Post by carandini on Apr 17, 2010 3:24:45 GMT -5
Old Mr. Grim
Name: William ‘Black Bill’ Rann
Location: England
Group Affiliation: IMPERIALS
Powers: Old Mr. Grim is a ghost, an earthbound spirit that manifests upon the physical plain. As a ghost, he is largely immune to material weapons with a few exceptions. Fire and silver are the most common defenses against him, and he is unable to enter any sanctified ground, such as that of a churchyard.
Old Mr. Grim manifests in a very solid form, so he is unable to pass through walls or turn invisible in the way a ghost is supposed to perform. He is, however, capable of ignoring the effects of gas, smoke and other environmental conditions that would incapacitate a living man (though he cannot endure the scent of incense). He is almost entirely immune to the effects of normal weapons to such an extent that his ectoplasmic body can reform in a matter of minutes from even the blast of a ten-ton bomb. He is able to defy the constraints of gravity, allowing his ghostly body to glide slowly through the air.
Old Mr. Grim’s grisly appearance is coupled with a supernatural ability to provoke fear. His mere presence is enough to stagger even a brave man, and there are a number of criminals who have died of fright from the ghost’s chilling touch. Old Mr. Grim carries a brace of 18th century horse pistols, massive blackpowder weapons that, like their owner, are not entirely physical in nature. These pistols shoot balls of ectoplasmic energy that can pass through most armour and even through solid stone. The phantom bullets don’t cause any physical damage and leave only a bruise-like discolouration upon the victim’s body when they strike. What the ghostly bullets do inflict is a withering pain that affects the very soul of the victim. Depending on the will power of the victim, the bullets can cause anything from trembling and nausea to unconsciousness or even death from heart attack.
History: Black Bill was one of the most notorious highwaymen of the late 1700’s, preying upon travelers on the infamous Hounslow Heath. Black Bill had been waylaying coaches on the road between Bath and Exeter for several years before his path crossed that of the Bishop of Bath and Welles. The highwayman ambushed the Bishop’s coach in the dead of night as the clergyman was making his way back to Bath Abbey. When the Bishop tried to appeal to Black Bill’s conscience and fear for his immortal soul, the highwayman rebuked the priest’s concerns with a diatribe of abusive invective. Not only did the robber steal the Bishop’s money and jewelry, but also his clothes. Stranding the Bishop on Hounslow Heath, the highwayman disappeared into the night, laughing at the sport he had made with the powerful clergyman.
Furious over the outrageous treatment he had received at the hands of Black Bill, the Bishop of Bath and Welles hired Samuel Gladwin to bring the highwayman to heel. Gladwin was one of the best thief-takers in England and once he was engaged by the Bishop, Black Bill’s days were numbered. The thief-taker prowled Hounslow Heath for several months before finally witnessing Black Bill in action. Using his own prodigious skills of stealth and tracking, Gladwin was able to follow Black Bill to his hideout and lead constables back there to arrest the highwayman.
Black Bill was tried as a highwayman and hung at Tyburn. Intending to meet his end boldly and make a courageous show of his last moments of life, Black Bill joked with his guards and even danced a jig with his own hangman on the steps of the gallows. While the huge crowd that had appeared to watch the execution applauded the highwayman’s bravado, there was one spectator who did not appreciate the lack of contrition shown by the robber. In a stern voice, the Bishop of Bath and Welles approached the gallows and denounced Black Bill’s antics, telling him that until he had made recompense for his life of evil, he would find no peace in the grave.
Black Bill was hung with the Bishop’s curse still ringing in his ears. As a criminal, his body was not interred in hallowed ground, but instead thrown into an unmarked grave beyond the walls of the churchyard.
True to the Bishop’s curse, the highwayman did not rest easy in his grave. Within ten years of his death, Black Bill’s restless spirit manifested as a grisly specter, haunting his old hunting grounds of Hounslow Heath. Terrifying those highwaymen who now prowled the Heath, Black Bill’s ghost soon came to be known as Old Mr. Grim and avoided by criminals as if he was Death itself.
For years, Old Mr. Grim tried to atone for his life of evil by chasing new generations of highwaymen from Hounslow Heath. However, it seemed the Bishop’s curse would require far more courageous deeds from the ghost before he could find his final rest. Old Mr. Grim looked for even grander ways to earn the peace he so desperately craved.
When Great Britain went to war with the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, Old Mr. Grim lent his services to the conflict – secretly aiding the British behind the scenes as a spy and assassin. French battleplans stolen by Old Mr. Grim and delivered to the Duke of Wellington directly led to the disastrous defeat suffered by Napoleon’s armies at Waterloo. This service performed for the Crown was to become a pattern with Old Mr. Grim and he involved himself in several other wars, using his spectral abilities to spy upon enemies of the British Empire. His activities caused him to be involved in such conflicts as the Gurkha War, the first three of the Anglo-Ashanti Wars, the First Opium War, the First Anglo-Sikh War, the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the First and Second Boer Wars, the Mahdist War, the Boxer Rebellion, the War of the Golden Stool, and the Anglo-Aro War.
Old Mr. Grim also involved himself in several notorious crimes, seeking to apprehend the perpetrators in order to atone for his own misdeeds. Principle among these was his efforts to bring down the demonic creature known as Spring Heeled Jack, which had begun terrorizing the English countryside in 1838. The feud between ghost and demon would continue for decades until, in 1877, Old Mr. Grim was able to banish Spring Heeled Jack from the mortal world for 100 years after learning the demon’s true name.
The ghost was also involved in William Sleeman’s campaign against the murderous cult of Thugee in India. Old Mr. Grim even managed to save Sleeman’s life from the Phansigar of the time, battling the Holy Strangler of Kali through the streets of the Indian city of Gwalior when the murderous thug arrived to assassinate the police commissioner. Although Old Mr. Grim was able to defeat Phansigar and help Sleeman to discover the leaders of the cult, culminating in the arrest and execution of Behram the Phansigar, the cult itself would endure, hiding in the remote corners of India and awaiting its chance to rise again. The Thugee did not forget Old Mr. Grim’s campaign against them and over the years have orchestrated several plots to lay the ghost to rest permanently.
The year 1888 found Old Mr. Grim back in England and pitting his powers against a creature of the night even more fearsome than Spring Heeled Jack: the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. The ghost’s investigation into this murderer’s activities would pit Old Mr. Grim against one of the deadliest enemies he would ever face, a man whose soul was so evil that he could laugh at the highwayman’s touch and could shrug off the phantom bullets fired from his pistols. Old Mr. Grim’s battle with Jack the Ripper eventually resulted in the madman’s death as he pitched headlong from the top of London Bridge and into the Thames. The Ripper’s evil spirit would not rest, however, and he returned to menace London again as an undead specter. Now able to fight Old Mr. Grim on his own terms, the Ripper became Old Mr. Grim’s arch-nemesis, their battles fought in the shadows of London. Each time Old Mr. Grim believed he had finally banished the Ripper, the murderous wraith would appear again. Finally, with the help of a mortal London detective, Old Mr. Grim was able to locate the Ripper’s bones at the bottom of the Thames. Removing the bones from London seemed to end the Ripper’s manifestations. It would be some years before Old Mr. Grim connected strings of bloody killings in foreign cities to the mortal remains of the Ripper. So far every effort to locate the bones has proven useless. Thwarted once, the Ripper now takes pains to guard what is left of his body.
During World War I, Old Mr. Grim was openly employed by the British as a spy against the Germans. In this role, the ghost proved invaluable and he became a feared bogeyman to German commanders. Several times Old Mr. Grim found himself facing Hochmeister, the German champion and discovered that the holy armor of Antioch was able to withstand his spectral powers. On one occasion, Old Mr. Grim was imprisoned within a cabinet made of silver by the Austrian spiritualist Der Beobachter and locked inside the Imperial Cathedral at Aachen, his essence slowly being distilled into a sorcerous elixir which Der Beobachter hoped would endow the recipient with immortality. The scheme was thwarted by Avalon, who managed to infiltrate into Aachen and free Old Mr. Grim. Der Beobachter intended to escape with what elixir he had already distilled, but was betrayed when his Russian bodyguard claimed the elixir for himself. The sorcerous concoction turned the Russian into a crazed monster, the beast that would come to be known as Koschei the Deathless.
After the war, Old Mr. Grim remained active, taking it upon himself to continue to pursue the Ripper across the globe and to help British authorities against a multitude of threats. He was involved in the Russian Civil War, assisting the White Russians against the Bolsheviks and during this period he came into conflict with the murderous spymaster Palach. Refusing to accept the existence of the supernatural, Palach turned to science for a way to combat Old Mr. Grim’s ‘tricks’, the result of which was a phase generator that can force the ghost’s essence to harden into an almost crystalline state. Palach was able to trap Old Mr. Grim within the field of one of these phase generators, freezing the ghost solid. However, thinking his adversary destroyed, Palach did not take any precautions with the body. After hours outside the generator’s field, Old Mr. Grim was able to thaw out and escape. He has not forgotten Palach’s sinister weapon, however, and is very wary anytime his missions pit him against the Soviets.
Old Mr. Grim was also instrumental in defeating one of the schemes of the Chinese supervillain Dr. Dragon when the megalomaniac attempted to make himself god-king of Mongolia by claiming ancestry with the great Genghis Khan. Appearing before the assembled Mongol hordes, Dr. Dragon displayed his super-science as proof of supernatural powers and evidence of the great khan’s blood in his veins. Old Mr. Grim, however, one-upped Dr. Dragon, manifesting before the Mongols not as a descendent of Genghis Khan but as the khan’s own ghost. Denouncing Dr. Dragon as an imposter, Old Mr. Grim whipped the Mongols into a frenzy. Most of Dr. Dragon’s men were slaughtered by the outraged nomads and he himself was barely able to escape.
Dr. Dragon would again cross paths with Old Mr. Grim in Canada in 1935. The villain had been orchestrating the import and spread of a toxic form of opium through the Chinese community living in Canada. This particularly vile opium, called the Dragon’s Tears, would provoke homicidal madness in those who partook of its vapours. A string of gruesome killings across Canada shocked the nation and laid the groundwork for an especially vicious blackmail scheme. Dr. Dragon, knowing the source of the wave of murders, offered to bring them to an end. His price was five Canadian scientists who would be turned over to him. Experts in their fields, the scientists would be invaluable to Dr. Dragon’s plans of conquest back in China.
The RCMP became involved in the effort to stop Dr. Dragon, and Walter MacSorley headed the investigation to uncover the plot. At the same time, Old Mr. Grim landed in Canada, thinking the killings might be the work of the Ripper. Pursuing their quarry from two different leads, the Mountie and the ghost reached the headquarters of Dr. Dragon at roughly the same time, a subterranean labyrinth beneath Vancouver’s Chinatown. Thinking the gruesome ghost to be some creature of Dr. Dragon’s, MacSorley fought against Old Mr. Grim, providing the opportunity for their mutual enemy to capture them both.
The two heroes were able to escape the clutches of Dr. Dragon by combining their abilities and together were able to thwart his insidious plan. Leaving MacSorley to co-ordinate RCMP efforts to shut down the opium dens distributing the Dragon’s Tears, Old Mr. Grim slid back into the shadows, allowing the Mountie to take all the credit for breaking Dr. Dragon’s sinister organization.
Other threats in the years leading up to WWII kept Old Mr. Grim abroad for much of the time. However, when war broke out, he immediately returned to England and offered his services to the Crown. The ghost would serve as an independent agent for the early years of the war, spying on those governments with German sympathies. Following the destruction of the Liberators, however, he was recalled once again. This time he was presented before Winston Churchill and offered membership in the team of heroes the Prime Minister was organizing: the Imperials.
Description: Old Mr. Grim is a ghastly figure: a walking skeleton dressed in the tatters of 17th century clothing. He wears a heavy great coat, a tri-corn hat and knee-high leather boots with broad cuffs. A heavy muffler masks the lower part of his skull. The huge pistols he carries are ancient horse pistols, massive flintlocks from his days as a highwayman.
Name: William ‘Black Bill’ Rann
Location: England
Group Affiliation: IMPERIALS
Powers: Old Mr. Grim is a ghost, an earthbound spirit that manifests upon the physical plain. As a ghost, he is largely immune to material weapons with a few exceptions. Fire and silver are the most common defenses against him, and he is unable to enter any sanctified ground, such as that of a churchyard.
Old Mr. Grim manifests in a very solid form, so he is unable to pass through walls or turn invisible in the way a ghost is supposed to perform. He is, however, capable of ignoring the effects of gas, smoke and other environmental conditions that would incapacitate a living man (though he cannot endure the scent of incense). He is almost entirely immune to the effects of normal weapons to such an extent that his ectoplasmic body can reform in a matter of minutes from even the blast of a ten-ton bomb. He is able to defy the constraints of gravity, allowing his ghostly body to glide slowly through the air.
Old Mr. Grim’s grisly appearance is coupled with a supernatural ability to provoke fear. His mere presence is enough to stagger even a brave man, and there are a number of criminals who have died of fright from the ghost’s chilling touch. Old Mr. Grim carries a brace of 18th century horse pistols, massive blackpowder weapons that, like their owner, are not entirely physical in nature. These pistols shoot balls of ectoplasmic energy that can pass through most armour and even through solid stone. The phantom bullets don’t cause any physical damage and leave only a bruise-like discolouration upon the victim’s body when they strike. What the ghostly bullets do inflict is a withering pain that affects the very soul of the victim. Depending on the will power of the victim, the bullets can cause anything from trembling and nausea to unconsciousness or even death from heart attack.
History: Black Bill was one of the most notorious highwaymen of the late 1700’s, preying upon travelers on the infamous Hounslow Heath. Black Bill had been waylaying coaches on the road between Bath and Exeter for several years before his path crossed that of the Bishop of Bath and Welles. The highwayman ambushed the Bishop’s coach in the dead of night as the clergyman was making his way back to Bath Abbey. When the Bishop tried to appeal to Black Bill’s conscience and fear for his immortal soul, the highwayman rebuked the priest’s concerns with a diatribe of abusive invective. Not only did the robber steal the Bishop’s money and jewelry, but also his clothes. Stranding the Bishop on Hounslow Heath, the highwayman disappeared into the night, laughing at the sport he had made with the powerful clergyman.
Furious over the outrageous treatment he had received at the hands of Black Bill, the Bishop of Bath and Welles hired Samuel Gladwin to bring the highwayman to heel. Gladwin was one of the best thief-takers in England and once he was engaged by the Bishop, Black Bill’s days were numbered. The thief-taker prowled Hounslow Heath for several months before finally witnessing Black Bill in action. Using his own prodigious skills of stealth and tracking, Gladwin was able to follow Black Bill to his hideout and lead constables back there to arrest the highwayman.
Black Bill was tried as a highwayman and hung at Tyburn. Intending to meet his end boldly and make a courageous show of his last moments of life, Black Bill joked with his guards and even danced a jig with his own hangman on the steps of the gallows. While the huge crowd that had appeared to watch the execution applauded the highwayman’s bravado, there was one spectator who did not appreciate the lack of contrition shown by the robber. In a stern voice, the Bishop of Bath and Welles approached the gallows and denounced Black Bill’s antics, telling him that until he had made recompense for his life of evil, he would find no peace in the grave.
Black Bill was hung with the Bishop’s curse still ringing in his ears. As a criminal, his body was not interred in hallowed ground, but instead thrown into an unmarked grave beyond the walls of the churchyard.
True to the Bishop’s curse, the highwayman did not rest easy in his grave. Within ten years of his death, Black Bill’s restless spirit manifested as a grisly specter, haunting his old hunting grounds of Hounslow Heath. Terrifying those highwaymen who now prowled the Heath, Black Bill’s ghost soon came to be known as Old Mr. Grim and avoided by criminals as if he was Death itself.
For years, Old Mr. Grim tried to atone for his life of evil by chasing new generations of highwaymen from Hounslow Heath. However, it seemed the Bishop’s curse would require far more courageous deeds from the ghost before he could find his final rest. Old Mr. Grim looked for even grander ways to earn the peace he so desperately craved.
When Great Britain went to war with the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, Old Mr. Grim lent his services to the conflict – secretly aiding the British behind the scenes as a spy and assassin. French battleplans stolen by Old Mr. Grim and delivered to the Duke of Wellington directly led to the disastrous defeat suffered by Napoleon’s armies at Waterloo. This service performed for the Crown was to become a pattern with Old Mr. Grim and he involved himself in several other wars, using his spectral abilities to spy upon enemies of the British Empire. His activities caused him to be involved in such conflicts as the Gurkha War, the first three of the Anglo-Ashanti Wars, the First Opium War, the First Anglo-Sikh War, the Crimean War, the Indian Rebellion, the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the First and Second Boer Wars, the Mahdist War, the Boxer Rebellion, the War of the Golden Stool, and the Anglo-Aro War.
Old Mr. Grim also involved himself in several notorious crimes, seeking to apprehend the perpetrators in order to atone for his own misdeeds. Principle among these was his efforts to bring down the demonic creature known as Spring Heeled Jack, which had begun terrorizing the English countryside in 1838. The feud between ghost and demon would continue for decades until, in 1877, Old Mr. Grim was able to banish Spring Heeled Jack from the mortal world for 100 years after learning the demon’s true name.
The ghost was also involved in William Sleeman’s campaign against the murderous cult of Thugee in India. Old Mr. Grim even managed to save Sleeman’s life from the Phansigar of the time, battling the Holy Strangler of Kali through the streets of the Indian city of Gwalior when the murderous thug arrived to assassinate the police commissioner. Although Old Mr. Grim was able to defeat Phansigar and help Sleeman to discover the leaders of the cult, culminating in the arrest and execution of Behram the Phansigar, the cult itself would endure, hiding in the remote corners of India and awaiting its chance to rise again. The Thugee did not forget Old Mr. Grim’s campaign against them and over the years have orchestrated several plots to lay the ghost to rest permanently.
The year 1888 found Old Mr. Grim back in England and pitting his powers against a creature of the night even more fearsome than Spring Heeled Jack: the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. The ghost’s investigation into this murderer’s activities would pit Old Mr. Grim against one of the deadliest enemies he would ever face, a man whose soul was so evil that he could laugh at the highwayman’s touch and could shrug off the phantom bullets fired from his pistols. Old Mr. Grim’s battle with Jack the Ripper eventually resulted in the madman’s death as he pitched headlong from the top of London Bridge and into the Thames. The Ripper’s evil spirit would not rest, however, and he returned to menace London again as an undead specter. Now able to fight Old Mr. Grim on his own terms, the Ripper became Old Mr. Grim’s arch-nemesis, their battles fought in the shadows of London. Each time Old Mr. Grim believed he had finally banished the Ripper, the murderous wraith would appear again. Finally, with the help of a mortal London detective, Old Mr. Grim was able to locate the Ripper’s bones at the bottom of the Thames. Removing the bones from London seemed to end the Ripper’s manifestations. It would be some years before Old Mr. Grim connected strings of bloody killings in foreign cities to the mortal remains of the Ripper. So far every effort to locate the bones has proven useless. Thwarted once, the Ripper now takes pains to guard what is left of his body.
During World War I, Old Mr. Grim was openly employed by the British as a spy against the Germans. In this role, the ghost proved invaluable and he became a feared bogeyman to German commanders. Several times Old Mr. Grim found himself facing Hochmeister, the German champion and discovered that the holy armor of Antioch was able to withstand his spectral powers. On one occasion, Old Mr. Grim was imprisoned within a cabinet made of silver by the Austrian spiritualist Der Beobachter and locked inside the Imperial Cathedral at Aachen, his essence slowly being distilled into a sorcerous elixir which Der Beobachter hoped would endow the recipient with immortality. The scheme was thwarted by Avalon, who managed to infiltrate into Aachen and free Old Mr. Grim. Der Beobachter intended to escape with what elixir he had already distilled, but was betrayed when his Russian bodyguard claimed the elixir for himself. The sorcerous concoction turned the Russian into a crazed monster, the beast that would come to be known as Koschei the Deathless.
After the war, Old Mr. Grim remained active, taking it upon himself to continue to pursue the Ripper across the globe and to help British authorities against a multitude of threats. He was involved in the Russian Civil War, assisting the White Russians against the Bolsheviks and during this period he came into conflict with the murderous spymaster Palach. Refusing to accept the existence of the supernatural, Palach turned to science for a way to combat Old Mr. Grim’s ‘tricks’, the result of which was a phase generator that can force the ghost’s essence to harden into an almost crystalline state. Palach was able to trap Old Mr. Grim within the field of one of these phase generators, freezing the ghost solid. However, thinking his adversary destroyed, Palach did not take any precautions with the body. After hours outside the generator’s field, Old Mr. Grim was able to thaw out and escape. He has not forgotten Palach’s sinister weapon, however, and is very wary anytime his missions pit him against the Soviets.
Old Mr. Grim was also instrumental in defeating one of the schemes of the Chinese supervillain Dr. Dragon when the megalomaniac attempted to make himself god-king of Mongolia by claiming ancestry with the great Genghis Khan. Appearing before the assembled Mongol hordes, Dr. Dragon displayed his super-science as proof of supernatural powers and evidence of the great khan’s blood in his veins. Old Mr. Grim, however, one-upped Dr. Dragon, manifesting before the Mongols not as a descendent of Genghis Khan but as the khan’s own ghost. Denouncing Dr. Dragon as an imposter, Old Mr. Grim whipped the Mongols into a frenzy. Most of Dr. Dragon’s men were slaughtered by the outraged nomads and he himself was barely able to escape.
Dr. Dragon would again cross paths with Old Mr. Grim in Canada in 1935. The villain had been orchestrating the import and spread of a toxic form of opium through the Chinese community living in Canada. This particularly vile opium, called the Dragon’s Tears, would provoke homicidal madness in those who partook of its vapours. A string of gruesome killings across Canada shocked the nation and laid the groundwork for an especially vicious blackmail scheme. Dr. Dragon, knowing the source of the wave of murders, offered to bring them to an end. His price was five Canadian scientists who would be turned over to him. Experts in their fields, the scientists would be invaluable to Dr. Dragon’s plans of conquest back in China.
The RCMP became involved in the effort to stop Dr. Dragon, and Walter MacSorley headed the investigation to uncover the plot. At the same time, Old Mr. Grim landed in Canada, thinking the killings might be the work of the Ripper. Pursuing their quarry from two different leads, the Mountie and the ghost reached the headquarters of Dr. Dragon at roughly the same time, a subterranean labyrinth beneath Vancouver’s Chinatown. Thinking the gruesome ghost to be some creature of Dr. Dragon’s, MacSorley fought against Old Mr. Grim, providing the opportunity for their mutual enemy to capture them both.
The two heroes were able to escape the clutches of Dr. Dragon by combining their abilities and together were able to thwart his insidious plan. Leaving MacSorley to co-ordinate RCMP efforts to shut down the opium dens distributing the Dragon’s Tears, Old Mr. Grim slid back into the shadows, allowing the Mountie to take all the credit for breaking Dr. Dragon’s sinister organization.
Other threats in the years leading up to WWII kept Old Mr. Grim abroad for much of the time. However, when war broke out, he immediately returned to England and offered his services to the Crown. The ghost would serve as an independent agent for the early years of the war, spying on those governments with German sympathies. Following the destruction of the Liberators, however, he was recalled once again. This time he was presented before Winston Churchill and offered membership in the team of heroes the Prime Minister was organizing: the Imperials.
Description: Old Mr. Grim is a ghastly figure: a walking skeleton dressed in the tatters of 17th century clothing. He wears a heavy great coat, a tri-corn hat and knee-high leather boots with broad cuffs. A heavy muffler masks the lower part of his skull. The huge pistols he carries are ancient horse pistols, massive flintlocks from his days as a highwayman.
