Balance Sheet – Popay

Design Notes

Every good Shadowrunning team has a Street Samurai.  The difficulty with a human Street Samurai is that they are a dime a dozen in the shadows.  When building one, you can either make a Street Samurai that checks the boxes for their basic skill set or try to make one that uses a “trick” or “signature” to set them apart.  Po’Pay is the former. He is built around what I see as the basic requirements of a Street Samurai, and I doubled down on this plan by using the Sum to Ten Method making “A” Priority Nuyen, with “B” priorities for both Skills and Attributes.  That left Magic and Metatype as “E”, but as a human that still means a 3 Edge.

Street Samurai are first and foremost Fire Support characters who are there to put bullets down range to attack physical threats.  Focusing on Automatics and modifying an Ares Alpha means that Po’Pay has 18 dice to shoot with his assault rifle with an Accuracy of 9. Because this is the result of amping up Agility, the Agile Defender Quality makes sense. He is a high value target after the Mages, so his armor is beefed up with Bone Lacing and Dermal Plating leaving him at 22 points of armor in his primary running gear.  

To set this character apart, I dove into his background.  While lots of characters talk about having been former members of a Corp or National military, I doubled down on his Negative Qualities to show his former Pueblo Corporate Council connections.  There hasn’t been a lot written about the P.C.C. military directly, so the best source for information was Horizon Twilight from Fourth Edition that was set in Las Vegas. The original NAN Books, Sixth World Atlas, Shadows of North America, and Spy Games also gave some insight into the P.C.C.’s activities.  

With an “A” priority in Nuyen, there was a lot of money to spread around.  This meant that a slightly modified vehicle with extra armor that can seat 4 and prepaying the main lifestyle on the character for a full year to keep him ahead of the curve.  Using his karma in the character generation, I upped his low skills and abilities while also adding a few contacts to his rather low Charisma total.

As a Street Samurai, he is focused on combat, but I tried to round out some of his skills so that he had utility outside of that role.  With his high Agility, a skill point or two can go a long way to making him useful as a secondary transporter or as infiltration support.  

Character Notes

Po’Pay is on the run and it drives his every action.  He knows the P.C.C. is still looking for him, both to recoup their business investment in his training and `ware, but also because of why he originally ran.  He has managed to keep his P.C.C. SIN from being fully linked to his Seattle activities through bribes and favors, but he knows it is only a matter of time.

Po’Pay started life in the Pueblo Corporate Council, the child of P.C.C. shareholders, issued his citizenship share at birth. Enlisting in the Pueblo Security Corporation, he worked both municipal security jobs and military actions, as is standard for the P.C.C.’s wholly owned security subsidiary.  His quiet nature was replaced with bravado and the stubbornness that is emblematic of PuebSec. While he had shown some initial promise to rise in the ranks, he wasn’t really leadership material. PuebSec used him for what he was good at, though.

Something went wrong. On a military detachment near Albuquerque, his unit was killed.  There are only vague public reports of a training accident, but it was more than that. Why Po’Pay survived and whether it was his fault isn’t known.  The P.C.C. would like to find the answer to that to see whether the Koshari has dug deeper, or whether the Kochina have resurfaced to try to gain more control over the P.C.C.  Fleeing into the shadows, he took the name of a civic hero carried down in families through the 2070s. Historically, Po’pay led the Pueblo in revolt against Spanish colonialism in the 1680s driving them from what was formerly known as New Mexico for a time.  What significance this has to the shadowrunner known as Po’Pay is not know.

Po’Pay is an accomplished warrior and particularly skilled in the use of firearms.  He has a firm grasp of Small Unit Tactics and will often try to take the lead in combat situations for Balance Sheet.  He and Preesh make a sort of Odd Couple, with near constant bickering born partially from Po’Pay’s absolute dislike for corporate SINners (P.C.C. excluded).  He gets protective of Anna, but has never explained why the Troll has such a draw to him.

PoPay Form
Key – R&G = Run & Gun; RF = Run Faster; DT = Data Trails; CF = Chrome Flesh; CA = Cutting Aces; R5 = Rigger 5.0; HT = Hard Targets

Balance Sheet Overview Here.

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