Horror Born Characters, A new race with a cursed bloodline Options

[Kesendeja]

Before creating this race I spent significant time reverse engineering both shifters and drakes to get the formula for building them.

I'd appreciate further help balancing them as a playable race.


Creating a Horror Born Character
As with changelings and Drakes the character begins by creating a standard character out of Shadowrun 4A. After metatype is selected the player pick the appropirate quality (Horror Born or Cursed Ancestry), then continues on with buying up her attributes, skills, equipment, and other qualities. These do not count against the character's limit of 35 BP at character generation.


Sufficiently Metahuman
The Horror Born arre still very much metahumans, and can acquire other qualities and gear available to other characters of her metatype, this includes augmentations and implants, as well as other types of equipment (and subject to the usual restrictions of Shadowrun character generation).

The character can also be touched by most of the things that affect and afflict other metahumans: magic, diseases, toxins, and severe lead poisoning. However, they are also sufficiently different that they can be categorized separately using magical theory if desired. Thus, a horror born character can be targeted and affected by a spell that targets its metatype (ie. Slay Human, Slaughter Ork, etc) as well as a spell that targets horrors (ie. Slay Horror, etc.).

They are also immune to HMHVV—they cannot become Infected, and they cannot carry the disease.

Magic
Due to their unnatural origins every horror born character starts the game with a Magic attribute of 1, which may be increased with BP or Karma as other attributes to a maximum of 6 (+ initiate grade), as normal, and is used for any Tests involving innate powers. If a their Magic attribute is permanently reduced to 0, it reverts to human form and loses the ability to assume their horror touched form again. Should Magic be reduced to 0 due to a temporary reduction caused by background count/domains do not affect them.

Their blood makes them Awakened beings, but not magicians. They cannot learn or use any other Magic Skills, astrally project, initiate, or bond foci unless they also take an appropriate quality such as Adept, Astral Sight, Latent Awakening, Magician, or Mystic Adept at character creation.

Their aura clearly shows their altered form as an overlay to their metahuman form. Magicians may use Masking to conceal their true auras. Adept powers function no matter what form the character is in.


Augmentations
They can accept any augmentations, but only in their metahuman form. These implants may carry over to their altered form. A cyberlimb will remain a cyberlimb if the altered form has the same limb, but a horror born with no eyes cannot gain the benefits of their vision enhancements.


Altered Form
Horror born character’s posses a second, heavily altered form. It takes them a pass to transform into either form.

The altered form is built with 200 BP of advancements, most commonly pulled from attribute boosts and metagenetic qualities.

Horror Marked
Like some changelings, the horror born can often be afflicted with bizarre mutations. These marks denoting their inhuman blood are visible in both forms. They must take 15 points of negative metagenetic qualities.


New Qualities

Horror Born
Cost 65 BP
The character's direct ancestor was a creature not of this plane. They possess the benefits and the banes of this ancestry.

Cursed Ancestry
Cost 5 BP
Their is the blood of a horror in the character's family history and will at some point awaken in the character.

Toxic Aura
Bonus 10 BP
The character's aura reads as if they were a practicioner of a toxic path regardless of the truth. This effect cannot be masked even by a magician with the appropriate ability.

[Glyph]

Sorry, not balanced. Shifters and drakes might seem to have a high net gain of build points, but those points are not allocated in an optimal way, and the player can't really change them. Their alternate forms come with drawbacks and disadvantages.

Horror born characters, by way of contrast, simply get 200 points to spend as they wish. They spend 65 points to be Horror born, and get 15 points of negative metagenetic qualities, so they have a net gain of 120 points. And again, the difference between them and things like ghouls is that they can cherry-pick exactly what advantages and disadvantages they want.

[baron_samedi]

would it be possible to have a priority system (a la SR 2.0) where there are like 4 options and they involve various trade-offs?

or just create a table and roll for random attributes?

the point being to eliminate "Cherry Picking" and enforce the horror of being a victim of chance.

so, yeah, he's a tough creature, but he can't go out in public like that.
or he passes for "humanoid" but he's a relatively fragile being that takes ages to reach magical maturity.

just thoughts.

[Hagga]

At a bare minimum, you should give them Berserker, Poor SElf Control (Vindictive, Combat Monster) and Impaired Charisma (2). Call it a relic of the horror mindset to eat and kill everything. Ontop of any other disadvantages you give - this will make anything aside from pure wetwork rather difficult.

[TheWanderingJewe...]

Sorry, not balanced. Shifters and drakes might seem to have a high net gain of build points, but those points are not allocated in an optimal way, and the player can't really change them. Their alternate forms come with drawbacks and disadvantages.

Horror born characters, by way of contrast, simply get 200 points to spend as they wish. They spend 65 points to be Horror born, and get 15 points of negative metagenetic qualities, so they have a net gain of 120 points. And again, the difference between them and things like ghouls is that they can cherry-pick exactly what advantages and disadvantages they want.

You might want to keep the The Corrupted (Horror Born) in a NPC corner to illustrate that even by the jaded standards of some runners, there are warped individuals out there which are just plain sick, twisted, and bent behind the brain. The Horrors literally exist to feed on suffering. So having one as a particularly sadistic serial murderer running in the background might bea good idea on how to introduce one of these freaks

[nezumi]

I would have extreme background problems with, well, all of this. Horrors are capable of making children with name-givers? They do so often enough to make them a playable race? The offspring are, well, basically metahuman and not mindless creatures of destruction and suffering? And which player is going to gravitate towards this? Because I'm betting it's not going to be the well-balanced player who buys everyone pizza. It'll be the guy who already thinks he's a cross between Batman and American Psycho, except now it's okay because his killing everyone in the whole world is role-playing.

If I were to do it, I'd do it thusly:
Horror-born is an 'unlockable' character build. It is too overpowered to be available by default (and too variable to be written out into a template). The player must first use one of his characters to track down and successfully impregnate (or be impregnated by) a horror. The PC most likely dies in the process in a fantastic way. He must have made contingencies to capture and tame the resulting perversion. Horrors do not develop, so it is assumed to reach adulthood almost immediately. Its stats are based on the parent horror, but are basically a jumble of madness and suffering (idea: make a lot of little tokens, like scrabble tiles, with different madness/suffering abilities and put them in a bag to draw the powers of your horror randomly. The more powerful the parent, the more draws you get.) Next, the GM rolls 1d6 to determine if the Horror-spawn is sufficiently 'tame' to be playable, referring to the following chart:

1 - Spawn immediately vaporizes everything within 6 square blocks
2 - Spawn devours caretakers, spits acid, grows to the size of a stadium and terrorizes the city until defeated
3 - Spawn drives all in vicinity to madness and leads a cult of howling-at-the-moon maniacs to crave the taste of metahuman flesh
4 - Spawn immediately disappears into the matrix and begins the third Great Crash and cyber-apocalypse
5 - Spawn bides his time to seize power (and is playable)
6 - Spawn realizes his own terrible fate, eats his own face and dies (playable, for about thirty seconds)

The player may spend karma pool for an additional kick to the nuts.

In addition to the penalties of 'corrupt the astral' and 'Hunted: A million' (everyone in the entire world wishes to capture or destroy the character, and will spare no expense in doing so). They get no benefits for these flaws.

[Kesendeja]

I was thinking of raising their cost to 100 BP and the number of negative BP to 50, but keep the ability to choose their positive qualities. This means heavily flawed but unique characters. It also keeps them playable.