Contacts and Enemies

From Shadowrun: Awakened

Contacts and enemies represent a specific subset of major NPC that form specific relationships with player characters for longer than one mission.

Game Rules Description

In Shadowrun, it's not what you know, but who you know. Contacts and enemies represent the two complementary sides of long-term relationships in Shadowrun that depict this very quality. Contacts are long time friends who, nominally, trust a player character and will work with them. Enemies are out to get a player character and may be indulging in some level of machinations against the character.

Contacts and enemies will have attitude and respond to reputation. To support ongoing relationships with characters, contacts and enemies will be able to store information. This will primarily be used to remember decisions made by the character or actions that happened. For instance, if the character chooses to let another NPC die, a contact or enemy could remember that, holding it against them. It could cause something such as a contact becoming an enemy.

Players, just like in the P&P, will be able to start the game with contacts. They will also be able to acquire them during play. The starting contacts, and many acquired during play, will be somewhat generic in nature; allowing for randomized name and appearance, but they are unlikely to tie into ongoing missions. These all-purpose contacts will allow for everyone to interface with information in the world to an equal degree, provided they have made the choices and investments necessary for the contact (IE bought it during character generation and does not anger the contact's associated Faction too badly). In addition to the generic contacts, certain missions, campaigns, and storylines will yield specific contacts and enemies. These will be fleshed out according to the story and will likely serve as a memorable reward, or punishment, for completing the story.

Primarily, contacts and enemies will be used to flesh out a narrative bridge between missions for campaigns, storylines, and to buttress the overall feel of the universe. By providing characters that interact with players between or after missions, it will help the world feel more alive. It will feel more like an ecosystem. Contacts and enemies also represent social rewards and punishments available in the game. Helping people and conducting yourself competently always earns friends; while betrayal often yields enemies. Obviously, a lot of enemies will be born from simply crossing the wrong people too often (reaching a low reputation with a faction).

Technical Implementation

There will truly be no functional difference between a contact and enemy, nor a generic or story specific C&E. They will all be Major NPCs, able to participate in combat, conversations, transactions, and will be able to remember arbitrary information that can be used by scripting. What changes between the types is the investment the assets team makes into the characters and the necessary roles they find.

Generic starting NPCs must be fairly blank slates because there are currently no background mechanics. Specific fixers can be imbued with specific personalities, conveyed by customized conversation cues, but assets is discouraged from them trying to indicate any background about the character. For instance, a contact acquired during a mission would have no problems later recounting the conclusion of the mission to the player. There is supporting history in the player's experience, but if a content creator places a story into the conversations of a starting NPC, it's possible that could be contradicted later.

C&Es will be able to start missions in the game. The most common might be a contact giving a player a mission that continues an ongoing storyline, in which the contact is a central actor. Another one might be a situation where an enemy puts a player into a mission in order to trap or take a shot at them. In this case, the mission starts out as a red herring and the enemy soon intervenes.