Providing Special Bonuses

[John Snead]

I've been thinking of letting every character have a single special bonus in a future campaign, and I need some more suggestions for bonuses. I want each one to be something that will be important, but not overwhelming, and will be personal (so not giving someone a really nifty ship, since the PCs all effectively share that). The ones I have so far are:

1) The character is a psion with a Psionic Strength of 1D6+6, who has spent several months being tested and trained in the use of their powers.

2) The character gained a vast windfall of Cr500,000, in addition to any other funds they gained from their careers.

3) The character has a single artifact well beyond TL 15 – a shimmersuit (that fits), a pair of linked teleportation portals, or something similar that isn't either a superweapon or anything too impressive.

4) Secret Membership in a large and powerful organization (organized crime, intelligence, large corporation) or a powerful and somewhat mysterious patron. This organization or patron provides various forms of aid and sometimes asks for favors in return.

5) Maybe one Attribute (other than SOC) at 15, but that's not very exciting.

 

[sabredog]

My current campaign has a PC who was a promising young psion tagged as such while taking his assorted standardized exams (see, they are for your permanent record!) in High School and college. In college he was gently nudged towards a research program for developing psions that provided him with a lot of intensive training in the form of tests and whatnot. He graduated with a high psionic strength and some well-developed talents.

What he found out later was that he had been watched all this time by Imperial Intel which uses this research program to find and develop potential future agents. It develops their talents to levels requiring drugs to maintain, and will probably damage the psion if the drugs are not used on a regular basis. This last bit is a feature, not a bug.

Once 'recruited' (more like 'activated) they are considered disposable and used for high risk ops as cut-outs and bait for enemy psions so the agent won't get brain-burned or captured because the enemy is targeting the wrong psion. Sometimes they are good for assassinations. Psychic patsies is what they are. Since they are addicted to psi drugs that are extremely hard to find they are already highly vulnerable and easy to recruit later.

They PC was then 'recruited' by an intel agent who presented himself as a smuggler looking to develop a new supplier of psi drugs. The PC seemed promising since the 'smuggler' claimed to have been in the same research program in college and met the PC once. The player got a supply of psi drugs he needed as payment until the 'deal went down'.

Many avenues of adventure for the whole group opened up from there, including trying to find a way to get the psion off the drugs and free of the intel agency's hooks once they found out what was really going on.

I'm not sure that is exactly what you are looking for but it might mesh with where you could go with #4 on your list. It could easily be adapted to a situation where the secret group replaces the intel agency and operates in a more beneficial way. Kind of like an X-Men thing, but personally, I figured my way fits easily into the OTU's tangled plots involving Zhodani hit teams, Solomani secret police, and similar often neglected shadowy bits of canon.

The bonus for the player is high psi level training, minimal risk using standard psi drugs, but access to more powerful, riskier ones depending how he plays the intel game. The leverage for you is how he got that way, providing lots of chances for 'assignments', both good and bad, and the player possibly not even knowing who he really works for or this mysterious benefactor really is.

Ho-kaaay, wordy but I'm done. Blame the painkillers for the verbosity, I do.