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>Shoot straight
>Conserve ammo
>And never, ever cut a deal with a dragon

How much mana is sloshing around your streets? Is it brimming out of the slums, or do the corps keep snatching up everyone who can string two spells together and putting them to work? What're the most popular traditions/magic societies? Have you used that thing from Shadow Spells about Lone Star flipping shadowrunner mages through cortex bombs?

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Nah, commit entirely to cyber. Fill the sword's fuller with a big crystal vial of FAB III.

the fuck is fab3

A type of bacteria designed for astral security. Strain III feeds on astral forms, so it can kill spirits.

Fascinating!

don't all the FABs have like, terrible side effects?
What's to stop someone from just having FAB3 contained in their body somewhere?

That's retarded and not a thing represented mechanically at all. An adept with cyberware will work out entirely better for the concept. Fully committing makes the character actually weaker.

Gee, what's with all the magic editions recently?

That being said, I've mostly seen magic where it's actively recruited, corp teams, Shadowrunner teams, and the like. As per usual, our teams are generally over magic-ed compared to the norm, with adepts and mages and such. Player characters OP and all that. I find it's good to try to keep the magic levels low. Security mages using spirits to patrol areas they can't be at physically is a good balance technique.

My group's playing with an all-magic team at the minute (and no decker), so there's quite a bit of magic flying all over the place.
Of course, so far they've spent more energy inspecting pint glasses than anything else, so the players don't know that.

A single assensing test and everything I'm planning will be ruined.
A large part of me hopes they figure it out, but they're so afraid of disrespecting anyone that they aren't even checking their reward is all there, let alone looking into/at any Johnsons, or their targets.

How do I protect my bug spirit johnson from assensing?
What are some obvious-in-retrospect-but-not-at-the-time hints that someone is totally a bug spirit?

Why don't I have that shadow-steppers image saved already?

Eating lots and lots of sugar with everything.

I lack imagination.
What are some OP uses of this?

Now I just need to look up a fancy french dish that is "steak with LOADS OF SUGAR ON IT".

Take immunity to alcohol. Challenge everyone to drinking contests. Take all their money.

Or at least get their guards down while drinking them under the table and get info from them while they don't remember a thing.

Annnnddd I just realized I didn't fully read the description. Nevermind, that doesn't do what I thought at all.

Simplest conclusion: slip something into someone's drink that you're immune to. If they don't trust you, drink some of it to prove that it's fine. Yup.

I wish I could use this to just straight up have a closed breather system of super poison like a goddamn supervillain.
Too bad it doesn't work like that.
I'd be fucking MR. SMOG.
with allergy (clean air) and immunity to some godawful chemical I'd have to look up. Preferably found in pollution.

I wonder if there's any way to make Mr. Smog viable.

You see, that's not OP at all really.

Neurostun gas? A refluffed pepperspray? Cyberlungs couldn't hurt as well.

I'm just having a hard time picturing how this guy came to be/what it actually looks like. Does he have a big pack with all the air he needs? How long does it last? If he blasts it at people, does that shorten how long he has air?

You should definitely get the steamers in chrome flesh though.

I might make this a guy in the campaign I'm running now. Goddamn, I was gonna be productive today too.

I'm not actually sure how he came about, I just had the idea of him being a fucking captain planet villain in a shadowrun team. Sort of a flash of inspiration thing.

Shit, what could make Mr. Smog? Maybe trying to breathe various things due to his allergy to clean air until he found one that was tolerable?

Well, there's always, depending on your GM's reading of it, being immune to a terribly dangerous drug like kamikaze, or nitro. Drugs are a kind of toxin, and you're immune to the "ill effects" of the toxin, so that's an option if your GM allows it. Or, be immune to long haul and never have to sleep again.

Are cyberlungs even a thing? I can't find them in core or the chrome flesh.

He grew up in a heavily polluted place (industrial part of Tenochtitlan?), and so his body got used to breathing that/whatever exhaust the factories put out, and when he first got to clean air, his antibodies attacked it, so now if he's not in the most awful you-should-be-wearing-a-gas-mask pollution, his allergy kicks in.

Maybe his mask has little pellets or something of solid grime and pollution, so it just contaminates the air he breathes, so no need to an extra pack of sorts. And his room would be filled with machinery, so he could take off his mask in there.

Starting to sound like a rigger.

I'd imagine they exist in world, but I'm surprised it's not in chrome flesh. I know there's an air tank that replaces one of your lungs so you can hold your breath for an hour or so.

A rigger is nice, but it'd be better if he was some heavy-overcoated pollution emitting tank motherfucker.

But I'm really liking the grew up in gasmask-worthy pollution thing. Liking that a lot.

No reason he can't be both. I'm just looking for justification for all the machines in his house, besides making air for him.

Hobbyist armorer or weaponsmith?
Makes money on the side doing a little industrial refining?
Reminds him of home?
Lives in the engine room of the team's hideout?
Stop me if any of these sound cool

lives in an absolutely smog belching vehicle with the exhaust re-routed?

Taps into whatever pollution-management system the city has and steals smog?

So in planning my technomancer to get some Bioware I notice this little bit of text:

>Whenever you lose Essence (after character generation), you lose an equal amount of Resonance, rounded up.

Does this mean I could get a small implant at character generation for, say, 0.1 essence and use that to offset the Resonance loss from the 0.9 essence worth of good are later and not lose a point of Resonance? Because if so I can then not have to shell out the Karma to regain the Resonance later.

I can't quite understand what you said, but even if you take a tiny implant, you lose a whole resonance point.

5.999 is equal to 5.000 in that sense.

You lose the whole point of maximum MAG/RES

So, what, Iocane Powder?

My question was more specifically, since it specifies after character creation do I only lose max RES and not RES itself if I lose Essence in character creation?

What are some good adventure modules (or whatever Shadowrun wants to call em) from the FASA editions (1st-3rd)?

Not really looking for something to run, but I do enjoy reading premade stuff and sometimes borrowing from them.

Does anyone have some art of the 5e Matrix?

I'm trying to wrap my head around it, with the hosts in the sky and stuff?

Basically, yeah.

I mean, you'd have to actually stat out iocane powder, but that's probably easy enough.

And now I want the Shadowrun equivalent of the Princess Bride to happen. Westley as a security guard from the countryside gets supposedly killed but was kidnapped by Shadowrunners and then becomes one... It'd be a stretch but I'm sure I could make it work somehow.

Name a drug with serious negative side effects. Use it semi-regularly, and only worry about addiction.

Get a chemical gland for your favourite toxin.

Forget Immunity, then. Take a look at the Geneware Pollution Tolerance. (or whatever it's called) Ask your GM for a Pollution equivalent to Radiation Sponge.

What is a good trait to represent being willing to take big gambles, even if it's to the detriment of the team?
I mean like literal gambles. Like being willing to let the extraction target go if they win at dice.

I don't have the book on me, but some form of compulsion from Run Faster would be good I think.

There's a Compulsion (Thrill Seeker) negative trait in Run Faster IIRC.

However, this is That Guy territory and you are a shitter for being willing to balls up an entire run just for fun.

>b-b-b-b-b-but it's what my character would do!
>he even has the trait!

Even as a GM who is compelled to be neutral by my almost autistic zeal for impartiality, I'd find a way to kick your ass for this.

inb4 the player gets lucky and, due to how a gamble works, wins an entire yacht

So I'm looking at the videogames on Steam, Shadowrun Returns, and the expansion pack Dragonfall. Has anyone played these and are they any good? 15 dollars each.

Kinda looks like a cross between X-Com and Baldurs Gate at first glance.

Dragonfall and Hong Kong aren't expansions, they're separate games.

All three are good. Returns is considered the worst by most.

I was thinking toxic mage desu.

I really didn't like Returns
Felt like a tablet game, not an RPG
I backed it and was super pissed, but Dragonfall and Hong Kong actually were satisfying

Grab standalone Dragonfall and Hong Kong.
Ignore Returns.
And yeah, combat is very much xcom.
Comparing it to Baldur's Gate is an insult. SR is many things, but it is not a highlander ripoff whose gameplay consists of fireballing offscreen monsters.

I have an ork who's naturally immune to tear gas. Every fight starts with tear gas spam.

So, how do I decide what city to host my session in?
I'm having trouble. I don't want to do Seattle because it's over done.
And not doing Berlin or Hong Kong because I think the games covered them enough

>he was tear gassed so much as a youth that he developed a completed immunity to it

Gotcha. I'll grab Dragonfall and report back later.

You set it in Rio, obviously, the biggest, most populated city in the entire world.

shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Metropole

I had fun running in the Rhein-Ruhr-Megaplex.
Still germany, but not the anarchist drekhole that is berlin.
The different cities making it up are very different, so you get a lot of possible settings and atmospheres or security levels in one giant cityscape.

Masking metamagic, as described in SR5 326, With a Masking Focus to back it up.

Possibly also within the anchored area of the Masking Ward ritual, as described in Street Grimoire.

Johnson looks Mundane or like something else entirely.

>What Bug Spirit Johnson worthy of the description isn't an Initiate?

I thought the characters in Dragonfall were pretty trash.

Some people just don't respond to CS, man. There's always that one private in a class at Basic that walks through it unfazed. When I went through it was an Indian kid. IDK which Indian ethnicity. The kind who are tall and darker than the lighter Indians who are kind of like Persians, but look more like Persian than Pakistani, but not as dark as the Tamil or whatever down south ones, and don't like Muslims. If some Indian or Brit user can help me out there, whatever they are. He was a big dude with a square jaw and went through the gas chamber twice and unmasked just to be a hardass. Didn't even get a runny nose.

Returns was the worst. It was before they started using actual parties that you could level up and get really involved in, not to mention the fucked up saving system.

Also Racter is best girl.

Returns is like the basic Neverwinter Nights scenario. It's an okay game, better as a show of what you could do, and everything that came after is much better.

On average I think that Hong Kong had better characters than Dragonfall, but Glory's personal quest was the absolute shit, and I really enjoyed Dietrich.

Duncan, Gaichu, and Racter best party members. I went Decker/Gunner and told magic to fuck off.

I went mage so I had to take Isobel instead of Gaichu sometimes. I hated that midget, but Gobbet was pretty cool. She was more friendly than fucking Duncan.

I've only run Paranoia before.How will this effect my ability to GM Shadowrun?

>not taking little-brother-kun on every mission
>not taking Duncan 'zip and rip' Wu on every mission
>not taking officer McGrump on every mission
0/10

Just because the guy was a prick sometimes doesnt mean I didnt take him. Him and Racter were my go to guys.

Dragonfall and Hong Kong are both improved by playing Deckers. Especially Dragonfall.

I think SR:R is worth playing first, but that's mostly because you won't want to go back to it after the others.

Literally the only mission I ever brought Blitz on was his (actually quite fun) loyalty mission.

I played decker in dragonfall but when I saw this particular portrait I just had to be a mage. Look at this smug motherfucker. He just screamed 'I shove lightning up peoples assholes' to me.

Now that they've fixed Duncan's supernatural ability to zip tie Horrors from beyond the astral planes into submission ... no.

ehh Hong Kong is pretty good, though I dont like the changes to one of the spell tree and its armor spell. I am at the very end of SR:HK, been a pretty fun ride, tried to make Amerika "dervish" san, didnt quiet go as well as I had hoped but been prety fun RIP AND TEARing through the majority of the game, next run through im totally doing a mage or decker though.

I don't remember if I brought Blitz or not to his own Loyalty mission. If it wasn't mandatory, I probably brought ANYONE else.

My first run of Dragonfall (pre Director's cut) was a Mage. I took the final and penultimate levels of Flamethrower at the same time and became the champion of single target damage.

If you haven't yet, try a monowhip build. It's the iconic weapon for SR:HK's protagonist because you're literally the only person in the entire game who can ever use one.

Returns is also worth playing for how much it will teach you to love the overwatch ability, but that requires two things.

One, reaching the end game. Two, realizing that you need to use overwatch.

Well, first, you need to learn to not try to sew intra-party dissent
Then, you need to realize SR requires way more planning than Paranoia, and at the same time more improv skills. Instead of deciding what will happen, you should plan out what the area is like and let the players approach it in their own way.

Actually, the extended campaign has some NPCs with them.
Isn't that basically the only way to properly geek the bugs?

You can do it without overwatch, it's just a load of unnecessary pain. Definitely need to have invested in lots of healing, both magical and medical.

I've been reading up on the Aztlan/Amazonia war and it mentions plenty of times that Shadowrunners were involved in the fighting. Anyone ever play a vet of the war before? I'm thinking of making my mage have the big regret quality for having done some rather inhumane things during the battle of Bogota.

>Shadowrunners were involved in the fighting
Wouldn't they just be called mercenaries at that point?

Depends on the location apparently. The ones going into the jungle and shit would be just mercs but Bogota was rife with usual runner shit before, during and after Operation Huntress.

That still seems like it would be mercenary work during the war.

Really, the only difference between Shadowrunners and Mercenaries is that Shadowrunners aren't involved in wars, I think. And they also usually do a little more on the investigation side, I suppose.

Well that and mercs tend to have bigger toys because they dont need to worry about being subtle.

>Well that and mercs tend to have bigger toys
Aside from anti-armour stuff, I'd have to disagree. Both have very big toys.

The Free Marine Company literally have their own navy.

Sorry, when I said mercenary, I was thinking of 1980s soldiers of fortune, not actual corporations.

Oooh okay then.

So, are Technomancers still able to thread liguasofts and other programs in 5e? I remember that being mentioned in TwoDee's storytime, which was based on a game using 4e.

I found it strange that though those games are just campaign official modules, they aren't contained in one Game(program).
Eh, Isobel does everything and she's competent in the Matrix even if you go EXPLOSIONS tree with her.
Melee and Unarmed Weapons have seperate cooldowns for their skills though, you can have like three Qi Onslaughts with three different weapons if you want.

Also: I want to play a pistolero in my third run. Are pistols viable?

There is really only one reason to ever use a pistol in Shadowrun: It's concealable.

Considering there is nothing of the sort in the game, I would argue pistols are an inferior option to nearly anything else.

Originally Dragonfall was a DLC for SR: Returns. Then it sold well enough that they made a separate, mechanically different Director's Cut.

SR: HK was its own thing from the reception of Dragonfall, but you can still import stuff from the older games. Sometimes it won't work because of system changes. Sometimes it will.

They changed a lot between each installment. Return wouldn't be able to handle the stuff it's been reworked to do in DF or HK.

They're cheap and you can reload them faster. IIRC, HK makes scrimping on cash a real thing.

If you build up an adept, extra heavy on dodge, pistols enough to get free reloading, and Chi Casting enough to get Counter, you can do some fun stuff by standing in the lightest cover of your group and letting people miss you.

If I remember correct, all weapons take the same amount of time to reload, and all costed the same amount of action points to fire.

I attempted to go with pistols on my first run of Returns, and ended up having to resort to the superior Assault Rifles.

Pistols get a skill that makes reloading cost 0 AP. They're a case of only really shining if you either build around it (see the PhysAdept idea above) or focus on it enough to get the good skills.

And in that case, get a revolver one too, and ride your skills to town.

Wait, does counter work with Pistols?

When last I did it, Counter seemed to attempt to use a basic attack for whatever weapon you had active when you turned it on. So make sure you have the right weapon active.

I know. I was expecting a retouched SR:R and Dragonfall /in/ Hongkong, so I'll have something to do once the campaign's finished. Plus, I like the HongKong trolls, less monstrous and more Snu-Snu for the female ones.

Wait, you can counter with pistols? I thought that only worked with MonoWhips.


The problem with Pistol skills is that they're not DPSy enough, and Double Shot is mechanically the same as simply shooting twice. I guess Chain Shot lets you triple shot with 2-3 different targets for 1AP, but they have very long cooldown and SHARE cooldowns with other pistols, so you can't just pistol-swapping and Chain-shooting three times in a turn. (Unlike the Rifle and Melee Weapons, where cooldowns are isolated. See Triple Qi Onslaughts)

It's been a while, but I think there's a few revolver only pistol skills.

And you can technically counter with any weapon, just some are better than others. (The main reason to do a ranged counter with pistols is that if you get the skill that lets your reload for 0 AP, you don't have to worry about running low on ammo and not countering when you should. Just need lots of dodge and some good body to make the most of it.)

And I think that some people made conversions and 'conversions' of Returns and possibly Dragonfall for HK. And obviously, of Returns for Dragonfall: DC.

Mercurial was great. Probably my favorite. One of the few pe-write modules that creeper my players out with how effectively it predicted their moves despite being pretty far from a railroading adventure.

DNA/DOA is something of a dungeon crawl but ended up kicking off our campaign so it has a special place for us. Also liked that the hit on the facility became canon and it was mentioned in a novel that "some team did that job."

For maximum weirdness, Harequin's Back (it helps to do the first Harlequin first and to let a lot of time passes between.. but not entirely necessary)

You know, I was running these things when they were brandy new so, with the setting as evolved as it is, players with a lot of exposure to Shadowrun might not se them as wonderfully as I remember them. Those books were always teaching you some hung ew about the setting that, at this point, is old hat. When I ran Queen Euphoria and the UB modules, they really gave a scare to my players. Now, bugs are passe'.

How would you an cyborg, /srg/?