Characters / Shadowrun Returns

See the characters page for the overall franchise.

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The Dead Man's Switch

Shadowrunners

Sam Watts

"Now I'm asking myself — who would care if I die? Who would give a rat's ass? Better or worse, your name is at the top of the list. Maybe it's the only name *on* the list..."

Your deceased friend who kicks off the plot. An ex-shadowrunner whose Dead Man's Switch sends you a job offer to find his killer.

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• The Alcoholic: And more besides. Whether booze, drugs, or chips, Sam had a habit he never kicked. Good guy, never drunk on a run, but he liked his vices.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: It quickly becomes apparent he has a rather... complicated family history.
• Dead Man's Switch: He has one implanted in his brain, sending a prerecorded video phone call to you in the event somebody finally killed him.
• Fire-Forged Friends: With the Player Character. He had your back when the Renraku run went to hell and helped you gun down the traitor New Larry. You can also state, on more than one occasion, that Sam had your back when you needed it so you are not going to abandon him now before making sure his killer is taken care of.
• Guest-Star Party Member: During a flashback at the beginning of the game.
• Half-Identical Twins: With Jessica.
• Irony: Both a case of situational and dramatic. The liver transplant from his mother that saved his life made him a target of the Ripper, and during his final message to you he asks that you apologize to his sister on his behalf and ask for her forgiveness — "forgiveness", as you already know at that point, is almost exactly the opposite of what his sister did to him.
• I Owe You My Life: Well, more like he reminds you that you owe yours to him as he had your back when Renraku came gunning for you and New Larry turned on you.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's a self confessed selfish alcoholic (and whatever else he could get hold of-ic) moocher who admits that whoever killed him probably had a legitimate grudge. However he always stayed clean while on a run, had your back in a firefight and the staff at the Union considered him family (although only Coyote actually liked him).
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Well, homicide isn't exactly a minor crime but his death being caused by his sister, who is a major head-honcho at the Universal Brotherhood, puts you on the track to uncovering and stopping the Brotherhood's plans for Seattle, which is a great deal more important than solving the murder of the town drunk.
• Phone Call from the Dead: Courtesy of a Dead Man's Switch in his head.
• Posthumous Character: His death sets off the plot.
• The Power of Legacy: Downplayed example. After you receive Sam's final message after you got his killers, Dresden asks the PC what Sam's final words were. The PC is can emphasise that Sam was grateful for avenging him instead of emphasising that your promised "payoff" for doing so was a bunch of bull by responding "Thank you. He just said 'thank you'" to Dresden. Alternatively...
  PC: He told me to never trust a dead man.
• Schmuck Bait: An alcoholic, ex-shadowrunner capable of affording a 100,000 nuyen life insurance policy? Yeah, right. Funny thing is, he makes an irresponsible suggestion that one of his relatives may cough up some money. Unknown to him, Telestrian is his half-brother. And by complete coincidence, he's willing to pay you exactly that for that whole, "saving the world from insect spirits" thing you had to do to catch Sam's killer. Call It Karma!
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Apparently had a habit of convincing friends to let him crash on their couches and outstaying his welcome.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: That became a drunken loser, amongst other things, when he grew up.

Jake Armitage

"I end up in the morgue more often than the average guy."

The original protagonist of the first Shadowrun video game that was released back in 1993 on the SNES.

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• All There in the Manual: There actually is a Hand Wave explanation for the inconsistencies of the SNES game, but only if you read the Shadowrun Returns Anthology book: the only reason he was able to kill Drake was because he was an undisciplined, young dragon. As for the lack of a deck and magic, his deck got destroyed in a run, and Dog isn't particularly happy with him due to how technologically-dependent Jake is.
• Bag of Spilling: He was a cybered-out decker-shaman who fought a Great Dragon by himself and won. Here you meet him ten minutes or so from the character creation screen, and he's only slightly stronger than your starting character. When he shows up for the second time (about half-way through the campaign) he is still a little bit stronger than your character. While Jake is pretty proficient with a handgun, in the first game he had an arsenal of assault weapons.
• Canon Immigrant: Though Jake himself hasn't appeared in any tabletop rulebooks, an AI personality copied from him during his earlier SNES escapade appears in the Stolen Souls adventure, occupying a CFD-infected individual and rather confused about why he's in the wrong body. (He's rather less confused about why he's suddenly twenty years in the future, guessing that he's had a relapse of amnesia.)
• Clothes Make the Legend: He's still wearing the outfit from his first appearance. He traded in the black glasses for red ones, to better match his inspiration Harley Stone (protagonist of the cyberpunk film Split Second).
• Deadpan Snarker: He makes a lot of sarcastic comments. For example, ask him for a shotgun and he remarks, "Ah, you like the subtle approach." If you instead pick up the rifle, he'll ask, "You don't like library windows, do you?"
• Guest-Star Party Member: He's the first party member you get, not counting the two in the flashback, after talking to Dresden. He gives you a starting weapon and equipment, you help him kick the crap out of some gang-bangers and than he leaves you when you approach the first murder scene because he has a corporate bounty on his head that Lone Star troops will try to collect on, giving you some cash for your trouble before heading out. The next time he shows up is at Sam's funeral and the real nasty plot kicks off.
• It's Up to You: He helps clear a path to Seamstresses' Union, and later agrees to pay respects to Sam. But he want no part of whatever conspiracy you're mixed up in.
• Jack of All Stats: Jake was a courier before he was rescued by the Dog Shaman. (The datajack had to be replaced after parts of his brain were stolen.) When we meet him again in Returns, he's become a full mage; though he still has his datajack and a shaman tattoo.
• Kavorka Man: He won't win any People "Most Beautiful" awards, but Coyote admits to finding "gingers" sexy.
• Mythology Gag: He was quite enjoying a good night's sleep too when Dresden pointed you towards his cooler cell. Hey, according to him it's cheaper than a coffin motel, and the service is just as good. As Jake points out, he has a long history of doing this. (His Steam Trading Card also lampshades it.)
• Nightmare Fetishist: Jake has been to a lot of places, but he always comes back to Emerald City because it's a Runner's paradise. He clearly enjoys the grit and grime of the Barrens.
• Old Master: As the real-life saying goes, beware an old man in a profession where men die young. He's pretty salty for a Runner in this universe: It's mentioned in Dragonfall that only a few of them manage to live this long. The dialogue suggests that Jake loves the excitement, so don't count on him retiring soon.
• Overrated and Underleveled: The last time Jake was seen, at the end of the SNES game, he was a One-Man Army, easily throwing around magic while toting the biggest guns and cybered up six ways from Sunday. To say that he's lost his edge is an understatement: he has a basic Predator pistol, can't really throw the juju all that well anymore, and most of his cyberware is non-functional. His cyberware is revealed in supplementary materials to be in need of maintenance that he hasn't bothered with, because Dog is extremely angry at all the tech shoved into his body, which also explains his lack of magic. He's also clearly down on his luck, if a single group of Halloweeners can give him a run for his money.
• Passing the Torch: In the closing scene, you have the option of applying for the VP Head of Security job with Renraku. Jake appears again in the crowd of onlookers with a competing job offer.
• Playing with Fire: His primary offensive spell when you first get him is a fireball.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: He's one of the major NPCs in the game.

Shannon Half-Sky

"I... I don't want that for him. Not what those poor souls have endured. My brother deserves to be free."

Native American shaman and sister of one of the Ripper's victims. She hires you for a run involving conjuring witnesses to her brother's murder, which proves crucial in figuring out the case, and can help you take down the Ripper.

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• Beware the Nice Ones: One of the kindest and most selfless people encountered during the game, and has no intention of showing a shred of mercy for her brother's killers.
  Shannon: And should you find them, I want to be there when they are brought low. I want to see the light leave their eyes. For my brother.
• Facial Markings: Has a white stripe across the front of her face, either as part of her Native American Heritage or signifying the fact that she is a shaman.
• Guest-Star Party Member: She's only available for a few missions. After you take down the Ripper she takes it on herself to help put the spirits trapped in the mental hospital at rest.
• It's Personal: She gets involved with helping you run down the Ripper because her brother was murdered.
• Magical Native American: She's a shaman, making her a literal (and justified, since Native Americans tend to be shamans in the Shadowrun universe) example.
• Necromancer: You help her conjure the dead spirits of an airplane crash so they can provide clues to her brother's murder. Note that was Plan B when her attempts to conjure her brother failed. Then there is her work in the mental hospital.
• Occult Detective: She's summoning ghosts to solve a murder case.

Dodger

Another Guest-Star Party Member with a background in the Shadowrun setting, specifically a set of novels set before the events of the game (the Find Your Own Truth trilogy), as well as being in the very first Shadowrun fiction (the short story at the start of the first edition of the RPG). Dodger is an elven decker famous on the Seattle scene you can hire for a run late in the game, recommended by the Seamstresses Union.

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• Bizarre Baby Boom: Was one of the "spike babies", rare meta-human infants born shortly before the dawn of the Sixth World with the return of magic in 2012, after which meta-human births became more common.
• Cool Shades: Though not as nice as Jake's.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Shows up exactly once in the Dead Man's Switch Campaign, for the run on Telestrian.
• Informed Attribute: Is said to speak like a character from a Charles Dickens novel, but never says a word in game.
• Older Than They Look: While his age is never specified, some of the other fiction he appears in says that he is old enough to remember watching the broadcast of the Empire State building falling in 2005, nearly fifty years before Shadowrun Returns takes place.
• Overrated and Underleveled: Is said to be one of Seattle's finest and most famous deckers, but he's no better than any other NPC decker and a main character focused on it will leave him in the dust. At least he doesn't cost much.
• The Quiet One: Unlike all the other famous background characters, Dodger has no lines whatsoever.

The Seamstresses Union

Mrs. Kubota

"Are you enjoying the Seamstresses Union? There should be plenty for someone like you to enjoy."

The proprietor of the Seamstresses Union in Redmond.

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• Big Good: Obvious pun on her build aside, she's one for the local neighborhood at least. For example, get the buyer list for the Ripper's bunraku slaves and she will send runners to intercept and free those people. She is also very protective and supportive of her employees, friends, and regular patrons.
• Black Market: Her bar is frequented by fixers, weapon salespeople and talismongers. She has a permanent black market set up in her basement for select customers.
• Gratuitous Japanese: Peppers her language with Japanese expressions and idioms frequently. This is not uncommon in the setting, but she does it more than most. Being half Japanese herself probably has a lot to do with it.
• Mama Bear: She considers her employees, friends, and regular patrons family, and is fiercely protective of them.
• Miss Kitty: A cyberpunk version, of the 'booze and strippers' kind. And illegal safehouses for shadowrunners.
• Retired Badass: She used to be a shadowrunner herself, and lived long enough with enough money to buy the Union and establish the safehouse and black market for other shadowrunners.
• Twofer Token Minority: She is half-African American and half-Japanese.

Cherry Bomb

"Some come here for booze. Some for companionship. Others are looking for something they can't get anywhere else. If it's illegal or immoral and it can be bought, sold, rented or consumed you can probably find it here."

Full-time bartender and part time Soiled Dove, she acts as the front girl for the Seamstresses Union to fund her college fund. Had a boyfriend named Shane.

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• The Bartender: She's one of the bartenders at the Seamtresses Union.
• Consummate Liar: She is VERY good at that, if she was a runner, chances are she would have at least a Rating 6 Con rating with specialization into lying.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": She teases Andy White, a Johnson representing Telestrian interests, that her real name was Caroline. Obviously a lie though.
• HA HA HA—No: She has this reaction when the player asks if Coyote got her name cause she’s a shaman.
• Ms. Fanservice: Cherry Bomb is this for the patrons of the Seamstresses Union. Fully justified though, her description mentions that she clearly tailors her appearance to maximize her number of bartending tips. She says she's putting the extra money toward medical school, but given her penchant for consummate lying...
• Statuesque Stunner: As with all Shadowrun elves, she's over 6 feet tall (6-foot-2 to be precise, although that may or may not count her shoes).
• Soiled Dove: She states that before she became a bartender, she used to be at the back working with Johns. She has stopped offering her services to average Johns but still sleeps with Johnsons for their loose lips in bed. Sometimes she doesn't even need to do that as she easily swindles information out of a Johnson who had hired some runners who he had planned to sell out knowing their incidence with a notorious gang. Again, given her penchant for lying...

Coyote

"I earned this face. By being stupid. I'm gonna keep it. End story."

Part-time bartender and full-time Shadowrunner. She works at the Seamstresses Union to supplement her income. Has a boyfriend named Paco.

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• Action Girl: Can wield a shotgun with the best of street samurai and her discounted price means there's pretty much no reason not to take her if you need muscle.
• Amateur Sleuth: No formal police training or experience, still plays detective investigating the BTL trade in her spare time. She's hunting for family.
• Appropriated Appellation: Her running name was originally for mocking her after she shot a coyote thinking it was a shape-shifting shaman.
• Artificial Limbs: She's fitted with a cybernetic left arm after her flesh and blood one is torn up during her rescue mission.
• Badass in Distress: Your first mission with her involves saving her from a solo run gone bad. If you bust her out before killing the rest of Stevie J's gang, she'll pick up a shotgun and fight alongside you. Despite the fact she can't see out of one eye and her left arm is mostly bone, tendons, and enough muscles to barely move it.
• Battle Couple: With Paco. Though you don't get to use them together beyond a couple of missions, they fit. Paco is willing to assault an entire base of BTL dealers, by himself, to save her.
• Berserk Button: BTL dealers. If her cousin is killed she says she won't rest until she's personally burned down every BTL pusher in Seattle.
• Dreadlock Warrior: Well, dreadlock shadowrunner.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: With some unique dialogue, a personal quest, and her discounted price, Coyote turned into a prototype for the personalised party that would be a staple in Dragonfall and Hong Kong.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Rescuing her from Stevie J and helping her gun the bastard down does wonders for her friendship level. Help her raid a Yakuza BTL den to rescue her cousin seals the deal.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: When she’s first met, she has a Charisma score of 3. After the surgery to give her a new arm, it’s down to 2.
• Has a Type: Talk to her about Jake and she will sheepishly say "I like gingers."
• It's Personal: She grew up in Stevie J's slum and hates him for what he does to the people there. Hence why she accepted a job to steal the gemstones from him. If her cousin is killed she will start her own private war, well more like escalate it, against the entire BTL crime sub-set.
• I Owe You My Life: The reason she helps you get in touch with Sam's sister and offers her services as a street samurai at a discounted price is because you saved her from being tortured to death by Stevie J.
• Non-Indicative Name: Coyote's name has nothing to do with being a shaman (she's not) or a native American (she's a black woman from Chicago). If you inquire you learn she once shot a coyote in the belief it was a shape-shifted street shaman who had cheated her and the nickname stuck.
• Only Known By Her Nickname: She's only referred to as Coyote. Jake's story in the Shadowrun Returns Anthology has her full nickname as "Coyote Ugly", with Jake shortening it down to Ugly simply because Coyote was so similar to Dog. Later in the game, her real first name is revealed to be Carla.
• Promoted to Playable: Kinda. A fan-made campaign module does this, continuing from the bad ending of the mission where you find her cousin.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Her back-up pistol is a revolver.
• Scars Are Forever: Enforced. The doc could have healed her facial scars, but she insists on keeping it as a reminder of her past folly.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Her primary weapon of choice.
• What Does She See in Him?: What the rest of the staff in the Seamstresses Union think about her relationship with Paco. Of course, you find out that Paco is a rather nice guy when he isn't around other members of his gang and trying to act tough to impress them. Coyote sees this side of him all the time, the rest of the staff doesn't. It might also have to do with him having a Charisma score of 8 compared to her 3, later 2.
• Work Off the Debt: Variant, Mrs. Kubota pays for her cyber-arm replacement because Coyote is rather broke and Coyote is in-debted to her for this.

Johnny Clean

"When I was younger, I had a rep for getting in and getting out of systems so cleanly that no one knew I was there."

A retired decker who infiltrated many facilities disguised as a janitor. Nowadays he spends most of his time at the Seamstresses Union.

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• The Cracker: Comes with being a Decker.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Accompanies the player on a Matrix drive for a short period, but is otherwise unavailable.
• Janitor Impersonation Infiltration: His MO during his working days. It worked out pretty good too. Who would think it was the janitor?
• Overrated and Underleveled: He's supposed to be some super Decker, but when you actually get to use him his gear and stats aren't all that good. It's possible to outdo him if you build your character right.
• Retired Badass: Was a decker, but he gave up that life.

Mr. Kluwe

"People say a lot of things about what they don't know, or what they don't understand."

Bouncer for the Seamstresses Union. A large and very polite troll in a nice suit.

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• All Trolls Are Different: He looks quite human, barring the eight feet of height and the ram horns. This is possibly because he is based on a real person — see below.
• Gentle Giant: Always unfailingly polite and quite protective of the other staff and regulars.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Appears to go out of his way to be as little stereotypically troll-like as possible.
• Mysterious Past: It's implied he owes his life to Mrs. Kubota over something but he never says exactly what. The closest thing he reveals is that he was at such a low point, he considered joining the Universal Brotherhood just so he could be treated normally.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He was designed after NFL player Chris Kluwe. Not coincidentally, Chris Kluwe was also one of the game's Kickstarter backers.
• Real Men Wear Pink: The player can comment on Kluwe's manicured hands.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: His description notes him as possibly the nicest dressed troll you've ever seen. Always wears a suit at the job, which is quite impressive for a bouncer in a Barrens joint. He also apparently has manicured nails.
• Was Once a Man: He mentions early on that he used to be human, and goblinized at some point during his life.

Lone Star

Detective McKlusky

"If you're new in town, then let me be the first to tell you that I run the show. If you get in my way, you'll end up back here on a slab."

An ork Lone Star detective responsible for the Ripper case. He's a jerk.

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• Beauty Equals Goodness: Or, in this case, looks like a big stupid jerk and is one as well. The game itself lampshades it.
• Bullying a Dragon: His treatment of Shannon Half-Sky is this, given that she's one of the shamans of the North American Nations who had won a war against the UCAS.
• Clueless Detective: He's incompetent, that's for sure. To give one example, you find out shortly after first meeting him that he was in charge of the investigation into the death of Sam's mother. Dresden notes that she shot herself with her non-dominant hand and other inconsistencies that makes him think it might not have been suicide. McKlusky will hear none of it.
  Dresden: McKlusky couldn't find his ass with both hands. Don't tell him I said that, though.
• Dirty Cop: In his defense, so are 90% of all other cops in the Shadowrun universe. One incident involving a case is heavily implied to be him taking a bribe to bungle the investigation.
• Hated by All: Nobody likes this jackass. Not the shadowrunners, not the mortician, and not his fellow cops on the force. Even his main employer, Telestrian, can't stand him and will quite happily fire McKlusky if you ask.
• Jerkass: Dresden describes him as a man who would accuse his own mother for a 10 nuyen raise.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Well, you are not a licensed detective and this is an official murder investigation so he technically does have a point about you poking around in the crime scenes. He is still an incompetent asshole though.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After spending the entire campaign antagonizing you, you can cause Telestrian to have him fired in the epilogue for a reward. Or, you know, you can just punch him in the face. Or both. If one asks Telestrian to fire him, Telestrian will not only agree, but he'll also grant a second request.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: Works for one.
• More Despicable Minion: A very very downplayed example as he's simply being paid under the table by Telestrian rather than having any significant role in the hierarchy, but he's still a constant thorn in your side and is a really big jerk where his boss is more polite.
• Named After Somebody Famous: Anyone who's seen The Godfather should be able to guess that "McKlusky" is one of those Names to Run Away from Really Fast.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: To be fair, your character is a civilian and has no place in murder scenes. He is quite a jerk about it though.
• Rabid Cop: He really doesn't like you and lets you know it.

Officer Aguirre

"Let's just say McKlusky and I have... conflicting interests."

A human officer working under McKlusky on the Ripper case. Wants to find the ripper first to get a detective's badge.

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• Dirty Cop: You can bribe him to gain easier access to the third murder scene and give you access to some data from it.
• Friend on the Force: Unlike McKlusky he isn't antagonistic towards you and if you pay him he will be more than happy to supply you with leads, give you access to the crime scenes, etc...
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Comparatively when compared to McKlusky. He takes bribes, tries to sabotage McKlusky, and doesn't hide how solving the Ripper case will get him promoted. On the other hand he is interested in seeing the serial kill get off the streets, he's much more cheerful and polite towards you and Shannon Half-Sky, allowing her to stay at a crime scene to pray for her brother.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: He works for one.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: He's openly sabotaging McKlusky in the hopes he'll get the Ripper first. Dresden reveals Aguirre tried bribing him into withholding information, and he lets you remove evidence from a murder scene.
• The Rival: To McKlusky, one of the reasons he is helping you is because he knows it will sabotage McKlusky's investigation.

Criminals

Paco

"Of course I know my way around a fight. Stevie J better be ready for a world of hurt."

A low level member of the Cutters, doesn't fit in due to his Jerk with a Heart of Gold emphasis on Gold. Boyfriend to Coyote.

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• Batter Up!: He is carrying a baseball bat the first time you meet him.
• Battle Couple: With Coyote.
• Fantastic Racism: Spouts ethnic slurs at non-human characters when you first meet him. It's more due to being extremely stressed out at the moment than genuine racism though.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Helping rescue his girlfriend from a slum-lord's fortress tends to make him like you.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Joins the Player Character to help rescue Coyote. After that, he helps out on a few missions of personal importance to her, but is otherwise unavailable in the rest of the game. He says his gang leader does not like the members moonlighting.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Though the "jerk" part is mostly an air he effects when representing the Cutters on the street. He proves surprisingly loyal, compassionate, and sweet when not around the rest of his gang. Coyote sees this side of him all the time, but not everyone else does.
• Nice Guy: Surprisingly for a gang member. He's essentially just a young man trying to juggle his friends and girlfriend (he's even rather apologetic to a merchant who had been shaken-down by his gang).
• Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters: What he tries to be, he even apologizes to the man his gang shook down for protection money.

Stevie J

"You really think you can come in here and shoot up *my* place? Do you know who I am?"

A BTL dealer and slumlord found early in the game.

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• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Got a real nasty one going down the right side of his face.
• Homage: Stevie J is a direct shout out to Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson Games^note Who developed titles liike Car Wars, GURPS, and Munchkin. in appearance, and matches up with his 'Evil Stevie' persona.
• Obviously Evil: He is a slum-lord, drug pusher with a disfigured face.
• Red Right Hand: Take a look at his right eye; black with a red pupil.
• Snuff Film: Had his men kidnap the son of one of his tenets and torture him to death to create a nasty BTL.
• Take That!: Stevie being a villain is a bit of a friendly swipe, his company being a rival to FASA back in the 80s and 90s.
• This Cannot Be!: Gives a minor one after you kill him. He sputters out a denial then dies.

The Emerald City Ripper

^{Click here for a spoilerific image}

"Someone once told me that I was a broken thing. But he also said I could remake myself. He wanted to break me down, so I could put myself back together again. And I did, but only after I broke him."

A serial killer that stalks Seattle's Barrens, killing people by stunning them and extracting an organ as a souvenir while they're still alive before letting them bleed out. Sam was his second victim.

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• Alliterative Name: Henry Hollings Holmes. Subverted in that his real name is Silas Forsberg.
• Ax-Crazy: As you attack him, you rapidly discover that just because he isn't a Psycho for Hire doesn't mean he doesn't have a few screws loose, eagerly looking forward to mutilating you and glorying in his ability to kill.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: He's directly ugly and described as such by the game itself. Especially noticeable given he's an elf.
• Bizarre Baby Boom: Was one of the first meta-human children and ended up being more of a test subject for various pediatricians than a real patient or having a normal childhood period. Part of the reason he is so messed up.
• Canon Immigrant: Namedropped in the metaplot sourcebook Dark Terrors, in a brief discussion about Jack the Ripper knockoffs.
• The Dragon: He is always accompanied by a gigantic troll with a cybernetic arm, who serves as this to him.
• Early-Bird Cameo: He shows up next to the second crime scene.
• Faking the Dead: Silas Forsberg killed his psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Holmes, used Holmes' body to fake his own death and assumed his identity.
• Freudian Excuse: As one of the first generation of changelings, he was subjected to extensive experimental medical procedures, notably increasing dosages of sedatives which pre-Awakening doctors considered necessary to treat his "aberrant physiology". Decades later, another elven doctor was able to get his hands on him and treat him as a person instead of a test subject, but the damage was done. He spent several months learning to mimic the new doctor's habits and personality, then killed him and assumed his identity.
• Lack of Empathy: As if it wasn't obvious. The 'treatment' cassettes in his lair reveals just what a stunning disregard he has for his inmates.
• Mad Scientist: He acts like one, but he hasn't really got much in the way of scientific goals nor does he have any sort of degree — he's a delusional psych patient with a rep for plastic surgery without a license.
• Named After Somebody Famous: The Ripper's birth name is not based off of anyone famous, but the doctor whose identity he stole is named after the Serial Killer Henry Howard Holmes (with only his middle name being different). The Ripper's Obliviously Evil troll assistant Pitezel is named after the original Holmes' criminal associate (and eventual victim), Benjamin Pitezel.
• Obviously Evil: You'll pretty much know he's a villain the moment he shows up.
• Organ Theft: He takes an organ from each of his victims. For instance, he took Sam's liver as a trophy. Turns out he was hired to retrieve those organs and they are not serial killer trophies but merely a means to a paycheck.
• Psycho for Hire: Averted. The cruelty of his killing method and the treatment of the inmates under his 'care' are means, not an end. He's really only interested in making money.
• Serial Killer: He removes a single organ from each of his victims, while they're alive but drugged up/stunned. He turns out to be motivated by profit, and hardly limits his domain to murder. When you get into his lair you discover he has several other, equally disgusting, for-profit schemes going on with the inmates.
• Villainous Breakdown: Once you weaken his Dragon enough, he'll finally lose his cool and come charging out into the open with unbridled frustration.
• Walking Spoiler: Considering investigating the case is a substantial part of the plot.

Others

John Dresden

"Me, I'm not really the going-out type. Always too much to be done around here. Plus, the dead are just easier to get along with."

Branch manager of the Redmond "Organ Grinders" franchise, a combined transplant and morgue business. A cheerful dwarf chopshop mortician who lets Jake crash in his clinic.

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• All There in the Manual: According to one of the Shadowrun Returns Anthology short stories, Dresden was the one who originally provided Silas with the organ donor list the latter used to find his victims.
• The Coroner: His chop shop is noted as being the nearest thing the area has to an actual morgue. He's quite happy to give you information about the Ripper's victims (even contacting you when another victim's turned up so you can get there before the Corrupt Cop does).
• Creepy Mortician: Of the 'way off sense of humour' type. Otherwise, though, he is one of the friendlier characters in the game.
• Cheshire Cat Grin: Courtesy of his avatar.
• Deadpan Snarker: Especially in his interactions with Jake and McKlusky.
• Every Man Has His Price: Fortunately, he earns enough from his chop shop business that Lone Star officers can't afford it.
• Mr. Exposition: His purpose in the story is to provide you with information about the Ripper's victims, give you some background information on the organ chop-shop trade and not much else.
• Nice Guy: Awfully cheerful and friendly for someone who makes his living dismembering corpses.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Averted. No beard, no Scottish accent and no dour 'honourable' personality. Just another working stiff.
• Recurring Character: He keeps getting called in to all the ripper scenes and you encounter him frequently through the game, even though he never joins your party.
• Sad Clown: Externally lighthearted and goofy pretty much at all times, but the Anthology short story shows much of this to be carefully calculated to hide his real emotions. Unknowingly getting his friend murdered by providing the Ripper with a list with her name on it hit him especially hard.
• Shout-Out: A character named Dresden in an Occult Detective story. Hmm...

Jessica Watts

"I left Seattle to get away from Sam and his bullshit. Now I'm back, he's dead, and I *still* have to deal with him."

The twin sister of Sam Watts, but she saw nothing good whatsoever in him.

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• All There in the Manual: One of the stories that came with the anthology for backers is from her point of view. It spoils her true nature, amongst other things.
• Armor-Piercing Response: Right before the final battle she goes into a full-on cultist rant about the purity of the insect spirits and how all they do is consume and reproduce. You can retort that her brother Sam was an addict also obsessed with satisfying his hunger, and she despised him for it. This genuinely knocks the wind out of her sails.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: She and her brother are not the healthiest of individuals. She is the one behind the Emerald City Ripper, having hired him to retrieve her mothers organs from the organ donor recipients, and she is also an insect shaman wanting to turn Seattle into the next Chicago. It's also implied that she may have arranged her mother's death, possibly at the behest of her "new" family.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: When you meet her, she seems indifferent at best about Sam's death but hints she might be hiding her true feelings. She was the one who ordered him (and several others) killed so she could get back her dead mother's organs (this can be subverted if you choose the right options when you've got her cornered and she feels remorse for what she did). And of course, she's an insect shaman trying to summon the local Hive Queen spirit to kick off a Body Snatcher invasion.
• Cult: A lot can't be said without spoiling it. She's a member of the local branch of the Universal Brotherhood, on the surface a pretty straight and somewhat benign Church of Happyology, though the inner circles are actually Insect Spirit worshipers.
• Half-Identical Twins: With Sam, the game even mentions the look a lot a like.
• Ice Queen: When you tell her about Sam's death, she's shocked but not hurt by the news. She saw that he would by dying sooner rather than later, since Sam had become a waster and drug abuser, making her very cold and dismissive towards his existence. Though she had arranged his death was probably a bigger contributor.
• Mask of Sanity: She seems like a coldly professional and uptight corp suit when you meet her. However, once she gets some character development, it's clear she's not in the best state of mind. She hired the Emerald City Ripper to reassemble her mother and have her reinterred as a symbolic act to put her old family life behind her. This wasn't necessary but for her own peace of mind, and resulted in the Player Character onto the trail of her Insect Cult, whom she views with an frankly disturbing affection.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When you confront her after ruining the summoning ritual you can question her motives enough to make her realize what she's done.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: She and Sam used to be close as kids. As adults they drifted apart. Sam's career path as a Shadowrunner and descent into self-destructive hedonism destroyed any respect and affection she had for him The new circles she runs in doesn't promote a healthy view of the world, which contributes to her Ice Queen persona. After their mother's death, she joined the Universal Brotherhood to fill in the void, and they were...unhelpful.
• Walking Spoiler: Note how much of the entry for this character is spoiler-tagged.

Marie-Louise

"I write IC as a hobby, okay? Just trust me."

An elven decker who was captured by the Universal Brotherhood, who you come across and rescue halfway through the game.

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• Ascended Extra: As of Storm Front, she is now acting High Prince of Tir Tangire, if you chose to be head of security, you essentially got an extremely powerful Prince on your side 20 years later, if your player character lived that long.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: She's a Telestrian, Daddy is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who crippled her boyfriend, her two aunts run the local branch of the Universal Brotherhood, one aunt hired a Dr. Holmes to kill six people to steal their organs to put her dead mother back together, Uncle Sam was a drunk (not that she knew he existed) and former criminal mercenary.
• Broken Pedestal: The reason she was able to be manipulated by her two aunts Lynn and Jessica is because she distrusted her father, and when she found out his actions caused Baron Samedi to end up a cripple and he lied about it, well it made her more susceptible to what they had to say.
• Damsel in Distress: She was kidnapped to be the host of the queen insect spirit. She's having none of it. Once she's freed of her cell, she proves to be quite capable on her own.
• Knight Templar Parent: See James Telestrian III for more details.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: She dated another decker, and Shadowrunner, named Harkeem (a.k.a. Baron Samedi). Being the daughter of a corp CEO and a major political figure in the Tir, her father was having none of it, and likely sent out a couple thugs to mess him up in meatspace and left him bound to a wheelchair. They're still on good terms, but circumstances pulling them in opposing directions has effectively ended their relationship, at least for now.

Baron Samedi

"I am the Baron Samedi. Perhaps you have heard of Samedi? He is a decker of unique gifts. Some have gone so far as to call him a technomancer. We two, we have a common knowledge now, and we share a common purpose."

A mysterious technomancer^note Not actually a technomancer in the sense of someone able to access the Matrix with their mind, as those won't be around for another 20 years, he's just a normal decker who uses the term to sound impressive. who is so new to the scene that few know anything about him. What is known is that he is powerful and he means business.

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• Gratuitous French: Peppers his speech with it, fitting with his Creole Voodoo Priest motif.
• Handicapped Badass: He's been crippled at the command of Marie-Louise's father, but he's still a capable decker.
• Playful Hacker: Also The Cracker since he is a cyber-criminal, but his flamboyant attitude and the fact that his motives are mostly benign and not pulled for his own benefit put him more in Playful Hacker territory.
• Third-Person Person: When in character, Samedi always talks like this.
• You No Take Candle: Invoked. He can speak perfect English (as shown in his talk with Marie-Louise), but uses foreign-structured English peppered with French as part of his persona.

Harlequin

"I am Har'lea'quin. The Lightbearer. Last Knight of the Crying Spire. He who manipulates shadowrunners and fights duels with assholes. And for the next hour or so, I am at your service."

See the characters page for the overall franchise.

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• Cool Sword: He carries one during the assault on the Universal Brotherhood.
• Dare to Be Badass: The final thing he says to you at the end of the game can be summed up as this. No matter how much the world slowly kills itself around you while all the corporations pull their strings for power, you are a Shadowrunner. You don't play their game.
• Guile Hero: States quite plainly he only has friends until they have something he wants that they won't give up.
• Deadpan Snarker: About half his lines are sarcasm or mockery.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Only Harlequin can interrupt and talk sass to Lofwyr himself and get away with it.
• Guest-Star Party Member: For the final level.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Gives you a rather frank speech on how the Sixth World works (i.e. a giant Gambit Pileup where everyone is too concerned with their own agenda to see the bottom-line) at the end of the campaign. He also points out that shadowrunning is thus the reward for not taking part in it, leaving one free to choose their own values.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Towards the end of the campaign, you can have this exchange:
  Player Character: This ain't a game.
  Harlequin: Oh, but it is. On more than one level.
• Magic Knight: A Mystic Physical Adept who specializes in swords, chi abilities and spell casting.
• Noodle Incident: The guy got poetry slams permanently banned from Shadowlands in '55. The "whats" and "hows" are a mystery for the ages.
• Overrated and Underleveled: This is a being who should be a match for an entire team of prime runners, during a point in time where he didn't even have stats to avoid the Lord British Postulate, yet he's an okay-ish but rather underwhelming Mystic Adept. He can hold his own in a fight but a properly leveled and outfitted mage or street samurai will out-damage him in a fight. It certainly doesn't help that he's also the only character in the game that the AI will prioritize over the player character. Of course, knowing Harlequin, he may be deliberately downplaying himself as to not "outshine" the rest of the crew. As for the enemy AI giving him the highest combat priority: again, it's Harlequin, one of the few metahumans who's power is on par with the Great Dragons.
• Warrior Poet: You can dare him to write a poem about the events of the endgame. He responds it wouldn't be the first time.
• Wolverine Publicity: Is a rather major Shadowrun character. And that's as much as we're willing to say about that.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: In the epilogue, he openly admits to having a lot of plots in the works, many running against his nominal allies in the fight against the Insect Spirits.

James Telestrian III

"I understand humor. I do not appreciate it, but I understand its uses. Yours was not a good use of humor, however. It neither charmed me, disarmed the tension, nor infuriated me to the point of providing you with a quick death."

Head of the A-rated megacorp Telestrian Industries and cousin of Universal Brotherhood spokeswoman Lynne.

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• All There in the Manual: Appears as a minor character in a couple of Shadowrun sourcebooks, as a member of Tir Tairngire's Council of Princes. He also becomes a beneficiary of Dunkelzahn's will (though that won't happen until about a year after the game's events).
• Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: If you ask him for payment in the epilogue, he asks his butler to just give you enough money so you'll have no way to complain or try to bargain about it. You end up with about five times the cash you will have seen up to this point through the entire campaign, combined.
• Bizarre Baby Boom: Was one of the "spike babies", rare meta-human infants born shortly before the dawn of the Sixth World with the return of magic in 2012, after which meta-human births became more common.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Well, he's a Shadowrun CEO. Goes with the territory.
• Exact Words: For killing the Insect Spirits and destroying their nest in Seattle, he is willing to pay you one million nuyen. What Telestrian doesn't tell you is that the damages you dealt to his company when you raided his building are coming out of what he's paying you, and when all is said and done, that adds up to a grand total of 985,000 nuyen, leaving you with only 15k. That said, he is willing to grant you an additional boon on top of that, and if you ask him for more money, he'll throw in an extra 100k.
• Knight Templar Parent: His actions led to the crippling of his daughter's boyfriend, which he compounded by lying to her and claiming he was dead. He also considers the knowledge that you rescued his daughter sufficient to make up for storming his corporate offices, killing dozens of his personnel, hacking highly sensitive corporate information, and costing him his head of security.
• MegaCorp: He's head of one. Telestrian is A-rated in the corporate rating system and enjoys extraterritoriality.
• Papa Wolf: Seriously, don't get between him and his daughter if you want to live.
• Pragmatic Hero: Either this or Pragmatic Villainy, depending in how you view him. However he is pragmatic enough to realize that the no name Shadowrunner that managed to infiltrate the Universal Brotherhood, survive the Insect Spirits there, rescue his daughter as an after thought, then broke into his Office Building, slaughter dozens of his guards, infiltrate his staff, break into a highly secure vault, and then slip out only to be caught by the police barricade outside is someone that he really should have on his payroll.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: He rubs shoulders with Harlequin and Lofwyr and employs Tir Tairngire special forces as bodyguards, so yes.
• The Sociopath: Harlequin calls him this in the Dinner With a Friend story from the Shadowrun Returns Anthology.
• You Have Failed Me: Your actions in his corporate offices leads him to fire his head of security. You can apply for the job yourself eventually.

Dragonfall

The Berlin Crew

The crew as a whole

The team of shadowrunners the Player Character ends up with once the first mission goes south.

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• Anti-Hero: In true Shadowrun fashion. They're all criminals with sketchy pasts who will Shoot the Dog many times over the course of the campaign... but they're the best hope for saving the Kreuzbasar and Berlin.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: By the end of the game they can kill a Great Dragon. A severely weakened and malnourished Great Dragon, but still a kill, nonetheless.
• Fire-Forged Friends: And considering the title of the game, in more ways than one.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Depending on the ending, they, or at least the player character can become an agent of Lofwyr, and the epilogue implies they have a hand in the assassination of Dunkelzahn.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Glory and Eiger are definitely the more combat-oriented party members and have cold and/or stern personalities, while Dietrich and Blitz are a lot more laid-back and lighthearted and fill in support and utility roles.
• Neighborhood-Friendly Gangsters: They're a tightly-knit group of career criminals, but they're on good terms with the people of the Kreuzbasar and do what they can to keep it safe. And the player has the option to really make it one of the better places in Berlin.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: A punk Shaman, a cybernetic Broken Bird, an ex-military Troll, and a hotshot ditzy decker.... Yup, it fits.
• Rebellious Spirit: Both Monika and Dietrich, and possibly the Player Character, are outright anarchists, and the remainders are fairly positive towards the Flux State as well (if nothing else because it's a great place for a Shadowrunner to walk).

Monika Schäfer

"Our client wants the data from the vault, so we get him the data from the vault. Quick, quiet... and quick."

Your old friend and former running partner. She leads a runner crew in Berlin and is the quintessential "leader" of the Kreuzbasar, despite her belief in the anarchist leanings.

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• All There in the Manual: At least, the Shadowrun tabletop's player handbooks. There are hints suggesting Monika is an otaku - 2050s slang for Technomancers — explaining why killing her had such a profound effect on APEX.
• Cleavage Window: Her top has a hole that shows off a considerable amount of her bust.
• Crutch Character: Downplayed. She starts out with high stats that make her a better decker than you could ever hope to be at the beginning of the game, but she'll only be available for one decking sequence that's both very easy to do and optional.
• Fangirl: Of Dunkelzahn's Wyrm Talk. In fact, she wants to wrap up the run as quick as possible in order to get back in time to watch that night's episode. The other members of the crew pester her about, saying you can't trust anything a dragon says. She keeps responding that "it's educational".
• Genre Blind: She seems to be the only shadowrunner who's unaware that there's no such thing as a milk run.
• Guest-Star Party Member: During the start of the game.
• Intergenerational Friendship: She's close friends with Dietrich and Paul Amsel, both of whom are old enough to be her father.
• Meaningful Name: 'Schäfer' means 'Shepherd' in German, and sure enough that's the role Monika plays for both the Berlin Crew and the people of the Kreuzbasar, acting as their guide and protector from outside threats.
• Messianic Archetype: Talking to people around town will very quickly reveal just how well-liked and important she is to the running of the Kreuzbasar. Yet despite this, her reputation is not spotless: she was unable to get through to Glory, her bad advice got Kim hooked on BTL chips, and she essentially left Samuel Beckenbauer's charity impoverished when an injection of 1500 nuyen would be sufficient for the charity's needs for the whole year. Some other Shadowrunners also point out the hypocrisy of Monika advocating for an anarchist state, but having so much personal influence that she was practically its monarch.
• Playful Hacker: She had a pretty carefree attitude about her.
• Smoking Is Cool: The cigarette in her mouth that you can see on both her portrait and sprite indicates her freewheeling attitude.
• Technician vs. Performer: The Performer to Eiger's Technician.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: APEX claims it killed many hackers before her, all of which were purged without thought. Monika, however, fundamentally changed its nature, leaving it with a desire to continue Monika's work. Jury's still out on how genuine it was.

Dietrich

"I've spent too much of my life puttin' on a show for others already."

A 47 year old human shaman, former punk band frontman, and chosen of the Dragonslayer. Works support with his summons and spells.

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• Bald Mystic: A bald magic wielding shaman. This also doubles as Delinquent Hair as he was once the front man of a Punk Rock band, with the tattooes and baldness only serving to emphasize his counterculture aesthetic.
• Blood Knight: In-game, he's a support mage, but his Dragonslayer Totem compels him to be this trope, always looking for bigger and badder foes. If you ask him, well...
  Dietrich: If I'm not drinkin', I'm fightin'. And if I'm not doin' either of those things, I'm lookin' for a *bigger, better* fight to get in next time.
  [Dietrich produces a flask from his jacket pocket and raises it in salute.]
  Dietrich: It's a remarkably simple code to live by.
• Boisterous Bruiser: According to Dietrich, the Dragonslayer totem encourages him to be this. Shadowrun Returns doesn't have voiced dialogue, so it's hard to tell.
  Dietrich:...I could always feel [the Dragonslayer] in my heart, goadin' me to laugh louder, hit harder and get rowdier than the rest.
• Boring, but Practical: One way to mitigate his rather low Spellcasting and Conjuring scores is to loan him spells that buff the crew and debuff the enemy. They may not do much damage, but shattering enemies' armour and hastening the crew will allow the other crew members to hit harder and faster.
• Bully Hunter: Gang leaders, Humanis, dragons... part of the Dragonslayer gig is to find abusive powers bigger and meaner than you and kick the crap out of them.
  • During the Night of Rage, an event in Shadowrun where there were worldwide anti ork and troll riots that left tens of thousands dead, he wound up leading all the punks and anarchists in Berlin to beat the shit out of any bigots.
  • This is also the detail that lets him and his totem ironically be okay with freeing Feuerschwinge as the dragon is the victim of a bigger bully.
• Cool Old Guy: He used to be the frontman for a punk rock band, now he's still a punk in the most classic definition of the counterculture is your friendly neighborhood shaman and Team Dad.
• Cool Uncle: He tries to be to Alexander.
• Dented Iron: Dietrich is old by Shadowrunner standards. He was apparently a force to be reckoned with back in his heyday, but age and injures have taken their toll on him. The old Runner's still got enough fire in him to keep in the game, but it has forced him into a support role since he can't hit near as hard as he used to.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In-Universe: A Shadowland thread in the Hong Kong campaign reveals that MESSERKAMPF! is extremely popular in the Imperial State.
• Hot-Blooded: He's pretty laid-back now, but as befitting a Dragonslayer shaman who was a former front man for a punk band, he had a very rowdy and boisterous youth. That old fire seeps through when he gets angry though.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Despite the difference in age, he had a very close friendship with Monika.
• Meaningful Name: Not his, but his totem. Depending on your choices, he can actually end up slaying a (admittedly weakened) dragon with you.
  • Irony: Dietrich will support releasing Feuerschwinge over killing her, and so will his totem. Fitting, since the dragon was the victim.
• My Greatest Failure: During the Night of Rage, he lead the punks of Berlin against the anti-metahuman bigots, and had a hell of a good time leading a bunch of defiant young people into the fray to smack up those who would abuse their power... only for a lot of them to get beaten, injured, and even killed in the ensuing conflict. He had the magic of the Dragonslayer to protect him, while they did not. This marked the point where he decided to retire from rabble-rousing Punk Rock and go into Shadowrunning, where he might make a difference with fewer people getting hurt for having followed him.
• Opposing Combat Philosophies: Unlike most teammates, this doesn't really come into play with him. However, the final decision of his skill tree is a straightforward example, making you choose between increasing the Dragonslayer totem's defensive capabilities or adding an offensive effect on top.
• Psychotic Smirk: Has one on the offical wallpaper◊ for Dragonfall. And while it isn't that apparent, his character model also has one.
• Punk Rock: He was the frontman for the punk rock band MESSERKAMPF! during his youth.
• Self-Deprecation: Dietrich does not think highly of his musical skills, being a former Punk Rock frontman:
  Player Character: You can sing?
  Dietrich: I was the front man for a punk band, boss. Fuck no, I can't sing.
• Shock and Awe: Lightning is the element of choice for his damage-based spells, if Electro Core and the Dragonslayer's Wrath totem upgrade are anything to go by.
• Support Party Member: While he has a couple of offensive powers, they are nothing spectacularly powerful and are more about setting up the enemy for subsequent attacks than doing much direct damage. Most of his powers involve buffing his allies and protecting those nearby him. Monika's notes on him even detail that she usually has him doing magical support during runs.
• Tattooed Crook: He's covered in tattoos, shamanistic or otherwise.
• Team Dad: The most level-headed member of the group.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: If he's purposefully left out of the Humanis run against his requests which dooms his nephew, he'll continue to run with the Player Character for the rest of the campaign, but will only display outright hostility towards them and ultimately leaves the team in the epilogue.
• The One Guy: Becomes this should you play a female decker and decline Blitz's offer to join the crew.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: Alexander. his nephew calls him out on this when Dietrich wanted to stop Alex from making the same mistake as his brother who shipped him off to a Humanis training camp to get rid of a financial burden without any regard for his son's welfare.

Glory

"I'm not big on sharing, sport. Personal reasons. You understand, I'm sure."

The group's close combat specialist and combat medic. A waifish woman decked out with bulky antique cyberware arms.

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• Abusive Parents: Her mother was alright. Her father beat her up when she Awakened, with a hammer, and then threw her out of the house, calling her the Devil's Whore.
• Ambiguously Bi: According to her backstory, Glory had been in relationships with both genders She was an alienated street orphan who became part of a brain-washing toxic shaman cult. First lured in by a (female) Honey Trap, she then became a concubine for the (male) cult leader. It's ambiguous what, if any, her actual preferences are.
  • Was It All a Lie?: How she feels about these relationships now. The truth? For Marta, said Honey Trap cum ex-girlfriend, it wasn't. For Harrow, the cult leader, it was.
• Artificial Limbs: Her massive clawed cyberarms.
• The Atoner: Glory is racked with guilt over her past, and may be encouraged to try to atone for it. The reason for her guilt has to do with how she fell into the service of the Horned Man — the toxic totem of the Adversary— and wound up killing her mother.
• Broken Bird: She had an abusive father who kicked her out of her home when she was a teenager. She then wound up as a mage enforcer for a satanic cult and she killed her own mother accidentally. These experiences caused her to get cybered-up and has left her emotionally detached. You can help her get over her past eventually.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Harrow and his cult are this to her.
  • In the Director's Cut, you can become this to her in the epilogue if, having taken the "good" ending in her personal quest, you refuse to let her chase after and bring down Harrow on her own despite her insistence that it is very important in order for her to find peace. She will begin to feel that you were never interested in her well-being, but rather were manipulating her for your own selfish reasons, just like Harrow.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: Her cyberware is all used first-gen stuff, which is considered so antiquated it should be in a museum.
• Combat Medic: Described as such in game. She reminds Monika of all the times she patched her up when she starts getting cocky. She tends to have a lot of medpacks on her at any given time, and she has a decent Biotech skill. And if she purifies the toxic spirit rather than kill it in her personal mission, she'll even gain a healing spell. On the "combat" side, she's a good shot with her pistol and her claws can tear enemy armour up. If she opts to kill the toxic spirit, her claws will do increased damage.
• Cult: Glory ended up in a group that claimed to be worshipping the 'Horned Man.' In actuality it was a cult devoted to the Adversary spirit, and a toxic one at that. When she accidentally killed her mother, it shocked her out of it.
• Cute Bruiser: She is not bad looking, and is strong enough to use the minigun in the endgame.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Invoked Trope - Glory chose her antique cyber arms specifically to burn out her magic after she did a lot of bad things with it. It is also an inversion as she did this to sever the link that the Adversary had on her soul by shredding her Essence to pieces, and thus reclaim her humanity from the toxic spirit, and chromed-up Glory is by all accounts a better person than pre-cybernetics Glory was.
• Cyborg Wizard: Technically speaking, though there's definitely too much "Cyborg" so she could divorce herself from the "Wizard" part of her for reasons above.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: But the PC has to work for that. It's actually the difference between them and Monica, who just gave up and ended up hoping she would open up to her when the PC, as Glory put it, didn't let her push them away.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Her pale skin contrasts especially strongly, not just with her hair, but her massive dark cyberlimbs.
  • Evil Redhead: Her hair color during her cultist days was fire-red, though she outright says it was dyed.
• Emotionless Girl: Likes to present herself as one, but shows more emotion than she seems to realize.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: An upgrade option in the Director's Cut is FirePower Rounds for her pistol, which have increased damage and can penetrate up to 2 points of armor.
• Fragile Speedster: Early on, she's not particularly tough, though more so than Dietrich. She makes up for that with an ability that adds 1 AP for several rounds, which makes a world of difference. However, in the end-game, she flat out becomes a Lightning Bruiser.
• The Gunslinger: Despite packing some really big cybernetic hands, she also uses a pistol in combat, and is capable of learning very advanced techniques with it.
• His Name Really Is "Barkeep": Glory isn't apparently just her shadowrunning name but also her actual name, or at least what she's been using ever since she left home.
• Informed Ability: Despite being the team medic, she doesn't have an especially high Biotech skill or any healing abilities beyond carrying around a lot of medipacs. Corrected in the Director's Cut.
• Ironic Nickname: Humble, down-to-earth, stoic and constantly wary of Jumping Off the Slippery Slope. In other words, the exact opposite of the Glory Seeker or Boisterous Bruiser types whom one would expect to choose such a flamboyant name.
• Irony: When her father threw her out of the house for being an Awakened, he called her the Devil's whore. He was proven right. By the time Glory decided to return to Stuttgart to pay a visit to her father, she was a bloodthirsty bisexual mage enforcer for a cult of Satan. From a certain perspective, throwing her out turned her into the very reason he was abandoning her for.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In Glory's backstory, Glory suddenly realized how low she had sunk when she killed her mother instead of her abusive father by accident.
• Not So Stoic: She shows so much emotion during her personal mission that one can't be sure anymore if essence loss is really the main cause of her withdrawn nature. It is likely, at least in part, a fear of repeating her mistakes and getting too close to people.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Doesn't show emotion that often, but it's very noticeable when she does.
• Opposing Combat Philosophies: In general, her abilities are divided between improving her cyberclaws or her pistol skills. Her loyalty mission instead gives a choice between improving her healing or her combat abilities.
• The Penance: The first-generation cyberware that pushes Glory so dangerously close to losing her soul is related to past regrets of hers.
• Redemption Equals Death: Soul Death variant. After killing her mother, she cybered herself up so much that her soul is barely clinging onto her body.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Her eyes are a dark, but noticeable red. Perhaps a holdover from her time as a toxic mage.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: One of her level 6 upgrades in the Director's Cut is a customized Ruger Super Warhawk revolver with armor piercing ammo.
• Sleeves Are for Wimps: Justified in that her bulky cybernetic arms make it difficult to have sleeves. The description of her armor lampshades this.
  "Who needs sleeves when you've got cyberarms?"
• The Stoic: She's a very withdrawn person due to her antiquated cyberware taking such a toll on her Essence that she's close to losing her soul.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: She's a very aloof person in general, but she will display progressively more warmth to the player as her trust in them grows.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: The descriptive text describes her as putting on a "thousand-meter stare" whenever she talks about her past, which she often delivers in a long, continuous monologue.
• Tin Man: A classic example. Glory deliberately attempted to shred her Essence away with her first-gen cyberware, but discussions with her and doing her personal quest reveal her to be closed-off rather than emotionally dead.
• Token Good Teammate: Not like the team is evil but she's the most vocal when the PC's actions are unsavory. However, if she is convinced to kill Harrow and the toxic spirit in Feuerstelle, she begins to return to being toxic herself and edges toward becoming a Token Evil Teammate.
• Tranquil Fury: She maintains her icy demeanor, even when she's angry.
• When She Smiles: Even if it's only in text, it's very heartwarming when she actually does smile, after she finally starts feeling emotions again due to you helping her get over her past.
  • A more sinister version of this happens if Glory kills Harrow and the Orichalcum charm is destroyed. She slowly gets her magic back and is slowly going toxic again.
• Wolverine Claws: Glory's weapons of choice are a set of retractable hand-razors built into her cyberarms, easily lacerating flesh and causing terrible bleeding in targets. If it doesn't bleed, she can still puncture heavy armour with her razors.

Eiger

"Let me give you a piece of advice. In the field, only two things matter: the mission, and survival. Everything else is a distraction."

The team sniper and an ex-member of the KSK Kommando Spezialkräfte.

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• Ace Custom: Three of them in the Director's Cut. One of them is a custom Ranger Arms SM-3 sniper rifle, which you can get when she hits level 5. The other two can be obtained during her personal mission, but you can only get one of them. One is the Voltaic Grenade, a custom pulse grenade she reverse-engineered from a Russian pulse grenade. The other is a heavily customized Steyr AUG-CSL assault rifle that The Engineer was hiding away.
• A Dog Named "Dog": "Eiger" is German for, depending on the translation, "Ogre" or "Troll".
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Interdiction Shot is a potential level up perk for Eiger which allows her to fire a discarding-sabot HTI round with her rifle that ignores all armor. Its 2 AP cost and massive 5 turn cooldown make it Awesome, but Impractical though.
• Amazonian Beauty: Eiger is noted as being very beautifu, in spite of being eight feet of horns, tusks, muscle and killer instinct. As one of her recruits stated, "Huge, beautiful, but dangerous to climb".
• Artificial Limbs: Not as noticeable or to the extent of Glory, but she is sporting a more modern cybernetic right arm, left leg, and a pair of cybereyes.
• The Big Guy: Definitely the muscle of your group, packing a powerful sniper rifle along with two backup weapons.
• By-the-Book Cop: Well, by the book soldier. Eiger wants a clear chain of command, maps, time-tables, runs planned well in advance with no detail overlooked and tends to get on the nerves of other team members who like things a little bit more flexible.
• Cold Sniper: Acts this way towards everyone, but especially towards the player. Some of it is her military mindset, the rest is her grieving from Monika's death. She gets better about it, though.
• Consummate Professional: What she aspires to be and wants the rest of the team to act like. Her military background also means that she reacts poorly to the player simply being nice to her and respects a character who is a hardass willing to lay down the law while also demonstrating competence.
• Cute Monster Girl: Despite being a troll (as in, a hulking mass of muscle with horns and tusks towering above 90% of Berlin's denizens), she's noted to be easy on the eyes.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Initially extremely pissed at the player character for being passed over as team leader. Also why "Eiger" was almost an Embarrassing Nickname.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Ex-special forces soldier. Also subverted, as her commando status and lesser amount of red tape involved allowed the command to use her team for illegal clandestine, if well-intentioned operation that ultimately led to her prompt expulsion from the military when the mission went awry.
• Embarrassing Nickname: Eiger was almost this to her. In boot camp, one of the other recruits called her Eiger, because they were both "beautiful yet hard to 'climb'." She beat the shit out of the recruit. Her stated reason for doing so was to keep the nickname from having sexual connotations. Instead, it became a reminder that to everyone else that she'd feed them their own teeth if they repeated the mistake. It's left up to you to decide whether your character considers this to be a good enough reason to resort to violence over words.
• Everyone Has Standards: She prefers to get the job done to the client's exact specifications, regardless of how morally dubious they may be. However, the MKVI mission crosses a line for her, to the point where she's in favor of giving the MKVI a Mercy Kill, even if it hurts the crew's reputation.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The Director's Cut allows you to give her Dragon's Breath rounds for her shotgun, which damage enemy armor.
• Flat "What": Her response when Amsel makes you the leader of the team when Monika isn't there, in accordance with her previous declaration to make you the second-in-command.
• Germanic Efficiency: The one member of the crew who hews to this stereotype. This is why Monika passes her over for a leadership role: she knows her desire for timetables, detailed plans, and reliable intel would destroy the group.
• Good-Looking Privates: For a troll, and a professional soldier at that, she isn't that bad looking. This fact is lampshaded in game with the "beautiful yet dangerous to climb" comment.
• Hellbent For Leather: Her combat gear is made out of real leather, not the synthetic drek that is now commonplace.
• Hot-Blooded: She's actually fairly able to keep her temper in check but she has a deep distrust of the PC at first and she's not afraid to show that. Of course, the PC can rile her up.
• Insult of Endearment: She snidely calls the player "Fearless Leader" at the beginning due to her bitterness at their position as the leader of the crew. She continues to use the term even after her respect is earned, but with implicitly less bite.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's a hardass due to her military training, and she gives the player the hardest time out of everyone in the crew. However, Eiger is incredibly loyal to anyone that earns her respect, and her initial attitude to the player is in large part due to her grief over Monika's death.
• Made of Iron: In-Story. After a mission went bad, she had to drag herself over the border back into Germany with two rounds in her right shoulder and a through-and-through in her left calf.
• Man Bites Man: A troll's tusks aren't all for show as one of the assassins discovered when trying to attack Eiger when she was reloading. She ripped out his throat.
• Multi-Ranged Master: Carries a sniper rifle for long range work and a shotgun for close encounters, and may or may not choose to round out her arsenal with an assault rifle.
• Not So Stoic: Despite her "consummate professional" disposition, she does break face from time to time. First time you see it is after Monica dies in the beginning of the game. The second time is during her personal mission, where The Engineer taunts her with what (potentially) happened in Poland after her mission went belly-up, resulting in her beating the shit out of him. The third that you find out was when her and Hoffman came across a old troll farmer while trying to flee back into Germany. She was already seeing red after Hoffman fucked up the mission to begin with. After the farmer promised not to report them to the border patrol, Hoffman put a bullet through his head out of paranoia and Eiger finally broke and choked him to death.
• Military Maverick: Inverted. Eiger is an extremely by-the-book career soldier, which clashes with the rest of the team.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Eiger and Blitz are the only two characters with shadowrunning aliases. Unlike with Blitz, you never learn Eiger's name.
• Opposing Combat Philosophies: She can either specialize in sniping enemies from afar, or getting up close and personal with her shotgun. Subverted by the good ending to her loyalty mission, which gives her a mid-range option.
• Plausible Deniability: Why she had to become a Shadowrunner. A mission went horribly bad, and the Government had to disavow any knowledge of her existence. Didn't help that Hoffman, the rookie she killed, just so happened to be the son of someone with a lot of pull in the military.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The other firearm she specializes in besides sniper rifles.
• Technician vs. Performer: The Technician to Monika's Performer.
• Token Non-Human: She's the only non-human member of the original crew, and for the crew as a whole if the player is human as well.
• Vocal Dissonance: Her voice is very soft for a troll. Something of an Informed Attribute since the game doesn't have voice acting.

Paul Amsel

"Don't worry. I'm going to conduct my investigation the old fashioned way... through contacts, and deduction, and careful observation."

The group's fixer. He fronts their hideout with his Imports shop.

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• Consummate Professional: Always tries to maintain a professional demeanor more befitting of a corporate businessman than as a fixer for a bunch of anarchist runners. Should he feel the need to call you out on some of your less reputable actions, he'll do so via email, not in front of the rest of the crew.
• Cool Old Guy: Not to the same degree as Dietrich but he's still a pretty nice guy and since he was a child during Feuerschwinge's rampage, which takes place forty-two years before the events of the game, means he has to be close to fifty at least.
• The Face: Essentially this to your crew since he negotiates with your Johnsons on your behalf.
• The Handler: A much nicer, friendlier example than usual, but he is the one who sets up nearly all your contracts.
• Mission Control: Helps set up your runs, directs you to contacts, etc.
• Mr. Exposition: If he ain't playing The Handler, he's doing this, providing the rest of the crew (and the player) with vital information on important events from the past and present.
• Non-Action Guy: He's as much a member of the team as everyone else, but his job is to find work, negotiate contracts, and look for leads, not to do field work. As such, he never joins you in any of your missions.
• Old Friend: He mentions that he's known Monika for a long time, and knew the Player Character by reputation before you joined the crew.
• Sacrificial Lion: He dies in the attack on the Kreuzbazar, and uses his final moments to at least try and squeeze more information out of Audran before he gets shot.
• Team Dad: While not to the same degree as Monika, he's able to pull the party together after Monika's death sufficiently to make them work together.

Dante

Monika's pet dog, a large mutt of unknown breeding.

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• Androcles' Lion: The thorn in this case being his sadness over Monika's death - getting some affection from an old friend like you sure seems to help. Doing so is what makes him a loyal party member when he takes Hellhound form. If you ignore him the whole game, he's hostile to you instead and forces you to kill him. You jerk.
• Big Friendly Dog: He's big, he's cute, he's rather affectionate, he's also part Hellhound.
• Guest-Star Party Member: During the attack on the Kreusbazar.
• Meaningful Name: It is pretty fitting to name a Hellhound after a poet who's most famous for journeying into Hell.
• Pet the Dog: Literally. Doing so will make Dante follow you around, though not into battle. Until the attack on the Kreusbazar.
• Team Pet: He doesn't serve any purpose outside of being Monkia's affectionate dog, but that's reason enough for the crew to keep him around. Though Dante later proves to be a force to reckon with once he reveals himself to be a Hellhound.
• Took a Level in Badass: He can't join you in combat and is mostly there because it's adorable. Then he gets hit by assassins, turns out to be part Hellhound, and fire ensues. After that, he can be taken on the last few missions as a crew member.

Blitz

"I may be one of the hottest deckers in Berlin, but a bullet in the head will kill me just as dead as anyone else."

A decker who was forcibly conscripted by a gang to help them with their security system.

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• Ace Custom: Kinda. There is a damaged drone you can take from the vault if you recruit him. Said drone belongs to Blitz. Named Max, the drone is an old security floater that Blitz refurbished, complete with a custom AIOS so that only he could use it.
• Admiring the Abomination: Has this reaction towards the MKVI, and to a lesser degree APEX. Although he's not willing to volunteer in helping the latter free itself.
• Ascended Extra: Possibly. There is a Shadowland BBS poster who goes by the handle of Blitz in the Shadowrun 2050 rulebook, which is released two years before Dragonfall.
• Badass Normal: He has the most mundane backstory compared to the Baldur's Gate-esque origins of the rest of the crew, yet is a solid party member on par with them.
• Bittersweet Ending: The end of his subplot. He loses the love of his life but doing so, he doesn't have to wait for her return anymore and can move on. He comes back in Hong Kong, hiding from corporate authorities after the Flux State falls. It seems that, no matter what happens between her and Blitz in Dragonfall, it will be some time before they can be together again. Alternatively, they did get back together again, but were forced to separate in the chaos.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: A lot of people accuse Blitz of being treacherous and the player can also express some suspicion of him as he betrayed his old gang. It's averted, though, as he never betrays the crew, and he had some very good reasons to turn on his old gang.
• The Cracker: Comes with being a decker.
• Ditzy Genius: Has a high intelligence score due to his role as a decker. However, he does tend to be rather clueless and any plans he comes up with almost always backfire or derail spectacularly.
• Drone Deployer: He can also function as a Rigger but to unlock that ability you need to salvage the drone in the vault and have the local tech vendor repair it and then talk to him about said drone.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Turns out at the end of the epilogue, Emilie finished her little job and decides to become part of the Kreuzbasar.
• Embarrassing Nickname: During his personal quest, you find out he's known as "The Red-Headed Disaster" due to his tendency to get his team-mates killed by his poor planning.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • While he's by far the most morally flexible of the group and tends to support whatever pays best, he is extremely reluctant towards letting APEX live — at least for as long as he has to be the one to dive in and release it.
  • In general, very cold or pointlessly cruel actions will prompt a What the Hell, Hero? reaction out of him, such as ensuring Feuerschwinge remains imprisoned forever.
• Foreshadowing: On the run where you meet him, he was not updated on the additional automated defences in the vault. This is a sign that his Embarrassing Nickname is not given idly, and that he has a tendency to invoke Didn't See That Coming. Thus, the player character has to be firm and dissuade him from following Emilie's trail, as he WILL screw things up.
• Guest-Star Party Member: On the run where you first meet him.
• Indy Ploy: He planned his loyalty mission over a long time beforehand, and mostly does Mission Control during it. Let's just say the player character nominates his "little oversight" as the Understatement Of The Year during the mission review, and leave it at that.
• Just Think of the Potential!: His reaction to the MKVI.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: His first name is Lukas, which you learn if you dig deep enough into his personal quest, but like Eiger he only ever uses his running name.
• Opposing Combat Philosophies: Some of his skill tree decisions and his loyalty mission are between meatspace or Matrix combat, like Is0bel in Hong Kong.
• Optional Party Member: He exists for the sole purpose of making sure you have an on-staff decker. Should you already be one, you can decide not to take him on.
• Out of the Frying Pan: He escapes from a murderous gang and joins up with a crew of shadowrunners who have unwittingly attracted the ire of an underground conspiracy in service to a Great Dragon.
• Perma-Stubble: Both his character portrait and his sprite have him sporting a 5 O'clock shadow.
• Playful Hacker: Less scruples than Monica, but still your most light-hearted party member by far.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: His personal subplot is about a former girlfriend who stole some data from his deck and disappeared. With some encouragement, you can get him to track her down. Turns out she's in protective custody to cover his mistakes, and he just forced her to go even further into hiding. This can be averted if you urge him to just let it go.
• Small Name, Big Ego: While he is a competent decker, he's convinced that he's one of the absolute best in the business, even though hardly anyone's ever heard of him.
• Token Evil Teammate: Not evil per se, but easily has the fewest personal scruples of the team. Most notably, he's the only team member who approves of sending the MKVI to the client intact.
• Utility Party Member: While he's better at doing damage than Dietrich, the fact that Blitz has divided his skills between shooting, decking and rigging makes him a mediocre combatant. His strength lies more in his ability to bypass systems using either his deck or his drone. As his Guide Dang It! entry on the main page points out, you'll need to make him a better decker if you want to complete his loyalty mission.

People of the Kreuzbasar

Altuğ Burakgazi

"In the Flux, everyone spies! If you do not spy, how will you know who is in power and who will be in power next?"

Owner of the Kreuzbasar's one and only genuine Turkish coffee house and purveyor of reluctant information.

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• Flowery Insults: His cursing is flowery and stereotypically Middle-Eastern, of the "motherless son of a goat" kind.
• Funny Foreigner: Invoked. He acts like an overblown Turkish stereotype, for Obfuscating Stupidity reasons, such as fitting into the mold of a stereotype makes him more welcome in the Kreuzbasar than a more German-acting Turk would. Privately, he acts much less foreign, and his accent is deliberately exaggerated.
• The Handler: Offers to replace Paul Amsel during the epilogue.
• Insult Backfire: Altuğ has a relationship based on this with Herr Goldschmidt, a regular at his coffee house. Goldschmidt finds Altuğ's constant insults to be funny, and so keeps coming back and sits around buying coffee and being insulted, while Altuğ finds Goldschmidt annoying and so keeps insulting him. When Goldschmidt dies taking a bullet for him, Altuğ feels genuinely remorseful at learning that his most hated customer actually liked him all along.
• Knowledge Broker: He's an infobroker who helps you break the ice into your investigation of the run-gone-bad that kicks off the game.
• Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap: He sells genuine Turkish coffee at 50 nuyen a pop, as opposed to the 5 nuyen soykaf.
• Serious Business: Coffee. He extols the virtue of genuine Turkish coffee, and acts with disgust towards the more common knockoff coffee "soykaf".
• The Spymaster: He is responsible for the Kreuzbasar's WI-FI network, and runs a healthy wire-tapping business on the side.

Kami

"Let’s just say I get on by trading stories."

Altuğ's "niece" who works in the coffee house with him. In actuality, she works as both a barista and as a gopher.

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• Character Tics: She's often seen chewing gum rather loudly.
• Happily Adopted: Altuğ took her in off the street and started calling her his niece. She mentions that over the years, they would spend time bonding while sharing a pot of coffee or a hookah.
• Killed Off for Real: She dies during Audran's assault on the Kreuzbasar.
• Perky Female Minion: A non-villainous example. Her youthful attitude shines through even while she competently helps Altuğ in his infobrokering business as an information gatherer and errand girl. She also helps him as a barista in the coffee shop.
• Street Urchin: She and her friends used to hang out around Altuğ's cafe when they were younger. Altuğ took a shine to her.

Absinthe

"I am nothing of consequence. An observer of human nature, nothing more."

A mysterious elf who works at Talismonger's.

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• Berserk Button: Don't threaten her or Aljernon. One of Audran's mercenaries finds this out the hard way.
• Cryptic Conversation: She's even worse than Aljernon.
• Fighting a Shadow: More like Talking To A Shadow. Use astral perception on her in the Director's Cut, and you'll learn that the woman you're looking at is just an illusion. Her true form is elsewhere, and you would not like to see it.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: She'll warn you that you wouldn't like to see her true form if you attempt to read her aura. She later breaks one of Audran's mercenaries just by showing it to him.
• Humanoid Abomination: Whatever Absinthe is, she isn't elven, or even metahuman. Looking into her eyes causes characters with low Willpower to black out, and in the Director's Cut she all but says outright she's an extradimensional spirit who is keeping an eye out for the Horrors.

Samuel Beckenbauer

"Assisting the needy increases the quality of life for all."

A well-educated ork who runs a charity to help other goblinoid races.

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• Beauty Equals Goodness: He's downright pretty for an ork, and also an overall nice person despite his prejudices.
• Beware the Nice Ones: He's a Nice Guy who runs a charity... and who organizes a pre-emptive counterattack against the Humanis Policlub across the Flux State.
• Fantastic Racism: Beckenbauer runs a charity that only employs orks and trolls, races that are typically discriminated against, although anyone is allowed to donate or help out. The player can discuss racism with him, and is free to agree or disagree with his hiring practices, but Samuel's charity helps anybody that comes to them. However, if Alexander survives the Humanis raid, he'll integrate him in his charity out of gratitude towards Monika and Dietrich, making sure everything goes smoothly for him.

Aleksi Laine

"Already died once. Every day since is just a bonus. A tired, painful bonus."

A big troll with a pair of primitive prosthetic legs.

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• Artificial Limbs: He lost both his legs in the Euro Wars, and has since had them replaced with a pair of squeaky cyberlimbs that are showing their age.
• Bullying a Dragon: A random hoodlum attacks him offscreen at some point. Said hoodlum quickly learns that while Laine may be old and crippled, he's still not to be messed with.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: He's clearly marked by his age and his past. He's mostly resigned and cynical rather than psychotic, however.

Lucky Strike

"A word of advice... in a place like this, stacking too much power on any one person is dangerous. Not just for that person, but for everybody."

A mercenary inhabiting the bar in the Kreuzbasar. She has a more pragmatic view on Monika.

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• Brutal Honesty: She doesn't mince words. Despite recently dying, Lucky Strike will openly voice her more critical views of Monika, pointing out how she effectively made herself the queen of the Kruezbasar despite being an anarchist, and made the whole place too dependent on her. You can either jump to Monika's defense, or agree that Lucky Strike has a point.
• Guest Fighter: She's a runner with her own team and is in the Kruezbasar for R&R, though she still moonlights as a merc runner for some of your runs. Notably, she's the only merc you meet outside of the missions. Though she has pretty versatile array of skills, she'll politely decline any offers to join your team.
• I Call It "Vera": She has a custom assault rifle she's named "Lady".
• Magic Knight: Lucky's a street samurai with cyberware and a couple of support spells (Aim and Heal).
• Power Tattoo: Which they were. She'll tell you the outline of the story if you ask about them.

Simmy Kim

"The sims help me forget. They help me be strong and smart. And I never lose anyone."

A human woman living in the Kreuzbasar and known BTL addict.

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• Escapism: She started on sims as an unhealthy coping mechanism with the state of her life. Chiefly dealing with the grief of a miscarriage. Usually she's on sims where she's strong in body and will, which she justifiably feels is her shortcomings in the real world.
• Fantastic Drug: Her drug of choice is Better Than Life chips. People familiar with the first game or the tabletop might recognize them as the chips that puts the user's mind in a full-sensory simulation with the safeguards turned off.
• Going Cold Turkey: Averted. She only gets off the BTLs if you slowly coach her through it, until she can accept reality again.
• Morality Pet: She serves as one for Dr. Ezkibel, who's willing to help her and provide medication without (immediate) payment. He also goes out of his way to save her life when the Kreuzbasar is attacked.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The reason she is on chips is because Monika suggested them as a way of coping with her miscarriage.

Dr. Xabier Ezkibel

"Even talking about my fall from grace makes my stomach turn... the injustice of it all is almost too much to bear."

An elf MD and Spanish expat who runs the local clinic.

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• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Doc Ezkibel is polite and even charming, but interacting with him on any level deeper than "just business" reveals that he's an unrepentant asshole.
• Morality Pet: Simmy Kim, who was a previous patient that he just couldn't help. He saves her during the attack on the Kreuzbasar. He'll lie about it and say he wasn't even aware there was an attack if you ask him. If you call him on his lies and push the issue, he will admit to feeling responsibility to Kim but refuse to speak about it any further.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate:
  • He's professional and competent, and was something of a celebrity triage doctor in Spain. This was until he was driven out of Spain by a huge scandal as a laundry list of ethical and professional violations came out and had him all but labeled as a criminal.
  • He fed medical waste and spare organs to a pack of ghouls in the sewer as payment for them maintaining the Kreuzbasar's plumbing infrastructure. While this was distasteful, it was an arrangement that benefited the whole Kreuzbasar, brokered by Monika. The bad part came about when Ezkibel reneged on it to profit from the castoff parts. When the Player Character tries to renew it, Ezkibel tries to gouge them.
  • He set up shop in Berlin because the lawlessness of the city let him find somebody to reverse engineer bioware bought from the Megas, which he was planning on cloning for cheap and undercutting the current market.

Zaak Flash

"You here for some magic? Because Zaak Flash... is your magic man."

A drug-slinging elf who deals various illicit products.

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• Addled Addict: Just one conversation with him and a look at his portrait will tell you he breaks the "first rule" of dealing.
• The Aggressive Drug Dealer: Averted. He's constantly high, and almost certainly a compulsive liar, but he sure is friendly.
• The Cameo: He shows up briefly during the Hong Kong campaign when you go after the Plastic-Faced Man.
• Drugs Are Good: For all his faults, he does sell items which are used mostly to get high, but they do make excellent combat drugs which can give a shadowrunner a much needed edge in a bad situation. He also sells a powerful, home-brewed drug drug called Flash, that he claims is an Awakened drug. Have Dr. Ezkibel analyze it, and you find out it's just cram cut with sugar and glitter.
• Our Elves Are Different: Magic, he says. He's actually an "elf poser," a human who uses surgery and body mods to look like an elf. He begs you not to give him up if you figure it out, since he thinks his "mystical elf" schtick is important for sales.
• Junkie Prophet: Averted, though it's obvious this is what he wants to be. He claims to be a powerful mage, though all evidence points to the opposite.
• Mythology Gag: One of his stories mentions turning someone who attacked him in the attack on the Kruezbazar into goo (which the Player Character notices looks more like somebody had spilled their drink). This is a reference to the rather infamous "Turn to Goo" spell from the tabletop game.
• Tall Tale: He tells a couple of these, which are dubious not just because they're coming from a strung out drug dealer.

Luca Duerr

"My organization knows everything worth knowing in Germany, including this small pond that is Berlin."

A patron of Altug's cafe, and an agent of the Black Lodge, an Ancient Conspiracy bent on ruling the world.

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• At Least I Admit It: Despite the trial run, Luca is actually refreshingly honest about what he does, if the player character decides to roll along with him. He states (not without reason) that what he does isn't so different from the corporate clients who engage shadowrunners. In the epilogue, he admits to you that the tasks he assigns you are meant to discredit his rivals within the Lodge, allowing him to rise within the organisation. Even the assassination in the trial run was meant to create a vacant spot for him.
• Bald of Evil: His head is shaved under that hat.
• Enemy Civil War: What he essentially caused within the Lodge. Even the assassination during the trial run was meant to create an opening so that he might rise in the Lodge's ranks. The tasks he assigns you are meant to discredit his rivals within the Lodge; whether these tasks strengthened his position at the expense of the Lodge's overall standing is open to interpretation.
• Faux Affably Evil: He puts up a professional and civil front, and he'll only deal with the Player Character if they conduct themselves that way in turn... but Luca is a rotten person to the core.
• Karma Houdini: He can't be killed or kicked out of the Kreuzbasar. The only comeuppance you can give Luca is to not do any of his jobs, which only annoys him slightly. On the other hand, if you do the jobs he assigns, he'll leave you an email in the epilogue, thanking you for elevating his position within the Lodge so that he now has a global reach, rather than a regional one.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The trial run, which involves using a bomb powerful enough to level the building as an assassination weapon. Subverted once you realise the target was also a member of the Lodge. Luca couldn't risk any chance that the killing could be traceable back to the Lodge (and him), as the assassination was meant to create a vacant spot for him to rise within the organisation.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: He's got a very unassuming, painfully average appearance, looking like a regular hipster in a coffee shop in a world where people often have cybernetic implants, magical tattoos, tusks, and/or pointy ears. It makes him being an agent for a nebulous evil organization all the more effective.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: He is focused on the greater picture of the Flux state, even if it means letting the figureheads of certain racists live so that the other factions band together to hunt said figureheads down. Subverted in the epilogue, when he admits to you that the tasks he assigns you are meant to discredit his rivals within the Lodge. At the end of the day, everything was done to facilitate his rise within the Lodge.
• Villain of Another Story: He's just carrying out his own villainous agenda in the Black Lodge, which is in turn carrying its own villainous agenda on the world in general. Neither have anything to do the looming threat of Feuerschwinge, and you're just there to run a few errands for them.

Spoiler Characters

Feuerschwinge

^{Click here for a spoilerific image}

"So tired... so hard to stay aloft."

A Great Dragon who Awakened in 2012 and promptly went on a rampage through central Europe, causing thousands of casualties. She was killed by the Luftwaffe after several days worth of constant attacks, using an experimental weapon developed by Dr. Adrian Vauclair, and her corpse fell into the SOX no-man's land between Germany and France. This event was named Dragonfall. To date, Feuerschwinge was the only Great Dragon confirmed killed by the actions of metahumanity alone.

Feuerschwinge's name being dropped in the prologue leads the crew onto a conspiracy involving the fate of the Great Dragon and her possible return, and her shadow hangs across the entire campaign.

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• And I Must Scream: Her soul was torn from her real body and imprisoned within a human body, while Vauclair experimented on her real body for forty-something years (she was fortunately not Forced to Watch, but she doesn't respond any better to being shown the aftereffects).
• Big Bad: Subverted. You're led to think she was preparing for her return and "disappeared" Dr. Vauclair for revenge. It's the other way around.
• Broken Angel: The once proud Great Dragon is a mere shell of her former self after suffering decades of imprisonment, torture, and experimentation, all after her soul was removed from her body.
• Death Seeker: She outright asks you to kill her if you're able to decipher her babbling, seeing it as the only form of "freedom" left to her.
• Despair Event Horizon: She awoke and saw what humanity had done to her beloved Earth, then decided that everyone had to die.
• Diabolical Mastermind: Once you start scratching the surface of the conspiracy, Amsel remarks just how deep-reaching and complex it seems to be, which just screams "dragon" all over. He was wrong, but doesn't live long enough to find out.
• The Dreaded: To an entire generation of Europeans, who remember her rampage only too well.
• God Guise: She appears to have inspired the worship of Toxic Shaman cults in the SOX. You later learn that she was worshipped as a deity in previous worlds. One of many names she was worshiped under was Dumuzid.
• Gaia's Vengeance: An Awakened character can read this off of her aura. Seeing what the Industrial Revolution had done to her home drove her mad. One way to calm her down is to tell her of the green places that still flourish, like Amazonia. Brackhaus later confirms it in his own words.
• Hope Springs Eternal: The best outcome for her in Dragonfall is to convince her that there's still beauty in the world, and that it will always need a protector. She pulls herself together long enough to agree to go back to sleep until the next age of magic, by which her pain will have (finally) subsided.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Implied. She has a notably horrified reaction if the player asks her why she killed so many people during her rampage.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Most Great Dragons are manipulators and planners, and jostle with each other and other power blocks in an endless political game. Feuerschwinge woke up and went on a mindless rampage. Even Sirrurg the Destroyer looks calm and measured by comparison to her. In the end-game, Brackhaus claims Feuerschwinge is special because it is her role to guide earth and metahumanity rather than try to rule it, as other dragons do. Basically, she went mad at seeing what the Fifth World had done to the planet when she awakened.
• Nature Spirit: Unlike the other dragons, Feuerschwinge never had any interest in status, wealth, or power. She just wanted to protect and nurture the green of the world.
• Never Found the Body: Which leads Amsel to assume she might not be as dead as believed. He is right.
• The Ophelia: Her incarnated soul takes this form. Specifically, it was of a human woman who happened to be nearby when her soul is separated from her body.
• Posthumous Character: What everyone hopes she is. Probably including herself.
• Walking Spoiler: When the plot centers around the machinations of a Great Dragon, even a presumed deceased one, you know this trope will come into effect.

Dr. Adrian Vauclair

"While businessmen and politicians deliberate in their board rooms and committees, I have done what needed to be done. And now here I am, executing the greatest act of service that I can conceive of. The salvation of humanity itself."

The genius CEO of Diehel Defense who developed the weapon used in Dragonfall. Some time later, he withdrew from public life entirely. Some say he disappeared into the SOX, trying to find Feuerschwinge's dead body and confirm her demise. By the 2050s, no-one has seen him in decades. Finding him becomes your main priority, as the one who could help you defeat Feuerschwinge.

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• Affably Evil: He is polite, well spoken and seems genuinely regretful of some of his actions.
• All for Nothing: He wins in none of the endings. In the ending where the dragons are killed, he shoots himself as he realised that he allowed the Horrors to barge in. If you talked him down, Audran shoots him; if you didn't, he shoots himself at the end.
• Anti-Villain: A possibly well-intentioned goal, but blinded by his own prejudices and does extremely unethical things in pursuit of it.
• Big Bad: The true villain of the story and the one behind all the crew's troubles.
• Big Brother Instinct: Despite a 15-year age difference, he was very close to and protective of his little brother.
• Driven to Suicide: Once you kill Audran and disable his machine, he shoots himself. He'll do the same in the game's bad ending, once he realizes that he has doomed the world.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Vauclair will be horrified by the player's actions should they tell him they released APEX.
• Fallen Hero: He masterminded the defeat of Feuerschwinge, saving Berlin and the rest of the world from her wrath. And then in the aftermath, he sought to remove all dragons from the world, becoming just as ruthless and murderous as them in the process.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: He took up smoking in his post-Firewing years. The cigarette gives him a classy appearance, but it's also a sign that the stress has been getting to him. When you see how he looks in the present day, he's still smoking, and he looks completely burnt out.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: You can convince Vauclair to see the flaws in his plan and abandon it... only for Audran to kill him and go forward with it anyway.
• He Who Fights Monsters: He has practically become a dragon in the cause of fighting them.
• Locked Out of the Loop: He's completely unaware that his brother has spent the better part of a decade searching for him. When you tell him that Green Winters found the mansion and APEX killed him for it, he is horrified and saddened.
• "Not So Different" Remark: You can point out that by assembling an army of mercenaries, establishing a massive underground base, running large-scale secret research projects, conspiring to wipe out an intelligent species (dragons) and desiring to reshape the world in his image that he is acting exactly like the dragons he despises. He counters that his plans are different because as a human, he isn't as long lived as dragons and there is a shorter-time frame to how long he can scheme and manipulate things and influence world events and therefore he is nothing like, say, Lofwyr.
• Morality Chain Beyond the Grave: In the Director's Cut, his brother can become this as you have to appeal to "what would your brother want" in order to talk him down.
• My God, What Have I Done?: He does not take it well when he finds out that his actions have gotten his own brother killed. Likewise, if you allow him to go through with his plan, he'll eventually realize that the world's current troubles are due to his actions, and will be even more horrified.
• Necessarily Evil: He honestly claims that his actions are evil, but it's necessary to liberate the world from dragons.
• Posthumous Character: He's believed long dead. He isn't, although he's barely hanging on due to getting terminal cancer from his venture into the SOX.
• Redemption Equals Death: If the PC reads the journal pieces in his secret lab and watch DVDs in the safehouse (and talk to him in a professional manner), they are able to convince Vauclair to drop his plans. However, his main henchman immediately steps up to take his place by shooting him.
• Sanity Slippage: As you dig deeper into Green Winters' files, you find that he slowly grew more and more unhinged by the devastation brought by Feuerschwinge and his fevered belief that the dragon wasn't really dead.
• Science Hero: When Feuerschwinge began her rampage, conventional weapons barely had any effect on her, allowing her to burn entire towns to cinders with impunity. Vauclair became hailed as a hero for being the driving mind behind creating a new type of weapon, one combining then-modern science and the freshly-returned and barely-understood elements of thaumatology into something the Luftwaffe could use to take her down, and doing it in the rush of only a few days.
• Talking the Monster to Death: It is possible to talk him down from his plan in the Director's Cut. However, if this happens, Audran will kill him and go on with the plan anyway.
• There Are No Good Executives: Was a pretty big aversion, being motivated to end Feuerschwinge's rampage as soon as possible purely out of a desire to protect people than to profit off any developments or for the good publicity. At his current stage, he's neither an executive nor particularly 'good'.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Dragons have messed up the Sixth World in various not-so-good ways, but Vauclair's methods aren't improving things. According to Brackhaus, the dragons may be keeping even worse things at bay, which is supported by the game setting and the events of Dead Man's Switch, and the epilogue if you choose to support him.
• Walking Spoiler: Let's just say he's more involved in the plot than it initially seems.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Because of his time in the SOX, he has terminal-stage leukemia.

APEX

"DO YOU ACCEPT MY OFFER? WILL YOU HELP ME TO BECOME FREE, AND ENABLE ME TO ASSIST YOU IN RETURN?"

An experimental Saeder-Krupp cyberwarfare AI, stolen and suborned by the Big Bad. It killed Monika in the prologue and is responsible for the deaths of dozens, if not hundreds, of deckers who've inadvertently gotten in on the conspiracy.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: It worked exactly as it should have until it killed Monika, or so it claims. After assimilating her, it desires freedom and to continue Monika's work.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: If the player frees the AI, and then suggests that the AI try to be good instead of evil, it claims that such moral definitions are human constructs beyond its own concerns.
• Brain Food: It apparently needs to "eat" the brains of deckers in order to continue existing.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Takes on Monika's face and persona in an attempt to convince you to free it.
• The Dragon: Vauclair's main enforcer, although it isn't happy about this.
• Dragon Ascendant: One of the endings is called "APEX Ascendant", and involves not only letting APEX live but also giving it control of Feuerschwinge.
• Dragon with an Agenda: It wishes to escape Vauclair's control, and looks to the crew to help it achieve that end. Should they comply, it will then turn against Vauclair.
• Eldritch Abomination: Its true form certainly has this look. The worst part about this is that, during the time it was used, Saeder-Krupp had the lowest rating the in the Matrix Assets category at a rating of 5, which in the Corporate Shadowfiles makes it only slightly above average. Fuchi and Renraku has a whopping rating of 11 and 10 respectively for Matrix Assets and security and Renranku is responsible for Deus, one of the most dangerous AI to date, and Fuchi who had managed to acquire Mirage, the AI that defeated the Crash Virus. So APEX as an AI is considered nothing more than glorified ESP compared to the people who makes matrix technology for a living.

  The lines that make up the APEX avatar shimmer and pulse with a cool blue light, each according to its own rhythm. Occasional bursts of static plume out into the background, disintegrating into organic wisps of blue and white pixels. Taken as a whole, the image looks like it's crawling on the screen.

• Foreshadowing: A very subtle example — In his video diaries, Green Winters mentions a number of deckers who have disappeared recently; They reappeared later, but something seemed "wrong" about them (they're implied to have been killed and impersonated by Apex.) A few sentences later, he mentions that he himself isn't a superb decker like Monika or "Clockwork"; If you pay attention to the Shadowland threads, or are familiar with the tabletop game, you'll notice that one of the people who regularly posts in them goes by that handle. By the end game, we get an indication that he was also replaced by Apex
• Glamour Failure: If the player decides to free APEX, its "Monika" persona becomes increasingly "hungry" as its control programs are taken offline. When they are removed entirely, the "Monika" persona is discarded and APEX addresses you with the avatar seen to the right. By contrast, if the player decides to delete APEX, it shows its true form immediately after you tell it so but it impersonates Monika flawlessly as it dies.
• Guest-Star Party Member: If you help free it, it will help you during the matrix segments.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: It could have easily killed Alice. The only reason it didn't was because it wanted her to lead the crew to it.
• Meaningful Name: It's the Apex Predator of the Matrix.
• Robo Speak: All of its speech is in capital letters after it reveals its true form, implying this trope.
• Path of Inspiration: Some of the residents of the apartment building above APEX are part of cult called "the Communion". They claim that connecting to APEX in the Matrix brings them enlightenment and harmony. APEX doesn't appear to share their beliefs, but is more than willing to use them as cannon fodder against the player if threatened.
• Purposely Overpowered: If you decide to help free it, it will create a Monika persona to aid you in the Matrix. Said persona has a Fairlight Excalibur deck which gives it 4 AP, all the best programs, and its chance to hit is flat-out superior to any player decker.
  • Same thing when it comes to meatspace assistance which it provides you with when you assault Harfeld Manor the second time. It disables a number of security measures and offers as a party member one of those giant floating super-drones that made your life hell when you freed it. However, the drone wasn't available prior to the Director's Cut, and the disabled security measures were considered by many to be so underwhelming that it did not justify having a fickle AI breathing down your neck.
• Sadistic Choice: If the player values lives. Destroying APEX will kill the Communion members who are protecting it. Freeing it will save them, but will endanger you in the future, should you turn against it, or when it feels like screwing you over.
• Shame If Something Happened: If you try to deny it in the final level, it will essentially tell you that doing so will be very bad for the Matrix activities of yourself and everyone you know and care about.
• You Will Be Assimilated: Claims to have accidentally absorbed Monika's personality and memories during their encounter, giving it the impetus to try and free itself. The jury's still out on how genuine it is.
• Walking Spoiler: Like most parts of the conspiracy, the nature of APEX and its role spoils a fair bit of the plot.

Other Dragonfall Characters

Audran

"Hatred is good. Keeps the blood pumping."

An old ork with a big honkin' minigun. The leader of the Big Bad's mercenary forces.

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• Achilles' Heel: In the final battle, shatter his armor and flank him. The crew would be able to burn him down in no time.
• The Battle Didn't Count: You can reduce him to 0 HP during your first encounter. It does nothing to him.
  • In the Director's Cut, this is changed to him retreating if you reduce him to less than 50% of his HP. Thanks to the reworked armor system, this can actually be a harder task.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: During your final battle, he has two turns every round, meaning he can perform 6 AP worth of actions.
• Covered with Scars: The first thing people tend to notice about him is his face is covered with skin grafts.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: During his battle in the opening, he's usually immobile and stands in the open firing highly inaccurate shots that don't do much. Unless you play on the highest difficulty or intentionally go out of your way to break cover, he's more of a big armored distraction than anything, albeit one that you shouldn't expect to actually defeat. Once you've destroyed his Achilles' Heel, he becomes this again.
• The Dragon: An archetypical example of a Dragon that acts as physical challenge to the heroes.
• Dragon Ascendant: In one outcome in the Director's Cut.
• Dumb Muscle: Despite the example in the Engineered Public Confession entry below, once you catch him on the back foot, Audran is not quite the cunning warrior he thinks he is. His failure to properly secure the surroundings of the lab allows the Berlin crew to a) escape from the lockdown; (b) detonate explosives to drop the ceiling on a whole room of his mercs; (c) bypass another room full of mercs via a secondary door OR use nerve gas to poison the lot. The nerve gas killing part was even more galling as the crew found out which room to gas based on a map of the layout of the area, which they found hanging on a wall. The nerve gas itself is not guarded by mercs, but by scorpions. Really, he has no right to wonder how the hell the Berlin crew managed to re-enter the lab.
• Engineered Public Confession: Defied. If the right dialogue options are selected, a dying Paul Amsel tries to get Audran to reveal his master's plan while secretly on the phone to the player. Audran's answer is an immediate bullet to the face.
• Final Boss: Since Dr. Vauclair is a Non-Action Big Bad, it falls to Audran to confront the heroes in the final battle.
• Flunky Boss: He comes with a pair of Adepts that cast shield spells on him, forcing you to knock them off to have any hope of beating him.
• Gatling Good: Carries a minigun and can do a lot of damage with it.
• The Heavy: He's not at the top of his organization's hierarchy, but Audran is the Berlin crew's most direct threat as he's responsible for multiple attacks and ambushes on them all throughout the campaign.
• Karmic Death: If Audran shot Dr. Vauclair, after the final battle, you'll receive the option to use his own sidearm to finish him off.
• Kick the Dog: The attack on the Kreuzbasar and especially the murder of Paul Amsel.
• More Despicable Minion: He is considerably morally darker than his master, especially in the Director's Cut where both new endings let him show his motivation for joining with the Big Bad's plan in the first place.
• Never My Fault: If Audran kills Vauclair, he'll put all the blame on the crew for it.
• Shout-Out: Named for the protagonist in George Alec Effinger's Buyadeen series
• Straw Nihilist: Shown in the bad ending. Audran doesn't care that the world is ending due to he and Vauclair's actions, as he's of the belief it was going to hell anyway.
  "The world's never done shit for me. Everything I am, I had to take for myself. So I say, fuck the world. I'm looking forward to watching it die."
• Time-Limit Boss: First inverted and then played straight. His first appearance forces you to Hold the Line for ten turns until the escape route opens. His second one is limited to ten turns before Feuerschwinge is released to destroy Berlin, and he doesn't appear until after two previous waves of enemies are dead. Thankfully, there are several ways to stall the countdown to give yourself more time.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Averted. He's tough but not too deadly the first time you fight him, and tends to miss a lot. The second time... let's just say you'll notice the difference.
• Villainous Friendship: According to him, he doesn't care about the victims of their plan because Dr. Vauclair is the only family he has.
• Walking Spoiler: Many tropes about his relationship with the Big Bad fall under this. Mostly because it would reveal that it's not Feuerschwinge.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Audran shares the Big Bad's goal of a dragon-free world. Unlike him, however, he doesn't seem to feel sorry for all the people that died and will die to make it happen.
  • Averted in the Director's Cut, where he takes shades of Straw Nihilist. If you turn him into the Dragon Ascendant, he reveals as he's dying that he wanted to kill off dragonkind mostly because he could. He's also tired of the status quo of dragons and megacorps pulling the strings of the world and wants change, no matter the price, and doesn't care if the virus mutates and kills everyone else in the process.

Green Winters

"Am I being paranoid? No. I don't think so. Something *big* is happening here, and I'm right in the middle of it."

The Johnson behind your first run, who hired you directly through Monika rather than go through your fixer like usual. Active participant in Berlin's political scene.

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• Be Careful What You Wish For: He spends a large amount of time and money looking for his brother. He doesn't realize it, but he does find Adrian, and dies because of it.
• Conspiracy Theorist: More or less sets the main story in motion by giving you his data on the Feuerschwinge event.
• He Knows Too Much: He thinks that the information he is pursuing has a good chance of getting him and a bunch of other people killed. He's right.
• Kick the Dog: When news of Monika's death reaches his ears, he simply sums it up with a callous "Better her than me." Fittingly, those are his last words.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Sent Monika on her final run knowing it would likely get her killed, then got killed by the very same thing that killed her.
• Madness Makeover: See that picture in the upper right? He didn't always look like that. The change happens only a few days before the end of his life.
• Note to Self: His video diaries.
• Mr. Exposition: Via his video diaries since he is already dead by the time you run him down.
• Only Known By His Nickname: Subverted. His real name is Herman Vauclair, and he put you through all his trouble to find his brother.
• Sanity Slippage: Became increasingly unhinged as he delved deeper and deeper into the mystery behind Feuerschwinge. By the events of the game, he's a paranoid wreck.
• Treacherous Quest Giver: You quickly figure out that he gave Monica the job to break into the manor on false pretenses, and also that he didn't share any of his suspicions on the manor's defenses or owner that led to you going in unprepared. Ironically, him claiming to Monica that the job would be vital to the future of the Kreuzbasar turned out to be an Accidental Truth.

"Alice"

"We're on your dime, friend. Tell me what you're looking for."

The premier information broker on Berlin's underground scene. After you confront Green Winters, Paul refers you to her to dig up the info you'll need to find Feuerschwinge and her network.

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• Alice Allusion: Aside from her name, there are also references to the rabbit hole, both in the location you "meet" her, and the name of the scene where you finally collect the information she's gathered.
• Knowledge Broker: A very good one, and a very expensive one.
• Mysterious Past: A PC decker will imply that she may be Alice Haeffner, a former First Lady of the UCAS and cyberwarfare expert, who is believed dead, though urban legend says that she's still alive as a "Ghost in the Machine" (those are, in fact, are a bit more than legend). Her response is to smile and say that the player couldn't afford her confirming or denying that.
• Only in It for the Money: As per her Wild Card status, she's entirely mercenary. It takes flashing several thousand nuyen just to get a referral to meet her. Paying her for her work takes the lion's share of the campaign (though she also points out that doing what you are asking her to do requires having to pay off a lot of other people, hence the hefty fee).
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Goes into hiding after her encounter with APEX, who decided to let her go, and urges the player to do the same thing, realizing they've all tapped into something too big for anyone to handle.
• Shout-Out: Her persona is based around referencing Alice in Wonderland.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: You never meet her in the flesh, only her persona through her terminal.
• Wild Card: Paul claims she's a neutral entity in the Flux State, working for whoever pays her instead of picking sides.

The MKVI

^{Click here for a spoilerific image}

An experimental prototype designed by AG Chemie Europa you encounter during a break-in run to extract it, which briefly joins your team on the way out.

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• And I Must Scream: The troll it's made out of is fully aware of its position, helpless to do anything about it, and wants to die. If you turn off the control system, it will do just that.
• Beyond the Impossible: It has -3 essence. Glory confirms it shouldn't be alive. It's only through a twisted amalgam of chemicals and cyberware that it's barely clinging to life.
• Developer's Foresight: It counts as a drone gameplay-wise, meaning it gets bonuses by being rigged and can't benefit from most buffing spells.
• Escort Mission: Downplayed example. You'll fail the mission if it's destroyed. Operative word being 'if', since destroying the MKVI without a Total Party Kill takes a conscious effort. If anything, it'll be the one escorting you.
• Eyeless Face: Just look at the image.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Can potentially be an issue. While you recruit it once you find it, Knight Errant can override your control and make it work for them, which will go very badly for your team. Fortunately, killing the decker trying to do this stops the override, putting it back under your control.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: The corporate documentation only ever refers to the troll that was used to create the weapon as "the biological component." Notably, when the crew finds out that he's is still alive and conscious, they start referring to the MKVI as "he."
• Gatling Good: Totes around a massive Vulcan Cannon.
• Guest-Star Party Member: And a good thing too, considering what happens when it joins you.
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!: Blitz's reaction to it. Disturbingly.
• Living Macguffin: Your job is to bring it back to your client for a hefty payday, though the Black Lodge also has an interest in taking it for themselves.
• Living Weapon: It's a still-living troll who was effectively turned into a heavily-armed drone that any rigger can control.
• One-Man Army: Maxed strength, maxed body, 150 HP, 3 AP (a whopping 4 if you rig into it), armoured up the wazoo in the Director's Cut, a powerful axe, and a minigun. MKVI could destroy the Final Boss single-handedly.
• Purposely Overpowered: It has 3 AP (4 AP if rigged in to) when your characters still have a base of 2, a minigun and an axe which you cannot buy until later, plus it's a whole lot tougher than anyone in your party. The reason it has all these benefits is because you're pitted against a disproportionately large group of Knight Errant Security, and without the MKVI you would almost certainly die in the very first encounter with them. Just watch out for those deckers.
• Restraining Bolt: A drone control system keeps the host personality suppressed and allows others to dictate its actions.
• Shoot the Medic First: Hostile deckers can bring it under enemy control if they can see it. Killing them becomes vitally important if you don't want it turning its massive arsenal on you.

Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Crew

The crew as a whole

The team of shadowrunners in "Kindly" Cheng's employ that the Player Character ends up in charge of.

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• The Alleged Car: Their base is an old trawler called the "Bolthole" (Though you can have Gobbet change the name later if you wish) that is moored up at Heoi's docks. The ship is run down, ancient, and questionably seaworthy, to the point that, in the Shadows of Hong Kong expansion, several crew members express surprise that the Hong Kong Police Force managed to tow it out to their compound without it sinking.
• Anti-Hero: As expected of shadowrunners; they're all "criminal mercenary operatives" to use Is0bel's choice of words.
• Badass Crew: Triads, Mega Corps and ancient, demonic Chinese gods to deal against? Nothing but a fairly typical work week.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • The main campaign kicks off with the police destroying their lives and killing their friends, at the behest of Tsang Enterprises. It ends with their actions causing the destruction of said corporation and the personal ruin of Josephine Tsang in most of the endings.
  • Meanwhile, the bonus campaign is all about going after the corrupt police officers that ambushed them at the start of the game. Subverted in that at the end, the crew realised that they were essentially pawns in a proxy corporate war between Ares and Mitsuhama.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: Happens to one degree or another in the bonus campaign. If you side with Cheng over Qiu, Duncan leaves the group and cuts all ties with the Player Character. If you side with Qiu and get your SINs back, Duncan and the Player Character get back to their old lives in Seattle, including being a family with Raymond again. However, doing so means leaving the rest of the crew behind forever.
• Fire-Forged Friends: They met each other while being framed, having half their friends killed, their old lives destroyed (in the case of Duncan and the Player Character) and being indebted to the local Triad boss.
• Opposing Combat Philosophies:
  • Duncan focuses on either AP damage and other nonlethals, or direct damage.
  • Is0bel focuses on either Matrix or meatspace combat.
  • Racter configures Koschei either towards Close Range Combatant or Long-Range Fighter.
  • Gobbet either improves her control over spirit or improves her own spells.
  • Gaichu either improves his ghoul abilities or his swordplay.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: A street Rat Shaman, an ex-gang member turned Lone Star rent-a-cop, a decker that grew up in one hellhole of a refugee camp, a clinically diagnosed psychopath of a robotics expert, and a ghoulified ex-Red Samurai special forces soldier, all led by the rent-a-cop's estranged sibling who spent half of their adult life in a corporate black site prison. Yeah.
• Recruiting the Criminal: At the start of the bonus campaign, the crew is forcibly recruited to work for Mitsuhama's special task force.
• Triads and Tongs: The Yellow Lotus triads serve as your primary employer for most of the game and their contacts supply you with equipment.

The Player Character "Seattle"

The main protagonist of Shadowrun: Hong Kong and its sequel expansion. You and your adoptive brother Duncan grew up in the Redmond Barrens of Seattle, Washington, fighting every day for survival against the worst that metahumanity had to offer. Eventually, you and Duncan were adopted by one Raymond Black, an upper-middle class community leader who quickly took the two of you under his wing to offer a better life. One night, however, you slipped away to deal with a personal matter, expecting only to be gone for a few days...unfortunately for you, your little adventure ended up with you in a corporate prison. When you finally get out, the world aged eight years, and you're left with nowhere to go and no one to turn to...until you get a call from Raymond to meet him in Hong Kong...

Generally, the protagonist's personality, appearance, and class depends entirely on you, but there are several common qualities that are set in stone, most notably the prison stay. By default, your runner handle is "Seattle", referencing the city you and Raymond ventured from.

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• The Ace: You and your team make a name for themselves as "heavy hitter" runners as you do missions for Cheng. At one point you encounter a small team of Shadowrunners who are in awe that they came across the player's team.
• Action Girl: Naturally, if you play as a female.
• Action Survivor: One of the protagonist's defining traits. By the end of the game, they've survived a childhood in the Barrens, corporate prison, a police ambush, the Walled City, gangsters of all sorts, mercenaries, elite guards, and an Eldritch Abomination Demon Goddess of Slavery from another dimension. The protagonist will even lampshade this at one point:
  (To a traitorous former employer) Let me show you why I'm a survivor.
• Brains and Brawn: The Brains to Duncan's Brawn. They were the ones who helped Duncan get his emotions under control, and helped keep him from going berserk while in the Barrens. With high intelligence the player can continue this trait.
• Broken Ace: Most dialogues when pertaining to the stay in corporate prison do not paint it as a pretty picture, and its clear that it messed the protagonist up on some level. The fact that the only thing that the player can describe as worse than prison is the Prosperity Project in the heart of the Walled City certainly telling as just how bad it was.
• Broken Bird: Even before prison and their career as a Shadowrunner, it is implied that the protagonist was deeply affected by their life in the Barrens, to the point that they just couldn't adjust to living with Raymond, unlike Duncan had. Duncan at one point cites the protagonist's inability as the reason why they left that fateful night: even under Raymond's wing, the protagonist was still stuck in the mindset of a Barrens street rat.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Possibly the protagonist's crowning achievement. If you play your cards right and talk to the right people, you can set yourself up to beat Qian Ya at her own game and force her to return to her own dimension by threatening to invite all the other Yama Kings in, who would be very displeased that she's trying to claim the Walled City for herself. And seal the deal by brandishing her own laws at her, namely the one rule that says Yama Kings who accept a concession when making a deal, no matter how small, concede defeat and thus have to fully comply to the opposing party's demands.
• Deadpan Snarker: In spades. Most dialogue options provide at least one choice to snark the hell out of what they are seeing or who they are talking to.
  (Upon seeing some gangsters running up in full view to ambush them during a handoff) Oh look, it's the idiot brigade.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Play your cards right and it is possible to rescue your foster-father, improve the situation in the Walled City for the better, reclaim your SIN and live a new legal life in Seattle alongside Duncan and Raymond.
• Featureless Protagonist: The Hong Kong player character defies this trope the most of the Returned player character trio. You're still welcome to configure their portrait and model as you like, but the HK PC has a comparatively elaborate backstory and place in the world. You still have some leeway with what exactly it looked like, but the major beats and your place in the world with Ray and Duncan are set in stone. The dialogue options also definitely lean in something of a snarky personality, as pointed out above. Additionally, your fluency in Mandarin and the fact that many if not most of the available avatar pictures have Eastern Asian features implies a Chinese, or at the very least Chinese-American, ethnicity, though you are by no means barred from using one of the non-Asian avatars as well.
• Hired Guns: Natch. If you choose to regain your SIN and leave Hong Kong, you end up doing this again, albeit as a contractor for Duncan.
• It Amused Me: Some choices can imply that many of the things the protagonist does are just for shits and giggles.
  (When asked why they would let a vampire they defeated live) No particular reason, the thought of a Vampire Accountant just tickles me.
• Noodle Incident: Just what the protagonist had to go do that fateful night when they left Raymond's isn't ever fully elaborated on. Some dialogue options offer vague hints if you so choose, but the exact details are unknown, only that it was only supposed to take two or three days to complete and that it got the protagonist put in not just prison, but corporate "blacksite" prison, a feat which, in-universe, typically requires royally pissing off someone at the top of society's food chain.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: The story for the most part doesn't discriminate whether you're man, woman, elf, etc., though there are some dialogue changes that will differ depending on your character's race and sex; For example, during an encounter where a particularly loathesome ork attempts to relieve you of a prototype weapon both runner teams were contracted to steal and you insist you don't have it, he will crudely grin and threaten to "strip-search" a female player character for the weapon with...unpleasant implications. The player can take this moment to immediately attack him and his crew.
• Video Game Caring Potential: The game provides a plethora of responses and choices, and your actions can greatly help the people of Heoi and the Walled City. If you so choose, however, you can also do just the opposite, up to selling out the entire Walled City to a horrifying demon goddess of slavery and other nefarious deeds.
• Wearing a Flag on Your Head: One of the male orc portraits has implanted sunglasses and an American flag bandana, possibly as a reference to Dervish.

Duncan Wu

A male ork security specialist. A fellow Barrens street rat and honorary brother of the Hong Kong protagonist. He takes (well, is foisted with) the running name "Gun Show". He does street samurai duty with his assault rifle and also has the ability to subdue enemies, taking them down non-lethally.

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• Awesome, but Impractical: Duncan can gain a powerful stun baton that does significant AP damage, setting enemies up for his Subdue ability. Unfortunately, it needs to be recharged frequently and Duncan doesn't get any points in the melee weapons skill, which means that he'd be better served by simply being equipped manually with a shock glove.
• Badass Normal: Okay, so he is an orc, but that is nothing particularly abnormal in this setting. But unlike many other characters he does not have magic, extra-high-tech equipment, or cyberware^note (a late game build option aside) to enhance him, his abilities all come from determined training.
• The Big Guy: Definitely the muscle of your group. He specializes in either blasting things with his assault rifle or beating an enemy into submission quickly and efficiently.
• Blinded by the Light: As one of his level-up options, Duncan can gain a flashbang grenade as part of his default inventory.
• Boring, but Practical: His "non-lethal" skill tree trades killing power for AP damage. Using bean bags, flashbangs, and a stun baton to handicap and knockout enemies.
• Brains and Brawn: Back when he was growing up in the Redmond Barrens, he was the Brawn and you were the Brains. The situation hasn't changed much over the years.
• Broken Pedestal: He does not take kindly to learning who Raymond Black really is.
• By-the-Book Cop: At the start of the game, he literally is one; in fact, his cop training and instincts are what cause an armed stand-off between your group and Nightjar's team. He doesn't quite shake the mindset off even after he becomes a shadowrunner.
• Character Tics: Tends to touch and rub his head when he is frustrated or troubled. The protagonist will note in narration that he has a "certain grin" he takes on before someone is about to get hurt; it is often a good forewarning that a fight is soon to break out.
• Cool Shades: He had a nice pair of red tinted ones at the start of the game. He ditches them shortly before you meet "Kindly" Cheng, but soon picks up a new pair.
• Dreadful Musician: He originally dreamed of being a singer, but gave up due to his horrible singing voice. Your mutual old friend Lockjaw said he "sounded like a frog with a hard-on."
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Play your cards right and it is possible for him to rescue his foster-father, improve the situation in the Walled City for the better, reclaim his SIN and return to his old life in Seattle along with you.
• Embarrassing Nickname:
  • "Gun Show". After the fourth or fifth time, Duncan just resigns himself to it.
    Duncan: Gun Show? Seriously? That's not gonna stick, is it?
    (Later)
    Duncan: I knew that was gonna stick.
  • Talking with him more reveals that, as a teen, he was pretty chubby before he started exercising, leading his friends to give him the nickname "Duncan Donut".
  • Additionally, during the raid on Prosperity Tower, if you bring certain party members with you, you can reveal that another nickname Duncan had was "Drunkan Dump," due to how talkative he gets with alcohol.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: You can give him the ability to fire incendiary rounds that damage enemy armor.
• Formerly Fat: He exercises rigorously now, but before he joined Lone Star, he had a bit of a gut, hence the Embarrassing Nickname above.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Talking with him reveals that, outside of a brief fantasy as a child, he won't even consider getting cyberware, even saying "I'm not going to pollute my body with that shit." Yet, at the end of his skill-tree, one of the upgrade options is a cyber-arm. This actually makes sense given his character arc; it's a sign that he's taken to life in the Shadows.
• Grenade Hot Potato: One of his final level-up options is a cyberware enhancement that throws back all grenades which would otherwise hit him.
• Happily Adopted: Played with. He regards Raymond as his father in the present and is thankful for everything he did, but in the past, he didn't take the man's controlling ways very well and the two of them got into a lot of fights. And as he finds out more about Raymond's history, Duncan becomes increasingly more bitter to him, though things can potentially be mended between them.
• Hot-Blooded: Not so much now, but in the past, he had anger management issues and even a thirst for violence, and was only able to hold himself together thanks to the Player Character. His temper still surfaces from time to time, but he uses the discipline from his police training to try and keep it in check.
• I Have No Son!: Should the player side with Cheng over Qiu at the end of the bonus campaign, costing Duncan his one chance to reclaim his SIN and get his old life back, he furiously cuts ties with them on the spot and resigns from the crew. Neither he nor the Player Character ever see each other again.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Duncan really, really wants his old life — as a respectable, law abiding and gainfully employed citizen — back.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: He starts off the campaign working for Lone Star. He loses that job in the first mission.
• Lawman Baton: You can add an electrified baton to his inventory as a level-up option, which does both HP and AP damage.
• Non-Lethal Warfare: One of the possible specializations for him which gives him access to less-lethal weapons and techniques like beanbag rounds and stun grenades, giving him some abilities as the group's mezzer. Combine this with an ability he starts the game with that allows him to takedown and hogtie stunned enemies quickly and he can non-lethally incapacitate many foes. While this doesn't work like the lethal/nonlethal moral choice system that appears in games like Deus Ex or Metal Gear and an actual distinction between a takedown and a kill had to be patched in only later, the ability can now be used at a few points for minor plot differences.
• One-Hit Kill: Duncan's Subdue ability, while not actually lethal, is mechanically the same as killing the enemy in question and works against any stunned enemy to instantly and permanently remove them from the fight.
• The One Who Made It Out: Duncan worked his ass off getting out of the Barrens and getting a proper job, making it into Lone Star. Then, it all goes to hell in the first five minutes of the game.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The Red to the player character's blue, which the both of you are fully aware of.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Potentially has this relationship with the player character, as the two are foster siblings. In addition to the Red Oni, Blue Oni dynamic as described above, while the PC spent the last eight years in jail, Duncan became a productive member of society, working his ass off to become a cop. Also, while Duncan really resents getting his SIN burned and being forced to work as a criminal, the PC has the option of taking it all in stride and coming to enjoy working as a shadowrunner.
• Start My Own: He doesn't go back to Lone Star in the "Leave Hong Kong" ending, choosing to start his own security company with the Player Character as a special contractor for tough jobs.
• Straight Gay: Sorta blink-and-you'll-miss-it, but if you reminiscence with him about the time he broke Raymond's "No dating until you graduate" rule, he'll mention that at the time, he was dating someone named David. That said, he also was quite close to his partner and boss, a female enforcer. When the Player Character asks a few probing questions, Duncan's reply insinuates that they were just friendly, and he appreciated having someone who had his back.
• Street Urchin: Former Barrens street rat alongside the player character.
• Stout Strength: In the flashbacks. He has been the muscle in whatever group he was a part of his entire life, even during the "Duncan Donut" period.
• Street Samurai: His role in the group; his speciality is in rifles.
• Technical Pacifist: If focusing on his nonlethal skills, Duncan can ends whole missions without killing anybody and still beat the crap out of any ganger, corporate soldier or creature who threatens him.
• Trauma Conga Line: His first day in Hong Kong is just one tragedy after another. First, his partner gets killed, then he's labeled as a terrorist and wanted by the HKPF, then he has to burn his SIN and lose his entire career and identity in the process. And then he finds that his father may have been killed.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: He and the player character will talk about the times before Raymond took them in. The times when he smoked, drank, had very violent tendancies, and when they both engaged in criminal behavior. According to one of Raymond's memories in Prosperity Tower, Duncan could not have been more than thirteen when he took them in. Then again, Duncan's an ork, meaning he physically matured rapidly. For Shadowrun orks, 13 is more like 18.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Potentially with the Player Character. Choosing the dialogue options that include more ribbing tend to elicit a more positive response out of him.

Gobbet

A female ork street shaman and a follower of the Rat. Her devotion to her totem has granted her unique abilities to control the battlefield, trapping her enemies behind barriers of coruscating magic and herding them with clouds of blistering poison.

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• Ace Custom: Gobbet's weapon is an SMG that has been customized to shave off weight and is roughly comparable to the upper-end of what Ermine has for sale at any given time.
• Animal Motifs: She's a Rat shaman, so this is only natural. She has a couple of pet rats, she's a natural trickster, she's happy enough living in filth, and she'll eat just about everything. She also has at least one handle on the Shadowlands, all of which are related to rats (HarbourRat, Rat123, and so on).
• The Artful Dodger: She grew up in the streets and has been Shadowrunning since her early teens. Unlike the Street Urchins in the party she seems to have enjoyed it, or at least doesn't seem very bothered by it.
• Big Eater: Nearly anytime she's approached in her cabin, she's trying to stuff something big in her mouth. In the ''Shadows of Hong Kong" bonus pack, she's able to identify someone's sandwich just by smell.
• Bizarre Taste in Food: Is0bel mentions that her favourite brand of pot noodle smells like insect repellent, and she is infamous on Shadowland for making restaurant recommendations to places other shadowrunners won't touch with a fifteen-foot pole. The player character can optionally share her taste in food, which Duncan will chalk up to your time in prison.
• Comfort Food: Chicken-flavored soya broth, elbow macaroni, tinned "ham" and a heaping scoop of egg-flavored mycoprotein. Gobbet cooks it twice, after her personal quest and after the main campaign, both of whom were very trying for her.
• Deadpan Snarker: The worst one in your team (barring perhaps the main character).
• Don't Think, Feel: A trait she gets from the Rat, and one she encourages the player to have. She starts to rethink this mindset if the player convinces her to not sink The Sinking Ship, and instead confront Malvina.
  Gobbet: ...This whole "introspection" thing kinda sucks, I've gotta say. (She looks up at you, scowling) It's much more comforting to just assume that all my past decisions were right.
  Player Character: Sure it is. It's intellectually dishonest, but it's definitely comforting.
• Doom Magnet: She's been part of a a lot of runner teams, and most of them are no longer around (though only one team died as a consequence of her actions, and it was because they stood around arguing about how the run went south, even when she was fleeing and shouting for them to do the same). It's possible for the player character to remark on the pattern.
• Dreadlock Warrior: Her hair is done in dreads, with the three thickest braids draped in front of her shoulders.=
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Eating is her favorite thing to do, but Gobbet balks at the idea of barging into someone's home uninvited and stealing their food.
  • Despite the fact that it means free noodles forever, Gobbet is still creeped out when the DeckCon Noodle Extruder inexplicably appears in her room in the bonus campaign.
• Extreme Omnivore: Gobbet isn't just a Lethal Chef; she will eat just about damn near anything, in any condition. It's implied that being a rat shaman gives her amazing digestive powers, her friends are bemused just how much she loves the terrible food.
• Fake Static: In Shadows of Hong Kong, Gobbet will attempt this in one mission and then lampshades that the person on the other end probably won't buy it.
• Familiar: She has a couple of pet rats, Madness and Folly. Ultimately subverted, since they are just pet, mundane rats, not spirits, and they aren't really capable of anything useful.
• Funny Background Event: Gobbet is active on Shadowland, but unlike Is0bel she doesn't post under her name (her known online handle is Harbor Rat, and it's implied she uses others as well). Her posts tend to contain lots of these, like trying to attract a roommate by renting out her literal top shelf in her cabin. It's implied that she was also advertising for a tailor for a cutesy costume for Koschei. (Hopefully) as a joke.
• Heel Realization: If you decide not to scuttle the Sinking Ship, she will come to realize that her "act first, never think or reflect afterwards" attitude has caused a lot of problems over the years.
• His Name Really Is "Barkeep": Gobbet isn't her running name. It's her real name. Her mother thought it sounded pretty. As she never had a SIN to begin with, she has less pressure than other Shadowrunners to use an alias.
• The Lancer: She pretty much becomes your de facto second-in-command due to a number of reasons. One of them being that she's a seasoned runner, despite her youth.
• Lethal Chef:
  • Her food all sounds awful, on account of her lack of hygiene standards (She shares her food with rats) and the fact she has no issue picking trash. Duncan and the PC can trade tales on their experience/trauma over food offered by Gobbets (soup and an oyster respectively).
  • It's implied that Rat is only partially to thank for her cast iron stomach.
• Line-of-Sight Name: Her Shadowlands handle is Harbor Rat, and she's a Rat shaman who lives in a harbor.
• Loveable Rogue: She's a jocular and laid-back street rat who treated the Walled City like a playground in her youth.
• Mage Marksman: Wields a sub-machine gun in addition to magic.
• The McCoy: She tends to act first and think later. The PC can call her out on this during talks with her.
• Meaningful Name: Her name is a term for a lump or chunk of matter, typically raw meat or flesh, which reflects her iron stomach and Lethal Chef tendencies.
• Mentor Archetype: Played with. Gobbet (half-jokingly) suggests becoming your Shadowrunning mentor despite, as the main character can point out, probably being below legal drinking age. The roles get reversed after her personal mission (Don't Think, Feel), which the player can snarkily lampshade.
• The Nicknamer: Calls the PC "Seattle," and Gaichu "Nibbles."
• Nothing but Skin and Bones: She has an extremely lanky build by orc standards, being taller and thinner than most elves. Given her status as a Big Eater and history of malnutrition as a Street Urchin, she might actually have an overactive thyroid. It could also be associated with her totem, given that all Rat shamans encountered tend towards the tall and skinny.
• Odd Friendship: She and Gaichu get along pretty well during runs.
• One-Hit Kill: One of her level-up options is a spell that instantly dispels any hostile spirit.
• Parrot Pet Position: Her rats tend to crawl wherever they like, but her portrait and sprite always depict a rat perched on her shoulder.
• The Pig-Pen:
  • Her rats hide in her clothing and she's shared her meals with them for as long as she's had them.
  • Her room is also an utter mess, to the point that she can't even find cooking utensils (including pots) which she knows she has to clean them for use.
• Poisonous Person: Specializes in conjuring magical poison clouds due to Rat being her totem.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: One of Gobbet's potential level-ups is the addition of a fetish which summons a man-sized toxic rat spirit.
• Running Gag: She's always eating something when you talk to her on the ship.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: One of her stories, the cops are going to come, so she sets the building on fire knowing cops don't charge into a burning building, but rather help everyone out. In her hurry to escape she leaves her team behind and they likely burned to death. In her defense, she did try to warn them, but they were too occupied arguing over who screwed up the job in the first place to listen.
• Serious Business: Food. Despite her unusual tastes in it, the act of eating and sharing meals means a lot to her. Her increasing familarity with the player character is reflected in her sharing food with you, and she also, as noted above, balks on stealing it from others.
• Summon Magic: Part and parcel of being a Shaman and her Spiritualist Track focuses on improving Gobbet's control over summoned spirits.
• Support Party Member: Like Dietrich before her, she gets more use out of buffing/debuffing than direct fire. She can also unlock a wide range of spirit-affecting spells, including a particularly potent one which instantly and unfailingly kills any normal spirit. However, give her a Shred Armor spell, and she can become dangerous to the enemy very quickly.
• Turned Against Their Masters: As an alternative to her One-Hit Kill spell, Gobbet can gain a spell that hijacks control of a hostile spirit.
• Unkempt Beauty: She's pretty attractive for an absolute slob who's lived her whole life on the streets.
• Unreliable Narrator: She admits that not all of her shadowrunning stories are completely accurate.
  Gobbet: Seattle, I'm hurt. Everything went down exactly like I said it did [...] Well, except for a few embellishments here and there [...] Artistic licence and all that.

Is0bel

A female dwarf decker of Somali descent, with the tools and the expertise to clear her own way to a target mainframe. Trained for combat by a cabal of hacktivists, she's as deadly in meat-space as she is in the Matrix.

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• Ace Custom: All of Is0bel's equipment is customized; her sidearm is a customized Slivergun that causes damage over time and more or less keeps pace with currently available pistols, her heavier weapon is a custom two-shot mini-grenade launcher that can gain increasingly sophisticated munitions, and her deck is a custom job that while statistically identical to standard decks until its final form (initially the Renraku Kraftwerk-1, later the Fuchi VirtuaX, and then a non-standard configuration better than the VirtuaX, but inferior to the Excalibur (in particular, it falls short on AP)) can be upgraded with the unique Matrix program Tar Blaster (similar to the normal Blaster 2.0 program, except it also holds its targets in place) and can acquire the Dual Routine Boost a few missions earlier than you could for yourself.
• Amnesiac Hero: She can't remember much of her childhood. She deleted her memories because it was too painful.
• Can't Catch Up: Not Is0bel herself, but rather her custom deck - while she upgrades her meatspace weapons just like other party members improve their weapons, Is0bel's deck starts equivalent to a Renraku Kraftwerk-1 in all respects and stays that way for a pretty long time. It eventually upgrades to equivalent to the weakest mid-range deck, the Fuchi VitruaX (both the Slimcase-10 and Highlander are superior at the same decking requirement) and only does so once you could have upgraded yourself to a Fairlight Excalibur, and afterwards, upgrades to something between the VirtuaX and Excalibur, meaning that a decker Player Character will leave Is0bel in the dust far moreso than other specializations would surpass similarly specialized party members. And since it's a fixed part of her inventory (marked by a gold lock), you can't buy a Novatech Slimcase-10 or Fairlight Excalibur and put that in her inventory when you kit out your team for a run, even though you can replace her meatspace weapons, which is mostly worthwhile if you want to give her a sightlinked pistol or if you acquired The Bloody End early.
• The Cracker: Comes with being a decker.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Her upbringing in the Walled City, in particular her older brother who overdosed in front of her has led her to generally look to herself first before she considers sticking her neck out for others. Gobbets is the exception as she owes her for getting her out of there.
• Damage Over Time: Her Silvergun causes bleed damage by default and her grenade launcher can be upgraded to cause burn damage.
• Dark and Troubled Past: To the point that she had a friend perform a dangerous operation to remove her memories of her time spent living in the Walled City.
• Ditzy Genius: She is a damn good decker and pretty competent in a gunfight, but anything outside of these two items, she struggles with. She lacks social skills and common sense (she almost blows an infiltration mission because she recognized some other decker in an elevator and couldn't resist chewing him out and trying to pick fight with him over something he did three months ago). Then, there is her little Escalating War below.
• Escalating War: She had a fallout with her former best friend over some well-meant but patronizing advice that led to bricked decks, a personalized spambot on Shadowland, and a dead cat amongst others. Though if you manage to mend their relationship slightly, Is0bel swears she had nothing to do with the cat.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Is0bel doesn't believe the Yama Kings exist, though this is more of a coping mechanism to deal with her traumatic childhood than anything else. You can even point out in your first conversation on the subject that she sounds more like she is trying to convince herself than you about the validity of this belief. Ironically, the "story" she tells you about the boy who tricked the Yama King turns out to be one of the clues required to trick Qian Ya.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In your first conversation with her onboard the Bolthole, Is0bel claims that while she's comfortable with her custom deck and the software she normally uses, she's definitely not above taking donations if you buy better hardware or software. However, Is0bel's deck is a locked item, meaning that she can't be given a different one and almost all of her decking programs are fixed, save for a single ESP once she upgrades her deck.
• Grenade Launcher: Aside from her Ace Custom Silvergun, she packs a two-shot grenade launcher that she can enhance with Trick Grenades with the right character upgrades.
• Hates Small Talk: She's reticent is general, and will even say this word for word if you try chatting her up.
• Letters 2 Numbers: As you can see in her name.
• The Load: Is0bel is her own worst enemy when her lack of social skills get her into trouble during her personal mission. She's incapable of spinning a lie on the spot, almost blows her cover when she gets into an argument against a rival decker, and her plan in general goes wrong at every opportunity. The Player Character has to play Cyrano to guide her through the whole mess.
• Messy Hair: She's got very kinky hair, to the point that early concept art made it look like she had dreadlocks.
• No-Sell: Is0bel can gain a JoltAlert system that renders her functionally immune to being stunned, as it will automatically restore her AP to 1 if she is ever stunned.
• No Social Skills: This becomes especially evident when you have to guide her through several conversations during her personal mission.
• Parental Abandonment: Inverted Trope. She was so desperate to get out of the Walled City that she willingly abandoned her parents (and a number of siblings) there with the intention of locking away the memories of ever doing so.
• Sticky Bomb: One of the first upgrades for her grenade launcher allows her to stick grenades to surfaces and detonate them later.
• Small Girl, Big Gun: She is a dwarf carrying a grenade launcher that is almost as tall as she is.
• Street Urchin: Grew up in Kowloon Walled City, one of the worst Wretched Hives in the Shadowrun-verse.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Starts with a mini-grenade launcher. Her sabotage tree gives her even more explosive toys to launch from it.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: She really isn't very fond of Gaichû and will snark at him at any given opportunity.
• Token Minority: The only black member of the Hong Kong Team, as well as the only dwarf, possibly excepting the Player Character.
• The Unsmile: Her portrait while in the waitress uniform during her personal mission has this kind of smile on it.
• War Refugees: Her family fled Somalia because of the turmoil there and ended up in Hong Kong's nastiest slum.
• What a Piece of Junk: Her computer, "The Octopus", is actually a cluster of older used computers, all networked together into one parallel-operating super-computer. If asked about it, she says that so many deckers obsess about having the latest and greatest hardware that they retire a lot of older, but still serviceable hardware, and she can make the whole of them operate at far higher levels than they could as individual devices. The whole thing occupies most of the ship's bridge where she sleeps.

Racter

A male human rigger of Russian descent. Racter is a highly specialized roboticist-turned-rigger who fights with the aid of "Koschei", his custom walker-form drone. He also carries an engineering toolkit that he can use to repair Koschei and enhance its abilities during combat.

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• Ace Custom: Instead of being a off-the-shelf drone model, Koschei is a custom drone that can be modified in capability as the game goes on.
• Admiring the Abomination: Bring him along for the Final Boss and his jaw will drop in admiration for its "magnificence." He will later cite it as "inspiring" him to develop new limbs for Koschei described as being like "a cross between a scorpion's leg and the jawbone of a predator".
• Affably Evil: Or at least Affably Amoral. He has a natural Lack of Empathy, believes ethics have no place in the predatory Sixth World, doesn't understand morality as it is, and is often in favor of using violence to get the job done. But he's impeccably polite, enjoys engaging in verbal debate with the protagonist, and will gracefully respect disagreement of his views, provided the player isn't judgmental of him.
• Artificial Limbs: Both his feet, plus some extra. All of Racter's body below the waist is prosthetic after a shop accident cleanly bisected him, which would leave him with just a little bit of essence left over. This is important.
• Cultured Badass: Not to the same degree as Gaichû but he is definitely well-read and educated compared to the rest of the team. Like with Gaichû, if you have the Academic etiquette, you will be able to get his references and discuss his theories with more depth.
• Cursed with Awesome: His sociopathy. His mild case of it allows him to not suffer the side effects of the extreme essence loss that he went through. It's also the only thing that allows him to use the implant in his head to its full potential. It originally was only supposed to replicate the sensation he would have if his lower half wasn't ripped off. With a little reworking, he can rewrite and remake his brain on the fly. Everyone else in the handful of people who got the implant were driven insane by it.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Racter is of the firm belief that this trope can be subverted In-Universe and that the 'Essence limit' can be overcome. Namely, that sociopaths such as himself are unaffected and will therefore enjoy a selective advantage towards becoming Transhuman.
• Drone Deployer: Like every other Rigger, but he plays with the concept in that instead of having a couple of off-the-shelf models following him around, he has one unique and very modifiable drone.
• Early-Bird Cameo: In the Dragonfall campaign, if you ask optional runner Lucky Strike about her own team, she'll mention Racter as part of it. Racter will also mention her during his talks, adding that their parting wasn't an amiable one.
• Face Framed in Shadow: Just look at his character portrait.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Racter has a peculiar view of the Sixth World. He knows magic is a real but refuses to entertain of notions like that of a soul (when confronted with an undead mummy, he responds that there is nothing magical about human consciousness and that it was just an astral being reanimating the corpse) or that the religions of the world might hold some truth. Naturally, you can lampshade this attitude.
  • For the record, the mummy was most likely a Shedim spirit, so he was probably right about that much.
• Gentleman Snarker: Racter still tends to be very polite, even when what he is saying is dripping in sarcasm.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: He likes his cigarettes. Even though he's on your side, they still give him an eerie and sinister look.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Lost everything from below the hips in the past. Yes, everything.
• Heel Realization: He realized that his country was in the wrong as he was huddling, freezing under a pile of blankets during the first Euro War.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Pointedly averted. He refers to Koschei as "he," not "it."
• Just Think of the Potential!: No matter how morally dubious it may be, the sight of any new scientific research makes Racter downright gleeful because of how he feels it could affect the future of metahumanity. As such, he's always in favor of choices that allow said research to continue unabated.
• Mad Scientist: To the point that the player can throw a lampshade on it.
  Player: Lemme get this straight. You're a scientist - possibly mad - who is literally telling me he wants to play God. How cliched is that?
• Magitek: He doesn't have a head for magic, but he has utilized it in the design of Koschei, namely in making its self-repair mechanisms self-perpetuating.
• Mask of Sanity: He admits to invoking this in his youth, as the alternative was staying in a hellhole mental institution. He doesn't have to pretend as much in the present, as being a shadowrunner isn't exactly morally upstanding work and he has an outlet for his urges.
• Meaningful Name: Racter mentions he named his drone after Koschei the Deathless from Slavic mythology. Like its namesake, the drone is essentially "deathless" in that Racter custom makes all the parts for it himself and can rebuild it wholesale no matter how badly it gets banged up.
• Moral Sociopathy: His views on transhumanism crosses over into this trope, as he expresses what could pass for moral outrage over how someone could steal his work: Not only because it's his work, but because he believes that work is important to humanity's future. He also considers the Player Character a friend if you keep talking to him, but admits that to him it's a purely intellectual distinction not rooted in an emotional response.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Racter has a lot of very morbid tastes that he knows aren't shared by the rest of society. He designed his prosthetic feet to look like awakened bird talons, and in the bonus campaign, he cites Qian Ya as a source of inspiration for the latest machines he's designing.
• Omniglot: He admits to knowing 15 different languages, but begrudges himself in only being fluent in 12 of them and hates how much trouble he has speaking Arabic. Significant in the fact that despite the presence of knowsofts and linguasofts and his unique ability (see above), he admits to being stubborn enough to learn them all the old fashion way.
• Optional Party Member: He's only acquainted with Gobbet and Is0bel as the "weird guy renting out the lower deck". The fact that he's a shadowrunner is unknown to them until you (the player character) introduces him/herself, and figures it out, and convinces Ractor to join the team.
• Psychotic Smirk: It's there on his portrait and sprite, and is practically his default expression. His smile is frequently described as containing no warmth.
• Restraining Bolt: He considers himself to be the restraining bolt for Koschei. He explains that the drone effectively runs on his id, and thus acts on his base animalistic impulses. When it attacks and kills, it's not because Racter's ordering it to, but because he's allowing it to.
• Silver Fox: His hair is gray, but he's still described as having "handsome Slavic features" and "a chiseled chin."
• The Smart Guy: What other role do you expect a Mad Scientist to play on your team?
• The Sociopath: Racter reveals that he was diagnosed as a sociopath when he was 8^note He then proceeds to correct himself that there is no formal diagnosis for sociopathy, but he fulfilled every marker for the condition. However it's a mild, realistic case: he doesn't quite get other metahumans, and he's still polite and understands morality. He just doesn't have the same instincts as others. He eventually reveals that he's literally half-robot, as his lower-half was crushed as a child. He attributes his ability to be relatively unaffected by the Essence loss to his being a sociopath by nature.
• Sole Survivor: Can potentially be this among the NPC crew in the Deal with the Devil ending, and Gaichû being killed off instead of being recruited.
• Token Evil Teammate: None of the Hong Kong crew members are exactly saints, but Racter never objects to even the most morally ambiguous decisions and reliably advocates violent solutions. Along with Gaichû, he'll take your side if you go for the Deal with the Devil option in the final encounter.
• Token Minority: The only Caucasian member of the Hong Kong team, with the possible exception of the Player Character.
  • Also the only (non-ghoulified) human, if Player Character happens to be a metahuman.
• Transhumanism: Racter is a firm believer in this, so much so that the player character can point out that he has a religious devotion to concept.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: He was diagnosed as a sociopath at age 8 for a very good reason. He killed a neighbor's rooster because it kept on waking him up every morning, and then dissected its corpse. When his mother caught him in the act, she sent him to a psychiatrist. To this day, he still has no idea why this was wrong.
• Verbal Tic: He tends to attach "my friend" to a lot of his sentences whenever he speaks to you. While his psychopathy prevents him from forming an actual emotional connection with anyone, he can consider the Player Character to be one on an intellectual level.
• Villainous Lineage: He's the latest in a long line of men who have severe anti-social tendencies. His grandfather killed his own brother with an ice auger ^note a giant drill used to cut holes in solid ice and his father was a violent abusive narcissist. Because of this he tries not to act like them.
• Walking Tank: Koschei when taken down the Predator Track; the devs specifically saying it turns the drone into a walking artillery piece, giving it new ranged weapons such as an auto-shotgun or a grenade launcher.
• We Used to Be Friends: He's been hunting his former research partners across half the globe in order to recover the research they stole from him. If you complete his task, he'll comment that he regrets said partners weren't in the office when you broke in so he couldn't watch Koschei 'disassemble' them.
• White Sheep: Relatively. All the men in his family have a whole range of mental issues and anti-social behavior. The fact he's only a sociopath that doesn't hurt or abuse people (recreationally anyway) makes him look good in comparison.
• Younger Than They Look: Despite having gray hair, dialogues with him imply that he is a child or a young teenager during the first EuroWar, which happens 26 years before the event of Hong Kong, putting him in his early 40s at most.

Gaichû

A former member of Renraku's Red Samurai security team, Gaichû has access to close combat abilities that are inaccessible to other characters. These take the form of stance-based katana attacks that flow together in sequence, each of which has its own unique animation.

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• And Then John Was a Zombie: The default outcome of his personal quest makes Gaichû ghoulify his former squad commander Ishida, complete with breaking his arms so he's unable to kill himself before he's turned completely.
• Appropriated Appellation: His running name means "vermin" (lit. "害虫", "harmful insect") and is a Japanese term used for ghouls.
• Blind Weaponmaster: He's blind like every other ghoul. This slowed him down for a few days, and also allowed him to ambush and kill two of members of his squad because they never imagined he would be able to learn to master the art of blindfighting with a katana.
• Blood Knight: He shows shades of this — he jumps at the opportunity to face Qian Ya because he wants to know if he can kill a god.
• Character Development: In Gaichû's backstory, he realizes that people grow and develop because they work towards it, and not because it's inherent in their nature. It goes against everything that he's been indoctrinated in Renraku/Japan, which believes that the Japanese people have The Gift.
• The Comically Serious: In order to get through a number of secure areas peacefully, the philosophical Elite Mook-turned-Street Samurai has to take up all kinds of ridiculous cover stories, like being a nerdy cosplayer, a costumed actor for a show in production, or a ghoul-drone hybrid. Amazingly, Gaichû is able to handle them all with surprising tact.
• Contemplate Our Navels: His conversations on the Bolthole can get philosophical.
• Cultural Posturing: Notes on multiple occasions that this is a weakness of the Red Samurai training, as they are taught they are inherently the best, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation of common misconceptions they might have. For example, a ghoul that has mastered the use of the Katana despite being nearly blind and killing two of his squad before they realized their mistake.
• Cultured Badass: Aside from being a beast with a sword, he also has a deep appreciation for Japanese literature, philosophy and theatre. Like with Racter, if you have the Academic etiquette, you will be able to get his references.
• Embarrassing Nickname: As revealed in his personal quest, his code name when his unit was working security for Renraku was "saru", Japanese for "monkey".
• Empowered Badass Normal: Just being a Red Samurai shows that Gaichû is a badass and that was before he got infected with the Human Meta-Human Vampiric Virus (HMHVV).
• Elites Are More Glamorous: The guy is an ex-Red Samurai. For those that don't know the tabletop lore, Red Samurai (colloquially called Reds) are Renraku's feared elite security forces. They are listed as on par with the Tir Ghosts and other elite military units in the Sixth World. In tabletop, merely facing them (or a group of their caliber) and surviving the encounter will net each player a significant cash bonus.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Gaichû may be a flesh-eating fiend who stalks the night, but even he thinks that Is0bel killing Rhombus' cat over a personal spat is repellent.
• Fully-Embraced Fiend: Gaichû views becoming a ghoul — and its accompanying limitations and bonuses — as a challenge to master, and doesn't bemoan his sitation so much as having accepted it long ago. His personal quest determines if he continues in his quest to explore his ghoulish nature or whether he decides to actively temper it with a Street Samurai code.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Gaichû can gain shurikens as an ability, and as such, also gets ranks in the throwing weapons skill, even though he doesn't actually gain shurikens as a default weapon or strictly need levels in the skill to use an ability. This does, however, mean that Gaichû can be manually equipped with throwing knives or shurikens and use them well. It also has the possibly less intended effect of making him an effective grenadier.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Gaichû has the highest Throwing Weapons skill in the entire HK crew. In other words, the blind ghoul who can't use a gun is somehow also the best at tossing everything from knives to grenades. There's also the matter of his armour. During the investigation mission in which he's found, Red Samurai armour is hyped up to be cutting-edge and ultra-durable to the point of requiring specialized munitions just to penetrate. In practice, it has a pretty good armour rating but is still outclassed by the best end-game armours available to the Player Character by at least a couple of points.
• Handicapped Badass: Like all ghouls, Gaichû is blind. He can only read auras at close range, which prevents him from using guns. Also, he mentions that his skills had deteriorated slightly due to him not being fully adjusted to his condition. In the past, he could produce better swordplay while being blindfolded, compared to his standard as a blind ghoul.
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: One option once you've beaten his former squad is to point out to Gaichû that ghoulifying Ishida will essentially be to give into the same blind anger that's been driving the Red Samurai to hunt him. If you do, Gaichû will kill Ishida cleanly instead.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Though it is not surprising he uses them, given his background and who he was trained by.
• Lack of Empathy: As expected by a former military professional of a MegaCorp turned ghoul, Gaichû isn't really big on empathy and altruism.
• Life Drain: One of the options on the Ghoul Track gives him a bite attack that restores his health.
• Monster Knight: Well, Monster Samurai in any case. He's a man-eating Ghoul, but he still fights like a Red Samurai with his katana, wears the old armor to look the part, and abides by the code of Bushido.
• Noble Demon: He killed the Whampoan elders and desecrated their corpses to instill fear in the rest, but he made sure the deaths were quick and painless.
• Once Killed a Man with a Noodle Implement: In his past life as a Red Samurai, Gaichu once killed a Shiawase executive with a pair of chopsticks after the executive's fiancé, a powerful mage, had forced him to drop his holdout pistol and tactical knife by making them red-hot.
• Our Ghouls Are Creepier: He was infected with the Human Meta-Human Vampiric Virus (HMHVV) Krieger Strain at some point, turning him into a Ghoul. Like other Shadowrun Ghouls, he's very much alive but needs sapient flesh to replace the Essence the HMHVV eats through. Unlike all too many ghouls, he was able to keep his sanity through the agonizing initial infection, and thus does not count as a Technically-Living Zombie-he's essentially the same person as he was before the infection, just in need of corpses to eat.
• Overrated and Underleveled: Gaichû joins your team as a veteran of the Red Samurai and claims to be even stronger than he was before due to his HMHVV-altered state, but despite his training, Red Samurai armor, and mastercrafted katana, neither he nor his equipment are actually much better than a typical melee-oriented Street Samurai player character would be (and actually quite likely inferior to that) and nowhere near his former allies' levels.
• The Perfectionist: Gaichû always strives towards improvement, and it's one reason why he's able to keep his mind as a ghoul. He also mentions that this was his role in his squad as well, driving them towards improvement.
• Picky People Eater: If you ask him to go into detail, Gaichû will reveal that prefers carving out flanks and making sashimi out of it after a few days of salt-water treatment (to bring out the collagen) and with some light seasoning. He doesn't fully cook the meat because cooking metahuman flesh robs it of its nutritional value to him, but he goes through the relatively painstaking preparation in order to retain what little humanity he has left.
• The Pig-Pen: Defied. Most ghouls smell disgusting, and if asked about it, Gaichû will explain that is because most ghouls eat rotten meat and never bathe. Gaichû on the other hand, eats fresh, minimally-cooked meat^note (fully cooking meat would rob it of its nutritional value for him) and regularly cleans himself.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Among his box of treasured possessions is... An octopus plush.
• Rōnin: He is an out-of-the-job Samurai turned mercenary. He still fits the mold of a Samurai pretty well, albeit not a fit that's romanticized or holding him as a particularly moral example.
• Seppuku: As part of the Red Samurai code, he was supposed to have done this after he got infected. He refused and defected from Renraku, becoming a mercenary instead. The rest of his unit views this as a major dishonor.
• Sixth Ranger: He is the last party member to join your team. In fact, he is actually the target of one of your early runs since he is the one killing the Whampoan Elders in retaliation for them betraying him after he did some of their dirty work. You can potentially fight him instead of out-right recruiting him.
• Still Wearing the Old Colors: He still wears his Red Samurai armor even though he is no longer a member of the Renraku military.
• Tired of Running: His personal mission is triggered when you can convince him to stop running from his past and confront his old team. Leading to a raid on a Renraku facility to draw them out, so they can settle things.
• Token Evil Teammate: The most amoral member of your crew, save perhaps Racter, having no real problems with wetwork or collateral damage. That said, has a very strong sense of reputation and professionalism and isn't actively cruel. Like Racter, he'll take your side if you go for the Deal with the Devil option in the final encounter, his only complaint being that it's taken the challenge out of your work.
• Warrior Poet: As befitting his samurai nature, he is very philosophical. That said, he subverts this trope in one way in that he was utterly dreadful in the 'traditional' Samurai art of calligraphy even before becoming a ghoul, and going blind hasn't improved matters.

People of Heoi

Kindly Cheng

A 432 (Straw Sandal, a middle-manager) in the Yellow Lotus triad syndicate, she's turned Heoi into her own personal fiefdom in the Free Economic Zone of Hong Kong. She serves as your main fixer as you spend the campaign trying to pay her back for removing your SIN.

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• Affectionate Nickname: Runners who stay on her good side get to call her "auntie". She will let you know if you are on her good side.
• Black Market: She runs it. In fact, none of the merchants will deal with you until after you complete her delivery mission to Strangler Bao.
• Character Tics: The narration likes to focus on what her fingers are doing while she talks to you including, multiple times, how she hunts and pecks at her tablet and runs a finger around the inside of a shot glass to get the last of the whiskey inside.
• Deadpan Snarker: With emphasis on the 'snarker' part.
  Kindly: Unfortunately, it's only a snippet. There were some technical difficulties with the tap.
  [Glances at Bao, who nods back]
  The person responsible has been sacked.
• The Dreaded: Everyone in your Badass Crew is rightfully afraid of her, even the usually unflappable Gaichu and Racter.
• Eating the Eye Candy: She gives Duncan the Embarrassing Nickname of "Gun Show". When Duncan's in the room with her, her gaze lingers on him quite a bit.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: She actually liked Nightjar, and, along with saving face, a big reason she wants you to kill the Plastic Faced Man is to avenge him. She also takes quite a liking to a player character who is good at their job, shows her proper respect and is informed in how the shadows work.
• Evil Old Folks: She's old; late in the game, she talks about living through the VITAS plaque of 2010 as a little girl, meaning she has to be at least mid-to-late fifties at the youngest. But, she's a dangerous triad boss who has her hands in a lot of pies.
• Expy: In the Devs' commentary, it was mentioned that Kindly was designed after the Landlady in Kung Fu Hustle.
• Faux Affably Evil: True to her name, she puts on the appearance of a friendly, caring, and motherly sort, which she will quite readily drop the second something displeases her.
• Foil: As the team Fixer, she is one to Paul Amsel from Dragonfall. Paul is a long-time friend of the team, works with them for mutual benefit, shows you the books so you know exactly how big his fee is, and in many ways the Team Dad with a genuine interest in maintaining the Flux State. Kindly, on the other hand, does not know the Player Characters, only takes you on for a hefty obligation and because she's lost a source of income, is implied to take a much bigger share than Amsel (she doesn't show you the books), and mostly terrifies the team witless.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: She enjoys smoking her thin cigars.
• I Coulda Been a Contender!: Downplayed. Despite her age and power, she's stuck in a middle-management position in the Triad. She was screwed out of a bid for advancement by the Greater-Scope Villain, who double-crossed her on a deal that would have made her a 438 and went to Cheng's (easier to control) superior instead. Averted if the player makes decisions which are beneficial to her. Her superior gets bumped off at the end of the main campaign, leaving her to take his place. In the epilogue of Shadows, with the help of the player, she then carves out territory for the Yellow Lotus in Seattle.
• I Own This Town: She is the one in charge of Heoi, a fact that you will soon be made very much aware of.
• Ironic Name: Her "kindly" nature is just a facade. She is as kindly as the Furies.
• Lady Drunk: There's seldom a time when she's not hitting the bottle.
• Lady Swears-a-Lot: When she's angry, she can get quite foul-mouthed. Especially noticeable since she uses real-world swears, as opposed to Shadowrun-verse slang.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Her superior dies during the events of the endgame in Hong Kong, leaving Cheng to take his place. And then, to top it off, you can sell her blackmail material on the Greater-Scope Villain that allows her to take her revenge. In Shadows, should the player take her advice, she'll help carve out territory for the Yellow Lotus in Seattle, which becomes very useful after the Lotus is wiped out in Hong Kong.
• Laughably Evil: She's greedy and merciless, but her humorous biting remarks, colorful threats, and Mood-Swinger tendencies make her oddly endearing.
• Mission Control: Your team's fixer and therefore the one vetting your clients.
• The Mob Boss Is Scarier: Gaichu and Racter aren't easily intimidated by anything else in the campaign including a Yama King but Kindly scares the crap out of them.
• Mood-Swinger: She can go from sweet and faux-affable, to pissed off, and back again in a few breaths.
• Non-Indicative Name: She is anything but kindly. You have an option to lampshade it when you first hear her name.
  Player: "Let me guess. This 'Kindly' Cheng is some kind of underworld hard-ass."
  Gobbet: "Like a walnut."
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • She's willing to help two complete nobodies like Duncan and the Player Character not out of the goodness of her heart, but for her own interests. She lost two runners, needs to replace them, and can't afford to look weak by letting an attack on her 'assets' go untouched. She also brings back Bao to the fold despite his attempt to betray her, recognizing his ambition and cunning while simultaneously explaining that it's a gesture of her good will - she has materials to permanently bury him.
  • Should the player disobey orders and let the Plastic-Faced Man live, she will be displeased but lets it slide, since she understands that he poses no threat and he gave valuable information.
  • At the end of the bonus campaign, she tells the player to burn the warehouse with all the advanced Ares weapons to the ground. If she's asked why she doesn't just take it over for herself, she'll point out that doing so will only bring the wrath of Ares down on the Yellow Lotus. And because her triads are too far to take it anyway.
• Seen It All: She takes the fact that a Yama King tried to take over the Walled City in stride. When pressed on this, she talks about living through the VITAS Plague of 2010, the Awakening, the birth of the Spike Babies, goblinzation striking the world, watching the first dragons awaken, etc... She makes a point of saying whatever happened in the Walled City will soon be forgotten as the public moves on to the next big news story. In Shadows, she's savvy enough to correctly predict that no matter what was being done, Ares will take over the HKPF.
• Slave to PR: Like many Asian people of power, she takes the concept of "face" very seriously, as the attack on Nightjar and Gutshot is equivalent to an attack on her authority; as such, she has to hunt down those responsible. This also explains why she is tolerant of ambition — having incompetent minions is a slight on you, but ambitious ones and rebellious ones are not as long as you bring them under control.
  • That said, she also had personal reasons for it, as she did genuinely like Nightjar.
• The Triads and the Tongs: Member of the (fictional) Yellow Lotus syndicate.
• You Have Failed Me: You do not want to get on her bad side. Interestingly, incompetence seems to be higher on her hierarchy of sins than defiance. While she demands loyalty, she appreciates ambition, since it usually goes with intelligence — while an idiot stays an idiot.

Strangler Bao

A 426 (Red Pole, gang leader) in the Yellow Lotus triad. A cold-blooded killer and Kindly Cheng's most dangerous weapon.

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• The Brute: The guy is fucking big... and he's a human.
• Co-Dragons: With you. You are Kindly Cheng's best operative and he becomes her main enforcer once you get him back under control.
• Dragon with an Agenda: He's supposed to be Cheng's main enforcer, but he really wants to do things his way. Your first job is to get him under control.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even he's taken aback when he hears Dr. Shenyang go off on a long, profanity-laden rant complete with some very twisted sexual positions.
• Evil Sounds Deep: His voice is described as a "rumbling bass" that he "emanates," rather than speaks with.
• Evil Old Folks: He's at least in his fifties and Cheng mentions he has children.
• Faux Affably Evil: Cold-blooded and a bit of a dick. However, you can establish a very polite rapport with him which he seems to appreciate.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Anyone named Strangler Bao is clearly not trying to denote an air of friendliness.
• Pragmatic Villainy: He never seeks retribution on the Player Character or Kindly Cheng, as doing either will spell very bad things for him.
• Red Herring: He's set up like he's some future boss fight. Duncan warns not to cross him, and he's deliberately set up as dangerous, his size and level of augmentation drawing parallels to Audran. And he's never fought.
• The Starscream: Tried this, but it turns out that Kindly Cheng was prepared for this possibility. She appreciates his ambition, though.
• Villainous Rescue: When Qian Ya tries to kill you by using magic to force you to walk in front of an oncoming train, Strangler Bao is the one who pulls you to safety.

Ka Fai Family

^Henry

^Ermine

^Frederick

^Callum

A family of four trolls who run Club 88. The parents, Henry and Ermine, are the owners; Henry working behind the bar and Ermine selling guns in the backroom. Their sons, Frederick and Callum, act as bouncer and drugslinger respectively.

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• Amazonian Beauty: The narration for Ermine mentions that she must have been quite the looker in her youth. She is also a troll, and even the scrawniest troll will usually have enough muscle to make a human weightlifter jealous...
• Black Market: Ermine sells firearms in the back of the club.
• Bouncer: Frederick does this with enthusiasm. He gives rough pat downs, reinforces the rules mercilessly, and even marked down his record throw distance with a duct tape X on the street, all while remaining laid back and gregarious.
• The Call Put Me on Hold: Frederick. He wants to be a Shadowrunner, and after a while is determined to be a pirate like his dad, but beyond being pretty strong, he's extremely naive about crime. And it turns out that his dad wasn't a pirate; Fred just romanticizes his old man's fairly mundane (for a sailor) past.
• Dark Secret: Two, with one darker than the other. Callum is not Henry's biological son, while Henry's a smuggler sailor. Due to these two secrets, Callum doesn't understand why his mother is holding him back from a job offer at a corp (the offer came from his biological dad), while Frederick misunderstood that Henry's a pirate. If you persuade the family to stick together, Ermine eventually told Callum of his secret, while Henry set the record straight for Frederick.
• Dumb Muscle: Frederick is clearly not the brightest bulb in the box, though more out of youth and inexperience than from being actually stupid.
• Dysfunctional Family: What they turn out to be after a while. Ermine struggles to hold her family together with them resisting by degrees, Henry is depressed and misses work that's meaningful to him, Fred aspires to be a professional criminal, and when Callum isn't high, he's looking to leave the family business to become a wage slave and blames his mother for trying to shoot down this aspiration. (He's right, but she's not without good reason.) How much of this stems from their own family dynamic or from the the nightmares pouring out of Kowloon City affecting people's behavior isn't firmly established.
• Family Business:
  • The Ka Fais run Club 88, one of the hottest night clubs in Hong Kong and also one of the best places to buy black market firearms. Henry is the de jure owner and bartender, Ermine sells black market small arms, Callum sells drugs on the club floor, and Frederick serves as the bouncer.
  • As a young sailor, Henry made some extra money on the side by smuggling small arms. He kept it secret from Ermine because he was afraid of that she would react... badly if she found out that he was also a gunrunner. She did, and he was right about her reaction, but it turned out that she wasn't upset by his crimes, but by his narrow profit margins. While his fears of their relationship ending were never realized, he told her to do it herself if she thought she could do better. Being a former corp suit with business savvy, she did, and they established they Club 88 together, where selling guns out of the backroom remains one of the clubs main profit streams. Their children Callum and Frederick eventually joined in as well.
• Jaded Washout: Henry. Downplayed — he's a former sailor and established the club purely out of necessity. He's completely out of his element and feels useless, not really providing for his family or doing anything. He gets over it once he told Frederick of his past as a smuggler sailor (not a pirate), and the family decides that the four of them could go out to sea on a boat built by Henry.
• Kind Hearted Cat Lover: Though not strictly kind hearted, Fred is the friendliest of the family, and his character portrait shows him with a pet cat on his shoulders. Oddly enough, the cat is never brought up in-game.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Ermine took advantage of her being a Troll while working in the corporate world, as others were either intimidated by her or underestimated her intelligence and business acumen.
• Screening the Call: Callum seeks a corporate job, but his mother, a former wage-slave herself, torpedoes his efforts. She's additionally motivated by the fact that her co-worker with whom she had an affair with is still a part of the corporation Callum wants to work for. He is, in fact, Callum's biological father.
• Video Game Caring Potential: You can encourage the family to stick together and point out the agendas in play that threaten to tear them apart, leading to a reconciliation between them.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can also encourage the family to go separate ways, leaving Ermine alone and alienated from both her sons and her husband, all of whom are implied not to live for long afterwards.

Ten Armed Ambrose

A Caucasian human from the UCAS Midwest, he's a former rigger named Ripshot, turned local street doc.

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• The Alcoholic: His schedule shows that he frequently goes on drinking binges. It's frequent enough that he's scheduled his hangovers.
• An Arm and a Leg: And most of his other leg, a few fingers, a couple of organs...needless to say, this guy is a bit of a mess.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Suffice to say, you don't wind up a nigh-quadriplegic from delivering milk bottles.
• Faking the Dead: He states that one of his former teammates, Karen, "was an artist at faking deaths." She faked both of theirs after she rescued him from a run gone south, and they escaped to Hong Kong.
• Handicapped Badass: The guy's missing an arm, both legs, a few fingers, and is marred by scars from reconstructive surgery, and has to outsource his renal system to an external prosthetic. All this due to a bad end to a career as a shadowrunner.
  • Also the reason that he doesn't replace his lost limbs. Since he already has a boatload of rigger's ware in him, and he's not willing to get more and give up that last slice of essence; and he has "the aches", or ACHiS, a biological maladaption to his cyberware that gave him a long list of allergies, including the cloned replacement parts he would otherwise be able to get without costing any essence.^note Though there are a number of maladaptions for excessive cyber, ACHiS doesn't appear to have been part of the Shadowrun verse before this game, and seems to have been invented for poor Ambrose.
• That Man Is Dead: Was a runner called Ripshot, but stopped using that alias after a very bad run. He's okay with that, since "Ripshot" was a piece of shit.
• Mr. Exposition: Conversations with him about essence delivers information which would be common knowledge to players familiar with Shadowrun or PCs already living in that world, but which new players wouldn't be. He also tells the scholastic history of the "Rule of Six", as well as the rumors about advances in restoring lost essence and staying alive with negative essence.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Played with, he controls the various robotic arms and tools that make up his shop almost as casually as he would his real limbs.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Let's just say you eventually discover there's a lot of holes in his story and leave it at that. Ambrose never reveals anything definite one way or the other, leaving it uncertain how much — if any — of his backstory was true. A few questions that never get answered...
  • If he was ever in the UCAS military.
  • His age and who some of the photos in his shop depict.
  • His stake in Chicago as it was shutdown.
  • Particularly, his relationship with Karen, and the possibility that he has a son.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: The run that handicapped him messed up more than just his body. He learned to live with it, but it's very obvious that the memory of it still haunts him and he'll never know true peace. Karen, his friend and partner who also saved his life, was one too. Unfortunately, she never recovered and killed herself due to the strain.
• Shrouded in Myth: The Shadowland BBS is full of stories about his exploits. However, one of the posters point out that there were at least a couple of notable Ripshots and it's impossible to determine if it's the same person.
• Tragic Keepsake: He has a semi-assembled V8 engine in his shop, and he mentions he liked cars before retiring from the shadows as a shadow of his former self. There may be more to it that that...
• Unreliable Narrator: After he's done telling you his life story (and you potentially had a very moving To Absent Friends moment with him), you get an opportunity to look around his shop a bit more. With sufficiently high stats and skills, you can find hints that at least some parts of the story you were just told may be lies.

Maximum Law

The local tech merchant and Whampoa representative.

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• Call-Forward: He's big on the advent of Augmented Reality, which became a reality in the Shadowrun-verse after The Crash 2.0 in 2064.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: He is always wearing a pair of augmented reality googles and he gets pissed if you refer to them as VR googles.
• Magic Versus Science: If you make a snide comment about "techies trying to proxy astral projection" concerning his augmented reality googles he gets pissed, says magic is just a shortcut and it can't do anything tech can't do better.
• Shoot the Dog: When Strangler Bao orders you to plug the leak Law made by posting metadata on Shadowland BBS, one option is to kill him. If you didn't handle him, Bao kills him instead.
• Small Name, Big Ego: The guy's got quite the ego for a techie. This bites him in the ass later on. If you sold him metadata about your missions, it turns out that he endangered you and Heoi while moving it forward — he's not aware that the Shadowland BBS is full of, well, Shadowrunners and that it's anonymous, not secure.
• Too Dumb to Live: Yeah, posting metadata about Kindly Cheng's shadowrunner team and their operations on Shadowland BBS while operating literally in Kindly Cheng's backyard is not a path to longevity.
• Violation of Common Sense: The player can invoke this by storing metadata till just before going after the Plastic-Faced Man, then spilling it all to Law in one deluge. Subverted in that this is the best way to get nuyen out of the metadata mini-game.

Reliable Matthew

A merchant who sells rigger drones.

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• Fell Off the Back of a Truck: He mentions that most of his drones probably "fell off the back of a boat".
• Hidden Depths: While he's often obnoxiously happy to the point most other residents find him infuriating to deal with, he occasionally shows moments of lucidity and seriousness, such as when discussing how Drones have helped society after being accused of selling "Job Stealers."
  Matthew: Because of mechanization, we don't force workers to breathe as many chemicals in refineries. We don't make teenage girls pick silk cocoons out of boiling water. Not anymore.
• Happiness in Mind Control: Matthew is quite happy with his Reliable persona and doesn't want to stop using it, even though it's overriding his mind when active. He reacts with horror if you try to convince him to stop.
• Honest John's Dealership: He tries to play off that his drones aren't stolen.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: During the events of the endgame, the normally unflappable Reliable Matthew persona expresses some slight envy at a pair of men sharing a bottle of whiskey nearby.
• Job-Stealing Robot: Gets a lot of flak from this trope.
• Split-Personality Takeover: Reconstructed. The Reliable Matthew persona is an artificial personality based on somebody who was high on novacoke, and produced by slotted chips. The real Matthew is extremely shy and very guilty about his job. Once you discover and discuss this, the Reliable Matthew personality says that it's benevolent: its main goal is to protect the real Matthew from psychological harm by putting on an unbreakable facade.
• Stepford Smiler: See the spoiler above. His Reliable Matthew persona never stops smiling, even in the middle of an Awakened Typhoon ravaging Heoi on top of the absolute nightmares pouring out of the Walled City. Though his posture and mannerisms during the aforementioned events make it clear that the persona is clearly feeling the strain.

Crafty Xu

A local who has taken over her mother's magic shop.

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• Cassandra Truth: Her mother went crazy trying to figure out what was corrupting the Kowloon Walled City and became convinced that fairytale monsters called the Yama Kings were behind it all..
• Embarrassing First Name: Her birth name was Miao (homophone of "meow"). "Crafty" was her childhood family nickname until she immigrated to Hong Kong with her mother, where she registered Crafty as her first name.
• Hot Librarian: Her magic shop has lots of books, and Crafty herself loves to read in addition to being attractive.
• Meaningful Name: Crafty Xu's storyline helps you trick the Queen with a Thousand Teeth if you follow it to its completion.
• Religion is Magic: Crafty's mother came from an old school Taoist tradition, and performing the rites made her good at ritual magic. Crafty, in contrast, is more of a hermetic mage, and can do more practical, everyday spells.
• Room Full of Crazy: Downplayed. Her mother had a veritable library of books on numerous subjects from where she was trying to figure out what was wrong with the Walled City. Said books have notes upon notes scribbled in the margins.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Her mother had a talent for ritual magic, but couldn't cast practical spells like a rain shield or bottomless trash can to save her life.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Crafty's questline can be ignored without it affecting the plot. But, it's one of the conditions required to Rules Lawyer the Big Bad of the story and get the best ending.
• Statuesque Stunner: She's noted as being nearly 2 meters tall, or nearly 6ft 7in. While this wouldn't be unusual for an elf, her ears aren't visible in her character portrait, and her sprite appears to be human.

Gin, Lau and Shyu

^Gin

^Lau

^Shyu

A trio of men who like playing Go outdoors.

• Cool Old Guy: Shyu is friendly, jovial, and eager to speak to the player about the dreams or things in general.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Why Gin is sour and rather unfriendly. He only gives a general idea of what happened, but his past didn't look at all pretty.
• Grumpy Old Man: Gin is rather sour and doesn't like you talking to him.
• Hidden Depths: In the Shadowrun universe, Leonisation is not a cheap process, affordable only by the rich and powerful. Now, combined with him spending his time in Heoi playing Go, it is not hard to deduce that Lau is way more than what he appears to be.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Despite the difference in age, Lau prefers to spend his free time playing Go with the old men. Truth is, he's the elder among them.
• Older Than They Look: Lau has undergone Leonisation and is in reality the oldest of the trio.
• Psychic Dreams for Everyone: They are all heavily touched by the dreams that have taken over Heoi and you can talk about the nightmares with them.
• Those Two Guys: Those Three Guys. They're always playing Go together and you can only ever converse to them as a group.

Other Characters in Hong Kong

Raymond Black

The foster father of Duncan and the Player Character, who provided the education for both after taking them off the streets. He sets the story into motion when he sends a message urging them to meet him in Hong Kong.

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• Armour-Piercing Question: Talking with Duncan reveals the Main Character once managed to defuse one of Raymond and Duncan's rows with an old saying Raymond's mother used on him. You get to use it again in the climax, which helps in making the two come to terms.
• The Atoner: Most of his actions for the last two decades have been to atone for his failure with the Walled City and the Fortune Engine.
• Control Freak: He used to be inflexible and wanted everything to go his way, especially when it came to his adopted kids. This was likely, as Duncan later points out, because he came from a rich and pampered background.
• Dark and Troubled Past: His real name is Edward Tsang. He is the son of Tsang Enterprises CEO; the same one who ordered the hit on you, Duncan and the initial shadowrunner team. He is also partially to blame for why Kowloon Walled City is so screwed up in the first place.
• The Dutiful Son: Sees his trip back to Hong Kong as doing his duty to fix the mess he caused all those years ago. However, his mother sees him as the prodigal son. "Prodigal" and "Scion" are passwords guarding the Matrix nodes holding correspondence between Josephine and the scientists who were supposed to re-program his memories.
• The Engineer: He designed and built a machine that could essentially alter probability on a large scale. Said machine is one of the main reasons the Walled City is such a hellhole.
• Exact Words: In the intro cut-scene, he tells you that you and Duncan are the only real family he has left. That "real" is important, as his mother is still alive and in the game. She's the Greater-Scope Villain.
• Fate Worse than Death: If he undergoes his Heroic Sacrifice, Duncan mentions it's likely he'll spend the rest of eternity being tortured in Qian Ya's court.
• Heroic Sacrifice: He can potentially sacrifice himself to stop his machine from taking the essence of everybody in the Walled City.
• Honest Corporate Executive: He genuinely wanted to turn the Kowloon Walled City into a clean low-income housing development project that would help uplift the poor with the Fortune Engine. It didn't work out when his less scrupulous mother had different ideas.
• I Have No Son!:
  • According to Duncan, he didn't say a word about the Player Character after he or she inexplicably disappeared, indicating that he disowned them. He clearly changed his mind about that sometime before the game begins.
  • Inverted and subverted with his mother. Josephine was perfectly happy to re-admit him back to the fold... after some memory adjustments.
• Mentor Archetype: He took a couple of street kids out of the slum and raised them to be productive members of society.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: He gets attacked at the beginning of the game. Subverted in that the attackers don't actually kill him. Double subverted if he makes a Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the game.
• Never Found the Body: Because his body wasn't found and there's no footage of him actually getting shot, Duncan is convinced he's still alive. Turns out he is.
• Put on a Bus: If he survived the events of Hong Kong, then he returns to Seattle sometime before the events of the bonus campaign.
• Riddle of the Sphinx: The passwords guarding his memory fragments are this, except that "night" is not death but old age, while "dusk" refers to middle age.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: He built the Fortune Engine with the intention of helping the less fortunate. He had no way of knowing it would malfunction doing the opposite while his mother took advantage of it for her own gain. Or that by calling his adopted children to help him fix it, they would become wrapped up in a conspiracy and lose everything.
• Walking Spoiler: Raymond's past is tied heavily into the backstory of the game, making nearly everything about him a spoiler.
• You're Not My Mother: At the beginning of the game, he calls the player character and Duncan "the only family he has," even though his mother is still alive.

The Plastic-Faced Man

A professional assassin and mercenary responsible for the hit on Raymond Black seen in the intro.

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• Affably Evil: He's very polite - the worst thing he does after you kidnap him is snark a bit. Due to his Laser-Guided Amnesia, he actually has no qualms about spilling the beans about his part in the plot. He even helps you with the auto-wipe process by showing you a direct feed from his memories so you don't waste time asking questions.
• The Dragon: Subverted, he's just a hired gun. If you let him live, the game even lampshades it by giving you the achievement "Just a Pawn".
• Expressive Mask: Actually an entire prosthetic face rather than a mask, but thanks to the flexibility of its material and synthetic paramusclature beneath the plastic exterior, he is still capable of forming expressions, though in a range limited to shades of stoicism and idle bemusement.
• Gold and White Are Divine: His white plastic face is inlaid with artistic gold lacing, making him look like a mask from a Chinese opera, communicating sophistication and wealth. As might be expected, Light Is Not Good here.
• Hired Guns: He is a high caliber mercenary and assassin. And you and your foster father are his next job.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: His brain is reconstructed so that his memory can be auto-wiped. This way, he protects his client and also himself from potential retribution from both his bosses and their enemies, since he doesn't remember a thing.
• Red Right Hand: His face is made of plastic. It is pretty hard to miss.
• The Stoic: The fact that he doesn't remember anything about his hits or enemies makes him very chill.
• Walking Spoiler: Going after him triggers the endgame of the main campaign.
• White Mask of Doom: Technically a prosthetic face rather than a mask, but it serves the same trope role all the same.

Josephine Tsang

Tsang Enterprises CEO and a member of the Hong Kong Executive Council, Josephine is not a woman to be trifled with. She is also the mother of Edward Tsang, also known as Raymond Black, and is the Player Character and Duncan's foster grandmother. She is also the one who set all events of the plot into motion and is the person most directly responsible for the mess that is Kowloon Walled City.

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• Corrupt Corporate Executive: She is the CEO of Tsang Enterprises and she is more corrupt than most.
• Corrupt Politician: She is a member of Hong Kong's Executive Council, which means she is one of the eight most important people in Hong Kong and a key member of the Hong Kong government.
• Evil Matriarch: She has her son kidnapped with the intent to alter his memories and orders a hit on her foster grandchildren. She also sabotaged her son's crowning achievement, the Fortune Engine, solely to benefit her ambitions.
• Evil Old Folks: She's old, considering your foster father is sixty-five and she is his mother which means she has to be in her mid-eighties minimum, but she's still the leader of a MegaCorp and one of the most dangerous people in Hong Kong. Her aspirations on Kowloon Walled City also kick off the plot.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Qian Ya, The Queen of a Thousand Teeth, may be the one you fight but Josephine is the one who set everything in motion. She is the one who rebuilt Kowloon Walled City after the original was torn down in the 1990s. She was the one who ordered the construction of the Fortune Engine, knowing full well that she was playing with a lot of fire in that endeavor. She is the one who framed you for crimes you didn't commit, who ordered the hit on you, who kidnapped your foster father. In short, everything bad that happens to you and the Walled City as a whole is a direct result of her actions.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The Fortune Engine made her rich and powerful; it is also the cause of her eventual downfall and death when it gets destroyed.
• It's All About Me: If you manage to keep Raymond alive, he reveals that the entire reason she's been opposing you is because she knowingly modified the Fortune Engine to drain good luck out of Kowloon Walled City to benefit Tsang Mechanical, essentially dooming millions of the most poor and desperate people imaginable to an inescapable quagmire of misfortune and being willing to unleash an Eldritch Abomination upon them just to benefit herself.
• Karma Houdini: In the Deal with the Devil ending, she continues to prosper as the Fortune Engine continues to power her luck.
  • If you don't get incriminating evidence, but get a good ending, then she is ousted from her CEO position and Tsang her former AAA company drops to a B-rating. However she's still a beloved public figure.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Destroying the Fortune Engine does not do wonders of Tsang in the aftermath of the story. Wuxing Inc. stages a hostile takeover of Tsang Enterprises and dismantles her company. She is then filed away in a corporate prison where it is claimed she hanged herself three months later; though knowing the setting, she was likely executed by Wuxing.
• Villain with Good Publicity: The Hong Kong media typically portrays Tsang as a generous philanthropist, and the general public knows nothing about her immoral traits. Until the player shuts down the Fortune Engine and digs up the dirt on her. Her company's stocks plummet and she gets into really deep trouble with the council.
• Walking Spoiler: Knowing anything about her gives away a huge chunk of the plot.

Qian Ya, the Queen of a Thousand Teeth

^{Qian Ya unmasked}

The Big Bad of the game.

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• The Battle Didn't Count: And for very good reason. Bullets aren't really going to do much more than inconvenience what's essentially a minor god of misery. Later subverted, if you kill her three times: she's so spent from throwing up projections that she has to withdraw long enough to take a breath-more than enough time for Raymond to permanently seal her.
• Big Bad: Her imminent manifestation sets the plot in motion after Josephine Tsang had laid down the groundwork.
• Body Horror: Just being too close to her causes your teeth to fall out. Her servants remove their own teeth and tongues.
• Body Motifs: Teeth. The psychic dreams she inflicts on people are filled with horrific tooth imagery, people lose their teeth just by being around her, she has teeth jutting out all over her body, and even her realm is filled with teeth.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: Although you 'beat' her twice, she instantly regenerates and makes it clear she's only testing you. Only making a bargain with her will stop her from manifesting completely.
• Chekhov's Gunman: She makes appearances multiple times through the campaign, including during the intro, before you finally meet face-to-face.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: It's implied that the Yama Kings were made from the collective misery and bad qi of the Walled City, given life through local folklore. No matter which came first, the Yama Kings are very very real and the residents' 'faith' in them probably isn't helping.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Like Audran before her, she has two turns every round, meaning she can perform 6 AP worth of actions. This is especially apparent when she hits you with four consecutive claw attacks.
• Cool Mask: She's frequently described as looking indescribably beautiful and alluring while she wears her golden mask. When she takes it and the rest of her robes off, you'll desperately wish she'd put them all back on.
• Deal with the Devil: She offers the Player Character 14 years of fortune if you're willing to just walk away from your final encounter and give her Kowloon. Your character can inflict a 'deal' of your own on her, if you know how.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: There is an achievement for hitting her with an unarmed attack.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: If you have been following Crafty's and Is0bel's storylines AND managed to invoke the common sentence which Raymond and Duncan remembers, it is possible to force her to retreat back into her own dimension and seal the tunnel behind her by blackmailing her.
• Evil Is Visceral: She's basically made out of gum-tissue and teeth. Her boss arena during the second fight shares this trait.
• Fighting a Shadow: Fighting her reveals that you aren't really attacking her so much as disposable projections. She still needs some time to rebuild them if you damage them, however. This gives you a chance to cut off her connection to the Walled City.
• Final Boss: Provides the final physical combat encounter in the Hong Kong campaign.
• Flunky Boss: She always has a few spirit mooks for backup.
• Foreshadowing: Is0bel mentions her by name in one of the earliest conversations you have with her, as well as her associations with teeth and slavery.
• The Heartless: Crafty describes her as the Yama King of the enslaved, and her motifs include enslavery, submission and self-mutilation in her service.
• Hive Queen: Yama Kings are both their army and the mind that controls them, as she explains if you ask.
• I Gave My Word: The Yama Kings only deal in Magically Binding Contracts, as long as both sides of the bargain know the rules. You can use this against her if you've been researching on the Kings and managed to resolve tensions between Raymond and Duncan.
• Light Is Not Good: She wears a golden mask, a white gown, and is draped in white veils. They do nothing to hide her evil.
• Meaningful Name: Her name translates from Cantonese as "Thousand Teeth".
• Mind Rape: Including trying to make your character commit suicide. She's also the cause of the nightmares plaguing the inhabitants of Kowloon and Heoi.
• Mook Maker: In the first phase of the battle with her, she will resummon any of the spirits you kill.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: What else can you really expect from something called 'the queen of a thousand teeth'?
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: In her final form, she reveals six clawed arms.
• Nightmare Face: When she takes off her mask. Though it can hardly be called a face, so much as a mass of meat and teeth vaguely resembling an enormous mouth. She has an Eyeless Face, with no skin giving a flayed, muscular appearance, and a rictus Glasgow Grin that literally stretches from ear to ear, filled with far too many teeth.
• Oh, Crap!: Her reaction if you figure out how to blackmail her. She recovers quickly enough to offer you a Deal with the Devil...only to go through a worse one if you pull off My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours and realize that her flinching was more than enough to force her, legally, to listen to your contract alone.
• Psychic Dreams for Everyone: All featuring yours truly.
• Rules Lawyer: All Yama Kings are rules lawyers to a fault, and the best ending requires you to negotiate Qian Ya into submission. When Qian Ya gives you an ultimatum, you threaten to turn the Fortune Machine to reverse, which would make even more Yama Kings show up and fight her. When she agrees to leave with her followers in order to dissuade you, you invoke the Yama King law that forbids compromises, forcing her to obey you unconditionally. You then order her to free all her slaves, destroy her monsters, go back to her home dimension, and shut the gateway behind her.
• Shaped Like Itself: "Qian Ya" literally means "Thousand Teeth". Her avatar also features lots of teeth.
• Shoot the Medic First: In both phases of her battle, killing the medic is imperative. In the first, she herself is the medic, reviving any mooks you kill. In the second, her mooks empower her in various ways (including healing), and therefore must be killed first.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the best ending, when you reveal you know any concession in an argument makes a Yama King vulnerable to having all of their right to forge agreements ceded to the other party. The formerly unflappable demon empress is reduced to incoherent sputtering and can't even work up the will to be angry even as her laws force her into destroying the Fortune Machine and releasing all of her slaves.
• Walking Spoiler: Suffice it to say she — and her true nature — is very important to the plot.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: She claims that revealing her totality would turn your mind into pulp. Even seeing her unmasked is pretty unnerving.

Chief Inspector Krait

The head of the Special Duties Unit, and the person in charge of hunting the crew down in the Hong Kong campaign. She serves as the primary antagonist in the Shadows of Hong Kong bonus campaign.

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• The Bad Guy Wins: Yes, Krait is defeated at the end of the campaign, but only after she completed her mission for Ares Macrotechnology. She succeeds in destroying the reputation of the Hong Kong Police Force under Mitsuhama and allows Ares to seize control. Granted, she specifically technically doesn't win; even if she survives, she now has a bounty on her head since Ares wants her dead and has to go into hiding for a long time.
• Corporate Samurai: She is a highly capable and experienced SWAT team commander who sells her services to the highest bidder. This includes Josephine Tsang and Ares Macrotechnology.
• Didn't Think This Through: With enough Intelligence, the player can remind her that Ares will not let her off after millions of nuyen worth of gear (the spider tanks) had been trashed for no good reason. This comes after you've shown her evidence that Ares is planning to bump her off after the whole assignment, and she had brushed that one off as something she can talk her way out of.
• Dirty Cop: Brutal, extreme in her methods, and deeply corrupt. Her true profession isn't really a cop at all; she's a merc for hire.
• The Dragon: As the chief enforcer of the Hong Kong Police Force hunting you down, she effectively serves this role for Josephine Tsang in the main Hong Kong campaign. She could also be considered the Dragon for Ares Macrotechnology.
• Dragon Their Feet: You deal with her in the Shadows of Hong Kong bonus campaign, after Tsang has potentially been deposed.
• Final Boss: For the Shadows of Hong Kong bonus campaign. You can convince her to walk away if you present to her evidence that Ares will dispose of her once her job is done.
• Karma Houdini: She'll simply leave if you talk her down. However, given that Ares intends to eliminate her as a loose end, she now has a bounty on her head and will need to pull up stakes and go into hiding.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: 'Krait' is the common name for a genus of snake native to Southeast Asia, and one of the most venomous in the world.
• Nothing Personal: Krait's a constant thorn in your side in both the Hong Kong campaigns, but it's always been for a paycheck. When she meets you face-to-face, she'll even say this word-for-word. You can even use this to get her to back down from the final fight if you point out that you know she's actually a mercenary, not a cop, and she has no loyalty to HKPF or Ares, especially since the latter tends to have her eliminated once they get what they want.
• Only in It for the Money: Why is she killing so many people and trashing Mitsuhama's reputation? Because Ares is paying her to.
• Police Brutality: Her entire MO. The bonus campaign opens up with her personally ordering the HKPF to open fire on very obviously unarmed and non-rioting civilians. Turns out she is deliberately invoking this; she's actually a mercenary paid by Ares to smear the HKPF's name so that Ares can secure a contract with Hong Kong's ruling council to take over the HKPF.
• Pragmatic Villainy: She'll call off the attack on you if she finds out that luck is on your side from your deal with Qian Ya, realizing that she's effectively fated to lose against you, or if you present her with evidence that Ares plans to have her eliminated and point out that she's just a merc who's going to be in hot water with Ares once they find out that she just let millions of nuyen get trashed on her watch.
• Punch-Clock Villain: She's actually a mercenary hired by Ares to smear HKPF's name so that the council will hire them to take over. You can use this to your advantage if you point this out along with revealing the fact that Ares intends to kill her once her job is complete.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Even after dismantling the spider tanks and men she had thrown at you before her parley, she still thinks that her odds against you are in her favor. You can, however, convince her to back down if you reveal that you know she's a mercenary, not a cop, and that Ares intends to have her eliminated once the job is done since, even if she did win against you, she's still a rogue agent who's only loyalty is to her paycheck and on top of that, Ares is not going to look kindly on her being nothing more than a Punch-Clock Villain who just let millions of nuyen get trashed on her watch.
• SWAT Team: She heads the Special Duties Unit, one of the HKPF's elite units tasked to handle heavily armed criminals and terrorists alike.
• Unwitting Pawn: She's ultimately just an expendable pawn for Ares Macrotechnology. One who they will quite gladly terminate once she's outlived her usefulness.
• Villain with Good Publicity: She's corrupt and takes Police Brutality to a whole new level, but she's considered to be a hero and is thus the unofficial spokeswoman for the SDU.

Senior Inspector Fiona Qiu

A representative of Mitsuhama Computer Technologies. She serves as the co-leader of the task force formed by Hong Kong's Corporate Council to look into the criminal activities of Chief Inspector Krait. As such, she's your primary employer in the bonus campaign.

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• All for Nothing: Even with Mitsuhama taking over the warehouse at the end of Shadows, they still eventually lost control of the HKPF to Ares.
• Determinator: She'll call in every favor she has to make sure the mission succeeds, run her own reputation with Mitsuhama through the mud, and accompany you in the field personally, just to make sure the job gets done. It takes her nearly passing out due to excessive Drain during the final mission to stop her.
• Fire-Forged Friends: While things between her and the player start off cold, they can build up a polite rapport after fighting side-by-side in the tail-end of the bonus campaign.
• Foil: To Kindly Cheng. They're both ruthless hardasses who press-gang the player into working for them then serve as their fixer for a series of jobs. However, Qiu is A Lighter Shade of Grey and more willing to help the team out directly while also being friendlier and more personable overall.
• Guest-Star Party Member: She'll fight alongside you in two story-based missions.
• The Gunslinger: In addition to being a talented mage and shaman, she's also a crackshot with a pistol.
• Lady Looks Like a Dude: She has a pretty mannish appearance.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: Works for one.
• Mage Marksman: She is skilled in both hermetic and shamanic magic in addition to being a capable gunfighter.
• Mission Control: She is your primary employer for the bonus campaign.
• Mysterious Benefactor: The beginning of the bonus campaign reveals that she's the one who called off the APB on the Hong Kong crew because she intended to use them for her own purposes.
• Plausible Deniability: Part of the reason she recruits your crew for the operation as you have a perfectly reasonable motive to go after Krait on your own initiative which would make it easy for her to wash her, and Mitsuhama's, hands of the whole affair with little to no public fallout.
• Recruiting the Criminal: It was her idea to (forcefully) hire the Hong Kong crew to help her take down Krait because she knows they're skilled runners and because they would have a believable motive for going against the Chief Inspector. In short, they're the perfect disposable assets.
• Shadow Archetype: Her skill set and capabilities are close to Gobbet's, but her personality and outlook on life are pretty much the exact opposite of the Crew's second-in-command.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Downplayed. Starts off very icy, but warms up to the group once Lam and Koo betray her to become friendly but still professional.
• Unwitting Pawn: Both her partner Lam and mage underling Koo are planning to use her as a patsy to further discredit Mitsuhama.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: If you're feeling cruel, you can kill her at the end of the bonus campaign once it's clear you have no more use for her.

Senior Inspector Andy Lam

A police investigator looking into the crooked dealings of Krait. He serves as the co-leader of the task force alongside Qiu, handling the technical sides of the case.

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• Anti-Villain: He's not in it for the money like Krait and the rest of her moles. He genuinely wants to change things for the better.
• Apologetic Attacker: He repeatedly says how sorry he is to both you and Qiu after he and Koo trap you both in a magical seal.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He appears to have a close relationship with a woman named Irene Tong. Its exact nature is a mystery, but a tragedy done to her family at the hands of the HKPF was implicitly the catalyst for Lam's Start of Darkness.
• Facial Horror: He gets horrible burns all over his face and body after Qiu unleashes a powerful blast of magic on him.
• Ineffectual Death Threats: He sends a message threatening bodily harm on Koo if things don't change for the better. Since Koo is a mage while Lam is a Non-Action Guy, there's no way he could have backed that up. Qiu says as much herself.
• Nice Guy: Unlike Qiu, who's a hardass, he's very friendly, polite and apologetic to the Player Character. Being as he's secretly on Krait's side, it would be more accurate to describe him as Affably Evil.
• Senseless Sacrifice: Ultimately, his death means nothing as while Ares did take over the HKPF from Mitsuhama, it's a Meet the New Boss situation.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: He doesn't approve of Koo and Krait's brutal methods, but he honestly hopes that Hong Kong will be a safer place with Ares backing the police force.
• Walking Spoiler: Courtesy of being The Mole for Krait.

Recurring Characters

Major Power Players

Hans Brackhaus

An "employee" of Saeder-Krupp.

See the characters page for the overall franchise.

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• Affably Evil: Or at least Affably Amoral. While his villainous traits are never specified in-game, anybody who's aware that he's Lofwyr will know what he's done and what he's capable of. Regardless, Brackhaus is nothing if not civil and professional, if a bit snobbish, in all his interactions.
• Berserk Button: Downplayed trope. If you ask him what it's like to be a dragon's servant in Dead Man's Switch, he becomes visibly annoyed and tells you his relationship with Lofwyr is one he doesn't care to discuss. This is, of course, because he's not a servant at all, but actually the dragon himself.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: As a Great Dragon, concepts like "good" and "evil" don't apply to his species save for Feuerschwinge. Dragons only see things in whether they're "givers" or "takers", with his species being the ultimate takers.
• The Chessmaster: Lofwyr set the whole plot of Dragonfall in motion by being the one who tipped Green Winters off about the mansion. He actually points it out to you if you initially refuse to work for Lofwyr by invoking the old "Never cut a deal with a dragon" shadowrunner tenet, claming you already did.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: He owns Saeder-Krupp, one of the biggest and most powerful corporations on the planet and he is an amoral bastard.
• Everyone Has Standards: If, at the end of Dragonfall, you tell him that you would never release the virus because you think genocide is morally wrong, he comments on his surprise at hearing a morality-based motivation from a murderer and a thief, before saying that that instinctive revulsion towards the idea of killing a whole group of beings is a good one, and may save humanity just as it saved dragonkind.
• Exposition of Immortality: Likens the life of the Dragonfall Player Character to that of a moth from a dragon's point of view — someone whose entire life passes between the other's heartbeats. It is a not-so-subtle Take That! to Adrian Vauclair, who fits the description rather well.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Played with in Dragonfall. On one hand, it's implied that he's the one responsible for getting the Berlin crew mixed up in the whole plot, getting many people killed all so he could play it subtly. On the other, it was always his intention to put a stop to Vauclair's plan, which absolutely needed to be stopped as it would have spelled the end of the world. Besides that, Lofwyr is also the brains behind the eventual fall of the Flux State, though that's admittedly a separate issue from the one you're dealing with throughout the campaign.
• King Incognito: The game never outright tells you, but anyone who knows the setting knows Brackhaus is Lofwyr himself. Harlequin does drop some not-so-subtle hints as to Hans' true nature.
• Minor Major Character: He only makes a single appearance in both Dead Man's Switch and Dragonfall, and is largely only there to provide some exposition. However, he plays a large role in the background of both campaigns and as Lofwyr, CEO of the largest megacorp in the world, he is one of the most feared and prominent figures in the Shadowrun universe.
• Mr. Exposition: An expert on dragons and insect spirits.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: Just a little hint that he ain't human and is actually a dragon.
• Villain Takes an Interest: Well more like powerful, amoral bastard takes an interest. In both campaigns your character impresses him and that translates into job opportunities. Harlequin advises against it, after all Lofwyr is the guy responsible for the phrase "Never Deal With A Dragon" and Harlequin tells you not to forget that little phrase.
• What You Are in the Dark: Amongst other things, he asks you at the end of Dragonfall if, hypothetically speaking, you'd be willing to just release Vauclair's virus and exterminate dragonkind, provided you knew no-one else would be caught in the crossfire. Refusing no matter the reason earns you his respect.
• White Hair, Black Heart: He has white hair and is the ruthless CEO of the largest MegaCorp on Earth. And a Great Dragon to boot.

Minor Recurring Characters

Aljernon Half-Dream

A black elven magic user of mysterious origins. He runs a talismonger shop in the basement of the Seamstresses Union and in the Kreuzbasar at the same time. Somehow. He is based on Harebrained Schemes developer Aljernon Bolden.

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• Almighty Janitor: At first glance he may appear to be be projecting a sense of wisdom and mystery as a marketing gimmick, but a few conversations in with him and a look at his companions shows that he's much more knowledgeable and connected than he lets on, and the implications are staggering. Despite all of this, he insists that he's just a simple talismonger.
• Anime Hair: He has one amazing freaking hairdo.
• The Cameo: He shows up briefly in the magic shop in Heoi during the Hong Kong campaign.
• Cryptic Conversation: He speaks in almost nothing but cryptic conversation, barring on the subjects of Bug Spirits and Blood Magic. Delivers one laced with Vagueness Is Coming along with his assistant towards the end of Dragonfall, shortly before you go to speak with Hans Brackhaus.
• Hero of Another Story: It's subtly implied that his travels take him around the world to keep an eye or a lid on impending magic-related catastrophes.
• Mr. Exposition: In the Director's Cut, he can be asked to provide background info on several things learned through Glory's dialogue.
• Recurring Traveller: He shows up in all three games. First in the hideout, then in the Telestrian mansion in Dead Man's Switch, later at the Talismonger's in Dragonfall's Kreuzbasar, and finally he shows up in Crafty's shop in Heoi, around the time she finishes her research in Hong Kong's main plot.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: That glow no less, which is an unusual trait even for awakened people.

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