I recently acquired my dead tree edition of Cities Without Number from the Kickstarter campaign reward drop. While I am not a huge fan of OSR games in general, CWN’s predecessors have a lot of GM tools, so I went into the KS expecting something similar for the cyberpunk genre and was not disappointed.
Coincident with this, I started listening to the second season of Tale of the Manticore, having recently finished the first. I usually can’t stand actual play podcasts (Two Past Midnight being the main exception), but Tale works for me because it is solo play. As such, there’s none of the usual annoying uncut table talk and in-jokes, and it flows very well. While I have neither bandwidth nor inclination to do a solo campaign right now (let alone, ye gods, podcast or blog it), Tale‘s S2 character creation episode inspired me to roll up a team of PCs using CWN’s random creation options. I used Behind the Name for all character names and Fantasy Name Generators for operator handles.
I don’t know that I’ll ever do anything with these folks again, but here’s the first one.
Brass (Jacinta Dumont)
Brass is a second-generation hacker. Growing up in the city’s crumbling low-income quarter, she spent most of her free time and cash in Tybee’s, the corner arcade, which was something of a safe haven for the neighborhood kids who were on the outside of gangs and other social structures. Her interest in how the games worked caught the attention of the owner, Tybee, who ran the place as a cover for their less-legitimate work.
Under Tybee’s mentorship, Jacinta grew into a skilled coder, going so far as to serve as a subcontractor for some of Tybee’s last jobs before they exited the business. Tybee, still well-known under their operator handle of Surveyor, finished Brass’ training and pointed her at her first few jobs before setting her loose to fly on her own.
In her off hours, Brass is something of a gym rat. It started as a way to convince the neighborhood gangers to leave her alone, but she’s found that weight and bag work are a good way to let her mind chew over a persistent coding problem. She’s never benefited from formal training, though, so she’s overspecialized in strength work at the expense of cardio.
Attributes: STR 16 (+1), DEX 10, CON 8, INT 15 (+1), WIS 8, CHA 8
Skills: Fix-1, Program-1, Punch-0, Sneak-0, Talk-0
Edges: Focused, Hacker
Foci: Safe Haven 1, Unarmed Combatant 1
HP 3; attack bonus +0; saves physical 14+, evasion 14+, mental 15+, luck 15+
Contacts: Tyler “Tybee” Biondi (formerly Surveyor), watchful neighborhood elder as described above (friend)
Cyberware: cranial jack
Equipment: scrap deck with cheap VR crown; ordinary clothing; basic tools; basic smartphone; armored clothing; light pistol w/ 2 magazines; $25 cash
The initial rolls for Brass left me scratching my head a bit. How to reconcile a Coder background with that STR score? Well, okay, lean into it and play against type. If I were using the optional Shadowrun-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off material from CWN’s deluxe edition, I’d make her an orc decker. Here, she’s an atypically-physical hacker who isn’t completely useless for fieldwork. The “watchful neighborhood elder” roll for her friend suggested a hacker mentor and the detailed d4/d6/d8/d10/d12/d20 one-roll flesh-out confirmed a lot of those details.