Recounter

The Recouters, an ancient race of vampires, live in the north of Iceberg, in the deep caverns of the mountains. After discovering an ancient artifact they call the Plan, they put down their dark arts of magic and set out to learn and understand the Plan. Over time, they began to see the world in numbers and are able to understand the combinations behind them, believing that the world is built from deep structures of codes and numbers. This includes their view of magic, which allows them to change the numbers and codes at will and enter them into punch cards, making them the first race to be able to program. The Recounter can live for hundreds of years like any other vampire and needs blood as a food source to survive. The Recounter have a high level of mechanical knowledge and attempt to duplicate their dark arts of old, such as creating ghouls, killing creatures, assembling body parts and mechanical parts into new beings, and being able to revive them using punch cards. The Recounters are a very isolated race, not caring about what happens in the world as long as they have their food source and the peace to discover the code of the world and how everything around them works.

## Apearance

Recounters are humanoid beings, usually quite thin and without any real muscle mass, still showing much of the skeletal framework under their skin and flesh, and always having a piebald skin color. These features come from the environment they live in, as the combination of cold air in iceberg and their preferred habitats in caves, out of any sunlight, caused their random skin color. Their eyes are quite good, having lived in dark caves for a long time, and have black lines around the eye sockets. Their hearing is also above average, similar to that of bats, which grow wider and larger compared to humans. However, the most noticeable feature of the Recounter, as with all other vampires, are the two fangs on their upper jaw, which they use to drink the blood of their victims. All of these features are rarely seen, however, as this race completely avoids interactions with other creatures or the use of disguise magic in order to look like a lean human.

## Location

The Recounters are located in the deep caves and tunnel systems beneath the mountains of Iceberg. Their tendency to avoid contact with social interactions and their only goal of solving the world's codes lead them to live in caves or other dark and inhospitable places. After finding out that these places were perfect for their undisturbed explorations, they decided to expand their habitat, using their Gear Ghouls to build additional cave systems under the mountains of Iceberg, creating a huge metropolis underground that few knew even existed.

## Society

Recounter society is built only by two major aspects of their ancestors. The first is to understand the plan and solve it completely. The second is to decipher the world's code and use it to gain their secret dominion over the world, if they chose to do so, or simply to explore the world in secret while enjoying the rich tastes of blood around the world. For this they use the gear ghouls and the punch cards to archive development and knowledge.

### The Plan

The plan is an ancient stone found by the ancestors of the Recounter. This object has an unnatural number of numbers written on it and shows a connection with the essence of magic itself, but until today it has not been solved how this connection works. The Recounters, however, saw in this object the one item that connects everything around the Earth and is the answer to every problem, written as this number code. The Recounters slowly began to learn and interpret the way it was coded and saw this as a gift from the Creator to test them to see if they were worthy of understanding the world. This led the Recounter to stop believing in knowing gods and only believe in the deep core of the numbers and everything around them was explained in the Plan. The Plan is the most important object for the Recounters, deeply hidden and guarded in the deepest parts of the caves and can only be explored by the oldest of the number traders.

### Work ethics

While Recounters may practice any type of profession, they must take at least one of the two professions with which the Society is built, either as a Numbers Trader or a Toniker.

#### Number Trader

The number trader is one of the two main professions in the Recounter world. The number traders could be described as information scientists who work all day to understand the coding and numbers behind everything, especially in magic, and write them down in punch cards. These cards are infused with the coding of the desired magic and are ready to be read by their special machines to read and translate it into the desired magical output. In addition to creating the punch cards, after hundreds of years of experience, they have the task of understanding the plan or exploring the world and trying to find the hidden codes and numbers anywhere in the world.

#### Toniker

The Toniker is the other main profession in the Recounter world. The Toniker are responsible for fusing body parts with mechanical body parts to create psi-enabled vessels for the punch cards, the Gear Ghouls. They are also responsible for creating the Translator, which makes them the engineers and doctors in this society and the most popular profession. In addition, they are also responsible for obtaining the necessary bodies and materials for their creations, which makes them especially active in the mining industry and slave trade markets.

##### Gear Ghouls

The Gear Ghouls are empty vessels made from used bodies that are fused with various corpse parts and mechanical parts that replace the missing biological parts. The Gear Ghouls can vary in shape and size depending on the resources and each Gear Gould gets a translator and a punch card built in, which allows them to be active and sometimes even use simple magic attacks. The use of the Gear Ghouls can also vary, mostly completly random.

Basic Gear Ghoul soldierBasic Gear Ghould for miningBasic watchdog Gear Ghoul
##### Translator

The translator is a device that is usually installed in the brain and nerve center of the corpses. This device looks like a small block of metal with a slot where the punch cards were inserted. The purpose of this device is to translate the numbers on the punch cards into information and actions as electrical and magic signals. This allows the Recounter to create ghouls by giving the bodies the correct numerical code, which punches the cards into the ghouls and gives them any order. This council can also translate magic codes and give the ghouls the ability to use basic magic.

### Relationships

The Recounter's society and relations with other races are very simple. The Recounters ignore them because they have no interest in them, which explains the isolation. Otherwise, the Recounters look to see if they can get benefits from relationships with others, which are often between mining companies and slavers who provide food sources and corpses for the Gear Ghouls. But in most cases, they see any life form that provides blood as an active food source, but do not kill them mindlessly and are able to interact normally with individuals, which also distinguishes them from normal vampires. But in most cases, they are more interested in discovering new codes than helping a starving child.

## Magic and Abilities

### Physical Abilities

Thanks to their years of living in caves, the loss of their dark arts, and their diet of only blood, Recounters have very little muscle mass. This makes this race very weak physically, probably one of the weakest races around. This is also the reason why the Recounter use their ghouls for most of the physical work. However, by losing their dark arts, they lose their weakness to sunlight, although they dislike sunlight and any other light source that is uncomfortably bright.

### Intelligence

The Recounters are one of the smartest races on Earth, the first to gain access to programming and able to construct basic program codes and use them with advanced technologies. They also focus on technology after years of research to be able to translate their program codes that are in punch cards. Also, their basic knowledge of magic is quite high, thanks to their way of seeing magic as numerical codes.

### Magic

The Recounters, like any other race, are capable of learning a wide variety of magic, but after years of learning programming, they have created a new type of magic they call translation magic.

#### Translation Magic

The translation magic is a type of magic created by the Recounter that can create a purple sphere capable of reading the number cards on the punch cards and translating them into a magical output depending on the number codes read. The magic is also able to translate and read runes and other languages, allowing the Recounter to communicate with any race. However, the translation magic must first receive the information manually before it can use the ability to translate.

## History

### Origin

In the early years of the world, a small group of ancient vampires traveled to the mountains north of Iceberg. After a successful hunt for a human village, they gathered enough corpses and bodies for a great feast. With large carts full of corpses, they moved through the snowy area, climbing up the mountains, looking for a good place to rest and shelter from others. The snowstorms covered the tracks of their group so that they could avoid a revenge attack by the humans. After searching the area, they found a large cave that could accommodate them all and provided shelter from the storm. Celebrating the delicious taste of flesh and blood, they began creating their ghouls from the remaining ghouls. After celebrating with his group, the leader of the group, in a drunken state, throws one of his comrades who angered him against a cave wall. They expected their comrade to explode on the wall, but they didn't expect the wall to break as the other vampires flew through the wall, exposing a new area of the cave leading deeper into the mountains. In their drunken state, the group, with the leader in the lead, followed the path that led deeper into the cave. When they reached the end of the cave, they found a small room with a pillar. On the top of the pillar was a strangely shaped stone with a strange list of numbers. The leader looked at the stone before picking it up. He felt nothing and dropped the stone on the ground in his drunken state, but when it hit the ground, the object flashed in a purpil flash and lit up the whole room. The leader and the group of vampires got a visual disturbance as they saw numbers and codes everywhere, as slowly their middles merged and understood the meaning of it. This stone showed them everything, the meaning of the world, the meaning of the numbers and the solution and reason for the existence of the world and they knew that everything is hidden in this stone. From that day on, this group of vampires decided to pay their lives to discover the secrets of the stone, known as the Plan, and are the beginning of the born of the Recounter.

### Development

After the discovery of the plan, the Recounters began to drop their dark art of magic and began researching the numbers and codes of the plan, slowly acquiring a knowledge to understand how these numbers worked and being able to write them into punch cards. However, although they were eventually able to encode commands and magic in the number codes, they did not know how to preserve the power of the number codes. Therefore, the Recounters began to abandon their own magical arts and tried to develop a new magic that could use the number codes. Thus, they managed to create the translation magic, which allows them to read the number codes and output them as magical energy. But even with this magic, the numerical codes are rarely used, forcing the Recounter to think about how to solve this problem. After years of experimentation, the Recounter began to look at the mechanical and biological aspects. This prompts the Recounter to build the Gear Ghouls, which finally have a use for the punch cards and allow them to create mindless soldiers that are more effective than any other vampires, because they don't need complete corpses, as they can patch together multiple corpses and replace the missing parts with machine parts. The creation of the translator could be built into the Gear Ghouls so that commands could be sent from the punch cards to the Gear Ghouls. After the Gear Ghouls were put into operation, the Recounter needed the necessary parts to remove them. The resources for the machine parts and the bodies needed. Therefore, they built the Gear Ghouls to dig and build deeper and deeper into the mountains to get the resources and also create more underground habitat, slowly but surely increasing in number and area. To solve the other problem, the Recounters had to expand into the outside world to satisfy their hunger and the bodies they needed. In order not to be discovered as vampires, they also began to use diguism magic and invested their time in the black market and in the business of slavery and human trafficking. With this development, they built their habitat in the mountains of Iceberg and now, with the necessary resources and manpower, they can invest all their lives in building more complex technologies and larger numerical codes, getting closer step by step to the full understanding of their sacred relic, the Plan.

### Present Time

In the present, the Recounters are still working on developing their technology and punch cards, so this race is currently the most advanced compared to other civilizations. The Gear Ghouls and the Translators are always evolving, which allows them to have more complex units and missions to develop their civilization. A huge metropolis was created under the mountains, focused on developing technologies or keeping corpses and slaves in different areas. After some time, the Recounters make contact with the society. On one of their trips to archive slaves, the group of Recounters met Paytson Bioleck, the pillar of production, and after an accident in which the pillar realized their true identity. However, after an agreement between Frederick Stickholm and the top number traders, they exchange resources among themselves. The Recounters provide their advanced knowledge of technologies and weapons, while the Company supplies the Recounters with the materials and bodies they need to fulfill their wishes, marking the Recounters' first collaboration with an outsider in history.

## Trivia

* The image and idea is based on the PnP adventure Ultracore
* The image of the Gear Ghouls are from Resident Evil 8, Invinceble(death soldiers) and Wolfenstein