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| Dr. Andreas Gelé by Eugene Jaworski |
While the game never went as far as I wanted, The Refrigerator lived on and found his way into other games of mine as a semi-recurring bad guy. I say "semi" since he usually never appeared in the same game or campaign twice, but over many games and many campaigns. It turns out his particular flavor of evil is useful in a lot of places.
The Refrigerator began life with enough psychosexual baggage to make Freud sit up in his grave. His earliest incarnation was much more specifically obsessed with preserving beautiful women. That remains a perfectly valid version of him, but for this open incarnation I wanted to get at the larger idea underneath it: Andreas Gelé cannot tolerate impermanence.
He is not so much an admirer of beauty as he is someone who hates age, change, and decay.
Since he has proved useful in my games (and to some people I have lent him to), I thought, why not make the lending formal? Or, more to the point, give him away.
Background
Dr. Andreas Gelé was born into extraordinary wealth, privilege, but not love. His father was a powerful industrialist who believed anything worth having could be bought, owned, and controlled. His mother was a celebrated actress whose face appeared on theater posters, magazine covers, photographs, and advertisements.
As a child, Andreas grew up surrounded by images of his mother. In those images, she was always young. Always beautiful. Always smiling. Frozen forever at the moment the camera captured her.
The woman herself, however, changed. She aged. As she aged she became bitter and cruel.
The difference fascinated Andreas. Later, it horrified him.
Gelé became a physician and researcher specializing in cryonics, hypothermic medicine, suspended animation, and the preservation of living tissue. He possessed a brilliant scientific mind, enormous financial resources, and almost no ethical restraint.
The first of his experiments were a failure. Tissue would die, cells would rupture. One could freeze an animal, perhaps, but there was no safe way to bring it back.
Yet Gelé was not one to give up.
In time he put to rest the suggestion held by others that what he was doing was impossible. For his first human trial he chose his father. How much of a volunteer the elder Gelé was, or whether he was made use of or even misled, is a matter of debate. In any case, he did not last long once revived.
His mother was next. He had her preserved, and in his view the success of it was proof enough. It meant decay could be vanquished, beauty could persist, and time itself brought to a halt. Or, at least, a very slow crawl.
After that, Andreas Gelé no longer saw death or aging as anything natural; they were technical issues to be resolved. Worse, he began to regard anything exceptional as something that should be preserved: youth, talent, genius, rare biology, or an extraordinary feature or trait. If it was at risk of being lost, it had his full attention.
Andreas Gelé does not consider himself a killer or a base murderer.
He instead sees himself as a curator. One who collects and saves.
The ones he selects are specimens of things the world is too negligent to look after, so he preserves them with or without their consent.
Such work has run through most of the vast fortune he inherited. To fund it all, he has resorted to theft and extortion, to illegal experimentation and criminal machinations of ever greater complexity. His cryogenic apparatus has been made portable and weaponized to freeze people, objects, and entire environments as required.
Gelé himself has even repeatedly entered suspended animation.
On some level it is for an experiment; at other times he is making an escape. There are occasions when he just feels the present age has nothing left to give him and makes his choice accordingly.
One can never be sure when or where Dr. Andreas Gelé will appear. He might sleep through decades, let civilizations come and go, allow technology to progress and people to put him out of mind. And then, somewhere, an old cryogenic chamber will start to thaw. The Refrigerator is back.
His outlook is as it ever was: all things beautiful die, the extraordinary vanishes, life itself decays.
Unless one takes the trouble to preserve it.
Appearance
Dr. Andreas Gelé is a tall, thin, pale man of indeterminate middle age. He is not physically imposing. His frame is narrow, his features sharp, and his posture tends toward the rigid precision of someone who dislikes unnecessary movement.
His hair is dark, usually worn neatly combed back, though some versions of Gelé show premature gray or white at the temples. His face is handsome only in a severe, bloodless way. He rarely smiles warmly. When he does smile, it usually means he has just encountered something he finds scientifically interesting.
Gelé dresses with deliberate formality. Depending on the era, this might mean a tailored European suit, a physician’s coat, an old-fashioned evening jacket, or specialized protective clothing of his own design. Even when working in a laboratory or committing a crime, he prefers to look like a doctor or gentleman rather than a conventional costumed villain.
Cold follows him.
His clothing may be dusted with frost. His breath may be visible even indoors. Glass fogs or freezes near his equipment. His gloves, goggles, insulated coats, and other protective gear often resemble medical or industrial equipment more than superhero technology.
The Refrigerator’s most recognizable piece of equipment is a portable cryogenic weapon. Its exact design varies widely. It may resemble a bulky retro-scientific freeze gun, an elegant pistol connected to coolant tanks, a brass-and-glass apparatus from an earlier age, or technology so advanced that its function is barely visible.
Gelé himself should always seem slightly out of his proper time.
He may dress too formally for the present day, use outdated expressions, carry technology decades ahead of everyone around him, or combine obsolete machinery with impossible scientific breakthroughs. Repeated periods of suspended animation have left him disconnected from ordinary history.
His appearance can change from one incarnation to another.
He may be young or old, scarred by failed cryogenic experiments, physically altered by repeated freezing, or almost unnaturally well-preserved. His ethnicity, nationality, clothing, technology, and even gender may be reinterpreted freely.
Essentially, Dr. Andreas Gelé is a person who has spent too much time among things that do not age.
He should look preserved rather than alive.
So now I am releasing him into the Public Domain under the Creative Commons License 4.0, CC BY-SA
What You Can Do With Him
Now that you have him, then what? You can…
- Write stories about him.
- Give him game statistics.
- Put him in your RPG, comic, novel, podcast, video game, or movie.
- Change his origin.
- Change his powers.
- Change his identity.
- Make him a villain, hero, victim, monster, or something else entirely.
- Sell what you create
You may also create new versions of The Refrigerator and place your own original material under whatever copyright or license terms you choose.
Your version belongs to you to the extent that you add something original to him. You do not gain exclusive ownership over The Refrigerator himself, and neither does anyone else.
So, for example, if you create a version of The Refrigerator using the 3e SRD and Open Gaming License. That particular expression of his abilities (class, level, spells, powers) will fall under the OGL, but his background is still CC 4.0, BY-SA.
NOTE: This only extends to the Character. If you write a story, blog, or game that features him then you retain the rights to your own intellectual property.
Use him. Change him. Rewrite him. Redeem him. Kill him. Bring him back. Put him in the 1930s, the present day, the far future, another dimension, your superhero campaign, your horror novel, your comic, or whatever strange thing you are working on.
You may use him commercially. You may create derivative versions. You may change his history, appearance, powers, personality, gender, motives, or anything else.
- You do not need my permission.
- You do not need to credit me. (CC 4.0 BY-SA says you do, but I am not going to enforce it.)
- You do not need to tell me. I would love it if you did, though.
Because I plan to maintain a page called "Sightings of The Refrigerator," linking to versions of Dr. Gelé that turn up elsewhere in the wild.
There will be no official continuity. Your Refrigerator is as valid as anyone else’s.
I am not lending him out. I am letting him go.
He’s everybody's problem now.
Good luck.
Release
Dr. Andreas Gelé, also known as The Refrigerator, is now released under Creative Commons License 4.0, CC BY-SA.
This CC 4.0 dedication applies to the character Dr. Andreas Gelé, also known as The Refrigerator, and to the original character material presented in this post, including his background, personality, appearance, motivations, concepts, and fictional history as described here.
To the extent permitted by law, Timothy S. Brannan has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights that he holds in the CC character material identified above.
See the CC 4.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/#licenses-40
It does not apply to game rules, statistics, mechanics, terminology, settings, characters, trademarks, artwork, logos, or other material owned by third parties that may have appeared in earlier versions or adaptations of The Refrigerator.
Earlier game-system write-ups remain subject to whatever rights apply to those individual works and systems.
Art
The attached art was created by Eugene Jaworski and is owned by me (“Timothy S. Brannan”). It is released under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license with proper attribution.
You may use this art with your creations with the following guidelines.
- The Artist’s name (“Eugene Jaworski”) must appear with any work where the art is used.
- You are allowed to sell your creations of The Refrigerator, but this art cannot be sold independently.
- You are allowed to create your own art of The Refrigerator and use that art as you like.
So let me know how he does in your hands.
Links (Sightings of The Refrigerator)
Note: These pages are not covered under the Creative Commons Licenses.
