Character Backgrounds and Concepts Options

[Explosive Donut!]

Yo, this is a repost of my topic from the official SR4 forums.

Hey ya'll! Since Shadowrun is an RPG, and that means Roleplaying, characters gotta have a backstory. So, I'm making this thread where we all can post character backstories. Hopefully we can make a good little place to come and borrow ideas from backstories of other people in times when we're feeling a little short of ideas ^_^. I'll start us off.
In 2030, a boy named William Montez was born in Seattle to two middle class human parents. He lived a relatively normal life, going through grade school and high school and on to college to study in security design. In high school, he met an elf girl named Melissa Richardson. They dated, and when they went to college they stayed together. She studied to be a reporter. Eventually, after college, they got married. William got a job as a security specialist for the local branch of Ares Macrosystems, and Melissa became a reporter for a local news station. 2 years later, they had a son. A human boy named Hector. Another 5 years later, William became head of security for the local branch of Ares. He got a cybernetic eye to help him with his job. Between his job as head of security and Melissa's job as a trideo reporter, they lived easy for a while. Eventually, Hector turned 18 and went to college, following in his father's footsteps to become a security specialist.
A year later, Melissa got a job to do an undercover report of a local gang in the badlands of Seattle. Halfway through the job, however, she was reported missing, and eventually turned up dead. William was distraught, and snapped. He went to work for the next few weeks. But he couldn't handle it, and decided one day he was going to fake his own death. He left a suicide note in his office one day, then went home. There, he cut out his cybernetic eye so they couldn't track him, and destroyed it. Then he set up evidence to make it more convincing, and then burnt down his house, making it look like he had burnt himself down with it. In truth, he left as soon as he set the fire, and headed for Seattle's badlands. Thinking he was dead, they marked off his SIN, pronouncing him so. He took on the name of Ricardo Estavez.
In the badlands, he made himself a mask out of the various bits of scrap metal lying around, melting them down and forging them into the shape of a leering skull. He vowed to find the men who had killed his wife and exact vengeance. He got help from a local private detective named Terrence O'Malley. After running a few favors for him, Terrence pointed him to the leader of a local group of squatters named Riley Tam. They formed a fast friendship. Riley gave him what information he could, and they narrowed down what gangs it could have been. Seeing the squalid conditions the people of the badlands were living in, William began to feel sympathetic towards them. When Riley asked William for help after all he had done, he quickly agreed. He painted two red marks from the base of the eye sockets of his mask. One for his dead wife, and one for the people of the badlands he had now vowed to help. He decided to take on the alias Scrap while wearing his mask, in homage to what his mask was made from and what his former life had become.
He's pretty much the very definition of a 'Hood runner, protecting the people of the badlands from the various gangs and other hostile criminal elements residing there. He only does runs because they are the only source of income he can scrounge together. He generally uses nonlethal methods to take down CorpSec and small time gangsters. The former because he knows most of them are just doing it to feed themselves or their families, and won't kill someone for doing their job. The latter because he hopes it will scare them enough to try and get out of the gang life.

[Seriously Mike]

Um... paragraphs? Also, what happened to the kid?

[Explosive Donut!]

The kid's still alive, but thinks the father's dead. So, potential GM exploit.

[Seriously Mike]

Kinda cold of him to leave the kid behind like this, but I can understand it.

[Tanegar]

1) If he got a cybereye to help with his security work, it makes no sense at all for him to replace only one eye. See the rules for single cybereyes in Augmentation, p. 38.

2) Unless he doped himself to the gills on painkillers and stimulants, there is no way he cuts out his own eye and remains ambulatory afterwards. Much simpler solution: RFID tag eraser. Failing that, hit up a street doc to swap the eye for an unregistered unit.

[Seriously Mike]

And as for the kid - leaving him behind could work as a Big Regret quality.

[TwoDee]

1) If he got a cybereye to help with his security work, it makes no sense at all for him to replace only one eye. See the rules for single cybereyes in Augmentation, p. 38.

Yeah, this kinda bugs me. Cybereyes work way better as a suite (hell, to operate well with a single cybereye you gotta cover your biological eye up like a pirate), and you explicitly only get half the bonuses in stressful situations because your field of vision can only handle so many markers, warnings, and bits of information. As an example, all of the company cybernetics suites that come with visionware all have both cybereyes, because it just makes sense for someone who has to see combat. Single cybereyes are a fairly specialized implant, and don't apply themselves well to security work.