Shadow Knights

San Francisco—the Golden Gate city—has always been a curious crossroads where new world meets old and the fabric of reality wears thin. Strange things have always bubbled up from the ether here, where a hundred different cultures met and mingled, and the Earth itself has opened to swallow them up. Once a world of ancient magic, modern San Francisco is now a technological hub, the seat of power for the leading companies in a dozen scientific industries. In this bizarre landscape, four shadows stand—bold knights challenging the threats that stir as the new world ploughs into the old, as well as those who would use this chaos to line their own pockets and hurt others.
The Shadow Knights were born to the land they protect, equal parts new technology and ancient art. Applied Genetics Technology was supposed to save the world. A Silicon Valley biotech startup, it saw some early success in unwittingly aiding some refinements in the DNAscent process, but its fortunes turned quickly once the Labyrinth withdrew interest and funding. The company founder, Doctor Kate Darling, began a string of desperate alliances. Darling’s personal genius and the focus of AGT was the direct manipulation of genes via particle physics, a science she dubbed “genokinetics.” While it promised wonders—cures for cancer, reversals of birth defects, and the direct manipulation of the human genome—her practical work saw few successes. She managed a questionable bump in the intellect of her pet bearded dragon, Moon, though even this breakthrough only resulted in a pet adept at escaping her terrarium to watch Korean soap operas. The scientific leaps required to make genokinetics practical kept serious investors at bay. When silent investors finally presented themselves, Dr. Darling chose not to ask questions.
Had she investigated, she would have realized her newest backers were the Iron Claw Tong, an organized crime syndicate that had plagued San Francisco since its founding. While Dragon Master Guan Mu—the fearsome Iron Empress and head of the Iron Claw—found the company’s scientific pursuits entertaining, she found far more profit in using AGT’s scientific credentials to import weapons and drugs from her Triad allies in China. Their unlikely partnership would have continued indefinitely in blissful ignorance had a third party not presented himself: Mr. Vacare.
Mr. Vacare offered no references when he applied to work for Applied Genetics Technologies. He offered no contacts, no home address, no work history. What he did offer was a colloidal gel that served as a perfect catalyst for Dr. Darling’s genokinetic research. With Vacare’s gel, she completed work on her magnum opus: the gene collider. Ms. Guan and Mr. Vacare both moved to seize the new technology, revealing Guan’s identity as the crime lord Iron Empress and Vacare’s as a member of The Grue, a shapeshifting alien race preparing Earth for a secret invasion. Gukseon Moon, Dr. Darling’s pet, launched herself at Guan in the chaos, triggering several unexpected discharges of the gene collider she carried and beginning a fire that destroyed the AGT offices.
In the rubble, Moon survived alongside a handful of the laboratory animals. The reptile found herself more keenly aware of her situation than ever before: the gene collider’s beam had infused her with Guan’s human DNA and begun a rapid evolution. The same accident had merged the genes of other lab animals, creating strange creatures that fled into the night—and likewise affected four rabbit kits. Moon gathered up the youngsters and retreated into the catacombs beneath the city, where she was shocked to see how quickly her adopted animals grew. Once the rabbits began to speak, Moon realized she had saved daughters, not pets. She named them Marie, Carlotta, Lucille, and Francesca for the Pas de Quatre, four famous ballerinas Moon recalled from her endless formative hours watching television documentaries.
Raised on Korean television, Moon learned the ways of the Hwa Rang Do, Korea’s clandestine warriors and spies who mastered the arts of invisibility. As her adopted daughters grew, she taught these arts to them so they could learn to remain unseen in a hostile and judgmental world. They became sulsa, the invisible flower knights of Korean history. The three tenants of self-defense, self-confidence, and self-control became the family’s guiding principles. While Moon remained cautious and never as fully developed as her daughters, the children grew increasingly curious as they aged. They often snuck away against their mother’s wishes to explore the wonders of the human world above and experience life beyond what cable television could provide.
The Shadow Knights are a sideways take on street-level vigilantes. The resources available to them are mundane— they are skilled martial artists, but not so much that they clearly outclass street toughs and ninjas—but their anatomy sets them apart from the world and forces them to hide. And the challenges and enemies they face are anything but mundane: superhuman martial artists, genetically mangled monsters, and shapeshifting alien sorcerers. They save the world through grit and sarcasm as much as by martial prowess, and sometimes the challenges before them seem impossibly overwhelming. Time and again, they need to find the human element behind the overwhelming force—and usually kick it in the face.
And so the Shadow Knights remain unseen, fearful of what the world would think of them but longing to be a part of it. They fear exposure and what the money-hungry industry of the human world would do to unlock the secrets in their genes. The world can never be theirs, yet they still feel an overwhelming responsibility to stop the dangers their conception created. And of course, as teenagers, they want to have a little fun while doing it.

Assets

The sisters train together, play together, and argue together; their lives are a shared resource and they bond— and argue—in ways that only siblings can. Beyond this relationship, they share the love, support, and expertise of their adopted mother, Gukseon Moon. Raised together, they practice Moon’s own take on the Korean art of hapkido—an evasive martial art built around circular movements, adaptability, and the redirection of opponents’ force—as well as the arts of stealth and misdirection favored by Korea's ancient sulsa flower knights. While none of their small family are actually Korean—even taking their human DNA from a Chinese woman—they are a people without a background and Moon's early saturation in Korean culture is the closest they have to a shared family background.
The Shadow Knights' home is also their headquarters: the Warren, a turn-of-the-century hotel buried in the great earthquake of 1906. Though outfitted with a few comfortable modern amenities, their home is still little more than a ruin buried deep below the city’s streets. It lies at the heart of the tangled web of drainage tunnels, transit tunnels, natural caverns, and buried ruins that makes up San Francisco’s hidden underworld—an alien and confusing place for most surface-dwellers, but the childhood backyard the sisters learned well in their formative years.

The gene collider is a unique piece of technology in Earth Prime that uses a modified particle accelerator to forcefully insert genetic information into a host. It allows the addition of a sample gene sequence into whatever creature it strikes, or to cause random exchanges between two creatures caught in its beam. While the exchange of DNA is instantaneous, it may take days or weeks for the new genes to express themselves and complete the transformation.
The gene collider must be fueled with a special genofluid, a catalyst produced by the Grue for their biotechnology and originally provided to Dr. Darling by the strange grue cult known as the Arcane. The fluid itself has no special gene-editing properties, but obtaining samples to power the gene collider is a frequent goal for the Iron Claw or Dr. Darling and may motivate adventures.

Location

San Francisco, Ca