/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Me and my GM both sat down with this PDF and learnt Hacking from it. It's 4th Ed, but it's probably a good base to start from. Anyone know if there's an updated version for 5th?

That PDF is great.

Linked for conversation purposes.

I'd agree with the notion that on account of Trolls having such high base stats, they gain the least benefit from Complete Cyberization.

5e question:
How much karma do Prime Runners start with?
Since karma=cash in karmagen they must start with more karma, right, since in prioritygen they get more cash

Prime Runners start with 1k, although I don't think thats an official rule

good enough
200 more karma does sound about right.

The next run giving the option for my runners to go trough is gonna be an assassination.
I thought it would be interesting to the target have a lethal allergy.

But I can't think of a good allergy to give him.
Bees and milk seem too cliche.

Make it something obscure in the sixth world, so the Runners have to kill the target with something silly.

Latex.

Gluten.

Seafood.

Peanuts

>Runners have to kill the target with something silly.

That's what I was thinking really.

>latex
I'm pretty sure that would end up with the elf face dressing up as a girl and seducing the target.

food seems too obvious to be honest
peanuts is the best of the bunch tho

Air.

Vacation time just let out and I already miss it. After a frankly terrible espionage job overseas in Guam, the team got to spend three days in a fabulous luxury resort relaxing on the beach, relaxing by the hotel pool, playing golf and one of us catching a trid of some of the last bits of fashion week streamed right from Paris. Once the resort staff got sick of dealing with us, we scored a pretty sweet milk run: bunch of frat guys hired us to do a panty raid on a sorority house. Talks were had, surveillance was done, job was performed smoothly, we robbed the boys at gunpoint because fuck them what are a bunch of polo shirt-wearing fuckboys from a state university gonna do about it? It was a fun, relaxing week.

Point is, tell me about the fun times, /srg/. You know, the runs that are the equivalent of the cast of "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension" getting the script to that movie and realizing they were about to spend a whole movie shoot getting paid to have as much fun as they possibly could. Running the shadows isn't all running for you life from corpsec or staring down insect shamans. Sometimes you just gotta kick back and blow of some steam, and if your fixer can find that fun for you, all the better. After all, if you do a job you love you never work a day in your life.

Since Onis have +1 charisma does that mean that the type of onis in shadowrun are the sexy oni you see in some anime? (guys are handsome and swole, girls are fit and hot)

Or do they fluff that as some sort of overwhelming presence or something? Run faster book isn't very clear. All I know is that they're bright red, blue, or orange, have horns, and elf ears.

It says they have a greater force of personality, but that won't stop you from having your oni waifu/husbando if you want.

I need help. My group had a close call with the fuzz getting dangerously close to tracking us down to our homes off run. How can we clean up after ourselves if we leave astral signatures? Is there a way to get rid of it?

Sweet. Also very cool picture. Though the fangs (tusks?) surprised me, I must have missed the enlarged fangs in the physical description in run faster.

Have your mage astral project and then clean it if that's what your asking. It takes a complex action to reduce the time it will be around by one hour, so just keep doing it until it's gone.

im looking at bikes for my oni Bōsōzoku razorgirl and I got to know is there any real reason to buy a YAMAHA KABURAYA over a Suzuki Mirage? I keep checking the stats and the mirage seems to be the better bike in almost everyway including base cost. am I missing something.

No you're not missing anything, whoever wrote the statblock for the Kaburaya fucked up bad.

yeah that's what I thought. the way its priced and hyped up id at least expect it to be lighting on wheels with better handling.

All orcs have tusks and enhanced strength.

They should make it clear which characteristics are valid for all the subraces then.

How do you guys come up with aliases or names for your fake SIN(s)? Are there any you're particularly fond of?

Johnny Nuyen is a personal favorite of mine, but nothing particularly special.

I'm not really seeing the issue with the latex desu.

Just keep the descriptions of each race in the core book in mind as standards and any descriptions they make about variants are the changes.

depends on if I got a theme or gimmick or some concept going for them.

for example my MAGA mage uses the switched around names of the founding fathers/signers of the declaration of independence as his go to SINs with his two current ones being Nathanial Paine and Benjamin Adams respectively.

Is there any sort of "cyber wings" or some shit to allow a character to fly without using a vehicle?

Or only magic can do that?

So will a standard decker always beat out technomancers? I can't figure out if the ability to make sprites is actually any good?

Where do you get the inspiration for your characters?

Behindthename's random generator is particularly useful for disposable fake SINs.

4e wingsuits, Spy Games or War!, rocket boosters or no.

neat, thanks.

colloidal silver

>War!

We don't speak of that book.

Depends on the leniency of your GM. Allowing sprites to use Diagnosis on a set of skillwires is quite powerful, for example.
Give this a crack. mediafire.com/download/osk2bi8v4odfc5b/Matrix Actions.pdf

You don't speak of that book.

When I still played 4e, we restricted content based on use, not books.

Hey /srg/
Strange little query:
What's a "normal" shadowrunner alias/handle.
I had my current one with the alias cassidy butcher, as an obvious reference to butch cassidy.
But, I don't know if that's a normal thing for shadowrunners to do, have their aliases be full names.

TwoDee immediately springs to mind, as do all the other runners from the storytime he did, so I feel like it's not the right thing to do.
Pic is something I just chose at random, but sundowner also seems like a pretty good shadowrunner alias, now that I think of it.

Common aliases are nicknames that fit the character.

I've got jack and shit for ideas, then.
Thanks anyway, chummer.

Actually, I just looked through a couple generators/lists and picked out a few.

What do you guys think of these:
>Deviant
Both of her brothers (who are both older) went on to join lone-star and be corrupt pieces of shit, repeatedly berated her for being such a deviant. Might be shortened to "Dev"? pronounced the same.
>Medusa
saving for my next runner, a shaman with green dreads
>Blitz
She's "lets slot and run, you pieces of drek" 80% of the time
>Flak
Like flak jacket, or giving you flak, ect
>Itch
like "itchy trigger finger"
but I'm not a huge fan, makes me think of an std or something.

sorry if they suck, I'm bad at names period, and it's late

I'm kinda frustrated with my players. All their runner names are actual names like Steve and Simmons. However I'm a fan of my player who's character that loves old movies and has a daughter named his guy Liam Neeson.

It's generally single names or (compound) words, the type of stuff you'd usually use for a nickname. If you look through the comments and examples in the rulebooks, you'll see a lot of examples.

I run with one that sorta springs from his background story I give him.

Movies, games, dreams, jokes, and on one occasion a bet.

>steve
>simmons
Maybe they thought it's supposed to be like super generic to hide your identity or something, like you could be any random smuck off the street or something?
That's kind of the line of thought I was going with for Cassidy.
>comments
not quite sure what you mean by that
>examples
the stories? I should look through those, yeah.
What is it?

Those are all good, but I'd shorten deviant to dev, yeah.

In-universe, the books are online guides for shadowrunners by shadowrunners. They often have comments from other runners interspersed like this.

Wiz. Didn't realize that it was by runners in universe, have to look over everything now.

Criticism for the guy shilling his story in the other threads:

first: too much vacillation. almost everything i read was along the lines of: Jim was a normal guy, if a guy could be normal, but no one is normal so Jim is weird for his normality, but then if everyone is weird and Jim is weird for being normal, then i guess Jim is normal, but weird, but normal.

second: holy thesaurus, batman! not EVERYTHING needs embellished. Most times, the dog can chase the cat. the soot-grey dog with the bristling mane and hungry, dripping, wind-flapped jowls doesn't need to frantically chase, like a drunk 97 year old man, who lost all his friends on Normandy Beach, trying to put out the fire on his dick after he fell asleep smoking, the cat.

Indecision, rambling simile, and verbosity might be traits your narrator has, and thats fine, but it is tedious to read and makes for an unlikable character.

third: run-ons and comma splices EVERYWHERE. stylisticly fine on occasion, but terrible as every sentence or in every paragraph.

Hey Chummers, got a pseudo-heist run, but instead of stealing something, we need to get data on an artifact held by an art dealer, mostly video. Security on the estate is crazy, crazy tight, and we're Street Level. Our tentative plan is to sneak in during a huge party on the estate, posing as catering (3 of the party) and bodyguards for a guest (2 of the party, the party lead and myself). My thought is to rig everyone up with micro-cameras (throwbacks of course), and the party lead and I with tricked out glasses (Image link, Vision Enhancements, etc.) and try to get footage of the artifact, samples of it if we can risk it.

Details on the estate: 30 Active Private Security, all ex-military, high level guys, we have names and faces of 11 of those. 2-4 Mages, unknown capabilities, unknown identities. Knight Errant on standby,

I can see what you're saying, and I know a lot of it is negative from most people's viewpoint. As said, it's unedited, which means that I write down everything I can come up with to keep the flow and work up a large amount of raw material. It's going to lose about a hundred pages if I ever go on a serious editing pass.
I'm also writing it to fill out something I'm missing - atmosphere and ambience. One thing that really rubs me the wrong way is the writing style that more or less goes "He went to the center of the town, which was filled with high-rises. Then he went into an Italian restaurant, where he ordered a plate of pasta and ate it. It was decent." To get around that, I'm going completely overkill the first time around and then planning on cutting in it later - if I have to think about the value of every description or metaphor when I'm writing it, I'll stall and not end up writing jack shit because I don't get into a routine. I feel that it's better to go a bit too heavy on the descriptions than too light - you might make the content harder to read, but it's there and you wrote it.
It's really written for people with the same kind of autism as me, and I understand that it's too much of a brick for most people - I mostly wanted to crank out something that I liked, since there's a chance that other people would have the same kind of autism. I underpitched it for a reason.
The comma splices and run-ons are my fault, though, and I admit it. I can't shorten my sentences or boil them down without seeing them as the clumsy ramblings of a retard with the vocabulary of a travel parlor and the attention span of a gnat. I get carried away easily, too.
Basically, thanks for the criticism, but most of those things are either my (slightly autismal) intent or something I know I need to get rid of. I can't get rid of the run-ons, though, because I would just stop writing and not come back to it.

>me
>10Blade, elven combat medi/sammy who uses knives and katanas and used to be a top notch surgeon to the stars
>Lock, as in Lock Stock and Barrel, human weapons specialist who used to be a big arms smuggler and human trafficker out of istanbul. He likes guns
>Mauser, as in katzen who mouses. An ork decker and infiltrator stealth specialist who likes to keep runs nice and quiet.
>Helleb0re, as in winter rose. Elf decker faggot. His real name is Holly Winters. It's not even a clever pun.

Charisma is based almost entirely on presence, their "aura" and that kind of shit (charisma effects shaman magic remember). If you make a troll with 1 charisma, there's no reason to assume he isn't handsome enough to be in Playgirl if that's how you want him to look, he just is less likely to be propositioned to do it because he doesn't give off any personable qualities and when people look at him they think "bland nobody asshole who can frag off."

Fucking keebs.

You wouldn't happen to run with a fat bearded human rigger named "Daddy Nick"

How would you guys run a motorcycle combatant?

Yeah. The waste I was talking about was that arms and legs have a too high availability if you try for Max Troll physical stats + some Enhancement on them.

Less of a problem if the skull is used for the base and the GM lets Restricted Gear apply to the whole thing. Then you can just trick everything the fuck out. Just make sure that everything's slave to the decker's deck and that they're running high sleaze. But at least your razors and spurs are going to hit like a goddamn nightmare.

In a straight fight, there's only a few very specific builds of Techno that can really stand up to a decker, and it's still going to be lucky. One is a techno juicer that uses custom drugs (or Cyber-singularity seeker, but that's really too much of a specialty build to be talked about here) to stand around with 10 Will, 10 Firewall, and whose first action each turn is FMD. The other is a high-edge human Techno.

But that guy's probably better off dropping large amounts of Edge to get huge Sprites and have them hack. Or save a favor or two for extra dice on a simple low level form, edge that, and hope for luck.

Now, if you're willing to drop a point of essence or so into augmentations, you can hide better, among other things, and so make it a little harder to bring things into a straight fight. Still not the best result, but at least one submersion lets you connect in all situations that you would have before.

And if anyone can figure out where wireless handshake range is, that'd be even better.

Well, i write background story, then I start thinking about what his runner name wouild be based on the events.

Or, I write name, and write background story based on it.

Either way, it works.

>>War!
>We don't speak of that book.

so who won the war anyway

I might be running a 5e game soon, and in preparation i am looking for pre-gen characters made with the actual char-gen rules (in contrast with the pre-gens in the book).
I would like them both for myself, so i can get a better feel for actual PCs as well as for my players who might take some inspiration/take one all-together.

Aztech of course. They always win.

lame

Is it just me or is attribute boost in 5e pretty much best to take only 1 point?

>Magic + Attribute Boost Rating Test. Each hit on this test boosts your attribute rating by 1, up to your augmented Attribute maximum

No limit listed so magic is a much bigger contributor to how much of a boost you get.

>drain=level of attribute boost
so with 1 level you only take 1 drain

and it only costs 0.25 power point!

0.25 and a simple action to get on average +2 to an attribute for .25 power points seem like great deal to me. That 1 drain is always gonna get resisted anyway.

Nah, you want at least two levels of it, split over two attributes. That way you can use both Simple actions on boosts (body's nice).

Oh yeah, that makes sense.
Boosting body and agility right before a fight is a pretty good idea.

in 5e astral beacon seem to give too many points for what it does.
+10 karma for having your signature lasting twice as long (when you should always scrub it away after using magic regardless, and if you didn't, you're fucked even without this quality), and mere -1 to the threshold to gather information about it (when any competent corp mage will find you if you leave your signature -1 threshold or not).

Yeah, you only ever want to put a single point into each Attribute Boost you take. Just remember that it gets unwieldy past too Attribute Boosts, because then you're losing more than one combat turn on getting magic swole.

The in-book characters are bloody awful, so I applaud you for not trusting those. I am running some houserules, but I can toss you a sheet if you'd like for a face I'm working on.

>The in-book characters are bloody awful
some of them don't even follow the rules right!

Except you won't always have six complex actions worth of time to scrub away each force 3 spell you cast with if you have Beacon. Or eight and force 4, ten and force 5, and so on.

The -1 threshold is there because means that as long as they didn't fail the assensing roll, a memory roll to recognize the aura is always a chance, instead of needing 2. Flexable Signature is also made less useful by it (you're basically counted as one less grade and you need twice as many grades to ignore the signature left behind.)

But, I do want to know. What were you thinking of that they'd use to find you based on your signature? I want to look up how those will be affected by

>Except you won't always have six complex actions worth of time to scrub away each force 3 spell you cast with if you have Beacon. Or eight and force 4, ten and force 5, and so on.

a round is 3 (or is it 6?) seconds
If you have a minute of downtime you can scrub away literally everything you do
if you don't have a minute, I doubt you can scrub away anything since you're likely in combat or something.

>But, I do want to know. What were you thinking of that they'd use to find you based on your signature?
I was under the impression that
>signature found=they know where you are

but I'll admit I didn't really read the magic rules that closely since I'm not a mage, and no one in my group is a mage either. (I'm the GM)
If I'm wrong please correct me.

>I am running some houserules, but I can toss you a sheet if you'd like for a face I'm working on.
That would be nice.
What House Rules are you using?

Yes, it's three seconds a round, but unless you're really specced for rounds, it's going to be one force per three seconds (effectively if you have astral beacon). So unless you're burning reagents with direct spells, every two spells in effect is a minute. And if you're not having more than two spells in effect, it's probably not a corp you're dealing with.

Signature Found has a few meanings depending on how good the assensor is. A poor one just means that there's a chance they'll remember and be able to pierce any disguise you put up (less chance if you have Flexible Signature, Masking, or both). A good one means that they'll have an idea of how powerful you are and be better able to find if you left anything behind. And Astral Beacon makes all assensors better. At the very least it means every successful looker can try to remember your signature and pass through your disguises.

Now, while you can be tracked by the astral signature, it's not super easy. Five successes minimum, one hour per roll, each hour passed means one more success needed, and here's the big thing. If you're behind a mana barrier, the force of the barrier is added to the successes needed. So if you have the Mana Barrier spell, you can add successes to the search by casting a spell. If you don't, there's the two rituals that can also put up mana barriers.

However, there's two even simpler ways. The easiest one is to have a lodge set up. You're behind a barrier of (Lodge's Force) and while it does have your signature should they find it, that's still a lot of successes they'll need to find it. The other is to have spent a few hours beforehand, and an equal number of reagents, and made a temporary lodge. It'll last till sundown or sunup, but it's cheap, can be put down near anywhere, and can make the numbers pretty high. Spend the eight hours before the run putting up a temporary lodge and for 160 NY you've made it so that the base difficulty to find you by your signature is 13.

Can you use Turn to goo spell to steal cyberware without needing complex surgery?

This is all great info, thanks. It makes it much easier for me to understand how signatures work in case my players ever make a wizard.

In theory. In actuallity, you're going to have to break it out of the goo, which could still damage the stuff and may be worse than just trying to chop the stuff out of a corpse.

It mentions they have the protruding eyes, so like this (at least in the eye region, no muzzle). Charisma is more than just looks.

>download Shadows of Asia
>mfw it's absolutely stuffed with setting information and actionable plot hooks all across the continent
>actually covers more than just Japan and China

Holy fuck, I'm blown away. Is all of old Shadowrun this good?

2 (2) cookie elves! Out of 4! That's only 50% keeb!

Since Shadowrun's timeline diverges from our own, does that mean there was no Syrian civil war and resulting refugee crisis?

45 soak dice, tanked a spirit, two machine gunners, and a troll adept all at once.
Still not safe enough.

Penicillin.

hey /srg/.
Where do you go if you want beachside fun for the various sprawls?
I am curious what preparations and gear you need for appropriate 6th world beachtime fun.

The resulting goo is as tough as the subject's Body, if I'm not mistaken. You're still going to have to rip it out, but you probably won't need a hacksaw to do it.

A good, hot-sim enabled comm or deck, some tanning lights, a trip (or dream) chip, and something to flip you once the tan's started up.

I have a wetsuit with chemical resistance, goggles, and a cyberlung with internal air. The beachtime fun might feel a little acidic otherwise.

I am still dead set on having beachtime fun.
Maybe they make some kind of acid-resistant suntan lotion