[Poindexter]

So, are we deciding on the whole syndicate angle? Because that will likely affect what I'm going to play.

I also second Ryo, I would rather start from Standard as a jumping off point, and then upgrading them.

I don't think anyone has decided on anything yet.

Play what you wanna play, I cannot stress this enough.

EDIT: The motion to start from standard rather than street has been seconded. If we have a third, the motion carries.

[Poindexter]

Initial post has been updated a bit.

Hey rednblack? Won't you tell the rest of the group a bit about baby hardcore, huh?

[rednblack]

So, are we deciding on the whole syndicate angle? Because that will likely affect what I'm going to play.

I also second Ryo, I would rather start from Standard as a jumping off point, and then upgrading them.

I don't think anyone has decided on anything yet.

Play what you wanna play, I cannot stress this enough.

EDIT: The motion to start from standard rather than street has been seconded. If we have a third, the motion carries.

I'll be the third.

Hey rednblack? Won't you tell the rest of the group a bit about baby hardcore, huh?

So, Baby Hardcore is a character I've been trying to do stories with for a few years now, but I've yet to get a one that I'm happy with.  He won't leave my head, though, I'm really happy to be playing him.  At first, I was writing him in a present-day St. Louis or Dallas setting, but I think he's good SR material.  The basic gist is: he had a rough start to life.  Mom had to call Bikers Against Child Abuse to get him and his brother away from dad.  His first memory is being out on the front stoop while his burly leathered up dudes are literally escorting his mom into the house to grab clothes while his dad shoots his mouth off with all sorts of unpleasantness.  A couple years later, and it's the same deal, only with BH's new "Uncle" who had been staying with them for a few months. 

Then mom gave up on men bc bliss is really a whole lot better than a man ever could be anyway, and it was Baby Hardcore who called BACA next after not being fed for like a week.  Not much BACA could do, and BH's brother had already split, so at 12, Baby took to the streets.  He learned a few good cons early on, and that kept him fed so long as he kicked up some of the earnings to the gangers who controlled the area, but you don't stay cute for long, and even though Baby is young, and looks young, the street rat game wasn't getting him anywhere, so he did what a lot of boys who grow up in the sprawls do: he got himself a gun.  In his early days, his favorite targets were dealers.  Not that Baby Hardcore is above getting his buzz on, but as Omar Little would say, "It's all in the game though, right?"  Baby Hardcore was smart about it, he'd catch a bus down a dozen or so blocks, watch his quarry, and then pounce on the guy in the Shin-Hyung, usually without firing a shot. 

He found himself a new family too: Angie and Nina, a troll and elf respectively whom he calls "mom" and "dad," the latter much to Nina's disapproval and his own entertainment.  It was Nina who exposed him to anarcho-punk music of the 20th century, and where he started to develop his neo-A education.  Suddenly, the world looked a lot bigger than his sprawl, and Baby Hardcore started to see that the corps, the government, the syndicates, they were all playing the long game and rigging the rules as they went.  It's awful hard in 2075 to believe in some overarching figure like "the man," but as far as Baby sees it, there's a chess game going on, and the pawns have a lot more power than they know.  So Baby started setting his sets higher.  If there was a chance to take a corp down a few pegs, he'd jump at it.  Embarrass a mafioso, gun down a politician in a bunraku parlor, publish some of Ares' dirty little secrets about how they've been infiltrating and then torturing Terra-First activists, these were Baby Hardcore's wet dreams. 

Only, this line of work is bound to earn you some enemies, and you're lucky if a long, protracted death is all you're up against.  Somehow, Baby fell under the radar of Lin McAlexeyev-San of the Golden Star (since we don't know which syndicate, I'll just go with a portmanteau.)  And Baby Hardcore was issued an ultimatum: a complete or total cleansing of the blocks he loves, or a little work now and then, some ¥ that could sure go to good use on his home turf, and some protections for those who love and depend on him.  At first, Baby hated the reigns, and hated his new masters for them.  And the crew he worked with, slag-offs, every last one of them.  It's awful hard to bleed with somebody, and not start to love them, though.  And sure enough, as they started to depend on him, and he in turn on them, things in Baby Hardcore's revolutionary fantasy started to get a lot more complicated.  Hell, some of them he even likes like get a drink when you're not working kind of "like."  Fucking weird.  On the one hand, the setup is perfect: he gets to keep putting rounds at high value targets for his ultimate agenda.  On the other hand, it's kind of like what the cops do, being in the pocket of what criminal syndicate while taking down another.  Morally ambiguous if not bankrupt.

Last few notes, Baby Hardcore is young, like young young.  Like, if the team has been together for a few years, he might be pushing 18.  It's more likely that he's 16 or 17.  This may or may not make it in game, but he has a milky right eye, and word on the street is that he sold his soul to a devil, a loa, an insect spirit, or something to get his powers.  Either that, or he found a Robert Johnson LP around all those punk records, and made up the story himself.  Still, it's been a lasting stain on his rep.  He looks like this:



tl;dr version: street rat comes up hard, robs drug dealers, wants to move on to corps, but becomes indebted to powerful criminal organization that will wipe out his adopted family and friends if he doesn't play ball.

[Poindexter]

I LOVE him. Only thing is, we're gonna have to do one of two things, as I envision this group to have known one another for 8-10 years.

1- make him older
2- make him the newest member of the group by a LONGSHOT.

Also, is the bit near the end about him getting roped into syndicate duty specifically added cause of the syndicate talk thats been floating around or was that always there? Cause this is NOT decided as a syndicate game at all. In fact, I'd almost say it's definitively NOT a syndicate game, though characters with ties to such are not discouraged.

[rednblack]

The syndicate stuff is an add-on.  If we play it, cool, I think it'll be a good hook for him, but if not, he could just be the starry-eyed idealist of the group, or he was added on for his knowledge of these particular streets, if our first run is taking place around his home turf.

As for timeline stuff, I'd really much rather him be the FNG than older.  I have a hard time imagining someone coming from his perspectives in life being much older than 18, which isn't to say that I think radical political views are necessarily naive, only that he's still in the chanting slogans and seeing the world in a black and white fashion that gets eaten up as you get older, especially in the 6th world.  I want to see his ideals start to crash down around him as the game progresses, not have that as his baseline, ya know?

Just a thought, but Baby's brother is a bit older, and he bounced before BH did, so maybe one of the runners is that brother -- or could be sister?  It'd build pretty instant trust, and all his radicalizing came later, so that wouldn't need to be on the table either.  BH is human, for what that's worth.

[Tecumseh]

Only thing Street Level does is harm gear acquisition. Lower Nuyen totals, lower availability and lower rating caps. Ultimately all that serves to do is hamstring mundane builds while awakened characters barely notice. It wouldn't actually affect my troll much at all, since he's an infected adept, but anybody planning to be a decker or street sam, or just not awakened, would be seriously handicapped.

I'll be the fourth. I used Street Level once and it was poorly balanced for all the reasons Ryo gives. We ended up with 4 Awakened (out of 6) for a ganger campaign. The magicians weren't slowed down in the least by Street Level chargen and proceeded to mop up all the opposition with a steady stream of spirits. I know Poindexter isn't overly concerned about balance but I wasn't thrilled with the results.

I feel like I'm getting some mixed messages about the nature of the game. On one hand it's "play what you want" but at the same time "you've known each other for 8-10 years, trust each other, and will continue to work together". Marrying the two requires a certain amount of collaboration about backstories and making sure we don't pair a pacifist healer with a Kamikaze Combat Monster rage troll.

A gang or a syndicate were suggested as a good way to give the characters a common background, especially since Ryo had a concept for a syndicate kid and 8-bit an idea for a made man. I grant that Baby Hardcore doesn't fit as neatly into a syndicate. We can drop the idea, or maybe revisit the idea of the group growing up in a gang together (representing Step 1 of chargen, perhaps) before graduating to become a shadowrunning team (Step 2 of chargen). Or we can scrap both ideas and just work with our individual concepts to make sure that they don't conflict with each other.

[rednblack]

I really hope Baby Hardcore doesn't end up being the reason why the syndicate angle is scrapped.  It may not be "neat," but I think it's certainly workable.  This would be especially true if we go in for a little collaborative work.  Say, the mafia's had control over Peach St. for as long as anyone could remember.  Capo Joe Walsh ruled with an iron fist, and made sure nobody rolled the sari-men as they exited the gambling dens, or so much as swiped a pie cooling on Mr. Frank's windowsill.  Sure, there was the usual antagonism between the street rats and the suits, and sometimes heads were busted on both sides, but when the Yakuza showed up and kids started turning up missing, well then it was time for the squatters and the mafiosos to line up shoulder-to-shoulder and take Peach St. back.  It's been a few years since the slaughter at Dawe's place, and the old grudges are making their way back into the sprawl, but there's still a level of respect between the two groups, and at times, still cooperation.

Anyway I'm just rambling, but again, I think that part of the fun is coming up with how these disparate types could conceivably work with and trust one another. 

[Poindexter]

Honestly, while having a character with Mob ties is interesting, I'm really not at all interested in doing a game centered around the mob. If that's where you came from, fine, but that aint where this game is gonna focus.

EDIT: I'd like this game to be more "Man vs self" than "Man vs society" and mob stories tend to get into man vs society a lot.

[Ryo]

Could be a case where we started out small time in our own gang, which would be the stage 1 build, and after we went our own ways, some of us may have graduated to bigger and badder crime lifestyles. The Syndicate Kid who was a rebellious brat that was slumming it with his ganger buddies grew up and had to take his position in the family, maybe bringing one of his old buddies along and turning him into a Made Man, as an example.

I'm curious to see how you'll do a Man vs. Self story in an RPG format, Poindexter. That's super character driven, and the key to character driven stories is that the characters themselves are the driving force of the plot. RPGs usually have to be event driven, since it is a force outside of the players that keeps the plot moving forward and forcing them to act.

[SgtBoomCloud]

Hmm...good to know about the standard ruling.  I'll adjust accordingly.  I won't be able to wrap something together mechanically wise till Friday anyhow, but I'm bouncing between a couple of ideas, and want your opinions on each.

First is the decker idea from early.  Callsign "Judge."  He is a human who grew up in the NeoNet family dynamic, and passed aptitutude tests for technical training early.  By age 19, he was in full employ as a stealth spider for a number of NeoNet points of interest.  To him, it was all a game, and he was good, watching the hackers' surprise as they're suddenly bricked, or in his later years as a spider, hit with biofeedback.  But, he got bored shortly after 21, and on his own time started doing work for the other side, dabbling the shadows as a paydata-thief for hire.  Obviously, he got caught on a job directed at NeoNet, and it blew back at him and forced him to run.  Now, he's on the streets with the deck he took along with him, using his talents to find lucrative income, still treating it like a game.

Second is a mys-ad take I hope actually works.  Callsign "Lyall".  She is a dwarf who enlisted in the military upon reaching adulthood, and became part of a special tactical unit thanks to her "uncanny prowess".  By some miracle, it was completely missed that she was Awakened, even to herself, until one mission went bad and her astral aura blew their cover, causing death and injury to many.  Pinned with with-holding of her Awakened status and professional negligence, she was dishonorably discharged and thrown to the streets.  There, she started to hone her talents, using them to survive and scrape a living by.

What do you guys think? I don't have much experience with either deckers or magic-users, so I'm pretty much looking to use this story to broaden my SR understanding

[Poindexter]

OP updated with ROLES TO FILL.

[Tecumseh]

I nominate Baby Hardcore for The Noble Savage.

Based on what he's said, Ryo's Infected Troll may be a good fit with The Wicked Atoner.

SgtBoomCloud's concepts sound like they might match up with The Fall(er) From Grace.

[rednblack]

@Sgt, they both seem pretty interesting, but the disgraced military ma'am might have more of a street feel.

@Tecumseh, what are you interested in playing?

[Poindexter]

Based on what he's said, Ryo's Infected Troll may be a good fit with The Wicked Atoner.

Either that or the Swimming brick, depending on which way he plans on going with it.

[Ryo]

Based on what he's said, Ryo's Infected Troll may be a good fit with The Wicked Atoner.

Either that or the Swimming brick, depending on which way he plans on going with it.

That was exactly what I was thinking. The Wicked Atoner works, but also works for the Syndicate Kid. The Swimming Stone is a close second. No matter how much he may try, there's no escaping the fact he's Infected, and that is a stone that will keep dragging him down.