Kazpur Gooding

“Guy like Kazpur? Doesn’t need spells. He’s got bulkhead fists, a small army of idiots, and just enough true believer trouble sniffing around him to make everything worse. I don’t buy his mumbo-jumbo—but I don’t stand in front of him, either.”

— CrenshawMack

Minion on the Make

Kazpur Gooding has been a Minion in the Hyperion Crime Ring for what he considers several lifetimes too long. By rank he’s “just” the field commander of a hit squad, answerable to a Toady who answers to a Boss. In practice, Kazpur runs his crew—the Goat Boys—like a personal army and half a cult, and treats the rest of the chain of command as temporary obstacles he’ll eventually bulldoze.

Kazpur’s job, officially, is muscle: hits, punishments, and terror jobs. The Goat Boys don’t pull many high-profit heists; when they do, they’re usually punitive raids meant to send a message rather than balance a ledger. Smuggling is strictly side hustle—running chems, illicit cyberware, or “hot” bodies and synth platforms between safehouses to keep the crew in walking-around money and stims. On top of that, Kazpur keeps several local businessmen, midgrade gangsters, and corrupt officials on a private blackmail drip, ensuring a steady trickle of Chits that doesn’t pass through his Toady. The HCR hierarchy would call this “initiative.” The Psychovector would call it “probable future problem.”

He doesn’t want to be a Toady. He doesn’t even want to be a regional Boss. Kazpur wants a seat with the Grannies or whatever those whispered “overboss” rumors hide at the top. He sees every job as a rung on that ladder. Every corpse is a résumé line.

Raised by Mercy, Turned by Spite

Kazpur was born on Rhea, under the shadow of Saturn, and raised in a Mercy House attached to a Seekers of Wisdom convent. He grew up watching sermons, catechisms, and moral lectures delivered with practiced cadence to rooms full of desperate people. Where most children saw comfort, Kazpur saw mind control. The idea that anyone, anywhere, genuinely believed in divine grace struck him as absurd. To him, the pulpit was a blunt instrument for guilt, fear, and behavioral management.

The faith curdled in his mouth early. He wasn’t seduced by subspace, not at first, but he was absolutely seduced by the idea of power over minds. He walked away from the Mercy House with two dominant convictions:

1. Religion is theater, and
2. Whoever controls the theater controls the crowd.

Where most ex-orphans drifted toward legitimate work or petty crime, Kazpur went straight for organized violence. The HCR was a natural fit: a syndicate that trafficked in chems and fear. He climbed quickly to Minion status by being meaner, louder, and more organized than the competition. Then he discovered he could mix his childhood “theatrics” with real-world brutality.

The Goat Boys and the Cult of Fear

Kazpur’s crew, the Goat Boys, are a hit squad wrapped in occult branding. They dress in black combat jumpsuits, paint or print white sigils they barely understand across armor and clothing, and wear goat masks with spiraled horns and too many eyes when going masked. They call themselves Goats; their disposable hangers-on and temporary muscle are Kids. It’s not magic—it’s branding. It’s intimidation. And it works.

He maintains his Mooks’ loyalty by presenting himself as a sorcerer-boss:

• He stages “curses” that are backed up by carefully timed beatings, arsons, and disappearances.
• He orchestrated at least one fake death-and-resurrection for a Mojave City street vendor to cement his own legend.
• He terrorizes his own people with rigged “ritual punishments” so they never dare call the act out.

Some of his crew kind-of-believe, some absolutely believe, but none of them are brave enough to say it’s bullshit. Not after what happened to Joen—one of his early skeptics who crossed him publicly and died in a way that made “curses” a very convincing explanation.

Kazpur treats his occult trappings the way other Minions treat brand identity. The sigils, candles, smoke, and goat masks are a fear amplifier, giving him more leverage for less expenditure of bullets. As long as he can keep the mystique going, his people will shoot where he points, bleed where he orders, and die believing he’s something more than just a Criminal with too many implants.

When the Hellfire Came Calling

For years, Kazpur’s “magic” was a con job—a terrifying one, but still empty of true subspace involvement. Then the Hellfire Cabal came for him.

Hellfire had been trying to subjugate a Sentient that called itself Valefor, but the Secundus slipped the leash in the smartest way possible: it let Hellfire believe it was already being wielded by Kazpur Gooding. To them, that meant one thing—competition. Another subspace power-player on Terra, operating under their nose.

They hit him hard. Seasoned Hellfire hitters, neural weapons, actual RAIs in the wings. Kazpur watched his own version of the Mercy House sermon in reverse—his troops reduced to screaming, flailing meat, harried by real Things From Beyond. The rituals he’d used for years to scare shopkeepers and gang punks suddenly looked like finger-paint theology.

That should have broken him. Instead, it lit him on fire.

Kazpur managed—through sheer brutality and opportunism—to take one Cabal member alive. Over days of cruel interrogation, he broke out enough half-understood doctrine, terminology, and point-of-contact names to wedge himself into the edges of the occult underworld. He got:

• Names of kthonikers
• Locations of safehouses and shrines
• The outlines (but not theory) of Callings, Contracts, and subspace hierarchies

He understood none of it properly. Not the metaphysics, not the risks, not the long game. But he understood one thing crystal clear: this was real. And real or not, it could be weaponized.

Kazpur the Dabbling Butcher

Kazpur is now one of the most dangerous types of occult-adjacent operator:
a man with resources, muscle, just enough accurate information to be lethal—and absolutely no grasp of the stakes.

He:

• Captures kthonikers and tortures them, not to learn how to perform Callings with skill, but to find where they keep their trappings and grimoires.
• Treats subspace artifacts like guns or stims—things you steal, hoard, and point at people.
• Assumes that whatever demons, RAIs, or Wights he stirs up can be handled by the same formula that’s always worked for him: more force, more bodies, more cyberware.

He is materialistic to the core. To Kazpur, subspace is just another angle:

• A new set of tools to terrify the weak
• New levers to pull in the HCR hierarchy
• A ladder to climb out of Minion-hood and straight into the Grannies’ council

He’s not exploring metaphysics. He’s looking for more efficient ways to scare, hurt, and dominate.

In the eyes of RAIs and true kthonikers, this makes him an idiot with a lit cigar in a munitions locker. In the eyes of normal people, it makes him a nightmare.

The Monster in the Doorway

Physically, Kazpur is a giant. He fills doorways. In his work jumpsuit he looks obese, a wall of mass that moves like a dropped safe. His nose is broken and rebroken, never repaired because the crooked brutality suits his personal brand. His jaw is uneven, reinforced and left visibly scarred because it makes him look like he’s chewed through bad odds and won. He keeps his hair carefully coiffed, with distinctive sideburns and small, piggy eyes that glitter with anger or amusement, but rarely warmth.

When violence comes—and it does, often—Kazpur doesn’t slip into armor or hide behind cover. He’s just as likely to strip to the waist, letting the enemy see what they’re actually dealing with. The fat that made him look slow in clothing is revealed to be barrel-chested powerlifter muscle, overbuilt shoulders and arms, and a midsection packed with woven Cybernetics and reinforced bone. Kazpur is a walking warning label.

He’s not subtle. He’s a demonstration.

Cybernetic Overkill

Kazpur’s body is half meat, half weapon system. He invests heavily in hardware that makes him:

• Hard to kill
• Hard to knock down
• Hard to surprise
• Terrifying in a fistfight or gunfight

Sensory & Tactical Systems

• Combat Nexus – Battlefield overlay, marks enemies, tracks allies, fights fog of war, and makes surprise nearly impossible.
• Tinfoil Hat (Mind Shield levels) – Para-radar skull mod that gives him strong resistance to Psionics, Neural Weaponry, and telepathic intrusion.
• Voxconn – Radio implant for silent command-and-control out to 10 miles.
• Sunshield (x3) – Protective retractable eye shields; toughens his eyes against flash, debris, lasers.

Time & Cognitive Edge

• Lightning Drive – Grants Altered Time Rate (2) in perceptual terms; he processes events at triple subjective time, making split-second tactical calls with eerie calm.

Strength & Frame

• Basic Prosthetic Arms with +4 Arm ST – His punches, grapples, and weapon handling are well beyond human norm.
• BigBone System (+4 Lifting ST) – Reinforced skeleton and servo supports that let him lift, grapple, and apply crushing force vastly out of proportion to his mass.
• Gorillas – His unarmed strikes hit like sledgehammers; punches do boosted damage, double knockback, and enjoy “exploding” dice.

Durability & Pain Resistance

• Molerat – No shock penalties; he shrugs off pain that would put others in shock.
• DieHard (multiple levels) – Incredible resilience against outright death; he tends to “die,” lie still, then get back up.
• Rhino Tan – DR 3 over his flesh, a living combat hide.
• Glitterati – DR vs. beams and radiation resistance; his skin scintillates faintly and likes to bounce light.
• Rayshield (Head, Chest, Both Arms) – Micro-shield generators along his hair follicles give DR 10(4) on exposed regions, particularly upper torso and head.

Mobility & Stealth

• Catspaws – Reinforced legs and spine; negates fall distance, halves fall damage, and gives +5 to Stealth vs hearing. He doesn’t move quietly in conversation—but when he wants to stalk, the big man can stalk.