KANEDAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! *THWUD*

~J

I think we have to make the distinction between "how do we refer to our character when speaking with your usual team" or "with new people who don't know your character". Because when I talk to friend who know well my character, I refer to this character by his name. Then anyone is able to imagine better the character and doesn't limit it to a single or two things...

Take my character Jia for example. To introduce her to you I have to say that she is Korean, she is a mystical adept (adept following the way of magician) but magic is not her main interest and she's better for tactical ops (automatics, infiltration etc without skill improvement from magic) as she is a former Korean SWAT. She's pretty technophile and she is MMORPG addicted. Ok, that's only the big lines needed to understand the character's personality and abilities. So it's a lot easier to talk about "Jia" when I speak to people who know the character and that help to understand correctly a story. Moreover she haven't a real defined function she's musn't be considered as magician and she's not a hacker too, in fact she is polyvalent. And her personality and description is simply too complex to repeat it each time...

However, if I talk about Jia to people who don't know the character, generally I give her name and then the description.

For me characters are a personality before an archetype and I always try to set an original character or at least with its own personality so generally it's not easy to refer to those character by a description. But sometimes it's easier than others. Some character even with their own and original personality can be referred by its function too (sometimes with an adjective to mix with descritpion). And it depend also to the context. If you tell a story and if the character isn't one of the main character, then it's not important to reduce the character to a single function or personality aspect but if it's the main character it's another story... ^^

- Daegann -

i've always figured that street names are just part of the culture--an evolution and extension of online behavior. look around in here, how many people are using their real names as their username? take that into 2049 or so, where many runners use the Matrix for their transactions because they want a degree of anonymity. if your online name is, say, motorfirebox, and you meet up online with a guy named Talondel who agrees to sell you an HK227-S with two clips of EX-EX, how do you introduce yourself when you show up for the real-world meet? i, personally, would probably go ahead and say "i'm motorfirebox, gimme my guns and a big sloppy kiss you sexy hunk of man." and he'd say "i'm Talondel, and i knew from the way you typed you'd be a really hot, let's go make man-love somewhere." and then...

but i digress. so, next week, when Talondel is talking to Ellery in some anonymous chatroom about the buyer he found for his surplus SMG, he's going to refer to me as motorfirebox, right? and if i ever met Ellery, she would also refer to me as motorfirebox. people would start knowing me as motorfirebox; my real name wouldn't matter.

now, combine all that with the percentage of runners who have something to hide. they're ex-company men, or former Yak assassins who refused to kill a target, or what have you. they don't want to be known by their real names. they could buy a fake ID (or ten), or even just start calling themselves Bob instead of Chow. or, they could just do what everyone else is doing anyway--pick a cool-sounding nom de plume (and if you say you've never wanted to have a cool-sounding nickname, you are a liar and probably a witch). it makes you anonymous, in that nobody's using your real name, but lets you avoid the hassle of true anonymity, where no one knows what to call you.

All of my characters have a Given Name or Birth Certificate name. Most also have a couple of aliases (Fake ID's) and a few have one or more street names, nick names, matrix handles, etc. The first two classes of name are decided and character creation or at the time of ID purchase. The others tend to growout of the games either through the characters appearance, habits, or exploits and are developed by the other players and by the GM through contacts (or for the less fortunate the local News). Rarely a nickname devised at character creation will actually stick.

EDIT I really need to use the spell checker, though now that it was up for half a day, any character ever had a "Girth Certificate" (particularly one over 40")

Well, it's kind of... Wierd.


First I come up with a proto-concept, IE, "Chinese female elf communist helicoptor rigger inspired by the chinese helicoptors in BF2"

Then I start on a character sheet.

Then I download a Shadows of Asia PDF, find out that the People's Republic of China ended in 2018, and get wholely depressed.

Yeah, 2018 is way too far off.

Sometimes the metaplot really pisses me off for doing things like that. Oftentimes, even though I know it's bad and wrong to ignore it, I do just that. I mean, I personally don't really care about the post SR2 metaplot, not one bit...

Yeah... I mean, really. What is the SR metaplot? They shatter every country that should have held together, and have something as fractitious as India hold firm?! I dunno...

Well, since I currently only game online (On Shadowland, click the link below for super-happy-fun-good-times), given the nature of collaborative fiction the only way that the site can function effectively is to accept the canon wholesale - both the rules and the setting material. That way everyone starts from the same point and no one gets into fights about house rules or setting mods.

Not that there isn't a place for house rules and setting mods. I've been running since October a post-Crash ('64) campaign which I'm sure has any number of deviances from the canon setting. However, that campaign is being run in the Private Campaigns area of Shadowland, where you can do whatever you want because they function like tabletop games that are played online. But for the majority of the role-playing areas on the site, specifically The Sixth World (meatworld) and The Matrix (guess), they are 100% canon setting, and 99% canon rules. The few Official SL Houserules were written, discussed, voted upon, and accepted by the consensus of SL players, but they are all minor add-ons, as opposed to major changes or contradictions.

The same applies to the WoD and D&D/d20/dn) sites on Shadowland.

Now, as far as filling in the gaps, well... Until it's contradicted by canon, it's fair game. Until Fanpro says different, there was a magician uprising and battle against shedim in Wetar, one of the PCs was on Gen. Yeats' Candidate Protection Detail in 2057, and there are a group of runners who are reputed to have been involved in the events which take place in Brainscan. And those are just the first things that come to mind. Over 12 years, a Hell of a lot has happened on Shadowland, some of which has actually spilled into SR canon (stuff involving Deus, otaku, some canon NPCs, etc.) so it's a fair wash in the end.

You can run a game at rpol.net and not have to worry a bit about whether your game meets canon or not.

Well, having joined SL back in 1994 when Dave first opened it to the world (and the Shadowspawn Guild before that, RIP) I have no intentions of leaving anytime soon, or taking my business elsewhere. I can play non-canon games just fine on SL (and like with the post-Crash campaign I am enjoying the Hell out of it, and the players seem to be as well).

Sorry, when you said

Ah. Woops.

Yeeesh. This is a huge debate over my grumbling that the PRC broke up about 40 years too early for my character to be viable.

I dunno. Somehow, I'm not seeing a 60-year-old human being much of a Shadowrunner. And she woulden't have been old enough in 2018 as an elf to have been a military chopper pilot, given that, you know, even if she was born on the exact date Ryumo appeared, she would have been seven.

Leonization and Spike Babies, respectively. Or just go pure Rigger.

~J

"Then you will need to gain or lose weight."

A: Leonization is expensive, but I thought about it...
B: What's a spike baby?
C: Another thought I had was a former PLA chopper pilot, from 60 years ago, who was getting very old when SURGE hit during the YotC, she SGE'd into an Elf, regained her early-womanhood beauty, and kept all her long-won bitterness.

Enough acryonyms in C?

A spike baby is an Elf born before the Awakening. So called because one theory is that they were born, conceived, or partly gestated inside a mana spike providing the necessary conditions for expression.

~J

Okay, but.. If she was born in any decent time to be a PLA chopper pilot before the fracturing of China, she'd have a birthdate in the 1990s at the latest. That would mean xenophobic Chinese, she'd probably not survive until the Awakening, let alone enter the PLA.

IIRC, prior to the Awakening Elfishness was thought to be a minor mutation similar to a cleft palate or extra digit on a hand or foot.

~J

In progressive, Western countries, maybe.

In late-communist China, it would probably be regarded as a genetic defect to be neutered if they were feeling nice, or killed if they were feeling merciful.

A little xenophobic there? We're talking funny-shaped ears and a predisposition for being tall. If she survives being female, I don't think the rest will be a problem.

~J

Another reason I wanted to give her a birthdate with the third digit being a late 4 or a 5-on-the-oh.

And no, I do not mean 1948-50, either.

Though a Centinnial (or longer) Shadowrunner might be interesting... Wonder if it's possible to have a spike baby from say, 1922 or so.

I suspect that they might not identify too much with the Elf metatype if they were 90 when the rest of them started showing up

(Barring pickup by Mr. Sean Laverty, of course.)

~J

Sean Laverty?

And of course, by the time I'm talking about, they'll be 160 and have had plenty of time to come to grips with their metatype.

Unfortunately, I imagine far too many of them will identify with their own first impressions of Elves, damn you Tolkien.

He ran around collecting Spike Babies in a tip of the hat to The X-Men. As for Tolkien, an Elf born in '22 would be 15 by the time The Hobbit got published

~J

So yeah, perfect time to form his impressionable opinions about what he is.