My search fu might be weak on this.

I'm going to be running a 4E campaign after Origins is over. One of the players is very excited about the concept of spike baby elves and wants to play one.

Are there any rules (qualities I suppose) for a PC being a spike baby immortal elf in 4E? Or any other edition I suppose.

If not, any thoughts on how to build that quality?

My initial thought was to tie it to appearances of Haley's Comet, and for 5 points per level, have the PC born during a prior Haley's appearence starting with 5 points being Feb 9, 1986, and then each additional 5 points being a previous one (So, 10 point equals April 20, 1910, etc). Each level of the quality would give Knowledge skills (Not active skills) equal to Int + Log (Or perhaps (Int+Log)*2) expressly for time period appropriate skills (i.e. something like Profession-Steam Locomotive Repair or Interest-1920's Jazz Bands, or Profession-Log Cabin Building).

Thanks,

Eric

PS I also asked this on the shadowrun4 forums.

No.


No. There are traits in previous edition books though, most notably the 2E campaign Harlequin. Immunity (disease, age), dragon magic, and a magic limit of essence +2 were what that bioled down to, I think.

I would allow it at my table. It's just fluff after all. There's no mechanical effect, so why not?

No seems kind of harsh. The player seems quite excited by the prospect of being incredibly old. I hate to squash creativity. Perhaps if he agrees to not be a magically active or potentially magically active type?

Looking through Harlequin, Harlequin's Back, and the Dawn of the Artifact stuff, it seems Frosty is an immortal elf. Powers: Immunity to Age, Disease, Pathogens, and Poisons per Harlequin's Back. Her initiate levels under H's tuteledge would give her the dragon magic access, not merely being immortal. Plus, she's not a spike baby.

So, perhaps a 25 Point Quality granting those 4 powers and some "antique" knowledge/interests/etc skills in the (Int+Log)*2 or 3?

Cordially,

Eric

Spikebabies arent necessarily immortal elfs which i think is what the immunities refer too. They are just born ahead of time for magical reasons. IE however would be mistaken for spikebabies if they showed their hand ahead of schedule.

The way I see it a spikebabie is just an elf with a long background story.

Nope.

That's what I meant to say. Ignore the stuff from previous editions. If a player wants to be an IE, let him be an IE. If he wants to start as a 10,000 year old, 10,000 karma character OTOH, I would probably say "no".

I see it that way too, so being a spikebaby should be no problem. But Immortal Elf? Plain no, there are too many of them already and they are TOO annoying as is ... as always YMMV.

Ok. So ditch the "Immortal Elf" thing. Perhaps an "Age" quality for a spike baby? I'm just thinking if he was born during the 1835 Haley's Comet appearence, he should be more skilled, or knowledgeable, than an elf born post Awakening even if those skills are now practically useless in a modern era. He might have learned dairy farming in the 1800's but how often does that come up in 2068? Something along those lines.

And if it will not come up, then why would it matter? Just curious...

When I was young, I could bth Draw really well, and write pretty exceptionally. Now, 35 years later, I can't draw to save my life, and can write only decently. Over the course of 100 or more years, you will have forgotten a lot of what you knew for things that actually matter in the here and now.

N.E.R.P.S. are a good thing? However, I see your point about skills not used being forgotten. Maybe a tiny bit of crunch for a fluffy ROLE playing quality?

What about something like:

Spike Baby, 5 point Positive Quality, Elf or Dwarf only. Character is over 100 years old and was born during a mana spike of some type. Bonus Knowledge skills equal to (Int+Log)*2 on non-modern skills and languages.

No offense meant with the "No", that's me speaking from bad experience with that kind of character.

Also, all immortal elves are magically active, no exceptions. It comes with their dragion blood, I suppose. And they have access to a very, very powerful form of magic - though that seems to have been retconned out with newer installations of Frosty. Additionally, age should be reflected in power with magicans, and even with regula chatacters, thinkling of skills. Consequently built, this character would just be too powerful to handle, unless built into a specific niche.


Frosty is an Immortal and the daughter of Ehran the Scribe, Harlequin's arch-nemesis/buddy (depending on what book you read). Further, she's only some 45 years old (born in the late 2020s, I think?) and already a several-grades initiate that makes playing a mage in the Artifacts series nearly redundant.

Price it like Nosferatu, and build all characters according to high-powered campaign rules.


Well, yes. Spikes are regular elves that happened during a mana spike in the 5th world (conceived over the ruins of Sereatha or whatever). Spike babies are just unusually old regular elves (regular elves have a life expectancy of some 450 years). There may or may not be spike dwarfs, too.

Immortal elves are dragon/metahuman hybrids created by the dragons to create a race of gifted, powerful slaves to handle stuff that bores them while they are off doing dragon things (it didn't go well, and it didn't go particularly well with later experiments in that direction either). there may or may not be immortal dwarfs, too.

Your spike baby quality sounds okay, though I'd price it at 10 BP (20 Karma) for balancing reasons.

I'm playing a Spike Baby Elf Mage (Swordmage to be exact.And born in the 1970ies,so He's a relatively Young One ) myself
The Houserule is a combination Package :
-(INT + LOG) additional Knowledge Points
-Pos Qual. College Education
-Pos Qual. Hard Knock .... ?
(Harte Schule des Lebens in German)
- Old Fashioned ( -1 Die for Social Interactions)
- 1 Lvl Distintcive Style
-----------------
= 10 BP Advantage


With a Dance on a Spike
Medicinemana

As long as you can balance it out, I don't see why not. I agree with others that it should be a costly trait.

Since Elves typically have a life span of a couple of hundred years, he could theoretically be born in 1986 and be alive in 2070 (and live another hundred years!)

I would look at the motivation behind the player's desire to play an IE. If he wants extra karma or just an immunity to poisons, then you can make him a spike baby that's not an IE.

You can balance out the karma issue, maybe, by giving him amnesia (either through some accident or some IE conspiracy).

But if the player just wants it for "fluff" as another said, I say "why not?"

A force 1 spirit pact: Formula Pact has this effect.

Use the cost as a meterstick, refluff it, call it something else. Done.

5bp seems cheap, though, if there aren't any strings attached. Then again, its a fitting price because it won't have any impact upon the game just due to timeframes.

When attempting to plan for contingency issues while running games, I came up with a character that was an elven spike baby. He went into a coma a year or so prior to the first crash. "Somehow" he was kept going during the intervening years. Has all kinds of great hooks. The runs to find him, and a litany of nasty PQs: uncouth, uneducated, computer illiterate, amnesia, wanted, many others. I say why bother with a quality. If you just want the guy to have forgotten stuff, play the old crotchety kind of guy.

Looks like the game mechanics aspect of this has pretty well been covered, so I won't add any more to that. On the fluff side, there's some fairly well-established canon material on the who's who of spike babies and how they got on before the beginning of the Sixth World. A bunch of it was collected in a thread here if you and/or your player are interested in reading it.

I've read that thread. I don't want to deal with the likes of Laverty or Ehran or whomever. Well, maybe after I run them through the Artifact series of mods. I'm going to try and talk the player into taking "Human Looking" to explain why the IE's never did find him. The player wants to have a crotchy old man personality complaining about how things were better under the old US of A and how he fought in WW1, WW2, Korea, and Nam et al all under different assumed names. (This was new info after I spoke with him about it yesterday.)

E

IMO, it wouldn't be unreasonable to require it rather than just suggesting it. If you don't want to deal with Laverty et al he's going to have to come up with some way of explaining how he avoided them all these years. (Especially thanks to all IEs being magically active, as was mentioned upthread. I'm starting to agree with the suggestion that it might be easier to have him play a spike baby that isn't immortal.)

The character I played in the last Shadowrun game I had was born in 1991, and was human. She had a very sweet, convoluted background which included having been a surviving member of Echo Mirage (first as the supporting technical staff, then got into one of the tanks herself when the team started taking losses,) having lived out the '50s as an Ares wageslave, the '60s as a Leonized 'Runner, and was starting the '70s having been Leonized again.

Thing is, you can justify a lot of mediocre stats that way. Her hacking skills were still good, but not FastJack good, because she hadn't been using her hacking skills for much of that time. Give her a 40-year-old cyberterminal and she'd know her way around it like the back of her hand, but she wasn't novahot on SOTA equipment. And sure, she was trained at using assault rifles and such - back in the mid-2000s when she enlisted in the Air Force, and most of that had gotten rusty during her time as a wageslave.


On the other hand, I think I'd let a player take Immortal Elf as a trait. The plusses are nice, but if people start to figure out you're an IE, they will be coming for you, either because they want you as an apprentice (because they are an IE,) because they want you under their thumb (because they are a Great Dragon or a meta-friendly Megacorp,) because they want you dead (because they are a Great Dragon or a meta-friendly megacorp whom you chose not to work for,) or because they want to Cut You Up* and figure out what makes you an Immortal Elf so they can make Immortal HumansJapanese (because they are Renraku and they hate the fact that you exist, subhuman vermin, let alone that you're outright ageless and immune to diseases,) or because they are Aztecnology and wish to sacrifice you to the heathen gods.



*WARNING! TVTropes Links Detected. Not that that's a bad thing.

No.

We have one now actually. Relatively newer player. Didn't change anything. Spike baby does NOT equal Immortal Elf nor should it. He was born in the latter part of the 80's, wound up becoming a professor at Prague before going afield for more interesting stuff. We did actually "gift him" with 1D6 of "odd knowledge skills" for every decade he was alive after 21 until the timeline of the game (74 at the time). All skills were verified and some quirky moments arose. The player is pretty even headed actually IMO and that is what made this possible. He was a new character entering the ongoing gameline, so no harm.

End rule, if it makes sense and the player is worthy of the fun, don't deny it to them. Or you might wind up denying yourself the fun as well.