/srg/ - Shadowrun General

Do initiative improving implants also affect matrix/astral initiative?

They do not boost astral initative as far as i know, neither does the spell "improved reflexes" since it's a physical spell... which in theorie means that you could cast it on drones.
Shit's weird man.

What is the status of luchadores in Shadowrun are they still a big thing in aztlan or are they suppressed due to being linked to catholicism

Off the top of my head, I'd assume that Aztech would have given most of them a choice.
Rebrand themselves as jaguar warriors or sacred gladiators for Aztlan, participating in bloodsports and national religious ceremonies, or suffer an unpleasant fate.
Aztech being Aztech, they likely wouldn't give them a martyr's death and inflame the people - no, they'd use ritual magic and plain bribery to have them drown themselves in vices and smear their reputation before they died, so that not even the most heroic luchador's funeral could be shown on TV.

Or worse: take their masks

That's for the real big ones, the ones where no one could ever believe it wasn't foul play.
That's where, in best show wrestling style, the Aztlan gladiators challenge them to a gauntlet and rip off their masks the first time they lose - and Aztech is going to do its best to make sure they don't win. After all, while there's the hardest core of loyalists who're loyal only to the luchadores and the ideals they represent, a lot of casual fans will bite onto the drama of heel turns and turnabouts not unlike American pro wrestling.
And if you want to inject a bit more heroism into your Shadowrun campaign than is par for the course, assume that a few luchadores managed to escape - of course, Aztech tries to paint them as cowards for running away, but they were never going to give them peace anyway and would keep on cheating till they "lost".
After all, cowardice isn't one of the seven deadly sins, but pride is - as such, some of them are now biding their time in the UCAS, in the NANs or in Amazonia, just waiting for their big comeback.

That is scarily good.

Matrix/astral/physical initiatives are all seperate stats. You'll have to read the descriptions carefully to see which overlap.

I'm a beginner GM and I have no idea what the fuck are you talking about.

It's so, so stupid, but there is canon for luchadores. Per Run Faster, they're the Mexican version of Wuxia.

Fight corrupt officials, give money to orphans or religious groups, fight crime. That kind of stuff.

There are qi focus masks.

What you people have been saying about them here is better, and I have a player who loves them. Please keep giving me ideas for when I next run a game in Aztlan.

You know how there are certain rules for CharGen that say which characters are viable and which aren't (such as characters having stuff with higher availability than set)? Yekka wants to make it so that you get shown during the CharGen process which rules you violated and (in my reading) be able to selectively ignore rules.

These increasingly disturbing wojacks have to stop.

Thanks! I spend more time playing with the character editor than I do playing the game itself.

Let make some improvement....

>Watch your groin
>Shoot wildly
>Buy plenty of ammo
>And never, ever, seduce with a dragon

>seduce with a dragon
>Only you can team up with Lofwyr to seduce the horrors and save the Earth

take your average white guy. Now make him 40, scarred up and the world's angriest man at all times.

>Watch your navel
>Hold down the trigger on your gun
>Dump every clip into your teammates
>Obey dragons

So hey, anyone here seen Bright? I watched it last night. It was pretty fun, but mostly I got this strong Shadowrun vibe while I watched it that really appealed to me.

Pretty vague, but I did my best!

You even got the receding hairline. Wonderful.

Very nice job user

Got a game to run in under 12 hours, my anxiety is stressing me out. Just gonna run food fight as the party intro (since all but 1 are SR noobies.) gonna try and jot down some quick mission notes and a potential 2nd quick gig for 1st session. Just made tokens out of all the Shadow Run Returns portraits for Roll20 for NPCs/Enemies, just wish there were more Ganger and Lonestar applicable portraits.

Any tips Chummers? Any cheatsheets for Runner lingo so I can attempt to toss out more than just Hoi, Chummer, Omae, Wiz and Geek?

Ahhhhhhhh, dnes pleh!!1!

Hayek Sheets from the pastebin?

Newbie GM
I've always heard that it's supposed to be nearly impossible to one-shot a target without explosives, but most of my team seems to always get enough net hits with full auto smgs, shotguns, and rifles and enough AP to shred even 25 soak target pretty consistently.

Am I missing something from the rules? I use recoil, range, light, and weather penalties when appropriate but they all generally plan for and compensate for those things pretty well.

Hayek sheets? Like the Cheat Sheets? They seem to be 5th ED and I'm running 4th, a bit of a shame.

where does this come from

Is downgrading to stun still a thing in 5th ED? In 4th if the attacks damage doesn't beat the targets armor value, then it does stun instead of Physical.

>and I'm running 4th
should have said that directly, chummer.
page 47 of the CRB has a table with common street slang.
Just eyeball dice pools. 3 dice will on average get one hit.
Don't use the matrix

it still is

Honestly forgot 5th was a thing. It's 6am and my brain is in panic. Apologies.

Any idea what sort of runs I should setup for a group that has 0 stealth? Got a Techno, Rigger, mage and Troll Adept. Honestly want a 5th for the game but having trouble finding a filler friend.

Openers?
"Hey, dickheads. We're a pack of street gangers and we're doing street ganger things, like looking weird and pimping five year old orks. We need you to go knock over a yak warehouse that's filled with drugs, and bring us the drugs, so we can sell the drugs. We'll give you 10% of the street value or something as a finders fee."
"Greetings, honourable idiots and filthy metahumans. We are the yakuza. There are some street gangers who have irritated us. They are hiding amongst the local population. We would like it if you found them and killed them in an interesting way. At least three should die in bike related accidents. This will give your technomancer something to do, as well as your rigger."
"Hi, we're from Aztlan and we'd like you to raid the Crime Mall. Bring back the following stall holders alive. In some stores are hidden things. Bring those."
"Hi, we're the crime mall. We're having trouble with groups of gangers being paid by aztlan. Would you track them down and convince them to fuck off?"
"Hi, I'm hestaby. We're going to recreate a drug trip the GM had one time by calling it an 'astral quest' that 'i' took you on."
"Hi, I'm Johnny Spinrad, the best Johnson ever. You're going to wingsuit out of planes amid flying anti-air rockets and kill some other runners for me."

That last one is a published adventure, check bloody business. Fucking amazing book. It might honestly work for your players.

Anything where the employer doesn't care or want it to be stealthy.
Assassinations could fit if the Johnson wants them to be noticeable
Bodyguard jobs could fit, since all of them seem pretty well in a fight and could protect a charge
Destruction or Distraction where they are not allowed to be stealthy
Enforcement
Smuggling if they're fast enough
and what said

Those all sound like fun, especially the last one.
Hadn't thought about smuggling much, but smuggling through particularly dangerous territory sounds like it'd be right up their alley. (Like through an abandoned subway filled to the brim with ghouls or worse.)

>"Hi, I'm Johnny Spinrad
Best guy ever ?

Is there any rule for using intimidation off of a physical stat like STR in 4E? Or would I have to houserule it?

Now that his corp is one of the Big 10 he's going to be even awesomer! Unless CGL.
Amusingly, 1 month before that update hit I made a face that had both Richard Villiers and Johnny Spinrad as Loyalty 6 contacts (Friends in High Places). I thought it was actually stretching credulity since they were probably rivals, but their descriptions suggested potential chemistry. Then suddenly they are officially buddy buddy and making secret deals, and my character has unwittingly given my GM a metric fucktonne of material to work with.

I've got a question. We all now that shitty

>Do not buy CGL books

boycot won't work. CGL will sell stuff to newbies, or whole Shadowrun will die for decade or so. How can we actually make a difference?

For now, Shadowrun needs either 6th ed or HUGE Matrix/Chargen/Magic overhaul.

It's far too much work even for /tg, and CGL makes their new books without any deeper thought nor serious collaboration woth fans, by letting bunch of freelancers write whatever they think will do.

Is Shadowrun doomed to fall?

How badly would running 5e with a full group of players who don't know the system/setting go?

I'd probably be GMing, and I at least know enough about the setting to get me through being able to come up with adventures, and these players are patient and ready to learn.

>Shoot heroin
>Watch your stack
>Conserve animals
>Never deal with a drag queen

Problem is that with CGL's current staff, 6th ed won't be much better, and a huge overhaul won't come. Nearly all of their writers are freelancers at this point too, and they just get the blank check to do whatever the hell they want, example being The Complete Trog.
>Is Shadowrun doomed to fall?
Probably, but it will come back. Somebody's going to want the license, and fans will always come up with new content because people actually like Shadowrun.

>How can we actually make a difference?
by killing all the CGL higher ups and making Pegasus take over

The sequel announcement trailer has a callout to Shadowrun in it; I think it was a very intentional callout.
Uhh, give us an example of the dicepools and a walkthrough of your combat.

>an IRL Johnson pays some /srg/ anons to go on a real run and kill CGL corp higher ups
How much would you have to be paid anons?

~3.5 nuyen

As far as I know Pegasus is doing mostly translation and localization work and it would be unlikely for them to take an whole IP over. They do put alot of extra work into it, so they might pick it up when it's cheap on the market or come up with their own off-brand urban fantasy cyberpunk.
But I doubt it will happen as long as CGL makes a plus with it

>it would be unlikely for them to take an whole IP over
Pfft. while they do translate a lot of stuff they also produce their own books as well, which are generally regarded to be far higher in quality than the english ones
And I do not doubt that they'd manage it. They have people that care about the franchise and who have proven to be capable.

>captcha: Pech sartoria
Wer isn sartoria?

>Swords and tiddies > guns and muscles edition

Bitch I'll fite you.

>Du weißt schon dass Pech auch eine Substanz ist die bei der Herstellung von Teer entsteht? Vielleicht geht es um Teer Miniaturen.

schon klar, aber wer ist das?

Looks like it is the Italian word for tailor. The more you know.

>street lifestyle runners

No one here is interested in the money.
Hell, you could pay most people here in pieces of paper with "NUYEN" written on them and no one would care.
Now we only need someone proficient in US law to figure out what would actually happen if Coleman was to get acute lead or asphalt poisoning.

It was a tree fiddy joke.

Honestly, given the way he treats runners ("You impressed me! Here! have your dream car. I've loaded it with mods and a pile of tromp d'oleil commlinks! Vote spinrad for world president!" or "Mind selling me that arteefact you lifted? No? Oh, that's a shame. Well, dinner's on me. Try the surf and turf. Ciao!" or "Yes? You'll sell it? Have ah alf million nuyen, right now. Dinner's still on me. And an extraction! And some SINs! SINs for everyone!") having Spinrad as a contact is probably the most likely high end one a runner could have.

Spinning him that way, though, could probably take a bit away from the original themes and mood of the game.
He lends himself well to being a "too good to be true" contact in my opinion - someone whose gifts and favors might come with strings attached, but where the runners don't know if he's earnestly just a friendly eccentric or a self-advertising megalomaniac until he chooses to make a move on it.
I can see a story in which the runners are carried along by his favors and charisma for a fairly long while, until he really chooses to make good on all his bragging and runs for world domination - and while he's not the same brand of callously profit-minded robot as many corp executives, even a lot of runners who thought they were doing the right thing by letting him help them against the more malicious corps could get some doubts when they're honestly helping someone who might be a sociopath-lite gain more power than he already has.
A Spinrad-run country could be hell in a different way than a corporate territory - bread and circuses all day, every day, with the slow failure of the economy and infrastructure covered up by his charisma and what basically amounts to bribes, as he spends his way through the budget of a small country every month, makes public safety plummet by slackening legislation and encouraging spectacularly explosives-ridden runs, and all of a sudden the runners have to protect Spinrad headquarters against angry mobs who have a problem with the flighty Spinrad ignoring the "boring" parts of managing a country, letting heavily armed gangers flood the streets and gouging the economy to the point of Zimbabwe conditions.
Spinrad works well as a moderating factor against the corps, but if he ever gained power, he could be more terrifying than any corp exec or dragon - he doesn't seem to have the patience for or interest in long-term planning, nor the empathy to care for the people he hurts in his spending.

Well, his entire bag is "Fuck Lofwyr". He's also possibly going to fall under the sway of the Black Lodge. PLus, uh, he is a corper. He owns an AA corp. He's moving toward AAA. He is the representative of the Spinrad brand, and knows it. The real nasty work of the corp is done by everyone else.

So if you're lucky and he likes you, you'll just have to run against S-K. If you're not, you've got a bright future as Lodge Fodder. He's still an amazing contact, and if it works for the tone of your game great fun to play with. Or even as a temporary mission. We played Bloody Business in the midst of a hardcore black trenchcoat campaign, where we'd expended exactly 8 rounds in the course of the entire game. It was a shock.

>Honestly, given the way he treats runners ("You impressed me! Here! have your dream car. I've loaded it with mods and a pile of tromp d'oleil commlinks!

>commlinks

Do they go "Booooom"?

Nah, they just have some incredibly gaudy AR icons.

CGL company still holds the licence, so they'd likely appoint a new chairman. Keep in mind, Topps doesn't give a shit about what CGL do provided they pay their licence fees.

Yellow Bellies
Run Type: Enforcement
Difficulty: 0: Kitty Run
Matrix Difficulty: Blue-9/14/15/13/15/13
Paydata Points: 4 (200 Mp)
Payout: 1000¥
Employer: Private (Middle-Class)
Target/Opposition: Private (Lower-Class)
Complications: Location (Syndicate Turf)
The Runners are hired to ensure a meeting for a buyout goes according to plan, everything's alright unless the Yellow Triad open fire.

It's War Then
Run Type: War
Difficulty: 0: Kitty Run
Matrix Difficulty: Blue-9/11/12/14/11/15
Paydata Points: 5 (100 Mp)
Payout: 5000¥
Employer: Other (Cult/Conspiracy/Insect Spirits)
Target/Opposition: Minor Corporate (A Corp)
Complications: Transportation (Vehicle Breakdown)
The Clients don't approve of a Corps current R&D, they want the entire building shut down, people and all.

Going Somewhere?
Run Type: Assassination
Difficulty: 0: Kitty Run
Matrix Difficulty: Blue-8/13/11/13/15/15
Paydata Points: 5 (140 Mp)
Payout: 5000¥
Employer: Government (Gvmt Office)
Target/Opposition: Major Corporate (AAA: Mitsuhama Computer Technologies)
Complications: Criminal (Recent Activity)
A Mitsuhama representative is passing through town, someone has a grudge against him and wants him dead. Remove the Representative and get paid.

Dude, where's my car?
Run Type: Retrieval
Difficulty: 0: Kitty Run
Matrix Difficulty: Blue-9/12/14/12/11/14
Paydata Points: 1 (220 Mp)
Payout: 2000¥
Employer: Minor Corporate (A Corp)
Target/Opposition: Private (Middle-Class)
Complications: Location (Syndicate Turf)
A wicked after party left the client without a ride, he'd get it back himself if it wasn't a Yakuza after party.

Do these seem like good ideas for just quick runs inbetween story based shit? I've just been using the random run generator and adding a bit of fluff so I have an idea of what to do should they take the job. I'm jotting down like 4-5 of each difficulty and will offer them 2-3 jobs with ranging difficulties at a time.

I do know he's a corp exec, but the whole core of his appeal is that he doesn't do it in the way everyone else does.
He runs his corporation completely counter to the way that most disliked corps such as Shiawase and Ares do - superficially friendly, honest, open and mainly interested in pushing product rather than controlling people's lives for generations to come.
A more magic-focused game might enjoy the whole Black Lodge thing - but if you're playing a more trenchcoaty game, I still think that the political angle without the conspiracy could work better, because let's be honest, black trenchcoat and huge conspiracies don't always have to overlap and once in a while raw realpolitik is a good fit.
It could be thematic too - it shows players that once in a while, not every evil has to have an ultimate cause and a long, complex plan to bring about its ideal society under the noses of the mind-controlled populace who're going to die as corporate slaves or Horror fodder.
Play him as an eccentric hero for a long time, having him "help" the runners and win their favor - and then land them on the side of someone who turns out to be a very, very petty little man who never had the foresight or understanding of people that the other corps and dragons at least have.
I can imagine it being a good plot point, because there's no obvious "right" answer to it. Imagine the group coming to meet Spinrad in his headquarters, expecting another explosives-fest run or a party - and then have him break down explaining defensively how the people must be mind-controlled by Lofwyr because they're rebelling against him spending the better part of the medical, police and infrastructure budgets on bribes and parties.
Of course he never told the PCs. Of course he expects them to clean it up. They're his friends, after all.
This is how actual sociopaths act when breaking down - incomprehension and lack of willingness to take responsibility.

>Spinrad working for Lofwyr

Uh.

Also, SpIn has a long history of doing shit that's horrible under his direct supervision. The Marseilles eugenics were directly his responsibility, for example. The TechWarrior cyberware suite they sold had killswitches built in in case it was ever used against him, and then the tech was 'stolen' by saeder-krupp. And he personally killed a pile of S-K soldiers by throwing the killswitch as soon as it had gone into production. And half of the companies that make up SpIn are, uh, interestingly horrible.

Can you pop those into two sentences or less for me as a total summary of the above? I just want to bolt them into the 'random run ideas' table.

The payout is a bit shit, though.

Not quite sure what you mean, the information above my little blurbs was just the details from the Run Generator.
Like this maybe?
Dude, where's my car? - Retrieval- 2000¥ - Yakuza
A wicked after party left the client without a ride, he'd get it back himself if it wasn't a Yakuza after party.

>And half of the companies that make up SpIn are, uh, interestingly horrible.

More info on that pls?

I like them, but my crowd works kinda cheap, and one of them is a legit Baptist preacher (13 ST troll) who wants to purge sum crap.

I'm exaggerating. Most of them, like Lusiata Navel Interests and Fatima Petrochemicals, are just massive polluters.

Chalmers and Cole are criminal lawyers - hiding the hotel maid the vampire guest drained dry, altering trial outcomes through use of shadowrunners, blackmail and extortion.

Sorayama were on retainer to Renraku, and the tech that they developed was (probably) the basis for the stuff that went into Deus' banded.

Aegis Cognito is a recent acquisition, but plenty shady. And Regency Megamedia used to make stories, LA style. I'd need to find my old printed books, but I'm pretty sure they also used to try to assassinate members of KSAF. And Phoenix Biotech I *think* used to be involved with metaeugenics, but don't quote me on that.

>Lusiata Navel Interests

>Lusiata

Hey, Yekka, with the full body armour helmet items issue, is there any work around? Play in the file to insert a 'pre made' helmet into the armour entry? Or will I just stick with an altered helmet?

Hm? What issue would that be?

You mentioned a few threads ago you couldn't put armour mods into things inside armour, like the helmet. I was testing that for our upcoming game and, hey presto, it's true. So you can't give a helmet pulse weave or anything.

...Am I Tyler Durdening myself?

Um. I'll look into it.

So, has crafting things ever been handled well in this game?
I feel sort of bad that mad scientist is NPC only.

Just insert a helmet into full body armour. Right click it; you can't add addons. Just mods.

Best one has been unique foci in digital grimoire/street magic, and that's basically "Double the normal time limit. Here is a list of unique reagents, make them gather one every time they glitch on the creation of the formula. Here, mr dragon, I need you to piss in this cup. No, I am not the Whizzard, I promise."

Oh; is there a reason you need the helmet to be attached to the armour? I generally use Armour Locations for outfits, it works a bit more reliably.

Ok, mechanics question for riggers.

The missile defense system vehicle mod gives bonus dice to defend against missiles and rockets, but to the best of my knowledge there is no defense test against such weapons. Is this another case of CGL being dumb motherfuckers or have I actually missed something here?

No, I was just fiddling around while building this troll and was curious. I mean, the armour helmet has one extra armour, but obviously I'll just pencil that in as normal.

Right, okay, catching back up to myself here. Um. Per RAW, the helmet only has a capacity of 6 for the purpose of being equipped with vision or audio enhancements. I'd prefer not to fiddle with it without a RAW reason to do so, but you could make an amend entry in the xml; any armour mod that has a negative armour capacity will give armour to its parent. So if you make a file called amend_fbahelmet_armor.xml and fill it with

71c20b15-de11-49eb-93fe-f4d7491283e3
-[6]

the helmet will give the armour an extra six capacity for mods.

Bump. Please, Chummers.

About as bad as any other RPG. It's really not too horrible. Skill+Attribute for pool, write out yourpossible modifiers. The biggest issue is forgetting the setting.

Noted. Thanks, friend.

Bring it on bitch.

So, I was trying to introduce a friend to Shadowrun, and they asked if they can be, quote, "a mohawked furry Satanist"

I told them about Shapeshifters, but the bit about Satan reminded me of The Adversary, who I only remember being referenced by Shadowrun Dragonfall. Is there material that talks about him in greater detail, and what following/worshipping him entails?

You don't need to bring in shapeshifters, and in fact you'd be shooting yourself in the foot balance-, rule- and setting-wise by doing that, as well as locking him into a set few options.
Biosculpting, chummer. The furry subculture is alive and well in the Sixth World too, and it would give him a lot more flex and a lot more roleplaying opportunities if he played an actual furry instead of someone defined solely by being a magical talking animal.
I've played Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Trust me when I say it's more rewarding to play a human who had something done to them or did something to themselves than the hard-to-explore, setting-antagonizing talking animal route.

Guns are for hoops, a real runner chooses a street sign.

I think I may have been confusing shapeshifters and changelings, actually.

Are changelings more balance, rule, and setting friendly?

Also, I'm curious (and frustrated) by the issue regarding the adversary myself now. Shadow Spells has nothing. Book of the Lost has nothing. Forbidden Arcana has nothing. Street Grimoire has nothing.

Assuming 5e the differences between the changeling rules and shapeshifter rules is mostly fucked and completely fucked

How big is the return of ancient Egyptian religion in Shadowrun, or is the country still firmly Islamic?

Egypt: Incredibly heavily Islamic. Expands to cover most of northern africa. Egyptian Religion, according to 4e books, has a good following outside its birthplace as well as its magic. This is mostly because magic is banned in Egypt, and the legal system is bordering on full Sharia.

Egyptian magic: Problem with quasi insect magicians following things like scarab. Temples and holy sites are watched, as are holy days within the country. It's more common south of egypt in tribal lands as well as in the more cosmopolitan european cities. Anywhere the NIJ touched, it is quite rare and treated like any other pagan faith. That means they burn them.