Preston Pembrooke, aka The Philanthropist, was one of the wealthiest men in the world. After surviving the Great War, he regained control of the family company and spent the next two decades building Pembrooke International into an industrial and technological powerhouse, while also founding the Randar Foundation for Humanity, with the stated aim of preventing a second global conflagration.



In 1936, he joined forces with a collection of similarly unique individuals that came to be known as The Paragons. In the course of their adventures, the group traveled around the world as they battled mobsters, ninjas, Nazis, Carpathian Death Cultists, aliens, and invaders from the future. In the end, the world survived, but just barely.

In the decades that followed, each of the Paragons once more pursued their own agendas. Preston Pembrooke, naturally, focused on rebuilding the world through the careful application of SCIENCE!

In 1999, five years after breaking up his vast empire and assigning control to handpicked successors, he passed away peacefully in his sleep on the eve of his 100th birthday, in the shadow of the recently completed Pembrooke Orbital Space Elevator.

  -- Matthew Gabbert

Slim, the 'wareless mundane Shadowrun 4e character. He can be best understood by some stories of his escapades. These are just his first two adventures.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=11537&view=findpost&p=351575
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=11537&view=findpost&p=353186

Pretty good for starting out as a vehicle to investigate a concept of a type of character not readily supported by previous Shadowruns.  I've played him for well over 100 karma now. He's just a great character. Not the most powerful of course, his lack of specialization isn't the power-play for Shadowrun. In fact even after 100 karma he played with a team of 3 other newly minted 400 BP characters and fit well with them power-wise.

EDIT: Here is a picture (both sketch and inked) done by someone else based on that first story.




They captured him really well I think.


EDIT2: Note, I don't consider him my most memorable. Top 5 easily, probably top 2 or 3. It's just the easiest for me to write up for this thread because all I need to do is link elsewhere on the internet.

My favorite and more memorable?  Right after OA came out I rolled up a ninja, Norlay Nguyen.  Setting was pretty much generic, with locales from Grayhawk and Forgotten Realms all thrown in.  First adventure?  Keep on the Borderlands of course.


Norlay was a one-man hardware store.  There wasn't a situation in which Norlay couldn't find the tools, or improvise the tools, to get the job done.  True, he wasn't a toe-to-toe warrior,and could never match up against Orin the half orc barbarian in a brawl.  But he was creative.  He'd use is climbing claws to scale the walls of the rough hewn cave tunnels, only to drop behind or on top of the enemy as they charged toward the bellowing Orin.  His ninja-to (who all the other players referred to as "ninja-toe") was his most skilled weapon, although he preferred the utility of the kusari-gama.

It was in the Caves of Chaos where Norlay established himself as an decent if not skilled warrior while always managing to find a way out of trouble.  That freedom of creativity and resourcefullness has made him a long time favorite of mine.  That, and his house I designed was awesome.  Like him, simple from an outward view, but very complex inside.  Despite being 20 some odd years old now, I don't believe he ever progressed beyond the mid-teens, level wise.