Contacts

During the course of our lives. we all meet a great number of people, many of whom become important contacts. For a role-playing game to mirror reality, then, it should take into account important contacts that PCs acquire. Of course, it is easy enough to do this with characters met during the course of an adventure campaign; we need merely put down a note that so-and-so can be found in such-and-such a place and may be able to help somehow in later adventures. But what about contacts that PCs would have made during their education and development prior to play? In Shadows of the Unknown, those contacts are indicated in a note at the end of each career description.

Contacts are categorized in two broad groupings: solid and generic. Solid contacts are intended as resources for PCs to use during the course of an adventure, as people who can provide information, special equipment, or some other source of needed aid. (Note that the availability and quality of such aid will be dependent upon a contact's situation, personality, and relationship to the PCs.) Generic contacts can serve well as a resource for a referee to use to help spur the adventure plot along, allowing the him or her to drop an unexpected ally into the story just when the PCs really need one.

GENERIC CONTACTS

Generic contacts are received as a result of career terms during character generation. If players desire, they may generate names and statistics for these characters, or they may leave this entirely up to the referee. Perhaps best is a course that combines these two, in which a player suggests the contact's name, general description, and areas of expertise, and then the referee generates the details of attributes and skills. In this way, players determine what sorts of persons become important to their characters' lives, but some mystery remains as to the contacts' exact abilities. That fosters a sense of contacts being personalities rather than merely lists of statistics.

The career notes list contacts in terms of what they were doing when a PC first met them. A basic description of each of those contact types is given below. However, just as a PC may have changed careers since the time the contact was originally made, so may have the NPC. The final determination of what has happened to a contact in then intervening years (including what new abilities the contact may have gained) is left to the judgment of the referee, as with all NPCs.

SOLID CONTACTS

Solid contacts are those whose present whereabouts the PC knows, and with whom the PC has fairly regular dealings. These include three different types of characters. The first are the other PCs in the adventure group. When a group is first put together, or whenever a new PC joins, the players and referee should work together to determine how the group members know one another. As long as each PC has some link to one other in the group, that is enough to justify their all working together. Understand that while PC links are similar to NPC contacts, they do not actually use up any of the contact designations given by careers. PC links are in addition to those contacts.
The second type of solid contact is basically a generic contact that a PC has asked to have as a regular source of aid, even before the campaign begins. For example, in the group above, Kirin's player asks to convert one of her criminal contacts to a solid contact, so that she can have someone in the local area to turn to for underworld information and equipment. The referee agrees, deciding that it would actually make his job easier to have an established source of such things. Note that this type of solid contact does use up one of Kirin 's listed contacts from her careers.
Finally, the third type of solid contact also involves generic contacts that have been converted. In this case, though, the contact is converted during an adventure, usually at the referee's instigation. For instance, while investigating a story about vampires in New York City, the PCs mentioned above are confronted by a threatening street gang. They run away, and manage to lose their pursuers. Later, investigating the subway, the group stumbles upon a nest of what must be vampires and soon find themselves fighting a losing battle against them. Just when it looks like there is no hope for the PCs, the street gang turns up again and rescues them. The referee, realizing that the PCs need some help, has decided that the gang's second-in-command served time in prison with Big Daddy G and recognized him. The gang has been following the group ever since, watching to see what they were up to. Big Daddy G's player marks one of his generic criminal contacts off, and adds the gang's second-in-command to his list of solid contacts.
Note that while solid contacts cannot be turned back into generic ones, they can turn up again in a different place if the referee desires. In general, though, once a generic contact is turned into a solid one, the referee must pay a little closer attention to that NPC's destiny, in order to remain true to the character's desires and unfolding history. The street gang contact in the example above might become a drifter and end up in a completely different region of the globe, for instance, but the mayor of a city . is much less likely to wander about so freely.

FOREIGN CONTACTS

At the time that a character is generated, a 1D10 roll is made to determine whether the contract is "foreign." However, a "foreign" contact in Shadows of the Unknown does not merely mean a person from a different country, but rather denotes a bizarre or unusual contact. This can certainly include a contact from a foreign country, but it can just as easily indicate a contact with someone or something having to do with Extraterrestrials, the Occult or Parallel Realities.

Types of Contact

• Academic
• Business
• Criminal
• Entertainment
• Government
• Intelligence Community
• Journalist
• Law Enforcement
• Medical
• Military
• Paranormal
• Specialist
• Wealthy