Most people, when starting an online game, don’t really pay much attention to the ‘fluff’ parts. After all, the ‘big numbers go up’ bit is the more important part, right? You’ll eventually find or buy the cosmetics to make your character look like you want in game. And what does a backstory matter when you’re all going on the same quests? Sure, you have some people who customize looks more in RPGs than MMOs, but the background for those games is still a generic, typically. Maybe a choice of one of three or four options, if you’re lucky.
Shadowmen wasn’t like that. While it wasn’t wrong to call it a VRMMORPG, that wasn’t quite right, either. In the Beta community, people had coined the term VRMMUSH, or Virtual Reality Massively Multi-User Shared Hallucination. Apparently, the idea came from back in the dawn of the internet, when the forerunners of MMORPGs, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) were being played over entirely text-based clients, if you can believe that. They were mostly the ‘kill things’ kind of games, while MUSHes arose to be more roleplay-heavy.
Personally, I liked the term. It definitely fit how Shadowmen operated, after all. This was a game to be lived in and experienced, not just run through, going from quest marker to quest marker killing mobs. And part of living in a world was all that ‘fluff’.
Kept my looks mostly simple. Scan of my RL face, courtesy of the pod keeping me alive. Ditch the short hair for a long, wavy mane, almost down to my waist. A neatly trimmed goatee, as well. Some of that was a vanity choice on my part, but there was good reason for it, too. If a guy needed to disappear, the easiest way to completely change your look was to swap up facial hair and haircut. If I really needed to, I could cut the hair, shave, and look like a totally different person with just a trip to a barber. Obviously, I’d do more to change my look if it came to that, but the point still stood that it was easier to get rid of hair than to suddenly grow it.
For my build, I went average elf on most things. Shoulders, muscles, and so on. I would look gym-fit, and neither overly tall nor too short. OK, so I did go above average on one part, but I dare any guy to say that he actually wanted to be average or below on that scale, unless they were asexual, looking to transition, or had a humiliation kink.
Looks set, I turned my attention to backstory. I knew some of the game world’s history, thanks to the Beta, so I didn’t need to go trolling through wikis or other resources to pull together something to make a non-generic backstory. Starting off, homeland would be Ola Serin, the elven land that used to be Oregon.
During the general insanity of the Cataclysm, as people called the period where magic woke up and everything changed, the elves teamed up with the Native Americans to try and carve up bits of North America for themselves. However, instead of a tribal council, or other methods that the different sub-countries of the FAN created, the elves decided to go old school, with a full-on monarchy and nobles and everything, with a strong elven supremacy vibe. Surprisingly, most people were OK with that, at first. After all, Ola Serin was far more stable than other places, and with a lot of humans expanding their bigotry to include ‘nonhumans’, having a place by the elves, for the elves, sounded damn good.
Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last, and some people started getting upset. Nobility acting like nobility and fucking over normal people, and the non-elves in the country not liking that they were second class citizens definitely didn’t help things. So, when the internet (now called the Matrix) crashed and burned for the second time, about 6 years before current day in the game, the plebes decided it was a great time to make the nobility burn with it. Ola Serin was technically a republic, now, but there were quite a few faces who somehow still managed to be in charge, despite not officially being nobles.
My plan was to be a minor noble, forced to flee the country when the rabble revolted. No place for me at home, with the family killed or scattered, so I went and got myself lost in the Seattle Metroplex. Becoming a Shadowman might be quite the fall from being a noble, but it beat being dead, by a long shot.
I spent the next hour answering questions from the system, tracing out my family life in Ola Serin, before the rebellion. I picked a prestigious private school that I attended, included a couple childhood sweethearts and old flames, the swordmage who trained me, and so on. The world outside may have still resembled a capitalist hellscape rather than a cyberpunk dystopia, in that there was all the corporate greed and oppression, but a distinct lack of functioning cybernetics or other hallmarks of a cyberpunk world, but at least computers and AI had kept advancing. Otherwise, the way Shadowmen built in NPCs and ‘plot hooks’ for the player base would never have worked.
Basically, the more questions I answered about my backstory, and offered more ways to link me into the world, the more immersive the world would be for me. Of course, there were limits. During the beta, one tester had tried to make himself the bastard child of one of the big corporate bigwigs, and tried to game the system that way. Either the AI or the people at MetaTech figured it out, though, because he spawned in thinking that’s what he was, only to find out that he was an escaped clone, waking up just as they were about to harvest his body parts. People decided against pushing the limits after that.
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So, I made a solid backstory for why my elf was living in Seattle, instead of his homeland, and why I had some skills and abilities that common folk didn’t usually have access to. Of course, there were some NPCs who would hate on me because I was an elf, or because I was a former noble, or any number of other things, but that was part and parcel of a cyberpunk dystopia setting. Everyone had someone they hated, even if it was just the fans of that team they couldn’t stand.
Identities
Name
Description
Mirikon Mollen
SIN (Ola Serin), Weapons Permit, Driver’s License
Jack Frost
Fake SIN 3, Fake Weapons Permit 3, Fake Driver’s License 3. Cost: 3600
Uptown Condo: Comforts (Middle), Entertainment (Middle), Necessities (High), Neighborhood (Middle), Security (Middle), Network Bottleneck, Rough Neighborhood, Well Made, Workplace. Cost: 6000 / month
Matt Whitemane
Barrens Bolthole: Comforts (Low), Entertainment (Squatter), Necessities (Low), Neighborhood (Street), Security (Middle), Alternate Energy, Defective CHN, Free Access, Fully Stocked Bar, Loud Neighborhood, Network Bottleneck, Poor Condition, Rough Neighborhood. Cost 800 / month
That was good for where I came from. Now I needed to work on where I was now. I had three identities to work with. Two of them had property, while the third was my real identity.
In essence, this part was easy. I just went through the two fake identities, and started fleshing out the lifestyles I was living. Obviously, I started with the condo, since that was where I’d spend most of my time, unless things went bad.
Middle-class neighborhood allowed me to pick a place in Olasar, the Ola ex-pat community. New construction, so things in my condo were well-made, and I had enough room to put my magic lodge in there, but the Laesans, an elven mafia, to put it plainly, had a drug processing business in the area, which made things a bit rougher than normal, and slowed down the Matrix. Still, I was able to get good food (not that flavored soy crap) and get tailored suits when I wanted them, and could live it up at a nightclub fairly easily. Even had a couple drones to do the cooking and cleaning that came with the place.
The bolthole in the middle of the Redmond Barrens (so-called because Redmond had descended well past shithole status long ago, and no one who had a choice stayed there) was not nearly so nice. Solar panels were a great idea, except Seattle was known for clouds and rain. There wasn’t much in the way of comforts, but the place was stocked with some quality booze. The area was even more of a shithole than much of Redmond, with the Fleshtearers, a ghoul gang, claiming much of the area.
Oh, yeah, that was gonna be a surprise to some of the people playing the game. Magic went and made some of the ‘bump in the night’ things real. Just, not as you might have hoped. Ghouls, Vampires, and other such things were all poor fucks that got infected by a plague, only this one wasn’t so kind as to kill its hosts, it changed them. In the case of Ghouls, they were mostly the same, though they tended to get grey skin and lose their hair, and they needed to eat human (and all the various metatypes of human) meat or they starved. Some kept their brains, others went feral.
The Fleshtearers were some of the ones that kept their heads. I’d run into them a couple times in the Beta, and honestly, they were fairly chill to live nearby, provided you didn’t bring trouble to their door, and were willing to help them out, those times they needed a pretty face to smooth things over or get things done. Also, they were more than happy to take a body off your hands, no questions asked. Even if the body was still screaming when you left.
Only thing left was fleshing out my contacts. Otherwise known as the people I could call for help, information, or making introductions, if I needed them. They were important, and Shadowmen learned fast to not burn bridges with them. Or they died. I only had three contacts, now, and each of them at a 2 of 6 on Connection and Loyalty, but it was possible to gain more during the game, if you played your cards right. Maybe even get your existing contacts more loyal, or better connected, as time went by.
So, first up to flesh out would be my fixer. Random name came out as Alisha Cooper, better known as Pixie. The elf was a former Shadowman, one of the better deckers out there, but the second Crash burned her bad, so that she couldn’t sling code like she used to. Didn’t mean she was helpless, though. She could still shoot just fine, and she knew people who knew people. So, she’d started working as a fixer. And the ex-pats from Ola Serin were all more likely to work with another elf than a filthy human, or *audible gasp* an ork or troll!
Pa-Akanti Stormcloud was a talismonger, which was a fancy word for ‘guy who took magic shit, and made usable magic shit out of it’. You wanted a fetish for a spell? Maybe a focus? Or just the materials to put up a nice, solid ward? He could set you up. Wanted the inside details of Mexsanto’s newest gun? Talk to someone else. He was from the Kiowa tribe, supposedly, but there was some trouble in his past, and if he showed his face there again, the welcome he received was likely to be at muzzle velocity.
Finally, there was Foxy, one of the leaders of the Blacksuns, a motorcycle gang that, amongst other things, ran quite the smuggling operation between Ola Serin and, well, anywhere their bikes could reach, really, but Seattle was one of their main hubs, and the Olasar community could usually count on any Blacksuns around to show up and push out any non-elf troublemakers. Foxy, otherwise known as Amelie Fox, got hit by a patch of wild magic during a ride a few years back, and got mutated, rather than dying horribly, like some did. Unlike some other mutants, though, she didn’t become some horrific monster but a nine-tailed foxgirl. She had to put three guys in the hospital before the jokes about that, and her name, stopped.
I took a deep breath as I took another look over everything while the AI set about generating the links from my backstory and working them into the world. The previous tests had all been just that, tests. Now, I was about to go into the game for real. I couldn’t wait.
Generation complete.
Introduction Scenario ready.
Proceed?
Yes / No
Of course I hit yes.