Shadowrun Street Game

Step One: Concept

Choose a character concept. This often consists of a role and an origin.

• Role: Shadowrun doesn't have specific classes. You can build characters of just about any allotment of abilities, with a few limitation. By and large, though, most runners fall into one of several types of characters.
  • Faces are social characters, focused on cons, negotiations, contact networks, and often leadership.
  • Spellcasters are magic-users, with the ability to cast spells and summon spirits. There are several "traditions" of spellcasters, drawn from a variety of cultural, religious, and esoteric practices.
  • Deckers are computer whizes, skilled at hacking networks and hunting up information and paydata to make a shadowrun succeed.
  • Technomancers are like deckers, except that they have a strange power to mentally merge with the Matrix, doing with their raw nervous systems what deckers do with expensive equipment.
  • Riggers are wheelmen, incredible drivers and masters of drones used for the benefit of their team. They usually use cyberware that lets them merge mentally with their vehicles.
  • Street Samurai are gun-havers and violence specialists. Though they deliver it in a hundred different ways, street samurai all specialize in delivering lots and lots of injury and death when the time comes for it.
• Origin: You should also at least have a vague idea of where you come from. In this kind of game, most characters probably come from the streets proper, although having a different answer to that - and the story about how they ended up on the streets - can make for an interesting character.
  • Street characters grew up poor and probably even SINless. Their educations come from rough lives, not schools, and whatever they've got, they fought for or stole, by and large. Characters who come from gangs, who survived as urchins, or as barrens-dwellers all come from this origin.
  • Underworld characters are closely tied to the streets, but they may have grown up in tremendous wealth. Violence and the potential for violence is endemic to the lives of such characters, and many street characters may have started off life as minor cogs in an underworld's machine, or as the family members of underworld figures that were killed.
  • Corp characters also usually have interesting stories about how they end up on the streets and SINless. Someone who saw too much, someone who was mercilessly cut out of corporate employment and association due to cutbacks, a child born outside of corporate sponsorship, or any number of other factors.
  • Tribal characters usually come from one of the Native American Nations around Seattle, or even from the elven lands of Tir Tairngire south of Seattle where Oregon used to be. Exactly why they've come to Seattle should be considered: the small town kid that wasn't ready to deal with life in the hard city, the man on the lam from tribal authorities, the spiritualist drawn by visions and omens to the horrors of the city for some higher purpose.

Step Two: Priority Table

The next step is determining just what is most important to the design of your character, using the Priority Table.

• Categories: You have five categories of traits for this process: your Metatype, your Attribute points, whether you have Magic or Resonance or not, your Skill points, and your financial Resources.
• Priorities: You have five "grades" of priority: A, B, C, D, and E. You must assign one of these letter codes to each of the five categories.

Priority	Attributes	Metatype	Magic or Resonance	Skills	Resources
A	20	Human (7) • Elf (6) • Dwarf (4) • Ork (4) • Troll (0)	Magician or Mystic Adept: Magic 4, two Rating 4 Magical skills, 7 spells Technomancer: Resonance 4, two Rating 4 Resonance skills, 2 complex forms	36/5	75,000¥
B	16	Human (5) • Elf (3) • Dwarf (1) • Ork (0)	Magician or Mystic Adept: Magic 3, 5 spells Technomancer: Resonance 3, 1 complex form Adept: Magic 4, one Rating 2 Active skill Aspected Magician: Magic 3, one Rating 2 Magical skill group	28/2	50,000¥
C	14	Human (3) • Elf (0)	Adept: Magic 2 Aspected Magician: Magic 2	22/0	25,000¥
D	12	Human (1)	-	18/0	15,000¥
E	10	Human (0)	-	15/0	6000¥

• Karma:Eachplayerreceives13Karmatocustomizecharacters (maximum of 26 Karma). • GearRestrictions:DeviceRatingsmustberatedat4orless. Maximum Availability is limited to 10 or less. • Nuyen Restrictions: Characters may only convert up to 5 Karma into nuyen (10,000 nuyen). • Follow all other rules for Character Creation/Advancement as laid out in this chapter.