/srg/ - Outside the Sprawl

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>Welcome back to /srg/, chummer
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>Watch your back
>Shoot straight
>Conserve ammo
>And never, ever go hiking with a dragon
Rural edition. What weird and wonderful places have your runners been to out of the Sprawl lately?

Anchoring from last thread.

Are there any sourcebooks about Knight Errant procedures and "company culture"? Im writing up a few stories about the knight-errant investigation into my runners.
T. the jewlery store massacre user.

There might be something in one of the books about the corporations, otherwise what I'd do is use some CP2020 sourcebooks to get a basis, then Shadowrun-ify and tech-update them. Protect and Serve mixed with the Arasaka section of Corpbook 1 (I think), probably.

So, /srg/, just finished a sidequest session, where all that needed to be done was a small smuggling run to increase my Contact's Connection.

Wound up getting shot at by sorority themed chicks, ran a semi off the road, all while I had to beat the clock and make it to my date with my gf on time.

Then the elf decided to fuck with my date, seduced my my girlfriend and they both wound up getting pregnant by my orc

>they both wound up getting pregnant
I do not see the problem, now you have two gf

No, now he has two baby mommas, that's a whole bigger problem.

Any of you trogs have any neat ideas for some small gangs?

Pic kind of related, I've been trying to come up with a name for this gang of magical girl wannabees.

He can just go to a local health mage and have her cast fetus deletus. Problem solved.

Now I'm thinking of high Cha Black mage who learns slay fetus to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Congratulations, user. You increased your Contact's Loyalty, too! That's at least a 3 or 4 Loyalty right there.

You're also going to be getting the Dependent negative quality in about 9 months.

Help me anons, I'm doing something foolish.

I've got a technomancer with Skillwires 4/Skilljack 4. What are some good skills to buy in chip form?

From what I understand the world of Shadowrun outside the sprawl is like a wonderful and wild mix of Mad Max, Borderlands, and Stalker.

So, question, anons:

An androgynous elf, with 8 Charisma and 6 Con (Seduction) along with a number of points in Disguise and Impersonate, takes the following Cyber and Bioware: Modular Connector (Groin), at least two different Modular Cyber Genitals (one for each gender), Breast Implants 2.0, LED Hair, Skin Toner, False Face, Elastic Joints, Sensitive Skin (multiples to cover chest, upper back, and butt), Tactile Sensitivity, and Tailored Pheremones augmentations, in an attempt at making them as sexy as possible to as many people as possible.

Would you allow this in your game, or is it too Magical Realm?

Combat skills, and skills that you can use outside the Matrix in general.

If they were a former bunraku doll, maybe. I'd have to know more about their combat skills to say yay or nay at my table.

>Combat skills
Since combat will obviously be secondary for the character, I didn't know if that was a good idea because it precludes using edge to make shots count when you really need them to do so.

>in an attempt at making them as sexy as possible to as many people as possible.
Disallowed for this line, banned for being creepy permavirgin. If the character was supposed to be a cyberware-based disguise expert, that's one thing, but it's just fetish bait at this point.

Agility 6, Automatics 4, Smartlink in their glasses with an automatic pistol.

>Disallowed for this line, banned for being creepy permavirgin.
"I want to be as sexy as possible to as many people as possible" isn't a viable character motivation? I mean, look at what people do to themselves with plastic surgery IRL in the pursuit of better looks.

So, question: if a character has Custom Fit armored clothes and the Body Sculpt Adept Power, do their clothes resize to fit them as a result of the magic? Reading the RAW, it looks like Custom Fit clothes only stop fitting you if your physical Attributes change, and the Body Sculpt power explicitly doesn't change any of your stats, just your appearance.

Not that guy, but he never said it wasn't a viable character motivation.

He just said it creeped him out and you come across as a permavirgin who can't into social cues and will try to ERP where and when it's unwelcome.

You aren't gonna fit in at every table, you may as well accept that right away.

>isn't a viable character motivation
Not really. You've already got 9001 types of cosmetic 'ware, go be a whore somewhere else. It's pretty fucking shallow for a reason why you're committing deniable ops instead of standing on a street corner.

A desire to be attractive can be an interesting facet of a larger character, but as the main driver it's basically only there for the character to try and fuck everyone for validation, which is boring af.

Realistic answer: no, as a bit of bulking out/shrinking would ruin a very close tailored fit.

But this is Shadowrun, so I'd just wing it and allow it unless playing an über-Black Trenchcoat game where the players expect and want to play around such 'details'.

Related question: would it allow you to morph the appearance of any cyberware your character has installed?

Not him, but I'd severly limit it or even prohibit it
Cyberware is part of your aura, but not a natural part, which makes it harder to modify it. I'd personally prohibit it changing the ware

No, not at all.

By RAW it's allowable that Custom Fit still fits because it doesn't explicitly prevent it, by what the power fictionally does and what a custom-fitted piece of clothing is, no. The clothes would never resize, that's beyond the purview of Body Sculpt, and if you want to argue that the same Executive Suite fits a human woman and a wakyambi man you're a very silly person.

>The clothes would never resize, that's beyond the purview of Body Sculpt
They're inside the Adept's Aura, right? That's why you can Assense someone through their clothes.

It's the body that resizes, not everything in range of the aura. Which is why ware doesn't resize, or why when you attack someone with a powerbolt their clothing isn't affected.

>While the total body mass does not change dramatically, the body (skeletal bone and muscles) can be elongated, shrunken, or otherwise altered to appear like another metatype or a metavariant...

Just because something is next to you, doesn't mean it's magically a part of you.

I'd rule that because shifters can shifter with deltaware, you could feasible change deltaware to some degree, it would depend what exactly you wanted to change.

Are there any specifics on the testing procedures for kids/adults to see if they are Awakened?

The best I can find are oblique references to a 'Dumas test', and that testing is generally done to school-age children to catch them early. No specifics on what the test actually is or how it's administered.

Step 1: bring mage along
Step 2: have mage assense kids
Step 3:???
Step 4: Hire/acquire any awakened kid.

The only ones that can got through such a net are technomancers, since detecting Resonance require one hell of a godly roll. Detecting 'mere' Awakening, anyone capable of astral sight can do in its sleep.

But the Dumas test goes back to '27 when such things were very primitive, and even nowadays there aren't enough spare astrally perceptive individuals to cycle through every classroom in every village, town, and sprawl in the world, especially when there's lots of other demands on their time and talents. It's implied that testing is all-but-universal if you have a SIN, but that's hundreds of millions of children being searched by tens of thousands of mages.

Nah, the Contact was not the one that got GREENED. It was our mage, who is a Jap pop star.

It's not like sending a mage over for one day each year to just take a look at the kids in a given school is some kind of extreme logistic effort; like organizing a class photo shoot.

Sure, you'll miss a couple sick/skipping/the mage bungling his assensing; but you'd bag most of them easily.

bump. And say what you want about Complete Trog, the art is pretty good (even if the people doing art for the stories appear to have only read them as thirdhand tweets).

Yeah in general 5E has done well on artists (maybe they actually got paid), but I can't help seeing thick whiskers (or like a moustache of sorts) on her face in that picture unless I look closely.

Nico Nico needless

And for people who are supposedly writing a book all about orcs and trolls, they have no clue what the fuck they are supposed to look like. This is supposed to be orc actress Kat Berg.

In my current campaign the party went to an area of Alaska that had been terraformed by inter-dimensional invaders. The air was mostly breathable since the terraforming had been halted by UCAS and CSA militaries but some of the critters from the invaders dimension still wander about.
Really they're monsters from DND I've converted.
Works better than I thought

>reading CT
>suddenly 4 pages on Spanish history to catch us up with them in recent years

Anyone have any interesting house rules or bending of the rules? Our GM likes to make faustian deals with us.

As an example, a few sessions ago I decided my phys adept sam really Really needed a weapon focus (damn spirit nearly ruined the previous run and TPKd us. Couldnt rely on just the mage.)
Asked my low loyalty/high connection contact for a good place to get my katana enchanted. Dice were rolled (poorly on my part) and my GM asked if i wanted a "double-edged deal." Contact said he'd do me one better and told me of a dojo with some secret forbidden chi technique to make any blade a force 4 foci. With the help of our decker I was able to sneak on in and grab the scroll suspiciously easy. Turns out contact tipped the dojo off as to who stole their shit immediately after and then hopped town. Turns out its Triad run. Turns out, the technique also makes the blades fragile and gives it a 50% chance to break after each swing.

TLDR:
>Ask contact for katana foci, roll poorly.
>get info on secret weeaboo technique instead.
>steal secret scroll, contsct snitches me out to dojo.
>have the Triad constantly trying to ambush me at home
>any blade can be a focus but 50% chance of breaking.

Sounds like a good reason to buy 10 survival knives.

>incisions/lines on the arms and head
>cybernetic looking eyes
>adept

It might be a ruse. Like dressing the tank up in wizard robes.

That was one of the few good parts of the book.

>not getting cosmetic scarification

It's like you don't even punk

user, he has lights in his arms
which counts as an essence costing ware
are you willing to reduce your essence for being easier to hit?

Counterpoint

Just some really tiny lights with a sticky coating on the backside. No harder to apply than a pair of googly eyes.

So do the Street Samurai follow the bushido code or is it just their name ?

yes, go read Run Faster

That is a taboo topic round here. Please desist.

>tfw you had a really fun run planned out, and your players were really into it at the beginning of the night
>you get pretty drunk halfway through and rush them through cliffnotes of the climactic parts

:(

They could if they wanted to. Plenty of Street Samurai live martial lives and aspire to martial ideals, but it's not inherently true. The name is mostly a title to pick out the real deal bad asses from the average street thug.

Will do as soon as they deliver the book to me.
You're not serious are you ? Do people argue whether or not they should follow it or what ?
Ok, that one makes sene.

>Do people argue whether or not they should follow it or what ?
yes chummer they do
that is the problem
because once started the thread is then filled with nothing BUT discussion about it.

oh, and:
>Will do as soon as they deliver the book to me.
DO NOT BUY CGL BOOKS
DO NOT GIVE THEM MONEY
ALL BOOKS ARE IN THE OP PASTEBIN

It it perhaps one of the most famous arguments on this general and it completely derails the thread every single goddamn time.

Not specifically bushido, but a Code of Honor is what separates you from the amoral mercenaries who, for a very long period of time lorewise, have been known to have a bitter rivalry. Many Mercs won't work with Street Sams because they get in the way of money making, and Street Sams won't work with Mercs because they are unscrupulous.

Some people like to have the title without the effort.

A person doesn't even have to be a Sam to have a proper code-of-honor. Wasn't there a whole dumb jackpoint section about how this honorable assassin guy wrecked Clockwork's fancy new drone and let the target go cause Clock wanted to geek some women who were in the way?

Oh yeah, not everybody with a Code is a Street Sam, but every Street Sam has a Code.

I'm not going to read 100-300 page pdfs of text, I'm not fucking mad. I use them for reference but I prefer physical copies at the table, always did.
Everyone's asleep at this time so no one is going to bother anyway. The thread is barely moving at the moment.
Doesn't code of honor get into the way of well, shadowrunning ? Having to kill people like an old security guard that's just doing his nine to five and shit.

Which is why Stick-n-Shock and intimidation exists.

Sure it can get in the way of running, its why its a negative quality. Still, that shouldn't stop someone from taking it and having a code. You don't have to (and probably shouldn't) kill the old security guard; there are other options. Chloroform, non-lethal CQC, stick'n'shock, straight up convincing him its not worth the fight.

Is this a good twist?
>building spider is highly effective
>goes rogue
>rampages through facility, killing all staff with slammed doors and vented air and autoturrets and robot arms
>runners are hired to deal with spider
>when they finally get to the control coccoon, it is a bloody mess
>something else has been pretending to be him this whole time

Where do the runners go from there? And what should the thing be that's been doing the spider work? I'm leaning towards AI, but am up for good ideas.

Swarm of technocritters
Now they have to take back control by using cybercombat and meat space combat on the bugs

>techno-roach hivemind
Burn it to the ground.

>Not wanting to become part of the hivemind

It's like you want to be alone forever

Said the bug spirit.

>technoroaches take over facility and kill everyone
>begin arranging the corpses into strange arcane patterns
>the mundane tech roaches are attempting a magical blood ritual to summon bug spirits

Is this too many twists?

>Final twist, it was all arranged by the janitor who got fired because the manager saw a bug in his office

>they have no clue what the fuck they are supposed to look like
Admittedly, that much you can brush off under various augmentations.

It's not how mana works, for one thing.

A technocritter (or paracritter) isn't necessarily any smarter than a regular critter, just like a capuchin isn't smarter than a chimpanzee just because it has a tail it can use to grab things. It just has evolved to fit a certain ecological niche. The roaches don't have anywhere near the kind of knowledge to perform a magic ritual, or magic of any sort - they're still likely to scatter when the kitchen light is turned on.

All Street Samurai follow A code, but not necessarily THE code.

Better, techno bug spirits straight from the resonance.

Yeah, but magic nigga.

But what if you take 5,000 capuchins and wirelessly network their brains into a super-entity?
How many monkeys do you need to make something smarter than a monkey?

Sticking horns on an orc is not an 'must be augmentation' thing. Every troll seems to have their dermal deposits scraped off (except for a few strategically placed on the arms), so which ones have horns are pretty much the only way CGL leaves us to figure out which is which.

They don't get smarter, though. Just like you can't pile a bunch of ants together and watch them start performing Bach.

E-Hive is them networking and what it does is gives them a stronger Resonance.

>Yeah, but magic nigga.
The laziest answer, especially in a setting where magic is rigorously and scientifically studied, and we have generally clear ideas about what is possible and what is bullshit.

Hive organisms do get a bit "smarter" when there are lots of them, though. As in, more able to solve complex problems.

I figure actually wiring them together instead of using reacharound pherimone systems would have an even greater effect.

problem is:
>how would they understand magic?
>Why would they want to summon bug spirits?

Oh, I thought you were arguing against them being smart, period.
As for magic motives, I thought the unspoken understanding is that they were linked to bug spirits in some way due to being bugs.

Chummer, bugs don't like other bugs when they are the same type of matter
why would they like bugs that aren't even that?
Why introduce a potential rival?
What would they gain from doing that?

And I'm not the other user, but I do agree that even if they were connected their brains do not work in the same way we do and are focused on one task. Even if you have dozens of vectors of type (x,y,0), you'll never be able to create a vector of type (0,0,z)

I gotta disagree on the brain thing, everything we've found out about neural networks is that they are scary after they stop being retarded. Which is a function of how big the network is and what it is being trained to do, more than any initial program.

Magic I can take or leave, it was sort of an idea I tossed out there. Might go along the lines of the other guy who suggested summoning resonance bugs, or possibly making cockroach filled drones.

You're talking to two different people. I'm against saying they are smart, at least insofar as their actual intelligence is increased. They become more capable of solving problems, but from what I know this is not them becoming better thinkers (for example, beehives with many members are able to find better nesting grounds, but that's because they look at more areas and 'debate' them, not because the proximity of bees next to each other gives them the brains of a real estate agent).

Also, bug spirits have literally nothing to do with bugs. You can argue that they are related to the Earthdawn concept of Horrors needing to be defined before they can come into our world. Insect Spirits aren't Horrors, but they're from metaplanes on the road there. What in metahuman minds better encapsulates a soulless hivemind, bent only on consumption and procreation, then a swarm of insects?

>they get smarter, but not because they're better thinkers
It doesn't matter whether or not the chinese room is or is not actually intelligent.

It does with magic, especially conducting a ritual to contact the farthest metaplanes and striking a bargain with the spirits therein.

Man, it matters way less that you know what you are doing when it comes to magic. People are all the time accidentally summoning horriffic shit.
Though, it is a fair point that resonant bugs probably won't have magic.

It does matter whether the improvement is in scope or in power.
Is the swarm capable of things the individual entities can't, or is it just more powerful in the areas the entities are already capable of?
AFAIK they are the second type, meaning that they won't just willy-nilly summon spirits, since that isn't something they have to deal with.
Your sound analyser may be the best in the world, but it still will be confused when offered some economics data

>People are all the time accidentally summoning horriffic shit.
What? Where do you read that?

As a neural network, it'll improve in scope as it is exposed to new scope.
That's how they work.

That's the entire premise of how shit like bug spirits and horrors get here in the first place. Some idiot summons a thing that they aren't prepared for and don't know how to handle. Or just accidentally appears them when they weaken the veil with too much blood magic.

But that's not how technocritters work. Digits=/= neural networks.

So, what would you call a bunch of neurons networked together then, if you are arguing they aren't a neural network?

a hive mind
a group of processors capable of transmitting data between them to increase their calculation power.
Think multi-core processors

But if you get a bunch of processors together, and put them in a neuron-like setup, they increase in scope. That's the basis of modern neural network computer design.

I would call it 'read the fucking book, then you'll learn what e-hives and technocritters are and how they don't for any kind of symbiotic or parallel thought process, literally all they do is increase the hive's Resonance while they all individually do bug things like walk about and eat'.

I get it, you read about neural networks in a Slate article and now you're all hot and bothered, but that's not what's happening here.

Man, I hate it when shadowrun can't keep up with actual progress in the fields it is talking about.

>and put them in a neuron-like setup
which isn't given here
neuron-like setup =/= just connected
it means that each component cares for one part and the connections between them are weighted.
a hive mind is just that each part can access the information of all the other parts, which is already a massive boost. But it doesn't make it a neural network

What does make it a neural network setup is that it is literally running on neurons.

The flour makes it through the sieve, but not all of it makes it into the bowl. The more flour you use, the greater the chance people will notice you're spilling flour everywhere.

There's a ritual spell that can be performed by anyone and allows you to summon spirits you can't otherwise summon, with the caveat that you might summon something unintended.