# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 01 - Runners in the Shadows - Orvan Nal, Rigger tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/runners-in-the-shadows > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2025]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] It's that time of year again, folks. The beginning of January means it's time to crank out one new character every day for the next 31 days. If you don't think that's a challenge, you've never tried it. But I encourage you to give it a go. If you pick it up, send me a note. Let me know what you're up to. Sometimes it's grueling and sometimes it's easy, and sometimes you just don't know how it's going to fall out. I'm going to try and focus on games that I've picked up this year, which is going to be a little bit of a challenge. However, I'm sure a few unusual historical examples will fall into what we're doing at least at some point. No reason not to get this party started, however. ## Game of Choice ![[Runners in the Shadows (cover).jpg|400]] We are going to start with the literal latest acquisition because that is how we roll here at the beginning of the year. Plus, there has been some discussion of **[[Shadowrun]]** and other systems which might be able to replace it for people. Today we're going to be shockingly topical. **[[Runners in the Shadows]]**. As the format of the name might give away, it's a *[[Blades in the Dark|Forged in the Dark]]* game heavily inspired by **Shadowrun**. Near-future cyberpunk fantasy dystopia. In fact, let me grab a couple of paragraphs from the opening and share them because I think it really nails things down: > The game takes place on the island chain of Jamaica, in the capital city of **[Kingston](https://maps.app.goo.gl/wpRyeEqzJX8trxVm8)**. It’s **near-futuristic** in its development. Imagine a world like ours during the next era of human advancement—there is renewable energy, quantum computers, self-driving vehicles, and an economy based on information technology. This impending Earth is something like a mash-up of a mythical past and predicted futures; the future imagined by writers in the 1980’s (namely, William Gibson), and the future predicted by modern day fringe futurists. It’s **dystopian**: over-populated, controlled by powerful corporations, there is vast inequality of wealth and opportunity felt throughout the world. While it’s connected by ubiquitous access to a worldwide information network known as **cyberspace**, it’s still divided by a wide disparity in social and economic class. > > The city is also a **fantasy**. It’s about fifty years in the future and the world is struggling to deal with the resurgence of supernatural awareness, beings, and powers—a result of the **revelation** of the lost islands (of Aztlan and Atlantis among them) due to the breaking of many-thousand-year cycle known by ancient beings. The end of this period roused the great dragons from their ancient sleep, caused ghosts to linger in the material world, and lifted the Fog of Mortal Disbelief. There is actually quite a lot of awesome here, even beyond the Shadowrun setup. Frankly, I am most impressed by picking Kingston, Jamaica, as the default setting because it's a place with a lot of narrative potential, access to the Caribbean Sea, something off the beaten path. But like much of the really good cyberpunk literature, a place with a history of bad economics and poor public policy. There are reasons that the place is as it is, and why there is promise in the presence of a new magical awakening and greater access to technology. Good juicy stuff. It's hard to say no to, so we're not going to. ## Acts of Creation Obviously I don't have a group to put together characters with and that would just add immense amounts of overhead to putting this together. So I'm going to assume one. I'm not going to create characters for the rest of the group, but I am going to proceed as though they existed. We'll walk through the plan for carrying generation and then I will present a completed character sheet at the end. So, where do we get started? ### Running in the Shadows  *(It's relevant, I swear! Besides, if Stevie Nicks isn't a hot **Face**, they don't exist.)* #### Classless Society: Playbook Just as in many other *[[Blades in the Dark|FitD]]* games, the first thing we have to do is choose a playbook. It's not quite a class and it's definitely not quite freeform, though it is quite flexible. I have a personal inclination when it comes to **Shadowrun**, and that's I either end up playing some sort of mage or a **Rigger**. Last year I made a *lot* of mages during January, so we're going to give it a bit of a pass and do the next best thing: we're going to choose the Rigger playbook. Per the usual nature of the genre, the Rigger is your technical gadget geek and drone user (as opposed to the **Hacker**, which is the software equivalent). We'll go ahead and grab a blank Rigger sheet so that the special abilities available are right here in front of you. ![[Runners in the Dark - Rigger Playbook.webp]] Obviously we don't get all of those special abilities right out of the box, but they definitely give you a feel for the kinds of things this character is going to be involved in doing. I would actually like it if there were more drone-oriented special abilities, but I think we can make do with what we have here. We're going to assume that there are magical lineages in our setting, but our Rigger is not one of them. Straight-up old school human right out of Zion. #### Heritage Foundation Every character is from somewhere and we are no different. I mean, sure, we *could* go with the old standby and be an American from the Bible Belt Union, but that seems way too straightforward. I have a better idea. It's the near future. People are living in orbit. A ton of third world workers had to be used in order to build the relatively extensive orbital spins. So how about we descend from African workers who were taken up to high Earth orbit to do real deep space welding and then just never left but instead settled in within the workers' communities that still need to do maintenance and engineering on the high frontier. I like this idea. It's appropriate to the character concept and works really well. We'll go ahead and circle **Other** for Heritage and put in *“Saturn Orbital, Family Line of Engineers.”* #### Behind the Background Before he went dirtside in Kingston, our character had to do something with his life. Let's figure out what that is. There are a number of choices here which look good, but only one really fits with our heritage, which is fine with me. It's going to be *“Labor, Orbital Drone Operations Expert.”* #### Action Man Next up is pretty straightforward. We assign four action dots, three of them already chosen for us thanks to the playbook. So, with the additional four, we'll have a total of seven when we're done. We're limited by only being able to put a maximum of two in a particular action rating unless otherwise directed. Effectively, we'll choose one that we think is related to our heritage, one which reflects our background, and the other two can go anywhere. Since we start with two dots in **Engineer** and one in **Finesse**, there's nothing else that we can do about increasing Engineer. But both our heritage and our background suggest we could put a point each into **Interface** — so Interface will also go up to two dots. I can't decide whether it would be better to have a little extra oomph in studying or a little bit more capability in destroying things. I'm going to split the difference and put one dot in **Wreck** and the other in **Study**. That gives us at least one dot in all three action types, which doesn't suck. #### I'm Special Finally, we get to pick one of the special abilities, which gives us a lot of flexibility here. If you can't decide, the usual thing to do is go for the first one on the list, which is great, but in our case that would mean that we can easily do physical things while we're jacked into remote drones. You never know when you're going to have to not pull out of your surveillance drone, when you see somebody coming and have to go sprinting to a new position. I like this one. It's a good call. That's the one we're going with: **In Control**. #### Friends in Low Places One of the great things about the *FitD* games is how important relationships are at the beginning of the game with a new character. Immediately you have hooks that your character cares about and everybody's had someone at the table who just can't seem to get involved with what's going on because they've made their character effectively untouchable by the world because they don't care about anything going on or anyone in it. Usually this is because of reaction formation to a really bad GM. Fair enough, you don't get to do that here. Instead, we get to pick someone on the list that we have a close relationship to, in a positive sense, and someone else who is our rival or enemy. Since some of these things are replicated on other play sheets, you immediately get a web of relationships which can go a ton of different ways in a player group. In a fit of madness, I decided to go with having a close buddy named **Memphis**, who is generally known for running *“cargoes”* between various orbital stations. It's always good to know somebody who can get a thing when you need a thing. Likewise, we've had a few nasty run-ins with a guy named **Twitch** who is more than a little bit crazy, possibly from staring into the deep black way too long. Plus he really likes the drugs, like all the drugs. #### Vice City No good character is complete who does not have a vice. In particular, we need something that we do to blow off steam, to get our head back in the game, and which can be potentially very negatively overindulged in when you need to get your edge back. Nothing satisfies like playing with your vice, sometimes literally. We try not to judge around here, but we judge anyway. We've gone this far being a little bit strange, how about our vice also being literally **Weird**? Despite not being a hacker, how about we have a certain obsession with artificial intelligences that — particularly rogue ones? Our vice is that we like to chat with them, maybe run a few helping hand bits of assistance once in a while. Build the odd piece of gear and send it off to a place we don't actually know what's going to happen to it. *“Consorting with rogue AI”* is such a great vice that I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. That it has to be hooked up with the **Machina Imperium**, knowingly or unknowingly, is just gravy. #### ID-You, Do You Know Me? Now comes the question that is critical to every runner's life: do you have an official ID? Most don't, until they get caught and thrown in prison. Some do and can take real legitimate jobs at the risk of having that identification tainted if they get caught doing something nasty. For a good time, *we're actually going to have a legitimate Saturn Orbital ID* because we remain technically a contractor for SO. Sometimes it's just good to have a professional gig to fall back on if that whole crime thing doesn't work out for you. #### Get the Good Stuff It is cyberpunk after all. What would a cyberpunk game be without the ability to choose cool bits of gear or implant technology? It wouldn't be much fun at all. Actually, it would still be incredibly fun, but you would miss a fine opportunity to do cool things. We don't do that around here. There's actually a full sheet to cover implants which looks a bit like this: ![[Runners in the Dark - Implant Tracker.webp]] We don't need to go quite that far to track what we are going to take being a rigger. Obviously, we need to take a **configured drone**, and it's never bad to have a **utility harness** from which we can choose three uses during a particular run. And any of those three can be any of the things listed on our sheet. I see a lot of uses for *spatial scanner* and *vehicular override* — all nasty, horrible uses. We'll also take an **integrated cybernetic neural control rig** because having *two* spare hands while you're controlling drones is better than *no* spare hands. Given that we can do things in the physical world simultaneously with controlling a drone or other piece of hardware, I'd say it's better than magic. Let's configure a drone real quick and see what we end up with. I am sort of a classicist when it comes to remote controlled drones, so let's go for one with a frame size of small, which is about the size of a cat, -1 scale, with one built-in feature. The classic is always the best until we can earn some Nuyen and spend some downtime on upgrading this thing: **flight**. Later we'll go ahead and upgrade the sensor array, maybe even make it stealthy or downsize it a bit so that it's even less obvious. For the moment, a remote control surveillance drone will suffice. #### Whaddaya look like, chummer? Time to do the finishing touches. Picking a proper name, our aliases, and a general look. We've got all the tools necessary to work that out and I've already put them down on the sheet: Orvan Nal or Bore^[He likes to really dig into subjects. And drone on about them at length. Ironic, no?] to his chummers is a tall lanky very black bald man with clear implant ports at the base of his skull. He has a clear orbital accent. That's it. We're done with the character… ![[Character Creation Challenge 2025 - Day 01 - Runners in the Dark - Orvan Nal, Rigger.webp]] ### The Crew Frankly, it wouldn't be a *Forged in the Dark* game if the group of characters themselves didn't have a sheet for the organization. I'm not going to go through creating an entire crew today, but know that there are multiple kinds of crews that could be brought to the table: - *Assassins* - *Courtiers* - *Cults* - *Mercenaries* - *Radicals* - *Shadows* Shadows are your typical Shadowrun group, to the point it's almost right there on the tin. If you wanted to play Fleetwood Mac as a group of runners in the shadows^[I told you it would be relevant.], I would be very inclined to do them as courtiers who just happened to use the cover of a traveling band to go about their business. Johnny Silverhand would certainly approve. Given my druthers, I would enjoy starting my own cult… but when isn't that true? Needless to say, there are tons of other bits which go into setting up your crew, including figuring out what amenities your beginning headquarters has, whether everyone sleeps there or has their own apartments, figuring out if you have some additional crew members who aren't part of the party proper, and so on. This goes well beyond the classic cyberpunk setup and allows you to take things to a bit of a higher level. Plus there's the entire downtime system which pushes you into the struggle between the factions — and there are tons of factions in Kingston… there are a lot of moving parts. ## Exunt Overall, I have to say **Runners in the Shadows** is a pretty good example of a fully featured *FitD* game that started as just a hack and expanded into something considerably more. If you've been interested in playing a **[[Blades in the Dark]]** variant but weren't really into the almost steampunk high fantasy motif and wanted something a bit more grounded, or if you were looking for a replacement for **[[Shadowrun]]**, and curious about a bit more narratively focused fiction-first game design, I'd heartily suggest you pick it up. The layout is a bit spare and a little bit dense, but certainly not the worst I've seen by a long shot. It's light on art and heavy on description. There's a good chance that if you like cyberpunk, you'll like this. Give it a try.