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Effective Characters 101
Everyone loves a good role-player, and that is a fact. The rest of the party welcomes anyone who can immerse everyone else in the world by acting as a denizen of New Seattle. But even if you are an effective role-player, there may come a time when you simply cannot come up with more ways to make a cooler street sammy, more new ideas for that whiz decker, and some fresh air to put into the stale tomes of magic. This is where this article comes in. If you’ve already got all sorts of ideas ping-ponging around in your head about your new drug dealer character or the chemist who’d put Dr. Jekyll to shame, move along, this isn’t for you. But if you’re tired of cookie-cutter sammies, magicians, and deckers, read on.
First of all, when creating a character, you have to get an idea. Ideas can come from anywhere, recent events, people you see, or even simple books. When I pull up the bucket from the idea well and find that it’s empty, I get the nearest dictionary, open a page, and jab my finger randomly into it. If the word makes sense, I take it and go from there.
For example, say your digit ends up on the word “Firefighter”. From there, expand on the idea. For this example, we’ll go for a mage with all water and ice spells. That will be our basic idea.
After you have a basic idea of the character, you can come up with a snappy name to fit their archetype. We’ll go with Drench for this example. Now we’ll have to come up with a reason for the character to fit their idea.
In Drench's case, we'll need to come up with a reason that he would know water and ice spells and fit in with the word "firefighter". We’ll say he was caught in a house-fire as a child. After that, Drench was always wary of fire, and when he discovered his magical power, he researched all the anti-fire magic he could so that he could stop something like that from happening again.
Next, the character needs a reason to begin the "art" of Shadowrunning.
Now, while we've got it down why Drench knows the spells that he does, we still don’t have a reason for him to start running the shadows. We’ll say his father was working for Renraku, and after he was caught letting out company secrets to rival companies, Renraku decided to have some runners “terminate his employment”. They apparently didn’t do their research, otherwise they would’ve figured out that Drench’s parents had gone out for dinner and he was left at home with a babysitter. By the time the flames reached his room, Drench was the only one left by the burning remains of the house, but was luckily awoken by a nightmare he had been having, and saw his door burning down. He knew enough to get down on the ground and call for help, and was lucky enough to have a phone and a fire extinguisher in his room. He called the fire department and just after, his luck ran out. As the flames approached and he depressed the handle of the extinguisher, he heard a loud sputter and to his dismay, nothing happened. He simply got down and hoped for the best, and finally the fire department arrived to find Drench, covered in burns. Drench apparently still had a little luck left, as he survived the blaze, but was permanently disfigured because of it. It was apparent to investigators that the cause was arson, and when Drench learned the truth years later, he delved into the shadows to not only to seek revenge upon those who had started the fire but also the giant corporation of Renraku.
Now we’re getting somewhere. We have a good back-story for the character and a good few things to start basing the creation of the stats on. I recommend starting with edges and flaws, as they fall in quite easily if you created the story and idea first like we just did.
Drench's backstory will give us some good material for flaws. We’ll give him Flashbacks when he sees any large fires. Things like lighters and fireplaces wouldn’t bother him, but just about anything larger would trigger it, which is a very understandable condition considering he almost burned to death.
A mild phobia of fire is also applicable, since while not all fire triggers his flashbacks, Drench will still be wary of fire and its harmful effects. We’ll also give him the example flaw from the Shadowrun Companion “Ugly and Doesn’t Care”, since someone with burn scarring isn’t going to fair as well with the opposite sex, and will get looked at a little funny by those of the same sex.
Some edges we could give him are Bravery (staying cool and knowing what to do in a huge blaze as a child), Will to Live (living through a fire serious enough to permanently scar), and Toughness (living through a fire constitutes being a hard motherfragger).
Next are the attribute points, spells, and skills (and race, too, if that wasn’t part of your character’s story or archetype), but one thing to keep in mind is that there should be reasons that a character knows what he knows and has what he has.
Drench, for example, probably wouldn’t have a high body skill (due to his burn trauma), and sure wouldn’t be packing incendiary grenades or a flamethrower. A fireman’s axe for a melee weapon and all sorts of fire-retardant clothing, however, would fall right in with his "firefighter" idea.
Once you have all those game-essentials assigned, you just need to get your character a personality (although you may very well have done that already, considering their personality can easily be spawned from their backstory, and usually does).
That should do it. We’ve now successfully created a character that, while still falling into the normal rules and regulations, has more flavor than the average mage. There is a line between original and weird to keep in mind, though, and you should make sure to keep your character within reason, but with a little common sense you shouldn’t have any trouble. Hopefully this guide has helped you to create characters that will be a little above the cut in style and background versus all the other sammies, physads, and deckers of the Shadowrun world.
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