Emerging Experiment, Rules light, character driven PBP - any interest? Options

[Aria]

Word of warning, this is an experiment, I’ve GM’d and played a lot of SR in the past but always face to face, never like this. I’m hoping it will work but please bear with me. I’m also not all that familiar with the SR4 rules hence the desire to sideline them in favour of story telling and ‘learning as I go’.

I’m looking for 1-3 players for now, perhaps more if there’s sufficient interest but I’m not sure how many the game can cope with at the moment. A former player/GM of mine may make an occasional appearance as co GM when he can make the time or I can bully him in to participating.

The game will be begin at the start of 2070 (SR4A) and the protagonists will be a loose affiliation of fixers or other ‘shadow movers and shakers’ that control events from afar rather than getting in to the down and dirty events themselves. The game will be dice free and about making strategic decisions and helping the story to unfold indirectly rather than by shooting people…of course you can order someone to be shot, employ shadowrunners etc to get your work done… Events will be linked to the Emergence campaign, possibly with some back story from the Renraku shutdown and will introduce the odd canon character to add some depth and tie in with the SR story.

My plan is for the players to help to tell the story by sponsoring shadowruns, actively seeking out their own assignments and pursuing their own individual agendas. I’ll try and give you the freedom to do whatever you want within the rationale of the SR universe… Of course if you claim to resurrect the Big D, defeat the horrors and take tea with Deus you may find that something happens to your nasty delusional mind! Characters will still be statted up, largely for the purposes of comparing against NPCs...

Rather than a blow by blow account of events in ‘real time’ the majority of posts will be about chunks of time, although I’m not ruling out the need for me to conduct conversations with players occasionally. This may mean that I expect more from you in one go but as I said, this is an experiment. Hopefully the episodic nature of this will mean that it won’t matter so much if someone is unable to play for a bit.

Character concepts could be info brokers, fixers or ‘small’ corp Johnsons and I’m sure you can come up with more. I would prefer no mobsters as I’m not that comfortable with doing justice to the organised criminal world (no pun intended) and prefer it as background. The game introduction will probably be one of you being introduced as a new member to the ‘fraternity’ assuming two or more players.

Main character build: 500BPs.

Race: Human / Orc / Elf / Dwarf / Troll… I’d prefer the ‘normal’ 5 unless you’ve got a compelling reason for a changeling or other weirdness. No technomancers at this stage.

Stats: As normal

Skills: I’m thinking of removing the cap of the number of skills at 5 or higher and skill groups at 4. We’ll see how this pans out, no raging abuse please.

Qualities: Positives as normal. I like negative qualities that provide plot hooks!

Resources: 250K max but lifestyles, safe houses and fake IDs will be ‘free’ and you can spend as much as you want within reason…no ‘Bill Gates’ please and bear in mind what comes easily can be easily taken away (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rotate.gif) . We’ll stick with gear availabilities as normal unless you have an argument for why you have harder to come by equipment.

Contacts: at least 50BPs spent here please…you’re meant to be fixers after all. I’ll provide the group with a ‘stable’ of runners that are shared but feel free to have your own as separate contacts. You are important people and will mix with some of the other movers and shakers in the Seattle world, shadow, media, corporate and political.

Anything else as per normal character gen.

Let me know if you have any questions or observations… Aria