I have gotten the word that the TimeWatch folks don’t mind free fan-based stuff, so: enjoy. Obviously: this dude is a time traveler, he’s designed to be a pain in the neck, and he’s blissfully unaware of just how much of a disaster he’s being. Enjoy!
Eddie Peasantsbane
TimeWatch ranks this rogue jumper as being somewhere between a nuisance and a problem; strictly speaking, he’s definitely a problem – but Eddie Peasantsbane is far too useful as a Horrible Example, and as a reason to stamp down on human beings with intrinsic time-jumping abilities. He is, in fact, the literal poster child for the campaign to report and register all humans who don’t need an autochron to time-travel. All of this, paradoxically enough, gives Eddie Peasantsbane just a little bit more leeway in which to operate. Not that he realizes that.
Eddie was born Edward Eugene Henry in 1948 AD: his native timeline popped into existence after a particularly disastrous TimeWatch operation in 1876 led to a series of revolutions, wars, and eventual ecological collapse in 2025. However, as Eddie’s parents were both members of America’s new Party elite, he largely missed the unfortunate aspects that followed from his world’s slowly degenerating ecological and political condition. Eddie’s early life was, in fact, rather indolent and superficial.
Normally, Eddie would have been erased from history with the rest of his timeline when TimeWatch finally launched a repair operation; unfortunately, he is one of a vanishingly small number of humans who can time-travel without equipment. Even more unfortunately, he had just discovered this about himself, and was actually on his first time-trip (to 1934, to witness firsthand the final destruction of the counter-revolutionary monuments of the old American regime) when the timeline was reset. Thus, his reappearance in the main timeline’s 1967 was quite the shock. Eddie, naturally enough, assumed at first that he had somehow changed history; his immediate reaction was to jump back to 1934 in order to repair the damage. Finding that things were also now different there revealed the ‘truth’ to the traveler: clearly he was jumping to different timelines, which meant that his own universe was still out there, somewhere.
Eddie has since established a quite elaborate, and amazingly wrong, ‘scientific’ theory of dimensional travel to explain his surroundings; he’s far too in love with it to ever accept any evidence that it’s fundamentally flawed. About the only thing that can be said for the theory, in fact, is that it’s still less idiotic than his economic and political beliefs: unfortunately, Eddie typically spreads those wherever he goes, and he has a real knack for finding places in the various timelines where his message can be heard by exactly the wrong people. Hence the nickname ‘Eddie Peasantsbane.’ Some TimeWatch researchers estimate that this guy has indirectly killed more people than Josef Stalin.
When encountered, Eddie comes across at first as being charismatic, friendly, and highly intelligent. In reality, the friendliness is superficial – Eddie will do anything for you, right up to the moment when your glorious sacrifice for the Revolution is required – and the time traveler is barely of average intelligence. The charisma is real, though. The charisma is what gets the people around him in trouble. Or dead.
As noted above, TimeWatch finds Eddie Peasantsbane morbidly useful: the amount of damage that he does to history while trying to go ‘home’ goes a long way towards justifying the regulation of people with intrinsic time-traveling abilities. Typically, the atrocities he accidentally generates are erased along with the alternate timeline that they happen in, so TimeWatch does not have a dedicated team out there hunting Eddie down. TimeWatch agents are, however, permitted to capture or eliminate him, if necessary. Or if possible: the man has a remarkably good command of time, if nothing else. Almost literally nothing else…
Eddie Peasantsbane
Defense: Hit Threshold 5, Armor 1 (Almost tangible accumulated paradox), Health 28
Offense: Scuffling +1, Shooting +1, Damage Modifier +2 (Zap Gun)
Abilities: Tempus 40, Authority 8, Charm 8, Paradox Prevention 8. Eddie believes that he has a wide variety of other Abilities: he does not.
Special Abilities: Clock Out, Distortion, Electronic Interference, Embrace Instability, Interdiction (cost 0), Stealth. Eddie is also aging at a dramatically slower rate: he probably has several hundred years left on his personal lifespan, even without medical intervention. Lastly: by spending a point of Tempus Eddie receives a temporary knowledge of either the local language or culture.
Misc: Alertness Modifier +1, Stealth Modifier +2
Description: Tall for his original timeline (5’9”) and in excellent shape in general. Eddie has dark hair, brown eyes, and precisely the sort of roguishly disreputable good looks that one associates with the more romanticized sort of guerillas. His clothes and equipment are always of the highest quality available – even if his current acolytes don’t have enough necessities. A Servant of the People must have the tools he needs to carry on The Struggle, after all.
Man, I see a write up like this and I wish I had a group willing to play Gumshoe. I tried Ashen Stars (it’s like Firefly, I said), but that went nowhere because didn’t have a combat map.
I went in for the Kickstarter and got a couple of physical books for Timewatch, but I think they are just going to sit on my shelf. I’d let them go at KS prices it I could find someone who would be able to use them.