Each character has an archetype or a base concept connecting the character to the game fiction and themes. The character concepts form a platform for you to build your character with backgrounds, specialties, powers and aspects.

This is an Ashcan quality preview for the Touched. The preview material is collected in the Ashcan category index page.

Touched

It started with a corpse. You touched the dead man, and everything flashed before your eyes. His life, his love, his death. The actual, gritty events of his death. The passion he had felt for his murderer. They had both adored each other so much. Just like you love your partner and your son. Recoiling from the emotion, you ran home. It all must have sounded quite mad, trying to tell them how much you loved them. How what you had seen had resonated with you. But no matter how much you tried, the words didn’t add up the way you wanted. You slept on the couch that night.

It came up only once after that. You were both tanked after the New Year’s party. He asked, and you tried your best to explain how you couldn’t just say that you loved him. The words came out even more wrong that time. He cried, and you never spoke of it again.

These days you know more of the Quick and the Echoes. How communing with the dead gets you back that rush of feelings, almost as powerful as the one you felt the first time. He never asks where you’re going when someone calls and tells your gifts are needed. Not that you would answer. One day when you find the perfect Echo, you’ll know what actually to do and say. Until that, he’ll just have to wait.

The Echoes stole something from the Touched, leaving behind a void that they need to fill and the Touched compelled to do just that. While they can come from any walks of life, whatever the Touched’s “normal” before the Echoes was, it is slowly but inevitably crumbling away as the phenomenon draw them deeper and deeper into their fold. Many of them are quite conscious of what’s happening to them but still live in a denial that they are in control of their downward spiral.

The Touched are highly prized by the other Quick, for whatever took away something from them also made the Touched immensely more sensitive to the Echoes. A Touched can with a mere touch witness events tied to the tragedy that created an Echo relatively safely. Feel what emotions were felt. Or even receive a clear vision who was behind the murder that broke the walls of reality – whatever the Echo wants to show them.

The Touched is a The Quick take on the Nordic Noir archetype of the hero who is unable to let go of the mystery because it has a too personal connection to them, even if it might ruin the rest of their life. The doctor trying to fix their marriage by catching the real killer of their child, or the lawyer doing an investigation of their own on a cold case, because it might reveal to her the childhood she has forgotten.

Power – Resonate: The Touched can detect traces of Echoes in our world and see useful things relating to the Echo not visible to an ordinary person. Things revealed vary from one Touched to the other, and by the individual Echo. But it is always relevant and useful to the investigation.

Flaw (Aspect) – Lost: The Touched have all lost something, and would do anything to get that back.

Pop Culture References:

• Jana Berzelius (Jana Berzelius series by Emelie Schepp)
• John Wick (John Wick)
• Joe Miller (The Lost Room)