So I'm about to start up a SWT campaign with players that are generally pretty new to Shadowrun lore, or at most know the barest basics. I used to take a fairly strict stance on non-core options, but I've been getting more lax, so when one of my players wanted to play a vampire I was like "what the hell, let's try and make this work."
So she had a lot of questions about how they fit into the world, and so far, she's been pretty good about understanding that this is a shadowrun vampire, not a whatever-else vampire. She's been made aware of the risks of addiction to essence drain, and that she will have to either feed on a sapient creature at least once per month or (house rule here, since it's been seen often enough in fiction) partake of preserved blood (blood packs, blood wine, etc...) twice per week. The latter cannot restore essence, but if consumed regularly can stave off its loss.
In any case, since she didn't know much about the lore of the world, I helped her build her backstory, and asked her if she felt okay if some of the stuff would have plot implications later on that she will be in the dark about for a while, and she said sure. So she find herself at the center of a very elaborate Aztechnology recruitment scheme. So here's where we're at with this...
The backstory..... Kimberly was born a horizon citizen, and an adept. When it became apparent that she had a knack for the social game, they started grooming her pretty much immediately. She was molded into social adept, though, since mages are rare and certain accommodations are made for their eccentricities (especially at Horizon), she dabbled in the combat side of the physical arts, having been a fan of old Bruce Lee films as a kid. Jeet kun do also made the approach of the chaos tradition feel pretty natural. By this time, Horizon was looking at her as a potential candidate for the Dawkins group. Not now, but with a few more years of grooming. So she was sent to good corporate college in Seattle, and one night and a party, she meets this latino guy who is just the right blend of delicate and rugged and he is suave as fuck. They are on their way to a no-tell-motel, step into an alley, and the fangs come out. She wakes up, thirsty as hell, two days later.
She's in a ramshackle tent with and old man, a dying junkie, and a jaguar. The old man, wearing a tattered coat adorned with plumage, bids her drink, and she does. He's a street shaman following the Aztec tradition, and found her after the attack. A retired runner, he once had a vampire friend, and knew immediately what he'd come across. He found a junkie from the community who he estimated had about a year left to live and made him her first meal. Guy was so strung out he might have enjoyed it. He explains that the first thing she needs to understand is she is not a monster, but she is a predator. He gives her a little Aztec shpeel that ultimate comes up to accepting that she will need to kill, but that the streets are an ecosystem. A smart predator hunts only for food, not sport, and doesn't take more than they need. He tries to instill a worldview that life preying on life in a natural, inescapable cycle, and that doing good with her own life is the best way to honor the lives she must end (or at least injure, but he IS kind of darwinistic) to sustain her own. He helps her learn the basics, and get her feet under her. She decides not to go back to Horizon (she has a corporate SIN and is listed as missing), because she knows that even thought they're ostensibly very open, the thing runs on the Consensus, and she knows what the public thinks of vampires. So her new shaman mentor has helped her acclimate to the streets and given her a couple contacts in the shadows.
What she doesn't know.... The vampire who bit her and the shaman instructing her are both Aztechnology. They saw an adept who enjoyed fighting, was socially adept, and young enough to mold, and they marked her for what amounts to an elaborate extraction. Ultimately, they want to make her into a Bloodpanther. The guy who bit her was one, and now the "street shaman" is very slowly trying to lay the groundwork for her acceptance of blood magic. I told my player that he will work as a talismonger contact and will also be able to help her initiate after she gets enough karma. If she takes that option, though, he's going to ask her to kill someone as part of the initiation, and he's probably going to make some arguments that sound pretty convincing coming from a trusted mentor. If she goes through with it, rather than choosing her first metamagic, she will gain Sacrifice and become a blood mage. She's a generally good-natured character, and I presume at that point she will quickly catch on and reject her mentor, but forbidden arcana had what seemed like a cool take on PC blood magic, and I thought this might be a neat way to sneak the option in.
So my questions are twofold, here.
1) Am I being a little too invasive as a gm here? I think it will make for some VERY interesting storytelling, but it does involve her being "tricked" into making a few decisions, including one build option. I THINK she would be okay with it in this instance, but I wanted to get the community's opinion.
2) Is this fitting with Aztechnology's? MO? I figure that they are the only corp that can rival Horizon's PR machine, so this sort of shell game doesn't feel too far out for them, but I don't have a lot of knowledge of how they have historically worked.