Balance Sheet – Phoenix

Design Notes

First things first – if you are an optimizing player who ekes out every last drop of effectiveness, you should skip this character sheet.  Making a technomancer has some interesting challenges, but when you have a dwarf in your head already for the character, it gets even more complicated.  With the minimum priority of “C” for metatype, things get thrown out of balance quickly. I also wanted to make a former otaku who became a technomancer, and that means at the minimum a datajack dropping the characters Resonance.  Once I accepted that the character wouldn’t be nearly as good at what they do as, say, Po’Pay, it started to get easier. In trying to balance out Phoenix, I ended up using Sum to ten with “B” – Resonance; “C” – Attributes; “C” – Skills; “C” – Metatype; and “D” – Resources.

I designed Pheonix more for the roleplaying opportunities when I went this route.  I covered the basics of being a Technomancer and she isn’t completely useless, but with a Resonance of 3, there are some real limits.  To give her at least a small chance to shoot something, she got a cyberarm since I had nearly a point of essence that wasn’t doing anything after the datajack and crammed in some agility modifiers and some sensors.  To round out the character, including a really low attribute and get the remaining nuyen I wanted, I took some potentially dangerous Negative Qualities, especially Curiosity Killed the Cat for such a low Resonance character.   

Phoenix won’t set a game on fire, but as part of Balance Sheet, she is an interesting part of the team and full of roleplaying potential.

Character Notes

Phoenix is a female dwarven Technomancer who has been running with Balance Sheet pretty much since their first run.  Her secrets, however, are her own. She hasn’t shared with the rest of them that before Crash 2.0, she was an Otaku – a child of the Matrix that didn’t need a deck.  The thing is, Phoenix was already facing the fading, when Otaku would begin to lose their connection to the matrix as they aged, when Crash 2.0 happened and was left in a coma for weeks afterwards.  Her original identity was gone, wiped out in that catastrophic system failure, but she slipped out before they managed to tag her with a criminal SIN. The benefits of near societal breakdown is that some paperwork gets lost. Her ruined arm replaced with chrome, her connection to the Matrix and the Resonance cut off, Phoenix found herself truly alone.

She quietly managed to keep herself fed as the new Wireless Matrix started to come online around her, feeling dejected and rejected by the Resonance as she pained for warm embrace of the Matrix again. Then it happened.  She woke up to seeing and hearing the wireless noise around her! It had come back! Her gift had returned! Sadly, Anna realized that this gift wasn’t nearly as strong in her connection to the Resonance as it used to be. She sought out the sprites in this new Matrix, hunted for the Resonance to come back to her.  In this quest, she found Preesh and Po’Pay and has been running with them ever since.

Anna doesn’t tell them that she isn’t as strong as she lets on.  She also tries to hide the near panic she feels in Matrix deadzones, being reminded of the quiet and stillness that so disturbed her after Crash 2.0.  She has been compensating by slotting BTLs into her old datajack, and trying to find the same Resonance she once knew. While doing this, she has found a new joy.

Anna and Phoenix seem to get lost in conversation time and again. Their different backgrounds and different abilities mean that the conversations seem to be about the nature of reality and the Sixth World, though it seems at times that their spirits and sprites are just using them as a cut outs to talk to each other.  

One more secret she has been keeping – something in the Resonance has started talking to her again.  Promises of restoring her connection and diving deeper into the electronic reality she craves are made.  She is seeking this voice in her head out, but she doesn’t know if it is Resonance or Dissonance. Frankly, she doesn’t care.  

Phoenix 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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