by Alex van der Kleut and Marc Renouf
Art by andi jones
Whether he's a Secret Service agent protecting President Haeffner, or a made man standing watch over his don, the Sixth World is full of bodyguards. They are expected to watch out for their client, scanning for possible threats, keeping clients out of danger, and if necessary push a client out of the way of an attack or intercept a bullet meant for another. In some situations, they are directly opposed to shadowrunners, preventing them from carrying out their wetwork assignment.
Bodyguards have been a part of the Shadowrun game since the 1st Edition was published in 1989. However, while FASA is now publishing the third edition of the game, there has never been any description of how a character could work as a bodyguard. This article attempts to rectify this situation by giving some guidelines for players wishing to create bodyguard characters. As one of the most common adventures in Shadowrun involves kidnapping someone (usually a researcher), the following guidelines can be used to improve the caliber of opponents as well.
Unfortunately, the way a bodyguard actually does all of these things is very vague. While the Corporate Security Handbook describes what kind of services that personal security companies provide to protect their customers, very little is actually written about the methods that a bodyguard can use to protect his client. The inclusion of a few extra skills and optional rules will provide some . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: September 24, 1999
Copyright © 1999 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.
