Shadowrun/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


This is a sheet for Shadowrun's NPCs.

Jackpointers

Jackpointers are (as it says on the tin) members of the fictional forum Jackpoint, sharing their insight in the in-character sections of splatbooks for the 4th Edition. Jackpoint itself is a successor of earlier such forum, called Shadowland, of which Fastjack, Jackpoint's founder, was an long-standing member.

Fastjack

Born in 1999, Fastjack was the acknowledged #1 greatest hacker in the world, whose career began with the original invention of the Matrix and lasted long enough to survive both global network crashes.

  • Badass: Not physically, but until the CRD nanoplague literally ate his brain nothing short of a Deus-class AI could stop Fastjack in the Matrix. Two crowning examples would be Fastjack's solo defeat of the Jormungandr crash worm, a digital doomsday weapon that had just finished successfully causing the second Matrix Crash, and Fastjack's "last man standing" result during the Matrix brawl involving Deus' otaku making a mass assault on the Seattle Shadowland nexus. (Which is to say, out of an entire roomful of world-class deckers and otaku, under assault by Dissonant otaku and Deus-created digital hunter-killer constructs, by the end all of the special snowflakes were down and out and the last two people standing were an old guy with an old-fashioned cyberdeck and a copy of the Jack Hammer utility, and the Megarea AI).
    • During a Matrix geek discussion of a particular network topology, Fastjack offhandedly mentioned that he'd seen a similar arrangement 'in the Fuchi central mainframe in Japan'. The discussion stopped as the other participants realized this meant that only had Fastjack successfully broken into Fuchi's central mainframe, he'd had time to leisurely stroll around and do a network traffic analysis while he was there.
  • Cool Old Guy
  • Papa Wolf: towards Jackpoint and its members. But betray him and...

I will hammer you back to the Stone Age myself if I find out my trust has been misplaced.

Clockwork

Hobgoblin rigger and mechanic from Sarajevo, Clockwork is also a Jerkass of monstrous proportions whose actions gave him quite a few enemies on Jackpoint. Until late 4th edition and 5th edition unaccountably made him an accepted and popular character anyway.

  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: There are only three circumstances under which Clockwork will not betray you: if the return on investment would be insufficient to make betrayal worth the bother, if breach of contract would lead to him holding the short end of the stick, or if you (or any friends that would avenge you) present a credible threat to his life. If none of the above applies then he would unhesitatingly shoot you in the back for the price of a donut, and then not eat the donut.
  • Fantastic Racism: Clockwork is rabid on the subject of technomancers. He doesn't even consider them to be human beings at all, let alone people with equal rights, and openly campaigns for their being rounded up and put in extermination camps after being scientifically dissected first. He also subscribes to every paranoid conspiracy theory about technomancers that exists, even the blatantly false ones, and his first reaction to any crisis not obviously caused by something else is to blame technomancers.
    • Basically, take how J. Jonah Jameson is about Spider-Man, then square the result, then super-size that until JJJ starts looking like Aunt May... and you're still not anywhere near Clockwork and technomancers.
  • Gadgeteer Genius: he specializes in modding various easily available items for more... specialized uses. Then he sells prototypes and blueprints for a living.
  • Jerkass: Dear Lord, where do we begin? Clockwork is pretty much the Trope Codifier for Jerkass.
    • Clockwork is almost invariably rude and abusive in normal communication, and the rare exceptions are when he's being so succinct he simply doesn't have time to insult anyone. Even during Fastjack's departure from the board due to his terminal CFD infection, an occasion that literally moved other occupants to tears and had them essentially composing Jack's eulogy while he could stil hear it, Clockwork's contribution boiled down to 'You were an old guy way past his prime that I would have inevitably surpassed in time anyway but maybe you didn't completely suck at everything, possibly.' This was noted as the single nicest thing Clockwork had ever said about anyone.
    • In addition to his horrible manners there's also his complete lack of ethics. As in, they are so profoundly absent that he stands out even among the members of a hardened criminal community as a complete bastard. Clockwork spits on even the generally accepted tenets of organized crime etiquette (such as "don't sell your fellows out to the man"), let alone the behavior expected in normal society. Indeed, he is openly contemptuous pretty much any time anyone else suggests a response to a situation that isn't 'completely self-centered purely survival-focused will-backstab-anyone-the-instant-its-advantageous greedy bastard'.
    • As per the Fantastic Racism above, Clockwork's hatred of technomancers is beyond all reason or sanity and has led him to do things such as attempt to sell fellow JackPoint members to megacorporate vivisection labs. He also regularly taunts Netcat, Jackpoint's resident technomancer, about his collecting bounties on technomancers (by selling them to said labs). He takes particular relish to doing it to friends of hers.
    • But wait! In addition to all of the above, he's also a psycho creepy stalker! Yes, Netcat not only suffers through Clockwork targeting her friends and regularly threatening to sell her back to the vivisection lab she already escaped from once after he sold her there the first time, he also does things like hack the drones in her house to take pictures of her and her infant son without their knowledge and post them on the Matrix.
    • Clockwork's so extreme a misanthrope that you can't even compliment him without him swearing vendetta against you. Slamm-0, another one of his stalking victims as Netcat's husband, once (in total sincerity) posted a testimonial to Clockwork's skill as a hacker and investigator, because while he hated the idea that Clockwork was stalking his family he was still honest enough to admit that if Clockwork could succeed so well at bugging two people who were themselves experts in hacking and surveillance, he was damned good at it. Clockwork's response to what was quite frankly an extraordinary gesture of respect, given the circumstances? To explode in the worst Cluster F Bomb in JackPoint history.
    • Basically, if you can simultaneously make Kane look ethical, Slamm-0 look emotionally mature, and Glitch look socially well-adjusted, you are the most fucked up specimen of humanity that the planet has ever seen.
  • Our Orcs Are Different: he's a hobgoblin, an ork variant whose hat is being a vindictive asshole.
    • And in Clockwork's case, that's putting it lightly.

Fianchetto

International Man Of Mystery, suave superspy and another Cool Old Guy, Fianchetto's history is pretty much unknown - few more or less certain things about him is that he worked for various governments under numerous covers over the previous forty years.

  • Rogue Agent: once, he compromised an operation he was hired for to retrieve a collection of stolen art from a Russian Mafia boss.

Kane

Rigger, pirate and mercenary with a grudge against Aztlan, Kane is known as a loose cannon and a team killer and wanted in at least twenty countries.

  • Ax Crazy: 'Tactics', 'subtlety', and 'self-restraint' are things Kane doesn't even begin to prepare to get ready for the possibility of idly contemplating the use of at some point in the indefinite hypothetical future until after he's already determined that "shoot everything that moves, then napalm everything that isn't moving" doesn't have sufficient odds of working.
    • One of his favorite methods of amusing himself while out pirating is to sink the ships after looting them, then get out his hunting rifle and use the survivors floating around in life jackets for target practice.
  • Blood Knight: Kane is just as happy to take on heavily-armed opponents as he is to strafe or bomb civilians, and has never been known to back away from any fight involving opposition smaller than a dragon, a warship, or a ballistic missile submarine.
  • Cosplay: the intro story of Safehouses tells how he infiltrated ComicCon dressed as an Imperial Stormtrooper. He was not amused.
  • Manipulative Bastard: For an Ax Crazy berserker with the subtlety of an earthquake who normally flies around in a ground-attack aircraft decked out with missile racks and gatling guns, Kane is actually a very savvy bastard when he needs to be. For an example, despite being on the Most Wanted list in at least 20 major nations his major capture-avoidance strategy is not stealth, but instead in playing off one enemy against the other in a continual round-robin so that he's always just more useful outside of jail than inside of it to whichever one of his many pursuers is closest to catching him that week.
  • Token Evil Teammate: Not quite the worst on JackPoint, but still pretty awful.

Man of Many Names

Mysterious, white-haired shaman who is said to be incredibly powerful. One of Jackpoint's resident experts in the topics of magic and its chief crusader vs. the insect spirits.

  • Magical Native American
  • Older Than They Look: most probably. His age is the subject of mass guessing by Horizon analysts who broke into Jackpoint to gather information on him.
  • Shut UP, Hannibal: During one JackPoint conversation, Haze criticized Many-Names loudly and at length for talking such a great game about fighting the insect spirits longer and harder than anyone, for allegedly not having helped out any during the insect spirit crisis in Chicago. Many-Names then calmly informed the room that he was the person who'd originally found the insect spirit hive in Chicago and notified Ares of its existence.
  • The Stoic: also, The Cryptic.

Turbo Bunny

A Latino elf hailing from Pueblo, she was forced to escape to Seattle after an incident involving an illegal diamond shipment and a police chase all the way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

  • Badass Driver: that's one of her talents.
  • Beauty Is Never Tarnished: would you believe that she's a VR junkie looking at her picture in "10 Jackpointers"?
    • Being fair, she's a recovering VR junkie.
  • Drives Like Crazy: and how. The "incident" in Vegas ended up with Bunny crashing her Ferrari on a DataTerm booth at presumably high speed.
  • Wrench Wench: that's her other main talent.

Great Dragons

Tropes common to the Great Dragons

  • The Ageless
  • The Chessmaster and Manipulative Bastard
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Dragons. Unlike most NPCs, Dragons get Edge and can use it in ways even the PCs can't. However, the simplest way for them to do this is to simply be Only Mostly Dead after being turned into chunky salsa by the PCs. There is no way for the PCs to beat this, and the dragon can immediately turn around, hide, and from a position of complete safety, use their various pawns to completely and utterly wreck the PCs' lives. This is of course still under control of Rule Zero, of course, so most reasonable game masters will let you kill them permanently as long as you do it in a suitably awesome and/or thorough manner.
  • Our Dragons Are Different - Occasionally, Our Dragons Are PRESIDENTS: Lofwyr's the big shot at Saeder-Krupp (BMW after a few good buyouts), Dunkelzahn was President of the UCAS for a little over 10 hours before the bomb in his limo tore open a Negative Space Wedgie and Hestaby is one of the members of Tir Taingire's ruling Council.
    • Dunkelzahn was also pretty net-savvy, too. Look in any of the first edition's sourcebooks- he usually goes by 'The Big "D"', though one occasion (in the Street Samurai Catalog) saw him use his real name.
      • The Big D wasn't the only Great Dragon on the Matrix. Hestaby was a Shadowland regular under the handle "Orange Queen", and Celedyr (who is also one of the two majority stockholders of a technology megacorp) was a lurker in many forums under the handle "Stone-Diver" or "Script-Diver".
      • Dunkelzahn's will brought a number of other Shadow-talking Great Dragons out of the closet, if only to bitch about how the Big D hadn't left them anything.
    • Shadowrun's dragons may be the only dragons you actually run away from. They aren't fightable: they're stronger, tougher, bigger, and smarter than you (human average stat: 3 (max 6), dragon average: 8, great dragon average: 13--except body/toughness and strength, those are 35+). Oh, and unlike every other NPC, they have Edge (the Luck Stat, only PCs have it) and great dragons can do some nasty things with it that you can't. There's a damn good reason why you never deal with a dragon.
      • Alamais, a Great Dragon who operates in Europe, was hit with an orbital weapon system intended for use against military targets and survived.
      • The crowning example of Great Dragon durability is Sirrurg, who culminated his one-dragon war against Aztlan/Aztechnology by ending up in a fight with an entire Azzie carrier battle group backed by an airmobile infantry brigade. Final scorecard: after a 12+ hour engagement involving Sirrurg being smacked repeatedly with capital-scale naval railguns, repeated aerial bombardment, bioweapons tailored for use against dragon metabolism, and entire air wings' worth of fighters and drones, backed up by said brigade of troops with tanks and artillery once they finally clipped a wing and grounded him, he still didn't die. Got pounded into 'unconscious and nearly dead' and had to be spirited away from the battlefield by his servitor spirits/possibly other dragons, but still breathing and eventually recovered. Azzie casualties were reported as somewhere between serious and godawful. Granted that Sirrurg was one of the physically brawniest of the GDs, still, holy crap.
      • This is not considered wildly atypical for Great Dragons. While a Great Dragon on a rampage tends to hedge their bet by doing things like using epic ritual buff spells before the battle and summoning an army of spirits, the fact remains that there are four canon examples of a Great Dragon doing a single handed-rampage all Godzilla style -- Sirrurg vs. Aztlan, Ghostwalker vs. the city of Denver, Aden straight-up obliterating Tehran, and Hestaby's wrecking Tir Tairngire's attempted military invasion of northern California. All four had one dragon single-handedly laying down damage comparable that humans could only match with a fully mechanized army on the march.
      • They burn some Edge (permanently decrease the stat by a bit in exchange for something like a guaranteed critical success or surviving certain death) and let you THINK that you killed them, and then when you get home you discover that your entire family has been eaten, your SIN has been revoked, and there is now a bounty on your head that is so large that every shadowrunner in the time zone is now after you.
      • Maybe that's the reason for this entry in Dunklezahn's will:

For a period of ten days beginning on 14 February 2057, Lars J. Matthews will cease to possess any legal status. He will be stripped of all evidence of legal existence, including SIN, credsticks, DocWagon contract, bank accounts and so on. To the individual or group who ends Lars J. Matthews' physical existence during those ten days, I leave all of Matthews' assets and 1 million nuyen for a job well done. If Mr. Matthews survives and can prove his identity, his legal status and all possessions will be restored to him. Haven't you heard? Never deal with a dragon, Lars.

Dunkelzahn

For the first two editions "the Big D" was the in-character NPC spokesman of the line. Considered one of the most friendly and media-savvy Great Dragons, Dunkelzahn had a career as a talk-show host for many years before deciding to run for President of the UCAS as an independent candidate. He won, and then died in a mysterious explosion shortly after the inaugural ball.

  • Beware the Nice Ones - Definitely the most human-friendly of the Great Dragons... but not above completely incinerating with a single look the assassin who killed his first translator.
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass - To the general public, the Big D was an affable if slightly shallow TV talk-show host (who later on went into politics) that just happened to be a dragon. In reality, he was the legendary Mountainshadow of Earthdawn, the single oldest, most knowledgeable, and most powerful dragon to ever live. In the Sixth World, he was secretly a shareholder in several AAAs, the power behind the throne at Ares Macrotechnology, the Loremaster of the Great Dragons (i.e., as close to an overall leader figure as the dragon race has), and a power sufficient to make Lofwyr sit down and listen quietly and respectfully.
  • Gambit Roulette - His will amounts to this.
    • Ehran the Scribe, himself one of the major immortal intriguers of the setting, remarked that Dunkelzahn's will quite likely set more plots, schemes, and upsets in motion by his death than most of his fellow intriguers had ever managed to pull off while they were alive.
  • Heroic Sacrifice - Unknown to most, Dunkelzahn's death was not an assassination -- he deliberately sacrificed himself in a blood magic ritual intended to power a mystical barrier to delay the Horrors' entry into our reality for several thousand years, and thus give humanity a chance to prepare and survive.
    • Noteworthy in that while the ritual required the sacrifice of a Great Dragon, Dunkelzahn didn't necessarily have to use himself. There is an outside chance that Arleesh, a fanatic anti-Horror crusader among the Great Dragons and one of Dunkelzahn's allies, would have volunteered herself if asked. Or for a more pragmatic (if less in-character) alternative, the Big D could simply have rounded up a couple friends and then gone and dragged in a Great Dragon they didn't particularly like. (Goodness knows few of his peers would have raised any lasting objection if he'd decided to use Alamais, for example. Hell, Lofwyr would have happily joined in.) Instead, Dunkelzahn chose a more heroic path.
  • Posthumous Character - Dunkelzahn's canon death is about midway through the 2nd edition timeline, meaning that he'd already departed the scene before the vast majority of current Shadowrun players even started the game. Only the oldest grognards still remember when he was around.
  • Our Presidents Are Different - Became President of the UCAS... for little over 10 hours.

Hestaby

  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech - one she gave Aztlan (publicly, at the UN Assembly) in the intro story to SOTA 2073. A great dragon thoroughly wrecked your shit? That's because you asked for it for at least a decade.
  • Take Up My Sword - she is considered Dunkelzahn's successor as the "Keeper of Mankind".
    • Until later 4e decided to make her an epic failure at it, to the point of ending up losing all of her powerbase and being exiled completely from dragon society. This was not universally received well.

Lofwyr

Quite possibly the richest and most powerful mortal being in the Shadowrun universe, Lofwyr is CEO, chairman of the board, and majority stockholder of Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries, the world's largest and most diversified AAA megacorporation. (Second-most largest as of late 5th edition, with MCT having finally lapped it due to all the knocks Lofwyr took in 4th edition.)

  • Badass: While any Great Dragon is nothing to trifle with, Lofwyr is considered exceptionally powerful and formidable even by the standards of his own species. In canon Lofwyr has killed two fellow Great Dragons (Nachtmeister and his own brother Alamais) in single combat, and that's more than any other character has managed. Only his peer Ghostwalker (and before he died, Dunkelzahn) shows no fear at the prospect of taking Lofwyr claw-to-claw if necessary, and Ghostwalker (and before him, Dunkelzahn) is the single largest and most powerful Great Dragon alive.
    • There is a scene in 'Survival of the Fittest' where Hestaby is estimating her chances in a throwdown with Lofwyr. She was sitting directly on top of her mystical nexus of power in her home lair at Mount Shasta, while Lofwyr was present only via astral projection and thus at a severe disadvantage. And she still estimated her chances as less than even. Given that Hestaby is not a lightweight, that says something.
  • Big Bad: Lofwyr is the iconic master villain (well, antagonist) for the Shadowrun franchise. For the first two editions he was the only 'super villain' they had -- it wasn't until late 2nd edition that they started seriously going into things like Aztechnology, or the Horrors, or Damien Knight, or etc. This is also when Lofwyr started getting Character Development.
  • Pragmatic Villainy: The main thing that keeps Lofwyr from sliding all the way down the slippery slope. Lofwyr is in it solely to win it, and doesn't do anything without a sufficient return on investment regardless of his personal feelings on the matter. If being kind or restrained would work better than being brutal, then Lofwyr will not hesitate to use kindness or restraint. Some examples:
    • Saeder-Krupp consistently pays the highest salaries and benefits in the business. This is because Lofwyr knows that he is a demanding perfectionist, and that people being expected to work extra hard expect extra rewards for their diligence, or else they will feel undervalued and resentful, which increases employee disloyalty, which increases Lofwyr's internal security problems, which eventually costs more money than simply paying people generously does.
    • Likewise, while most megacorps expect their senior executives to stay with the corporation unto death do them part, Lofwyr will readily let any senior executive who is feeling dissatisfied leave to start their own business. He will even provide them with generous start-up loans and give their businesses contracts to deal with Saeder-Krupp. This is because Lofwyr is playing the win-win here; he's allowing unenthused or burnt-out managers to self-select for getting out of the executive suite where they can be replaced with more motivated and efficient candidates, while at the same time expanding Saeder-Krupp's business empire by creating more smaller corporations that are naturally allied with and kindly disposed to him. Of course, this only applies if the executive wishes to start a business that usefully expands Lofwyr's reach, or at minimum does not detract from it. Trying to leave to get a job with one of S-K's significant competitors, which would negatively effect the bottom line, is something Lofwyr will actively prevent -- with lethal force, if necessary.
    • While most megacorps are into You Have Failed Me... territory, Lofwyr's punishments for screw-ups are known for being relatively proportionate and survivable. This is because Lofwyr knows that if you kill or completely ruin someone's life for their first screwup, the only thing you're motivating them to do is conceal evidence of all of their screw-ups from the boss -- which means that even minor problems get enough time to lay low, stay hidden, and fester into major problems. Of course, this only applies to screw-ups or bad luck. Actual disloyalty gets you killed, if not eaten.
  • The Dreaded: No sane being in the Shadowrun universe, however powerful, crosses Lofwyr lightly. The vast majority of them are terrified of doing so at all.
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