The Zeroes
An episodic campaign starting out in the HotZone universe.
Character Creation
A gritty Tech Level 9 crime drama...
You and your roommates (the party) are living in a rough-and-tumble concrete urban neighborhood of an unnamed large American city.
These are zero point characters with no Supernatural (lightning bolt) or Exotic (alien) traits.
- Exactly zero-point characters.
- Up to -100 points in Disadvantages
- Up to -5 points in Quirks
- No basic attributes (ST, IQ, DX, HT) below 6.
- Consider spending on Area Knowledge, Contacts, Urban Survival, Streetwise....
- Cyberpunk enhancements to be approved by GM
- You're probably of below-average wealth (to explain having roommates in this neighborhood)
- Your "job" can range from none (welfare) to panhandler to handyman to lawyer (with a huge debt?) - anything realistic that places you in shared housing in a rough neighborhood.
Setting
It is 2026. Bayport is a "suburb" of Newark, a sprawling jumble of vacant warehouses, dilapidated 50-yr-old public housing, drug dens, tattoo parlors, pool halls, junkyards, and inadequate services. When the port and rail unions got busted a few decades back, smart people left and the mafia moved in. Then the Russian mob kicked their asses, but the war left the whole area a metaphorical smoking crater.
You inhabit a two story brick tenement house at the corner of Granger Ave and 129th Street. There are six bedrooms and one bathroom. The building next door was demolished six years ago, and now stands as a pile of rubble infested by rats. Across the street is the Granger One-Stop, a convenience store where you get all your supplies. Mario runs the place - a mafia holdout who's gone mostly legit.