/srg/ Shadowrun General - Su Casa Es Mi Casa

Hey chummers, I'm planning on having my runners get contacted by a Mr. Johnson who's secretly representing a cult organization that follows the teachings of a pre-Awakening televangelist on a bunch of VHS tapes. The job is to steal a small library of VHS tapes containing more footage of the cult's leader, but I'm having trouble determining exactly how much information there is on VHS tapes and how easy it would be to find devices capable of playing them in case the runners actually want to try to find out what these tapes are and what's on them. Would it be common knowledge what VHS tapes are in the 21st century, or is it more likely that only experts on the subject of pre-Awakening media would be aware of them? How rare might VHS players be?

It's like 100 year old tech at this point, right?

Break into a tech museum, steal a DVD/VCR combo. Have the players roll knowledge technology/history to not accidentally steal a VHS tape rewinder.

Do you know what daguerrotypes are? If not, did you do a google search to find out?

That's about how hard it would be to learn more about the topic.

For a game set in 2075, it's roughly 100 years after the invention of VHS, but VHS only got phased out in the mid 2000's, roughly 20 years before the Awakening. Some seniors would probably remember VHS, but it's hard to estimate how available the technology still is.

Well, practical limitations of the physical format mean that at their normal quality a VHS tape holds between 3-5 hours of data usually, depending on if they're PAL or NTSC. Longplay can make that much longer but the quality is shittier.

According to wikipedia, the last known company IRL to produce VHS equipment was the Japanese Funai company in 2016. But there seem to still occasionally be productions and sales of materials on VHS up to and even past that point.

Not 100% certain on SR tech, but depending on if you want to fudge the history any, it's possible that analog materials could occasionally be kept for nostalgia or hipsterism - like with Vinyl now, that's a medium which is from the late 1800s. Libraries, universities and other repositories of knowledge could have tapes and hopefully some way to read the magnetic strip. Some people could be crazy enough to want to store data in analog formats (reminded of a Ghost In the Shell episode where a contact of the Major keeps all his shit on ancient floppies to people can't steal them).

As for common knowledge, what said. Assuming they aren't part of a scene which understands them, future-googling "VHS" can't be too hard.

youtube.com/watch?v=XiiJKfsNxz0
I see what you're doing there.

I'm imposing a -4 to social limit if you're wearing Sleeping Tiger from now on. -4 for hangers, -6 for socialites to represent how everyone hates it.

Great.

Outside your head canon, not everyone hates it. Some circles like it, corp and non-corp, particularly corp trog risers.

It looks like absolute trash and it is immersion breaking to think that it could possibly look fashionable.

Fashion looks like trash. The parts that aren't trash are boring.

Don't try to act like stylish suits are the same as Sleeping Tiger.

You're right. Suits aren't trash, suits are boring.

Oh boy it's time for SRG's favorite meme!!!

Fuck off with your Sleeping Tiger apologism.

>Vinyl now, that's a medium which is from the late 1800s.
You're thinking of Shellac discs, which are the direct predecessor to vinyl.

Why is kitty mortality rate so high?

I'm sure some stupid rich fuck wearing a WWII Japanese fighter pilot's outfit has very strong opinions on an outfit the book doesn't actually describe as being outrageous.

Our runner group is all roomies in a house with luxury comforts, necessities and entertainment, it has ultramodern, What kind of shit do we have? Are we beta testing Ybox 360000s for MacroHard?

Hell Heritage is bunch of Tradional Garbs smashes with Fashion Clothing and its selling like crazy
But people here are still hating the Sleeping Tiger on basis description from 3e. Even though the line was just brought back and fresh from R&D

>Even though the line was just brought back and fresh from R&D
Because the R&D change amounts to "we put RPC in it instead of colour changing fibres!", and there's no fucking description of what it looks like in the last two editions.

>future-googling "VHS" can't be too hard
After two matrix crashes and constant aggressive corporate pushes to support tech that's new and actually makes money, it really can.

Hey guys, I've got a bit of an odd question but I figured this would be a good place to start asking:

A friend of mine suffers from extreme dyslexia and has a hard time reading. He loves the Shadowrun fluff and has been trying and straining for literally years trying to read some of the novels.

Anyhoo, I've managed to get my hands on a copy of the next book he wanted to read ('Changeling') and I was wondering if anyone knew of what might be involved in trying to fan-make an audio book for private use?

I know it's a bit of an off-kilter question for Veeky Forums, but I thought I might as here before trying out maybe Veeky Forums or something.

The easiest way would be to feed the text through a text-to-speech program. That'd sound kind of shit, though.

I do a lot of voice overs for videos.

It would take hours upon hours upon hours of reading and re-reading the text as you inevitably fuck it up several times.

And probably a similar mount of hours to go through and cut out those verbal fuck ups.

Generally, I find it takes me a total of an hour or so to record about 5 pages of text, after accounting for re-recording and editing out my fuckups.

As said, the easiest solution is Text-to-Speech. Recording it yourself (especially if you've got a nice speaking voice) will be better by leaps and bounds, but it'll take a ridiculous amount of time.

Hey, whenever somebody brings up 1e, people always say that the 1e matrix rules don't work for some reason. Are they actually broken?

it isn't uncommon for cat's first litters to be only 1 or 2 kittens

They are going to play angry birds on the girl's tab.

They require the GM to literally spend over an hour with a single player (Decker) while the rest can sit around doing nothing.

Sounds pretty normal for SR decking rules. Or RPG decking rules in general. Somebody was trying to tell me SR1's decking is better than CP2020's netrunning, and I'm trying to get an idea of whether or not that's true.

I solved this by setting up a game of Mastermind with the decker, and when it was his turn during combat, he would play his color choices; if he wanted to roll a skill check, I would give him better hints on what was right/wrong/close. It kept him feeling the pressure of a hacking time, while the others didn't get ignored.

Personally I just speedrun it, Or do it all seperately from the normal game. Make it really feel like its happening in real time. Call for a couple rolls and then say how it goes, Or just have them achieve all their goals 'instantly' as it would be in real time, Because you already did all the rolls and stuff another time.

when will armored school uniforms come into vogue

start a few school shootings
I'm pretty sure that eventually they either will increase the security, invest in armoured school clothes or both

When megacorps give a fuck about public education.

I will take what is armored cloathing for 500, Bob.

Now I want to run a street scum game where the runners are a group of school kids with overactive imaginations

That sounds neat. Would headware be considered cheating on tests, though?

Cerebral boosters and the like, no. An implanted comlink, yes.

I ran a campaign where the PCs were all in high school.

Several events:
>played two runner groups off each other selling a lost extraction item
>one of them was initiated into a road gang
>attending the homecoming dance
>one hiding that he'd been bitten by a ghoul and trying to find surreptitious medical assistance for it
>rescuing one PC's sister kidnapped by runners in a case of mistaken identity
>investigated missing dogs leading to an insect spirit hive

Funny story time

> be me
> be playing shadowrun for the first time **okay, second time. well, first character ever, second session ever... you get the point**
> Be a dwarf rigger with the alias Urist... because memes
> Mission goes better than planned. Spend the whole time that the rest of the party is scoping out the lower sections of the high security facility with one eye on the security cameras whilst i carry top secret bio samples up to the bar fridge in my van.
> Turns out the facility is running tests on a Roc in an attempt to harness its resistance abilities
> Relay new information to Mr Johnson with an inquiry as to how she would like us to proceed...
> Promptly asks us to waste the facility (luckily it's in the barrens)
> Send the orc street samurai the buildings floor plan so he can ask one of his contacts /theoretically/ how one would best demolish the building with Level 15 foam explosives
> Realise the building still has ~40 civilians/lab technicians inside
> Don't want that much blood on my hands so i check the fire escape plans and use the security system to give everybody in the building a warning that they have [recommended fire escape time]/2 to exit the building before it goes kablam with a not so subtle warning that any attempts to try to recover or save samples or data will result in a premature ignition.
> Hightail it out of there as the building collapses.

> unsurprisingly the authorities notice and check everybody's SINs as they leave the barrens. Still have my (single) edge point and instantly tell GM that i'm rolling with edge. Critically glitch the check on a quality 4 sin WITH EDGE.
> GM asks me to hand over my character sheet
> ohshit... it's character reroll time.

Continued

> OFFICER 1: Sir, there appears to be an issue with your SIN, would you mind stepping out of the vehicle?
> URIST: Sir, i assure you i have all the necessary paperwork right here... *hands over credstick loaded with 2k*
> MRW succeed whichever charisma based check the GM had me roll
> OFFICER 1: Everything seems to be in order sir, have a nice day

> realise i essentially traded a 2k bribe for an extra point of Karma in reward for a combination of good rollplaying and dice rolling

I'm starting to see why people talk so highly of shadowrun and i'm kicking myself for not playing it years ago.

In other news, the dedicated hacker we expected to have in our group is no longer able to come to sessions. How do i best initiate "script kiddie" mode to cover for his absence, whilst continuing to play the rigger character that i had planned?
(SR4e. Currently have very high software, mechanic, and electronics skills. Have a software suite, Data Havens 11 knowledge skill, and Data Havens Network contact with Connection 3, Loyalty 2, Size 2... no points at all put into hacking skill. I can literally write my own programs during downtime or rely on finding the programs on the DH network as long as i never actually have to rely on the hacking skill.)

The cheapest way to get the equipment is usually the ghetto commdeck hybrid. Some people were discussing it higher up or in the last thread. As for the skills, I think you're kinda SoL.

>ghetto commdeck hybrid
chummer, he's playing 4e

>particularly corp trog risers.

OrkCEO specifically calls out how professional orcs and trolls hate it because it's a retarded stereotype made by humans. The people who wear Sleeping Tiger are the equivalent of Kevin Federline playing at being a street nigga.

GMs, what's the stupidest thing you've ever gotten an idea for a run from? I just got an idea for one from, I shit you not, Mystic Messenger.

Browsing the Fallout 4 mod page and seeing one that replaced the brown shitty Boston with a nice spring.

Oh shit I'm illiterate. I can't help you but at least it means that it's less of a stupid idea.

No, not really. The Library of Congress survived both crashes and was back on the net both times. Considering that in universe people still watch 'flat-vid' movies from the VHS age, it's actually kind of silly that anyone would consider videotapes some kind of lostech. I mean, it's not like you don't know the older computers ran off punch cards, and that was before the internet existed to document it.

Please tell us about the mystic messenger run

The line from the Simpsons about how Milhouse's dad sunk the number 1 cracker company in town into a 3 way tie for 6th.

It was kind of a throwaway detail that my players latched onto and now we're pivoting into the Cracker Wars.

Sticking with pic related until there's a page number, omae.

>people still watch 'flat-vid' movies from the VHS age
They don't. They watch modern remakes. No Predator, instead they have Manhunt. Etc.

Meant to reply to this one.

They do though, not every movie gets remakes. Think 'shit on the public grid', not 'Horizon milking the cash cow'.

Old PBS reruns omae.

lol, how many reruns does PBS actually run of movies from the 40s though?

just because the number is non 0, doesn't mean it's not practically 0

Then show it.

I can't 'show' it because it was on the Neo Anarchy podcast everyone here plugs.

Is it a good source of lore or not?

Not that user, but the fact that people today still watch Oliver Stone's JFK doesn't mean they have 8mm film projectors at home or know anything about them. Technology changes a lot more quickly than the media it shows. You can still buy Chaplin films, doesn't mean a hand-cranked camera is something people would even recognize. The odds that VHS (a format that existed for about 30 years, 100 years before SR) is recognizable as anything other than vague hints that it's a very dead storage medium are very long.

Can you cite an episode? Opti pulls from tons of books, from every edition, and deals with the inconsistencies by coming up with his own canon answers where none exist.

Fuck no, I was in the middle of binging. It was the one where he was talking about enjoying the old flatvid film noire movies.

Ironically, movies from around 1940.

And it doesn't matter if it's something the average person would recognize. The original point was that it was easily searchable in the net. Which it would be simply due to western culture and classical entertainment.

Apparently my character is going to go and attempt to heist the soda equivalent of Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory in short time, due to a running gag of him only drinking SODA brand soda. GM said that he even made a modified version of 'Pure Imagination' for me.

My character has a mild phobia of dwarves, so I'm scared how the Ooompa Loompa knockoffs are going to be handled.

Pixies

See, to me this just makes it sound like he's pulling directly from Gibson, Stephenson, or whoever else has thrown old reruns into their dystopia. Great stuff for head canon.

And given how many of Opti's personal details don't line up with canon (though I hear they put him into the vidya, so I don't know what he created for himself is now retroactive canon) I'd say it's way more likely to just be personal inventions.

I also like the Az-Am war, in my game that I'm currently running the players are in Argentina in a three way civil war between a military coup, government loyalists, and moderate™ rebels.
It's only shortly after the Az-Am war but neither Amazonia or Aztlan can avoid meddling in the affairs on the doorstep of Amazonia, with Aztlan supporting the loyalists with materiel and "security consultants" and Amazonia totally not sending agents into Argentina to assist the rebels.
The players recently stole an APC for a Johnson of questionable nationality by finding a broken down APC, repairing it to working condition (although it had no working gun), then getting loyalist uniforms/ID tags, sneaking into the Buenos Ares dockyards where the loyalists were gearing up for a retreat into Uruguay and then stole a better APC and drove that to a safehouse, taking out an enemy helicopter, TOW-Humvee and another APC on the way.

>I'd say it's way more likely to just be personal inventions.
Sounds as legit as standing in front of a Star Wars poster to talk about some donut steel idea for a sci-fantasy mono myth saga.

What is life in Aztlan like?

Like Mexico today except the blood of Christ is used very differently.

Considering that the books usually reference obvious remakes of classic movies (and often say that they're remakes of flatvids) PBS user sounds like he's full of shit.

So it's still a shithole.

Sounds like people have a working knowledge of flatvid and at least a cursory knowledge of what it was stored on to me.

Complete with the Revenge, yeah. They've only spread it like a plague throughout all central America and the former US Southwest, because misery loves company.

Working knowledge is giving them too much credit. Rather they are aware that they live in a derivative culture, with many movies being remakes of previous ones. They know that flatvids existed, but don't have a knowledge of what is on them beyond the most basic premise ["ll admit I loved Manhunt, that remake of the old flatvid with the alien hunting a bunch of mercenaries in the jungle."], which can easily be gleaned from the modern hype machine for the new movies.

And again, there is a huge difference between 'flatvid' and 'VHS'. Tapes are two decades dead and we're still in flatvid territory, but ask anyone in highschool or younger what 'be kind, please rewind' means. OP was asking if they are common knowledge (definitely not) and how rare VHS players would be (very rare).

The tapes wouldn't work anymore. Too degraded.

And the counter argument was that the flatvid derivatives of VHS/remakes are popular enough that you can wikiwander across VHS accidentally, or are almost assured to find one on a matrix search. Hipster elves especially would be posting about VHS and DVDs on their mefeed.

Agreed. You'd want to be after old hard-drives with masters or DVD rips. Magnetic media just doesn't have the shelf-life you get with optical storage.

IIRC, there's a part of either SR:R or Dragonfall where you have to find a flatvid player. VHS or DVD or something.

Yeah, in mine there's the Cuban Nationalists, led by a recently leonized President for Life, the Metahumanist Movement, led by guys pissed off that Cuba still considers metas to be second class and that their president for life just extended his lifespan by another 60 years, and the Neo Communist party, who want to seize the means of production from all the megas and make them state owned and then kill all meta sapients because they hate Amazonia for "some reason."

The players were in Cuba because they were working for a rogue CIA agent that they busted out of prison. His name is Ivan, and he wants revenge on the guy who he believed set him up to get burned - another CIA agent named Nicholson. When they got there, a secretive group of mercenaries named the Boa Vista Burn Teams (who specialise in fire based weapons and collateral damage) show up and start killing people from all three factions indiscriminately. Both Nicholson and Ivan believed that the other hired the Burn Teams. Both of them were wrong, and are now working together to stop these guys.

I'd say more, but my players browse these threads sometimes, so I don't want to spoil anything for them. This campaign has been running for so long that my players have reached critical mass power levels, so I can truly throw anything I want at them and they'll be able to handle it without calling BS.

...

>2014
good times

Fun, believe me, I've lived in Aztlan for my whole life and everywhere else sucks.

You can go back. All the SRvidya are like $10 on Steam right now.

I own dragonfall and dont have the money for any of the others.
Played em anyway.

I mean that the whole set of them are $11 total, and it discounts out the ones you already own
store.steampowered.com/bundle/532/Shadowrun_Complete_Collection/

Give in, you know you want them.

Sadly my players also browse /srg/ so I can't say a ton more.
In mine the military are nationalists, trying to nationalize the corporations and are lead by national hero general Rodrigo Valencia, who became a hero by leading the campaign to retake the Falkland Islands from britain roughly 20-30 years ago. Rebels are a bunch of rag tag resistance fighters fighting for more corporate regulation and democratic representation, and the loyalists are just essentially a CC puppet government.
The coup happened as a forced election was being held after the current prime minister was forced to step down, with the military attempting a coup shortly before the election and the rebels capitalizing on the chaos to make their own grab at power.

You know how the opening of the game is sketchy as fuck? All I could think was "if I didn't know this was a dating sim I'd assume I was going to be framed for murder." And then I realized that'd make a nice plot for a run. Prove the innocence of some kid who really shouldn't have listened to some sketchy chump who happens to text them.

I watched somebody talking about Jason Vorhees and his impact on the world of horror so I made a run about the players stopping a chainsaw wielding madman who's been forced to become blasted off BTLs and only wants to kill people.

Brainstorming about stupid jobs, we had an idea for breaking Mr. Johnson into his rival's corporate exectuive's highrise apartment in order to clog his toilet.
Then it got stupider. Turns out the rival is an avid follow of the shinto religion and his toilet has been pristinely cared for for 100 years and has an accompanying spirit. Which has now been desecrated and has become a toxic toilet spirit.
So now the runners have to kidnap Mr. Johnson and bring him back to the apartment to clean the toilet and appease the spirit.

My favorite is the lawn sabotage job. So many different ways you can take it. Did that user ever tell us how it went?

what is that? Just a pair of VR goggles with a camera in front?