Shiro, Street Samurai

Character portrait drawn for a player character in a sci-fi/cyberpunk/horror campaign set in the Interface Zero 2.0 universe ( Gun Metal Games -- www.gunmetalgames.com ) using the Savage Worlds RPG rules ( Pinnacle Entertainment Group -- www.peginc.com ).

This character was a bit odd in my group (and in most of the campaigns I run) in that the player chose to be a married man, having to worry about his wife (and the potential of upcoming children!) while working for the Dakiniten Group megacorporation on a distant asteroid mining base.  Since this is a setting where cyberware is ridiculously extensive in usage and cultural acclimation -- even to the point of everyone having wireless internet connections attached to their BRAINS, despite the risk of being "hacked" -- and this character was meant to be a bodyguard who would occasionally be given SENSITIVE assignments on behalf of his employers, the player borrowed a cue from a couple of movies, and came up with the idea that his character regularly undergoes partial "memory wipes" as a price of his job.  That is, if he does a bit of dirty work for the company and then has NO MEMORY OF IT, there is no risk of someone hacking his brain (or probing it via a neural induction interrogation device, etc.) and getting the information ... because it just isn't there anymore.  Of course, a price of this is that sometimes he loses a little more memory than is strictly necessary, and the system shock accumulates over time.  It also means that he may well have earned some enemies over the course of his work ... and while he doesn't know a thing about them, they may very well know about HIM.

Oh yeah.  And his wife has connections with the Yakuza -- and not in a good way.  Because we just couldn't pass up THAT cliche.