Sven Östberg

**Character:** Sven Östberg

**Player:** Hatless

**Position:**Problem Solver and 24/7 Music Source

**Demeanor:**Sven appears to be rather unaffected by the situation he’s in, focusing instead on keeping morale up in any way he can. He smiles a lot and loves to play music on his guitar, encouraging others to keep their spirits high and not let the situation keep them down. He is always on top of things when conversing with people, never missing a beat with his responses. Even mid conversation, he is often analyzing words used, expressions, gestures, anything he can use to read the person he is speaking to.

**Nature:**In reality, Sven’s happy-go-lucky attitude is a means of coping with how much the bombs really did hurt him. It takes a while of getting to know him before he’ll open up about anything, since he greatly prefers to ignore it and pretend nothing happened.

**Description:**Sven is a slender man standing at 5’10. His once neatly brushed dark brown hair now is an overgrown and tangled mess. Sven’s eyes are grey, but he is missing his left eye. It’s covered by bandages but scars can be seen coming out from under the covering. The scars extend across the side of his head. He wears a discarded coat he found over the clothes he was wearing on the day of the bombings, a brown vest over a white t-shirt and grey jeans. Sven travels with a border collie named Astrid, who is almost always by his side.

**Stats:**

Characters have 15 points to spend. It costs one point to buy a rank in a stat, or to be trained in a skill. Trained skills are indicated with **bold**.

Health

* **Physical Health:**10
* **Mental Health:**13

* Strength: 1

```
* Athletics
* Melee
* Ranged (heavy)

```

* Toughness: 0

```
* Resilience
* **Determination**

```

* Speed: 1

```
* Acrobatics
* Stealth
 * Ranged

```

* Charm: 3

```
* **Persuasion**
* **Bluff**
* Intimidation

```

* Intelligence: 3

```
* **Perception**
* **Insight**
* **Logic**

```

* Education: 1

```
* Engineering
* Survival
 * Medicine

```

Specialties

* **Cognitive Dissonance:**3. Despite his training in knowing how to gain control of a conversation and receive specific results, that first requires someone who’s willing to listen at all. The wise decision might be to avoid the confrontation altogether. Sven is willing to go to serious extremes to get out of certain interactions. This can be a bit of a problem if he does happen to get caught and gets himself too worked up to smoothly engage in conversation. (Sven can trade 3 persuasion for 3 stealth.)
* **Two in the Bush:**3. Sven has spent a lot of time searching for supplies and food in the woods, which holds the unfortunate downside of meeting a lot of things that want to kill you. On the upside, it’s good practice for future confrontations. He’s had a few particular run-ins with plant mutants that he’d rather not have to deal with again. (Sven gains +3 melee when in forests.)

**Gear:**

```
*Swiss Army knife
*Larger knife, dull from use
*First aid kit
 *Water bottle
 *Matches
 *Tord blanket
 *Owl's Eye flowers
*Falling-apart backpack

```

**Possessions:**

```
*Sven carries his old guitar everywhere he goes. He feels like it’s the one thing keeping him sane out here.

*The only other thing he has with him is his wallet. Although the contents are near worthless nowadays, it contains a small photo of him with his family at his high school graduation.

```

**Personal History:**Sven was born in 2029 and grew up with his parents and 3 older sisters in a coastal town in Sweden. He wasn’t very skilled in any sort of physical activities, being much more interested in instruments. He began playing guitar at a young age, originally just to himself, but soon began branching out a bit and posting videos of his songs online, which gained him some internet popularity. Sven had planned to work off of this become a musician, however upon getting older he decided to go for something he saw as a more realistic career. Despite this, he never lost his love for music and enjoyed playing guitar whenever he had the chance. After graduating from high school, he began attending university in hopes of pursuing a career in journalism. While he considered himself to be rather useless when it came to any physical activity, Sven was extremely well versed in how to speak to people and solve problems, analyzing the situation and determining the best course of action. He did well in school, enjoying his studies and resting in a solid position at the top of his class. Over a break, his family arranged to visit Germany together. However, disaster struck while they were there, and most of the family was killed. Sven and one of his sisters were the only ones to survive, though his sister was partially trapped beneath heavy debris from the explosions. Sven did everything he could to try to get her out, desperately trying to get help from authorities, but received no response. He stayed with her as long as possible before eventually wandering further into the wrecked city and the rest of the wasteland, seeing for the first time why no help had come.

**Miscellaneous:**Sven loves card and board games.

**Loot:**

```
*Sven does not currently have any loot.

```