[Magusinvictus]

Hello everyone!

When starting a new campaign with, starting with each player designing their character independently, it’s really great when synchronicity throws up interesting and surprising links between them.

This has happened recently within my group. Two players designed very different characters- one is human, and the other an A.I., however;

•   Both have very similar names (or designations), just one letter differentiating them.
•   Both have the taken the Erased quality.

I could obviously go for along the somewhat clichéd route of saying that the A.I. was in some way a corrupted mind-taping of the man (the A.I. also has amnesia), but I was wondering if the community here could come up with other cunning, devious, or nasty ways in which the two characters could be connected…

Thanks everyone!!!

[JoeNapalm]

Hello everyone!

When starting a new campaign with, starting with each player designing their character independently, it’s really great when synchronicity throws up interesting and surprising links between them.

This has happened recently within my group. Two players designed very different characters- one is human, and the other an A.I., however;

•   Both have very similar names (or designations), just one letter differentiating them.
•   Both have the taken the Erased quality.

I could obviously go for along the somewhat clichéd route of saying that the A.I. was in some way a corrupted mind-taping of the man (the A.I. also has amnesia), but I was wondering if the community here could come up with other cunning, devious, or nasty ways in which the two characters could be connected…

Thanks everyone!!!

I would start with the typical Who, What, Where, When, Why?

So far you have What answered, but who did it (obviously someone with the resources to attempt it without his knowledge) and why? A Corp? Organized Crime? The Government? A Shadowlab?

I would work with the Human on a backstory for him, or have him take the Character Quiz, and work with that.

-Jn-
Ifriti Sophist

[StarManta]

The "why" depends entirely on the human's background. Who? The corps, like it always is, that's easy. But why? Is there profit in trying to duplicate his personality? Or maybe it was just for research, a corp looking into the "Ghost in the Machine" rumors? Alternately, perhaps it was an accident that happened when the human was trapped online during the Crash - though his personality was duplicated into an online persona, it also remained in his head.

I think a thread of these kinds of things from other GMs would be interesting (and plot-inspiring!) I have a pretty good one from one of my games, tying together 3 of the party (with a fourth maybe able to tie in later)...

[JoeNapalm]

Those are interesting ideas. Could have been a test subject - you don't expect an important Exec to wire his brain into an untested apparatus, do you? Oh no - not even when his digital immortality is on the line.

*Grin*

-Jn-
Everyone's Favorite Vile Fiend

[Valashar]

In Corporate Guide, iirc UniOmi, Proteus, and possibly Evo are working on figuring out just what it is that makes an e-ghost. There's also a semi-religious organization mentioned in Attitude that's all about making the jump from physical to matrix entities.

[CanRay]

Man, is the digital fur going to fly when someone finally decants the Captain out of his box!

[Charybdis]

Several questions to clarify in this regard:

A) Do the PC's have to be connected?
B) Do they have to be erased by the same off-screen method? (Friendly AI, Hacker, mysterious benefactor etc)
C) Names are only minor details. As a GM, I normally veto similar names to avoid confusion and make someone (or both of them) change the names. They'll be using fake sins or aliases most of the time anyway, so this is only a very minor issue.

[The Cat]

Why do you have to "resolve" anything?  Other than possible name confusion, I see no problem.  If one was named Frank and the other Luther and both had Erased it wouldn't be a problem.  If only one (or neither) had Erased and thet were named Frank and Franz there would be no problem.  Two data points line up and one is unlikely to ever come up on conversation (no one announces, "you know, I have Erased" in character), no need to worry and nothing a GM needs to do, really.

I'm not really seeing a problem outside name confusion.

[John Shull]

I am in the like them tied together camp.  It also seems to flow with the theme of a mega rich and famous developing Project: Timeless, where he was finding a way to live forever.  So if, for example only,  Damein Knight was running out of time in leonized bod, at least at the level he was used to.  He could shoot money at some fun people at R&D to make his own reset button.  The AI and Jr would be the prototypes of this black project, if I have correctly understood the gist of the last few posts.  This gives them a really cool potential plotline.  Soon the new total package Knight will rise and all the prototypes are a loose end that must gettaken care of.  So you have a enemy, maybe hung out to dry, maybe borrowed time, maybe amnesia, maybe mysterious cyberware or cortex bomb and erased you could work into the origins.

From a GM perspective you can have two characters looking into their origins and slowly start a who's your daddy side hunt.  They can run the lab where one was cloned, crack the server center where one was electrobirthed, do a snatch and grab of the scientist who ran the project, etc.  In short your playing the Shadowrun version of Twins, ala DeVitto and Arnold.  It has to be run.  You just gotta do that.

[Valashar]

OP isn't saying he has to tie them together, he's saying he wants to. Big difference.

In our campaign, we've used an organization called Flatliners, Inc. What they do is they offer the chance to 'Experience death and live to brag about it!'. Customer gets plugged into an immersion pod, jacked or troded in, and hit with a funky mix of black IC, psychotropics, and a brief (3-5 second) chemically induced flatline. Part of the psychotropic is to make it seem like the experience takes longer than it does, so they think they got their money's worth. We used it as the playground of a death obsessed AI. Nothing says something similar can't be used as a means for the kind of immortality projects others have mentioned. Hell, you could do something of that nature with a 2070's sleep research center.

[Trenchknife]

I've been a fan of tying runners together with past history.  It's sometimes even more fun to do so without their express knowledge.  Not necessarily long lost twins, but maybe just worked for the same people a while back without knowing. 

In this case I see two options...one easier than the other.
1.  As has all ready been mentioned, the AI is somehow a digital copy/clone of the Human's personality/persona.  This would work well, if there is some sort of similarity of training/purpose in the two characters.  Heck, you could even reverse this scheme.  Maybe the human had it's identity overwritten in the matrix by the AI.  It was traumatic for both of them and neither remembers.  Effects to be determined..

2.  The other way is to have them connected by one remove.  Maybe the Human's mother was a genius hacker.  The crash/comet/whatever caused her to lose her baby through kidnapping/disaster/whatever and so she created the AI somehow as a way to regain her sense of motherhood.