In any case it will be AWESOME when he appears!

So what WOULD be fair enough?

Not having a pet character.
Maybe having a recurring NPC, as a bad guy or whatever, but not a character.

GMPCs can work just fine. Don't let them make any decisions except for roleplaying ones and you're ok. They can't accidentally benefit the party with their OOC knowledge if they never talk during planning sessions or offer tactical advice.

Edit: And don't hesitate to kill him. And make sure all the rules apply to him as much as everyone else, at all times. that means when he's not witht he party and when he's witht hem. If something would normally require a roll, roll it for him, even if it's off screen action.

I won't.

Won't what? Let him make decisions or make all the rules apply to him?

Have you been rolling drain for all these spirits you have running around? Having a spirit use a power on someone (like mind probe) costs a service. So if we assume that the gangers think about blasting the spirits every time they see one you'll run out of services really fast, which means you'll be doing a lot of summoning every day. And if you're summoning high force spirits you probably won't always be able to heal all the physical drain.

I'm having it be possible to heal physical drain. Plus, if I Edge the drain resistance tests, I usually get no drain at all. That's canon SR4, right? And I don't have him overcast for binding spirits of Man.

Plus, I used the focus building rules made up in the SR forum to build him a force 4 power focus. I allowed him to build karma at group rate, and had him make orichalcum on the side so that he didn't have to pay karma to bind it. I even had him pay lifestyle with the orichalcum money. The focus building skills are there for a reason.

And no, I won't cash-for-karma his orichalcum money. I have SOME humanity in me.

Do you let everyone pick and choose from the cheesiest SR3 rules you can find? Will you burn the power focus when SR4 rules come out that preventt hat abuse?

What force are the spirits, and what are you doing about them running out of services incredibly fast because each Mind Probe is a service?

They aren't Mind Probing very often; maybe once or twice a day. My dude's given them instructions not to do that very often.

How can they effectively be thought police if they aren't allowed to mind probe when their duties call for it?

Are you making the rolls? At some point spirits of man would get tired of being bound by you. Binding isn't soemthing they enjoy, but they'll put up with it every so often. When the spirit burns his edge and gets a lot of successes you could find yourself unconscious and then dead.

How long before they start getting pissed?

I once heard it said that bound spirits use one service for multiple uses of a power.

Would three bound spirits wandering around assensing everybody be enough for a 4-block section of the Barrens? I'm assuming the gang's former turf is pretty small. He renews their services daily, and he circulates. Would that be enough?

How long before they get angry would depend on their force. Lower force spirits would probably be more servile, where the high ones have a stronger will (because willpower is equal to force). A force 8 spirit would be incredibly strong willed and could do things to try and screw over it's captor. I wouldn't have it happen all the time. Perhaps just when there's a glitch on the summoning test.

It depends entirely on how active and mobile the people in the area are. If there's a lot of hustle and bustle you'd probably need more. If only people generally stick to themselves and the gang mainly hangs out at their homes then that's probably enough.

One thing that could eventually happen, especially if any of the gang members has a spellcasting contact, is that they'll wise up to what's going on. Pretty much every gang has to have access to some sort of magical backup or a rival gang will just summon a force 6 spirit to kill them all.

Once they've talked with a spellcaster and had him come check out the spirits they can start to circumvent them. Being strict about controlling their plans when spirits are around could play with the assensing. In fct, now that I'm thinking about it the assensing might never really work. these guys just all got torched by a spirit. They're probably always angry and afraid when they see a spirit. This would couple with fantasies of blasting the spirit straight to hell.

In any case though, once they get in touch with a spellcaster they'll learn to control their thoughts around spirits. It wouldn't always work, but I'd give them a willpower test opposing the spirit's assensing test. Also, the spellcaster will be able to assense the spirits to determine their force. Once he knows that he can tell the gang what kinds of weapons will work and they can call up their contacts to get them. They gotta buy their guns and ammo from somewhere, so at least one of them knows a fixer or arms merchant.

At that point everything goes to hell. The gang is probably going to be forced to resort to grenades to get enough firepower. That means buildings getting holes in their walls or even collapsing. Bystanders will become collateral damage.

Fear and hate go hand and hand, and eventually the hate will overpower the fear. At that point you'll find yourself in the middle of Beirut.

Check out the sidebar on page 178. I think that creating a small kingdom counts as abuse, and would have those rules kick in after a while.

Goddammit...

What if they mostly lurk in astral space when they assense? They can't be that hateful and afraid all the time; it won't be that focused if they can't see the spirits. Character is, after all, defined by what you do when nobody's looking, or when you THINK nobody's looking. And those same rules say that resting bound spirits keeps them from wanting to kill you too badly, so rotation should work.

Those are NPCs. There's a subtle difference ni that GMPCs are usually a permanent fixture, like the mage that always goes in with the group as opposed tot he one they hire every few runs when they need it. They both operate on the same principals though: apply all rules evenly to everyone and ensure that the NPC doesn't use OOC knowledge.

He won't use OOC knowledge, and when I do play as him, someone else will GM. He has been mostly uninvolved with the more important things so far.

Did you create them using the character creation rules, give them full back stories, become a bit attached to them, and plan to run them if someone else GMs? That's what I define as a GMPc. YMMV.

I'm a bit attached to them but i'm perpared to sacrifice them for plot and NO they will not ever be PC's.
NO character of mine ever goes from NPC to PC, although they do go they other way.
They are Luther the Wise, brother of lothan. Tendancy to ramble and "educate" these younsters.
Trinity, Rigger of Air, Water and Land. Never uses Drones.
KrackerJack. Anorexic Hacker. Pistols Fetish. STR: 1 BOD: 1.

One great way to slip a particular type of NPC past a group of experience gamers is to pretend to run a GMPC. Players expect a certain level of betrayal from an NPC that they don't from a GMPC, often to the point where they will keep distant from an NPC far longer than might be reasonable. With a GMPC, or more to the point what they think is a GMPC, much of that distance evaporates and they treat it far more like a regular PC.

This can be excellent for a one time horrifying betrayal that will likely turn the GMPC into a villain that players will despise far beyond typical NPC villainy.

Good times.

Otherwise running GMPC's can more dangerous than it's worth, leading to things like monty haul style gaming (Cause you want the toys for your own characters too) or a disparity in rewards that makes your players angry. (This can actually be done on purpose preceding that betrayal I mentioned before so the players already start hating 'your' PC character.)

I had an idea for who his fixer is. She'll be a Wuxing corp exec who used to be his sort of girlfriend. When they were kids, they'd sneak out at night where she'd tell stories that she'd made up with her fertile imagination and he'd use illusion magic to animate them. He'd mindlink and generate them real-time. This all changed when she went away to Wuxing and she'd changed into a practical, businesslike woman while he'd grown more fanciful. When he meets her again, he'll talk about how he wanted her to tell him that she'd ridden dragons, taken over the pirate fleet she'd been abducted by, and found a magic lamp only to use the wishes to save the world three times, that she'd lived all those wonderful dreams they had together. That's why she has a loyalty rating of 4 and a connection rating of 6.

My dude's identity seems to be changing very quickly even with a few weeks of on-forums gaming. I envisioned him as being very introspective and even self-obsessed, but he's turning out to be a savior of the damned. I kind of like it.

I'm thinking of making a new character if Shen gets too much influence too quickly. He'll be a mixture of John Constantine, Austin Powers's dad, and Doctor Who. His name is Jacob Crowley, which he claims has nothing to do with Aleister Crowley. He is a knight of the crown, and he lost his manor when it was possessed by a poltergeist-like free spirit. When he attempted to bind it, he ended up wrecking his manor, and it drained his prodigious hermetic library of all its power. He bound it to the oldest piece of wood he could salvage from his house, and only managed to get it for one service. He'll have a hangup where he can bind spirits for only one service each, and he travels the world as a sort of con-man magician. He got in trouble with both the Mafia and the Atlantean Foundation when he made a deal with the Mafia to have their connections put him on a dig so that he could steal ancient power foci and instead ran off with one himself. The power focus has a powerful imp on it that he has since befriended, and he has maxed out Influence skill group.

Question: Why does this foci manufacturer not have any foci?

A force 3 power focus is relatively cheap at character generation for what it gives you. That's +3 dice on anyting involving magic (skills that you've already tried to max) and it only costs 18bp to purchase and bind (15bp for 75k , 3bp to bind).

If you drop Spellcasting, Ritual Sorcery, and Summoning down to 4 each (or some other combination of 18+bp worth of magical skills) to pay for it then you're still rolling more dice on each of those tests than your currrent character woudl be.

If you're removing all the caps then you could buy an even higher-force one. A force 4 one for 24BP? A force 6 one for 36bp?

He doesn't manufacture foci, and his hermetic library is inherited.

I know. That first power focus from the 4th world is what he'll buy with those BP's.

I'm thinking of changing Shen's personality a bit. He'll be very nice and compassionate, but when somebody abuses his sense of compassion and acts without it, he'll get mega-super-pissed and kick his ass. For example, if he met a con man whose MO was to get to the woman by allowing her to feel comfortable around him and trust him implicitly with his good looks and ability to fake sincerity, Shen'd probably melt his face off and not heal him until he learns the value of trust and compassion.

Is there an in character cause for this or is it a GM decision. Neither is really a bad idea, I'm just curious.

It's just an extrapolation on a trend in his personality that I've noticed. You know, with his taking over a neighborhood and flame etching of the skin of murderers.

What exactly would stop any of these people from just getting healed somewhere else? The trouble with taking over a neighborhood, even a hellhole in the Barrens, is that it isn't a closed system.

Medical bills are costly, and if they got healed, he'd just do it again.

Plus, if it was a con man, he'd probably pay a hacker to take out his account, or for a few runners to steal his credstick or comlink.

What do you think of my character? Do you think he's becoming too dark too quickly, or do you think it's appropriate that he's going through a sort of Siddhartha-esque realization of the world's sorrow? I'm hoping that whoever GM's him will create a good reason for him to break out of it.

He is getting dark, and more than a little bit sanctimonious, but more worrisome is how much he seems to be getting away with because he's not being played in a game, but simply written as a story. I think the ubituous hackers/runners that he is supposedly hiring are getting way too contrived - it seems that he can wipe people out financially, or anything else he wants, just a bit too easily. I could see him leaning on a bunch of teen gangers who have no real resources, but people like the hypothetical con man should have access to the same kind of resources that Shen does, if not more.

I wish somebody would GM him... Then again, Shen does make and sell orichalcum, and anyone can tell you that that shit will get you a lot of money.

I'm thinking of renaming him Johnathan Crowley, and he'll be the adopted distaff cousin of Aleister Crowley; his mother was unable to give birth, so she adopted him into the family. She was a horribly strict Christian, made worse by the fact that he had full access to Aleister's hermetic library. The free spirit is in fact Aleister Crowley himself.

Johnathan Crowley's power focus will be a blood charm from the Theran Empire, and a powerful one at that. It'll have drawbacks, such as giving him a permanent wound point, being bound to his soul so he dies if he loses touch with it, and not being able to remove it.

Ahhh, the power of Knowledge (Artifacts) and Unarmed Combat (Diarm).

question: will he ever put it down or will the players be able to find out that he needs it to live? As an NPC that is totally up to you, and if he never puts it down then a balancing factor of "he dies if he puts it down" is meaningless.

If his hand is cut off, then he dies. Instantly. It's something that grafted itself to his hand, kind of like the Witchblade.

Ah, so it's something that can't possibly happen without both knowledge from his foe and intervention by the GM?

... shut up, you're making me cry...

Anyway, the focus will be obvious if it's not covered with a glove, and anyone seeing it will identify him instantly.

He'll be able to summon demons, but that will always require a blood sacrifice in wound points equal to the force of the demon summoned. It won't be able to be healed until the deal's made with the demon. This includes binding, which can be really dangerous.

During my running of Harlequin's Back, there'll be a metaplane in which the group enters the battle of the bands. They'll go up against DragonForce, and the whole game will be centered around memorizing their song and writing their own 20 line set of lyrics for me to memorize. They'll probably win, but it'll be fun.

I wouldn't be so sure of the "it'll be fun" part, at elast not as it applies to everyone else. You may want to ask ahead of time to avoid having a session where the majority of the players get bored and annoyed.

It'll be a 20 minute thing, the climax of the Battle of the Bands.

Ah, "the whole game" made me think it might take longer.