rules for asian mentor deus ex machina flashback

Welcome Guest ( Log In | Register )

Dumpshock Forums > Discussion > Shadowrun

rules for asian mentor deus ex machina flashback, Orientalist Hand of God

Options

Wounded Ronin

Aug 20 2007, 11:01 PM

Post #1

Great Dragon

Group: Members
Posts: 6,640
Joined: 6-June 04
Member No.: 6,383

At a very obscure bargain store on Pohnpei I found four books from a series called "The Destroyer" by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy from the late 70s. Reading these books has changed my life in ways previously unimaginable. Sweating and burning with orientalism, I reread this thread: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...pic=13774&st=25

Now, I have decided to write rules so that in your SR3 game you can have an orientalist flashback which will save your character from a seemingly intractable situation. First, the flavor text, copied exactly from book 25 from the series "The Destroyer", entitled "Sweet Dreams".

QUOTE

Remo saw happy children laughing, big warm houses, and lovely women secretly smiling. But they kept bursting into flame. And what was worse, they didn't seem to notice. The children kept on laughing, the women smiling.

Remo woke up. He was sitting on a hot floor in the middle of a roaring inferno. One of his legs was stretched full length and the trousers had been burned through by drops of explosive gelignite. He pulled the leg up to his other which was bent to his chest.

The room crackled with flames.

Outside, the entire fire department of Edgewood University - two men and a truck - had arrived to fight the blaze. They had battled for ten heroic minutes until St. Louis had sent in more equipment and trained firemen, whose technique in fighting fires was a little more sophisticated than pumping in enough water to launch Noah's Ark. The Edgewood firemen immediately began to drift off to talk to the Edgewood police about the terrible violence on campus.

Editorial staff members of the Edgewood Quill were at the fire scene, trying to sell copies of their mimeographed [MIMEOGRAPHS PWN! - ed.] special edition on the violence, which reported that although Wooley and Woodward were dead, "there have been no reports thus far of student injuries. All's well that ends well."

The St. Louis Fire Department fought on for five more minutes, then the battalion chief in charge gave up on the house. He ordered his men to just keep it "wetted down" so that embers and sparks could not fly off and imperil any other nearby buildings.

"Let it burn out," he said.

"Suppose someone's in there," a fire captain asked.

"Nobody's alive in there," the battalion chief said and went over to buy a copy of the Edgewood Quill to look at until the photographers arrived at which time he would run back to the equipment and help his men haul hose.

Remo felt the heat blast at his body and the heavy hot air singe his lungs when he breathedk.

He rolled onto his stomach to be closer to the floor and slowed his breathing to reject any smoke that might find its way into his lungs. He raised his body temperature so that he would not feel the heat so intensely.

He looked around., He was in the center of the room, surrounded by flames. The walls and ceiling were burning, and the carpeted floor and the wood underneath had caught fire and the flames were now marching inexorably across Norman Belliveau's tweed pile carpet, $7.95 a square yard including installation, toward him.

He looked for a break in the flames but there was none. He moved himself to a crouch and then did what he thought he would never do. He ran.

He ran in his own mind. He could feel the flames lapping at his legs, and then in his mind, he moved into a room and he closed the door behind him.

The heat that singed his legs no longer hurt. He could breathe.

He thought he heard Chiun's voice and he yelled, "Get me out of here."

"Who are you?" Chiun said.

"Get me out of here. Save your silly games for later."

"If you were a baby I would carry you out," Chiun's voice said in that secret room in Remo's mind. "But you are not a baby. Who are you?"

"I am Remo Williams," Remo said.

"Not good enough," Chiun said.

Remo didn't want this to be hard. He wanted to be human and simple.

Now he could see Chiun. The ancient Oriental stood in a ceremonial white robe across the room from Remo. "Who are you?" he repeated. His voice seemed to be filtered through a tunnel because it resounded with echoes. [crappy late 70s movie effects - Ed.]

"I'm Remo Williams. I'm a Master of Sinanju;" Remo yelled. He felt tears coming from his eyes. They sizzled and disappeared before dropping halfway down his cheeks.

Chiun's face grew cold, almost angry. Remo opened his eyes and Chiun's face vanished. All Remo could see was flames. He closed his eyes again and Chiun's face demanded, "Yes, but who are you?"

And, in his mind, Remo stood and said, "I am created Shiva, the Destroyer, death, the shatterer of worlds. The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju."

"Then walk out," Chiun said.

Remo stood and was back in the burning house. The flames engulfed him. The building shuddered, the flames seemed to roar in triumph.

But it could not match the roar in Remo's mind, the roar of realization and rebirth.

He ran forward through the flames, strongly breathing out, willing the flames away from his face and his eyes. It only took a split second to pass through the flames to a window and then roll through the window out onto the grass. He gulped clean fresh air, barely tained by the smoke from the inferno behind him.

A fireman saw him come through the window and dropped his hose. [Ha ha, he they wrote that a firearm dropped his hose. It must get pretty steamy at the firehouse at night... - Ed.]

Remo smiled and waved.

The fireman said dumbly, "Your back's on fire."

"Thanks, pal," Remo said, and he spun around, a dervish motion so fast it created a partial vacuum of thin air around him and the flames on his clothing sucked out and died.

"Take your time," Remo told the fireman. "Everyone else in there is dead."

Before the fireman could speak, Remo was running off from the house, across the greensward toward Professor Wooley's home.

So, basically, in SR we definitely need the ability to bust out a David Carradine style asian mentor flashback which, through circular philosophical claptrap, manages to instantly negate the most dangerous or hopeless of situations.

On the other hand, it's very difficult to introduce this sort of thing in a role playing game since the whole point of a table top role playing game is to have statistical difficulty and a possibility of failure. Furthermore it always upsets the people at the table if a given piece of cyberware or magic is ridiculously powerful since most people subscribe to the idea of game balance. (Not sniping; I can personally appreciate the role of game balance for the purpose of making a tactically challenging game that requires thought and planning if you're not looking to play a simulationist game.) So, writing the following rule was a real challenge.

Orientalist Hand of God, aka Asian Mentor Ex Machina:
In order to use the Orientalist Hand of God, the player character must first have an Asian Mentor contact ( http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...pic=13774&st=25 ) to star in his oriental old man ex machina flashbacks. Alternately, the Asian Mentor could be dead at the start of play and thus not be a contact, but this requires that the PC take the Hunted flaw, or the Compulsive: Avenge Asian Mentor At All Costs flaws without accuring any bonus points for them.

Orientalist Hand of God must be declared by a player before his character enters play (i.e. before the start of the character's first adventure or campaign, or in between the time that a character to replace a dead one is created and when it enters play) in order for it to be used by the character. In order to do this, the player must decide how many karma pool dice the character will "pre pay" towards the OHOG rule; a maximum of 20 karma pool dice and a minimum of 5 may be pre paid in this manner. This pre paid pool of dice is known as the David Carradine Pool (DCP).

The DCP may be applied at any time as though it were an ordinary karma pool, eg. reroll failures, Hooper Nelson, and so on. The exception is that a character who uses OHOG may not use the vanilla Hand of God rule, since that would probably be too powerful. (Woo, game balance!)

Another negative to this rule is that the character starts with 0 karma pool (instead of 1) and whenever the character would gain karma pool the karma pool dice he would have gained instead goes to filling the DCP pre-pay. So, in other words, if I started with a DCP of 20 dice, I would start with 0 karma dice, and I would not be able to start a karma pool until I had gained enough karma to accrue 19 more karma pool dice, as that would be the amount of karma pool dice needed to match the amount of karma pool dice in the pre-pay.

After the DCP has been paid for in the manner described above, the character in question may accumulate a karma pool as per normal, but the character never regains the ability to use vanilla HOG. As such, it might make sense to think of the OHOG as an emergency karma reserve rather than as something to blow entirely in the beginning of your character's career.

Posts in this topic

Wounded Ronin rules for asian mentor deus ex machina flashback Aug 20 2007, 11:01 PM

hyzmarca What exactly are the advantages and disadvantages ... Aug 21 2007, 06:20 AM

knasser If I have an oriental character, is it acceptable ... Aug 21 2007, 07:08 AM

Wounded Ronin QUOTE (hyzmarca) What exactly are the advantages a... Aug 21 2007, 07:36 AM

Wounded Ronin QUOTE (knasser) If I have an oriental character, i... Aug 21 2007, 07:42 AM

Daddy's Little Ninja Just admit it guys. Asians rock. We know it. We ju... Aug 21 2007, 08:30 PM

nezumi Wait, I missed the part where you say what the DCP... Aug 21 2007, 09:42 PM

Wounded Ronin QUOTE (nezumi) Wait, I missed the part where you s... Aug 22 2007, 12:56 AM

Draconis QUOTE (Wounded Ronin) QUOTE (nezumi @ Aug 21 ... Aug 22 2007, 06:43 PM

hyzmarca Being an advance on karma pool, this would make st... Aug 22 2007, 07:27 PM

Wounded Ronin QUOTE (hyzmarca) Being an advance on karma pool, t... Aug 23 2007, 02:25 AM

hyzmarca QUOTE (Wounded Ronin) QUOTE (hyzmarca @ Aug 2... Aug 23 2007, 03:09 AM

nezumi See, reading the description, I"d assume the ... Aug 23 2007, 02:18 PM

Kagetenshi Here's a proposal: Every other karma pool poi... Aug 23 2007, 03:11 PM

Wounded Ronin Oooh, there's some creative ideas. Aug 23 2007, 11:44 PM

Snow_Fox QUOTE (nezumi) Wait, I missed the part where you s... Aug 26 2007, 03:31 PM

nezumi I was going to be worried, then I realized I never... Aug 26 2007, 05:46 PM

hyzmarca Boredom can be dealt with by having the other play... Aug 26 2007, 05:54 PM

Wounded Ronin QUOTE (hyzmarca) Boredom can be dealt with by havi... Aug 26 2007, 10:47 PM

« Next Oldest · Shadowrun · Next Newest »

Display Mode: Switch to: Standard · Switch to: Linear+ · Outline

Track this topic · Email this topic · Print this topic · Subscribe to this forum

Lo-Fi Version

Time is now: 3rd January 2025 - 07:51 AM

Topps, Inc has sole ownership of the names, logo, artwork, marks, photographs, sounds, audio, video and/or any proprietary material used in connection with the game Shadowrun. Topps, Inc has granted permission to the Dumpshock Forums to use such names, logos, artwork, marks and/or any proprietary materials for promotional and informational purposes on its website but does not endorse, and is not affiliated with the Dumpshock Forums in any official capacity whatsoever.