I didn't see a topic for it, which is odd, cause there just needs top be! It's time to describe your character. Or, if you run through several campaigns, your favorite/current character!

I'll go ahead and start:

Kyleigh Wester, or Ikasu as he goes by, is a young combat decker who does just as much fighting as decker. His high charisma gives him an almost perfect semi-feminin anime-esk look, though it's immediately off set by the long cybernetic tail extending from the base of his spine. Brown hair, brown eyes, and he wears what looks like an aviation jacket over regular clothing. He's a constant smartass and more then eager to start a fight, but in the end he plays good guy and rarely kills. He has a minor matrix addiction.

A Rigger who desperately misses having a functioning liver.

(That said, I'm not really sure there needs to be—descriptions of other people's characters are rarely enthralling. Of course, if I'm right, the thread will naturally drop into obscurity, so don't let me stop you :) )

~J

Well I enjoy such threads, you never know when someone's idea will jump out of your monitor, grab you by the throat, and scream "Use me as a NPC or die!" :cyber:



Bot is a mage who considers himself just a bit "quirky", but his previous employers at Ares remember him as a brillant magical researcher who cracked under stress and became a fragging loon who cut off his own hand and threw it at his shrink while in a session. He sports more cyber then most mages do, including a cyberhand and cybereyes that glow on command. His primary passion in life however is still understanding the heartbreaking beauty of magical theory, including the raw power that flows in the veins of every living creature.

I enjoy these types of threads, too. I often find one or two concepts that appeal to me, either for character inspiration or for use as an NPC or contact. Course, if you describe your character in one ambiguous sentence without even citing a name, I can see why you may not fancy such topics. :P

That said, one of my all time favorite characters is Ol' Scratch. He's a satyr (usually as a spikebaby changeling since I don't like the ork metavariant all that much, with his early life colored by the whole UGE fear) blues guitarist who sincerely believes he sold his soul to the Devil for fame and fortune. Within a year of making the deal, he had obtained a huge recording contract, was engaged to a beautiful young elf and otherwise had the world as his oyster. Then, on the night he went out with his fiancee to celebrate the record deal, they got shanghaied by a marauding pack of ghouls after leaving the pub. His wife was slaughtered before his eyes. Just as they were tearing into Scratch, a Lone Star patrol wandered by and interupted the feast.

Scratch was rushed to the emergency room. His injuries were severe and he lost his arm, but his life insurance only had a clause for a cheap prosthetic replacement instead of a cloned part (with neither cloning nor modern cybernetics being a viable options at the time). After his recovery, life just kept getting shittier and shittier. The record company he had a contract to demanded an album, but his cybernetic hand didn't have the fine control his meat one did and he just couldn't perform. The resulting breach of contract lawsuit left him bankrupt and in debt. He held out for as long as he could, but one night he got shitfaced drunk and decided to rob a liquor store. It didn't go very well and he ended up behind bars. And it just kept going on and on from there until he finally fell into the newly emerging shadows.

If it wasn't for his strict Catholic upbringing, he would have offed himself long ago, but he can't risk suicide (a cardinal sin and passport straight to Hell) and never seeing the love of his life again. Not to mention the whole winning his soul back thing. So instead, he tries to do what he can to prolong the inevitable until an opportunity arises for him to do that very thing and see his would-be bride again.

He's had several variant incarnations. Sometimes a purely mundane street samurai type, but more often than not an adept with unarmed combat powers limited to a Condition:Drunk geas for the whole drunken boxing effect. (That combo was particularly fun once Enthralling Performance and similar powers showed up in the game). He's also pretty old for a runner, well into his late 40's/early 50's in most games. Doesn't care a wit's end about cash beyond saving up for something else to keep him alive and ticking plus enough left over to pay the rent on his shitty apartment. Just.. really down and dirty.

He's a very earthy character and a ton of fun to play. Definitely my all-time favorite.

A rollerblading streetmage named Flux. Specializes in illusions and telekinetic manips. Very fun to zip around and cause chaos with. Almost made a mobility adept with the same concept but I decided on a mage.

Morgan "Doc" Shanes

Morgan is an ex-DocWagon heavy threat response team pilot/combat medic. He took to the shadows when his sister got into the Yakuza for more than she'd ever make in a lifetime. Doc did a bunch of research, made some new "friends" and learned as much as he could about running the shadows, almost as if it were a college course. After a few lucrative jobs, knowing that no amount of money would ever actually get them away from the Yaks, he pulled in some favors (including one owed him by a Tir ambassador) and got his sister "vanished" to England. He followed shortly after.

Chronos, with the name Gabriel Walker on his current set of SINs, is old. He's not sure how old, but his Doc says there are definite signs he has had a Leonisation treatment at least twice. He is a rather perculiar amnesiac, in that it appears his memory loss was actually imposed upon him in an attempt to retain his sanity. What he does know is that at some point he worked Spec Ops, and there are a damn lot of Elves nosing around in his history. His cyberwares tend towards the Delta grade, and low profile...nothing that he couldn't sneak past security, or purchase a license for if he had to. He is a human male, appears to be in his early thirties, and has the kind of face that just fades into a crowd. His only truly distinguishing feature is the tattooes that cover his body from neck to wrist and down to his feet, they are a visually disturbing non-euclidean pattern of swirls and spirals...most viewers get a little nauseated and/or disoriented if they look at them for too long. He does not remember getting them.

These threads can certainly be useful, and fun if approached correctly.

My very first Shadowrun character, years and years ago, was a decker named Aristotle (hence my name on these forums). He was an opinionated sixteen year old with a mop of curly red hair, freckles, and a streetsweeper. He always wore goggles, but they were almost always set high on his head to keep his hair out of his eyes. Ari ran a small "arcade" on the edge of the barrens. It wasn't profitable, but it was a neutral hangout for several smaller gangs that allowed him to live above the arcade unharmed so long as he kept the place online and fun. Ari collected and restored "antique" game consoles in his free time.

Grandmaster D is a dwarfen nahualli living in an AZT-enclave in Seattle. As any proper citzien he was brainwashed to prefer AZT products and is reluctant to work against "his" corp. He specialises in illusion magic and uses an X-Bow IF he does fight physically. According to GD, anyone should embrace technology in the wireless age. This of course leads to clashes with the pure-magic shaman/eco-terrorist on the team.

...My first, and longest running SR character is my Namesake KK. Originally she began as a straight athletic/blade adept back in the original SR1. By the time she made it to, SRIII, KK had taken toting her now ubiquitous six-guns and adopting her Bushido Cowgirl persona. This was a direct after effect from her participation in the A Fist Full O Karma segment of Harlequin's Back.

Of course being my all time fave, I had to "redesign" her for SR4 albeit as a starting character again (for some reason a 300+ karma character really didn't set well with the GM, don't know why :grinbig:). So from the Get go I kept odd fusion of her traditional Japanese and Wild West backgrounds and added in a few new surprises.

So, KK, when you revised her as a starting character for 4th Edition, did you drop all of the stories built up during play in the other editions and come up with a new background or what? Like, things she did as a 300 karma character suddenly never happened?

Rabbit isn't quite sure who she is anymore, sure she clearly remembers growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in some urban hell hole, only she can't quite place which sprawl it was in or the name of the gang she used to run with even though she can draw their faces down to every last detail. Hells, she doesn't actually remember going under the knife for the rather nice chrome she sports.

But the most distrubing thing of all is that she can't recall anything at all from the last couple of weeks and her now ex-girlfriend called her Jessica with her dying breath.

@ Doc. Funk: I think I remember a game here on the forums where you ran Ol' Scratch. Definitely a cool character.

One of my favorites was a 14 year old girl named Push. She was in a gang and, as a result of the gang's rules, had to masqueraded as a 11 year old boy. She was very slightly magically active and knew one spell: Influence. She was the gang's drug dealer (precious, isn't she) and also helped out at a local brothel (not working Johns, just cleaning up and getting drinks, etc.). The best part was the teenage boy that she hooked-up with (working in a brothel, she wanted to see what all the fuss was about) but she ended up pregnant. Aborted the pregnancy (and subsequently owed "favors" to the mob), but the teenage boy kept hanging around. Since the rest of the gang thought she was a boy, it made for some interesting role playing.

I know I'm having to do that for Doc. Well, I'm not so much pretending the stuff he accomplished never happened. It's more along the lines of chunking that stuff in his background and ignoring the fact that statistically, he's not as advanced as he would be in the SR3 rules.

Mostly, I just want to be able to play him in a new game, and I'm not about to ask a GM "hey, this character has been around for a while, so I gave him a crapload of free karma, is that cool?" :)

It's almost like the new Doc is just another guy in an alternate dimension.

My favorite character is "Big Bertha". You'd know her if you ever saw her, she's big even for a troll, and she sports a pair of kid stealth cyberlegs that she ain't shy to show. She lost her legs back when she was in the military, and got the odd replacements because she's proud of looknig different, and she's a bit of a body-modificiation addict. Lots of peircings and tatoos, but all are more tasteful than in your face. She ain't shy about her femininity, at least in part because she loves to see it make people uncomfortable. She works barback and bouncing at a local dive, which pays the rent but not the maintainence.

In the military she was a emplacement gunner, and in the shadows she's a one woman heavy weapons platform. Her signature weapon is an LMG on a gyromount. You don't hire her unless you need that kind of firepower.

In the team she worked on, she frequently wound upp wearing the dwarven parapelegic rigger as a backpack. He'd face backwards and cover her rear arc.

Wow! Glad to see so many replys in only a few days. I'm currently working on a GM character for a campaign i'm running. Thinking about making a shapeshifter shaman, just because, but I haven't worked it out yet.

If any of you want to use Ikasu as an NPC feel free, but PLEASE let me know before hand, thats all I ask. Oh and, try not to get him killed :P.

Ok. I intent to use Ikasu as a NPC hacker for the team, and do not intent to kill him per se. It´s just likely to happen somewhere along the line :P

Hopes it's a concept and not actually my character XD If I awake to find my sheet missing tomorrow i'll suspect something.....

And my group will have 5 more karma to spend ;)

If you DO have that char in electronic format, I´d be glad. Else I´ll be doing my regular thing and ignore the need for "fixed" stats...

..yes, basically being effectively a new character none of the old war stories (many of which were pretty cool) would have applied.

For one the original character would be 33 years old in 2070 (she began her career in 2052 at the age of 15.)

Also there would be no sense in trying to make sense as to what happened to all of the Karma she had invested. All of a sudden she would wake up one morning and *poof* everything worked for, fought for, and nearly died for was gone?

Furthermore, were I even allowed to play her as she was, KK exceeded the Skill/Attribute caps and basically in reengineering would lose a lot of her applied Karma anyway. Also a number of her edges and flaws were no more or had been so drastically changed in the new ruleset that they didn't have the same effect on the character.

In short, Conversion would have been areal pain.

Another part to this was while we were figuring out the ropes of the new rules, I at least wanted a character concept I had familiarity with. That was why the new character was named KK4.0, KK4.1, etc... as she was modified the more we understood the rules. In a way she was originally kind of a "Beta release" to playtest the SR4 in our group. The thing is, while playing her, she kind of grew on me in some ways even more so than the original.

So basically The SR4 KK is somewhat the same personality as she was in SRII -III but with a background that fits the current canon and is still a teenager.

[edit]

...yeah that's exactly it. Kind of like the J.T Kirk from the Mirror Mirror episode of the old Trek, only in KKs' case dain bramaged instead of evil.

Why not? I did, and guess what? He said yes (yay Fisty! :D), and then set about designing a game suitable for a group of that level.

yeah eidolon, maybe you should drop in for a game. :D

Hah, I might have it in a text file really but feel free to take him and just wing it, it's not like it's canon to my campaign, not unless you live in Tennessee and are looking for a new group.

Sounds interesting...I have only one character, but will have more soon. (I hope)

Anyway, meet Kan Kugarugu...but on sprawl streets everywhere, he is known as "Shagu". Born and raised in Chicago...and in the Box to boot, Kan is a take-no-drek kinda guy...seven feet tall and three hundred pounds of solid ork muscle. Unless you're bigger than him, have some kind of gun, or are a troll, you don't wanna meet him in a dark alley...and even then, those three things don't guarantee your safety. He is a samurai, willing to work for anyone that doesn't offend his personal honor; his weapon of choice being his trusty katana(proportionately sized, of course). He also carries a bow(which he is extremely talented with and prefers over firearms if he can help it), a couple shruikens and throwing knives, and an MP5-TX on him at all times. He has long black hair that spills all the way down to his butt, and it usually untied or kept in a double-braid. The long hair is a trademark, as is his lined trenchcoat that keeps his goodies safe from prying eyes.

When he was only eight years old, Kan watched his father die, shot execution-style by a trio of Yakuza hitmen after a failed run...then they took his mother and ten siblings from him as well. (This is an ork we're dealing with, and orks often have large families if I recall properly.) Since then, he has vowed to avenge his family and has been hunting the one responsible for the killings, a powerful Yakuza boss named Sato Tokura, and will do anything...and give everything...to kill him. Kan has connection with several Chicagoland gangers, especially orks in the CZ, and a couple are willing to fight and die for what he believes in. But keep him away from the brothels, specifically in ork and elf-dominant neighborhoods...Kan has a thing for the ladies of those metatypes and is not above doing his own kind of bagging and tagging to them. ;)


Though I have one question...seeing as how orks mature sexually at a younger age, do they mature physically at that age as well, or do they grow with age like a typical human would? That is all.


--
Kan Kugarugu, Orkrunner for hire


((EDIT: Forgot about Kan's facial features...he does have the typical pointed ears and tusks that orks have, but they are a bit gentler on the eye than some orks are. Still...when you look into Kan's eyes, you know you're dealing with an ork.))

That's essentially what they're trying to say when they say that sort of thing most times.