Shadowrun 4e newbie questions

Jason · Post by **Jason** » Thu Mar 10, 2016 8:41 pm

virgil wrote:Have they said what the background count of the moon is?

Not as such, no. Outer space is classified as a "void" according to the rules:

Street Griomoire, p 33 wrote:Outer space is one large void, away from
the biosphere and the emotional content of metahumanity...

Now dependign on whetehr your read that as "mana void" or just in its literal meaning of empty of things defines all further inferences. According to their rules mana voids...

Street Griomoire, p 33 wrote:... are usually rated between –13 and –20.

Upper limit is listed as:

Street Griomoire, p 30 wrote:A background count is a measurement of a variance from normal of mana levels in the area. Arcane scholars have developed a scale to measure the strength of these areas, ranging from –24 to 24,

So, depending on whether you read "empty void" as "mana void" or not you end up with a background count for the moon somewhere between -20 and -24 or no specified value at all.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Mar 10, 2016 8:52 pm

Since planets are alive, even barren worlds like Luna would have less background fuckery than actual outer space. But... did the clowns who did 5e seriously decide to double the size of background counts? What possible use is there for a -24 background count that wasn't served by a -12 background count?

-Username17

Jason · Post by **Jason** » Thu Mar 10, 2016 9:06 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Since planets are alive, even barren worlds like Luna would have less background fuckery than actual outer space. But... did the clowns who did 5e seriously decide to double the size of background counts? What possible use is there for a -24 background count that wasn't served by a -12 background count?

-Username17

Yes, they did. The sox is at -20, btw.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Thu Mar 10, 2016 9:55 pm

I meant for the question to be for 4E, though I suspect the answer wouldn't be all that different. Sorry for the mixup.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Mar 10, 2016 11:31 pm

"No Magic Zones! We mean it this time!"

Shrieking Banshee · Post by **Shrieking Banshee** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 5:21 pm

Also would anybody mind listing some of the best guns for drones to have assuming Im looking for non-war! guns for each different gun types (Im using different guns for different drone types)?

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 5:56 pm

Define BEST.
Cheap and easy to replace with reasonable damage/AP?
High Alpha, no DPS?
Fuck-Hueg Reach?
Short-Range Punch with specialized Ammo?
Suppression-Capabilities?
General, for all purpose, AR is the best you can get.
Because it will do most of that at least a bit.
And is not an actual HMG, MMG or LMG.
For smaller Drones: Ruger Thunderbolt or Savalette Guardian, Burst Fire Heavy Pistol.
Or some Chem-Tech delivery maybe.

And of course, there's always the Burst Fire Grenade Launcher for when you don't care anymore.

Shrieking Banshee · Post by **Shrieking Banshee** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 6:18 pm

Neat. I was thinking to maybe get a minigun o replicate that T-1 look.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 6:31 pm

Ah, a T-1, neat Idea.
Crawler/Tracked drone. Bloody huge one at that to accomodate at least one Minigun in a Mount.

Shrieking Banshee · Post by **Shrieking Banshee** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 8:00 pm

Hachiman! I mean its perfect! Reinforced mount, medium sized but body 4 (So it can have armor 12). And with a house rule update thing, it can be retrofitted.

Also it looks like a T-1 and the only minigun in the game is LMG sized.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 8:42 pm

There you go then!
Body 4 Medium Drones are somehwere along the lines of Motorbike and small car in terms of Size.

Shrieking Banshee · Post by **Shrieking Banshee** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 9:02 pm

Eh, I think its about Troll sized. Its mentioned to describe that the Hatchiman is supposed to be super "Dangerous despite being old" and that never made sense too me until I realized that its higher body means more armor and power for a smaller package which can fit in a corridor.

I mean the Mistuhama Otamo is designed to be metahumanish despite being Body 6, which says there is not a super exact body-size correlation.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 10:46 pm

Well, Trolls are about the size of a Motorcycle to a small car . .
Depending on SR Edition of course <.<

Rasumichin · Post by **Rasumichin** » Fri Mar 11, 2016 11:37 pm

Shrieking Banshee wrote:Eh, I think its about Troll sized. Its mentioned to describe that the Hatchiman is supposed to be super "Dangerous despite being old" and that never made sense too me until I realized that its higher body means more armor and power for a smaller package which can fit in a corridor.

I mean the Mistuhama Otamo is designed to be metahumanish despite being Body 6, which says there is not a super exact body-size correlation.

There's no super exact Body-size correlation and even the imprecise correlation they use scales differently for vehicle Body than metahuman Body.
Vehicular Body 6 means the vehicle may, with the approval of a freshly fellated GM, be large enough to mount an Aztechnology Itzcoatl Railgun. But that Body applies to trucks as well as things that are about troll size.

As far as weapons for vehicles smaller than a Tata Hotspur go, you're best off with either a Barret or an Ares Thunderstruck (if you use the unofficial errata that all railguns have AP/half on top of AP reduction) against hard targets - or a minigun for supression capability and laying down the hurt on soft targets. Combine with an area-effect weapon if you have a mount left over. Missiles are fuckexpensive, so you'll usually go for a grenade launcher. Get the one with the ammo drum and mod it with an ammo skip system to choose between a couple dozen different grenades.
This means that building a T-1 works pretty well, you just have to modify the Hachiman for Walker mode. It's a "centaur" drone, humanoid upper body on top of a wheeled platform. The armor looks like samurai armor, but you could easily apply the pimped ride modification to make it look exactly like a larger version of the T-1. This, btw, rightfully gives you a bonus to your Intimidation (Terminator) skill.

For smaller drones, just go for any SMG. No recoil + the option to add an external ammo feed mean they're all interchangeable. So you can get a bunch of throwaway drones, slap Sandler TMPs for, what, threefiddy nuyen a piece on them and you're done.

Shrieking Banshee · Post by **Shrieking Banshee** » Sat Mar 12, 2016 2:26 am

Where the railguns at? As in which book are the affordable within restriction railguns?

Rasumichin · Post by **Rasumichin** » Sat Mar 12, 2016 10:14 am

Railguns are in Arsenal. They all have an Availability >12 and are a lot more expensive than other heavy weapons. You can get a Thunderstruck with the Restricted Gear quality, but that's a massive waste of BP when you can just buy one regularly after the first run or two.
Better to start with a T-1 and build a Necron later in the game.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat Mar 12, 2016 11:22 am

Shadowrun leaves spirits and metaplanes intentionally vague so different magical traditions can hold conflicting views. To use D&D summoned outsiders as a comparison, they're definitely "alien beings" who live on "another planet" and you pull them into the prime material plane with your magic.

So how fleshed out does Shadowrun get with that, do they ever give detailed info on specific metaplanes and the spirits that inhabit it? Is it possible to do a "journey to the brass city and see the king of efreets" kind of adventure to Shadowrun, or is it always "the brass city metaplane is believed to exist by some guys and not others and nobody has been there and maybe the efreet king is just a projection of the summoner's beliefs and not an independent entity" or what.

Now the bit on "Spirits can't see computer screens and perceive astral stuff", does that mean they just don't interact with technology so Sadako and Rotom aren't possible, or are there exceptions? Can a spirit read a book?

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat Mar 12, 2016 11:58 am

Shadowrun is vague and contradicting itself even in terms of metaplanes.
TECHNICALLY there are no 2 magical active people that practice the same form of magic, because the form of magic they use is influenced by the people using it in the first place. See cartoon-characters being used for example. And yet, even though that is supposed to be the case, magic has both in fluff and in crunch similarities that apply to everybody using it for some reason. The Guardian for example. The being trying to stop you from reaching the metaplanes at large, and not a specific one. And technically, because everybody is practicing his or her very own unique flavour of magic, there should not be metaplanes that can be visited by different magicians. And yet, the elemental ones are virtually the same for everybody who travels there. And totems or however they are called are the same and allude to working with other magicians as well. And then they went stupid with stuff like ancestor spirits. If there is no soul, if you can not summon the dead . . then what are they? And i think they even allowed spiritual(pun intended) testimony or something like that in court in murder cases if i remember correctly.

A BOOK is slightly different. Well, as long as it is handwritten it will, at least, convey a general idea or feeling of what it is about or what the writer felt when he wrote it. And of course, there's always magical ink. No, not the disappearing one.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat Mar 12, 2016 12:12 pm

OgreBattle wrote:Shadowrun leaves spirits and metaplanes intentionally vague so different magical traditions can hold conflicting views. To use D&D summoned outsiders as a comparison, they're definitely "alien beings" who live on "another planet" and you pull them into the prime material plane with your magic.

So how fleshed out does Shadowrun get with that, do they ever give detailed info on specific metaplanes and the spirits that inhabit it? Is it possible to do a "journey to the brass city and see the king of efreets" kind of adventure to Shadowrun, or is it always "the brass city metaplane is believed to exist by some guys and not others and nobody has been there and maybe the efreet king is just a projection of the summoner's beliefs and not an independent entity" or what.

Now the bit on "Spirits can't see computer screens and perceive astral stuff", does that mean they just don't interact with technology so Sadako and Rotom aren't possible, or are there exceptions? Can a spirit read a book?

It's complicated. Spirits objectively exist as individual entities - if you have a spirit's true name different people can summone that same spirit and can follow him to his personal metaplane. The journey to the brass city to see the king of efreets is definitely possible*, but unless you know the specifics of the city and the king, you could arrive to an entirely different brass city than the one you were hoping to get to. It's like Shadows in the Chronicles of Amber.

*It's not possible in the actual game because only 1 man in the entire party can go, but details.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:00 pm

OgreBattle wrote:Now the bit on "Spirits can't see computer screens and perceive astral stuff", does that mean they just don't interact with technology so Sadako and Rotom aren't possible, or are there exceptions? Can a spirit read a book?

The deal with spirits not being able to do computers is due to the fact that spirits have Astral Perception as their only sense. They don't see, hear, taste, smell, touch, etc. like a metahuman does, they just get whatever information their Astral Perception gives them. For visual information about non-living objects, that's limited to size and shape but not colour or texture. Books written with ordinary ink look blank because to Astral Perception the letters look the same as the page - uniform drab grey.

Nath · Post by **Nath** » Sat Mar 12, 2016 9:22 pm

My (possibly own particular) understanding of SR metaplanes was they resulted from the merger of everyone's thoughts and feelings in the astral plane. Carl Jung's collective unconscious if you prefer. There is a metaplane of fire or forest because those concept are shared by billions of people in the world, with tens or hundred of thousands of them thinking about it any time (to which you may had animals... which in turn may explain something about insect metaplanes).

There would be somewhere in the metaplane a forest the astral equivalent of a one per one meter square that exactly mirror your concept of forest (possibly this is actually the very position you would enter that metaplane) but it exists as a metaplane because there are billions of people wuith the concept of forests.

On the other hand, the astral echo of your concept of brass city is going to be surrounded by maybe a few hundreds other people with their own concepts of brass city, which would end up lost and crushed by the much larger metaplanes of cities, making it like, well, one brass building in the entire plane.

Rasumichin · Post by **Rasumichin** » Sun Mar 13, 2016 4:52 pm

OgreBattle wrote: So how fleshed out does Shadowrun get with that, do they ever give detailed info on specific metaplanes and the spirits that inhabit it?

There's information on specific metaplanes and deep metaplanes here and there, but never anything detailed. Like, we know there's The Hive, home metaplane of insect spirits, and that it's so overcrowded with bugs that they try to invade the material plane, and Ares regularly goes there to kill bugs or find new ways to utilize them as bioweapons, but that's literally every single fact we know about that place.

Is it possible to do a "journey to the brass city and see the king of efreets" kind of adventure to Shadowrun, or is it always "the brass city metaplane is believed to exist by some guys and not others and nobody has been there and maybe the efreet king is just a projection of the summoner's beliefs and not an independent entity" or what.

If you're willing to write the entire brass city from scratch, you can absolutely go there and it can be an actual place in your campaign setting without contradicting anything canonical about SR magic.
It's just unclear if it always existed or if enough people believed in that place to make it real or if it's all just a very consistent collective hallucination or whatever.
But either way, the metaplanes at least appear as discreet locations that people from different traditions (or even mundanes, if a spirit uses the Astral Gateway power to get them there) can visit.

Now the bit on "Spirits can't see computer screens and perceive astral stuff", does that mean they just don't interact with technology so Sadako and Rotom aren't possible, or are there exceptions?

Inhabitation-based spirits can interact with AR and VR normally. Hacker spirits are possible, but will úsually be insect spirits.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Mon Mar 14, 2016 1:01 am

I wonder what a spirit or astrally perceiving magician would make of a computer hosting an AI? It's sort of alive, pending philosophical discussion, and you can tell somebody's a technomancer with 4 hits on an Assensing test, so there's precedent for magic/tech interaction.

Shrieking Banshee · Post by **Shrieking Banshee** » Mon Mar 14, 2016 3:18 am

Also call me a bigot, but does anybody else find the way that the books (At least the ones im reading) very easily dismissive of anti-dragon people? I mean, im not calling for genocide, but the way the in universe characters dismiss fears about flying magical demigods that see metahumanity as toys to be played with or pets to be taught (At best), does anybody else find this grating?

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Mar 14, 2016 3:50 am

Thanks for all the info on metaplanes and spirits. I've also been recommended "Aetherology", have any denners read it? It was released after SR5e but comes dual statted for 4e too, but most of the content is mechanics agnostic setting details.

Now... is it heard of in Shadowrun to have a dead character "come back as a spirit"? Considering there are various traditions that say they summon ancestor spirits and that 'spirit testimony' can be accepted in murder cases.

Are there any cases of two people claiming to summon the same deceased person's spirit, but the spirits are different because those people had different perceptions of the deceased?

If "spirits are formed by belief" it seems like you can have a situation where a character the summoner has a connection with seemingly dies, but then the summoner thinks they've summoned their spirit, but then that guy comes back later.

Also call me a bigot, but does anybody else find the way that the books (At least the ones im reading) very easily dismissive of anti-dragon people?

I was surprised that Street Magic casually mentions a real world faction of Iranian Muslims declaring a jihad on magic so a dragon comes by and flattens Tehran.