I love a life path system. It was by far my favourite thing about Cyberpunk 2020 and I'm delighted that Cyberpunk Red has one too. I randomly rolled my netrunner's backstory, and used it to write the following backstory incorporating everything I rolled. One of the other PCs rolled the same childhood background living in a megabuilding, so we decided that was how we knew each other and I've incorporated some of the details of his story into mine. In particular, the megabuilding in question, owned by a corporation with a particular fondness for alternative facts, whose residents are indoctrinated with capitalists beliefs and the values of America's greatest ever president...
---
Armala Suda was born into a homeless community in Night City. Several families lived together under a bridge until one day they finally managed to find a way inside one of the city's megabuildings.
They hoped to find work and maybe even a home there, but the residents of Eric Trump Plaza turned out to be oddly suspicious of anyone even slightly brown. They tried to escape the building, but their original entrance point had been cut off and attempting to leave via the main entrance without documentation resulted in a police shooting. The only survivors were Armala, her parents, and Armala's friend Kamala Singh, thanks to one of the residents, a janitor, who risked his own life to snatch the two girls out of the line of fire. The four of them went into hiding, making their new home in the dumpsters, constantly on the lookout for the building's authorities.
Finding she had a knack with machines and computers, Armala began to practice making the security cameras look the other way to make their foraging a little easier. The residents were a little harder to hide from, but soon realised Armala could be useful to them too, and soon she was trading her skills for food and clothes for her family. Dean, who worked at the gun range, started sneaking her in after hours so she could learn to shoot. It wasn't long before they were in love, but their plans for a life together were tragically cut short. Dean was killed when one of the range's customers accidentally shot him dead.
Armala attempted to channel her grief into something positive, answering an advert for someone to play synthesizer in a new band called Gen Sys. While she was forced to leave when the rest of the band's infighting started to attract too much attention, it did allow her to catch the eye of a local netrunner collective.
They were working to take down the corporation owning the building from the inside and looking for a new member. They offered to get her neural link installed in exchange for her working with them, and she accepted. One of the first things she did with her new abilities was to hack the door code of an apartment in the hab block that she knew had recently been vacated, to give her parents and Kamala their first real home.
Initially her work for the collective was to pay off her cyberware, but soon she became friends with one of her fellow netrunners, Arch. While she wasn't convinced when Arch insisted on setting her up on a date with her younger brother Bobby, things went better than anticipated and soon they were dating.
Life with the netrunner crew was going well. Arch and Armala made a good team and their services were in demand. It all went wrong one day when they started picking up chatter across the megabuilding's networks suggesting that a riot was imminent. They tried to contact Bobby to get him away from the danger area, but by the time they got through it was too late and Bobby was killed in a fight with the police.
As a known associate of Bobby, now officially declared a terrorist, Armala (now going by the name Widow) knew it was time to get Arch, herself and her family out of Eric Trump Plaza. Help came from an unlikely source. Staff Sergeant James Ford had been part of the police squad that had attacked them when they first tried to leave the megabuilding. He'd seen the corporation for what it truly was that day and finally had the chance to try to make things right, risking everything to get them out of the building. Unable to ever return safely, he took the fake ID Arch offered him to begin a new life outside the building.
Out of the building, Arch and Widow set up a new team of freelance netrunners catering to local nomads and fixers. Unfortunately they'd had to abandon all their old clients in the flight from the Plaza, and some of them have taken this as a personal insult. Widow doesn't intend to let them get the better of her though. After everything she's been through, anyone attempting to cross her had better watch out. One day she'll get the janitor who saved her and Kamala out of there and into a better life. And then that building's going down.
No comments:
Post a Comment