Shadowrun: Wyatt Ork
Pink Mohawks Ahoy!
The 5th Edition of Shadowrun is gritty, grimdark, edgy, and runs around everywhere with a heavy pistol and a black trenchcoat. Not unlike a number of other urban fantasy settings, actually. Most of my character concepts for Shadowrun reflect the setting… but sometimes, it’s fun to run around with a pink mohawk, too. This would be an example of the latter. Mostly.
Character: Wyatt Ork
Race: Ork
Background:
Wyatt doesn’t just believe he’s a descendant of the legendary Wyatt Earp. He believes he’s actually Wyatt Earp himself. He’s got explanations for how he got to the Sixth World (magical sleep), why he’s still alive (faked his death), why he’s an ork (goblinization), and even how he survives being a shadowrunner despite having no chrome (he’s Wyatt Earp). He doesn’t always get the known facts about Earp correct, and while those that know him think he’s probably taken a few too many hits to the head, he’s friendly and likable, and even something of a good guy for a shadowrunner. He looks out for kids and the innocent, doesn’t shoot his team in the back, and a number of other things that aren’t good business sense for shadowrunners, but are popular with civilians. Most people think he’s weird, but harmless.
Well, harmless except for being a shadowrunner, of course.
SPOILER ALERT:
“Wyatt” knows exactly what he’s doing. The goofy ork routine is a deliberate choice, intended to make him seem ridiculous so people underestimate him. In his experience, the people who dismiss him as a dumb, crazy ork are the usually the ones that would likely double cross him if they thought he was a threat, so he presents himself as harmless. His survival isn’t an accident either — Wyatt is an Adept, focused on speed, agility, and accuracy, making him a gunslinger that can keep up with his heavily augmented peers. He keeps his Adept powers off as much as possible to not attract attention, and the Awakened rarely feel the need to examine him for magical ability because of his goofy ork persona. That suits Wyatt fine — being underestimated makes his job easier.
His Adept training came from a small, mostly overlooked school in the Barrens, too small to even have a name. Students of this school learn to protect those weaker than themselves and other almost forgotten moral lessons from ancient martial arts, and generally go on to be vigilantes and other unsung heroes of the poor and downtrodden. They don’t usually live long, not because of poor training, but because altruism can be fatal in the Barrens. Nevertheless, they try to make the world a better place. For Wyatt, the warrior’s morality he learned meshed well with the concept of the good-guy Old West gunslinger, and thus, the goofy Wyatt Ork routine was born.
Ironically, Wyatt Ork actually is an extremely distant relative of the real Wyatt Earp, but genetics and humanity being what they are, so are thousands of other people in the Sixth World.
