Character: Brenda Smalls, Piano Teacher and Seer (125 points)

This is a pregen character for the 1980s GURPS Horror adventures listed on the roadmap. This GURPS-O-SCOPIC character sheet is designed to be given to a new player in one of the listed adventures: You shouldn’t need any prep. There are some additional notes about this set of overall characters if you are interested.

Notes

• Unlike ghost hunters who are fanboys and charlatans, Brenda actually sees the future. (And the past!) However, this is such a disturbing process that her supernatural ability has made it impossible to lead a normal life.
• Brenda’s large number of Animal Handling skills have been merged into one entry on the simplified character sheet. The talent that makes them affordable (Animal Friend 3 [15]) has been omitted.
• She is a classic crazy cat lady type, and full of eccentricity.
• She has a Gizmo 3 [15] advantage to be able to produce surprising things out of her gigantic purse without specifying them in advance.
• Brenda is not able to defend herself, but her black cat will attack anything that threatens Brenda! As claws convert cr punching damage to cut, her cat can slowly whittle away at an enemy. Her cat’s combat stats appear on Brenda’s sheet for convenience but the cat should be controlled by the GM as an Ally/Minion.
• This is a “paranormal investigator” character concept suitable for GURPS Horror. She was originally created for the Haunting at Langley Manor.
• The GURPS Precognition advantage is not scoped or costed very well in my opinion, and the merging with Danger Sense is not necessary in my view. I have removed Danger Sense from this advantage. There is no equivalent Retrocognition advantage that makes sense. I took the approach specified in the last post of this forum entry. Basically, Precognition is too cheap on her character sheet and Retrocognition is too expensive, so I just add the point values together and call it a combined ability.
• Just to emphasize the above, this character has the Can’t See Own Death [-60%] limitation on Precognition, so the character does NOT have Danger Sense. This is because the power is really used for investigations, not combat.
• The idea is that this character would be a very weird piano teacher, and perhaps not the best at that job. This might be modeled by the fact that I did not give the character the Singing (HT/Easy) skill, but it would be expected for a piano teacher. So among her other eccentricities, maybe Brenda likes to sing badly! Her default for Singing would be HT-4, or Singing-5. Pretty awful!

IMAGE CODA: Generated by DALL-E 3.