TLV App

[stand_unshaken]

User Name/Nick: Lieke
User DW: n/A.
E-mail: n/A. poliorketes @ plurk
Other Characters: Elizabeth Jennings

Character Name: Arthur Morgan
Series: Red Dead Redemption 2
Age: 36
From When?: Final chapter, mission: Red Dead Redemption. After finding out John was ‘killed’ during the train heist and learning that Abigail has been taken by the Pinkertons. He’d be very desperate indeed to make at least one thing in his life go right.

Inmate/Warden: Warden. I’ll be taking him from a high honor playthrough, and he’s made the exact change that the Admiral needs from inmates. He’s always had more depth than he lets on to most people around him, but during the course of the game he’s learned priorities, learned what’s important to him, and how he thinks a life should be lived. He’s been through a lot of bad, and done a lot of bad, so he’ll be a warden with little moral high ground. He honestly doesn’t think he’s actually good enough to do anything like this, but desperation has led him to strange places before. He’s a deep thinker, though not much of a talker, and he’ll really consider an inmate’s motivation for whatever reason they came to the Barge. Besides that, he’s persistent, and very, very loyal.

Item: He’s got a journal he very regularly uses. It’ll notify him of any casualties or other important events by glowing hot a moment.

Abilities/Powers: Nothing supernatural. Very good gunslinger, and the game has a mechanic whereby he can very briefly react in slow-motion. This will just translate into him being a killer shot on the Barge.

Personality: Note that I’m applying him from a high-honor playthrough, which means that his personality may vary from medium or low-honor playthroughs.
Arthur grew up with an absent mother and an abusive father, whom he saw die. He was adopted by two outlaws with big dreams for the future. It’s made him both fatalistic as well as deeply hopeful. Hopeful for other people, fatalistic about his own future. He’s a killer, he’s a crook, a robber, a liar, and he’s done too much bad to ever make up for it by doing good.

Not that that means he doesn’t do good. He does a lot of good, against his own better judgement, and sometimes gets hurt by doing good. He doesn’t do it to redeem himself, but because it’s the right thing to do. He’ll often say that’s not my battle, and try not to get involved, but it doesn’t take much for him to get involved anyway. He wants to do right by the people he loves, and by people who deserve a better fate. That attitude has a darker side, of course, when his people or his deep beliefs are threatened. He’ll have a short temper when it comes to that, and he’ll gladly shoot someone for it.

He was raised to believe revenge is fruitless, but that doesn’t mean violence is out of the question. He feels bad about useless killing, killing for a cause that seems fruitless, or as part of a venture that’s doomed to fail. He doesn’t often talk about it, but reading his journal we can find out more about what he really feels. He loves that the gang’s leader, Dutch, is such an idealist. But the calmer, emotionally more mature ‘vice president’ Hosea is really the man he looks up to more. He wishes he could be more like that, and sometimes tries, with varying results. He likes Dutch’s idealism and wants all of his ideals to come to fruition, but a part of him doesn’t believe they will. And he’s right. They don’t.

He’s been hurt a lot in his life, by people who were supposed to love him, and it’s made him reluctant to open up. His first girlfriend came from too good a family to ever accept him as husband material, and he never got over her. The waitress he slept with and the child they had were both killed in a robbery for a few dollars. His mother died when he was young, his father was killed in front of him. By the time he gets to the Barge, most of the people he trusted have either left, died, or changed so much he can’t trust them anymore.

When Dutch starts going further and further, keeps saying ‘one more robbery’ ‘just a little more money, and then we’ll all be out’, Arthur doesn’t think that he’s changed. He thinks, or is afraid, that Dutch was always like that, and he just started showing it more around the end of the whole venture. It’s the fatalism about his own future, applied to someone else. He can’t truly ever become better, even if other people tell him he’s a good man, so if Dutch is bad now, then he must always have been bad. This will be a sore point on the Barge, where he’ll have to believe in change. He wanted a better world, like Dutch promised, but even though Arthur got better, the world only got worse.

The disillusionment about Dutch and the gang’s idealism really made him reconsider where his own ideals lie. Before realizing Dutch was getting in deeper and deeper, he could tell himself this was all for a fight for something better, if at least for their own little gang, and for a little piece of America where polite society wasn’t yet the norm. But as he sees Dutch manipulate good people into bad acts he really had to re-examine his own ideals and actions—if he can manipulate a young Native American man into an unwinnable fight (ostensibly to ‘help them with their cause’ but also, conveniently, to give the gang some cover to get out of dodge), couldn't he have manipulated Arthur the same way?

His own imminent death has also played a big role in seeing the world more clearly, and wanting a little more goodness in the world. During the last few chapters of the game, Arthur is terminally ill with tuberculosis. Knowing he won’t see a better world if he doesn’t make a little good himself before he dies, he’s more motivated than ever to help those few people he can. To see beautiful things, and help good people. He’ll still kill people during a train robbery, or gun down a staggering number of Pinkerton detectives, but it’s to help the people around him, who really matter.

He’s stoic and humble, doesn’t really care if people see him as kind of slow, even if he’s actually quite intelligent and emotionally mature. He records his own thoughts in a journal and doesn’t hesitate to put an actual damn heart between his initial and that of the woman he loves. He’s good under pressure and a born leader, even though he doesn’t want to lead. He’ll do it in a pinch, and he does it at the end of the line, when he can’t trust anyone anymore, but he doesn’t need the attention.

He’s had to make a lot of difficult decisions to become someone who can be a warden. But that fight is exactly why he’ll make a good, balanced one.

Barge Reactions: He’ll be stunned by all of the weird things that happen on the Barge. He luckily already holds pretty ‘modern’ ideas about women and non-Caucasian people, so at least we won’t have to worry about a cowboy throwing around slurs willy-nilly. He’ll need a lot of time to get used to the technology, since he’s really not all that technologically inclined, nor really interested in it unless another party can get him interested in it.

He will, genuinely, hate being cooped up. He’s used to open air and open spaces and camping, and being able to just take off with his horse, not a single ship. He’ll deal with it, but he’ll hate it.

He’ll be a little more surly at first, and take his sweet time opening up, but he’s curious and clever and will eventually get to enjoying getting to know all the weird people on the Barge. Floods and breaches will be a little harder, since he’ll hate having his privacy invaded or his brain scrambled for a breach. He will, again, deal with it so he can get his deal, but he might put up a bit of a fight if something happens he finds genuinely unethical.

Deal: Everything in Arthu’rs life has basically gone to shit. He’s got tuberculosis and won’t make it much longer, the crew he was riding with has fallen apart because of a few people influencing the leader into making worse and worse decisions. He knows there’s no saving himself, and he doesn’t really care enough to try. But there are three people he needs to get out: John, who’s like a brother to him, and his wife and child.

At this point in time he’ll believe John has died during One Last Train Robbery (there’s always ‘one last job’), that his wife has been captured by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and his son has been safeguarded by one of the last people he trusts. He’s on his way to save John’s wife Abigail, but the Admiral coming along and offering to get those last three people out so they can make a real life for themselves. He’ll take that chance with both hands. It’s the only thing he’s got left to live for.

History: Linked!

Sample Journal Entry: TDM!
Sample RP: TDM!