Joseph Woodward

NPC
name Joseph Woodward
alias Giuseppi, The Man in the Hat, Hatman
pronouns he/him
type type
status forcefully retired
A man in a hat. Ex-CEO of the Seventh Tower Consortium. Father to Sizzle. Excellent listener.

Joseph Woodward is Sizzle’s father and the former CEO of Seventh Tower Consortium. He traded most of his humanity to become the head of a semi-sentient corporation. Approximately 60% ego-dead. Currently apprenticed to Giancarlo Valentini.

Appearance

A well-dressed man who appears to be in his early forties. He is rarely seen without one of his signature black, wide-brimmed hats, which were specially created for him in the Imperial City and shipped to Duskvol in bulk.1

Background

About two decades prior to the founding of the Nameless, Joseph Woodward and his wife, Robin “Bo” Woodward, were living in a small community in the Deathlands surrounding the Imperial City. He left the homestead for unknown reasons around the same time as the birth of their first child.

Joseph arrived in Duskvol as the CEO the Seventh Tower Consortium to spearhead the opening of the Duskvol branch. The details of how Joseph joined the Seventh Tower and his rise to executive leadership are currently unknown.

Prior to the events of “The Crash”2, “Joseph Woodward” was a cocktail of a few different phenomena. He is 1 part the man who was Sizzle’s father, 1 part ghost field binding agent (probably related to the arcane documents found in his Deckherd Hall office3), and about 4 parts of… something else. It’s assumed that the “Seventh Tower Consortium” was filling up those 4 parts, but the exact nature of what that is would require more research.4

However, what’s clear is that Joseph Woodward willingly hollowed himself out to put most (not all) of who he was into Seventh Tower Consortium. This would’ve given it a blueprint for a kind of sentience that we’d recognize, as well as keeping Joseph Woodward alive and well as long as Seventh Tower was alive and well. It’s not even as though Joseph would’ve felt much by the sacrifice: as long as he maintained an official and arcane connection to Seventh Tower, he’d be able to keep access to most (not all) of his conception of self AND gain a ton of social and supernatural power in the bargain. Essentially, he found his own blank-slate warlock patron and taught it to be about 80% exactly like him.4

Involvement with the Nameless

Woodward’s connection to the ghost field was severed at the grand opening of the Palisade Avenue Stock Exchange.2 Ordinarily, that effect would be of brief inconvenience, as a spirit would be inexorably drawn to its own still-living body. In Joseph’s case, that spirit had been so adulterated by Seventh Tower Consortium that rejoining the two would have taken time or extreme arcane effort. When he was fully ousted as CEO and had the door shut behind him by The Nameless’s forgery3, there was very little left of him, and it was not clear that he was capable of being more than a hollow shell of a person anymore.4

Sizzle worked to find Woodward a new sense of self and reason for living, eventually asking for help from Giancarlo Valentini, the Nameless’s resident chef/medic. Giancarlo offered to take Joseph on as an apprentice, and his mental state has been steadily improving along with his culinary skills. Upon proving himself to Giancarlo, Joseph was immediately adopted has his son and given the honorary adoptive name “Giuseppi”.5

Citations

  1. Dishonored Guests. https://voidseaphilly.com/story/act-6/2023-11-16/ ↩

  2. The Crash. https://voidseaphilly.com/story/act-6/2024-01-11/ ↩ ↩2

  3. Snakes on a Frame. https://voidseaphilly.com/story/act-7/2024-01-25/ ↩ ↩2

  4. Project clock results, 31 Jan 2024. https://discord.com/channels/1022641517170540574/1129229682777260122/1202267497437614171. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Tales of Duskvol. https://voidseaphilly.com/story/act-8/2024-04-02/ ↩

Last updated February 04, 2024.