Steal this Cyberpunk Netrunner Villain: Blaze

After a long run of plot seeds, I’m going to be trying something a bit different for a while, and write up some character inspiration for you all. To start with I’m going to rock something from my current genre of choice, Cyberpunk. This one is written with CP2020 in mind, but there are plenty of other cracking settings out there that showcase the future shock just as well.

If you would see Blaze working away, you’d think he was just a bit of a douche. Sat in a high end coffee house, with a light blonde pony tail lank against his back, and thick rimmed glasses resting on the bridge of his nose. Under them a thin looking mustache and pitiful goatee. His fingers tapping away on a deck that looks deliberately vintage, for no good reason, while he sips his coffee. Looking closer though, and a few other things start to become obvious. He’s had surgery at some point, and both eyes have been replaced with cybernetic augmentations. Deep scars on his face have been corrected as well as possible, and the piece of crap deck is hooked into a fully functional cyberarm, with strands of living flesh stretched tight over chrome. His clothes seem heavier too, and that’s because they’re all as well armoured as money can buy.

There is definitely more to this Netrunner than meets the eye. Raised in a traveling family, he quickly made a name for himself as a “the computer dude”. And when he got the chance to ditch the wanderers and strike out on his own, he grabbed it. It didn’t take him long to realize that out in the world, there were two types of hackers. Successful and long lived ones, who usually never left their parent’s basement and weighed about the same as a mid size town car, and brave ones who joined a gang and terminally found out that skills with a deck were no match for someone with a gun. he wasn’t going to let that happen.

Instead of putting all of his money into the latest technology and firewalls, he bought biotech adrenal boosters and combat chips. Spent money made from hacking on armour and a hand cannon he couldn’t lift until he got his muscles laced with steel. It held him back in terms of becoming a kick ass Netrunner, but made him friends who were looking for more than a keyboard jockey. It also didn’t take him long to fall in with a bad crowd.

It all started with a job going south, ad the crew he ran with getting blackmailed to do some less than kosher jobs. Blaze saw that he could make a lot money from jobs if he shelved his morals, and just got the job done. This caused more than a hint of friction between himself and the crew, so he did something about it. With a well laid plan detailing how they would take out their blackmailers in place, the crew moved out. What they didn’t expect was that Blaze had tipped the authorities the wink, and with the villainous activities that the crew had performed sent the feds, everyone was taken down in one fell swoop. Blaze was a free agent, and looking forward to working for himself.

Since then he has masterminded more than a few jobs, but freelanced even more, working for the highest bidder and making contacts all over the place. His skill behind a deck or with a plasmatic revolver in hand make him valuable indeed, and he has been instrumental in human rights violations all over the globe, as well as ripping off corporations, governments and charities as well. True, he’s made some enemies, but a call to the right agency can often see them shipped to a penal colony somewhere warm and lacking in Wi-Fi access points.

Bringing Blaze into a game.

There are a few possibilities for this, the simplest being that any team that goes on a run will likely face another team sent against them. Blaze is a great jack of a few trades in this regard and he uses the fact that he doesn’t look like a combat character, or dress like a bad guy, play to his advantage. He will take his time and think about when best to attack, and has no qualms about bringing in others to do the dirty work for him.

There’s also the possibility that he is a mastermind of a job involving the players. Either hiring them on to do something that seems innocuous but casts long and dark shadows, or blackmailing them like he himself was to do something particularly unpleasant. Either way, he should be played like a reasonably charming easy going kind of chap, keeping the truth of his nature hidden for as long as possible. He knows that he can get better results if people think that they’re doing something for the right reasons even if their methods are deplorable.