Once upon a time I scrawled up some pre-generated Solos and Rockers for Cyberpunk 2020. You might remember, although at this point I doubt it!
This week's year's character role is the Corporate. Presenting the Company Man, the Dogged Investigator and the Ambitious Courtier.
As usual, this post is rounded out with some contacts. ALSO: a D20 table to explain why you failed your Resources roll!
These characters were generated using the basic rules in the Cyberpunk 2020 Corebook, with no detail from the sourcebooks.
1. Every character has 60 Attribute Points and 60 Skill Points (40 career skills and 20 pick-up skills).
2. I haven't rolled for Humanity Loss or on the Lifepath tables (let the players do that!).
3. I've given everybody a (fairly) balanced array of equipment and cyberware based on the "Quick and Dirty" character creation guidelines.
THE CORPORATE
Another strange, campaign defining role.
The Corporate is a vital part of the cyberpunk milieu and yet surprisingly hard to fit into a CP2020 campaign. Part of this is simply a matter of tone - an explicitly corporate character seems far more in keeping with latter-period Shadowrun's amoral economic warrior ethos than Cyberpunk, whose characters often tend towards gutter-survivalism or pretensions of rebellion. CP2020's Corporates are also presented as 1980s Wall Street issue bastards, which serves to alienate them from the other roles.
There are a few sympathetic Corporate characters in the literary genre - Islands in the Net's Laura Webster probably fits the role, as does Landon Kettlewell in Makers. Neither is a Wall Street issue bastard. Another example is Julia Evans in the Greg Mandel Trilogy, a character who is absolutely a 1980s-style besuited monster presented positively, because Peter Hamilton's Mindstar world is a uniquely middle-English Tory fantasy.
As usual, I've created three pre-generated characters. They've all been designed to fit in with a group of 'runners, one way or another.
THE COMPANY MAN: AKA Mr Johnson. The company official sent along to co-ordinate the action, select the targets, or ensure the team gets impregnated by xenomorphs.
THE DOGGED INVESTIGATOR: the employee who learnt too much to sleep at night. The whistleblower who risks exile or worse to expose wrongdoing inside the Company.
...and the THE AMBITIOUS COURTIER: the rising executive, prepared to scheme and spy and shoot her way to the top.
Below these three characters are the usual array of contacts and antagonists, and a D20 table you didn't know you needed.
For Laura Webster, use the Investigator. For a "heroic entrepreneur," mess around with the Ambitious Courtier (or frankly, use a Fixer or a Tech). For everybody else, read on...
Welcome to part 2 of my Cyberpunk 2020 pre-gen project. Once again, this post will provide three pre-generated characters and a whole bunch of contact and adventure hooks to go with them. Next time we want to run a Cyberpunk 2020 game on G+ at short notice, sorting out characters won't take an hour!
Last time, we covered arguably the least popular role in the Corebook, the Rockerboy. This time, we're all about Solos. Below, you'll find the Smooth Operator, the Pointman and the Professional. All of them are hardened, effective killers.
As before, the characters below are mostly RAW (Rules As Written), drawing skills and equipment from the Corebook alone.
A few things that aren't RAW:
1. Rather than spend hours picking equipment and cyberware, I've given everyone a fairly balanced array of gear based on the "Quick and Dirty" character generation guide.
2. Everyone gets 20 pick-up skill points, regardless of their INT and REF scores.
Each character begins with 60 Attribute Points and 60 Skill Points (40 Career Points and 20 Pick-Up Points).
I haven't rolled the dice for Humanity Loss or the Lifepath tables. Leave that to the players!
SOLOS
The Solo: Cyberpunk 2020's classic Cyber-Enhanced Murder-Bastard (CEMB), played by just about everyone at some point (admit it!). Genre examples include Molly in Neuromancer, Sarah in Hardwired and zen-inflected cyber-enhanced murder-bastard Etienne Stewart in Voice of the Whirlwind (my personal favourite).
And then there's film. Bonus points if it was directed by Luc Besson! Nikita, Leon/The Professional, District 13...
There are a couple of good Solo films not made by Luc Besson. Ghost Dog, Way of the Samurai is superior to all of them. Even better, one of the main characters can only speak French, which means it could have been made by Luc Besson.
The less said about that bog-spawned abomination Taken, the better.
This post includes three pre-generated Solos.
The Smooth Operator is fast. Really, really fast. S/he has the Social skills to blend into any crowd, the Awareness/Notice to identify any threat, and the speedware and Combat Sense to outdraw any opponent. S/he could just as easily be a super-spy.
The Pointman takes on the jobs where the milspec tech comes out to play. A mercenary, an armoured tank, a rifleman. A Solo to fight an all-out Corporate War in those campaigns where armour and automatic weapons are the norm, not the exception.
The Professional is an urban hitman. S/he relies on stealth to case and enter target buildings and a multitude of skills to stalk and kill targets.
And once again, scroll to the bottom of the post for a collection of contacts and antagonists for Solo/Street Samurai style characters in any cyberpunk setting!
...or girls!
This post contains two part. It begins with three pre-generated characters for Cyberpunk 2020. Being me, I couldn't just post some stat blocks without following it with a bunch of sample contacts, places and villains below, which should be useful to fans of any cyberpunk genre game.
Because I'm going through the roles in the order they appear in the corebook, I'm starting with Cyberpunk 2020's most quixotic class, the Rockerboy. This post includes three Rockerboy Archetypes: the Street Fighting Punk, the Rock and Roll Hero and the Spiritual Warrior MC.
So G+ gaming has exponentially increased the amount I actually get to play games. It's allowed me to run much longer and more regular campaign games than ever before, and try new games I would never have tried for simple opportunity cost reasons.
At some point I'd like to actually use this space to run Cyberpunk 2020. One of the things getting in the way is the lack of pre-generated characters for the game: Cyberpunk 2020 character creation can take awhile, especially if you aren't familiar with the game. I need characters to hand to people at the beginning of a session (Hardwired had a few, but they seem too specific - I'd like some "archetypes").
So I've decided to make some, and post them here so that anyone and everyone can use them. While my own games tend to have a lot of house rules, I've avoided them here in order that they be as useful to as many people as possible.
