Ivan Grozny
Servant: Berserker
Appearance: A stout and powerfully built man in his middle years, with deep-set, red-rimmed eyes and a long black beard streaked with white. His expression and manner seems to rapidly shift between sorrow, mirth, and anger. He’s dressed in a fine golden robe trimmed with fur, and wears a golden skullcap studded with jewels and trimmed with sable. He bears a weapon somewhere between a staff and a spear, with a pommel of twisted horn and a sharpened iron tip.
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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ov_Ioann_4.jpg )
Background: The wikipedia article on Ivan is pretty good, if you’re interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Grozny
I’ll give a quick summary here that plays up certain aspects manifested in this interpretation.
Ivan was born as the eldest son of the Grand Prince of Moscow, a long-awaited heir. When he was three, his father died, leaving Ivan the title of Grand Prince and his mother the regency. She died just five years later, most likely of poisoning. The young Ivan was alone in the world; the powerful noble families viewed him as a pawn at best, and he was often left to wander the halls of the palace in a state of neglect. It was here that the seeds of a powerful hatred for the nobles were sown.
At his coronation ceremony at the age of 16, Ivan surprised those assembled by titling himself Tsar of all Russia, as opposed to Grand Prince. With this, he declared himself a supreme ruler whose authority derived directly from God. He seized power and rapidly began to institute a series of reforms, establishing himself as a wise and dynamic ruler. Sadly, this was not to last. Against a backdrop of domestic troubles and foreign invasion, Ivan’s wife died in another suspected poisoning.
At the age of 30, this would prove to be another turning point in the Tsar’s life. His distrust of the nobility grew into a raging paranoia. Within four years, Ivan maneuvered himself into a position of absolute authority, carving out a huge territory over which the nobles held no power, and creating the oprichniki, a private guard and secret police force that owed allegiance to none but the Tsar. With these, he carried out a campaign against those he despised, sending any even suspected of opposing him to exile or death.
This is of totally unreliable historicity, but I’m going to leave it here because it’s just too good: “When Ivan declared himself the "Hand of God", 300 of the Oprichniki were selected to be his personal "brotherhood" that lived within Ivan's castle at Aleksandrovskaia Sloboda near
Vladimir. Every night at 4 AM these Oprichnik "monks" would attend a sermon given by Ivan himself before the morning's ritual executions. The Oprichniki would lead an externally
ascetic lifestyle, like the monks they emulated, but there would be mad outbreaks of cruelty and debauchery. Ivan would sing while they ate, himself not eating till everyone had finished. He would go to bed at 9 PM, with three blind men telling him stories.”
All the while Ivan slipped further into madness, wildly vacillating between his deep faith and his penchant for cruel debauchery. This culminated in the Massacre of Novgorod; seized with suspicion that the city intended to defect to Lithuania, he ordered it sacked. With Ivan at their head, the Oprichniki swept in. Any treasure that fell within their sight was fair game for confiscation; any person they encountered could be killed or spared at their whim. This was the fate of those against whom Ivan held no suspicion; the nobles, clergy, and other ‘big people’ of the town were singled out for cruel tortures and eventual execution. By the end, thousands were dead, and the town all but destroyed.
Ultimately, Ivan’s fierce temper sealed his legacy. Enraged by his pregnant daughter-in-law’s attire, he beat her to the point of causing a miscarriage. When his son confronted him over this, Ivan struck him with his pointed staff, killing him. With the heir to his throne dead, when Ivan himself died a few years later the title of Tzar fell to the second son, a weak and simple man whose rule led Russia to the Time of Troubles.
Stats:
STR: B (A)
CON: B (A)
AGI: D (C)
MGI: E
LCK: E
Class Skills:
* Mad Enhancement (C)
Rank up for STR, CON, AGI. Loss of ability to speak and think clearly. Most skills or techniques requiring finesse will be sealed.
Personal Skills:
(Not bothering to list sealed skills.)
* Protection of the Faith (A)
The mark of one who submitted to no earthly authority, but faithfully served God his whole life. Ivan’s mind and soul are too full for outside influences to enter; mental interference magecraft is doomed to fail, and at this rank it’s not impossible to break through the false world of a Reality Marble.
Noble Phantasms:
* Monomakh’s Cap -- The Emperor’s Authority (B):
The crystallization of Ivan’s claim to the title of Tsar, the one who bears ultimate authority as the living hand of God upon the Earth. Raising arms against such is a daunting prospect, and blows directed at the Tsar tend to lose their strength in flight. Effectively, this is the mother of all stare-downs, manifested as a golden disk of light behind the Tsar’s head. Attacks against the Tsar from someone looking him in the face suffer two ranks down in STR and one in AGI, and activating an NP takes twice as long (four-count). This effect can be lessened by not looking directly at the Tsar himself, which has its own problems, or by those who have Divinity or equivalent rank.
* Oprichniki -- The Black Monks (A):
Ivan’s hands and eyes, the external manifestation of the madness and rage within his mind. In life, they were servants who swore loyalty to him before all else, and committed atrocities beyond measure at his command. Any person or object upon which Ivan casts his shadow may find itself grasped by dozens of arms, clad in the black monks’ habits of the Oprichniki, seeking to drag it inside. For most Servants, this is just a snare that forces them to keep moving, though if they do somehow end up being dragged into Ivan’s shadow they’ll find themselves in a world of blind depredation, being torn by hundreds of hungry hands until they die or somehow escape. The individual Oprichniki are not truly independent existences; they are numberless, and generating more merely requires the expenditure of prana. The true danger of the Oprichniki lies in this: any number of people can be held within the shadow, kept alive (if barely) until they are needed. When they are finally torn apart, Ivan can consume them for prana, making this NP a massive prana battery. In addition, as the Oprichniki kill more and more, they grow stronger, both in terms of their physical strength and in ability to manifest. As their strength waxes, they can emerge from other shadows near Ivan, and even leave the shadows altogether, becoming quasi-familiars. An ‘unpowered’ oprichnik is strong enough to easily down a normal human. A fully powered one approaches very low Servant stats (lower than a Zero Assassin, for instance).
Strategy/Role: Berserker is pretty straightforward; he’ll fight whoever appears in front of him and spend his spare time depopulating Fuyuki. If he’s left alone he’ll happily recreate the Massacre of Novgorod. His Master is content to take this ‘wait and see’ approach and spend time accumulating power. Berserker is built to be the character that brings others together: he’s a clear and growing threat that can’t be reasoned with, but is very tough for a single combatant to take down-- a milder form of Hercules. Now that I've written him up I'm afraid he might be a bit too weak, but I think I've given him everything I plausibly can.
Originally Posted by Milbunk
