What's your favorite character of all time?

1. Ian Michael Taggart: professional occultist, member and co-founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn. Also a Homid Theurge Iron Rider, with ties to the Stargazers (who had named him Counts the Stars).

2. Werewolf: Wild West

3. Ian was an unparalleled master of all things occultish (it never got explored in-game, but he a cult of his own back home in England), and an expert in almost two dozen forms of divination, with a specialization in astrology. He would frequently use three or four methods at once to cross-reference whenever he would do a reading for someone. The GM let me run wild with the description of the actual readings: "Well, your rising sign indicates this, but the I Ching says that, while the runes indicate..." and so on. There was a lot of Rupert Giles in Ian.

It was also great to see the interplay between traditional Victorian England with the untamed Wild West. Most of the rest of the PCs were Native American.

4. There was an NPC named Clarissa who was a Metis Ragabash, and totally wacked-out insane. She also had prophetic visions from time to time. Ian was the only one who could ever understand anything she said.

At one point there was a humongous battle (which Ian was not at all suited for, so he stayed well out of the thick of it) in which Clarissa was killed. Before she died, she scrawled a bunch of nonsense on the wall in her own blood. Ian translated it, and again the GM let me run with the description, which also allowed me to show off Ian's multi-lingual abilities: "Over here in Latin it says... Down here in an ancient form of Aramaic... Across the top in large Enochian ..." It was a blast.

I also got a chance to shock the other players when this very bookish, very proper English gentleman rolled up his sleeves and, without any hesitation or squeemishness, started rooting around in Clarissa entrails. Just another way to read the signs.

-- Ben