Shadowrun in Space

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Laertes
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Shadowrun in Space

Post by Laertes »

So my friend E. recently asked me to consult on a game she's running. It's going to be Star Trek style space opera for the most part, but she wants to get the space science as close to right as possible except in cases where they have to resort to outright fiction to get the genre conventions to work. This got me thinking about space more generally, and about the oft-heard lament that Shadowrun has never properly examined the space parts of its setting.

I like Shadowrun, although my tastes run very much towards the dystopian social commentary side and away from the magical fantasy world side, and closer to the black mirrorshades than the pink mohawk style of play. However, I don't have the decades of experience with it that some people have, and the encyclopediac knowledge of the background. What I do have is an astrophysics degree, a massive geek crush on cohesive settings (see also: various fantasy worldbuilding threads) and about 14 years wargaming experience.

If people are interested, I propose an experiment whereby I witter about space and people shout at me about Shadowrun lore I've overlooked, and this process undergoes recursion until it achieves something like a useful Shadowrun resource on space. Any takers?

Alternatively, if there are any resources which have done the same thing (or any Shadowrun canon on the matter) then please point me at it so that I may disassemble it to its underlying Newtonian mechanics.
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Post by Username17 »

Shadowrun space canon is actually pretty out-there. There are fusion reactor powered space ships that can maintain an acceleration of 1G or more for an entire journey to Mars or even the asteroid belt. You can fly to Mars on a long weekend, and you won't even have to spin the ship for artificial gravity. There are specifically asteroid miners, and independent anarchist asteroid miners. There are seriously private citizens doing their own shit in fucking space like it was a Heinlein juvenile. Telekinesis can put small satellites in orbit for nearly free (pushing them up to 70 kilometers above sea level without any fuel use at all), and big corporations still use a land based mass driver in Africa because telekinesis is just too fucking slow.

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Post by Otakusensei »

Shadowrun plays well in space, too. Especially if your group isn't 95% awakened, which seems to be my local meta. I once made a technomancer whose parents were space pirates. There's enough lore about space stations and shit that I figured there must be something up the well like Zion Cluster. And as long as there's something that can function like a rogue port you're going to have piracy. Hell, I'm sure there's all kinds of very literal corporate raiding going on. Add in something like the rules of the high seas, perhaps stating even the most vile pirate wouldn't leave a shuttle without life support, and you have all sorts of cool angles for storytelling.

I've never been one for hard sci-fi settings personally, but respect to those folks who want to calculate weight ratios to figure out how they are going to get the troll into orbit.
Last edited by Otakusensei on Thu Aug 21, 2014 2:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by mlangsdorf »

You may want to look at GURPS Transhuman Space, even if you don't like GURPS mechanics. The setting is a non-dystopian*, more or less realistic near future space exploration. I think the worst thing they do is fudge the ISPs for some of the more powerful drives, but they're like 20-30% more powerful, not orders of magnitude better.

As an example, a standard interplanetary space craft carries 3 ktons of cargo, accelerates at 0.05 g for 31 hours, and has a turn-around velocity of 34 mps. It would take ~9 weeks to make it from Earth to Ceres in the asteroid belt.


* There's plenty of dystopian bits, but the overall trend of the setting is positive. Things are going to get better, etc. Though if you're a genetically created pain addicted love slave to a neo-anarchist trojan asteroid miner, you might find the setting fairly grim.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Magic would make working in space cheap and easy, but it does not work up there.
Guns would make working in space expensive and dangerous and they don't really work all that well up there either.
Same for sonic weapons, at least outside. inside they would be pretty close to perfect. Laser and Railgun and Missle/Rocket like Gyrojet would be better suited for use in microgravity/vacuum. But then you still have the problem of accidentally killing everything around you once you penetrate the protective layer between you and nothing and destroying fucking expensive equipment too. And close combat is a different kind of problematic all of itself. if you hit somebody without anchoring yourself to something relatively stable and immoveable, not only will whatever you try to kill fly away from you, but you will also fly away from it in the opposite direction.
The habitable space is also very cramped, so you can't realistically run away and hide somewhere either for the most part.
And then we get to the point where somebody asks:"why would a shadowrunner need to go up there?"

The Zurich orbital is up there in orbit. At one of the lagrange points ares is still doing strange magix.
No idea what they are doing on moon and mars . .
Last edited by Stahlseele on Thu Aug 21, 2014 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by erik »

Stahlseele wrote:Guns would make working in space expensive and dangerous and they don't really work all that well up there either.
No loss to air-friction and minimal correction due to gravity seem like ideals for using ballistics. Recoil isn't going to send you flying either.

Unless you are talking about it being bad to poke holes in the thin walls separating you from cold dark nothing. Yeah, then most weapons have problems.
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Post by Stahlseele »

BAD to poke holes in the walls. And in a vacuum it depends on how good the bullets are manufactured. You still need oxidizer to get combustion/explosion going chemically. And the temperatures in space will go from -200 to +200 in minutes as well if i remember that correctly. So everything that relies on mechanical principles for anything is going to suffer from certain ill effects.
And why is recoil not going to send you flying? Have you seen how bad recoil can be down here on the ground already when you have gravity nailing you down?
Last edited by Stahlseele on Thu Aug 21, 2014 4:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Otakusensei »

Guns for show, knives for a pro.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Stahlseele wrote:BAD to poke holes in the walls. And in a vacuum it depends on how good the bullets are manufactured. You still need oxidizer to get combustion/explosion going chemically. And the temperatures in space will go from -200 to +200 in minutes as well if i remember that correctly. So everything that relies on mechanical principles for anything is going to suffer from certain ill effects.
And why is recoil not going to send you flying? Have you seen how bad recoil can be down here on the ground already when you have gravity nailing you down?
In Traveller our SOP when engaging in ship based combat was to get into a vac suit and decompress the entire ship. That way if you had a hull breech almost no damage other than a small hole or whatever was in the way actually got inflicted. The idea being the majority of damage actually came from explosive decompression. If someone got hurt you'd restore atmosphere to the med bay or whatever.

Also, unless someone actually scans your ship, they'll be awfully surprised when they board if they don't have vac suits on too.
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Post by Laertes »

I don't have my books convenient to me, someone advise me: does Background Count apply to the place you're casting from or the place you're casting to? If (to take a non-random example) you're casting a spell from HEO which is aimed via an optical mirrored telescope onto the ground, would you take the penalty for casting in HEO? What if you cast from the ground towards the satellite in HEO?

I can't believe this has never come up for me before.
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Post by Stahlseele »

BGC applies always.
Casting in, check
Casting into, check
Casting through, check
Effects are a bit different, depending on circumstances.
Casting into/through BGC is easier on the mage than casting inside.
Casting inside increases drain, casting into or just through just decreases force as far as i remember.
Last edited by Stahlseele on Thu Aug 21, 2014 4:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Dragon Instincts »

Here is a Dumpshock thread with a collection of spacey official material.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=37473
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Post by erik »

I'm just saying. I've never personally had a problem with projectile weapons in space battles.
Stahlseele wrote:And why is recoil not going to send you flying? Have you seen how bad recoil can be down here on the ground already when you have gravity nailing you down?
Depends on the weapons I suppose. If you have a heavy weapon then yeah (and will need to be stabilized anyway), but pistols only send people flying in the movies.

My understanding is that bullets contain their own oxidizers and can function just fine in a vacuum.

Big temperature swings may be dicey I suppose, but I reckon that can mess with all sorts of things mechanical and electrical.
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Post by kzt »

TheFlatline wrote: In Traveller our SOP when engaging in ship based combat was to get into a vac suit and decompress the entire ship. That way if you had a hull breech almost no damage other than a small hole or whatever was in the way actually got inflicted. The idea being the majority of damage actually came from explosive decompression. If someone got hurt you'd restore atmosphere to the med bay or whatever.
Small caliber weapons won't cause explosive decompression. You just don't leak that much air through a 5-9mm hole, or even a fair number of them. Blow a large hole through the hull, like with an AT rocket or a satchel charge, then it is going to be exciting.
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Post by Stahlseele »

@erik Well, yes, Heavy Pistols obiously. And they have quite the kick, depending on the ammo used.
Shotguns as well. Though shotguns might be a less problematic weapon in terms of holes in walls, because the projectiles have less Mass.
And Needle-Guns of course as well. Just the number of ricochets would probably be horrible.
Chem-Tech weapons like Pepper-Punch-Sprays and the such would probably really benefit from the micro-gravity i guess.
Last edited by Stahlseele on Thu Aug 21, 2014 6:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Laertes »

Chem weapons would probably get lots of horrible glares because you're in a sealed environment with recirculated air, so it would be very difficult to *ever* get that stuff out of the atmosphere.

I'm imagining that large orbitals would have fairly sturdy sides because of the possibility of micrometeors and space junk. Orbital velocities can give even very small things enormous kinetic energy; the story about STS-7 is a very famous one which deserves repeating. As such, they would almost certainly be able to stop a bullet.
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Post by Stahlseele »

ah, right, i actually forgot about the circulated air problem . . good catch . .
ares super soaker . . super squirt or the one with the chem tech bullets would maybe work . . dart guns and tazers/electric weapons in general are probably a bit more usefull.
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by silva »

I dont see much point in using Shadowrun for space adcventures. Not only magic doesnt work up there, but youvwould have to create a whole lot of gear from scratch. At tgis point you are better using Transhuman Space or Eclipse Phase or Blue Planet or whatever other sci-fi rpg fancies your suit.
Last edited by silva on Thu Aug 21, 2014 10:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Laertes »

It's not about wanting a space adventure and trying to find a setting to run it in. I'm more than capable of doing that. I want to write something that allows people's Shadowrun games to have a space session in it, where Mr Johnson comes to them and says, "Guys, we want you to abduct this dude from an orbital and bring him back alive."

Shadowrun works insanely well for setting-of-the-week adventures. It's a shame that you can't make one of these be up there in the void.
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Post by silva »

Laertes, the problem is that space has not a.. how can I say it.. mythosphere for magic and mana to work, so it imposes a series of peoblems not only for spelkcasting but for awekened characters and critters overall.

Now, if you want to do it anyway, you could always use Zurich orbital or some transatmospheric hijacked flight as cool sertings-of-the-week. (I like this expressiin btw, and yeah it fits shadowrun nicely).
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Post by Laertes »

It makes it hard for the magician to get his rocks off that session. Yes, that's true. It's like the jungle session where the decker has to fall back on other skills, or the combat-heavy session where the face doesn't get to use Etiquette. It happens occasionally. Shadowrun is a game about specialists, and sometimes your speciality doesn't apply. It's not really a problem unless it becomes a recurring thing in the campaign.
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Post by Stahlseele »

Still, space is a useless setting for shadowrunners . .
WHY do you need to get to that dude who is in orbit WHILE he is in orbit?
Orbit is expensive, he WILL have to come down at some point, and if you can pass him off then, that's so much easier, less dangerous and cheaper as well.
It's the same problem with the under water arcologies mostly. Why would you ever need or even WANT to go there aside from running away from problems of your own?
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:
TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.

Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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Post by Lokathor »

Why rob a bank? That's where the money is.
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Post by silva »

What Stahl said above.

Also, not trying to be a dick here, but if you want interesting speculation and extrapolation on space - and by your backgeound and OP you wannt - you wont find it in Shadowrun. There are much better games out there for it.
Last edited by silva on Fri Aug 22, 2014 2:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
The traditional playstyle is, above all else, the style of playing all games the same way, supported by the ambiguity and lack of procedure in the traditional game text. - Eero Tuovinen
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Post by Aryxbez »

Well in Arsenal, there's an upgrade to fire your weapon underwater or in space no problem, so ye can totally have space gun fights. Also, Shadowrun has power armor, Explosive rounds, Assault Cannons, so ye can totally have SPACE MARINES. I've also been told there's apparently plants that Corps use in space stations, so there's an actual background count & mages can use their magic. So maybe they could set up pseudo ley-lines into asteroid belts, fit those plants into suits, and so, magicians in space?
FrankTrollman wrote:Shadowrun space canon is actually pretty out-there.
What sources have all this cool stuff for Shadowrun in Space?
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