The final Archetype-Avatar brings us to The Vessel.
Crafted by humankind through magicks and dark rituals, the Vessel is created to serve, entertain and protect. For this choice, I have to go with Jean Claire/Protean from Penny Dreadful.
Jean Claire is so cool! Poetic, self-educated, tortured, and scary as f*$k when pissed off!
I suspect we’ll get some great examples from you on this one. Let me have it! 😀
Edward Scissorhands!
Just read a book titled The Golem and the Jinni. I wish it were a movie because Chava is a very interesting take on the Vessel.
The replicants from Blade Runner!
If androids count, Bishop from Alien would be my choice!
I wouldn’t want to see an android in my U-S games, but I don’t see why not.
It doesn’t really fit Urban Shadows itself, but they’re actually really good analogues for the concept.
Drawing from Sci-Fi again, Johnny 5 from Short Circuit has a great character arc that you could adapt to an Urban Fantasy vessel!
Agent Franks from Monster Hunter International.
Andrew Medeiros in my mostly undeveloped Pandora Pox setting, one of the original twenty titular poxes is one that turns women into techno-organic entities. Like all the poxes, it is part of a 6:3:2 mixture of human:other:nymph essences. In this case golem which are a manifestation of essence of human artifice. Despite their condition being entirely magical in origin, they prefer being referred to as “cyborgs” or “androids” rather than “golems”. Since golems were created based on the manifestation of the human talent for artifice, they had some control over technological creations…so the magical cyber-pandoras functioned like cyberpunk cyborgs.
Pandora Pox is a mostly silly setting were 10% of the world’s female population acquired mythological based superpowers just about the same time that magic returned to the world…the source of the Pox was a movie studio dabbling in alchemy to mold actress personalities to be perfect for specific genre movies…really not dark enough for a standard US game, but I thought I’d mention it as a supernatural origin for sentient androids.