/srg/ Shadowrun General - Infection Connection Edition

That sounds pretty cool, how would I go about getting that metamagic? I know it's to do with initiation or something.

When you Initiate, you pick a metamagic. You then know this metamagic, and can use it as and when you feel like. Channelling itself is described in Street Grimoire, on page 148.

Cheers man

Jesus christ, that's horrifying but I love it. I might also include some optional objectives that can be decked specifically so they can't fulfil them without contracting or diversifying.

What skills do I need to prepare vessels, i've been told it was something in the enchanting group, so like artificing?

just give them what they want -- which would appear to be combat and social shenanigans, based on class description.

SG p. 197 has the possession power Spirits use, 135 has how to prepare a living vessel. You don't need to prepare a vessel for it to be possessed, it just makes it easier.

Awesome, cheers man. Just going through the motions of making a character, never made a mage before, and possession seemed pretty rad.

Do you have any suggestions for knowledge skills? I'm not sure what'd be good to know besides city knowledge, street gang ID and magic threats.

Nah, make sure they can do everything they need to on their own. Just show them what a properly motivated decker can do, and possibly have an escort mission where they need to get a decker into a place to get something of a faraday'd server.

I am thinking of making my first char ever into a Elf Adept Face centered in pistols and sniper rifles. I have read the rulebook and understood that by getting cyber or bioware it eats essence which is vital for adepts/mages. And I have also understood that without ware gunslingers become underpowered compared to ware users.

So the question is what kinds of ware should I get to make my character usable in long run in semi combat heavy campaign. And what other character creation tips could you give to a Elf Adept Face Gunslinger?

What I know about the other players is that we have Troll street samurai, Dwarf rigger and Human combat mage in party and none of them are faces. DM did inform us that we should be able to not murderhobo our way through jobs and that we should get in good/neutral mind set. Basic 400 BP start

Additionally, the summoner is always a prepared vessel.

But as a vodoo summoner, one of the better decisions is not to have your spirit possess you, but an opposing enemy.

Shifts the numbers by 2 to your favor.

>And I have also understood that without ware gunslingers become underpowered compared to ware users.

Not so. Pure mundane (no magic, no ware) gets outclassed easily and for obvious reasons. Getting Adept powers like Increased Reflexes (or Improved Reflexes, can never remember which is the power and which is the spell) makes it viable.

For general recommendations, I'd focus on either pistols or longarms, not try and do both. Pistols for preference if you're going to be a face, you'll be up close and you can hide pistols a lot easier than a sniper rifle. Your rigger will be able to do long-range combat, focus on getting up close and riddling the enemy with bullets.

Does drugging up count as mundane?

If should close the gap quite a bit right?

Being a juicer is a good place to start, and can keep you going through low-level games and supplement high-level play, but eventually the cyborgs will get significantly ahead of you unless you're really good at speedballing drugs, and even then the crash is horrendous.

I looked into going full into drugs, but they really aren't what I am after. Pistol only suggestion ia good one, saves me some BPs and other party members can do heavy lifting in fighting

Well, being an adept you can do a damn good job fighting. It's just easier to stick with one weapon, and pistols work better for a face.

Your rigger will (most likely) have some drones with automatics and maybe grenades, and he will do crowd control and suppression. It's hard to kill with drones against a smart enemy, but he can pin them down while you waltz over to their cover and shoot them in the face.

What's the biggest abandoned city in North America?

Howling Shadows makes me want to send my city slickers out to some ruins to recover paydata and deal with the wildlife, but I don't know where. I don't know of a canonical settlement of size in NA that is totally abandoned (i.e. no government or mega has claimed it, squatters and bug hives are fine), and I'd prefer not to just make up a generic town. I'm looking for somewhere they could plausibly have some large buildings for harpies to roost in, where someone might have built a lab for research.

Without channeling your body would be controlled by the spirits that possess you. You could use your sorvices to issue commands, but a kind read: lame GM would let you controll your character anyway.

I prefer letting the spirit walk around with my body while I astrally project. Look at me, I'm the spirit now

I guess it depends on your tradition. I can't imagine allowing a Loa to walk around in my meatsuit on a run without Channeling, because no way Papa Legba treats it well with unfettered access.

Can an RCC be slaved to a Commlink to protect it while still ordering drones around? Or does the Commlink being the Master prevent the Slaved RCC from having Slaved drones? In 5e core I'm leaning towards no, but I can't find the line regarding if something can't be a master and a slave at the same time.

You can chain-slave. what you cannot do is close the loop, ie. C is slave to B, B is slave to A, A is slave to C.

Thanks chummer, anywhere in the corebook that says I can do that? Or is that just a "it doesn't say I can't" logical conclusion?

Hey gents,
I want to run a shaman runner, but I hate being stuck in elf face/shaman stereotype. Can an orc shaman be viable or no?

Absolutely viable. An Ork Shaman is worse from the higher levels of minmaxing, but you'll be fine with 5 (or more) CHA and plenty of (wiz)skills. Plus you'll be better at taking bullets and looking tough, dandelion eaters need not apply to intimidation school of diplomacy.

It doesn't say you can't, but an A to B to C chain is basically the go-to method of making sure people can't hack RCC'd drones - rigger slaves drones to RCC, then the RCC to his decker's deck. Also, for all the points where Shadowrun devices don't follow the rules of modern technology, slaving is pretty much the same as connecting to a network. Hell, they even use the word "Network" to describe such a situation.

Solid. Any tips for skills and the like? I was thinking of going with a boar mentor spirit but otherwise I'm not sure

But if channel a Loa, isn't that like trapping him in your body? Seems pretty disrespectfull to me.

You do have a point, when you bind a spirit you can probs make a deal. They like to experience the material plane, so giving them use to your body when you're not using it or whatever in exchange for services could work.

The way I view binding spirits (for those who care to be respectful), is that the binding process should be an exchange.

Like what said. In return for the binding, promise to do something on the meat plane for them, a few nights out with them in the driver's seat of your meat, or a gift of reagents or karma. Its flavorful, and regardless of your tradition (psionics disregarded), it keeps the astral planes on your side.

Hey Yekka, getting another crash:

While adding a spell, typing into the search bar to look for a spell works, however the minute it has no results for your search, it crashes.

A master cannot be a slave.

I haven't kept up with 4e/5e for shit, but Detroit should still be pretty barren no? Or just pick any ~250k population city and set it as a deserted ruin, slowly reclaimed by nature, in your campaign.

Detroit is Ares global HQ

Where does it say that?
Check the github issue page to see if its already posted, if not, please post it for him.

Detroit is pretty much wholly owned by Ares.

Well, you can still channel him and have fun doing it. A Loa probably wouldn't mind sharing the wheel if you're going out partying or getting in an awesome fight, but channeling a task spirit just to use it's concealment powers for spying is disrespectful.

I'm saying I would not want to give my body over to a Loa in combat or another critical part of a run, because it may not respect the rest of the team or the plan, and want to do it's own thing.

Oh well. Still easy to make a postapoca wilderness filled with abandoned buildings though. Some large-scale suburban area that's grown too wild for vehicles other than tanks, a small city half-buried when Redondo explodes or whatever.

That's the thing, I don't want to just invent something out of whole cloth before exploring alternatives. I was asking if anyone knew of a canonical abandoned city/town I could use.

I could make up shit all day long, but one of the selling points of playing a game set in the (more or less) real world is using real locations.

There seems to be a bunch in the NAN.

It's not NA, but the SOX is pretty fun...

They mention small towns that were more or less abandoned, but I can't think of one of appreciable size that was mentioned.

They're not at the level where someone would ship them halfway around the world to a toxic zone, my only problem. I figured that if I could find something on the continent they could go on a summer road trip, do a few odd jobs there and back, and take a break from corporate espionage in Downtown.

Look to the midwest. Milwaukee, Peoria, Helen, Topeka, anything like that. They're big now, but once VITAS hit, most people moved to the big cities, like Chicago, New York, LA, Seattle, etc, at which point it's up to you if a given city survived or is a ghost town.

Maybe its not your players but you (or rather your payout), who is the problem.
I'm playing Streetsam (so only a semi-ressource intensive class, compared to riggers) in my current group and i wouldn't do it again.

GM need to get over their "high monetary payout is BADBAD" shittery that only panders to magic users.
If losing a single Drone sets me back 3 Missions or if i never have a Chance to get a better Deck, the GM can go to HUI when he cries about magerun.

Where's the best place to find a game. My friends got tired of shadowrun but I didn't. I tried posting in the game finder thread several times but I got nothing.

5E question here - were there ever errata on focus formula costs and/or availability? It seemed odd to me that on the price table in the rulebook, the formula is available as much as the whole focus, even though (and in fact because) it already costs much less. I have run an online search, but it did not come up with results.

I still can't get over how they made Auburn Hills the barrens of the Detroit metro. Has anyone in any Shadowrun design team even been to South-Eastern Michigan? Auburn Hills is one of the whitest whitebread low-crime-rate nothing-ever-fucking-happening-here towns in the entire metro. Couldn't they have at least picked someplace like Pontiac or Highland Park something? Or, hell, maybe Flint. Flint's not part of the metro, but it may as well be the barrens.

Agreed. If shadowrunning only manages to pay rent, there wouldn't be shadowrunners.

Do you really think nothing could happen to change that between 1980 + 100 years of alternate timeline?

So I am DMing my first game of Shadowrun 5th Edition (or any edition) ever. One of my players want to make a runner who is mundane and doesn't believe in 'ware. How do I help him make it viable?

Financial stress is important, though. Shadowrunning should be like any other criminal enterprise- it might pay the rent if you're good, it' might pay more than that if you're really good, but almost no one is going Pablo Escobar.

If your game has a mohawk setting of anything less than hot pink, you should work out a budget of how much your lifestyle is, and how much you spend per run. Then you work hard and work often to make ends meet. If it means you have to take crappy jobs, that you have to take what you can get or you have to balance your mortgage against your morals, then you're living the life of a career criminal on the outskirts of society. Plus, setting that dynamic up when you start out -where you have to work simultaneous runs, or roll right from one into the other without a recovery period- makes your achievements that much more meaningful. I find it a lot more satisfying when I hit that stage where I can blow an entire run's cut on some sweet cyber if I can contrast it against when that same character was taking a job to wipe out some gang because he knew he could sell the parts to Tamanous for some extra scratch.

You shouldn't need to spend a long period at that level, but it also doesn't make sense when you're two runs in and you already have cleared 60k. If Shadowrunning payed like that, there would be nothing but shadowrunners.

Not even minor ware like decking/rigging? Maybe technomancing isn't haram to his holy ways but he better start injecting all the drugs if so.

1) You tell him not to be such a faggot. If he doesn't want to use magic or cyberware, why the fuck is he playing Magic+Cyberpunk: The Game?

2) You tell him to load up on Jazz and be an edgemaster.

3) You tell him to roll up a backup character, because the first guy is going to be dead pretty fast.

>i dont want to use magic or technology but i want to be as good as the people that use magic and technology

slap him

How well are drakes balanced in 5th? Way overpowered, underpowered, too special snowflake, or viable?

You can do financial stress while still giving pretty good payouts. Runners are usually paid through certified credsticks. I'm not exactly clear on how the IRS does its business, but if your primary civilian identity suddenly finds a thousand nuyen on the ground every week, people are going to start getting suspicious. It costs money to launder money, and there's a limit to how much you can get away with before someone starts investigating you. It's no good for your living arrangements to get a huge stack of cred and then find you can only spend it on illegal shit because it doesn't make sense for your cover identity to make that much.

Also, finding a launderer who won't rip you off or squeal on you to the cops can be an adventure on its own.

Drugs, LOTS of edge, and some goddamn good planning. It might be better to make this his second character, not his first, so he's not trying to learn the game and play on hard mode simultaneously.

So what's the status of the New Revolution? Did Angela Colloton exploit the conspiracy to eventually become president or was the crushing of the coup and her ensuing election just the victory of one side of the NR against the other?

yes
depends on the chargen method

>too special snowflake

Euphemism of the Sixth World

If you want to go more trenchcoat, that can be fun. I know my players are less about that, so I just say their fixer can launder money. On top of that, it's being laundered to fake SINs, which can burn at the drop of a hat, so it's not really that big of a deal. When I run, I just keep most of my cash in credsticks, maybe a couple thousand on my SIN of the day for emergency expenses.

You know, that just sounds like the plot of Breaking Bad after Saul Goodman enters the scene.

Your primary civilian identity never ever has that money, that's what every single /srg/-made runner has one R4 and a shitton of throwaway R2 SINs for.

Credsticks are not associated with anything, anyway. It's like some future bitcoin.

karmagen?

>It's no good for your living arrangements to get a huge stack of cred and then find you can only spend it on illegal shit because it doesn't make sense for your cover identity to make that much.

Maybe it's just the groups we play with, but most runner characters I've seen would happily make a cash arrangement with a landlord in Redmond and go live there if the GM threatened them with the IRS. It's not like most people have Day Job, they pay off their lifestyle and anything else that is tied to their clean SIN (if they have one that they are bothering to make a fake life for) and the rest of their money goes into new running gear or a retirement fund.

Chargen drakes cost 75 Karma, that's a pretty heavy tax for any magic user (and since you are a drake, you have to be some short of awakened)
Latent dracomorphosis requires you to pay 140 karma in game, with every 10 karma "unlocking" a drake ability. You can't buy anything else in-between with karma.

So you are stuck between a character that is gonna be good in one thing and one thing only (magic), and probably not as good as others specializing in it, or such a heavy karma tax you probably won't get to spend karma to boost your sheet for the rest of the campaign.

Do all dragons have a metahuman forms, or just the greats? My players got sent on a suicide mission against SK, and I want the leader of the facility to be a dragon for optimum "OH FUCK"

It's probably a very young or disgraced lesser dragon for him to have such a low position (except if the facility is considered extremely important by the Great Dragon that commands him). May i suggest he's a drake instead ?

Naw, his character is a Humanis supporting, only-white-humans-in-my community type of character. I told him drugs would be his friend.
1) He got interested when I told him it'd be in Seattle (WA locals).
2) Alright, I will.
3) He already has a backup in mind, 'cuz I told him I wouldn't gun for him intentionally, but the world might.
Man, do I want to sometimes.
OK, Will tell him, and I warned him his character, in the world of Shadowrun, might have a short life span, but he'll have fun with it and has a backup character already.

IIRC, being able to assume a human form is just a mark of experience, not of being a Great One.

Henequen can do it despite being a "regular" dragon, for one.

Is Dunkelzahn dead or is he just scarred from the attack on his election?

Deader than John Lennon.

he killed himself to stop the after effects from the great ghost dance. AFAIR there isn't conclusive proof that ghostwalker is or isn't dunkelzahn

Greats can assume human form indefinitely. Lesser dragons take drain IIRC, and have to learn it. And I think they have to swear allegiance to the dragon council or something. Alternatively, my brain is inventing all of this out of nothing.

And on the flip side, Aden has no known metahuman form, despite being a great dragon.

According to the Dragonheart Saga, Dunkelzahn died and became a spirit named Lethe which fused with a cyberzombie named Burnout (or Billy) to form a gestalt entity, which now wanders the metaplanes using the dragonheart, a powerful orichalcum artifact powered by Dunkelzahn's death, to destroy metaplanar bridges which The Enemy (The Horrors/The Tzitzimine) might use to cross over and destroy all life on earth.

I always took that to mean Aden was super good at being sneaky though, not that they don't actually have a form. Also in my headcannon Aden is Mukhannathun.

It is the newcomer Elf Adept Face here and the GM decided to switch to 5th ed and told us to make characters with it. I looked into the priority system and Chummer5 suggesting karmabuy and I am just confused. How does the priority system work and how different the characters will be compared to karmabuy? Help a man in need.

I though Ghostwalker was Icewing, Mountainshadow/Dunkelzahn's borther, but perhaps this is not definitive.

It is. The only people that are confused about it are the Church of the Dragon Reborn, an offshoot of the Children of the Dragon who believe that since Ghostwalker emerged from Dunkelzahn's rift, he's therefore Dunkelzahn. I'm not actually sure how you could be confused as a player/reader.

I would assume so as well, but given Aden's displayed personality, its also possible they dislike metahumans so much they don't have one.

Priority system means that you have to chose your priority in 5 categories: metatype, magic, Attributes, skills and dosh. They go from E (worst) to A (best). You can only assign each letter once, so e.g. you have ACEDB as a combo.
Metatype says which metatypes you can chose and how many special attribute points you get
Magic says wether you are awakened or not and what type you are, the points for the actual magic skill however depend on Metatype above
Attributes determines the points you can spend on attributes
Skills determine how many skill/skill group points you get
Dosh say how much LOADSA MONE you get

the table for priority should be either in core or in Run Faster

>Mukhannathun
I always got the opposite impression, that Aden was female but since dragons are, among other things, a sexiest lot, she went to some trouble to not give much impression of gender, so as to be assumed male, much like female authors using a first initial.

>treating the Dragonheart Saga as anything but poorly written fanfic

I am disappointed in you, user

Stat this dude /srg/

>since dragons are, among other things, a sexiest lot

Damn right they are

This reminds me of a similar concept I thought up when making a character in 4th ed. The difference being he wasn't possessed by a spirit, but rather he would turn off the safety features of the skill wires, and sim rig and allow a pilot program to run his body while he was jacked into the matrix. If I recall you could technically do it, with only a little bit of hand waving on part of the sim rig, I was pretty excited to try it out, but never got the opportunity.

All the shadowrun novelizations are poorly written genre fiction more concerned with cramming as much lore and gameplay references into them than in story, theme, or character. The Dragonheart Saga has Ryan Mercury being badass and explains Dunkelzahn's death in a way that's consistent with the facts (sixth world almanac introduces an independent analysis of footage of dunkelzahn before his death which suggests suicide). Even if it's been removed from canon it's part of my canon. Fuck you.

Thanks a lot, we messaged GM and he confirmed that we are going to use Priority. /srg/ seems to be pretty helpful and friendly general.

I believe it was Boston that got nuked after it got infected with bug spirits. Word is its still kinda there, so if you're looking for "underground bunker fortress" you could probably get away with it. Mind you the bugs that are still there mind not like intruders. Or the Ares patrols that are guarding the wall around the perimeter.

Adult Cyborg Conversion, in a humanoid chassis, lots of ranks in Blades and Throwing Weapons, some sweet martial arts stuff, something custom for being able to reflect projectiles from firearms, which isn't really a think in Shadowrun. Alternatively just a LOOOOT of high grade chrome, depending on how much meat you think is left inside.