And if so, what are they like?

Yeah, there are. They are pretty much like small horses, only, get this, they've got fragging horns on their foreheads!

Okay, so what powers do they have?

UNICORN
A unicorn resembles a horse with a single, spiral horn in
the middle of its forehead and a flowing mane and tail. It
stands 1.5 meters tall at the shoulder and weighs 370 kilograms.
Unicorn horns are prized in many parts of the world for
medicinal and magical purposes.

B Q S C I W E R
8 5 x 6 8 — 3/4 4 9Z 5

INIT: 5 + 1D6
Attacks: 8M, +1 Reach
Powers: Immunity (Pathogens, Poisons), Magical Guard
Weaknesses: Allergy (Pollutants, Moderate)



GREATER UNICORN
The greater unicorn is larger and less delicate-looking than
the standard unicorn, with a thick mane and pink-tinged
hooves. Its single horn is short and thick, and its eyes have a
golden cast. The greater unicorn can grow as tall as a meter
and a half at the shoulder. Many shamans consider this creature’s
horn ideal for making fetishes or spell foci for dealing
with poisons and pathogens, which has prompted a sizable
poaching industry.

B Q S C I W E R
8 4 x 5 8 4 3/4 4 6Z 5

INIT: 5 + 2D6
Attacks: 8M, +1 Reach
Powers: Empathy, Enhanced Physical Attributes (Quickness),
Immunity (Pathogens, Poisons), Magical Guard (Self Only), Search

Immunity to pathogens and poisons, the ability to use spell defense, and an allergy to pollutants. They're also dual-natured and one point more intelligent than a Horse, but they aren't very special in general.

Edit: too slow. Also, I never knew the Greater Unicorn had less Essence than the Unicorn.

~J

That's utter crap! Everyone knows unicorns sound like sheep and teleport.

Actually, everyone knows that they're vicious, nasty creatures with little intelligence but a pack mentality and a hunger for human flesh.

~J

I was hoping they'd be special, sentient guardians of nature like from The Last Unicorn. That book's so beautiful and depressing. It makes me cry. :.(....

How was I to know an RPG that centers around violent corporate crime would be nothing like a wistful tragicomic fantasy novel?

And they steal your kidney.

I'm still writing something that features a sentient unicorn for my creative writing class.

I'm not really confused any longer. And whether or not you're a bad person depends on why I make you laugh.

In my story, unicorns are really rare, sentient protectors of nature. They're kinda like blink deer, except they can purify water with their horns.

Hey it's your game . Do it how you like. You can have 'em be like the Grandfather elk. They hang around with their "lesser kin" that are pretty bland, and protect them.

It'll center around a hermetic mage working for Renraku's product development division. It's trying to make products that mundanes can use, so they're analyzing magical creatures. Of special interest is the unicorn's ability to hide and evade hunters while in the forest; if they can isolate the aspect of its magic that allows it to do this and possibly create implants by cloning its flesh, then their red samurai will have a new edge, one that trounces chameleon suits and can be used by anybody.

The hermetic mage hears a thought in his head while he's looking at her, and he's magically compelled to free her. he opens up her cage while he's under magical compulsion, and the unicorn goes free, only to get tasered down. He runs away from Renraku, since they'll view his actions as willing betrayal and have him killed.

Through a process I haven't figured out yet, he decides to search where he found out the unicorn was captured, and while he's looking at Tir border patrols and looking for a way through, Harlequin pops up alongside him mimicking his hunkered-down stance, with parody binoculars and everything. He leaves behind a credstick with 150,000 in it. He also leads the guards on a chase away from the forest.

When he gets to the grove in which the unicorn was captured, the guardian spirit that protects the grove senses the desire to save the unicorn in him and decides to help him. The guardian spirit is a possessing spirit, and when it tried to kill the Red Samurai team that took in the unicorn by possessing its physad, the physad stabbed himself in the heart mid-possession and disrupted the spirit.

Our intrepid hero decides to hire a shadowrunning team with the money to break out the unicorn. One of them is a beautiful chaos magician who's utterly materialistic and has a cynically approving view of the current social structure.

Once they shoot their way to the lab and the unnamed hero kicks the crap out of his supervisor initiated mage, they find that most of the unicorn's tissue has been removed and it wants him to kill it. With tears pouring out of his eyes, he does so and sets fire to the building on his way out.

He becomes a shadowrunner afterwards.

You should have the unicorn have been loaded up with 8.9 Essence worth of cyberware and be a crazed and deranged killer now. Cyberjaw, move-by-wire 4, muscle replacement, the works.

~J

Umm, consider me speechless...

*Edit*

The story Emo, the story... *winks*

At the story, or the idea of a cyber-unicorn?

There's also the old SR3 min-scenario They Shoot Wild Horses that Mike Mulvihill did to tie into Threats 2 from shadowrunrpg.com.

What's the group that's featured in Threats 2?

Oh... WTF?

And were unicorns flesh-eating in ED?

Well, there used to be unicorns, but then there was the Dumpshock 50th anniversary of the awakening BBQ in 2061. No one told us they were on the endangered species list! and some of those dumpshockers are big eaters, and well the unicorns were quite tasty.

Now they're just dumbass horses with rainbow-colored horns. They suck.

Unicorns can be cool

There actually are beautiful, perfect unicorns in Shadowrun. The problem is only virgins can see them, so the oldest account is from a six-year-old.

(And none of this 'technically a virgin' crap. That's a Shadowrun argument, not a unicorn argument. Unicorns are fundamentalists. If you've seen porn, you're on longer a virgin by unicorn standards, get out.)

The unicorns are excellent. They're exactly the kinds of things you don't want killed, evar.

And I agree with your assessment of dystopian settings; they make every pre-cataclysm book, symphony, and poem a bajillion times more valuable.

I'm thinking of making the head of research a complete asshole who views magic as something utterly cold and inhuman, not because he earnestly believes that it's something unaffected by human emotion, but because he hates that aspect of magic. His capturing of the unicorn and dissecting of it is his idea of victory over what is truly magical and wonderful about the world.

The idea is that as a boy, while he was in Tir territory when his father was on a business trip to a Renraku-owned subsidiary, he ran away from the tour group and saw a unicorn purely by chance. He knew in that instance that he was unworthy, that in comparison to it, he was selfish, cruel, and impure, a blight upon the face of nature. It turns out that the unicorn, despite being a guardian of nature, is a pretty big snob.

He came to hate it, projecting that sense of utter rejection upon everything remotely magical. His Awakening as a powerful hermetic was his way of corrupting magic, his way of weaving doped silicon into the heart of all that is mysterious and mystical.

His last words before he ignites himself are, "I... I think it's best that I lost, that you had a chance to see what I'd done to her."

The unicorn will have had its heart removed and the remaining vessels hooked up to an external mechanical heart that baroquely resembles a human heart in complexity but not in aesthetic. It'll have that Akira-esque almost-organic look.

FWIW, I always thought the point of a dystopian setting was to drive home that the beautiful is either rotting away or is actively destroying other beautiful things.

~J

The thing about SR, though, is that the traditional cultures have managed to take some power away from the technocratic ones. The caveat is that the traditional cultures all want to destroy or buy out every other culture.

So on the one hand, you have the megacorps, and on the other, you have the warring NAN. So I don't think your idea of dystopia is being contradicted by SR, or my story in which a unicorn is dissected by a mad scientist.

But why can't we have a little hope here and there? Pockets of happiness amidst the bullshit?

Well, the issue I have with your story is that the unicorn remains pure and incorruptible, as does the mage—he's a big-H Hero. In the end, the unicorn dies a noble and tragic death. Even worse, the mad scientist is just that—he's all "what evil thing can I do today? I know, I can cut apart a pure and innocent forest guardian just 'cause! BWAHAHAHA!" Even worse, he recognizes this at the end. There's no self-righteousness, no rejection of the protaganist's (and unicorn's) moral superiority, it's all "I was wrong, I die now".

It's all pretty simple and clean and straightforward, and pretty much doesn't have moral ambiguity at all. I'm sure it's possible to get less Shadowrunny, but I'm not sure how.

~J

That's an oversimplification of the mad scientist. The thing is, he HATES beauty, because he saw the ultimate embodiment of it and it rejected him. So he turns to logic, trying his damnedest to BECOME logic, to become hateful rationality because he can't stand being anything else. He wants to purge that seed of humanity and melancholy from himself. He hurts inside, and he wants to hurt no more. If you think about it hard enough, you'll realize that in a way, he's a victim; he was effectively mind-raped by a unicorn when he was a kid and forced to face things that destroyed his sense of self. And you'll notice that the unicorn isn't really good, either. Most of its interactions with people will be through its aura of purity and chastity, which is basically a constantly-running Suggestion power.

The mage won't be that heroic at first. The main reason he's doing this is because he has nothing else. His life is mostly empty; he makes only the smallest pretenses of ambition to keep his job, and he basically coasts along in his personal life. And he's a hero only because of an idea that was planted through the unicorn's mind-rape. He'll spend about a month in the Barrens, drinking himself stupid and absently helping a gang claim more territory through the use of his spirits before his dreams grow so terrible that he HAS to do something.

Plus, I won't make the unicorn's death a noble death.

There's a lot of depth to these characters that I'm leaving out in these summaries.

That you, Wounded Ronin?

That's the question we should be asking: is there the Shogun of Harlem in Shadowrun?

~J

His Orkiness prefers to be referred to as the Black Khan of the Harlem Steppes.

Sho'nuff!

~J

Beware his custom chrome-plated Ares Predator, the alicorn-handle notched with his many kills. He calls it "Mercy."

I have to watch that movie now.

And in my story, the mad hermetic will carry around an old copy of the Last Unicorn with its binding stripped off and all identifying pages removed; it'll be a mysterious book until the end, when the main character pockets the book and does a string search on TomeSearch. The mad hermetic will be seen as constantly looking through the Matrix for a first edition of the book, but he'll never tell anybody what it is.

Plus, the way in which I'll make the unicorn's death anything but noble is that I'll portray it as a death of vanity. He'll want to touch the unicorn and pet it one last time, but she'll tell him, "NO! I can not abide this... this abomination that I've become! Do not touch me!" She'll use the last of her strength to rear up and scare him away when he approaches despite her commands.

This is all reminding me of "I was born a unicorn" by the Unicorns.

...I imagine you can order one to be vat grown by one of the designer genetech firms.

Actually Unicorns might be one of their more popular products in some markets.

Knasser; I took a look at your link and I really liked your approach.

Three comments:

First: as the stats are clearly SR4 maybe you should post a link in the SR4 are.

Second: personally I have two pictures of the Unicorn in my mind; the animal, which may have the Movement power as well and would, as a species, need more than one male : ) Or the Wild Nature spirit, whose materialization form is that of the Unicorn. There are some stats in Street Magic that could work for that.


Third: Isn't the DV of the horn too much? Str/2 +3 or 4 could be ok.


All in all, I like your take, the descriptions are cool too.

Cheers,

Max