Adjunct Actors

In almost any game world, actors move among vast networks of strangers, friends, contacts, and acquaintances. Even skilled adventurers can't do everything for themselves. Sometimes you have to "know a guy..."

While it is always a valid option for GMs or players to create full NPCs to represent side characters and support characters, ’Verses provides a short-hand mechanism to promote more ad-hoc inclusion of temporary or permanent support characters: Adjunct Actors.

An Adjunct Actor is a partially defined actor created to serve specific roles in a character's life and adventures. Maybe it's Knuckles the fence, who can help your thief character buy and sell on the black market. Or Sully the ship's mechanic who lives on Cor Caroli L5 Station and always cuts you a discount on repairs. Or perhaps it's Chip Reddy, your ward by day and super-heroic sidekick Cardinal by night.

Creating Adjunct Actors

Because ’Verses has intelligent defaults representing an average actor for all attributes, an adjunct may be defined by allocating only those attributes, abilities, and skills which make them unique and useful in play. If a situation arises during play that requires an unspecified characteristic, any undefined attributes can be assumed to be 2 and any derived attributes set based on the default formulas for the adjunct actor's species.

When an actor reaches out to a contact or an acquaintance or tries to find a provider of specific skills, they may call upon one of their established allies, existing NPCs, or one of their already-established adjuncts. However, when the actor seeks a skillset that is not already established, or for whatever reason does not have access to an existing contact, the GM may call for a Connectedness test to establish a new Adjunct Actor.

The GM first considers the context of the situation and the rarity of the skills required and determines a rating that represents the difficulty of finding an appropriate actor with the necessary skills. Then the player or GM rolls a test of Connectedness against this difficulty. The success margin of the test determines the number of dice that may be allocated for the adjunct's relevant capabilities.

CN + #AD → [Difficulty]S [1 Refinement Die]/SM

Just because an actor can "find" an adjunct with the skills to serve their needs, doesn't mean the adjunct is simply an extension of the actor's will. Many factors go into whether or not an adjunct performs the service or function the actor needs. They may demand money. They may require a favor in return. Or they may find themself drawn into a bigger story.

 

Tano has made it out of the alley ambush with little more than a graze to the arm and a sprained ankle, and now he's taking cover behind a dumpster in a different alley three blocks away. He's still got to finish the hack he set out to accomplish tonight, before the thugs from AmberCorp jumped him. He pulls out his trusty 88Gray cyberdeck, but his heart falls as he sees the bullet hole punched straight through its power supply. He's only got four hours left to grab the data from the AmberCorp servers, so he's got to get his ’deck repaired, and fast.

The GM rules that finding a capable fixer that won't ask questions at this time of night is a difficulty of 2. Tano has a Connectedness of 4. Using all five action dice, he's got a pool of 9d6 to find a qualified ’deck-mech.

Tano rolls . With a success margin of 2, Tano finds an old aquaintance Slash, who's running a repair stall. The success margin from the roll gives Slash an Engineering skill allocation of 2 and as an adjunct actor, she's got a Smarts of 2 and 5 action dice, so when she rolls a repair check on Tano's ’deck, she's rolling 9d6 (Engineering + Smarts + AD)—should be enough to get him hacking again.

Tano's player notes Slash in the Contacts section of Tano's character sheet with her 2 Engineering skill, just in case he needs another timely repair in the future.

Adjuncts & Reputation

When an adjunct is first created, their Reputation should be set equal to the connecting actor's. If an actor is seeking an adjunct specifically for a higher or lower reputation, the refinement dice obtained by the success margin may be used to increase or decrease the adjunct's reputation to suit.

GMs should consider the difference between the actor's and adjunct's reputations. If an actor's reputation has shifted since the last time they worked with the adjunct, they may find the adjunct unwilling to work with them.

 

A few weeks later, Tano is on the run from Intercorp Security. He's fresh of a string of jobs that have turned the corpos upside-down, and his rep on the street reflects his exploit. He's in the market for an upgrade, and drops by Slash's stall.

But Slash has a stall to run, and having a hot target standing in front of her shingle is bad for business if it brings the cops down on her. "Sorry, Tan," she says. "I'm in the mainstream. I can't have you dropping the cops on me; you're too hot. Come back when things have died down a bit, yeah?"

Full NPCs from Adjuncts

If an adjunct spends more time than expected participating in an adventure, it may be time to promote them from adjunct to full NPC. To do this, players or GMs can take their existing allocations and apply them retroactively to an NPC built in the traditional manner. If core attributes or allocated abilities and skills affect the NPC's primary capabilities, this simply represents the character's evolving and growing capabilities.

Playing an Adjunct

It is up to the GM and player to decide together who will play the adjunct and determine their actions in the game. This decision may depend on the player's capacity, the role the adjunct plays in the character's life, and the nature of the services provided by the adjunct. For an adjunct serving a role of minion or sidekick, it may make sense for the player to determine their actions, assuming the player feels up to the challenge of directing two characters. If the adjunct acts in a more service-oriented or adversarial role, it may be more appropriate for the GM to play the adjunct.

Adjunct Encounters

Even when traveling far from home, there’s always a chance to run into an acquaintance. Depending on its nature, that chance meeting could be a happy coincidence or uncomfortable encounter.

When characters move through small or large populations, try to track down a contact, or want to keep a low-profile, the GM may make a connectedness test to see if the characters encounter someone they know. The GM can interpret the result in different ways. Is the character trying to avoid recognition? Randomly encountering a face from the past? When rolling the Connectedness test, the GM may use the distribution of success dice to determine the nature of the resulting encounter.

On a successful roll indicating that the character has encountered someone, if there are more sixes than fives in the roll, the GM may take this as a sign that the encounter is a generally positive one. If there are more fives, the encounter leans negative, and if the count of fives and sixes is equal, the encounter is neutral. The total number of successes can be read as an indication of magnitude of this disposition.