2026-01-27 The Esoterrorists (2nd Edition) (Pelgrane Press)
Note: This character is built from a 2-player level of point allocation.
Name: Dr. Tarini Desai Player: 张殿李
Dr. Desai was a brilliant and compassionate forensic psychologist for a federal investigative agency. Her work was then rooted in a profound belief that understanding a broken mind was the first step toward protecting society from it.
Then came the “Clayborne Case”, a string of horrific mass killing events where each suspect was not 'broken' in any known, meaningful way until three days before their acts. Each reported, in post-crime interviews and assessments, seeing a figure of fractured light and whispering static.
Her profiles were useless. Evidence trails led to tangles of nightmare logic. The final subject of her investigation, a quite, soft-spoken, perfectly ordinary librarian looked at Tarini with terrifying clarity before saying: “You think you protect people from monsters. But who will protect you from the very idea of monsters?” She then, to the shock of all onlookers, without making any sound, without flinching, without any show of pain, grabbed her own windpipe and pulls so strongly she tore it out of her neck, leaving a cooling corpse and a hellish mess while calm, now dead, eyes continued to stare at the traumatized doctor.
Dr. Desai was declared medically unfit for duty after a severe dissociative episode not long thereafter. She could not continue in her work and was put on medical pension pending some sign of recovery. The Ordo Veritas, recognizing in this broken asset, someone of value to them, someone primed to believe already what the OV fought, helped recover her, setting her up, post-recovery, in a small consultancy which she could use as her grounding day job, but which served too as a perfect front for investigating the thinning of the Veil.
She no longer profiles criminals. She diagnoses memetic infections, psychic plagues, and ontological wounds to the world, fighting to protect the world from that which further fractures her own sense of what is real each time she encounters it.
Off-Duty Occupation: Organizational Psychologist (corporate consultant) Current Cover: Desai Group: Organizational Health & Diagnostics, a small consultancy hired out to corporate interests, non-profits, and even government agencies to assess workplace trauma, cultural breakdowns after scandals, or to implement wellness protocols for HR departments.
Hit Threshold: 3
Health: 7 Stability: 9
INVESTIGATIVE ABILITIES
| Academic | Rating |
|---|---|
| Anthropology | 1 |
| Art History | 1 |
| Bureaucracy | 1 |
| Forensic Psychology | 4 |
| History | 1 |
| Law | 2 |
| Natural History | 1 |
| Occult Studies | 3 |
| Pathology | 3 |
| Research | 4 |
| Textual Analysis | 2 |
| Interpersonal | Rating |
|---|---|
| Bullshit Detector | 2 |
| Bureaucracy | 1 |
| Negotiation | 2 |
| Reassurance | 1 |
| Technical | Rating |
|---|---|
| Chemistry | 1 |
| Document Analysis | 1 |
| Forensic Anthropology | 1 |
| Photography | 1 |
GENERAL ABILITIES
| Ability | Rating |
|---|---|
| Athletics | 3 |
| Driving | 3 |
| Health | 7 |
| Medic | 15 |
| Preparedness | 7 |
| Scuffling | 3 |
| Shooting | 3 |
| Shrink | 15 |
| Stability | 9 |