One of the things I dig about SR is how much the developers leave up to the individual GM to define about canon npcs. For newb GM's it's scary, for experienced guys it makes them god. Me, I hide under my bed when I think about it.

Anyway, reading the dragonheart saga now, second book as I don't have the first. I always thought Dunkelzahn and Damien Knight were nice caring people. I'm finding stuff that... well... makes them a lot more ... human I guess. I won't give it away here, just read the books yourself.

So tell me, which SR 'heroes' have your groups seen the bad side of and how? Or vice versa.

I'm currently on my way to making my group see a different perspective on Deus. (checks sky for lightning bolts) Damien Knight is getting a makeover, but Aztechnology, oh azzie will always be the king of evil. Richard Villiers is still a bit of an enigma by me.

If I can kill them, they're bad.

If I can't, they're good.

-Siege

That's one of Shadowrun's strengths as an RPG I think. There are no real clear-cut good guys and bad guys, it's all shades of grey. Everyone is human. Everyone does good things and bad things for good reasons and bad things. The only thing in the Shadowrun universe that you could truly called pure evil are the Horrors/the Enemy. Even the bugs aren't pure evil because they're just alien. All they want is their own survival. Other than that, they don't wish humans any ill, we're just in their way of finding a new place to live.

The Abstruse One

The Aleph Society.... not sure if they're suppose to be bad or good, but in our game they became allies in fighting Aztlan. As best as we can figure it, Gaf is a 'mutated' Free Spirit who was mutated by certain toxitities in the area. He's allied with us and the Sons of the Alamo(another god/bad??? group) in cleansing Aztlan of their current government and ruling Corp....

Great thing about Aleph was how the GM portrayed them as near cyber zombies who seemed genocidal with a desire to wipe us from the earth for being in the area (they assumed your basic SRer running for Aztlan). RPing is why they're allies, refusing to hurt people until we knew for sure they were the enemy, and when confrontation was inevitable, resorting to non-deadly levels of attack.

Sphynx

heh.

that's really one of the things that annoy me about the SR novels, most of them--they're usually about good guys, basically decent people in a bad world. even nigel findley did this--though it worked better in his because of his hardline noir storylines.