Jericho Cross:
With his strong jaw and dead-eyed gaze Jericho Cross looks the part of a tough outlaw and trail rider. There is something dust covered and rumpled about him – even in a brand new Darkwatch uniform, Jericho looks like he hasn’t slept indoors for a month. With a mysterious past and an uncertain future, Jericho is the archetypal western hero with a twist – he’s turning into a vampire.
Drifting out West after a murderous run-in with his slave owning father, Jericho tried his hand at a new trade – robbing trains near Arizona’s southern border. Jericho’s lean and hungry one-eyed face soon appeared on wanted posters across the frontier. What was supposed to be his last, big job went disastrously wrong when Jericho robbed a Darkwatch armored train – and let loose a Vampire Lord of the Undead.
Bitten by this ancient creature, and with his soul slipping into darkness, Jericho must master his vampire powers and hunt down the vampire who sired him. Only by killing the Lord of the Undead can Jericho hope to reclaim his soul and save the West from the Vampire Lord’s diabolical designs. An excellent shot and a fine rider, Jericho thinks on his feet and is tough as nails, traits that are only enhanced by vampire powers that afford him super-human strength, endurance, jumping ability, and enhanced senses, in the form of the blood red orb that bloomed from his empty eye socket after the vampire Curse surged through Jericho’s veins.
Jericho Cross: Outlaw. Outcast. Vampire.
Allies:
Tala:
Sultry, seductive, sensual, and smoldering, Tala is Cassidy’s opposite, and in many ways represents the “new breed” of Darkwatch Agent – as dangerous and dark as the evil forces they combat. With a past even more mysterious than Jericho’s, Tala’s meteoric rise through the ranks of the Darkwatch has been marked by two things – a ruthless efficiency on the field of battle, and a naked lust for power at any cost.
Graceful, quick, and powerful, Tala relishes combat with the undead, and will often pass up long-ranged combat opportunities in favor of mixing it up in hand-to-hand battle. She is careless with the lives of her men, but makes up for it in her utter fearlessness and uncanny ability to triumph against impossible odds. Silent as a shadow, Tala will sometimes vanish from the field at what seems a critical moment, only to appear suddenly behind enemy lines, bathed in the blood of her foes, and signaling her squad that the way to victory has been made clear.
Tala will do whatever it takes to rise to the top of the Darkwatch. In Jericho Cross she sees the perfect partner, both for the Darkwatch’s war against darkness, and in her own ambitious quest for power.
Cassidy Sharp:
Orphaned as a little girl when vampires slaughtered her parents, and raised as a ward of the Darkwatch, beautiful Cassidy Sharp has spent her entire life training to be a Darkwatch agent. A headstrong woman in a man’s world, Cassidy has to ride, shoot, and fight as well as any man, and think faster than all of them, just to maintain the respect she deserves. Haunted by visions of her family’s massacre at the claws of vampires that would not condescend to kill her, Cassidy harbors deep doubts about her abilities and her courage in the face of the supernatural – doubts for which she compensates by being the most career-driven agent in the Darkwatch.
Athletic and attractively proportioned, there is a seriousness about Cassidy that lends an aura of maturity beyond her tender years. A fine agent by any standard, Cassidy is limited by her blind conviction that the Darkwatch and the work she does for it are beyond reproach. She is a good shot and keeps her cool in deadly situations, but her slight physique means she needs to depend on brains rather than brawn when the chips are down.
As the soul survivor of Jericho’s raid on the Darkwatch train, Cassidy reacts in typical fashion, resourcefully deputizing Jericho Cross into the Darkwatch and leading a desperate bid to warn her superiors of the Vampire Lord’s escape. As Jericho’s partner, she acts as that tortured hero’s conscience, simultaneously guiding him toward redemption and using him as a weapon in her personal war against darkness.
Cartwright
General Cartwright is a former Civil War general who heads the Darkwatch during the time period when the game takes place. Cartwright portrays the classic Old West government soldier -uniformed as an agent of good, but in many ways more corrupt than the evil he hunts. Jericho catches on to Cartwright as an unsavory character from first encounter, when Cartwright puts him through the Darkwatch initiation exercise called Torture Maze. The maze is designed as a test of gunfighting and combat skills for Darkwatch soldiers, giving them their first taste of fighting undead enemies. But Jericho gets a special version, specially designed by Cartwright to kill him. When Jericho passes the test, Cartwright sees value in having a half-vampire agent with powers like his enemies…and his manipulation of Jericho begins.
Enemies:
Lazarus Malkoth
Lazarus was the Roman who founded the Darkwatch in 66 A.D. to battle the real reason Rome fell: vampires. In his pride, Lazarus thought he could gain ultimate power over darkness by bending a demon spirit to his will. When the demon possessed Lazarus instead, he turned on the Darkwatch and nearly destroyed his own organization. The Darkwatch pursued Lazarus across Europe and ultimately the Americas, where he vanished.
Brave:
As the white European pushed west, native Indian tribes are found themselves under heavy assault. The Navaho, Moapa, and Washoe tribes of the Southwest were pushed from their lands and hunted to near extinction. If the advancing settlers took the time to bury the native remains, it was often in shallow unmarked graves, with little ceremony. These corpses prove ample ammunition for the forces of darkness. The Brave is a blanket term for the resurrected bodies of these massacred natives.
There’s a nursery rhyme popular among frontier children when their parents have left them alone at night:
Hooked claw, wagon pine
Close your eyes, you’ll soon be mine
Pointed fang, railroad track
Take my baby sister, she won’t fight back.
Darkwatch Historians believe this rhyme an attempt to mythologize the reanimated native warrior. The ‘hooked claw’ and ‘pointed fang’ portions refer to the way the native body perverts after death, as its feet become jagged claws strong enough to cling to a cliff side, and its front lateral incisors extend into wicked fangs. The Brave favors the same weapons it used during life, the bow and arrow and the hunting knife. It is known to attack with a righteous fury, born of the desire for vengeance.
Gunslinger:
Self described frontier ‘philosopher’ Phinaeus Franklin is famous for a number of memorable sayings. Perhaps the most well-known, ‘there is no God west of the Mississippi’ found its way to The El Paso Times after the Doolan-Dalton Massacre of 1894. Franklin’s second most memorable quote, was in a similar vein, ‘Death’, he often said, ‘is the great social equalizer’. Chapter Twenty-Eight of the Darkwatch Regulator Training Manual explains at least one reason why Phinaeus Franklin was wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Eight is dedicated to the emergence of the Gunslinger at the turn of the 19th Century. The Gunslinger’s unpredictable behavior, combined with its aggressive attitude toward all other creatures, living or dead, place it on the outskirts of even the bizarre castes of the creatures of the night. When Franklin was musing about the equality of death, he couldn’t have possibly conceived of a creature like the Gunslinger with it unwillingness to follow orders, and inability to establish even the most temporary of alliances. Though Gunslingers travel in small packs, they are fiercely independent loners. They have been observed in the heat of battle to attack their own comrades just to steal a more effective weapon. They are sometimes known to blast their way into brothels, while frightened prostitutes cower behind locked doors. There is even one reported case in 1842 of a Gunslinger holding up a bank in Coffeyville, Kansas, though the undead have no documented need for gold.
Oozer:
The journals of the late Darkwatch agent Jack Mills tell of the first recorded encounter with an Oozer while Mills was patrolling the Basin and Range region of western Arizona. The following is an excerpt:
…the ground suddenly exploded in a shower of clay and Pete-rock, and when the dust cleared, it was standing there, the biggest egg-sucking spit in the face of God you’ve ever laid you eyes on, its lopsided malformed head not more than six inches from mine. That ugly face is still burned into my mind, with its parchment skin and the film of congealed mucus caked around its snarling mouth. I’m not sure why it didn’t kill me instantly. Maybe because my partner Clayton reacted quicker than I did, opening fire with his revolver. I though he’d killed it, because the creature blanched for a minute and seemed on the verge of heaving forward. But as it convulsed a second time, it vomited a thick fluid, which struck Clayton in the face and burned the flesh off his head, neck and shoulders…
Mills forced a lateral promotion into the Intelligence Division by refusing to ever enter the active field again. His research on the Oozer has revealed many things, chiefly among them that the creature has no eyes and seems to track its prey by a type of echolocation. It is also known to carry two over-sized cleavers, and can move with the grace of a pugilist despite an estimated weight of almost three tons.
Reaper:
It wasn’t until the 18th century that the Darkwatch organization began to use a specific classification system to identify the undead creatures that they faced. Previous to that time they were simply called demons, skeletons, or perhaps simply monsters.
The skeleton classification ‘Reaper’ is one of the most common found across New Mexico and Arizona. Relatively slight, the Reaper is frequently underestimated by those unaccustomed to fighting the undead. Its bone-thin body mass and unnaturally quick reflexes make it very difficult to target, and even more difficult to escape.
One unique aspect of the Reaper classification is the wide variety of weaponry these creatures have been observed to carry. It is unknown whether the weapon a Reaper carries signifies a socio-military rank, or if it is in fact simply another aspect of the creature’s desire to snuff out life by every means possible.
It is often thought that Reapers are named for the jagged bone scythe which sometimes grows from their right hand. The name actually comes from information collected by Darkwatch Intelligence that attributes more deaths to the Reaper than any other undead advisory. The Reaper will savagely pursue anything living. It is as likely to be found scratching at the opening of a rabbit’s den as it is tearing apart a wayward traveler.
Kegger:
In 1807 Darkwatch Brigadier General Edvard Wagonbach issued a Darkwatch priority Class 5, to the capture and interrogation of one of the undead legion of suicide bombers unofficially known as ‘Keggers’. Extensive efforts were made to cripple the Kegger with a long range weapon, then extinguish all explosive materials before detonation. What Darkwatch regulators discovered is that a crippled Kegger, even one crippled by a non-fatal injury, would fall lifeless, and they’d find themselves attempting to interrogate an empty husk. If regulators pretended to take their attention off the creature, it would re-animate and renew its attack.
It wasn’t until 1837 that an anonymous agent in the Darkwatch Countermeasures Division made an important connection. At every instance of battle with a Kegger, a Nightmare, or a Nightmare lair was often found at a close proximity. It is currently hypothesized that Keggers are in fact unwilling puppets of the far more dangerous Nightmares. Because they lack the ability to think for themselves, Keggers become the perfect undead familiar; tenacious, bold and egoless. The Kegger will charge toward an advancing enemy, its body strapped with explosives, the rictous grin stretched across its face a clear sign of its master’s felo-de-se intensions.
Rifleman:
The most frustrating thing about fighting the undead is the way in which they can swell their numbers simply by cutting down innocent people in the heat of battle. Whereas Darkwatch Agents always make it a priority to protect the innocent, they are doubly motivated by the fact that if an innocent is killed, it will sometimes rise again and take up arms for the enemy.
Far worse is when a Darkwatch Regulator is struck down in battle. In section sixteen of the Darkwatch training manual agents are instructed to immediately dismember any allies suffering from “fatal and irreversible injuries” during engagement. The battlefield slang for this proviso is ‘Code 16’, or simple ‘Coding’. Agents with spare heavy munitions can simply drop a hand grenade onto the lap of a coding comrade. However, in a lengthy battle, where every piece of ammunition counts, Regulators will sometimes find themselves sawing the legs off former allies while they still hover on the cusp of death. There is little worse for morale.
If a Regulator fails to immobilize a coding ally, and the corpse does re-animate, they will find themselves in a comprised battle position, facing a savage enemy who is wielding their own advanced technology.
Undead Ryder
These guys will shoot you from horseback. They use their demonic horses to move fast and block your fire, so targeting them isn’t easy.
Banshee
These former ladies float above you and scream death itself. Their scream will home in on you, but you can take cover and even shoot the negative energy. If a Banshee gets close to you, she will drop down and melee attack you.
