so we had character creation/campaign start this week. the setting of my SR4 campaign arc is going to be seattle circa 2072 (note to self - find hard copy of the latest book/buy same). I covered the basics of the rules, character creation and some generic details of the changes to the setting. I've got some players new to the setting, and two who've played SR1 all the way up to and including SR4. So it's a good mix of players. However....oy the concepts they came up with!

1. Bitter ex-cop. former Lone Star detective who lost his job in the Knight Errant takeover of the seattle PD. moderately cybered. troll metavariant (formori). light cosmetic surgery as well.

2. dwarf physical adept. largely amoral, recruited by the ex-cop as muscle.

3. combat mage. the dwarf's roomie. he's along for the money.

4. coyote shifter (used the fox shifter stat line/rules and fudged a bit) who is...also a coyote shaman. He finds indoor plumbing hilarious and believes the spirits have told him to help the bitter ex-cop 'walk the path'.

5. Vampire hermetic mage. She had the (mis?)fortune to be the ex-cop's last collar. He said 'hell with it', didn't turn her in and was one of the first recruited into the new team. she has almost no memory of her life prior to infection.

so they're a magically heavy team to say the least. Even the one who isn't magical has the formori thing going for him (arcane arrestor talent). they're also fairly light on cyberware and electronics, so I'm going to create a hacker/decker NPC type for them to hire out on an as needed basis. The ex-cop also loaded up on all sorts of contacts all over town (underworld, cops, lawyers, gangers...all sorts of stuff). oddly enough, I think most of them won't have any problems blending in with society at large. well...except for the shifter. He tooks a number of spells largely based on their prank value so we'll see how that goes.

i'm looking forward to this campaign. their first run is going to get them mixed up in the lone star/KE change over in a moderately big way. where we go from there depends on the choices they make.

When did KE take over for the 'star in Seattle?

After the events of Ghost Cartels, I believe. It goes into detail in Seattle 2072

Indeed. And there is mention that the Star ain't happy at ALL about turning over the contract to KE. Oddly enough, Lone Star still runs the local prison system. Anywho - there's a lot of stuff there to play with, and the first run is going to get the team up to their elbows in the whole KE/Lone Star mess.

Holy crap, that's like the pitch for a totally awesome action comedy.

it has the potential to go either way. the ex-cop is still basically trying to do his old job. kinda/sorta. mostly he wants to kick Knight Errant in the nuts for costing him his job, but not as a primary goal. he's more into the making money aspects of the whole deal. ticking off KE would be a nice bonus to the whole operation.

The vampire chick is just trying to make it through the night without getting taken down for a bounty. she's flat broke and fairly pissed off about it.

What are her morals pertaining to feeding? Anyone goes? Scum of the earth? Don't get caught? Or has she been alive long enough to develop those yet?

What are her morals pertaining to feeding? Anyone goes? Scum of the earth? Don't get caught? Or has she been alive long enough to develop those yet?

she doesn't really have any yet. she's mostly just trying to survive long enough to build up some level of personal safety and comfort. for her, being a vampire has mostly been extremely unfun...

A very interesting cast of characters indeed... let us know how it turns out...

Keep the Faith

The Coyote shifter would have been better statted as a Wolf, since coyotes and wolves are the same kind of animal. Foxes not so much. Coyote/wolf are more comparable in size than fox/coyote.

Other than that, don't let them read the link in my signature....

I've been thinking a lot about their first job. I think i've got it straight in my head now, and i'm going to put it in outline form either tonight or over the next couple days. then figure out what stats I'll need for the cast of characters.

Why didn't he just get a job with KE? The deal with the city should include a clause that forces the new contractor to take on layed off employees: the last thing any mayor wants is a bunch of angry unemployed men trained with a gun wandering his streets.

A couple reasons:

1. the seattle book mentions that KE simply didn't want most of the old Lone Star cops. it's cheaper to just bring in new people and train them.

2. KE did pick up some of the contracts, but the new hires lost their seniority and had their contracts renegotiated. most (if not all) lost rank, vacation time, and dropped a lot on the pay scale.

3. KE simply doesn't trust a lot of the former Lone Star cops. they could be corrupt, or selling out secrets to Lone Start. They're chomping at the bit to prove themselves - a clean sweep of most or all of the Lone Star cops would give them a PR boost.

4. for the Star cops to stay, not only are they starting over again at the bottom, but they've got to go in for retraining in entirely new corporate procedures. a lot of cops just didn't want to go through it. Esp when the KE trainers were busting their chops every step of the way.

And Brackhaven was in NO mood to deal with the Star. they screwed up on the Tiempo aftermath and he needed a scapegoat. That means the local cop shops got hosed on the wrong end of a politican scrambling to save face. He dumped the cops, gave the contract to KE and didn't give a damn what happened ot the Star cops.

This one raises an interesting question: was your player's character one of the clean cops or the corrupt ones?

Yes.

This sounds like a really fun cast of PC's and has the potential for being the type of game I would love to play in! I like it when players design characters with a past, round them out, take some flaws and ... well you know,give them character. You simply have to recap your runs on here; I am sure they'll keep us all entertained.

Give us some more details about where your thoughts are on the power level of the campaign. Are they being groomed to be big fish? Little fish? Medium-sized fish in a nice hollandaise sauce? How did these folks all meet? You gave a few details on a couple of htem, but what drew them together? Do they have a common fixer? Are they going to have a recurring foe?

Vlad

they're standard issue 400pt characters, with all that implies. so I guess you'd say they're fairly baseline. As to where they end up...well now that entirely depends on them. I've got an outline of my campaign, but I learned a loooooong time ago that players will never do what you expect. so I keep my options open, and update my outline as the game progresses through my planned story arcs.

They basically all got together because of the ex-cop. every one of them was, at one point, under investigation for something or another. They're the ones the cop could never catch, either because they were just too good or because they were damn lucky. Either way, he's decided to put together the team to make some damn money so he can retire on more than his lousy pension.

The guy with the connections is also the ex-cop. He's walked a beat, driven a desk, worked gang unit, narcotics and magical affairs. he's seen a lot, and knows people up and down the social scale and understands that a small team of collective oddballs can get a lot accomplished quietly and without fuss.

If they play it right, they might actually end up making a bunch of friends with the Lone Star guys....but the KE folks will probably hate their guts. In fact, for the opening campaign story arc, KE is going to be the bad guys. Overeager cops with a chip on their shoulders trying to prove they're better than Lone Star...oh yeah, I can GO places with that one! so city politics will be a good part of it as well.

I'll try to update the events of the campaign as I go. But this week we've all got prior commitments of one sort or another so we won't actually START the campaign until 22 Oct.

Sounds like a lot of fun. You have sort of a Leverage thing going on here, (TNT tv series where an ex-insurance investigator puts together a team of the former criminals he could never capture to be sort of "good guys" for big bucks.) I have always been a fan of setups like this... sort of an updated "To Catch a Thief" deal. My last campaign was centered on characters that started out as Lonestar detectives and, once they'd uncovered waaaay too much corruption (the first long campaign adventure) got recruited by the Feds as Marshals working Mission Impossible-type missions. Started them "small" and built them up into a bigger "save the day" type of team. So, I feel qualified to say there is a lot of gold in the plot lines you are about to mine.

Good luck and keep us updated as it goes.

Vlad

A lot of my players did use Leverage as the basis for their character concepts. they wanted to do a much more high tech/cyberpunk version of the concept.