Closing out the series after Brass, Fix, and Crashcart. Final thoughts about the team at the bottom.

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Blank Path (Gaius Zimmerman)

Blank Path is a man of faith. What that faith may be is currently undefined, because I had no idea where to go when the dice gave me a Clergy background for my final operator, but this dude definitely believes in something strongly enough to be a militant street preacher of his particular truth. Moreover, with Voice of the People giving him Pop Idol 2, he apparently has a substantial following among the city’s underclass. Of the four characters I rolled up, he’s mechanically the least effective, and the most frustrating from a characterization perspective – a pure face with a cause. But I find myself surprisingly interested to see where he goes.

(Of the four, he had the objectively worst attribute rolls. The combination of a rolled CHA 7 and Clergy background pretty much obligated me to spend an edge slot on Prodigy to make him an effective man of the cloth.)

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Attributes: STR 11, DEX 11, CON 8, INT 10, WIS 14 (+1), CHA 18 (+3 from Prodigy)

Skills: Lead-1, Perform-1, Stab-0, Talk-0

Edges: Prodigy, Voice of the People

Foci: Diplomat 1, Pop Idol 2

HP 6; attack bonus +0; saves physical 15+, evasion 15+, mental 12+, luck 15+

Contacts: see below

Equipment: Fashionable clothing; reinforced clothing; basic smartphone; sword; knife; trauma patch; $30 cash

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Voice of the People and Pop Idol combine to give Blank Path access to a motley collection of the faithful (or those who are just entertained by his message). However, his inner circle contains a few regulars:

Athanas Kuroki, Gaius’ distant cousin, is a well-known counterculture musician and rabble-rouser under the stage name of Zen Bomb. They’ve worked together on occasion when the job called for their combined social and networking skills, and are frequently found enjoying the attention of their respective groupies. Despite his own fame and influence, Athanas thinks Gaius is the one who’s really going to make it big. His extensive network of fans feeds him all kinds of information, but he’s best at working those connections to find people who don’t want to be found.

Arlen Baggio is Gaius’ oldest acquaintance and first follower of the faith. Their friendship began when Gaius rescued Arlen from a gang fight, killing their childhood bully in the process. Today, Arlen works as an outlander smuggler under the handle Slice, and he can occasionally provide transport or loaner vehicles.

Sonja Porsche is a corporate middle manager whose ambition once led her into crimes against Gaius’ faith. Gaius spared her life and she’s still trying to make good on that (a random roll which suggests she may have undergone conversion at swordpoint). Perhaps Gaius spared her because of their childhood friendship (really, dice?). Her current job is in her corp’s government liaison office, and while she won’t betray her employer (yet), she has no qualms about siphoning off government data or getting official paperwork rubber-stamped or lost.

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So is it a viable team? Well… I haven’t played CWN, which means my capacity to judge is limited, but it looks like the dice gave me a fairly balanced group of hacker, shooter, healer, and face. The only cyber on the team is Brass’ cranial jack and they lack any big-ticket vehicles or drones, but that seems to be the intent for starting operators. Fix will definitely have to carry the team in combat for a while, though.

I still have no idea WTF to do with Blank Path’s faith, though, or how to integrate that into being an operator. I have some vague idea that it’s a syncretic faith that appeals to operators in particular, and that demands action against the market forces that control society. That would impel him to action – and would make him a major target for corporate retaliation if he ever started getting real traction.

As I was writing up these characters, it occurred to me that CWN’s random creation system doesn’t yield much in the way of PC backstory. The brilliant one-roll generator for contacts implies a lot of shared history, so that’s one way to find those hooks, but I also found I had more writing prompts for the contacts than for the PCs themselves. If I were actually going to do something with these characters, I’d’ve invested more time in profiling them, but this really was just an urge to use the random creation mechanics that I needed to get out of my head.

Continuing the series after Brass and Fix…

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Crashcart (Olga Novotny)

Crashcart is a former employee of the city’s largest emergency medical corporation. Originally trained as a physician’s assistant, she shifted career tracks to paramedic while studying for her cybernetician credentials. Her last few years of work saw her on the high-threat detail, where driving and marksmanship can be as essential as medical skills when it comes to keeping a patient alive long enough to reach a higher level of care. She wound up on the outs with the corp and working as an operator through an unspecified set of circumstances (unspecified because the character creation arc didn’t suggest anything really interesting).

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Olga’s closest social connection is Marie Wallace, a corporate security agent who freelances in operator circles (under the handle Ice Bee) and remains a great source of insider info on their former mutual employer. Marie owes Olga a large unspecified debt, though Olga is too polite to bring this up when sober. They knew each other before Olga exited corporate employment, but didn’t really socialize outside work. That changed when they ran into each other at a club after Olga went freelance, and they’ve since worked together on occasion (and partied hard afterward).

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Attributes: STR 11, DEX 14 (+1), CON 12, INT 16 (+1), WIS 13, CHA 11

Skills: Drive-1, Fix-0, Heal-1, Lead-0, Shoot-0

Edges: Focused, Masterful Expertise

Foci: Authority 1, Cyberdoc 1

HP 1; attack bonus +0; saves physical 15+, evasion 14+, mental 15+, luck 15+

Contacts: Marie Wallace (corporate security officer, described above) (friend)

Equipment: cyberdoc kit; light pistol w/ 2 magazines; ordinary clothing; reinforced clothing; basic smartphone; trauma patch; $25 cash

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Every team needs a good medic and the rolls for Crashcart came out pretty well, with one glaring exception. That’s her sole, lonely hit point. Keeping her out of combat will be not only a priority but an absolute necessity until she has a few levels under her belt.

Continued from the previous post…

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Fix (Olaf Janssens)

Back in the day, Olaf Janssens was just another juviegang kid on the city’s streets, solving problems with applied violence. The corp recruiters said they saw potential in him – they just didn’t bother to tell him that he was a potential meat shield. He figured it out after a few years, though, and got out before he could be expended. Without many marketable skills for civilian life, he sidestepped neatly into the ranks of the city’s operators.

Outside his usual team, Fix’s closest associates are Nebo Ojeda and Vince Nakashima, the two other survivors of his juviegang. Nebo never really left his former life, moving up into a mid-level enforcer position in the organized crime syndicate that used the juviegang and others like it as a farm team. Today, he manages the syndicate’s safehouses and can make them available for a price. Vince got out of the city, more or less, turning his hand to pirate radio. He operates in the badlands just outside the reach of city services, broadcasting to an audience of badlanders, ruralists, and survivalists, and can tap that network to move things in and out of the city.

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Attributes: STR 12, DEX 15 (+1), CON 14 (+1), INT 15 (+1), WIS 8, CHA 12

Skills: Notice-0, Shoot-1, Sneak-0, Stab-1

Edges: Hard to Kill, On Target

Foci: Assassin 1

HP 5; attack bonus +1; saves physical 14+, evasion 14+, mental 15+, luck 15+

Contacts: Nebo Ojeda (gang enforcer, described above) (acquaintance); Vince Nakashima (public personality, described above) (acquaintance)

Equipment: heavy pistol w/ 3 magazines; knife; armored clothing; basic smartphone; ordinary clothing; 2 trauma patches; $51 cash

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With acceptable physical stats and the Soldier background, Fix was unlikely to be anything other than a combat-focused character. This build leans into that, with his edges making him more durable and more accurate – fairly straightforward. The Assassin focus suggests a bit more finesse than a basic infantry grunt, though, and makes it easier for him to carry out his default team role in non-permissive environments.

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.

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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.

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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

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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.