Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: DemoSquid on <09-08-16/1343:06>
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Hi guys!
I've played a LOT of Shadowrun over the years and, well, after a long hiatus... I'm trying to gear up to get to PLAY again!
There are a few restrictions. This is Shadowrun 3rd. There are no Otaku. It is right back into the good(?) old days. In theory this is a good thing because 3rd was where I've spent most of my Shadowrunning life!
But... I'm getting a weird problem.
I just can't come up with a character I want to play.
I keep trying to throw numbers and concepts around, and nothing seems to stick! Maybe it is because I'm GM'd nonstop for the past few years, but I've been staring at this problem all week and I just can't break my Shadowrun Character Writer's Block.
So I thought I'd come to you fine chummers to help me out.
Tell me about your best characters. Tell me who they were, what made them tick, what got them out of bed in the morning. Why were they fun to play? What sticks with you?
If this crazy idea works, I might just come back and return the favour one day. ;)
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Well, let's see here. I have Mouse the elf sniper from the NAN. Then there's Mod the decker from Japan who only curses in Japanese. I also have Taliesin the elf magician who is also the bastard son of a certain painted elf (THAT was an interesting/hilarious/insane campaign).
Any of those piquing your interest?
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Sometimes a random generator is just the thing to kickstart a character concept:
http://zylus.github.io/shadowgen/
http://www.enklave-23.de/WTF/
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Browsing picture archives, my own or Pinterest, usually helps me to come up with cool concepts for character.
Right now I have an ex-humanis turned full blown street samurai, bushido philosophy and a Japanese Language Soft on Level 1, included.
The second char is a reggae DJ divination Mage, who uses music and rituals to do his work.
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Embarrassing mistake on my first post. I thought you were looking for 5E and not 3rd. Silly me read your post and answered 12 hours later.
Well two ideas that might work in 3e as well even though I do not know a lot about anything released before 2008.
Elegant elven (specifically dryad) face and gunbunny. Always well dressed and loves her silenced pistols and shock gloves or shock hands and other electrically based never equipment. She has a terrible history. Dead mother killed by her boyfriend and dead boyfriend as well as a violent father she copes by partying and always being as upbeat as she can (with a nice dose of Nova and Psyche perhaps)
Elven mystic adept / (mage? in 3rd.) who likes detection and health magic for finding things and buffing herself. She works as a PI when she is not working the shadows. She doesn't want to be recognized as a Mage so she mainly uses two pistols when she fights often loaded with Shock ammo to arret potential fugitives
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I often like to start with an interesting negative quality or try to throw together two seemingly disparate aspects of the world and see what I can come up with. Most of my better characters have come from this process. For a few examples (in 5th ed, but the principle can still apply)...
Starting with the "dry addict" quality, I decided I needed an interesting reason that this guy stopped using. I came up with a former gang enforcer who had been a kamikaze addict, but during a job gone south the Star came down on him, and, needed an extra bit of juice, he overdosed, collapsed, and was arrested. He's been recently released and has decided that drugs are crutch, and has starting augmenting himself to make up for that lost edge. Also turned to bushido for the discipline he needs to stay away from the stuff, but with a very street gang spin on it.
In another case, I wondered how you could put together a conservative Japanese background and American Indian shamanism. Came up with a young half-Japanese Shiawase citizen, who's father is a powerful executive. They manifested magical talent but simply weren't meshing with Shintoism, Wuxing, or any any of the other traditional styles of magic taught in East Asia. Wanting to explore the American half of their heritage (and being singled out in Japan for being a halfblood), they badgered their father until he caved and grudgingly got them into a university in Seattle to study western hermetic magic, though they quickly became more interested in their Amerindian Studies classes and found their totem animal, and are now putting one foot into the shadows as they try to escape the rigid academic approach of their thaumaturgical studies and try to work with their gut a little more.
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I often like to start with an interesting negative quality or try to throw together two seemingly disparate aspects of the world and see what I can come up with. Most of my better characters have come from this process. For a few examples (in 5th ed, but the principle can still apply)...
This is pretty much what I do also! Not only in shadowrun but in just about every game I play. I never like to play the usual.
The players at the time were going to Bug City. My existing character just said "no way.. this job is too dangerous. I'm not going". What the players really needed was a mage.
So..I knew I was going to play a mage-type, but I wanted bioware too.. At the time bioware was a new thing. Why did this mage have bioware?
Maybe someone stuffed it in him as an experiment.. against his will. Why? Perhaps they were trying to make a "cyber-assassin" that couldn't be detected easily.
So... My character was a young kid living on the streets eeking out a meager existence when he was kidnapped for bioware experimentation. After all, no one was going to miss a sin-less street urchin. They began inserting various bioware into him, when in between surgeries, Rat came and spoke to him. Rat told him how to escape and provided the magic to do it (he awakened). After his escape he went back to living on the streets but began learning to control his new abilities with the guidance of Rat. The doctors hadn't had time to get too much Bioware in him so his magical abilities severely curtailed (only 1.0 essence loss). He suffered from PTSD and a severe phobia of all things Medical. When the trouble broke out in Bug City he had the street survival skills to stay away from most of the danger. The runners came across him during a fight with some bugs and he saw an opportunity to perhaps steal some good stuff, or maybe up his survival chances. The runners needed someone that knew the city, particularly the back alleys and other ways to get from point A to point B without attracting a lot of attention. In addition they discovered he had magical abilities which they desperately needed to counter the bugs, so they welcomed him with open arms. When the team left Bug City, he went with them.