Em: Manipulative Face (Shadowrun sci fi)

Photo by Michele Bergami on Unsplash with some modifications to colour levels

Em is a Face/Fixer character I played in a year-long Shadowrun campaign. For the first few months, we used the Shadowrun 3rd edition rules but found it was too crunchy for our group’s style of play. We switched to Shadowrun in The Sprawl, PBTA hack, which suited us much more. The world of Shadowrun is sleazy and 80s-vibe cyberpunk. The only thing Em truly loves is her motorbike and novacoke. Or at least that is how she started out – she very slowly developed romantic feelings for another player, and a deep bond of protective friendship with still another player. She is very cavalier about saying what she needs to to get what she wants, including using her sexuality and femininity. She believes anyone who falls for it is stupid and deserves to get taken advantage of.

Over the course of the game, I got a bored with playing the Face/Fixer mechanic set and changed her to something more combat-focused. I used the Killer playbook, and explained the change narratively through stories I’ll share here. There is a lot of content for Em because – though the game is done now – we had nearly weekly games for a year and a half. Most character development, for all characters, was done outside the game by the players because each session was an hour to an hour and a half long only as we played over lunch. The GM was not involved in this asynch writing that was happening so it was almost like we three players were co-writing a book together.

There is a section of the game called downtime – i.e., what do your characters do between missions. Much of the writing for Em comes out of downtime.

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