Leonard Holloway

Ability Scores

Personality

Traits: (To be developed through play)

Ideal: (To be developed)

Bond: (To be developed)

Flaw: Deep down, Leonard fears that if the paranormal is real — truly real — then so is everything else. And that terrifies him.

Backstory

Leonard Holloway grew up in Dorchester — raised by his mother, Marianne Holloway, a practical woman who worked long hours and believed in paying bills on time, not asking questions you couldn't afford the answers to. His father left when he was young. Not dramatically. Just quietly. A slow absence that settled in and never lifted.

What Leonard had was time, curiosity, and a mind that refused to stop turning.

From an early age, he took things apart. Radios. Alarm clocks. Toasters. Sometimes he fixed them. Sometimes he made them worse. His mother learned to sigh, set aside broken appliances, and tell him to put everything back before dinner.

Boston fed his imagination. Old buildings, crooked streets, basements older than the foundations above them. Teachers called the city historic. Leonard suspected it was unfinished.

He grew up on library books, public access television, and late-night radio shows that treated the paranormal with just enough seriousness to sound plausible. When Ghostbusters hit theaters in 1984, it landed on Leonard like a revelation — not because of the ghosts, but because of the gear. Scientists. Nerds. Engineers. People who treated the impossible as a technical problem.

After high school, Leonard drifted through community college, night classes, part-time repair work. Too scientific for mystics. Too speculative for academics. Eventually, through a classified ad or a flyer or a conversation overheard in the wrong bar, he found his way to the Paranormal Society — and became their gadget man.

He tells himself this is all theoretical. That if ghosts existed, he would know.

Deep down, he fears the opposite. Because if the paranormal is real, then so is everything else — the history that bleeds, the bargains made in shadows, the idea that Boston is awake and watching.

The Night at Long Wharf:

Leonard had read that ghosts like water. Not sentimentality — physics. Water holds temperature differently. Carries sound. Reflects electromagnetic interference in ways that urban environments amplify.

He went to Long Wharf with his homemade gear: a modified EM detector built from scavenged radio parts, a rewired tape recorder, a Polaroid camera fitted with a cheap infrared filter.

The EM detector spiked so hard the needle slammed its housing. Cold rolled across the pier. Something manifested — a smear of distortion, a pressure behind the eyes. Leonard snapped a photo on instinct. Then he yelled at it. Not magic. Just defiant. The ghost recoiled, fractured, and dissipated.

Across the pier stood a man in a worn coat. Older. Sharp eyes. Notebook in hand. Chandler T. Harrow. Neither spoke.

Then the harbor flared — green and blue light rising from Spectacle Island, reflecting across the black water like a bruise forming under the skin of the world. Leonard's equipment screamed. His EM meter shattered.

Whatever he had been looking for at the harbor, it had just looked back.

Class Features & Spells

Specialist: Inventor
Infusions: Enhanced Weapon, Repeating Shot, Enhanced Defense

Spells: Absorb Elements, Alarm, Catapult, Cure Wounds, Disguise Self, Expeditious Retreat, False Life, Feather Fall, Guidance, Longstrider

Equipment

• The Newtonian Countermeasure (signature paranormal detection/combat device)
• Boy Scout Jacket
• Switchblade
• Slingshot & Sling Bullets
• Clothes, Nerdy
• Tinker's Tools

Connections

Session Notes

Notes updated each session.