I'm going to guess the movie.

Way ahead of you!

The Bowler

Real Name: Carole
Race: Human

Attributes
Body: 2
Agility: 2
Reaction: 2
Strength: 2
Charisma: 2
Intuition: 2
Logic: 2
Willpower: 3

Edge: 3
Magic: 1 (spirit knack)
Initiative: 4
Essence: 6

Skills
Climbing : 1
Gymnastics : 1
Running : 1
Swimming : 1
Etiquette : 2
Intimidation : 2 (spec: saying "why don't you tell me?" repeatedly)
Leadership : 1
Negotiation : 1
Summoning : 3 (Spirit of Man)
Very Exotic Ranged Weapon (Bowling Ball) : 6
Inflitration : 1
Perception : 1
Shadowing : 1

Knowledge (Bowling): 5
Knowledge (Criminal Organisations): 2

Positive Qualities:
Spirit Knack (Spirit of Man)
Spirit Affinity (Spirit of Man)

Equipment
Summoning Focus (Rating 3) - Bowling Ball
Glasses
Black silk cape with flames on it
Big carpet bag.
Eyeliner

Image: A petite girl with dark hair, heavy black eyeliner and an black, vaguely punkish outfit and a black cape embroidered with flames and a skull and cross-skittles motif. In her left hand, she carries a heavy looking carpet bag that occasionally moves as if there is something animate within.

Quote: "Say hello to Daddy!"

Background: The only child of the noted crime fighter Carmine the Bowler (a vigilante known for his unusual method of assaulting his enemies), Carole has grown up to reluctantly follow in her father's footsteps after he accidentally fell down an elevator shaft onto some bullets.

Preserving her father's skull in a translucent purple bowling ball (summoning focus), she can occasionally call on his spirit to guide the ball as she hurls it at her foes. Annoyingly however, her father's spirit continues to talk to her in a voice that only she can hear, accusing her friends of being gay communists and nagging her to avenge his death. She has an arrangement that once she offs his murderer, he will finally let her go back to grad school.

Notes: Carmine is summoned as a Force 3 Possession Based Spirit of Man with Innate Spell (Levitate). Using Levitate on the bowling ball enables Carole to hurl it through the air as an ranged weapon. Carmine's spirit will also occasionally guide the ball around corners etc, but essentially requires his daughter to hurl him for maximum force. He will normally then return to his daughter.

The levitating bowling ball is a thrown weapon doing (Str + 2)P resisted with half impact. It also does damage against barriers as an area affect weapon and causes knock back as if possessing Elemental Effect (Blast).

EDIT: Yes, I know the spirit can't have the innate spell if she doesn't have it herself, but I think it's a pretty valient attempt to make the character under Shadowrun rules.

Fantastic! The adept fits with it just being "a gift." I like!

Ironically, whilst Spirits of Air have the flight skill, they don't actually have a power of flight as such. It's a quality of their materialised forms so a possessed object wouldn't necessarily have the ability to zoom around even though it knew all the theory.

You're right of course that it would be less of a rules stretch than the spirit of man's mysteriously appearing innate spell when the conjuror doesn't have it, but I thought about it and decided that a spirit of man fitted the idea of it being the ghost of her father.

Also, daft though it is, this thread has just made me realise the character potential of the knack quality in Street Magic.

Mystery Men was a great film and for something so silly, it pulled off a really dark tone.

Geasa - must be nekkid...

Don't forget to make it Improved Invisibility so that he can be invisibile to even electronic devices as shown in the movie when he got past the sensor to deactivate the lightning sentry weapon. (unless I'm remembering that spell wrong...)

I love how the most seemingly useless power ever actually turns out to be effective at the end.

And yet, no-one has considered how the power can be used to get past automated disintergration devices. Priceless! If my game was just a little less gritty and realistic, I would so put this character in the game.

Is anyone actually going to sneak one of these in to their game?

It would have to be at least a force 4 spells as you need 4 hits for improved invisibility to work on camera and the like.

Interesting article. And quite timely, too. I'm currently weighing up the pros and cons of running Shadowrun vs. an Iron Heroes and Eberron hybrid. The deciding factor may be that I think the group would be more comfortable playing something daring and heroic rather than something dark and morally bankrupt. Most of the players have never done a role-playing game before and will happily play whatever I run... and I have a lot more material and experience with Shadowrun. But between us, most of the group have enough grim real life experiences that we'd be justified in playing nothing but "Happy Fun Pink Land: The RPG" forever more, if we wanted to. If I can swing Shadowrun around to being a bit more heroic, I might pull it off.

Like I said in that article, it's all in the attitude....

Hi,

I remember reading someone's SR campaign, which was basically TSR's FREElancers done using the SR rules.

In real terms, the only thing stopping 1 set of rules being used in different ways is the creativity and hard work of the GM.

Much SR fiction has PCs being heroic, with motivation rarely being about money - love, honour, friendship, saving people, looking cool.


Just my thruppence..

"Two hands there, son." was the reaction of The Blue Raja.

The Bowler's quote was:

"You might want to, you know, put some shorts on or something... if you want to keep fighting Evil today, I mean."

Accompanied by a sly grin.

Incidentally, she is indeed called the Bowler (as was her father) because she introduces herself as this at the hero auditions. It's Tony P. (one of the two leaders of the Disco Boys) who keeps calling her Baby Bowler because he's the one that killed her father.

Don't forget that he didn't strip off his clothes, they fell through him when he activated his power.

That's not Invisibility, that's a Geasaed version of the Critter Power 'Mist Form'.

There's even the uber-powerful 'Fading' where the Critter literally vanishes from both the physical and astral planes... Hmm... Nah. Mist Form's more likely as it works better with his clothes falling off.


Huh, his own family doesn't seem to register his presence more than half the time, yet his Charisma's probably pretty good... Maybe he has low Willpower... How do you stat someone who 'just blends into the background' socially?


According to IMDB.com, if you want to do a complete conversion:

'The Shoveller' 5'9 1.75 m

'Mr. Furious' 5'7 1.70 m

'The Blue Raja' 5'11.5 1.82 m

'The Bowler' 5'1 1.55 m

'The Invisible Boy' 5'11 1.80 m

'The Spleen' 5'10 1.78 m

'The Sphinx' 6' 1.83 m


Next Post: Jaid- Thanks

you know, there *is* a positive quality called "blandness"