For our final look at the Dead, we veer out of the ordinary (if there is any such thing as an ordinary Dead) and into the stranger version of the Dead’s urge. All Dead have the urge to evoke an emotion in someone, and must indulge regularly or lose themselves. But the urge doesn’t care what that emotion is. It’s the Families that place a value on one emotion over another.
The Family we’re showing off today doesn’t place value on any one emotion over another, instead they place their value on the action they use to evoke it. Or to put it another way: this Family craves the absence of emotion. Meditative quiet. Solemnity. Clarity. Silence.
The end of all things.
The Zeds
The Zeds are a company as much as they are a Family. They function like a corporation, whose main product is death. They decided they don’t care which emotion they evoke in people, any emotion will do, so long as it comes to a satisfying conclusion. They simply want to bring about finality.
The Zeds don’t claim to be the oldest of Dead Families, but they do classify themselves as the most necessary. Other Dead cling to life like a baby to a pacifier. The Zeds know that for life to progress it must end, even for other Accursed, and especially for the Dead. The Zeds generally consider themselves an exception to this rule. After all, the world will always need reapers to swing the scythe and bring in the harvest. Only once finality has been reached, can the Zeds likewise retire.
This isn’t to imply every Zed is a morbid sociopath bent on slaying the living or putting the Accursed to miserable ends. Far from it. The Zeds’ Family ethos (or company motto, in the eyes of many Accursed) is “Make your death the perfect punctuation on the end of a full life’s sentence.” When they’re talking punctuation, they’re aiming for a period or even an exclamation. A comma is an unnatural extension; a semicolon even more so.
Life needs editors and the Zeds are here to clean up the text.
All things must come to an end. As everything moves toward entropy, death is the natural conclusion of a life lived. It should be the end.
We’re the end of all things. The bullet waiting to make its way into your brain. The cancer overtaking your healthy organs. The Dead waiting to ferry you across the Styx. We’re fate’s dispassionate emissaries. Surely that’s better than being murdered by someone angry or with glee on their face?
We embrace our fatalism. Our urge is to progress entropy. We don’t care which emotion that evokes in you. We bring about that natural conclusion, and if we do our job right, you won’t feel much emotion at all. Quietude is our goal. We want to end hope, terminate pain, conclude misery, and eliminate the need for vengeance. There’s no victimhood in inevitability. We don’t just restrict this to the living. Ghosts must pass on to have their end, and we’re here to help them along. Even the Dead do not escape our notice.
One person, one death. We pick our targets carefully, and spend our time doing it right. The more souls you introduce to a killing, the greater the likelihood of a conscience rushing past fate’s door. Rather than having to clean up a mistake, we’d prefer not to make one in the first place. We let the living make their final arrangements and we give ghosts time to state their final wishes. We’re murderers, not monsters.
Z.E.D. & Colleagues. That’s the name of the corporation we have on the books. This worldwide conglomerate acts as a front to get us into places where people can’t normally go. It gives us credibility in the murdering department. And coincidentally, it’s where we got our name.
You’re not a child or sibling, you’re an employee. Others play at familial relations, but we know our place in the hierarchy. We all have jobs to do to ensure we can execute our function to the high standards we set for ourselves. We act with professionalism at all times, as we are each a representative of the corporation. If you need a new body, you have only to look at your most recent kill to find a fresh corpse waiting for you. It saves on cleanup costs. We might kill solo, but we aren’t isolationists. We have a network of built-in allies through our corporation. We pay them well to provide all sorts of aid when we need them, including physical backup.
We don’t do parties. We meet in offices and hold court at boardroom tables. We discuss matters of business among each other, and keep it succinct and to the point. During off hours, we gather in less formal settings to discuss other matters. No matter how efficient and merciless a killer you might be, it helps to express what you’ve seen and been through. It’s not therapy, however, Z.E.D. doesn’t cover those costs. We do appreciate a party if someone else is throwing one, but not while on the clock.
The Zeds use their magic as a tool for killing. Whatever gets the job done with the least amount of clean up afterward.
Play a Zed if you want to…
… Be an emotionless assassin looking to find a purpose beyond just killing.
… Help mortals and ghosts satisfy their last wishes before delivering them unto death.
… Wield a gun you get to name, and use it to hit a company-mandated quota.
J.M. Gasquet
J.M. is nobody’s idea of a pretty picture. He wears crumpled suits, dirty sneakers, and unironed shirts stained with sweat. His face bears the stubble of a dark-haired man who lost his razor two days ago and the purple rings of tiredness around his eyes make any observers more inclined to wonder “what is this guy taking?” over “my gosh, this poor man needs a rest.”
Yet for all his hangdog appearance, J.M. is one of Z.E.D.’s preferred specialists when it comes to matters of removing voids inhabiting unwilling hosts. It’s just a damn shame he’ll never receive the faintest of praise from his Family. He’s not exactly the figure of a Dead who can be presented at the company gathering as one of the best. Other Zeds call him “Sipowicz” because of his resemblance to early NYPD Blue era Dennis Franz.
He doesn’t get the reference.
J.M.’s not a strategic mastermind. He’s not a disheveled heap because he’s protesting the Family or his Damnation and he’s not imitating Oscar the Grouch to avoid public notice. He just can’t be fucked with such trivial matters as making the cadaver playing as host look better than it needs to. He takes drugs, drinks heavily, fills his lungs with smoke, and spends his ill-gotten cash on sex workers (most of whom insist on his showering before any act takes place). He slobs about in diners and bars, and when the call comes in to track and eliminate another void, hopefully passing that undead blight into nothingness and giving its host a reprieve (or much desired finality), he hitches his pants, fastens the one good button on his jacket, and goes to work.
Because the thing with J.M. is, as much as he looks bad, smells bad, and communicates more in grunts, outdated references to prog rock bands, and makes jokes no longer considered palatable to public audiences, he believes ardently that manipulation is unnecessary, that suffering is best ended, and that caretakers such as he don’t deserve thanks: they’re just doing their jobs.
What you got there is a typical Class B possession. Nothing extraordinary about it. Some dumb fuck messed around with a book they shouldn’ta, or some shit like that, and got themselves hooked up with a phantasm that don’t wanna let go. We call ‘em voids. You know, like ‘voiding your bowel’ because they’re pieces of shit.
Look, you don’t gotta get involved in none of this. I’ll try talkin’ to the asshole in charge, see if I can get the rest of the family outta there before I do my thing, maybe make a deal with it for a few more good days so long as the wife and kids can go free. And if that doesn’t work… Well, you seen how those expulsionist fucks do it? I do it a bit better than that. Years of experience. Unlike them, I don’t burn down the whole neighborhood to blat one errant ghost.
Oh, I get it. You’re lookin’ at me and thinkin’ “He doesn’t look like one of them Zeds from the brochure, all Day of the Jackal, suit-wearing, cool-ass ass ass assassin type.” Yeah, well the real workers spend less time moisurizin’ and more time getting things done. No, I don’t know who Agent 47 is, but I don’t think he works for Z.E.D. I’da met him.
I’ve been on the books a looong time.
Now please give me some space. No, not so I can channel my chakra and get my magic primed. I just need to pass wind, and you’re in the blast radius, if you get my meaning.
Are some of the families meant to be antagonist only? This doesn’t feel like a family you’d want a player to make as a character. A couple of the other families previewed feel the same way. I mean there’s dark, and then there’s playing a villain campaign. What would a ZED character look like in play? I guess the storyteller could just ban certain families they don’t want to see as player characters?
Nope, none of the families are antagonistic only, but that doesn’t mean some aren’t less pleasant than others. I could point at the Zeds, the Sphinx, and the Heirs and say a lot of them are assholes, but they’re still playable.
This isn’t D&D where everyone has to play lawful good and the only class options are Paladin or Cleric. This is a game about playing people who are cursed, people who have become monsters and are trying to figure out what that means. Besides, if Storytellers have been able to figure out how to have Assamites as PCs for close to 30 years I’d figure storytellers won’t have too much of a problem with Zeds.
More to the themes of Curseborne in specific. Some Families read as absolutely antagonistic. And that is somewhat intentional in that your character is unlikely to love their Family, or its politics. The Zeds are kind of shitty, but I could see several character types who are Zeds that want nothing more than to topple the organization and rebuild it with a better purpose.
Some Families are there to lean into their tropes, while others are there to push against their tropes. There’s a mixed bag of each for all Lineages.
Ah. The Jackson Lamb of the crew.
Very much so! Resigned but resolute.