/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Its not cyberpunk enough unless its a hexagon pattern.

Check a sharethread archive pdf.

>newer crossovers

None officially since 3e, though there is stuff like a Japanacorp board member SURGEing into an off-brand Obsidiman and the Atlantean Foundation digging into not-horror stuff.

In one recent book they mentioned someone found ancient dwarf ruins (from their bunkers).

One of my runners has a subscription to a mid-range escort service. Another is just numb to every drug on the planet.

Should be fixed in the latest build, by the way.

Cheers mate.

>What things does your runner indulge in? Expensive cars? Drugs? Prostitutes?
Yes. I spend a lot of money modding my car, I do drugs recreationally and I believe prostitutes are included in the cost of my Low lifestyle.

>I believe prostitutes are included in the cost of my Low lifestyle
that's gonna be like... manfaced ones in late 40's with most of the teeth missing...

Hey now, don't talk so poorly of the troll prostitute rings.

He has clearly never been punched by of these nice ladies the face. They got a good swing, I tell you! I heard most of her customers for some reason like really, really into it. Sometimes it's even cheaper to hire a couple of them, than some of there brothers , if you want someone to teach a lesson.

>Hilda, did you just beat up a customer?
>He came so it was making love.

The new character is already forming. A female troll ex-prostitute with loads of street knowledge and contacts, and a nasty sucker punch. Shes some combination of Face and Samurai.

So I bought my daughter a Horizon CU^3 Standard for my daughter like the other thread recommended me, and she loves it. I'm planning on getting her an upgrade kit for her birthday - My dealer has enough replacement parts for the Pro version that I can rig something up.

Only problem is, there's an elf kid down the street who's about the same age, and his parents bought him a cheap Radio Shack cyberdeck. Yesterday Katie brought her drone back, and it and her commlink were covered in marks. So I look through the logs (kid didn't know enough to delete them) and they show logins from his house's LTG Number, along with poking and prodding around the filesystem and a couple of issued commands.

I'm gonna have to give my daughter "the talk" about slaving her drone to her commlink and matrix security. But about the elf kid - I think he's doing this because he's sweet on Katie, and it kinda skeeves me out that he was probably looking for pictures of Katie on her drone, but he's an idiot kid who probably just needs to be told that he's being a little creep. I'm thinking that I'll just go to have a talk with his parents, and I won't tell Katie it was him if he doesn't do it again. Thoughts?

Also I tweaked the riggerdad build. Thoughts?

>Thoughts?
The Aztechnology Striker is great, and it's cheap too. You know, for when you want one of those near-miss warning shots with an antivehicle rocket.

>Just went from people paying me to rough them up to people paying me to rough up other people. Ain't that much of a stretch when you think about it.

>Parenting (Single Parenting)
I'm a bad person for chuckling at that.

Is there any practical use for Ritual Magic?

I haven't read the rules on ritual magic, but I'm fairly certain you can make a bubble blower with it

Several. It depends on the rituals you have, the spells you have, and how many drams of reagents you're willing to throw around.

Curse isn't worth it because you have to eat drain twice (unless that got errata-ed away recently), but with Watcher and Prodigal Spell you can potentially ping somebody with a high force indirect attack spell from miles away (as long as you have an unbroken line to 'em) or a few mid rank direct spells as long as you're willing to spend a lot of reagents.

Setting up an ambush? Make a temporary lodge and put one of your combat aiding spells down for a few hours.

Want to quickly get your team and a bunch of hangers on a Healthy Glow? There's a ritual for that.

>Healthy Glow
I thought that was what women got when they were pregnant.

I'm fond of Homunculus for when we're missing the Sam. Get a couple other people to help and find something durable; enjoy an ambulatory wall with ~40 dice to soak.

Is "corpse of the last sam" kosher?

>kosher
Only if he was killed by a single cut across the throat to a precise depth, severing both carotid arteries, both jugular veins, both vagus nerves, the trachea and the esophagus, no higher than the epiglottis and no lower than where cilia begin inside the trachea, causing a near-instantaneous bleedout.

Well, if they were any good at their job we would not need the homunculus in the first place. So yeah, consider it collecting refund for their poor service in life.

It's funny because hippo is kosher animal in theory, but good luck doing that...

I wouldn't put it past a streetsam or adept with a combat axe or a claymore to pull that one off.

Character Archetype "Big Game Hunting Jew Adept"
A true Shadowrun classic, right next to Elf Rocker.

Okay, this might be random stupid idea but... Jewish Ghoul?

Alright chummers, gimme your ideas on a mech. My group's rigger is thinking about Megas XLR-ing his van, but what sorts of stuff can you guys come up with?

In R5.0, I'm only able to find a secondary drive train for Walker, and it describes using 4-8 legs that pop out to replace the normal drive train, but that's lame. Do I have to get into homebrew territory to make a decently large mech?

Jewish Ghoul Assassin with a mono-garrote. He put so much work into learning how to kill people in a kosher manner, so why not make some money on the side from it?

Have a hard time growing out the beard and little side locks, but doable.

Except I'm pretty sure human meat isn't kosher, regardless of how it's prepared. Torah law is pretty strict on the sanctity of the human body, and on murder.

Well, there is a literal battlemech in Rigger 4....but that was an April Fools PDF. And it was 4e anyways.

The problem is - with 8 legs, you lose one, you don't really care, with 4 legs, you lose one, it sucks but you're still limping on, with 2 legs you lose one and you're done for.

You are allowed to eat non-kosher food if your life or health is at stake, IIRC.

Homebrew is the only way to do it other than.

Start with the Juggernaut, rule that a rigger cocoon can be added to it, and see how that flies.

What book should I be looking in if I want to read more about... like, runner motivation? What drives a man to the Shadows instead of a cushy corporate wage-mage job?

This. Another option is going smart-ass around it. Sanctity of human body may not cover metahumans... but with above method of slaughtering that already puts you on pretty damn restrictive diet even for the member of your "species".

Growing up in the barrens.

Though becoming a cursed monster forced to mutilatw and kill for your own survival daily might be pushing that a bit far.

Regardless, differing Rabbinical views on cannibalism torahmusings.com/2007/05/cannibalism/

Best part? The fact that eating human flesh is up for debate, but the law that you cannot each regular kosher food into which someone has bled even a little is set in stone.

That's not a book.

Its mostly scattered about, the fiction is probably a good place to look for "case studies". Run Faster surely has some stuff for that as well.

Stick around and you'll hear about a few. For instance, committing, suffering and witnessing so many atrocities in the war that you can't stomach serving your country anymore but having no good options other than the shadows because you're not good at much other than killing stuff. Or like in the case of
you're very talented but otherwise an average guy in a dead-end job who really, really needs the money.

>torahmusings.com/2007/05/cannibalism/
>The Gemara in K’suvos (60a) states that human blood is Biblically permitted. Rabbinically it is forbidden when it becomes detached from the body (eg if it drips onto food).
Wait, so drinking straight from the vein is ok?

There is no particular book to read. All of them really. The world of shadowrun is one that allows for almost any reasoning to be a criminal and each book gives a piece of the lore and often individual looks into the lives of both the common man and the extraordinary one.

In general, one becomes a shadowrunner out of necessity. The Sixth World is quite literally a post-apocalypse. Sprawls are a common setting within games but outside of those sprawls are hundreds and thousands of miles of land, air, and sea where there is no law, no government, and no civilization outside of what a bunch of people can make of it. Hundreds of millions of SINless people cut off from the system, either because they want to be, were made to be, or were simply born that way, cannot even take advantage of many things you and I take advantage of today. These people get by the only way they can. This breeds the kind of people who learn to steal, kill, and perform other unethical acts for money because these people are living in the universe of Mad Max, not Blade Runner.

On topic, if you ever get the chance to read Half the Blood of Brooklyn it's a great little book. Midway though a series, but entirely standalone.

I bring it up because it has an Idea I always wanted to use for Shadowrun; a community of Orthodox Jewish vampires that consider themselves the cursed descendents of the Tribe of Benjamin, and have devoted themselves to protecting the rest of the Brooklyn Jewish community from the Masqueraded vampire world. There's a huge amount of Sixth World potential in that idea.

They do the kosher thing by only drinking from unwed girls from the tribe, btw.

Also, because they cannot pass on vampirism genetically, they infect young boys on the eighth day, after the bris, and hope they survive. The boys grow up training as warriors with slings (propelled by vampiric strength) to use on the Sabbath when they can't shoot guns (no machine use on the Sabbath), while the girls become blood cows.

There's only a few of them, which is how it should be.

And on the flip side of things, it's also the universe of Neuromancer, so there are also people who have privileged backgrounds but are still willing to do unethical shit just because it pays better. Granted, those people tend to end up among the SINless hordes when they're caught.

>They do the kosher thing by only drinking from unwed girls from the tribe, btw.
You'd have to tinker with the idea a bit, because that's not exactly sustainable in Shadowrun.

>not sustainable

With a small population, sure, but bury a few vampires in a big enough community (like New York Orthodox Jews) and there should be plenty of Essence to go around. A sip here, a nibble there, and if a few get addicted and give themselves over wholly, so much the better.

If there's one thing I detest about cyberdecks in 5e more than anything else, it's that you can buy a device that has no legal reason to exist from an electronics store.
What's the deal with the minus-text? Are they telepathing at each other while in the same room or some other kind of vapid vampire shenangians?

>no legal reason to exist
They're only restricted, actually, and you kind of need them in the hands of your spider to counteract whatever actual hackers are doing. Bet you could fry the kid for not having a license, though....

In your experience, is 12 dice after taking into account all positive modifiers but before negative ones a good pool for First Aid? This is from the context of a character who's roles have nothing to do with being a medic.

I sat there for a few minutes looking at that "who's" before posting that and only now when it's too late did I realize it's "whose."

Dammit.

I didnt get a reply in the last thread, but what is the opinion on Drakes from Howling Shadows? Would an Adept (blade) be a good fit? Im gonna wear modified Sleeping Tiger & a claymore, drake form, & berzerk. Invisable Angry Dragon with Weapon Focus

>Nutmeg, 2.5 meters of sass and secrets. Heart of gold, knuckles of brass.

>2.5 meters of sass
Read that as 2.5 meters of ass

That's a lot of butt.

So when it comes to roomates, how to most GMs rule living expenses? If a player wanted to halve the cost of medium or high lifestyle living by claiming they got a place with either a contact or another player, what sort of drawbacks would that even imply?

Well, if it's another player, the other player has to pay for their half of the rent...

Sharing a place with a contact, though, that's interesting.

Oh boy, it's been a while since I wanted to crush someone's dreams this badly.

Living with another PC, there are already rules for it so it's cut and dry. Living with a contact....that just sounds like an exploit if the contact pays half the rent.

A spider has no reason or need for it to be a deck though; it can just as well be a big comfy chair that's leased from GOD.

Honestly, I want cyberdecks to be this custom-built melange of individualised components that mean it only works for YOU.
Being a dragon is A) mechanically terrible, B) going to get you handed in to Lofwyr for a huge bounty and C) you're not a lizard man none of your shit works in your human form.
Personally I only allow sharing with PCs for long-term arrangements to forestall shenanigans unless the player's footing the whole bill. Beyond that, the rules are +10% of base lifestyle cost, split each way.

From personal experience I'm divided towards my attitude regarding the First Aid skill.

On one hand it seems like common sense that every character have at least one rank in it, if only because shadowrunning is so inherently dangerous and chances are you or somebody you like is going to catch a bullet at some point. I keep a rank 2 medkit on every character I make since its small enough to fit in a pocket.

However, healing in Shadowrun, even in emergency situations, seems more efficient if left in the hands of a mage with a Heal spell or even the autodoc programs that are in every modern first aid kit. Even a Valkyrie Module in the Rigger's truck can instantly stabilize a dying runner so they can get him to a Street Doc (a contact that every runner should have along with a fixer). Furthermore, a rank 6+ medkit is necessary to maximize mundane healing efforts and that thing is the size of a duffle bag; its not easily smuggled into runs that require stealth or subtlety. But then again, runs that require either of those probably shouldn't need a medkit if done correctly.

-minus text

No idea. It's just the style the author uses for conversations.

The vampires aren't magic; it's a virus that makes them stronger, faster and quicker to heal, so long as they keep it fed with blood. No blood, the virus starts eating them. Exposed to UV, virus goes crazy with the cellular repair and they die of cancer.

There are some infected who are like monks, and think that if they starve themselves past the breaking point than the virus (which they think is magical, or at least spiritual) will turn them into vampire buddhas, free to walk in the dun and purge the world. Even the other vampires think they're crazy.

Plus 10% cost each makes sense. I was looking all over run faster for the ruling, but I guess that's core? Thanks. I guess I could always consider that it also means double the runners living in one place means double the datatrail to track them down, and one less place for them to lay low when shit hits the fan.

I'd consider letting them live with a contact, but it'll probably come with conditions. Maybe that person doesn't want anything illegal in the house/apartment, or perhaps they'll pester the runner for favors and eventually split from their lease if they don't get any.

>it can just as well be a big comfy chair that's leased from GOD
It doesn't even have to be a chair. Spiders can use distributed hardware just like runners can, but they can spread it through a room, building, or anything else you can imagine.

The reason for portable decks is because the Matrix is more localized now. GOD agents probably have superchairs in their hidden bunkers, but they don't want the average IT guy having enough power to blast into any host on the planet. Local grids help corp security against each other as much as they impact shadow deckers.

Never mind that mechanically you can stack enough Noise reduction to make distamce meaningless.

The problem with building that into the room is that it's built into the room. Anyone who can get into the room can get control of it, and it can't be taken elsewhere. If you're the guy responsible for scrubbing the marks left on Tacoma Kong Wal-Marts, you need a mobile deck to do your work. Spider Lairs only make sense in certain high-security buildings, where the permanent on-site decker is always protected and can always have hardlines inaccessible to intruders.

Being a drake is great for going on runs then shifting to metameat & looking completely different
Access to flight, real flight & not levitate bullshit, or riding in the riggers dick-compensator
Granted it might not be worth the 75karma price tag but what is the real downside? Drake form is for throwing down, which works well in pinkmohawk

That's not a problem. Spiders can easily be provided with a Satellite Uplink and 5 Noise Reduction, plus any needed NR for other reasons.

Easier to be a hawk shifter.

I built a Sea Drake who was a Corporate Sales Wageslave and a 3 MAG Adept. Then his office was hit by Shadowrunners, the terror causing him to awaken as a Drake. He has some strong combat skills but his true skill lies in navigating the corporate world.

He wears an orange tracksuit, and transforms into a blue Sea Drake.

How in the hell does a player make a character with the Pacifist quality without ruining the fun of the entire group? Much like other qualities like Uncouth, Alpha Junkie, and some forms of Prejudiced, you not only gimp yourself but you hinder your whole group to the point of purposefully undermining any sort of team effort to get through a job unscathed.

They could. Or, instead of spending the money on refitting facilities and worrying about the lurking technomancer menace that just destroyed the last Matrix intercepting remote signals, the corps could dust off the deck designs of a few years previous, update them, and have a mobile workforce that fits the new mobile Matrix, while also being able to easily sell the resulting products to other companies without the funds or ability to make spider bunkers everywhere they are needed.

Easy. The rest of the team can kill all they want.

Its extremely hard to actually play with those qualities, hence why they reward you with a whole bucket of karma. Most players who want to play a pacifist won't actually take the Pacifist quality, so they don't automatically shit on their table. Or they use a Code of Honor and work with the GM for something a little less (non)violently demanding.

Play the pacifist, but don't put yourself in the combat role. If you're uncouth or prejudiced, learn to sit down and shut up, or learn to love the interior design of your car. I don't know what Alpha Junkie does, though

And the problem with a cyberdeck is that the moment you find and shoot the decker, you've now got a device that's worth more than a lot of cars.

All of that aside though, there's still no reason for a commercially-available cyberdeck to exist aside from starting with 'We want to have cyberdecks you can buy' and working backwards from there. if your workstation was bound to your persona or biometrics, there'd be no benefit to breaking open walls to find the spider's hidey-hole.
Pacifist 1 just means you'll discourage the party from doing wetwork. I had a player once who took Pacifist 2 knowing that the group was a bunch of murderhobos, did his best for several in-game months to sway them towards other styles of job and execution, then swapped it out for Addiction (Anti-depressants), Combat Paralysis and... Big Regret, I think it was? Might have been a refluffed code of honour.

But yeah, it's on my personal soft veto list.

You don't; It's designed to make you the paladin and to get kicked out of the group for being a faggot. It's a trap.

Pacifist is the worst fucking quality ever, either everyone takes it, and gets a shit ton of free karma, or one poor soul takes it solo and has his character die and/or kicked out of the table within the first run. However came up with it was having a fuckin laugh.

>They could.
They do.
>Having a spider on-site generally leads to faster response times to network threats, but it leaves the spider vulnerable to physical attacks.
Spiders have bunkers. So do mages. That's fibre-optic mage goggles, trailing wires into every corner of the building.

>This is the world of that special kind of rigger, the security spider. They slave their RCC to the building’s host and connect to the entire security system, including all of its slaved drones. When you’re inside a host, your effective “physical distance” to drones slaved to that host becomes zero, even if you’re on the other side of the world. The spider-rigger is often teamed up with a spider-decker to help against hacking intrusions on the security system.
Then there's this, for when you're protecting a host rather than a physical location.

>Or, instead of spending the money on refitting facilities [...] the corps could dust off the deck designs of a few years previous
Or they could continue advancing decking technology, rather than going backwards to go forwards. They're going to build secure rooms, distributed decks, etc anyway. No point ignoring it to create a workforce of spiders that can have their most expensive shit stolen.

Other people's games of shadowrun seem to have a lot more murderous runners than the ones I've been in if Pacifist is a serious issue.

I've been GMing for a year or so now and I think I've only seen only a handful of 'hot' kills, heat of the moment deaths of gangers where the runners where arguably defending themselves, and only three 'cold' kills:

One was a greasy hacker Johnson who'd hired them to rescue his 'partner', upon finding out that she wasn't being held against her will and was happy to be free of the hacker, who'd basically been in an abusive relationship with her. The party immediately sided with her and told their former Johnson to go blow a goat, gave him the chance to leave peacefully before beating the shit out of him, and when he swore he'd come back and kill them all for betraying him they pre-emptively ran the unarmed man down and cut his throat. There was a little in-party debate as to if that was cruel, or distasteful but necessary.

Another was a crippled, broken-down shaman who'd lost his connection with his mentor spirit, and after a lot of running back and forth discussion during a sniper duel with the party he decided he didn't want to live anymore and just stood up and let the team's street sam blow his head off. The team's face and negotiator got pretty depressed about the whole incident, but nobody really argued.

The last time was a recurring antagonist in a gang war that kidnapped a popular Fixer Contact of the group's and tortured her, trying to force the run-team into handing over another, much-less beloved contact for her safety. The team stormed the facility and executed the dude, nobody argued about that kill.

>Other people's games of shadowrun seem to have a lot more murderous runners than the ones I've been in if Pacifist is a serious issue.
It's not. /srg/ just gets a vocal minority of fuckwits.

I'm sure that a majority of sr games aren't filled entirely with amoral cyber-psychos who make a sport of collecting corp-sec ears, but surely violence is a regularly occuring theme in a majority of them. Pacifist would throw a wrench in the works of practically any mission that wasn't some sort of stealth heist.

Check around, there's a 4e PDF and though it's the one that technically diverges from SR, it's the newest one and I liked it.

I might be wrong, but my reading of pacifist is that, while you might chide your chummers for killing corpsec rather than using gel rounds, and try to steer then away from wetwork contracts, in the end it only applies to you. If your group accepts an assassination contact, you take no part in it.

It works better if players/characters rotate out, or if you go full mirrorshades.

>At the 10 Karma level, the character avoids violence not performed in self-defense.
>Non-lethal attacks (gel rounds, tasers, flash-bangs, stun spells, etc.) are still considered “violent,” and may only be used in self-defense—after an opponent has clearly attacked the character, other team members, or innocent bystanders.
>The character will not participate in runs involving wetwork and may try to dissuade other team members from doing so.

Low grade pacifism is that you don't start violence yourself, or accept the group taking jobs revolving around killing under normal circumstances. (MAY try to dissuade) Most runs don't involve fighting until things get FUBAR anyway, so this isn't a major penalty unless you as a player can only see guards as walking bags of xp. Once bullets are exchanged, the gloves come off for the team and the pacifist.

High grade pacifism is more of a straight jacket, but doesn't specifically involve convincing anyone else or avoiding jobs.

It was my understanding that 10 karma Pacifist wouldn't stop at chiding and would actually actively prevent their team from killing; even it meant trying to snatch their fun away or standing in front of their target. And 15 karma Pacifist would take hits to their rolls and Ability Scores when they inevitably failed to stop the street samurai from doing what he was going to do.

>4e Pacifist
>If the quality is taken at 5BP, the character actively avoids needless violence and will not kill unless in self-defense (and even then, she will do so as humanely as possible). Such characters cannot participate in premeditated murders or wetwork and are compelled to dissuade their fellow shadowrunners from embarking on such operations.

"Guys, I don't kill people, it's against my religion. I'm not okay with doing an assassination job, if you're going to do this work, it's going to be without me. Seriously, do you want murder for hire on your conscience? It's bad karma."

>If the quality is taken at 10BP, the character has severe moral qualms about any violence and will refuse to harm any living creature that possesses more intelligence than a gnat, regardless of the provocation. If she does, she is overcome by a deep depression, during the onset of which the character refuses to do anything other than eat, sleep and go about her daily routine. Such a state typically lasts several weeks, but may vary at the gamemaster’s discretion.

"Yes, there is a security dog chewing on my arm, no, I'm not going to stunbolt it. I have very deeply held beliefs about the sanctity of life, ALL life. Just help me pry it's jaws off and I'll put it in a force bubble where it can't hurt anyone."

>It was my understanding that 10 karma Pacifist wouldn't stop at chiding and would actually actively prevent their team from killing
They will try to talk the team out of accepting runs that are specifically wetwork, and will not choose to participate in such runs.

Most runs are not paid wetwork.

>15 karma Pacifist would take hits to their rolls and Ability Scores when they inevitably failed to stop the street samurai
Nope. Only their own actions matter at 15 karma. They can even tag along on a pub crawl of assassination runs, so long as they don't commit a single act of violence.

That is true but a lot of violence can and does occur even when it not the main goal of the run. Gangers ambush you when you least expect it, corp-sec protects the property you are trespassing on by force, etc. The mission might not be wetwork, but there are all sorts of incidents that will lead to your group resolving to violence to get their payday or even simply escape with their lives. And the pacifist is going to either get himself killed or somebody else killed when he doesn't contribute to the team effort of not getting ganked.

>That is true but a lot of violence can and does occur even when it not the main goal of the run
>And the pacifist is going to either get himself killed or somebody else killed when he doesn't contribute to the team effort of not getting ganked.
No.

The 10 karma pacifist is opposed to partaking until they, the team, or a bystander is attacked.

The 15 karma pacifist must find non-violent means to separate attackers from attacked. I'm inclined to think use of industrial superglide lubricant is not committing violence, fwiw.

Orgasm/Orgy, lube-bombs, Hologram projectors/illusions, Commanding Voice....