The Drummer

The Drummer is one of the series’ core character, and part of a team of “mystery archaeologists”. These investigators reconstitute what should have been and fight against the suppression.

Our notes for The Drummer are embarrassingly old, though.

Background

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Powers and Abilities

The Drummer has a peculiar relationship with data and information.

1. He can talk to machines and tell them what to do.
2. He can sense flows of information (of any nature) in an instinctive way and get impressions about it.
3. He’s a natural anti-surveillance device.

He also seems highly intelligent (although he’s nuts). His skills at computer and telecoms engineering, hacking, phreaking  and so on seem superhuman.

History

The Drummer is the most enigmatic Planetary member. It is only known that he joined Planetary after Wagner did.

Planetary is an organisation seeking to unravel the secret history of the 20^th Century. As far as we know, it is entirely a support and intelligence operation, with only one field team – always made up of three metahumans. At present they are Elijah Snow, Jakita Wagner and The Drummer.

Led by a shadowy figure known as “the Fourth Man”, they seem primarily opposed by an organisation called Artemis. Artemis is led by “the Four”; crushingly powerful post-humans who travelled into space in 1961 as part of a shadow-government cold war operation.

Description

The Drummer dresses in ordinary clothes, with a 1970s theme in style and colors, and a slightly nerdish aspect. He has short sideburns, and a short goatee.

He often drinks Coke from those small glass bottles (but named Whak for copyright reasons), and always has a pair of drumming sticks, which he constantly spins with his fingers or uses on random object. If he doesn’t have his sticks, then he’ll be finger-drumming instead.

Personality

The Drummer is nuts, but not in a massively obvious or disadvantageous manner. “Weird” would be a better description. He detests physical danger due to a bad experience during a Planetary mission. Therefore, he’ll stay behind in the helicopters on most missions.

He really shines when information involved, or during missions briefings. The Drummer does all the research and preparation.

The Drummer tends to consider people he doesn’t know as slow-witted. He also has an habit to reduce everything to a key word, so Jakita generally ask him “What’s the word, Drums ?” to get information.

Quotes

“The Drummer. First name The, second name Drummer.”

“You’ll regret being so damn abusive when the electric UFO gods transphase in from dimension ten to appoint me manager of the Universe.” [pause] “I said that aloud, didn’t I ?”

“Learning curve’s steep on this one, so keep focused. The word is rockets.”

DC Universe History

The concept behind Planetary has three important points :

• There is a secret history of the superhuman and fantastic, purposefully hidden.
• A vast conspiracy is responsible for this – and purposefully isolates humanity from the wonders and terrors that are actually present on Earth.
• This secret history is a strangely twisted history of the comic books themselves, and their iconic characters and events, but strangely warped and somewhat sinister.

Thus, introducing Planetary and its field team in your campaign (DCU or otherwise) means you have decided there is a “secret history” and hidden wonders and dangers in the world. These can be relatively minor, or you could go for the “everything you know is a lie” approach.

An adventure involving Planetary could thus cast a strong doubt on an aspect of the universe your players took for granted.

For instance, a strange, alien sanctum where the character find the embalmed corpses of the JLA, as of 1968. Or a slightly odd villa in the Rockies where Bruce Wayne’s parents are enjoying their retirement. Or photographs of Kennedy in Dallas, shaking hands with an impressive-looking hero group in front of a cheering crowd and numerous press photographs – all of the group’s members being complete unknowns to the characters.

Basically,twist the campaign world away from what it was supposed to be, and suddenly make it unknown.

By Mark A. Ayen and Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Planetary, published by Wildstorm.

Helper(s): Roy Cowan, Hartley Holmberg.