Need help figuring out the rules for a character, A demonic sword, armor and horse - how? Options

[hyzmarca]

[Triggerz]

Are Imps evil? Hmmm... wrong question. :D Can they be conjured? If so, how and by who? Any special rules I should know of?

EDIT: I wanted to buy Threats 2 (in PDF) just for that, but I can't find it anywhere online. :-( The worst thing is that I'm pretty sure I have it back home, but I won't be back for another month.

[hyzmarca]

Are Imps evil? Hmmm... wrong question. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) Can they be conjured? If so, how and by who? Any special rules I should know of?

They're extortionists and they can be mischievous. Threats 2 has this great piece of art that shows an Imp reaching out of a female adept's weapon focus and grabbing her gun as she is trying to shoot someone, yanking it off target and causing her to miss.
Another piece of art shows the same adept in the process of being defenestrated from a high place.

No one can conjure an Imp, they're a type of free spirit; and no one knows their home metaplane in 2063 so their True Names cannot be found by metaplaner quest. This may have changed by 2070. If you can find one's Spirit Formula then you can probably bind it.

The Occupation power allows an Imp to activate or deactivate a focus at will, this can lead to the focus being deactivated in combat or being activated at a bad time. It also allows the Imp to decrease the force of the focus by his own force or increase the force of the focus by half of his force.
An Imp will use these abilities to extort karma from the user of the focus, drastically reducing the force of the focus in a time of crises unless karma is paid to him and/or increasing the force of the focus for a fee.

[Triggerz]

:eek: :rotfl: Ok. Maybe not exactly what I was looking for, but I'll make sure to use them if foci become a problem in my group at some point (or just for the sheer fun of it). Thanks a lot for the info! :-)

[PlatonicPimp]

I say no, you should leave the vulnerabilities that you have from invulnerability to normal weapons. It's flavorful and balanced. If you shore up all your defenses then you simply have a cloak of "you can't touch me" which is no fun at all. SOMETHING has to be a threat to you, for the purpose of good story.

[GrinderTheTroll]

This guy's gonna have quite an arsenal out-of-the-box, curiously, what sort of "epic" things you got planned?

Cheers,

~GTT

[hyzmarca]

Night: The Steel Horse
Free Spirit

Force 4
Strength F+4
Body F+3
Agility F+1
Reaction F
Logic F
Intuition F+1
Charisma F+2
Willpower F+1
Edge 3
Passes 2

Powers
Materialisation, Movement, Realistic Form, Shadow Cloak, Natural Weapon (Hooves, [STR/2]+2P), Banishing Resistance, Astral Gateway, Aura Masking, Sapience

Weaknesses
Allergy (Sunlight, mild)

Skills
Running, Unarmed Combat, Dodge, Infiltration, Negotiation, Assensing, Astral Combat.


Night appears to be a mechanical horse made entirely of smooth and sleek black burnished steel. His eyes are tiny red dots with black pupils set in a hollow steel skull. Occasionally hot steam snorts from his large and prominent nostrils. His his upper lip is curled open to reveal a mouth full or gleaming needle-like teeth, but that are just for show. His head is a single unmoving piece, the jaw does not open.

Night is bound by a debt of honor to serve any outlaw who calls on him, although he may charge karma for this service. He will only serve outlaws and has an uncanny ability to recognize someone's legal status at a glance. Those who are not wanted for some heinous crime quickly find themselves trampled to death unless they are able to bind him, and if they do then he will kill them as soon as he gets free.

Night's Spirit Formula is the Bon Jovi song 'Wanted Dead or Alive.' It must be sung three times in full without interruption to call upon him.


Its all the same, only the names will change
Everyday it seems were wasting away
Another place where the faces are so cold
Id drive all night just to get back home

I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride
I'm wanted dead or alive
Wanted dead or alive

Sometimes I sleep, sometimes its not for days
And the people I meet always go their separate ways
Sometimes you tell the day
By the bottle that you drink
And times when you're all alone all you do is think

I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride
I'm wanted dead or alive
Wanted dead or alive

I walk these streets, a loaded six string on my back
I play for keeps, cause I might not make it back
I been everywhere, still I'm standing tall
I've seen a million faces an I've rocked them all

I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride
I'm wanted dead or alive
I'm a cowboy, I got the night on my side
I'm wanted dead or alive
Wanted dead or alive

Jon Bon Jovi often uses Night's assistance when he hunts vampires with his dikoted katana.

[Triggerz]

[Triggerz]

[Triggerz]

[Triggerz]

My own personal character is the son of a human Mafioso and his elven trophy wife (who also was his way into the Cosa Nostra). He's an elf, so he was closer to his mother as a kid, but his brother is a human who followed in their father's footsteps. The father is more of a foot soldier than someone with any influence in Seattle's mafia, but when the son's magical talent was discovered, he used some of his hard-earned money to hire a magical tutor. The kid was an adept and received decent training from the time he was 14 years old. An arrogant child, he often looked down on the rest of the world and congratulated himself a lot on being so goddamn superior to "the masses". With a strong discipline and work ethic, he soon mastered his left hand and could use it as well as his (primary) right hand. His ideal, as a teenager, was to live the challenging and wealthy life of a professional hitman. Growing up in a world of fake sins, firearms and easy money had convinced him that, as long as he was on the right end of the gun, it would be a rather enjoyable lifestyle. He didn't really have much sympathy for the targets: they just weren't strong and smart enough to survive, and they simply should have hired him first if they valued their life a bit. With a tutor helping him not just with his magic but with learning and growing up in general, he did extremely well in highschool and went to Seattle University to pursue more formal magical studies. In his mind, a decent understanding of the laws of the universe was an essential component of any life worth living and he wanted to be a truly superior human being, not just some thug who's good with guns.

After his obtaining his Bachelor (and having learnt quite a few neat tricks since he started training at 14), he decided to officially start his hitman career. He was now 21. Obviously, he could have worked for the Cosa Nostra, but his ego was way too big for that. He didn't want to be anybody's son. He wanted to make a name for himself. So he asked a close (and trusted) friend of his - who had started working for the family as a forger - to provide him with new SINs that the family would not know about so that he could do his own things without being watched too closely.

Starting as an independent, he was soon hired by a Yak to get rid of an internal enemy discretely. And then another... and another. All the while choosing his targets to make it look like the Yaks were being attacked by outside factions such as the Triads and the Cosa Nostra with whom the Yak was clashing regularly over business jurisdictions, or other internal enemies the adept's boss wanted to get rid of. Eventually, though, the employer did piss off the Cosa Nostra and was targeted by them. The adept heard of it, by pure chance, through his brother at a family dinner (with his actual family - brother, father and mother, who were not aware of his connection with the rising Yak). The Yak was too lucrative not to save, so when the mafia's hit team attacked, the adept wiped them out. The Yak had almost become oyabun of his little sandbox and he offered the elf to join him as his bodyguard. He had done a good job at dealing with the Italian troublemakers and the Yak trusted him. The adept accepted for two main reasons: 1-) since the Yak was now more firmly established, he would not need his services as frequently because he'd be able to count more on internal resources, and 2-) the adept was strangely bored with the "train, study, hit" lifestyle he had led in the year that had passed since his graduation. As a hitman, his fighting skills were under-used, and he considered it an insulting waste of his talents to not use them in actual fights on a more regular basis. Protecting the oyabun would mean staying alert all the time, with real consequences if he didn't, and that seemed to be the best training possible.

The news quickly went around the underworld, though, as oyabun with non-Japanese, elven bodyguards are rather strange - although not unheard of, of course. (Prime Runner, anyone? :P ) People were quick to connect the dots and it was soon known that the oyabun was protected by the son and brother of Cosa Nostra soldiers. When it was understood that the adept was the one who wiped out the hit team and that he had learnt about the hit through his brother's big mouth, the adept's brother was executed by the family. His father, knowing too well that the family would not allow him to stay alive much longer anyways, chose to take care of the matter himself and commited suicide in an ironically quite Japanese turn of events. The adept, in his enthusiasm for his new and exciting job, had not foreseen these relatively predictable consequences or, rather, had lied to himself about the likelihood of such a turn of events and the impact it would have on him if things ever went that way. The adept was shaken. He tried to shrug it off and to rationalize it - they were just too dumb and got what they deserved -, but he understood way too well that they had died because he had chosen to protect his main source of income instead of respecting his brother's trust and keeping the family's secrets in the family. The adept's greed and self-serving attitude had cost him his family. Only his mom, who was visiting her brother in Italy at the time, was left alone due to her brother's influence and connections there. (She was never really involved in the family's affairs in Seattle anyways.) She's still living there now.

Despite his grief, he stayed at the oyabun's service for roughly three years before the wind turned and the oyabun was killed in his sleep through ritual magic. Not much he could have done to prevent it, sadly. The oyabun's magical protections failed. The yak mage helped him to track down and kill the Triad caster responsible for the oyabun's death before committing ritual suicide. The new oyabun told the elf that his services were no longer required. The trust he enjoyed with the old oyabun had not carried over to the new regime and he did not feel "home" anymore now that his old boss was dead.

He went back to his old line of work, but soon needed support for a complex hit, which is when he met some of the other characters in our group. Later, they needed his stealthy skills for a B/E job. He then started working with them on a more regular basis. Obviously, he mostly has enemies in the mafia, although he still has a few moderately trusted friends - well, contacts, anyways - and he has a few enemies in the Triads too. Overall, though, he had a much lower profile after the death of the oyabun.

A few years have passed and the adept has slowly but surely moved away from wetwork. Half ashamed of him past, he nevertheless assumes it entirely and understands it as an essential part of his spiritual growth. Trying to rise above his past and lowly greed, he now tries to earn a living doing (mostly) things that he believes in. In the last few years, he has changed his focus from firearms to melee weapons and martial arts as the latter are more useful when it comes to fighting the magical abominations he has vowed to destroy and/or keep at bay. His change of heart is in large part due to his growing realization that the world as he knows it might not be there for long if insect spirits, toxics, shedims and other such things are given an easy ride. Also, he realized that destroying the world is easier than fixing it, so there's definitely an ego factor involved as well. He wants to be the one who succeeds where Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi and Chuck Norris have all failed. He went back to Seattle U (with yet another fake SIN) to get his Master's degree in magical theory, and he will probably go back for his Ph.D. for research on Infusion and/or Channeling later on. (Yes, he is that vain and he needs that social recognition of his abilities, even though he's ok with using a fake SIN for that.) He'll most probably have his degree by 2070, but I'm thinking of moving to that timeline slowly. Also, I've always had in mind that he might express Mystic Adept abilities later on, so I might decide to make him that way when I convert him to SR4, but I'm still not entirely sure. I need to work on the two mages first and see that my character's abilities don't overlap too much with theirs, but spells are sweet and I was really thinking about using something similar to channeling for my adept way before the rules came out for it in Street Magic, so I'm keeping that door open for now. Anyways, I'd like him to eventually open a "dojo" where he can teach kids not just about kicking ass but also about morality and karma. The dojo would not be a serious source of income - in fact, it might well be the exact opposite -, so he would work as a "ghostbuster" or occult specialist to pay his bills.

I'd like to use this to drag the whole group into more and more serious magical stuff as they get better at dealing with magical threats. The group has dealt with vampires, insect spirits , blood spirits, zombies and a bunch of paranormal critters before, but I'd like to push things up a notch and involve them more seriously in some of the magical power struggles going on in the SR world. One of our coolest adventures was set in Australia, in a web of underground caves, where the group had to go to find a 4th-world (magical) painting. The painting in question held a spirit which claimed to be the "one and only original Lucifer"™, which, of course, he wasn't, as Lucifer in my world is a Totem, so to speak - i.e. a Mentor Spirit -, rather than an actual spirit. He was merely the (now free, although trapped in the painting) ally of a long-dead 4th world magician. The 7-level underground hell was full of giant worms with nasty teeth trying to eat the PCs. It was a really fun game, but it was more or less a one-shot thing. I'd like to get the group into this kind of action-packed mess somewhat regularly, but also give them a sense of where they are in the Big Picture and how their actions shape the world (or fail to). I want to make them scratch their heads as they try to figure out the connections between the various nasty things that they encounter. Is Ghostwalker evil? Should we oppose his agenda or help him? What the hell is the Atlantean Foundation up to? What happened to the Big D? Who killed him and why? What are the other big worms up to?

But first and foremost: How will the characters choose to live their lives in this world of shifting alliances and shades of gray? Even hooders like my adept is now have to face tough questions all the time, and they'll quite often end up on the wrong side of the moral fence. And good stats will not help them there...

Next, I'll write about the troll sammy, Chrono, who also has nasty magical stuff in his background that is finally coming around to bite him in the ass.

[Triggerz]

By the way, feel free to comment and critic the backgrounds I post here. I'm open to suggestions and a lot of it hasn't been exploited much in game, so I can change some stuff without my players going "WWWWWWHHHHHHHHAAAAAAA?!?!?!?!?!"...