wow
A female shoots Dranem down and he turns into a whipped puppy,

Dude, stop hitting on fangirl

I'm not hitting on FanGirl, unlike some of the sexually repressed gamers on this board that crave female attention, I'm a happily married man.

Though I do appreciate FanGirls oppinion, as she strikes me to be a decent person, so yes, I felt I owed her an appology.

wow... all that negative emo-shen was put to rest rather quick. i am duely impressed.

i have to give props to Emo just for sheer interest in giving a character a thorough background. it's a shamefully overlooked facet; i am far too accustomed to being surrounded with cookie cutters.

the background is a bit grand for my tastes, but that really doesnt matter, does it. what i'd like to say is 'thank you' for being an individual that wants to bring more to a game than just a huge bag of dice.

I like the latest revision, because it gets rid of a lot of the cliched elements, making him a more naive and likeable character instead of the old "I'm cynical and everyone else around me is a sheep."

GMPC's are still rife with potential pitfalls, though. It can be hard not to use OOC knowledge, or fudge things to help out that character, or have other NPCs who are there just for the GMPC to out-argue or otherwise get the better of, or make the GMPC's story part of the central plot.

I won't be GMing the games I play in, so there's that out of the way. If he appears in any of the games I GM, the rolls will be made in plain sight, and that's if he appears in person. Most of the time, he'll just show up over their comlinks, if at all. The only appearance that I plan for him to have while I GM is when they extract the hellhounds and need somewhere to dump them.

And even if his parents come back to get him, this is no different from the way I'll play the backstories of the other characters. I also hope that someone will GM the Little Trouble in Big China game.

He'll have traveled the world on his laundered money before deciding to "settle" in the Salish; he won't even live in his house most of the time maybe until he gets the hellhounds.

Also, one of the things that will come from his past will be his role as the village storyteller; when he gets the hellhounds, he'll tell them lots of stories.

As for the creepy pet mage, he'll be responsible for maybe 80% of the breakups, with his surreptitious mind control and everything. I think my character would REALLY love to kill him.

My character will spend a lot of time making a force 10 power focus, the formula of which will be given to his magical group in order to basically pay off his dues FOREVER. The power focus will be a nondescript ring of pure orihalcum; it'll be eggshell blue or whatever color orihalcum is, and it'll be smooth, sort of like the One Ring, except without the fire writing or indestructibility. It'll also be a mood ring of real ultimate power, shining when he's happy and being crisscrossed with crimson when he's mega-super pissed.

He'll also have anchored Combat Sense, Anti-Bullet Barrier, and Improved Reflexes spells that he'll have bought off of a koradji with a spell formula for Detect Magical Components that he made and lots of orihalcum.

How do spell anchors work in SR3, anyway? Same for Anti-Bullet Barrier.

Dude, has anyone seen this Something Awful parody of cyberpunk as a whole? So much of it rings true; Yakuza clone assassins, mega samurai, Japan buying up the entire west coast. Then again, Shadowrun was always careful to weave in some amount of plausibility to the setting; they don't buy up the west coast, they conquer it when asked for military aid, which, given the current situation in Iraq, seems completely plausible.

He'll basically be the opposite of what you would think a shadowrunner should be. If he exposes a corp executive's cheating on his wife, he'll invis himself and talk to the corper in public, asking him details about his life and trying to understand the man. This will also basically be how he gains the trust of his fixer, sitting him down on a couch and asking him about his past. He'll have a spell just for this purpose; I'll call it "Tell me how you feel." It'll be Line of Sight.

Magically forcing someone to tell you their secrets isn't a very good way to earn trust.

It doesn't really force people to tell you their secrets; it just dredges up what's eating you. It's more of a "know how you feel" spell. He'll focus on the more human aspects of the Shadowrun world.

I think I'll also give him psychometry when Street Magic comes out. He'll be useful both to the group and to his patients; he'll be a street shrink!!! I think that's a great concept; the shadows already provide guns, sex, and information; I don't think this is too big of a jump. I imagine a lot of corporate shrinks are very sterile, methodical, and unengaged; and if the employees go to the corporate shrink, they'll look unfit for work.

It doesn't make you say anything; it just makes you remember everything that bothers you; what you really mean when you laugh at somebody, why you work, what made you who you are. What happens to the person's more like a shamanic vision quest than anything else.

Ah, I see the distinction, now. Yeah, that seems considerably more moral/therapudic and less of a brain-rape-for-your-own-good mentality.

Yeah, he doesn't do that. He's much more human than, like, 95% of the people in the world and about 50% of the animals. He doesn't focus on making you "okay," he focuses on making you true to yourself, and possibly others.

But is he more human than Lieutenant Data?

Even with the chip, yes.

There's a reason why most people bury the feelings of what bothers them...
What's this spell suppose to do to someone if those 'bad feelings' you dredge up lead them to anger? Distaste? Insanity?

Or they could just bottle up and walk away, you can't walk everywhere they go invisible without eventually meeting up with a magical threat/security of some kind.

A "know the inner truth about yourself" spell could be therapeutic, but for a lot of people, it could be traumatic. And if the inner truth about themselves isn't pleasant, then they might not really be too kindly disposed towards the person who "enlightened" them. I mean, people use all kinds of faulty logic and rationalizations to maintain their security beliefs and/or keep themselves from facing certain truths. Messing with that is something that could be extremely unpredicatable.

Not that that's bad at all! I think such a spell could be used to create all kinds of plot hooks and NPC reactions, based on things being dredged up from people's unconsciousness, for good or for bad.

Hmm... I won't do the "walk into corporate enclave" thing until I've mastered masking; and eventually, if I help them with their inner feelings, even if they're bad, it will eventually turn good. And who can really say it's really them that's living their lives if they constantly live as somebody who doesn't have those feelings?

Shen will basically have his fixer spread the word on his personal "street therapy" business. They will meet him in random places in the city with low security but low crime, have his bound spirit of man lead them to their meeting place, which will be different every session, and speak to them while a summoned spirit of man sustains a Physical Mask spell on him. He'll talk to them in random places; sometimes a Barrens dive, sometimes in a bar's back room that he rents, sometimes in the park. With their permission, he'll cast the "tell me how you feel" spell on them, or have his spirit of man do it. He'll look different every time, sometimes, young, sometimes old, all of it depending on what would fit the patient.

What do you think about his side business? Think he'll get caught?

How does he get them to meet him? And why does he care if he's caught If he's doing it with their permission?

So that no one ever knows his face; he's very paranoid. But I think he does good work, and along with his Shadowlands blog, I think I'll post his conversations with damaged goods on the IC forums.

Why would someone follow a spirit to meet a total stranger and then say "sure, you can mess with my mind magically?"

The people coming to him are afraid of going to the company psychiatrist. There's a huge conflict of interest thing going on with most of the paternalistic corps. If they go to the shrink, they're clearly unfit for work, since the company has access to his records, and they're taking time off. Plus, they're taking up resources, since he's paid by the hour. On top of that, they can bribe him to give dig up dirt on them; this is really their only outlet for their emotions.

"Therapy... is that some new teen slang for LSD that I haven't heard about?"

I used to be, way back in the day. But even then you couldn't have talked me into following someone to meet a total stranger so he could muck around in my brain.

There have to be thousands of qualified psychiatrists in Seattle that aren't associated with a corporation and don't require you to jump through hoops just to talk with them. Someone paranoid enough to not talk to their own company about things is probably not very likely to run all around town spilling their secrets to different people every week.

I'm not saying it's a horrible idea, just that it's too unnecessarily intricate. If all you're trying to do is hide your face get yourself an office somewhere and always show up to work with a latex skinmask or disguise spell up.

If someone wants to catch him doing it they'll just follow a patient anyway.

Nah... the other players will allow it... or PERISH!!!

Plus, this way, it makes it easy for there to be an aura of mystique, as if they're stepping into a world that only they really have access to... which is mostly true. Ironically, this makes it more comfortable in a way. If they were in an office, they'd feel as if they were under a microscope; if they were in a park sitting across a person who may or may not be a precociously understanding magically active elven girl or wizened old man with a wooden cane, they feel special.

Ummm... Ok.

It WORKS!!! He's very much a fairy godfather; he hasn't really given up the role despite his leaving China with a complete lack of faith in his ability to help people be happy.

Ummm... Ok.

I'm not doubting his ability to help people, especially if he's got some skills in psychiatry. I just don't understand the methodology involved.

It just seems more personal, not just in the way that he tailors his sessions to his patients, but also that they're hiding in plain sight; although people can see and hear them, they are shown that they are free and that the world isn't as mundane and evil as they fear it is.

Ever see Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman? It's sort of like that, except without the vampires, the man-eating bridges, and people who knife you in the subways.

Hear of Neil Gaiman? He had a lot of stuff where the fantastical was forced into the mundane and grungy; that's where my character's psychiatric style is drawn from.

I'll take your word for it.

He is the BEST. I'm surprised you haven't heard of him. He's written a lot of other stuff, like The Sandman, perhaps the greatest comic story ever written.

The Sandman as in group of gods that bickered worse then my family? I read a few of those. They were good, but I wouldn't classify them as the best. Luckily for us "best" is a completely subjective term.

The thing is, though, if it was an objective term, then you'd be forced to admit that it IS the best. And it IS.

Oddly enough one of my roommates rented a movie from Neil Gaimen shortly after you metnioned him: Mirrormask. Luckily for me I had other things to do or I might have gotten bored after I walked out on that crap.

I've been through a few of the trade paperbacks at the library. He's okay, but too much nastiness solely for shock value, and sometimes he seems a wee bit too impressed with himself. Nothing he's done comes close to knocking Watchmen or any of the other biggies off their pedastals, in my opinion.


Now, back to your character. You seem to be falling into one of the traps of running a PC and GMing at the same time. What your PC does will work, because you have decided ahead of time that it will. You need to allow the possibility of failure for this guy, or he really will be a Mary Sue. Especially something like this, which can go wrong or have complications in so many ways. Maybe a corporate exec has second thoughts about blabbing his dark secrets to this stranger, and hires runners to eliminate him (that could even be how the group meets him). Maybe someone he was advising goes on a sudden killing spree, and he has to find out whether it was his fault (maybe the killer actually got possessed by a bug spirit, to tie in to your initial adventure, and the group can clear his name). Don't be afraid to have this guy screw up, or even to have bad things happen to him undeservedly. You can get all kinds of plot hooks that way.

Of COURSE that'll happen. I never thought of that; that's fucking awesome.

And I've never seen MirrorMask.

He'll be really distant and spotty at first; the first time I reveal anything about my character's past to my players (not their characters) is when he talks to his hellhounds. They'll sit around a fire he has them start and he'll talk about himself in the third person in a very fairy-tale sounding story. He'll constantly refer to himself as the "young man" until he learns of how those people he helped elope ended up; then, he'll say "Though his face was still young, and his mind as quick as it had ever been, he had, in a way that one could not quite see but could feel in one's bones, grown old." It'll get very sad from there and he'll fall asleep outside surrounded by the dogs.

I don't know how I'll reveal his past to the characters.

Maybe, I don't know, have someone see him talking to the dogs? Why introduce the past to the players at all until it appears in game? Especially in a monologue story form (unless they go for that).

Hmm... it depends on how chummy everyone gets with my character. Maybe not until his parents find him and try to kidnap him. I think I'll end it with "He ran away with a broken heart never to be seen again... except, you know, by you guys." I'm not sure what looking at his obviously emotional backstory with such irony would accomplish, though, and I'm not sure he'd feel comfortable talking about it in those terms to anybody but his dogs, unless he became really good friends with a few of the characters.

Shen is not a happy man.

How would I segue into a bunch of campfire stories told by my character, anyway?

Get him really drunk right before a meet and have him just start spouting them out? Or invite everyone on a camping trip.

Maybe for a wilderness excursion; I'll wait for one that takes us into the forest.

I played a little of Awakened Worlds; it says Focus Addiction happens when you use more than twice your magic in foci. Does this mean have them activated or simply bonded? This is important to my character.