Check back every Thursday for the Featured Centurion of the Week. All the Centurions spotlighted are characters in the Race to Adventure! board game.
If you were to use one word to describe Benjamin Hu, mystic detective, it would be “incisive.” From the tip of his deftly wielded rapier to his keen insight and eagle eyes, Benjamin Hu will always put a fine point on any problem put before him—no matter if that problem is a world-shattering occult mystery or an onrushing horde of Hashashiyyin assassins!
Benjamin Hu, Spirit of Mystery
Hu was born in Hong Kong, where mounting British influence led commerce in the territories to take off: silk, silver, spices, as well as trade and truck in stranger realms—mystical texts, mysterious artifacts, unidentifiable procurements of occult antiquity. Benjamin’s parents became dealers in such bizarre relics, a profession that took them around the world—from London to Istanbul to Chicago.
Benjamin first put his keen mind to use when he was very young—not yet a teenager. Someone broke into his family’s secret Chinatown storehouse and stole an archaic and purportedly antediluvian idol from a long-forgotten race in a crass act of burglary. His parents were distraught, and so young Benjamin thought to investigate the theft—but doing so was like kicking over a hornet’s nest. The boy stirred tensions between a powerful Chinese tong (led by the Three Sisters of Water) and a mystic society of ghost worshippers, inciting a full-on mystical war in the back alleys of and passages beneath Chinatown.
Benjamin’s parents tried to put a stop to it. The last Benjamin saw of his parents was when they left him outside and ventured into an illegal gambling house to help negotiate a truce.
That day, they vanished. It haunts Benjamin, and drives him to obsessively hone his skills as a mystical detective and world-class fencer. Hu is like a dog with a bone when confronted by enigmas, and he won’t let one go until he has untied that terrible knot. This makes him a valuable ally to the Century Club, whose members confront a constant stream of seemingly unsolvable puzzles.
To this day, Benjamin still hunts for both the stolen idol and his lost parents.
Chuck Wendig is the author of the upcoming Spirit of the Century novel, which is set in the same universe as the Race to Adventure! board game. Chuck is the author of the upcoming novels Double Dead (November) and Blackbirds (May) as well as a series of books on writing advice available for purchase at his website, terribleminds.
