatever the cost. As he learned his own inner powers, he found that, while lacking the immense combat prowess of so many other Lunars, he was capable of bearing incredible pain and injury, especially when in his beastman form. With Fights the Unseen, he searched the wilderness for more animals nearing a natural death, and as an act of mercy he removed their pain and took their heart's blood, so they could be reborn young and strong through him.
After several months with Fights the Unseen and the Silver Pact, Standing Stone took his leave of the Lunars. While he would always be at their service, he told them, he had left a tribe that needed him desperately, especially now. These were people he could not abandon. The elders only nodded and dismissed him, understanding his devotion, and so it was that Standing Stone traveled back to the lands of the Bear Tribe. It took him several weeks to find his tribe, and when he did, even his own family was astonished to see him alive; they knew the cold had broken, but they had expected that he had died in the process of releasing the tribe from the winter's grip. The Bear Tribe welcomed Kep-tah back as a hero, but Kep-tah was just as grateful to return -- to have again his kinfolk, and Shiri-kel and their children. When in time he revealed himself as one of Luna's Chosen, his people accepted both his greater burden and his greater power.
Standing Stone has spent the two years since his return to the Bear Tribe mostly quietly; he has resolved himself to act as a hero only when his tribesmen need him, for his ambitions are not to lead or cow the Bear Tribe, only to aid them. The two years since have been quiet ones, stirred only by the unification of two other Icewalker tribes by Yurgen Kaneko -- an act of which the Bear Tribe remains wary and continues to watch cautiously. The most interesting times in Kep-tah's life lately have been when another Lunar, or several, arrive at the Bear Tribe's camp and demand the aid of the Full Moon called Standing Stone in some trouble or another. Kep-tah is happy to render such service to the Silver Pact, and thus he begrudgingly spends some time away from the tribe he loves.
In character, Kep-tah Standing Stone is thoughtful, but he tends to act decisively and in a straightforward manner. His kindness and abhorrence of violence are the two most defining aspects of his morality, and he does everything possible to preserve life in the face of the war and suffering endemic to the North. If he is sometimes slow to make decisions, it is because he tends to make decisions firmly and hold stubbornly to his choices, so he takes no small care to make the right choice.
