Power level & progression

At least at character creation, this is a low level game. Your characters certainly wouldn’t refer to themselves as shadow runners. The starting characters in this game would be considered high-ranking gang members, within a small-time street gang. Likewise, the level of opposition that you’d expect to face will be similarly scaled-back. For example, where it comes to your starting characters I’m not expecting them to have multiple initiative passes ‘at will’.

What I will be doing as the campaign goes on is to be more accommodating of things which allow you to change/improve your character. For those of you who have an idea of what you’d like your character to look like when they’re more powerful, my advice is to take thematically-similar things at character creation. I’ll probably allow you to swap them out or respend later, particularly if you have asked me about it in-advance.

That means that it’s worth considering cyberware which you would usually pass-by with a full-power character because the essence cost is too high. Rank 1 Muscle Replacement is a very attractive implant at this power level.

As characters advance in power, I plan to ‘go easy’ on limitations which you took at character creation. You won’t be penalised for taking things at character creation which you don’t want later in the character’s career.

For example, I am planning to bend the rules on having old cyberware removed and replaced with better implants. For some characters I’d even be willing to allow one-off rule-breaking respends if you need to replace some starting-character skills or attributes at a later point in the character’s career. If you think this is appropriate for your character then please let me know of your intention as soon as you can, so that I can prep for it.

To keep distribution to a minimum, please try to stay the character as something as thematically-similar to your long-term intention as possible. I’d frown upon a guns-based physical adept respending to become a rigger. An enforcer/thug respending to become a street samurai would be much more acceptable. For the more significant changes, I’ll try to work something into the plot of the campaign, in order to explain it in-game.

An example of a rule-breaking respend

Here’s an example of the kind of rule-breaking respend that I expect to allow.

Say you’d like to play a technomancer. I’m acutely aware that technomancers need a lot of build points and there’s no way I expect you to be able to create a viable one as a starting character for this game.

I’d ask you you to begin the game as something that’s thematically similar: a normal hacker using hot-sim and probably using implants. Let me know at character creation that you really wanted to be playing a technomancer and I’ll build into the plot a “magical rule-breaking opportunity” for your character to be changed once you’ve received enough karma. Something exceptional will happen in the plot of the game and your character will come out of the other side of it as a technomancer, with all implants gone and any lost essence regained (I know that this is usually against the rules). When that happens I’d like to keep the character’s abilities as close to the original as possible, but just using technomancer versions of the hacker abilities.