So my thread about my Playable Dragon Character using the April Fools material from 2008 received some nice attention and helped me make something that I thought would work well in a 400 BP environment. Recently I've gotten the chance to play such a character... but in a 900 Karma environment using the old karmagen rules, as my GM didn't want to use the new ones.

This resulted in my character being fairly strong since I didn't have to pay for my metatype (Eastern Dragon, 325 BP).

So in an effort to dump a bunch of karma elsewhere and to make the character more interesting I invested a large chunk into talislegging.

Right now the character has the following:

Survival 3 (For finding ingredients)
Zoology 3 (For finding ingredients)
Botany 3 (For finding ingredients)
Metallurgy 3 (For finding ingredients)
Geology 3 (For finding ingredients)
Artisan 3 (For making Purty foci)


Arcana 6 (Focus Design)
Enchanting 6 (Artificing)

A rented Talislegger shop (Security 4, Necessities 4, Neighborhood 2)

A group contact (My Customers, 3/2, 100-1000 Members, Most have Magical Talent)

And finally, the Enchanting Shop, and Talislegger Kit tools.

Im looking for some tips, tricks, and advice to make her business flourish. I've taken the Day Job quality (10 hours a week), and a somewhat modified Dependant quality (live in boyfriend/business partner) along with In Debt (investors in the business, they want to see cash returns etcetera).

Since she is a dragon she can use her nail clippings & scales etc as virgin telesma but obviously that'll create a material link to her and as such isn't a viable option for marketing. Oh, things she makes for herself will probably be made with suchlike but she'd have to be offered an outstanding sum to use them for anybody else.

Flourish? Day job quality? By RAW, income is pretty much fixed, save for the Fame quality.
Interesting idea, but you're going to have to talk to your GM about advancing it.
I'd say working on improving the contact (nice idea there) and working to improve the shop lifestyle's neighbourhood would be the ways to go.
That said, be wary to not cross into carjacking>shadowrunning->profit area, unless your game allows for it.

On a sidenote; a great dragon with a boyfriend? How does that... Nevermind, I don't want to know.

First of all, make sure your GM accepts PC with such side activities.

Thats all been given the green light. The character is a Talislegger by day bodyguard/runner for Saeder-Krupp at night.

Well, you could of course specialize all those skills/knowledges to Gathering/Harvesting/Refining. That's a fairly cheap +2 dice to all of them.

Why is your GM dumb? Anyway… do you still need ideas about where to waste karma, or are you good now?

@ Ascalaphus: Ahh, I should have thought of that myself, good advice.

@ Yeremeyahu: I think I'm good now, though I'll be glad to hear your ideas. Right now the character has 16 Dice for Sorcery/Conjuring and 19 Drain dice.

Two questions you need to ask yourself about your character to make this somewhat playable:

1. Why would a person with a legit business run the shadows? If's he's pulling in a steady income, why risk it? If you pull down the 5.0 on your ass, shit or even another megacorp, it's going to hurt your business. Is your business currently struggling? He's turning to the shadows to save his business? Maybe a little bit more believable, but you better have a good hacker and get some good disguise spells and skills. Otherwise, all that nuyen and karma is going to get blown to shit once your ID gets made.

2. How do you invision this working out in the game? The other PCs aren't going to want to sit around and watch you make a shit ton of nuyen and spend a bunch of time making talismen. I would work with your GM to figure out how to incorporate it into your game without messing with your actual game play sessions. Be it that you handle it via email between missions or that you come an hour early to roll your stuff out, doesn't matter. But something that is worth discussing and considering if you want the game to last more than a month.

Core book Talismonger has a healthy amount of Etiquette and Negotiate so you don't get cheated by that cute elf in the tank-top. I would normally recommend some Intimidation so that rough and tumble troll can't squeeze a few more nuyen out of you, but you're a fragin' dragon, so I don't think that'll be an issue.
The Magical Goods Value Knowledge skill should also come in handy.

For 1. The character's investors are Saeder-Krupp, which is why she does runs and bodyguard jobs for them. She happens to owe them a bunch of money, and so she has a good reason to be in the party (everybody works for Saeder-Krupp).
2. Well there are really only a few things a magician can do with downtime, cast ritual spells, bind spirits, or work on talislegging. In every run there is some downtime, I dont expect to do any of this in such a way as to say "wait up guys, I need to spend a day or so working on this focus formula."
Thats a thought, I've got the Magical Background skill right now. Hrm, I might be able to break it into Magical Background and Magical Goods, I'll talk to my Gm and see if the two areas are inclusive or exclusive and require separate skills.

The Corebook Talismonger has both Magical Background and Magical Goods Value of three and six, respectively, if that helps any.

I believe the spell you want here is Sterilize. It breaks the material link, but doesn't ruin the material itself. Blood is still blood, scales are still scales, etc.

All sterilize does is make it so that it can't be used in ritual sorcery (but DNA tests work just fine) which is perfect for enchanting.

Are you sure that Sterilize doesn't ruin the telesma value? As a GM I'd say there's no free lunch like that.

AFB.

Well, Sterilize doesn't really say one way or the other whether it affects telesma. Since it's rather comparable to pouring extremely aggressive cleaning fluid over stuff though (which ruins ritual links for exactly the same reason), I'd say that anything that can destroy a ritual link also ruins a telesma.

Cleaning solutions, however, clean up blood and other debris by (partially) dissolving it, also rendering it useless for DNA testing. I'll crack open SM when I get home.

Im not sure, I think its likely that it would destroy the value of the telesma, at the very least it might knock down its quality by a few notches.

Ah, my mistake, it does destroy material.

Yes, we decided that average materials would be covered by the income provided by Day Job quality, but custom made things that cost karma to create (foci etc) would provide a nice bonus.

Increasing the neighborhood of the talismonger shop is also a good idea, I think I'll be putting more into that, and improving the contact as well.

As for Great Dragon with a Boyfriend, well, not a great dragon, just a dragon, and the Boyfriend is a Drake Magician.

for any PC with SINer I recommend the Erased positive quality. Make it a Hacker friend who owes you something, maybe you set him up with your sister (probably not for our dragon) or stuff like that. He doesn't have to be a contact, but a hacker is always a useful connection...

Start making Refined Materials and Orichalcum and retire from the shadows. Even with 30 points in In Debt you will be able to work that off in about 3-6 months of Orichalcum manufacturing without having to run the shadows for S-K at all. Refined materials take care of the monthly interest.

I'm sure your clutch daddy can find better uses for you than running the shadows. At least until you grow up and move out of the lair.

Also, why make an Eastern Dragon that is beholden to S-K? Could be more thematic to be beholden to Wuxing or one of the other Chinacorps. Or perhaps even to one of the Warlords. Just curious.

Well, I dig Easter Dragons more and I thought it would be more interesting if she was obviously of Asian descent and living in Germany.

Shes already out of the "clutch" so to speak, and is an adult dragon, but not a great dragon. As for why she continues to run the shadows, well, being all staid and proper and owning a business is well and good but its probably not terribly exciting. I figured that an adult dragon would still be somewhat brash and want to be challenged, they are predators after all not sheep .

Just as dragons are a girl's best friend, girl dragons are a guy's wet dream. ;P



Reminds me of this journal.
"I am so tired of this liquid diet that I've cried almost three nights in a row. [...] So, because I am so desperate to eat, I have actually decided on my own volition to draw a vore piece of [my dragon eating your character]."

You're just a tad strange sometimes

Seriously though: why not a non-monetary debt to S-K as character motivation? Perhaps they saved your life from someone and you feel obligated to pay them back in service. Getting money is easy, but playing a character who actually likes S-K is kinda kinky.

On a side note, how did you get around the fact that dragons can't talk? Even Great Dragons in human form have to use draconic mind speech.
I'm not asking this to be ornery, my players are two sessions away from being hired by Herr Brackhaus and I need to know how to cover that particular meet.

I know it's in Dead Air, but more Shadowrun novels are on next month's paycheck.

The clutch thing was a dig at the maturity of the dragon. Like making fun of your 40 year old brother who still lives in your parent's basement. The idea being why be a shadowrunner for Lowfyr -- who was probably minding the clutch you were in -- when you can strike out on your own? I totally agree with your "predators...not sheep" statement but the same goes for coattail riding.

As a GM I'd ask you to come up with some other sort of motivation to run. Especially when you have a day job where most GMs tell you to retire the character after character creation and make a new one that actually needs to run.

The story is something like, she's been trying to get in good with SK in order to attract Lofwyrs attention and get him to teach her the deeper mysteries of Dragon Magic. So she's got good reasons to work for SK, doing runs for them and acting as a bodyguard from time to time.

;D



That is untrue, unless you have a source to back it up.

I could swear I read some exchange between Dunkelzahn and Harlequin, Dunkelzahn was in metahuman form, talking aloud.

I'll see if I can dig it up, but basically its Frosty talking to Harlequin about how a dragon showed up wanting to talk to him and asking if she should let him in. He says to ask the dragon and she wonders how he'll be able to fit inside. She asks the dragon if he wants to come in, he changed to metahuman form surprising Frosty and he goes in to chat with Harlequin about making an appearance on his trid show. The topic of this episode would be revealing a bunch of secrets and Harlequin says no because he feels that depriving humanity of the opportunity to discover things for themselves would be bad.

Dragons of the Sixth World p. 18 & 178
SR4a p. 303

Dragons don't have vocal cords, so they have to use translators or draconic speech.

If this is off-set by anything it would make my job easier.

I remember reading that too, but I think the chat could have been in draco speech. I don't remember it saying one way or the other.

I'd just like something concrete in case someone throws out that Brackhaus can't be Lofwyr because they heard him talking via recording. If not, then I'll come up with an alternative plan to throw them off base.

They cant talk in their true form but if they assume metahuman form via a spell or special ability (like the great dragons have) they are able to do so (as then they have access to vocal chords).

Underlined for emphasis.

Where did you find that quote? Im looking and I cant find it.

I copied it out of my prior post, here's the quote with all its header data.

Oh, Duh, I was looking in the books to see if it was a quote from there /facepalm.

Yeah, I cant find anything prohibiting a dragon from speaking in metahuman form.

My problem is that I can't seem to find anything that says they can, and I'd rather not come down on one side or the other without some evidence to back me up.

Yeah, I was talking back at Fortinbras as I was saying that "can't speak in metahuman form" was blatantly untrue and I wanted evidence. All he supplied was the general "dragon's don't have vocal chords" bit, so I had to emphasis the part I wanted him to back up.

Opened this thread, to give this discussion it its own topic and keep mine on track .