/srg/ Shadowrun General - Mana e Mano

>adepts get counterspelling
>just in time to be hunted for their veins

What an age we live in. that said, i'm fairly pleased with the book, though I had hoped for a few more adept powers since they gave wizards some. But at least adepts got a few cool toys and at least mundane characters can summon wild spirits now

Sounds like they really need counterspelling now, omae. I wonder though, can you magically heal veins to keep a 'donor' alive?

Adept Counterspelling has been a long time coming. I'm definitely going to stat out a proper antimagic assassin now as soon as it hits chummer

You can even get a technique to use Sacrifice from Blood Magic on Spirits now!

Why do adepts need counterspelling but not mundanes?

Because mundanes are (generally) not going to be hunted down for the tasty, tasty resources within.

At least not in the way an adept will be. Most 'ware thieves don't bother with anything they can't chop off unless they were already going to geek the target.

So it's because mages don't have a reason to cast spells at mundanes?

I get where you're coming from, mundanes need counterspelling too. Unfortunately, in order to counterspell you need to be able to channel mana, which is not an attribute associated with being mundane.

No omae, it's more like Adepts just became white rhinos with great gorgeous horns.

And mages are now all impotent chinese. You can see where this is headed now that adepts are reagents for a preparation that nullifies physical drain. Just think of the spell you can cast, or spirit you can summon and bind with no physical drain being a factor.

I think it might be just a liiiiitle prone to being easily abused.

To be clear every character type besides mages needed better ways to defend and fight magic. It is good adepts got it but mundanes need some method of defending against magic meaningfully as well.

The best defense, to me, for a munane is a combination of going first (edge if need be) and HIGH NOON-ing it up. Preferably with a Split the Damage shot if you don't think the first hit will take 'em out.

There is, of course, also things like narcojet and stun grenades.

Remember that the ability to use adepts in this manner are limited to the ultrapsychotic blood mages. Who have... problems as a PC and who most NPC mages would agree is a universal evil that must be exterminated.

Like when a KE wagemage would go to the line to protect an unregistered SINless adept, which is mega illegal in the UCAS, from someone, that someone is seriously bad juju.

The issue is everything a mundane can do, a mage can do. And honestly they can do it better.

Obviously RPGs aren't PVP and it isn't about total balance between every PC, but at the end of the day some character types just have access to everything (Mystic adepts, and to a lesser extent mages and adepts) and some have access to very specific things.

Is Forbidden Arcana in the MEGA yet? Didn't see it.

Wait, meant Knock Harder (or Vitals). Either way, keep a gun you can have an ammo switch on, just to have more options.

Not in the mega yet, there's a link in the previous thread.

Actually, ANYONE can use Veins of an Adept. It's literally just something you can buy off the street.

>I think it might be just a liiiiitle prone to being easily abused.

Awakened abuse i never really abuse, its control pest

How much damage does it do initially?

Is combat decking effective (assuming you get autistic dice pools)?

Sorta. It is never optimal to do instead of something else if you could, save some stuff you can do with cybercombat in specific situations. It is just a way to use decking skills as a last resort.

Most deckers are much better off buying a CU^3 from R5, stipping its handling, and putting a machine pistol on it to always have a super cheap disposable combat drone they can use with gunnery. That lets them use a combat skill with logic, which will generally be like... 8. So they are now rolling 16 dice to attack with any ranged weapon in the game when done through a drone while in hotsim, without jumping in.

Meanwhile most combat decking either takes multiple turns to disable an individual or only disables gear. Both are strictly worse than assassinating someone with a sniper bot. But these things can be done if your party is split, or if you can't see the target because its a running skirmish rather than a shootout.

The best use of combat decking is throwing out a Brute Force to get the enemy team to shut things off quickly, and giving your team the wireless bonus advantage.

If that's not enough (one successful Brute Force probably isn't) then just start throwing out Data Spikes with all the trimmings. That'll get things shut down fast.

Its better to use dataspike right away, there is no reason to brute force in the first place.

You should also not use cybercombat at all without a good deck, as it is the one area of the matrix where every matrix attribute *REALLY* matters. A good deck running good software with a dataspike can instantly brick equipment, while running enough sleaze to run perfectly silent so no one can retaliate.

Incorrect. Literally anyone can use this. The book even says it can be sold by people who are secretive about what goes into it. All people need to salve their conscience is just that little bit of plausible deniability, omae. After all, the rumors of it being made from the veins of adepts are just 'fake news' to your average wagemage.

The Brute Force is more as a quick intimidation thing. A Data Spike will probably get the desired response immediately, but there's cases where you may want to see if someone will help spot your number on the other side for you.

Alternatively, forking and do it twice at once.

Mundanes can get Magic Resistance (and just use a Saviour Medkit to heal). Not perfect, but it's something.

>It's literally just something you can buy off the street

Not exactly. They said it's 14R for some retarded reason, but also threw in fluffwise that there is no standard market for it, and it's rare enough that there are shortages

Yeah, but that's not near good as counterspelling because it fucks with healing and buffs as well.

Everyone should use a Savior medkit though.

Only R? Not F? Holy shit Adepts are fucked. Demand is intense and you only need a fake license to keep from being hassled when trying to get it.

>he first Shadowrun Returns game is the worst of the three
I don't get why people say that.
I think it was better than Dragonfall. Dragonfall isn't bad, but you get sidetracked by all the BS personal drama.
Though the missions are optional, it's kind of hard to ignore them.

Dead Man Switch is a nice little classic Shadowrun story that is entertaining throughout and doesn't have the same 'pacing' issues, if you can call it that, that Dragonfall suffers from.

>Is there anything I need to know before I start playing showdown returns?
I can only say that whatever you do you can never go wrong with a gun sammy in the games.
It's kind of hard to play some of the other builds in the game imo.

Well, at least I now have some good subplots to throw at my runners if they go with their plans to play an adept duo or mage/adept pair.

>Logic is generally 8

>Veins are 14R
>R
Wow the devs are fuck ups.

They applied an avail code because they got bit over making it impossible to buy any critters in howling shadows, even really common ones like hellhounds, basilisks, and FUCKING MUNDANE DOGS.

Most players hard max their main stat and grab augmentation for it.

Most sams are agility 8. Most faces are charisma 6 with rating 2-3 tailored pheromones. Most mages are magic 6.

You are free to do what you want, but if you are already borderline forced to take resources A and your specialty requires you to optimize like crazy to do even basic tasks it is no wonder that most people are hard-maxing logic.

So when we talk about deckers/hackers the image that pops up is usually some dude or chick wearing some heavy duty si-fi goggles and sporting a mess of electronics out their head.

But in game is there anything to justify this style, is there a benfit to using goggles over cyber-eyes or contacts or whatever? In old editions some characters had multiple data-jacks but that doesn't seem to be as much of a thing now. Is there any other implants out there that need sexy, clunky cables?

Nah, the punk aesthetic is slowly dying.

Goggles have a lot of capacity. And vision capacity gets eaten up damn quick, which is why most people who depend a lot on vision mods like sams use goggles or masks.

Many tables also house-rule things like goggles to allow you to put sensors in them like they were armor, which makes them even better for everyone but especially for deckers and makes them line up really well to the source material that has those weird masks, like GITS.

However no there is no real thing to justify it in SR, and in fact a lot of SR decker art doesn't have them wearing this because it isn't an aspect of this game. A lot of that art is either general cyberpunk art or from some other game. One hypothetical mechanical reason a decker may want goggles is because they often are isolated and don't need to worry about how conspicuous they are. This means having the best possible vision equipment trumps having subtle ones.

Working on it as we speak.

>Goggles have a lot of capacity.
Are there any rules saying you can't wear both contacts and glasses and get the benefits of the mods in both? Like having vision enhancement in the contacts and wear them everywhere, and have smartlink and lowlight in the glasses for whenever youre not wearing your helmet/ballistic mask.

So I make a lot of tokens/art like pic related for my shadowrun games, quality can vary between my works but I generally try to keep somewhat of a standard. I would be willing to share my personal collection for use of websites like roll20 where you can upload images, I also have a lot of maps done if anyone is interested.

It is complicated. We know for example that the entire point of monocles (Which aren't *always* the gaudy steampunk accessory but can also be like those single eye targeting things straight out of mass effect, and are often worn with helmets in the art) are designed to be layered, but it is unclear how much you can layer.

No, user. You may play with uber-munchkins who insist on only playing the most cheesed out builds, but not every decker is a gnome or pixie with Exceptional Attribute (Logic), literally the only way to get 8 LOG. Same thing with AGI 8, which only comes from Nocturna, Pixies, and a handful of other metavariants with Improved Attribute.

There's a HUGE difference between "face got to the average human maximum for CHA and took a bit of 'ware" and "Most people who look sideways at a deck are minmaxing as hard as fucking possible." There's many, MANY decker builds out there you can find with 10 seconds on Google that are eminently playable and quality builds that don't sink 21+ karma into getting LOG 8.

Yeah yeah yeah blah blah b8.

>Implying
Nigger. It's called a fucking Cerebral Booster Bioware and having a 5 natural.

>This motherfucker hasn't heard of 'ware.

To be fair to the other user. I have never heard of a mage build with less than 6 in chargen

I would love that what you saying was true of most tables that they made well rounded pcs.....but it isnt, most people play autistics with the higher main attribute possible

That would actually be really awesome, user!
I'd love to see those!

I'll post a few more examples as people show interest.

Just post an Imgur album or something, man.

Seconding, I dig them but an Imgur album or similar would be the best way to go. Let people grab what they want and whatnot.
You could probably sell these to roll20 desu. Their usual token art isnt much better than that

Eh I'de rather not have it linked to me but I guess I'll just make a 10 minute mail one or something.

Funny that you mention that, you could say these are "liberated but with a twist" typically.

Do you think a parkor focused fun adept could stretch out enough to get that new counterspell too? I really want to be able to do those three things well

Sure. To be honest sounds like you aren't doing enough! Do you have the ability to sneak around? To fight? If so then being able to parkour, sneak, counterspell, and fight, maybe with some lockpicking and pickpocketing too would carry a PC well.

>it was better than Dragonfall

Nigger you what? Dragonfall is the best one story wise, Hong Kong is second in story and first in mechanics. Returns is worst in all respects. Everybody knows this.

>you get sidetracked by all the BS personal drama

>waaah character development

You fucking faggot. Play CoD or something if you don't want story. Also, the character missions are ENTIRELY optional and easy to ignore. You have to go out of your way and talk to the NPCs like five times to trigger them, and then directly agree to do the mission.

>you can never go wrong with a gun sammy

Good job saying something not retarded.

A few threads back we were talking about Pixies, and one of the things mentioned was a million nuyen bounty on then. Where is the source on this?

imgur.com/gallery/6t9oD

Well this is everything that I am willing to share at the moment, however I am willing to take requests for PCs or other shit because I am sure I will be able to re-purpose them in my game.

do you have any more tokens for characters? pink mohawk mage, cybered up gunslinger, melee/gun adept, rigger, trolls, …?

Also, on another topic:
Are the shadowrun novels worth reading, any specifically worth reading? I somewhat liked the fluff texts in the core rules book and are looking for more.

>imgur.com/gallery/6t9oD
Some of this is rather good, thanks user!
Also the IC is on point.

my players are rather vanilla so they're all humans (except the oni). I may be able to whip something up though given some time and soul searching.

yeah alot of it is shlock I take the most pride in the PCs and the maps. I will have more maps in the near future, their current run that I cannot disclose the map because my players go on Veeky Forums but it is on a futuristic blimp nightclub that is going to circumnavigate the globe in 7 days.

This is all I am gonna do for now, hope you enjoy. This is where I am right now skill wise when it comes to drawing.

>imgur.com/gallery/6t9oD
This is wonderful, thank you.

Anyone have that PDF that was a collection of Shadowrun stories from people here on Veeky Forums and similar? I heard it was a good read, and a good way to get into the headspace of the game.

I also have a lot of basic fantasy tokens that could translate into shadowrun use, but there are like 3-4x more stuff and I can't be bothered to do it at the moment.

There is the one about 2D in the pastebin/mega

Anybody who'd sell their pixie runner bro for cash is not only a bastard, but a stupid bastard for not working out a Blondie/Tuco thing instead.

>Are the shadowrun novels worth reading, any specifically worth reading? I somewhat liked the fluff texts in the core rules book and are looking for more.
The Secret of Power trilogy is a really good introduction to the setting.
Although it plays around 2050, while the newer editions take place a few decades later, in terms of lore there really aren't any major differences.

Not too long ago somebody posted an archive with all the books in ebook format. I lost the link though.

>I also have a lot of basic fantasy tokens that could translate into shadowrun use, but there are like 3-4x more stuff and I can't be bothered to do it at the moment.

It would be great if you could, but I understand if you can't right now.
you could do it later and make a new thread or drop it in a future /srg/.
Have an Arabic reaction image.

for your Arabic reaction image I will give you an arabic fantasy mage.

There isn't one. Some anons infer it from the million-nuyen bounty on blood mages offered by the DIMR based on Dunkelzahn's will, despite pixies and blood mages being entirely different things. Undoubtedly there are people who do hunt pixies for sport or trophies, as they do canonically with other metasapients like nagas, but the idea of a standardized bounty on them is entirely fictional.

>Undoubtedly there are people who do hunt pixies for sport or trophies
Could you make it any more obvious that you're making this up as you go? Trophy hunting pixies is literally impossible because they do not leave a corpse. They're hunted as live, and exclusively live, research subjects. It's like playing a technomancer but multiple orders of magnitude worse.

>implying I won't mount a leaf stained with pixie blood and shredded with birdshot

>mount
G-go on...

For scale

While it's not a million nuyen, Shadows Of North America p112 has bounties for paracritters of all shapes and sizes (though it's only examples, rather than a full list) for any hunter who can bring back the skin/pelt and head. Free Spirits included, so I assume you could get some kind of bounty on a live pixie.

shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/Harmful_Paranimals_Act

>crafts own targets to sate pixie bloodlust
This guy right here.

>To claim a bounty, 90 percent of the pelt, including the head, must be brought to a Ministry of Wildlife facility
>Class S Paranimals - Free Spirits, 50,000f per pelt

How the hell would you get a "pelt" of a free spirit?

You don't, that's the beauty of it.

Goggles are cheaper.
Goggles are stylish.
Not all ware is legal everywhere.
Your fancy induction datajack may be legal in the UCAS but maybe not in Ares land.
Not everyone wants to be a 0.1 essence mandroid.

Maybe you're strapped for cash and had to go with 2nd hand cyberware which is from 10 years ago, ugly and bulky.

There's also only so much you can cram into your skull.
At some point bits are starting to show because there ain't enough room left.
Can't have an implanted cyberdeck, a math cpu, control rig, encephalon and 1000MP headware memory crammed into your skull and at the same time expect it not to show.

There's also Distinctive Style.
Maybe your decker is proud of his status and deliberately went for showy ware.

A bounty listing that exists in Quebec only, and has drawn significant local and international criticism, and may or may not cover pixies. At best, if you're lucky there's a small portion of NA where you can legally go and hunt pixies, provided that there are any living in the Bouclier.

I'm not saying that nobody has reason to go hunt pixies. I'm saying that some people are so knee-jerk reactionary to the idea of pixies that they invent an ultra-Wanted negative quality and apply it universally.

You're not the first to ask.

Is there any equipment/ware similar to a jumppack? I think jetpacks aren't around (despite all this other technology so that makes little sense to me), but I wondered if there was anything that'd give you a short boost so you could leap into the fray like a proper madman.

I wonder if someone could invent a ghostbusters ghost trap to contain free spirits....

Maxxed Hydraulic Jacks and the Pouncing Dragon martial arts technique. Install Raptor Feet for maximum style.

If anyone has, Ares has. The only good bug is a dead bug. Would you like to know more omae?

youtube.com/watch?v=ThrVQKl04Ak

I was going to suggest a Dodge Scoot with a Rocket Booster but the Booster takes up too many mod slots, sadly.

We really do need an option for leaping into melee combat.

This dude is always being depicted with a glowing sword but he ain't an Awakened, what gives, artists?

>This dude is always being depicted with a glowing sword but he ain't an Awakened, what gives, artists?

It could just be an AR blade or something of that sort similar to the neon tattoos.

Is it true that you can play a cat girl in Shadowrun? I want to make a bounty hunter one who uses magic & knives.

Alright, worst snowflake offender.

Pixie, changeling, vampire, nartaki, or something else?