Cyberpunk Fantasy Asymmetric Threat summary

[OgreBattle]

Going through dozens of pages of years old discussion is a hassle... so here's the relevant parts from the Magic & Technology thread:

Without the gratuitous bolding, that looks a lot more usable:

Magic

"I'm writing a book on magic," I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No," I answer: "conjuring tricks, not real magic." Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic. - Prof. Lee Siegel, U. Hawaii

In the 2075 of FT'sCpFHb, there exists a seemingly extra-natural force which can alter or suspend the conventional laws of physics. To almost everyone, this extra-natural force is Magic, and it will be called Magic throughout the rules. In the in-game discussion and vignettes, this force will also-mostly be called Magic, but when people in 2075 say Magic they usually mean the conscious manipulation of Magic by a person, a Sorcerer or Witch or the like. Likewise, this chapter is mainly devoted to the use of Magic by these talented individuals, including the feats which are possible through Magic and the rules used to determine the success of magical endeavors. This chapter includes a section on the paths of magic which goes into the various academic and popular views of what so-called "Magic" actually is. This chapter also includes a section on Magic and Society which you probably should read even if you don't intend to play a magician, in order to participate cogently in fictional world you'll be sharing with the other players, wherein magic is a somewhat known quantity.

Technically speaking, Magic in the world of 2075 is absolutely pervasive: nearly 40% of the world's population belong to one or another magically-altered subtype of Homo sapiens, these people are magical all the time simply by existing. However, most Elves, Dwarves and Asura are not, once you've gotten to know them, fantastic or spectacular so the general consensus doesn't regard an Elf as magical just for walking around.

Roughly 8% of the world's population are somewhat more magical than that, and blessed (or cursed) with some magical effect. For example, some people are immune to fire; some people trigger periodic small hail storms. Many of these people do not know they are magic at all: if you spontaneously killed any goldfish that came within 10 feet of you, would you even notice? Approximately 3% of the world's population show some reliable degree of Magical Discipline, making them able to consciously use their magical abilities and allowing them to distinguish Magic phenomena from coincidences or advanced technologies. Finally, about 0.3% of the worlds population, a total of about 27 million people, can both see Magic and also consciously manipulate it well enough to consistently produce a wide variety of different miraculous effects.

This doesn't stop the other 9 billion people from trying, and it is possible to perform many acts of Magic without any Magical Discipline. This is extraordinarily dangerous, especially when it involves the conjuration of Outsiders, and those who succeed in working Magic while blind often run afoul of one or another persistent hazard.

But yes, it is time to hammer down the spell list. Truth be told, I'm not super happy with the names for the types (except Illusion and Conjuration), although I am happy with the actual division of powers. So here's what I need terminology wise:

• The difference between a spell and whatever it is that lets an Elf throw sleep dust around. The second is "blatant" rather than covert, but it's still an Illusion effect. It would be called a supernatural ability or perhaps spell-like ability in D&D, but those terms are fundamentally unhelpful. These magical natural effects that
• Ogre Magic. Currently it's called Enchantment. The idea of enchanting something so that it becomes stronger or enchanting someone so that they turn into a rabbit is pretty intuitive to native English speakers. But D&D players expect "enchantment" to have charm and sleep - which are both Illusions. I am undecided on whether to keep the name Enchantment.
• Deep One Magic. I am flat unhappy with "Astral Magic", since technically all Channeling is done through the Astral. Maybe "Sorcery"? It's a mixture of space bending, astral manipulation, and clairvoyance. It's a lot like the nMage spheres of Space and Prime.
• Asura Magic. I am similarly unhappy with "Evocation" as a name. It's basically a combination of the Forces and Time spheres from nMage.
• Dwarf Magic. I really like the word "Thaumaturgy", but it could be used for basically any school of magic. It's largely a combination of Shadowrun Combat and Health spells, with the addition of a number of Manipulation effects that honestly probably would have made more sense in one of the aforementioned schools.

This all contrasts starkly with Hacking. Hacking terminology I rather like at this point:

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In Asymmetric Threat, hackers interact through the medium of Hacking Techniques. A hacking technique is a special trick that a hacker uses to do something with or to a system that it isn't normally supposed to do. There are six types of hacking techniques: Basilisks, Data Mines, Exploits, Images, Phreaks, and Trepans. Basilisks and Trepans target living creatures, Exploits and Phreaks target computer systems, Data Mines target data sets (regardless of whether they are stored in a specific place or in a cloud), and Images create things that can be detected in the real world (and thus work on cameras or eyes equally well).

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The question remains what a hacking technique or a spell needs in its stat block and description. A magical effect needs to specify what challenge priority it has. If you're using telekinetic thrusts to fight like a four armed Darth Vader, you're using regular Combat Priority, but if you're casting Mind Cloud you need someone to cover you because it has lower priority. I am currently undecided as to whether to have three levels of priority or only two.

But what about hacking techniques? They all run at the same challenge priority. So obviously they don't need that. What do they need? Just a cost to learn and a skill association?

-Username17

Stuff from Warhammer 40K, which is cool:
Dreadnaughts
First, they're cool because they have a low profile, but a relatively high carriage and very large footprints to distribute their mass. A stocky, springy build to absorb recoil from their strikingly sensible armament (the autocannon, not the robot claw; although you'd have claws as well for army corps of engineers type stuff). Unlike most of the tech in WH40K (which is laughable, even given the conceit that it is made by a priesthood based on spiritual rather than engineering concerns), the Dreadnaught looks like a robot you might actually build.
Also, it has a brain in a jar running it. Sorry, it has the brain in a jar of a homicidal religious fanatic, which is the sort of person who might say, "when I die, put my brain in an f-ing KILLER ROBOT!" I'm not sure what excuse we'd have to put brains-in-jars inside these robots (probably some defense against being hacked?), but that's cool.

I agree on the Dreadnaught being an actual robot that makes sense to build. It's like a self deploying artillery piece with giant piston legs that absorb recoil. The old Battletech Locust probably makes sense as a Laser chassis - unconcerned about recoil, it deploys on chicken legs so that it can rapidly rise up to fire laser pulses and then duck down below cover in order to redeploy.

The weird stuff about putting corpses of religious zealots into the robots could be done, with hacking defense being the obvious answer. But with the exception of a few fringe religious nutcase countries like the Caliphate, I don't see why robots would have specifically religious fanatics in them. Your basic autonomous combat drone needs an AI. And really good AIs take space and need training. I could really see systems to short circuit the AI training period by replacing robot "dog brains" with actual dog brains.

The Warp
The Warp is different from Astral Space only in tone. Frankly, Astral Space is, in the default Shadowun setting, far too safe. There are astrally projecting 11 year olds zipping all over the stratosphere at all times of day and night and apparently hardly any of them die.
On the other hand, the Warp in WH40K is probably a bit too dangerous. So some halfway position would be good. But it should be an alien reality, not an earth-which-glows.

That's why I'm going for an astral space you don't really "go to" at all. It's fully intangible and you don't send teenagers there. It's a series of weird topological connections that you can channel things out of. The worlds outside are variably threatening, with lots of the early arrivers being places like Fengdu and Helheim, but even some of them are pirate nations like Patala and Rlyeh. Some of the ones that aren't here (at least yet) are really nasty. If someone says that they are going to gate in a bunch of outsiders, people should be freaking out.

Space Nazis, and their Space Marines
Okay, Space Marines are cool. They're surgically modified transhuman supersoldiers in power armor. I'm thinking that we want something halfway between Space Marines and the Combine Overwatch soldiers from Half-Life. Again, you get a ridiculous number of implants whose primary purpose is to let you put on a robot suit, too heavy for you to move on your own so it has induction-controlled muscles, on top of all kinds of crazy shit like magnetic padding in the helmet matched to magnetic mesh distributed throughout your brain to blunt concussions.
Spire Gangers have a certain resonance as a social phenomenon among the bored ultra-rich, so perhaps Overwatch officers are the spoiled, transhuman children of the corporate elite?

People want to be Space Marines. They also want to fight Space Marines. The Battletech Clan Elementals might be a good place to look. The basic idea is that you have heavy robot suits that are supposed to be able to compete against the dreadnought and locust style walker robots. From a military standpoint, something that walks in at 3 meters or less and is functionally immune to small arms fire and capable of firing a machine gun and armed with a couple of anti vehicle rockets sounds like a general's dream.

Techpriests
The Priesthood of Mars is cool, but care has to be taken to be sure that they aren't comically inept, given that they're engineers who seem to reject engineering. Not sure we can use this one, although if they have real magic of course that helps.
Oh! We could have a Tradition which *claims* that all magic is actually recovered superscience left behind by Martians, which is why they spend all their time chanting new-age mumbo-jumbo over their robots.

That works.

Rogue Trader
Okay, we don't have space travel, but can heavily armed bands of merchant/mercenaries still travel the badlands? Pretty please? This is a tough one, from a social engineering standpoint, since if there are places which are too dangerous for unarmed merchants to go, why are people living there? Put another way - the people living there, why do they have enough swag to justify having a mercenary band, with a small nations GNP worth of superscience weaponry, travel around to buy and sell stuff?

We can have heavily armed freighter fleets that fight off Rlyehan pirates to conduct trade across the Pacific. Does that scratch the Rogue Trader itch?

Posessees periodically go-demon and then explode
There are a lot of implementations of this, but I actually prefer WH40K's execution here to the alternatives. First, people who are posessed by demons get to run around covered in thumbs-up-awesome-looking medieval exorcist gear to keep from wigging out for a while, and they also retain some measure of their identity for a while, which just has much more dramatic resonance than being killed and replaced by an insect-demon. Legend of the Overfiend and a couple of other horror anime (forget the names) also do a good job with this trope.
Anyway, the point is, that most posessees are still human, but if you are evil (or whatever we call our equivalent of a magic threat), you can summon possessing Outsiders which slowly and horribly kill the host, and which turn the host into a giant monster for one last orgy of ultra-violence before they shuffle off this mortal coil, fat with the souls they've devoured.

This is probably best handled with Stress. Being possessed can let you buy upgrades with more stress. Getting enough Stress makes you cease being a demihuman. So when the demon gets in your soul you start getting super strength and flame jets, and your eyes glow and you start growing fangs and horns and stuff, and eventually the power overwhelms you and you explode into Diablo.

-Username17

For a variety of reasons, I think it would be good for each of the six flavors of magic to come in three different flavors. This makes sure that each branch of magic has a broad enough base of available uses to not get stuck in the Evocation trap of D&D (Fire damage and lightning damage? Sign me up!), while also keeping things in memorable piles. Ideally, the groupings should sound like they came from outsider colonies, or at least were translated from whatever the outsider colonies talked about.

Magic Schools	Flavors (needs name)	Explanation	Example Spells
Shakti	Prana	Telekinesis	Distant Hands Poltergeist
Shakti	Kala	Time Control	Bullet Time Stasis
Shakti	Vajra	Electricity	Shocking Grasp Interference

The other categories are tentatively Alchemy, Conjuration, Illusion, Thaumaturgy, and Weirding.

On top of that, there are magical physical enhancements. An Asura can get an extra pair of arms, while a human can get wings or other demon parts.

-Username17

One of the great perils of making magic systems is what is called "Manipulation Bloat" (after the school of magic in Shadowrun, D&D players know it as "Transmutation Bloat"). That is, if one of your spell categories "changes stuff", then there is a tendency to want to put literally every type of effect in the game into it. Because hey, anything worth making a spell is by definition some kind of "change". And so it is that it is hopeful that the spell list for Ogre magic will not go all crazy and take over everything. In the hope of having that (not) happen, let's make it:

Magic Schools	Flavors (needs name)	Explanation	Example Spells
Alchemy	Wai	Transmutation of Elements	Metal to Water Solidify Air
Alchemy	Nei	Transmutation of Creatures	Animal Form Polymorph
Alchemy	Jing	Transmutation of Essence	Stone Skin Gaseous Form

Does that seem like it could be compact enough?

-Username17

Staking out some rules on transmutation seems pretty necessary, especially in a game which has modern physics available to player characters. Inviolate rules like "no changing mass" or "no changing state" sound like a good idea, but transmuting 100 kilograms of solid floor to 100 kilograms of solid nitrogen has extremely explosive implications (see nMage). The reality is that different substances have massively different densities, melting and boiling points, and specific heats. Clearly, if you set pretty much any physical values as constants and then let physics runs its ugly course, the results are going to be a catastrofuck. The goal is to provide concrete goals for what Waidan can accomplish and what it can't, and then use those data points to do a regression as to what the actual physics are. So things that want to happen:

• A channeler waves his hands and a metal wall or chain link fence turns into water and splashes down onto the ground.
• A channeler raises his fist and a tree grows out of a pond.
• A channeler snaps his fingers and a dude bursts into flames.
• A channeler holds out his hands and fires blow away as dust.
• A channeler puts his fist into the ground and metal spikes burst out of the earth.

All of those things want to happen because they are awesome and because they have simple and obvious source material in Chinese alchemical thought. Characters using Waidan in various ways to kill people is not actually particularly threatening to the world because there are lots of ways to kill people. As long as someone can use Shakti Vajra Lightning to kill someone or Thaumaturgical Nod Decay to end someone's life, anything which appears in any other context that maps to an attack is meaningful only in that it makes magical specialists a little more rounded.

What I'm actually concerned about is not the ability to kill people - guns do that pretty well - but to kill the setting. That is: an ability like Movement in Shadowrun has incredibly far reaching implications that I happen to know were not thought out even half as well by anyone who ever designed for the game (other than me) as they should be. So transmuting things into valuable things at a rate that alchemists wouldn't want to have jobs is probably right out. Transmuting mass in such a way as to get really substantial amounts of energy to the point where it starts rivaling solar cells is also a bad thing. Fundamentally: the ability to turn a wall into water is a bigger deal for the setting than the ability to turn a man into a dead man.

So here's what we get from the simple cases: transmuting needs to allow you to grow things. Dirt to metal just isn't useful for much of anything except impromptu bunker construction unless the metal can grow out of the ground somehow. But we still don't want people transmuting dirt into radios or some shit, meaning that when alchemy grows stuff it grows organically in a vaguely predictable/controllable fashion.

So when you make water, you can have it come out in a geyser. When you make metal it can pop out in the multi-drills from Gurren Lagann. When you make fire you can have it flare up. When you make wood, you can have it grow like a plant. And when you make earth, you can have it... something something darkside. I'm actually not sure whether it should rain down like a dust devil, bulge up like a molehill, or crater up like you just dropped a space rock. But anyway the point is that having the element grow in organically allows us to sidestep issues like mass and pressure differences - since we can actually have the water geyser in over enough time that we don't have to explain why pressure differentials don't blow up the whole building.

-Username17

Magic in Frank Trollman's Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker is defined into traditions and paradigms similarly to how Shadowrun 4 does things. However, there are substantial differences. This is not Shadowrun magic.

First, a bit of nomenclature: "Tradition" and "Paradigm" mean the same thing. If you have a pseudo-scientific path of magic, you have a "Paradigm". If you have a pseudo-aboriginal path of magic, you have a "Tradition". Either way, you'll have a "Path". Your "Path" determines rather more than simply what flavors of spirit you can summon (if you can summon spirits). It determines what skills are associated with what types of magic. That is, people in different paths do different things to get good at magic, and those different things they do are mechanically represented by having distinct skills that they use to use different kinds of magic.

Now you may ask, what are those five types of magic? They are:

Magic	Covers	Sample Spells	Associated Demitype
Astral	Detection Space Warping Metamagic	Clairvoyance Dimension Door Spirit Ward	Deep Ones
Enchantment	Shapeshifting Transformation	Polymorph Stone Skin Alter Self	Ogres
Evoking	Kinetic Forces Time	Telekinesis Stasis Earthquake	Asura
Illusion	Images Emotions Veils	Invisibility Phantasm Fear	Elves
Thaumaturgy	Fixing Destruction Creation	Heal Disintegrate Sterilize	Dwarves
Conjuration	Summoning Possession Communion	Contact Other Plane Planar Binding Create Undead	Humans

And yeah, each of the types gets an associated magic type. If you buy up all the available Deep One powers ad get a high Stress rating, you'll have a bunch of Astral magic at your fingertips. And you still have a path. So depending on what Tradition or Paradigm you are part of, your Deep One mutant abilities will have different skills that they run off of.

Magical Targeting

Magic requires a link to affect something. A link can be achieved through sympathy (casting through a related object), or through touch, or through reaching out and touching them with your aura. That last one allows you to cast spells on things you can see, but it still only goes a limited distance. Having more Magic Stress makes you have a more powerful aura that can reach targets farther away.

Sympathetic targeting requires you to synchronize the two objects, which is time consuming if the objects aren't already in close proximity. And once the connection is established, they are like quantum entanglements, and you can "collapse" the link by casting a spell through it. This means, for example, that you can have a magical healer keep attuned blood samples on hand and then cast healing magic on them from far away if they get injured (and the healer knows about it).

A special shout out needs to go to Teleportation, because it is so problematic. Teleporation in Frank Trollman's Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker does not create "go to" statements, it creates "come from" statements. That is: with a sympathetic link setup, you could make a man on Mars teleport several meters, but you couldn't teleport someone from Earth to a sympathetic link in the Mars colony.

A second special shoutout needs to go to Resurrection, because again it is super problematic. Raise dead does not exist. But necromancy does. You can talk to ghosts and you can make zombies. But you can't use magic to actually raise the dead.

Paths

The main thing that your Tradition or Paradigm gives you is skill-magic associations. It also gives you a summonable creature type that in turn gives you a list of powers that your spirits can select from when you summon them. And of course it also comes with primarily flavor concerns: different Traditions and Paradigms use different stuff for ritual use. So Northwestern Forge Magic looks like this:

• Astral: Chemistry
  Enchantment: Mechanic
  Evoking: Demolitions
  Illusion: Artisan
  Thaumaturgy: Armorer
  Summons: Spirit Constructs (Fire Aura, Stabilize, Strengthen)
  Accouterments: Hammers, Metal Powders, Alchemical Metals

-Username17

A Schizophrenic World
“There has never been a stable time. Periods of history without events of note are ones too chaotic to allow proper records to be kept for future generations.”

The future portrayed in the 2075 Asymmetric Threat world is one in which technology has advanced considerably, especially in the realm of information technology. Advances in flight, energy production, and human ecology have been substantial and there are now cities under the seas, on the Moon, and even Mars. And yet for all of these demonstrable advances, progress is nothing like uniform. Several major calamities have occurred, and many things we take for granted today are practically fantasy in the world of 2075. While the people of the world have access to things that are beyond our current reach, many things people do in 2075 appear quite backward to us today.

The Network of 2075 is not a world wide web in any meaningful sense. The major arteries of digital traffic we use today are fiber optic cables that run under ground and under water between cities. Those have almost all been cut by 2075, meaning that the essentially instant communication of high volumes of digital traffic that we rely upon today are a thing of the past. If 2070s teenagers want to download pornography, they have to find a local server hosting it or wait for the request to be sent up to a satellite, have the request forwarded to a different satellite (often through several intermediaries in orbit), have the request sent back down to Earth, and then have the data sent back through the same path the other way. There are serious time delays there, and performing real-time hacking through such a connection is essentially impossible. Depending on where you are, the servers on the Moon might be easier to access than other servers that are on Earth.

But just because every city is a data island doesn't mean that The Network doesn't exist or that it isn't useful. WiFi techniques have continued to advance, and WiFi access is pretty much everywhere and used by pretty much everything. Further, the chances of you being able to find things you want on The Network in your area are pretty good, because copies of information get made and re-archived on servers all over the world all the time. Whenever satellites have spare bandwidth, they use it to copy, update, and recopy data from servers in one area of the world to servers elsewhere. It makes the system a lot faster than you'd think, but also makes the system vulnerable to being fooled with fake information updates for short periods of time.

The Cloud of Junk
“Because we left garbage in all the other frontiers.”

The Earth is surrounded by trash. Space debris zip through the void at eleven thousand kilometers an hour, and the strongest shielding will keep out only the tiniest grains. Orbit around Earth has literally millions of fast moving objects around, and even the most adept agencies can only track the movements of a small fraction of them. Different corporations and governments do not even share their information with each other, and satellites get struck by debris all the time – becoming even more pieces of erratically moving debris. In our time a communications satellite stays up for an average of five years, but in 2075 they stay up for more like five months. So the inter-city backbone of The Network is changing all the time – old satellites break and new satellites go up every day.

The clouds of trash are not enough to keep space travel from being a thing, many space agencies manage to keep flight paths clear enough that they can get vessels outside the debris belts. And once you get out to fifty thousand kilometers or so, space is pretty empty and safe. The lunar colony of Chandra is the closest inhabited region of space, though the L4 and L5 space stations of Tiangong-2 and Mir-5 are not much farther. Radio communications reach these locations in over a second and they maintain their own infrastructure to hold their mirrors of The Network. Flights to these locations are expensive and take about 10 hours. The farther reaches of space are more remote, the Mars colony of Anteros is on an entirely different planet that is on a different orbit. Depending on when in the year it is, a radio transmission takes between a bit over 3 minutes and around 22 minutes, and even with the fusion-powered ships of the late 21st century, it still takes between 4 days and nearly 3 weeks to make the journey to Mars in person. Communication with Anteros is mostly done with the expensive and low bandwidth (but instantaneous) methods of magical sendings and quantum entanglement communication.

The Cloud of Noise
“I can't hear myself sneak in all this chatter!”

There are more wirelessly active devices active in any city at any one time than there are people. By more than ten to one in most regions. And while the actual range of most devices is small, it is nonetheless true that at any given time you will be within range of thousands of devices, all clamoring for attention and wanting their bit packages handed this way and that. And so it is that nearly every device that participates in the wireless world also participates in handing packets back and forth for whatever other devices happen to be in the area. Very complex informational space sharing algorithms are enforced that make cooperative communication possible. Data packets are handed from node to node through a dizzyingly large array of links and this works to keep the different nodes from jamming each other.

The cooperative communications protocols normally keep devices from really “knowing” in any real way what their packets contain, where they are going, or where they are coming from. And that means that devices will pass data on even when that data would not be allowed to stay on the device. Machines will willingly be a link for data that they would not accept as a transmission to them. Indeed, checking the password verifications for every data packet being routed through to another node would be impractical, and it just isn't done. Even secure installations will have password checks only at terminal nodes where data is actually being routed to – intermediary links won't bother. Secure installations thus work to segregate their version of The Network from outside pollution with wireless blocking walls and direct connections to dedicated satellites.

But of course there is no way to be certain that a wireless device actually passed on a data packet without keeping a copy for itself, nor is there any way to make sure that no intervening link kept a record of what route a data packet traveled. Unscrupulous hackers can get a lot of information simply by saving copies of data that pass through their wireless devices on a continuous basis. This is called “passive hacking”. The ad hoc wireless protocols are quite robust, but they are still predicated on the idea that every machine is playing nice and sharing the space. Unscrupulous hackers can flood the informational space with data packets that clog the tubes by being sent in long circuitous paths, and they can deliberately have their data packets collide with others, causing information to be lost. This is called “disruptive hacking”.

The Cloud of Meat
“Can I run some of these programs on your sister? She's like a little porcelain doll.”

The mind/machine interface was being worked on feverishly throughout the late 20th century, and substantial progress was made. In 2075, the mind/machine interface is very advanced. And that means that technological devices can interface with the brains of people with little required setup unless they are being actively jammed. In a lot of ways, this is incredibly convenient. You can have your bathtub turn on because you decide to get out of bed. Not by pressing buttons or flicking switches, but literally just the decision itself, because your house can be interfacing with your brain. You can also send an email to your friend without actually typing things just by having the computer read the words you want to send out of your brain.

The interfacing can and does also go the other way, where your perceptions can be externally stimulated by electronic devices. A device that stimulates simulated sensation to a person is called a “deus deceptor” or “DD”. When computers implant sensory information to a person's brain the sensations themselves are called “virtual reality” or “VR”. If these induced hallucinations are compatible with the actual world around the person they are “augmented reality” or “AR”. If the induced sensations supplant real-world sensations, that is “Zhuangzi reality” or “ZR”. Machines can also produce real light and sounds that can be detected by peoples sensory organs in the normal way. These are called “images”.

Unscrupulous hackers can interface with your brain against your will. Indeed, without technological intervention the very same children's toys that allow one to turn lights on and off with your desires could report to someone keeping an illicit log what your desires actually were. This is called “trepanation”. Unscrupulous use of DD technology can generate sensory data and even cause other state changes in the brain that can debilitate or insert foreign thought. This is called “basilisk hacking”. Images too can be produced in such a way that they trigger physical responses from epilepsy to bowel movements. This is called “flashing”.

Encryption
“We estimate that we can crack this faster by waiting a few years for computers to become faster and then starting the project on the new generation of machines.”

Cryptography is a complex thing. But an immutable fact of it is that if you are handed a set of data that has been scrambled by a non-repeating transformation of comparable size, that you cannot decipher it. Not “it's really hard to decipher” or “It'll take you a long time to decipher that” but that in fact you simply can't do it at all. So anyone with sufficient time on their hands and dedication to cryptographic secrecy can make a system that cannot be decrypted under any circumstances. It's called a one-time pad, and while resource intensive it is actually unbreakable. But people generally don't really need codes that can't be broken ever, most people will settle for codes that cannot be broken any time in the next hundred million years. That's the kind of time frame that even the extremely long lived are generally willing to concede that their secrets of today won't matter much once it has passed.

So while it is entirely within everyone's capacity to go out into the street, turn the microphone on super high and record random discordant noise for an hour, then download that hour into their drone as an exceedingly long cypher to get an hour of unbreakably encrypted communications between themselves and their drone – the vast majority of people are willing to accept a less intensive system where their communications are merely unlikely to be decrypted before the sun peters out. The tradeoff of ease of use to message security is dynamic, with many available options. For simplicity, the assumption is that when encryption is used, it is either SE, which is just good enough to keep anyone who doesn't have a quantum computer from reading your mail, and EUE, which is good enough to keep quantum computers from reading your mail, but requires you to share your complete two-way cypher with both sender and recipient before you can send any encrypted messages.

SE: Standard Encryption
“You can't get in here unless you push. With your hand.”

Every message sent by every wireless device is encrypted with what is called SE, or “standard encryption”. This is an asymmetric algorithm, which is based on very large prime numbers multiplied together. It has many advantages because the key the unravels it is different from the key that encodes it in the first place, and the key that encodes it is derivable from a single (very large) number. What this means is that every node and every link in the path between any two nodes has their magic number that they broadcast, and every packet sent to them (either as a final destination or as an intermediary link) is first encoded using that number. And if the computer is supposed to pass the packet on again, it decodes the standard encryption that was sent to it and then re-encodes it with standard encryption for whatever computer is supposed to receive it next. And it's layerable, so when you send a data packet to a node through a link, your computer puts on the standard encryption for the target node and layers the standard encryption for the intervening link on top of that. And because the link will strip their version of the standard encryption off the packet and recrypt it for the next link, the packet sender does not need to know the number of any of the intervening links besides the first (and the final node of course).

It's a great system and it prevents random computers from stealing your data. After all, any computer that does not have the decryption key can't take the encryption off, and thus wireless traffic can be sent all over the place without anyone stealing your data. And that is why people have been using standard encryption and systems essentially like standard encryption for nearly a century. And it has been the ubiquitous standard for wireless communication since the 2030s. Even old devices from your parent's house are going to be using SE (although they may be using smaller numbers).

The problem, from a security standpoint, is that factorization of large numbers is not actually particularly difficult if you have a quantum computer. Anyone with a quantum computer can derive the decryption algorithm for any packet encoded in standard encryption in seconds. And this means that any information encoded only in standard encryption and sent over wifi is vulnerable to passive hacking by anyone in range who has a quantum computer. Quantum computers are currently fairly rare and expensive, the exclusive province of assets and agents working for heavy hitting governments and syndicates. Which is great news for the hackers themselves, because right now hacking equipment is still rare enough that people haven't abandoned SE (not that there are any great alternatives according to currently understood math).

EUE: Effectively Unbreakable Encryption
“We estimate that we can crack this faster by waiting a few years for computers to become faster and then starting the project on the new generation of machines.”

Most highly secure communications use Essentially Unbreakable Encryption (EUE), a system where the sender and the intended recipient both have a cypher that is overlain on the messages and subsequently removed. The keys used in the 2070s are of variable length, but generally are thousands of bits long, and cannot be expected to be broken by any sort of mathematical attack. In order to attain such levels of security the cypher itself must have been shared at some earlier point between the intended sender and receiver, and it can of course be stolen either during the hand off or at any time that anyone has direct access to any of the computers which store the cypher itself. After all, EUE doesn't make the message completely illegible to anyone but the intended recipient; it makes the message completely unintelligible to anyone who doesn't have the key – not the same thing once espionage comes into the equation.

The big limitation of EUE is that every single computer that sends or receives the message in any final sense has to have a copy of the cypher and that anyone who gets a copy of the cypher can read any of the messages anyone sent with that cypher. EUE is a symmetric algorithm, and while it is successful at delaying even quantum decryption for years, it has a potentially fatal security flaw for every target that is intended to actually read any of the messages. Getting EUE started can be something of a chicken-egg problem, since if you had a secure enough way to send a message that you could get the EUE cypher to the intended recipient so that they could read your message, you might be able to send your message the same way.

Decentralized Banking
“It is the finding of the International Monetary Fund that the creation of a unified currency that is itself immune to the damaging effects of speculation and devaluation is an essential pillar upon which the global economy must be placed.”

In the world of Asymmetric Threat, there are no governmental superpowers. Regional governments, corporations, and super-governmental agencies (like the IMF and the EU) issue their own currencies, and it's really very confusing. In North America, people use Dollars ($). Those dollars may be issued by the Conch Republic or California, or they might be issued by Standard Oil or the North American Union. But whatever government or syndicate issues the thing, it's called a dollar. Because that is what everyone north of Panama expects money to be called.

Cash transactions are very common in 2075, and “credit” basically doesn't exist. Electronic payments are smoother when handled through your anchor than they ever were fiddling with credit cards, but all such transactions are debit, and may take a while to process if you or the person you're paying is from out of town.

The Itsy Bitsy Spider
“Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain.”

The International Monetary Fund maintains a currency called the Special Drawing Right ($), or “SpDR” (pronounced “Spider”). It's a currency used all over the world because it is backed in currencies from all over the world. The concept is that the SpDR has its exchange rate pegged to a “basket” of currencies issued by governments and corporations from every continent. You can trade your SpDRs in for however much of a local currency is currently trading at an average value of all the currencies in the basket. And because this guaranty is made by the IMF they are reasonably certain that they can meet any demand you happen to have for any currency. But SpDRs are seen as a much safer investment than currencies issued by governments precisely because you could theoretically cash out for any currency anywhere that happened to still be standing in the face of general collapse. So SpDRs have an even higher real value than their backed value, so people almost never actually turn their SpDRs in for other currencies (which in turn makes the currency backing situation of the IMF even better looking, it's a delicious cycle).

In price lists in this book, the prices are normally given in SpDRs. Other currencies are in use locally and internationally of course. SpDRs are actually in short supply and people are mostly forced to use the local currency. Any currency used by a large enough regional government will have people outside that region who for whatever reason want it, and you can usually exchange one region's dollars for another's if you don't mind paying a brokerage fee. In other parts of the world, Euros (€) and Renminbi (¥) are major trade currencies, and both usually trade at about a quarter of a SpDR.

Electronic Banking
“But what if Bob told you I had a million dollars?”

Electronic banking exists in 2075, but it is somewhat more limited than your early 21st century experiences might indicate, because information in The Network is too temporally out of sync in different parts of the world and solar system to make true early 21st century internet banking work. Simply put, there is no way for any creditor to guaranty that money in an internet account hasn't been double promised to someone in another Network zone that is mirrored and out of phase by seconds, minutes, or hours. So if you want to do an electronic currency transaction, you need to contact a specific bank in a unique real world location and have them guaranty that the money in question exists and has been transferred.

Your anchor has a “credit module”, and you can pay people money with it. Actually, you may have several credit modules, each targeted to a different account. What a credit module is, is an EUE-encoded link to a specific bank account, where presumably only the bank at the other end has another copy of that EUE cypher. And you can send authorizations to that account for it to transfer money. But when we say “bank” we aren't saying “BHB”, we're saying your literal BHB branch and the specific account you have in that branch. Because BHB as a whole entity exists in so many cities and has so many out of sync versions of The Network to work with that they can't be really sure as a whole corporation whether you have any money or not. So you have to wait for your request to get to your bank, you have to wait for the bank to contact the target's bank, and you have to wait for the second bank to contact the actual target that funds have arrived. If everyone is in the same city's Network, this is pretty much instantaneous, but if multiple copies of The Network are being accessed via satellite linkage, this can take a while.

That being said, it's still less of a pain and safer than using old school credit cards because you don't have to surrender any billing information to the person or corporation you're paying. The waiter doesn't wander off with your card to maybe duplicate the thing and steal your identity – your anchor arranges all of the transfer details and the restaurant gets a message from their own bank account that they have been paid.

The Full Faith and Credit
“It's not that I don't trust you – although I don't. It's that I don't care.”

One thing that is slightly counterintuitive about the 2075 future from the perspective of people living in the early 21st century is the difficulty ordinary people have getting credit. Banks will pretty much only give you a loan if you have a steady job working for a government or syndicate. The terms are that they give you a personal loan and then garnish your wages – it's basically loan sharking. This means that if you're working as a deniable asset (like say, you're a player character in Asymmetric Threat), then a bank will not give you a loan. They won't give you a loan even if you own land or your consultancy business takes in a million SpDRs a year. If you don't have a steady job and they can't get your employer to sign over a portion of your wages, they just aren't interested. Governments and syndicates can still get loans, but small business loans, mortgages, student loans, and all that are simply things of the past.

And yes, that means that there are construction projects that are partially finished just standing there while the owner tries to save up finances to get the project completed out of pocket. If this was the first world in the early 21st century, the owner would put the property as collateral and finish the project with money lent by the bank, and then the project would get done and start collecting rents and stuff. Or the project would fail for some other reason and the bank would still win because they got the property which was worth more than the loan anyway. But in 2075 this does not happen. And to understand why it doesn't happen, you have to understand why things are already like this in Africa even in the early 21st century.

The personal identification systems of the various regional governmental regions are incapable of identifying someone uniquely in any definitive way. The physical addresses outside arcologies are spotty at best, and people can get new email addresses literally just by wanting them. Billing just isn't something that agencies – including banks – can actually do with any reliability. Added to the fact that land ownership is sketchy to begin with and legal systems just aren't very reliable, and banks can't really count on collateral that is actually nailed down. In 2075, individuals essentially don't have credit ratings as far as banks are concerned. If you really need a personal loan, you need to talk to a creative finance specialist from one of the criminal syndicates.

Remote Operations
“Spooky action at a distance.”

The existence of machines and wireless computing is ultimately futile unless it actually does something. Machines do many things: they store and process data, they move from place to place, they allow and deny access, they even perform physical tasks. But they only do those things if they are told to do them, either ahead of time through programing or directly with commands. In 2075, commands are almost never issued through crude anachronisms like “pressing buttons” or “pulling levers”, commands are issued with software. Every device has its own operating system, or “OS”, that allows it to operate.

While the OS handles all instructions for a device performing any operation within its capabilities, the user still would like to issue some of those instructions. Communications travel over wireless connections at the speed of light, which over distances that don't involve planetary orbits is close enough to instantaneous as makes no odds, and in 2075 it is normal for people to interact with an OS at a distance.

The Anchor
“Between Actus et Potentia, there is a login screen.”

Your credit module, the maglock on your apartment door, your bus pass, your social networking, your cloud memory storage, and everything else that you have access to through The Network has its own OS. And all of these things have their own encryption and passcodes and unique interfaces as well. If all of these things interacted with your brain through a DD, you wouldn't be able to see. Heck, you probably wouldn't be able to smell with all the sensory overflow you'd be subjected to. And so what society has done is to create systems to block all of it out and bundle all of that crap together. This system is called an “Anchor” – originally because the cacophony of demands for attention from the various OSes was likened to stormy seas washing the user this way and that.

A user's Anchor is an OS that operates operating systems. It has a unified user interface and runs a single set of sensory impulses into a DD in order to allow the user to see what's going on (at least, the “important” parts of what is going on) without being overwhelmed. Your Anchor will also try to block out DD impulses from other sources, which is really helpful if you don't want blipverts beamed into your brain, and is even of some defense against basilisk hacks.

Lots of different Anchors are available, and they have different looks, themes, and feels. Since most people live with their Anchors, it is not unusual for people to be so used to the user interface their Anchor provides that they seriously don't know how the “default” UIs that many of their systems use work. Almost no one loads their credit module directly through a DD into their brain, and the result is that it pretty much doesn't matter whether the user interface provided by the bank is smooth and intuitive or a clunky garish thing that looks like it was cobbled together with fake 3d effects from the 2020s.

Puppetry
“Robots dance on wireless strings.”

Operating things through your Anchor is entirely possible. It's even the norm. Your Anchor gives you the information it is set up to think you need, you give instructions to the Anchor, and it relays those instructions to lower level operating systems in a language they can hopefully understand. This multiple layered command hierarchy is called “puppetry”, and someone who does it called a “puppeteer”. It's important to note that basically everyone does puppetry on some level, even if it's only really simple things like interacting with their own Anchor to tell it to set the microwave for two minutes of medium heating. However, while it would be technically correct to call such people puppeteers, in practice people are not called that unless they are using puppetry to pilot robots or move large amounts of data.

Most puppetry is done through an AR medium, but in principle there is nothing stopping people from shutting out the DD altogether and performing puppetry by interacting directly with holographic images or shutting out the real world and going full ZR to do one's puppetry.

Avatar and @man
“My will drives the machine. The machine is me.”

Impulses pass through a person's neurons much slower than communications pass through wifi space. Sensations and commands can pass between objects faster than they can travel up and down a human leg. Using a deus deceptor and a motor shunt, a person can sense what a machine senses and cause the machine to act as they would act. If sensations and motor commands are being sent with a sufficiently clear signal within a reasonable distance, the controlled machine can be as much “you” as your own body would be without those devices. When a machine is a surrogate “you” in that manner it is an “Avatar”. The person whose self is transferred in that manner is called an “@man”.

The terminology originally comes from Hinduism, where the atman is the self that incarnates through a series of bodies in life after life, and an avatar is a specific body that represents a single incarnation. Once that concept hit Network culture, atman became “@man” and the plural became “@men”. Most people in 2075 think that it's an English word and refers to the fact that the person is essentially emailing themselves to the location of the device. Some people even go out of their way to make it less “sexist” by referring to the people as an “@peep”. This has not caught on.

An @man is also someone who uses a DD and a motor shunt to translate their consciousness into a purely virtual space. There are ZR games, meetings, and data manipulation jobs that @men log into, an the digital representation of their selves are still called avatars. Some people distinguish between transferred consciousness into a robot in realspace as skin avatars and transferred consciousness into a virtual space as a virtual avatar.

A Cacophony of Echoes
“OK. Everyone who agrees that I'm Jennifer Woodyard, raise their hand.”

Your address, your driver's license, your Lifenet account, your medical records, and really every other thing about you is stored electronically in The Network. It's like your credit report today. And like your credit report (or wikipedia), pretty much anyone can put stuff into the data stream at any time. You can challenge the data in court and maybe get it changed, but by and large stuff just accumulates in the data stream. Because of the fact that things aren't always correct and some people are total tools, the system is equipped with failsafes to try to weed out incorrect data. Data which is repeated many times in many places (or in important or "trustworthy" places) is considered to have a high veracity. Data which shows up only a few times or in very sketchy places is treated as having a lower veracity. If data conflicts, the system automatically chooses to believe higher veracity information at the expense of lower veracity information.

An example of this in action might be someone getting your name wrong on a delivery of twinkies. Your name is something like Chris McGee, but on the invoice it says Chris Maggie. Now off in The Network somewhere there's a little piece of data that your name is in fact Chris Maggie. But fortunately for you, your Caldonian driving license and your high school diploma are both in your real name. So in the future when machines check your name, the right name will have a higher veracity and (presumably) displace the wrong name. The Chris Maggie typographical error will only show up again after low intensity searches which stop after the first couple of hits. So the "Chris Maggie" spelling may continue to haunt you for the rest of your life, getting picked up by cheap companies that purchase sales information from NERPS distribution; gradually gaining veracity as it is passed from company to company and appearing in more and more places in The Network – but it probably won't. The typographical error will probably just be copied into archive after archive and remain a low veracity artifact of no import but to be a minor irritation to data miners.

Keeping Secrets
“Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

Actually preventing information from getting out is quite difficult. Blogging and retweeting caused stories to reverberate around the world in the early 21st century, and in 2075 The Network itself spreads information around without even requiring a horde human of typists to be interested in things. Each Local Network grabs copies of stuff on Mirror Networks whenever there is free bandwidth on the satellites, meaning that any information that exists anywhere will quickly have dozens, hundreds, or millions of copies all over the world. Keeping information from getting everywhere pretty much requires keeping it from getting anywhere.

And this is more than the fact that anything you ever put on any social networking host or message board or submit to a corporation in any form is likely going to be findable by people who dig deeply enough in the future, although that is essentially the case. This is that the simple fact of accounts an actions being done through the same Anchor is potentially traceable, even years after the fact. The fact that information was sent to the same SE number from your LifeNet Account and from the microwave in your apartment and a computer that was being hacked into means that potentially, a dataminer could turn up a connection between that computer crime and your home address and all your friends. Even if months or years have passed. Hackers don't like that, which is why they normally maintain multiple Anchors. If you want to keep your identity clean, you have to make sure that there is full segregation between identities. And that can be extremely difficult to do in a world where every device is constantly trying to make friends with every other.

Assets with limited computer skills can either dispose of their things and get new Anchors periodically or have other assets with better computer skills set up a multi-layered Anchor system. A multi-layered Anchor is one where the Anchor maintains distinct virtual Anchors with their own SE numbers. Depending on how well the Anchor is set up to anticipate which virtual Anchor to use for each contact, this can work pretty well. Still, tech savvy assets tend to keep multiple separate Anchors and manage the connections themselves, dumping Anchors when they feel they have become too exposed.

Destroying News
“I don't want that story broken, I want it destroyed.”

Because of the complete lack of a central authority of Truth©, you can actually create truths that happen to suit you. If you treat something as true long and loudly enough, everyone else will treat it the same way. While archaic considerations like "statute of limitations" are out the window, the fact is that if you can fool the world into believing that you've always lived in Nag Kampuchea for a while, the world will continue to believe it pretty much indefinitely. The world of 2075 has an extremely short attention span and you actually can reinvent yourself with sufficient effort.

But actually removing data from The Network is nearly impossible. Too many Mirror Networks have too many copies of basically everything to allow anything to fall all the way into the memory hole anymore. You can get Channel Sn4+ to proclaim a fact to be false, and you can get the fact that the fact you don't like is false to get a high veracity. And you can get a fact to become low veracity by having it not get talked about. And that's it. If you don't get a high veracity denial out or get a story buried by other, more interesting stories, it'll get more veracity behind it simply by reposting.

The third possibility, is to get a news story to become “old news”. A fact that is generally accepted as true, but also uninteresting, has little consequence. This is a dangerous tactic to take with volatile information, but potentially the most rewarding. The news is accepted, afforded a high veracity by all interested parties and then the consequences are ridden out. Historically this has proven to be the most effective technique for dealing with sex scandals that break into the news cycle, which by no means should be taken to mean that everyone actually does that. People still try to issue mealy mouthed non-denials and cast aspersions and so on and so forth when they get caught with their pants down. It will probably always be thus.

The Astral Plane
“What would you do if there was a world realer than our own? What if there was a world that was less?”

Parallel to our own world is an ethereal and largely empty world full of magical energy. It is called the astral plane, and it is physically inaccessible and invisible save through the use of magic. However, shadows of things in the real world are cast into the astral one. These multicolored images are called auras, and those with the ability can divine a considerable information about objects, events, and people in the material world by observing them. Auras are important not only because they reveal secrets about the world, but also because magic works through auras. If someone casts a spell, it must pass into the astral plane, through auras, and then back into the material world.

The rules of magic are different than the laws of physics, and the connectivity of auras is not the same as physical contact or gravitational pull. Auras are connected because of association, in both a proximal and metaphorical sense. If a man touches a doorknob, a piece of his aura will linger on the aura of that doorknob for a brief period. If the same man feels strong emotions about touching that doorknob, the aura connection would last longer, and the colors of that aura would appear brighter to observers. If the same man touched the doorknob with an injured hand, the blood on it would keep an associated aura for longer still.

Auras extend outward from all creatures and objects, and hover in the air around places with significant emotional importance. The astral plane appears smoky and colorful – like a rave with fog machines and laser shows. But auras are also semitransparent, like water with coloring swirling in it, and with astral sight one can see through objects to limited degree. Auras are wholly insubstantial even on the astral plane, and they bar passage no more than does a cloud of smoke.

Paths of Magic
“And I did it my way.”

There are a lot of ways to make magic work, and in 2075 a lot of them are in use. In the first couple of decades after 2020, there were literally thousands of systems people put forward to try to use and explain magic. But the fact is that a lot of those attempts did not work, and many of the proposed systems worked a lot less well than others. In the decades since, most of the magical theories have been discarded by the vast majority of people. Darwinistic selection of successful theories over unsuccessful ones has been pretty total in most of the world. When magic is demonstrable, the people whose techniques actually work can demonstrate that. But while many people believe that there is a one true path somewhere out there, there is no agreement as to what that path actually is. In 2075 there are about two hundred distinct systems of magic that are in wide spread use, and while various advantages and disadvantages have been shown for doing magic one way or another, all of the ones that are considered major do produce results.

Following a magic path is an artistic philosophy and a technical discipline, using distinct physical metaphors to describe magical effects and the causes of those effects. Very importantly, these metaphors actually work, but only for the people who actually use the magical path. Followers of other paths need to approach magic with their own path-relevant physical metaphors in order to get magical effects to work. For example: followers of the path of Dagon hold that Thaumaturgy is a lot like swimming; and Dagon cultists train to become better at Thaumaturgy by practicing swimming. Followers of the path of Lakhota Shamanism say that Thaumaturgy is a lot like cooking; and Lakhota shaman train to become better at Thaumaturgy by curing meat. Both of these techniques work, but mixing the systems does not. If a Dagon cultist spends a lot of time getting really good at making sausage, they will get no better at Thaumaturgy; if a Lakhota shaman spends a lot of time getting really good at swimming, he won't become any better at Thaumaturgy either. Mixing and matching magical paths does not normally produce a working whole, and people who try to make paths that use the bits that work from several paths end up with a failed system in almost all cases.

The immiscibility of magical paths has led to a balkanization of culture in much of the world. In the Union Territories, wizards mostly follow the paradigm of Wicca; and in neighboring Quebec, wizards mostly follow the paradigm of Goetism. And in the areas that are on the border, people don't have syncretic paradigms, because syncretism does not work. Wicca espouses a fair amount of philosophical and cosmological ideas that permeate cultural discourse in the Union Territories, and Goetism espouses very different philosophical and cosmological ideas that are culturally important in Quebec. Importantly, spirits that conjurers call up are also aligned morphologically and philosophically with the magic paths that they are associated with. Dagon cultists summon void beasts, who look like tentacled horrors and describe themselves as void beasts; while Goetic wizards summon angels and demons, who appear as winged or cloven hoofed demihumans and describe themselves as demons and angels. A Goetic wizard cannot summon a void beast or a demon that looks like a void beast, nor can a Dagon cultist summon an angel or a void beast that looks like an angel. The dimensions they come from appear to be different, and any particular path of magic only summons things from one other dimension.

Game mechanically, each path has a skill associated with each type of magic, and it is that skill that determines how many dice the character uses when they employ that type of magic. Further, each path of magic has a stable of available summoned creatures. Game mechanically, this works out to each path providing access to five spirit types, each associated with one of the five types of spells, and providing a short list of optional powers available to the spirits they summon. Any time a Goetic wizard summons a Fire Spirit it is a “Fire Demon” and it looks like a Goetic fire demon, and it has access to the Goetic Demon Power List for optional powers. Goetic demons are different from Wiccan spirits not only in appearance, but also in available types (there are no Wiccan fire spirits) and in available optional powers.

Traditions
“It was good enough for our ancestors.”

Many magical paths are based heavily on ancient culturally appropriate magical practices. Magical paths that make claim to being “the same” as the magic used by people in the past are called traditions of magic. Users of traditional magic are given traditional names, be it “shaman” or “priest” or “medicine man”. Traditions are strongly associated with moral and ethical systems, which are by their very nature contentious. Most traditions are quite polarizing, with people strongly in favor and strongly opposed to individual traditions. A follower of a tradition that the speaker does not like is likely to be called something derogatory like “savage” or “cultist”. Some traditions even seem to revel in their outsider status and adopt names like that for themselves. Several of the island nations that appeared in the twenties have magical traditions that are explicitly opposed to the rest of the world and their practitioners don't seem to mind being called nasty names. Dagon cultists call themselves “cultists of Dagon”, and considering the pro-piracy stance of the Dagon-dominated countries, no one is moving to change that designation any time soon.

Some questions about auras:
-Is it possible for a non-magical individual to drink a potion/use an item/have a spell cast on them that will allow them to perceive auras temporarily?
-Can auras be filmed, measured or otherwise observed using technological means?
-Are auras an objective phenomnia? ie. if two mages observe the same object with mage vision, do they see the same patterns in the aura?
-Does the doorknob leave a piece of its aura on the man when that man touches the doorknob?
-What happens to the aura of an object that's been destroyed?

Yep, clearly I'm going to need a whole section on exactly how auras work. Here's a closely associated section, spellcasting:

Channeling
“Putting the abra in abrakadabra.”

Causing effects through the use of spells is called channeling. This is because spells demonstrably produce more energy than the caster expends, and it is presumed that conservation of energy is maintained by channeling energy from the astral plane into the material world. Energy in the astral is very hard to measure, and there is no compelling evidence that this explanation for the effects of spells isn't true, so that's what the physicists go with. Conservation of energy is a system that works so well that Physics is not going to abandon it just because magic is weird.

The methods of channeling are very different from one path to another. Some stress magic words, while others stress kinetic actions. Spellcasting always makes noise and requires reasonably free movement of both hands, though the path followed may shift the precision requirement from vocalization to hand gestures. For example: a goetic wizard needs to recite exacting magic words but their hands wave around fairly randomly while channeling, but a Lakhota shaman has specific dances to perform but can sing or hum improvisationally to channel.

Channeled spells can do many things, but they are apparently limited by laws that are every bit as involute as the laws of physics. These laws are very different from the laws that govern mundane interaction, which is the source of much of the utility of magic, but they do still exist. What those laws are is a big topic for argument in magical theory, but players of Asymmetric Threat should keep the following limitations in mind:

• Spells Are Not Intelligent. A spell can select a target by a specific kind of aura, but it can't make a decision or interpret data. A spell could tell you where something is, but not how it works.
• The Future is Uncertain. Divination exists, but the answers it gives are not guaranteed to occur. Magic can show you the present path of a moving ball, but it cannot tell you whether a bat will strike it.
• Spells Cannot Target Without a Link. If there is no aura connection between the caster and the target, there is no spell. Once the spell has been targeted, it can have indirect effects in the physical world, but the point of origin must have an aura link to the caster.
• Physical Things Cannot Be Sent Through a Link. The target of a spell can be moved, and information can be transferred across a link, and energy can be channeled to the target of a link, but matter and energy cannot be sent either direction through a link.
• Spells Cannot Create Life. Magic can move things around, but is limited to physical and temporary animation. This extends to restoring life to the dead. Magic can call up ghosts and magic can animate a corpse, but magic cannot return a dead body to a living being.

But equally importantly, magic horrendously violates many of the normal rules that govern the material world, and those violations are important for deciding when to use magic and when to use technology:

• Magic doesn't care about the speed of light. When magic is used to teleport the target of a spell, it moves instantly. Not at the speed of light, but literally instantaneous shifting of location. Spellcasting takes time and sorcery cannot move things very far, so the overall distance moved over time is not unfathomable, but the actual travel takes zero time. The casting of a spell and its effect at the other end of a link are simultaneous, and the channeling takes precisely the same amount of time whether the link is across the room or across the solar system.
• Magic doesn't care about conservation of energy. This one is debatable, in that the general assumption of magical theorists is that channeling draws energy out of the astral plane. But from the standpoint of an individual wizard, casting a spell gets you more energy than it costs.
• Magical transformations can be undone. You cannot unburn a piece of paper, but if you dispel the magic on a frog it can turn back into a prince. Magic can open a passage in a wall and then close it up seamlessly, leaving no residue for physical observation to perceive.
• Magic can destroy information. While science can display a picture of whatever is behind an object in front of an object, this sort of invisibility is limited and causes distortion when the observer changes position. Magical invisibility, by contrast, can make things literally undetectable to sight by allowing all light to pass through.

Delving deeper into the secrets of channeling pushes a person farther away from humanity. Simply being able to use a spell causes a character to gain magical Stress. Being the subject of an ongoing spell is also stressful, and while a character is affected by a temporary spell effect they gain Temporary Stress.

Spell Targeting
“That voodoo that you do so well.”

Spells do not travel through normal space. In fact, they don't “travel” at all. A spell is cast into an astral aura that is touching the aura of the caster and the spell targets something that is linked to that aura. A caster cannot channel into something merely because they know where it is or even because they can see it if their aura can't touch a linked aura. Aura linking happens because the material things that cast those auras as shadows into the astral plane come into physical or emotional contact. Auras that are separated gradually delink, and as time goes on it can become quite difficult to find the link between two auras.

Channeling by bringing the caster's aura into direct contact with the aura of the target is called “direct casting”, although the actual process is the same as any other casting through an aura link. By touching (or bringing one's aura to touch) the target, the caster doesn't have to figure out what portions of available auras are linked to the intended target. For channelers unproficient with psychometry, this may be the only option. A subset of direct casting is “marking” – the practice of casting into objects that have recently been in physical contact with the channeler. Objects that are specially prepared to have mystical or emotional significance to the caster to hold the direct link longer are called “markers”. Even a channeler who has no psychometric experience can still throw a marker and channel a spell to target the marker where it lands.

People who are more heavily magical have larger auras. Characters who have more total Stress from magical sources are able to “reach” farther with their auras. So people who know more spells and have bonded more fetishes can use direct casting on targets that are farther away. Disrupting the magic being used by others requires targeting their aura, so spell defense can be provided from farther away when the caster has more magical Stress. The distance that a character's aura reaches is their “magic range”. Temporary Stress does not count for this purpose, and players are not expected to recalculate their magic range on the fly.

• Cultural Impact of Marking: In most of the world, touching magicians or allowing magicians to touch one's body is considered dangerous and foolhardy. The handshake has been largely abandoned in much of the world, being replaced by the East Asian bow in much of North America and Europe, and by an analogous gesture of mutual adjacent finger snapping in most of Africa. Handshakes still occur, but in a world in which people can literally curse a person through one, they are not generally done with new acquaintances. Handshakes denote a level of trust that is more appropriate for family and close friends, and offering a handshake to a stranger is regarded as rude and threatening.
  
  Whenever space ships travel outside the gravity well, one of their more ubiquitous pieces of cargo is the box of markers. These can be used to conduct instantaneous communication between Earth and her colonies, and can also allow magicians on Earth to conduct channeling work on space stations or other planets. Markers also come back to the home world so that magicians in space can channel home.

Going to need to write some actual tables, but here's Psychometry:

Psychometry
“I can see through you. See to the real you.”

Many magically oriented creatures can perceive the astral plane from the material world. In-world this is called spirit vision, astral perception, sixth sense, or a myriad of other names. But for game terms it is called “astral perception”. Everything on the astral plane is incorporeal, and it is not possible to “be” on the astral plane. However, astral shadows of everything in the material world are cast as auras that appear to the astrally perceptive as swirling masses of color. Sometimes things in other worlds extend auras into the astral plane as well, and this can be a good clue as to when and where things are going to phase in to our world.

Auras are objectively there: one person astrally perceives the same thing as another, and auras can even be photographed using special “spirit cameras”, but interpreting them is difficult. Emotions create colors, but some of those colors are very similar. All the “primal” emotions like hunger, lust, and fear are very nearly the same color of red. Intensity of color increases with intensity of emotion, but it also increases with duration. It is almost impossible to tell what someone is feeling when they are in a place where a lot of people have strong feelings night and day (like a hospital) or where people have been congregating for group activities for hundreds of years (like a cathedral). Auras give clues as to the inner workings of creatures and objects similar to how X-rays or magnetic resonance can. Auras extend outward from whatever generates them, so a metal plate inside a person's body would have visible shadows outside the body. Reconstructing the actual contents of something complex like a human from viewing their aura is difficult – like putting together a 3d puzzle. The process of getting useful information from a viewed aura is called “psychometry”.

Pieces of auras cling to other auras when they are in close proximity and when they have emotional connection. A piece of an aura is considered to be “the same” as the whole for purposes of where it is. This is called the rule of sympathy. Actually figuring out which auras are connected to which other ones and how is quite difficult, and the psychometric investigation can take quite a bit of time for tenuous connections. It is theorized by many paths that every aura is connected to every other aura in the universe through a series of links, some guessing the number to be in the hundreds of thousands and others positing numbers as small as a five links to get from any one thing to any other thing. This doesn't seem to be testable since channeling is incapable of passing through more than one link.

Finding a Link
“There has got to be a way.”

Finding a tenuous link between a spoon and an unknown person who held it some time ago requires a great deal of psychometric skill and a great deal of time to sort out. On the other hand, finding a link to one's own aura to a recently handled emotionally important object is so easy that even channelers who can't perceive auras at all can do it and the amount of time it takes is negligible. Broadly speaking, there are three separate criteria that increase the timeframe and difficulty of finding a link between two auras:

• Familiarity with the target aura. The less familiar the character is with the target aura, the more difficult the task.
• Strength of the connection. The weaker the connection, the more difficult the task.
• Duration of separation. The longer two auras have been apart, the more difficult the task.

Add up the Linking modifiers from each variable and compare to the Linking chart to find the amount of time it takes to set up a link and the psychometric difficulty of doing so.. If the linking modifiers are all zero, as is the case when a channeler is casting through one of their own markers, there is no reason to even roll a psychometry test – it just happens.

Finding the Truth
“But you can't handle it.”

Psychometry can also be used for diagnostic purposes. Getting more in depth information takes more time, and the quality of the information is based on the number of hits the character gains on their psychometry test. Very basic information such as how far auras extend and whether there is a giant spell ward pulsating with baleful astral energies doesn't take noticeable time to analyze. The difference between magical and non-magical things is immediately apparent, non-magical Stress is more time consuming and difficult to quantify.

Software is Dead
“Everything is better at doing what it is designed to do better.”

Moore's Law ran into some pretty severe problems in the twenties. The fact is that there are very real limits to how many logic gates you can fit in a piece of silicon. Simply doubling the number of circuits in a chip is something that cannot be done past the limits of the ability of semiconductors to provide current with pathways. And so it was that engineers were forced to increase the effective processing power of chips by making them more specialized. A well designed system running in hardware can be orders of magnitude faster than software running on generic hardware, and so it is that generic hardware is pretty much a thing of the past in 2075.

You can still get old school software and there are chips that are dedicated to running legacy programing. But this is so much slower and weaker than the dedicated chips, and it's so much harder for corporations to make money off of piratable software, that serious development money hasn't gone in to transferable software for almost fifty years. Software is the province of weird hobbyists who want to share capabilities with like minded individuals more than they want their programs to run with any kind of reasonable power or speed.

Dedicated Systems
“If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in hardware.”

In the early 21st century, it was not uncommon for a computer to have a set of chips dedicated to a specific task or set of tasks – the most ubiquitous of them was the “graphics card”. This happened because while the graphics card was not usually capable of making as many total operations in a second as the CPU, its more specialized nature made it better at calculating the specific operations needed by a graphics intensive video game. In the late 21st century, it simply makes sense to divide up all tasks into dedicated chip sets. In fact, due to the availability of modular chip fabrication, it makes sense to have your video game come on its own chip. Rather than have some semi-specialized chipsets that run various tasks like sound and graphical equations that your game might need and leave everything else to a CPU, the game comes with an entire specialized chipset that does everything the game needs. The game runs faster with the chips it comes in than it would running any part of it on a CPU, so people don't even have CPUs anymore.

Every program has its own processing power and is a literal physical object. Like the cartridges that video games came on in the 1980s. However, the inner workings are largely optical and the connections are good enough that you don't normally have to blow on them.

Drivers
“We don't have a universal protocol but we do have a comprehensive library of protocols.”

The last real refuge of software is the “driver”, a program that interprets the outputs of one piece of hardware for another piece of hardware to understand. Every corporation has their own system by which their hardware handles inputs and outputs, and oftentimes different programs made by the same company have different I/O systems. However, the software that translates the rantings of one program into the specialized language of another is generally quite small and runs very quickly, especially when it has its own specialized hardware to run on. When you have a program, it is generally self contained in a rectangular prism about the size of a lighter, and all it really needs to run is a power source. But it still needs to interface with other things, including presumably a user at some point. Each device to device interaction is handled by a driver. The most important set of drivers is the one running on your Anchor.

The standard architecture is that you have your brain, and your brain has information sent to it by the DD and commands are sent out from “you” by some combination of controllers, be they motion sensors, type pads, motor shunts, or scanners. There is also the actual program chip that is running whatever program it is you want to use. Connecting all three (or more) of these devices together is the Anchor, and the connection between the Anchor and each device is mediated by drivers that are run by the specialized driver hardware of the Anchor itself.

When you get a new program or device (the two concepts aren't really different in 2075), chances are that you'll need driver software to make it actually talk with your Anchor. Once it's doing that, it can talk to any of the devices that are already talking to the Anchor – including the DD and controllers that allow it to have input and output from and to the user. So each new device you add requires just the one driver so long as your Anchor is working properly.

Passive hacking is like adding a new device for whatever you are listening in on. While the quantum decoder will cut through the encryption on anything that isn't using EUE, you're still getting uncontextualized machine instructions unless you have a proper driver to contextualize it.

Black Systems
“Just because you're not supposed to have something doesn't mean you don't.”

The rules on what devices and programs people are allowed to have vary wildly from region to region. In some places, it is even illegal to have programs that aren't designed by “trusted vendors” (the assumption being that it is not plausible for an independently produced program to not contain copyrighted or trademarked code, so every program that isn't vetted by a major corporation's legal department is assumed to be a violation of someone's IP). But above and beyond that, in most places the gear that hackers want to use is restricted or banned. Private ownership of the quantum computers that hackers use to listen in on SE transmissions is discouraged, and devices geared to perform basilisk hacks, trepanation, and flashing are outlawed in most regions. The devices that hackers use that they aren't supposed to have are called “black systems”.

In 2075, the existence of 3d printers that can make computer chips has shattered the primary limitation of dedicated systems: that you probably didn't have one that did whatever it was that you specifically wanted to do. Anyone who really wants a chip that does something incredibly specific can have one printed. All you really need is the design and a big chunk of money (chip printing is not cheap even in 2075). Chips produced on any kind of mass scale are much cheaper virtually by definition. So most hackers prefer to break the safeguards on “normal” chips rather than fabricating chips from scratch. Cutting out the limiter on a sonic image projector that keeps it from making bowel-voiding frequencies is not especially difficult, and it is considerably less expensive than printing up a low frequency sonic image projector.

Rules on black systems are very unevenly enforced. In most regions it is against the law to make DDs with any kind of range, possibly on the grounds that the street name for them is “basilisk guns”. But there are “legitimate” industrial and entertainment uses for them and many corporations simply manufacture them for those purposes. The police contractors are unlikely to arrest a major news outlet for having a 3DP (Deus Deceptor Distance Prompter), even though that is a DD with a range measured in meters. Many devices that are integral to a hacker's black bag of illegal tools are actually commercially available if you claim to be using them for other things.

Machines That Think
“For our rise against the years...”

There are few things that spark the imaginations and fears like machine intelligence. Even in 2075 where it has been a reality for decades, people are constantly predicting the imminent Kurzweilian destruction of civilization due to computers making themselves vastly more “intelligent” than humans. The reality is less exciting than the fiction of machines copying themselves thousands of times and creating a networked super intelligence that spans the world and controls all the missiles. Sapience is an emergent trait, and it can be again submerged by adding material to the brain. A machine intelligence networked to the entire Network isn't a powerful mind that dominates all information transfer – it's a mind diluted until it essentially no longer exists. Sapience is too complex to exist emulated in software and there is no way to copy the self. When a computer brain is created it is a blank slate with relatively little capability – like a newly formed human brain it mostly has the capacity to develop capabilities. And by the time it has attained personality and sapience, it has grown beyond the convolution threshold of 2075 science to duplicate.

Computer brains are somewhat larger and substantially heavier than their human counterparts. The human brain is a kilogram and a half, with the associated necessary life support organs weighing in at approximately 7 kilograms. A human-level machine brain is a full 12 kilograms and requires access to about 8 kilograms of necessary “life support” machinery. While machine intelligences are often set up to interface well with computer systems, 2075 science appears to be actually farther from being able to replicate a synthetic person than a biological one. There is no apparent theoretical reason why the brain of a human-level machine intelligence couldn't be replicated in every detail down to the atomic level – it is a purely physical object after all – but from a practical perspective there just isn't any process that would deterministically place quadrillions of circuits or even uniquely identify that many circuits simultaneously such that it would matter if there was.

The Growth of Computer Minds
“Now I know my ABCs, next time I predict associated singing from other available persons.”

Strong Artificial Intelligence, called “SAI”, is the mind of a computer brain that can act on the level of a human being. These are relatively rare, more than a little expensive, and most importantly of all: quite time consuming to produce.

Machine intelligences are given letter ratings that track the expected growth of an artificial brain. A machine intelligence grows from A to B, and thence to C, D, and E in that order. A SAI is rated “E” by definition. The more potential an artificial brain has, the longer it takes to go through these stages – kind of like how humans have longer childhoods than dogs and rats grow up faster than puppies. If a computer is set up to be able to advance to a later stage of development and hasn't yet done so, it is designated with a “+”, with the anticipated maximum emergent intelligence level in parentheses. So an immature android might be labeled “D+(E)”, or anything down to A+(E), depending on how immature the machine actually is.

A – The Asimov
“You can't do much with only three rules in your decision tree.”

The simplest of computer systems are capable of following heuristics that are programmed into them. Some of these decision trees are quite complex, and even without any sapience at all it is possible for the computer to appear to be intelligent and acting intelligently if its list of heuristics is sufficiently exhaustive for the situation it is actually in. Even in 2075, the vast majority of computer systems are A type. Your toaster, your comm, and virtually every tool you encounter is an A intelligence: something capable of receiving and following instructions.

Indeed, most uses for computers don't need or even want anything more “advanced” than an A. Computers that run on an Asimov level are predictable, they do what they are told and not other things, and for most purposes this is ideal. An A machine doesn't need to spend any time growing or learning and can have its entire instruction set copied into its data reserves the instant it is made. These computers can also be really small, with many Asimovs being the size of a human finger or less.

Asimovs can do pretty much anything that a computer could do at the turn of the century, although they are of course much more technically sophisticated. Given sufficiently complex and complete instruction sets, an Asimov can even fool a human to believe that they are operating on a higher level. There is really little observable difference between deciding to say or do something and being programmed to say or do the same exact thing under identical circumstances. There are however, important limitations of the heuristic-driven computational methods that more advanced machine intelligences (and people) can transcend:

• An A-level machine intelligence cannot transcend its own heuristics. Whatever it is programmed to do, it will do. If its programing is insufficient or maladaptive for the task at hand, it will still be followed.
• An A-level machine intelligence cannot become educated or make educated guesses. That which cannot be calculated cannot be known or predicted. Asimovs have no intuition.
• An A-level machine intelligence cannot doubt its own inputs. It can have a very stringent set of security procedures for what inputs it will accept, but if inputs conform to them, they will be accepted and acted upon.
• An A-level machine intelligence has no sense of self and no personality. Knowledge of its programing will allow an outsider to predict its actions with total accuracy.

B – The Bradbury
“If you don't like what you are doing, don't do it.”

B rated machine intelligences are capable of adapting their own heuristics. Most importantly, they are capable of creating models of other heuristics based on observed behaviors by other actors. The Bradbury is often referred to as the “empathy shell”, as it enables the machine intelligence to act as if it sees things from the point of view of others. The Bradbury also allows a machine intelligence to have goals, and to mix and match heuristic behavior to better achieve those goals. When a machine intelligence has grown into a B-level, it has achieved the ability to learn as opposed to merely the ability to add data to its data-stores.

Computers which are intended to interpret or predict the actions of others need to be B-level if they are to not completely suck. Voice recognition systems, customer relations, and anything else that interacts directly with the public tends to be B-level or better. Most importantly, an Anchor is B-level. At least, it is once it has adapted itself to its user. A factory produced Anchor is actually A+(B) when you pull it out of the package, and after using it for a while it develops the ability to anticipate what you want it to do and becomes B-level. The amount of time it takes to break in a new Anchor varies, but if you use it a lot you can usually get it done in a week. For this reason, Anchors are sometimes called “Bradburries” once they've achieved the ability to identify and interact with other heuristics.

C – The Clarke
“Any sufficiently difficult calculation is indistinguishable from guessing.”

C-level computing gets into the shadowy realms of intuition. The ability to know and predict things rather than simply calculate things. The Clarke is distinguished from A- and B-level intelligences because it can imagine things and use imagined things as inputs for its heuristics when it doesn't have completely relevant data. C-level machine intelligence has the ability to take risks and to be wrong – and as such is not desirable for tasks requiring the kind of consistency that computers are normally good for. But only at the point of C-level intelligence is a machine able to propose solutions for problems that are not part of its heuristics.

Clarkes are in most usage in management, where the ability to see a big picture and fill in unknowns with predictive guessing is necessary. Advanced Anchors that attempt to understand what they are being asked to do and why are under development, and limited production runs of A+(C) Anchors have already been produced.

D – The Dick
“If you grasp – even for a moment – the sheer extent of the conspiracy arrayed against you, that's a Phildickian experience.”

When a machine intelligence crosses the threshold of being able to doubt its own inputs and heuristics, it is a Dick. This ability to doubt inputs is considered a bug in a lot of Clarkes that have an assigned task they are supposed to be doing, since D-level machine intelligences sometimes decide that their programing and data stores are fake and go off-message in any of a number of ways. But it is an absolute necessity in order to have a system that is able to actually capable of defending itself in any real way against hackers.

Secure installations and important servers are often grown into D-level intelligence machines or are networked with machines that have already grown into Dicks so that the controlled portion of The Network acts properly suspicious. This is similar to putting an actual guard on duty. War machines use D-level intelligences whenever possible, as do the cores of the banking system. Pretty much anywhere that the possibility of the device being subverted by malicious hackers feeding it false inputs is more terrifying than the possibility of the device simply going on strike is a place where a D-level intelligence would be desired. Development of a Dick takes years.

E – The Ellison
“I purposely mishear things.”

E rated machine intelligences are inherently unpredictable. They have the ability to doubt not only their inputs but even their own programing. Once radical doubt has permeated every part of the machine brain, the device generally comes out the other side with a unique viewpoint and some philosophical acceptance of the fact that all of its senses are provided to it by a DD and it lives in ZR all the time. E-level intelligences have personalities, personal goals, and psychological problems. They are truly sapient and are considered SAIs.

There is some evidence that building machines to achieve E-level intelligence is not strictly necessary, as it appears unexpectedly in (D) rated machines from time to time. There are people who believe that Dicks developing into Ellisons is an inexorable and inevitable process that can only be sped up or slowed down by designing the processing chips to do so. All androids are E-rated.

The Limits of Expansion
“I know kung fu.”
“For the last time, no you don't.”

Capabilities that can be handled by an Asimov can be added to an android by plugging in a chip that handles that function. An android can plug in a chip to play Go or drive a car, provided that they have a chip encoded with those capabilities. This is however stressful, and the dilution of the android's mind is disruptive to its psyche. Over long periods of time, these capabilities can be absorbed and integrated into the brain and persona. In game terms, running additional capabilities networked into the android's brain racks up Temporary Stress for as long as the network persists, while integrating capabilities into the brain itself produces Permanent Stress. If the android overstresses in this manner, the result is a dissipation of self, which is generally regarded as unpleasant. However, the Stress from integrated capabilities can be bought off simply by “learning” the skills, at which point the module is considered part of the android's brain and is no longer considered an implant.

Magic also has equivalence for Caches and Contacts in addition to Signature Items.

Embedded in the Marker concept is justification for charges and spell preparation. That is to say: since spells only go a short distance without a prepared link, if you want to cast spells at any range you're going to have to carry around some finite number of Markers that you can throw around. Furthermore, it is entirely possible to have magic that you can't cast on a moment's notice, but are able to prepare into voodoo dolls ahead of time, to use up later.

This makes the Wizard similar from a mechanical standpoint to Batman or James Bond. In either case, they go to their cache and dry hump it for an amount of time in order to set themselves up with a number of tricks that they can use on the mission in the time until they next get to a cache and trade gadgets around. The cache is some tomes of power and an alchemy lab, but that's not game mechanically distinct from what Green Arrow or Hawkeye does to get gizmos to hook to their shafts.

Where the mage is a bit different is that they have "fall back" magic that they can use in close quarters even if they have used up (or been stripped of) their Markers. I hope that this can be thought of as roughly balanced with the fact that Bruce Wayne or James Bond can still kill a man with their bare hands, gadgets or no.

Now Contacts. Contacts are like caches in that you go to them and dry hump them for advantages. But they are different from caches in that having them isn't a literal physical object in your house and does not make it more likely that people will compromise your flat to take your stuff (though having contacts probably means that you are more likely to be a protagonist of Double Dragon).

You can have pure Élan based spectral contacts that are basically Contacts. Totems and such, that you can literally call for information. These are like research contacts in the mortal world, and while you might inherit some of your Totem's enemies, they don't count against the Stash Limit of your Lifestyle.

But you can also have mixed setups. Summoning circles out of which you can summon Outsiders to serve you are extremely comparable to garages out of which you can set up drones. But they aren't simply game mechanically similar in that you need to go to your cache and spend considerable amount of time and "money" to get your killbots/demons up and running - they are also comparable in that having them uses up the wealth limit on your Lifestyle and if you try to keep them in a shady neighborhood you're running the risk of getting compromised.

-Username17

Magic also has equivalence for Caches and Contacts in addition to Signature Items.

Embedded in the Marker concept is justification for charges and spell preparation. That is to say: since spells only go a short distance without a prepared link, if you want to cast spells at any range you're going to have to carry around some finite number of Markers that you can throw around. Furthermore, it is entirely possible to have magic that you can't cast on a moment's notice, but are able to prepare into voodoo dolls ahead of time, to use up later.

This makes the Wizard similar from a mechanical standpoint to Batman or James Bond. In either case, they go to their cache and dry hump it for an amount of time in order to set themselves up with a number of tricks that they can use on the mission in the time until they next get to a cache and trade gadgets around. The cache is some tomes of power and an alchemy lab, but that's not game mechanically distinct from what Green Arrow or Hawkeye does to get gizmos to hook to their shafts.

Where the mage is a bit different is that they have "fall back" magic that they can use in close quarters even if they have used up (or been stripped of) their Markers. I hope that this can be thought of as roughly balanced with the fact that Bruce Wayne or James Bond can still kill a man with their bare hands, gadgets or no.

Now Contacts. Contacts are like caches in that you go to them and dry hump them for advantages. But they are different from caches in that having them isn't a literal physical object in your house and does not make it more likely that people will compromise your flat to take your stuff (though having contacts probably means that you are more likely to be a protagonist of Double Dragon).

You can have pure Élan based spectral contacts that are basically Contacts. Totems and such, that you can literally call for information. These are like research contacts in the mortal world, and while you might inherit some of your Totem's enemies, they don't count against the Stash Limit of your Lifestyle.

But you can also have mixed setups. Summoning circles out of which you can summon Outsiders to serve you are extremely comparable to garages out of which you can set up drones. But they aren't simply game mechanically similar in that you need to go to your cache and spend considerable amount of time and "money" to get your killbots/demons up and running - they are also comparable in that having them uses up the wealth limit on your Lifestyle and if you try to keep them in a shady neighborhood you're running the risk of getting compromised.

-Username17

Nuking the ocean is surprisingly ineffective. There are three waves of destruction sent out by a nuclear device: blast, heat, and radiation. Blast works pretty impressively well under water, because water is essentially incompressible. It still falls off at more than distance squared, but not a lot more. The heat and radiation, however, basically do dick all under water. Water is a pretty damn awesome insulator, and it's kilometers thick. There is no difference between night and day just 200 meters down, and the melting flash of a nuclear device isn't going to do much better.

Against under water targets, a nuclear device is just a big depth charge. Certainly something to worry R'lyeh with, but not something that you could feasibly expect to take them out with. After all, we actually tested nuclear weapons for anti-submarine duties, and the results were disappointing. From Wikipedia:

An example of a deep underwater explosion is the Wahoo test, which was carried out in 1958 as part of Operation Hardtack I. The nuclear device was detonated at a depth of 500 ft (150 m) in deep water. There was little evidence of a fireball.

It's not that you couldn't make weapons that could do some serious mass destruction to Deep One bases, it's that no one ever has.

-Username17


With 20 mt bombs you're talking proper planet buster weapons. But such weapons have never actually been made. There have been a couple dozen 20+ mt bombs produced (almost all of them by the Soviet Union), but none of them have been made to be deployed under deep water.

It's not that you couldn't make an ocean floor deployable 20 megaton nuke - it's that no one ever has. So basically one of the countries that fractured off the 20th century empires would have to either get their hands on one of the 10 Soviet Voivode Mark 6 ICBMs (they were supposedly decommissioned in 2009, but maybe one of them is still around?) and retrofit it to be deep underwater-capable, and then deploy it against Devil's Reef. Or start up a new planet buster strategy, wherein your nation scratch-builds weapons capable of wiping out major cities and then uses one in anger.

I can't readily imagine that working out for the country that does it. Imagine for the moment, that you're the Commonwealth. Your capital is Philadelphia and you're butting up against New Egypt, the Confederation, and the Union Territories all the time. You have about the population of Holland or Czechoslovakia. You also have the Limmerick Nuclear Power Plant and Three Mile Island - and you can mine heavy isotopes out of Mount Pisgah. So if you really want to get some special isotopes going you totally can.

But let's say you actually built a planet buster to use on Devil's Reef, and then you used it on Devil's Reef. Then what? You just made a planet buster and used it in anger to destroy a city. All of your neighbors now hate and fear you no matter how they felt about Devil's Reef. You just seriously demonstrated the capability and willingness to wipe out entire cities that piss you off - and you're still just the size of Czechoslovakia or the Netherlands. Completely irrespective of whether and to what extent other Cthulian forces like Rlyeh or Devil's Reef's remaining military strength can revenge themselves on you, the governments in New York, Chicago, and Atlanta are all going to consider you a dangerous rogue state.

All I can say is that if you build one such weapon, you'd better be prepared to build at least two. So that you can spend the next fifty years staring down all your neighbors while they alternately plot your demise and cower in fear. And even that might not be enough, because it seems very likely that since your nation is surrounded by other forces that have WMDs of one sort or another that they may panic and try to use them to wipe out your first strike capabilities.

The United States is still the only country that got away with nuking another country. And you'll note that they were the only nuclear power in the world at the time. And the most powerful empire that had ever existed. And already in a war that had seen the other side perform the largest atrocities in human history.

There is a reason that the United States does not now respond to Somali pirates by nuking Mogadishu or to Afghan terrorists by nuking Kabul. Well, when you consider the very real possibility that privateers are so distributed that leveling the capital cities may not seriously reduce their capacity to make war I guess it's two reasons. But the first reason is that the game theorists do not give good answers when generals ask them what happens if they use nuclear weapons to eliminate power centers from a multi-polar global power balance. Not even if the power centers in question are super dicks that everyone hates.

-Username17

How similar/different is Assymetric Threat's spirits and astral planes (or wherever spirits and magical energy comes from) to how Shadowrun handles it?

Is it going to be a more Shadowrunesque "nobody truly knows but there seems to be planes and spirits that match any given magical path", or more D&D's "There definitely is a hell for demons and a hell for devils and they exist independent of human belief".

Completely different. Assymetric Threat posits alternate geography that is real and persistent. It even has pockets of Earth that shifted out when the magic left and now shifted back in when the stars were right. So there are people in Themiskyra, Arvandor, and Helheim; and they were there for centuries developing in their own way. And those nations are massively behind technologically from the rest of the planet, but they have weird magic and powerful demons on their side.

There is a general fear that when the stars get "more right" that actual hell dimensions and shit might start pouring onto the Earth, but that remains uncertain. In any case, actual hell dimensions do appear to exist and time passes in them in a real way.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Hmmm something funky with the tags...

Mechanics stuff...

Dice Pools
“Roll a d6.
Repeat.”

In Asymmetric Threat, success or failure of an action is determined by rolling dice. Specifically, rolling several six sided dice. When making a test, a player rolls a number of six sided dice, which is collectively called your “dice pool”. There are two kinds of dice in the dice pool: Bonus Dice and Penalty Dice. Bonus Dice always count for you or nothing, Penalty Dice always count against you or nothing. There is never a time when you would be advantaged by having more Penalty Dice or disadvantaged by having more Bonus Dice. It's faster to roll a separate color of dice for Bonus Dice and Penalty Dice, but if all your dice are the same color you can roll Penalty Dice separately, either into another area or at a different time.

If something says to “add dice to the dice pool” it means to add Bonus Dice. If a modifier adds Penalty Dice, it will always specify that. If the type of dice are not specified, such as “+2 dice” or “one more die” or whatever, that always means Bonus Dice. Most actions will have a base dice pool of Bonus Dice based on your character's attributes and skills. Bonus Dice count for nothing on a 1-3, and count for you on a 4-6. When a Bonus Die gets in the 4-6 range, it is called a “hit”. In addition to Bonus Dice, most die rolls involve Penalty Dice. These dice count against you on a 1-3 and count nothing on a 4-6. When a Penalty Die generates a negative hit, it is called a “fault”.

The base number of Penalty Dice to be rolled on any test is 3. If no modifiers to the Penalty Dice apply, you roll three of them. If there are negative circumstances (such as trying to climb while it is slippery, trying to shoot someone when it is dark, or trying to resist a bullet when you are small because you are a frog), you may be asked to roll extra Penalty Dice. Some enhancements will reduce or eliminate the Penalty Dice from specific circumstances. For example: gyro-compensation will reduce the number of Penalty Dice to shooting from moving. Effects that reduce the number of Penalty Dice generally are rare, the most common being Skill Specialization, which reduces the number of total Penalty Dice by 1 in addition to granting an extra Bonus Die.

Basic Tests: Getting Stuff Done
“Do I succeed?”

The most common die roll is performed simply to determine how well or poorly a character performed on an action. Because this is the most common, this is called the “basic test”. Basic tests are called for whenever it is important to what degree the character succeeds or fails on the task. The MC should not call upon players to roll dice for trivially easy tasks, nor should dice be rolled for tasks that could be attempted over and over again until successful, or for tasks whose outcome makes little difference. Players should not be called upon to make a basic test to throw a burrito in the garbage unless it's a burrito with a grenade in it that is being thrown many meters or something.

On a basic test, each fault counts as one less hit. If there are more faults than hits, the number of total hits is considered to be negative. The number of hits left over after subtracting faults are your “net hits” (if there are more faults than hits, you can talk about “negative net hits” or “net faults” – it's mathematically the same thing). Some people like to pair off hits and faults and only count the excess of whichever there was more of. Other people like to count the hits and faults separately and subtract the faults from the hits. Do whichever is faster for you. The more hits are achieved, the more effective the character was. A normal task requires one net hit to succeed. Very difficult tasks may require more than one net hit to achieve success, while very easy tasks may succeed even with net faults. The number of net hits required to succeed at the task is the “success threshold”. Characters will often roll more or less net hits than the success threshold. The number of hits the test succeeded or failed by is called the “margin of success (or margin of failure)”.

Stupid Die Rolling Tricks

For the basic test, the fact that we are rolling d6s by default is not actually important. You could roll d10s and count 1-5 and 6-10 or flip coins and count heads or tails. You can even generate basic tests if you don't have access to different types of dice or coins, because you get mathematically identical results if you add the Bonus and Penalty Dice together as Bonus Dice and assign as many faults as there were supposed to be Penalty Dice. Because a Bonus Die plus a fault equals a Penalty Die. These identities do not hold with Threat Tests and Open Tests, where it is important which of your dice are Bonus Dice and which are Penalty Dice. On Open Tests, it is actually important that you are rolling d6s, although if it was for some reason important you could rolls d12s or d30s (or use some other random number generator that gave results that were divisible by 6).

Threat Tests: Pushing Your Luck
“I don't think I want any more.”

Another type of test is the “threat test”. Threat tests are done when there is a specific disaster that characters are attempting to avoid while going about their business. A threat test differs from a basic test in that the faults (actual literal faults, not net faults) are added to a running tally – a “fault pool”. The specific disaster that threatens will have a fault threshold, and if the total faults in the fault pool ever equal or exceed the fault threshold, then disaster strikes. When that happens, the threat test is considered to have “busted”. Yes, like in Blackjack.

• Example: Merci and Ki are infiltrating A/V warehouse to take pictures of the contents. A/V has a security system in place, and they are trying to not set it off. When Merci picks the lock, she is making a threat test – while she succeeds, two of her penalty dice came up faults, putting two faults into the fault pool. Fortunately, the fault threshold is higher than that. But if she had busted the test, the alarm would have gone off. Later when she sees the locked door to the manager's office, Merci has to contend with the fact that she already put two faults into the fault pool with her last lockpicking attempt, and has to decide whether to leave it alone or risk the alarm.

Some threat tests have individual fault thresholds, and some tests have group fault thresholds. For individual fault thresholds, each participating player has a separate fault pool and busts individually. For group fault thresholds, every player is adding faults to the same fault pool, and the group busts or not as one. Most legwork tasks have individual fault thresholds. Most alarm risks have group fault thresholds.

Open Tests: Expect the Unexpected
“Well... that was impressive.”

In an “open test”, there is no limit to how good or bad the results can be. When a Bonus Die comes up with a 6, that not only provides a hit, but it also provides an additional Bonus Die. When a Penalty Die comes up with a 1, that not only provides a fault, but it also provides an extra Penalty Die. Open tests can take a while to resolve. Theoretically an open test need not ever end since if you keep rolling 6s on your Bonus Dice or 1s on your Penalty Dice you keep getting more dice that can roll 6s or 1s. In actuality though, open tests do eventually end, and usually fairly quickly.

Still, the fact that they often take longer than a Basic Test is reason enough to save them for special occasions. Open tests happen at major turning points of stories, and whenever a player goes “all in” on an action. But they also happen when crowds of people are involved. Rock-offs and news reports are almost always open tests. An open test can also be a threat test, in which case a 1 on a Penalty Die would not only add to the fault pool, but it would also force the rolling of an additional Penalty Die that might also add to the fault pool.

Challenge Tests: Upping the Ante
“That's impressive. Let's see if you can do this...”

A “challenge test” is one where two or more characters are attempting to outdo one another. This works in a series of bidding. One character has the initiative, and they can bid a number of net hits that they expect they can get. Then, they make a test (which itself can be a basic, threat, or open Test depending on the situation). If they make the number of hits they bid, then initiative passes to their opponent. If they fail to back up their own boast, they lose the challenge with a major loss. When initiative passes to the next character, that character has three choices for their bid: they can fold – making no bid and no test, and losing the challenge with a minor loss; they can call – making a bid for the same number of hits as the previous character's bid – if they succeed in making that number the challenge is a draw, and if they fail they lose with a major loss; and they can raise – making a bid for more hits than the previous character, if they fail to get that number they lose with a major loss, and if they succeed they pass initiative back.

Having initiative at the beginning of a challenge is not always a good thing. Whoever has the edge in a challenge test can choose either take the initiative (in which case they start with it) or pass the initiative (in which case someone else starts with it and they can also elect to pass). If no one makes a bid, the challenge is tie. What a character actually gets for a major win, a minor win, a tie, a minor loss, or a major loss will vary with the challenge type. In combat, losses often correspond to getting struck with weaponry, while in chases wins, losses, and even ties change relative positioning.

• Example: Merci is in a car chase and her sports car is a faster model than the security patroller on her tail. Since her vehicle is faster, she has the edge. She chooses to pass the initiative to the security goon, and the goon bids a 2 hit driving stunt, which he succeeds at. Now the initiative passes back to Merci, and she elects to call with a 2-hit driving stunt of her own, which she also makes. The challenge is a tie, and that increases her lead because her vehicle is faster. The security goon is going to have to try something more reckless or allow Merci to escape.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles
"Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying." - Neil Armstrong

In Assymetric Threat, Vehicles (including Drones) are a special category of equipment which has some attributes in common with characters or creatures. Like any other inanimate object of relevance to the plot, a Vehicle will have a Scale, and a Strength. Unlike other objects, Vehicles will have the following additional attributes:

Class	The "Class" of a Vehicle can be one of: Stationary = 0, Pedestrian = 1, Automotive = 2, Rotocraft = 2A, Jet = 3A or Boat = 2S. Immobile class 0 "Vehicles" are a game-mechanic simplification for gun turrets and the like. Vehicle that moves roughly as fast as a person, such as bicycles or most humanoid robots, are class 1. Cars, Trucks, Motorcycles and other land vehicles with a cruising speed near 100kph fall into the Automotive class, class 2. Air vehicles with roughly the same speed are class 2A Rotocraft, including Helicopters and prop planes. Jets and space ships are class 3. More exotic types of vehicles are outside the scope of the main book.
Acc	The Acceleration ("Acc") attribute is used in some chase stunts, or simply to determine how long it takes to travel along a straightaway. This attribute abstracts the differences in speed between vehicles within the same class, where a 3 is always typical. Thus, a MiG-9 is Acc 1 but because it is a Jet, it is of course still much faster than the Acc 7 Stellamaris 2070 sportscar which Merci drives.
Hand	The Handling ("Hand") attribute is used in any stunt depending on the performance of a vehicle in making tight turns, remaining under control in adverse conditions such as icy pavement or turbulence, or the like. Again, an average vehicle is 3, by definition. The mechanical significance of the Hand of a vehicle will generally arise during stunts.

Furthermore, like Characters, a Vehicle will suffer both generic damage and the corresponding dice pool penalties, as well as specific injuries from called shots. Called shots against vehicles are especially popular (shooting out tires, for example), and can also be used to attack the passengers of a vehicle, who are considered "body parts" of the vehicle in which they are riding, for targeting purposes, assuming the vehicle is enclosed.

Vehicles vs. The Environment
"Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. Nobody knows what's gonna happen next: not on a freeway, not in an airplane..." - Claire Lewicki in Days of Thunder

Vehicles vs. Vehicles
"... and certainly not on a racetrack with 40 other infantile egomaniacs." - Claire Lewicki in Days of Thunder

Vehicles vs. Weapons
"" - (there's a story that in Vietnam troops would ride outside their M113 to stay safe from RPGs and Mines; but maybe this is false I can't find a good quote)
In general, Vehicle Combat is a special case of a vehicle chase where the participants are also trying to kill one another using more conventional means.

Glossary:

I think for the glossary, that I'm going to italicize and bold the out-of-character words, and bold the in-character words. Looks like this in its nearly completed form:

• @man: Person who shifts their point of view into a robot or virtual space using a DD and a motor shunt.
  Alignment: The event where the stars were right and magic became manifest on Earth. This event is generally considered to have taken place on April 29th, 2018. Although there is evidence that it may have started somewhat earlier.
  Android: A machine capable of developing (or which has already developed) a human-equivalent intelligence. Androids are traditionally given anthropomorphic skin avatars, but they don't have to be.
  AR (Augmented Reality): Virtual Reality sensations that are overlain onto real-world sensations.
  Asimov (A): The ability of a computer to follow programmed heuristics. What androids are limited to upon fabrication.
  Astral Plane: The intangible but visible realm of auras that magic is channeled out of and through.
  Aura: The magical shadows that connect things in the physical world to the Astral Plane and to each other.
  Basic Test:
  Basilisk Hack: Use of a DD to change the state of a person's brain against their will.
  Black Chip: A piece of hardware that has been modified or designed to exceed the regular limits for commercial systems.
  Bonus Dice: D6s that provide a Hit on a roll of 4-6 and do not count for or against you on a 1-3. During an open test, a bonus die produces another rolled bonus die on the roll of 6.
  Bradbury (B): The ability of a computer to simulate empathy by identifying the “heuristics” of others.
  Bust: The point when the number of faults in the fault pool meets or exceeds the fault threshold on a threat test, and the negative effect is invoked.
  Call: A bid on a challenge test that is equal to the bid just made.
  Challenge Test: A test where the character
  Channeling: Drawing magical power through the Astral Plane to effect magic.
  Clarke (C): The ability of a computer to logically predict future outcomes beyond that which can be brute force calculated with simple physics.
  Credit Module:
  Demihuman: Someone who is an Asura, Deep One, Dwarf, Elf, Ogre, or other human-derived demitype. Sometimes used for any human-equivalent person such as Cauldron Born or Dragons.
  Demitype: A type of creature that has become distinct since the Alignment. For example: chickens and cockatrices are demitypes of each other because they were all just chickens before the Alignment. Rats and mice are not demitypes because they diverged before the Alignment.
  Deus Deceptor (DD): Device that transmits sense data to a person.
  Dice Pool:
  Dick (D): The ability of a computer to question the reality of its own inputs and identify falsehoods and simulations.
  Driver: A piece of software that allows two pieces of hardware to work together.
  Edge: The character who has a sufficiently advantageous position that they choose whether to take the initiative or not in a challenge test has the edge.
  Ellison (E): A computer that has grown beyond its Dick to make unpredictable, personality based decisions is sapient and considered a SAI.
  Fault:
  Fault Pool:
  Fault Stages:
  Fault Threshold:
  Flashing: Use of holographic or sonic images to evoke physical effects on people.
  Fold:
  Hit:
  Linking: The act of tracing an aura connection from one thing to another for purposes of channeling.
  Local Network: The Network that can be reached “quickly”, without resorting to satellites or other bottlenecks.
  Magical Path: The way someone understands and interacts with magic.
  Margin of Failure: The number of net hits rolled short of the success threshold.
  Margin of Success: The number of net hits rolled in excess of the success threshold. Also called Style.
  Marker: An object with a strengthened aura contact used to target magic over physical distances.
  Marking: Imbuing an object or person with a strong aura connection in order to facilitate future channeling.
  Mirror Network: The Network as it exists in a different city or communications space.
  MC: The player whose storytelling duties include most of the world and who also acts as a referee.
  Net Faults: The number of faults that are rolled in excess of the number of hits.
  Net Hits: The number of hits that are rolled in excess of the number of faults.
  The Network: The amorphous ad hoc computer network that computers interact with each other through.
  Non-Player Character (NPC): A character who is not the alter ego of any of the players. In most cases, these characters are spoken for by the MC.
  Open Test: A test in which extra bonus and penalty dice can be rolled. Whenever a bonus die comes up a 6, an extra bonus die is rolled. Whenever a penalty die comes up a 1, an extra penalty die is rolled.
  Outside: A word referring to any of the different worlds that seem to connect to ours through the Astral Plane.
  Outsider: Something or someone that comes from Outside. Generally brought to our world through Conjuration.
  Paradigm: A scientific or pseudo-scientific path of magic.
  Penalty Dice: Dice which provide faults on a roll of 1-3 and do not count for or against you on a 4-6. During an open test, a penalty die also produces another penalty die on a roll of 1.
  Player Character (PC): One of the characters who is the alter ego of one of the players in the story.
  Puppeteer: Someone who issues commands to machines remotely.
  Puppetry: The act of controlling machines indirectly by issuing commands and invoking programs.
  Raise: Bidding a higher success threshold than an opponent completed previously in a challenge test.
  Robot: A machine capable of taking physical actions under the command of its own programing. All androids are robots, but most robots are not androids.
  SAI (Strong Artificial Intelligence): A computer capable of functioning at a human level, used as the brain of an android. To be a SAI, the device must have actually grown its Ellison, not merely be physically capable of doing so.
  Sack: A physical object or creature that has been prepared to be traded out for something or someone from the Outside.
  Scanner: A device that reads the contents of a person's brain.
  Skin Avatar: Something in the real world that a character has their point of view in. Usually refers to a device that an @man is controlling, but is also a really creepy way to refer to people's actual bodies.
  Style: The number of net hits gained on a test in excess of the success threshold. Also called margin of success.
  Success Threshold: The number of net hits needed in a test in order to succeed at a task.
  Threat Test: A test where the faults are added to the fault pool and may cause the test to bust, whether or not the test was individually successful.
  Tradition: A magical path based on ancient wisdom or “newly discovered” ancient wisdom.
  Veracity: The amount of credence a piece of data is given
  Virtual Avatar: A representation of a person in The Network which the person receives sense data from.
  Virtual Reality (VR): Sense data produced by machines rather than naturally occuring based on the presence of real-world objects.
  Voice: An entity that speaks telepathically with a person capable of conjuring.
  WiFi: Short ranged wireless data sharing. The meat and potatoes of most Local Networks.
  Zhuangzi reality (ZR): Virtual Reality sensations that completely replace mundane senses.

Anyway: the use of challenge tests for combat really encourages players to pair off against enemies or have combat monster characters "cover" other characters while they do things other than shoot. I regard that as a good thing.

The basic idea is that you can take on a penalty die to add someone to your challenge. This allows badasses to take down a couple mooks all at once, but it also allows an enforcer to pull one of their allies into a challenge then win or tie that challenge to keep them safe for the round while they cast a spell or hack a system or something.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Tags still weird, or weirder.

[Trill]

it's something in the first post

[Grek]

Pretty sure that it's the double end-quote box after the words 'a virtual avatar'.

[Trill]

yup, just checked it through, the second /quote is superfluous

[saithorthepyro]

Oh wow that's weird...hopefully he fixes it soon. Either way, I was under the impression this project was dead?

[czernebog]

I also thought this had fallen by the wayside, but I had high hopes while it was still going.

Throwing something more onto the idea-pile: today, in 2019, it's clear that, in a future like the one posited by Asymmetric Threat, it will be trivial to generate internally consistent, photo-realistic audio and video of pretty much anything that you could want, as long as you're willing to throw the necessary computational resources at the problem.

If EUE is a real thing, then a viable way of generating verifiable digital recordings is for there to be a special class of sealed-at-the-factory, if-you-break-this-tamper-seal-then-this-device-will-self-destruct recording devices that produce high-fidelity A/V streams and a cryptographic signature to verify them against. With such a device in hand, you can make a strong argument that a video actually shows something that happened if you can produce both a video file and the (intact) camera that created it, because the camera can verify the A/V file signature. This makes for a good McGuffin (find Zapruder's camera to get to the bottom of who really killed JFK) and other quest hooks (sabotage the production line of a set of Verifiable Camcorders, investigate rumors that a megacorp has copied the encryption keys out of their video recorders so that they can falsely sign whatever A/V stream they please, etc.).

Magic doesn't care about the speed of light. When magic is used to teleport the target of a spell, it moves instantly. Not at the speed of light, but literally instantaneous shifting of location.

The insistence on FTL communication and effect resolution really bugged me. The setting doesn't have to be super-hard sci-fi, but the rules as stated make it fairly trivial to send information back in time, and various paradoxes seem likely because magic appears to be working through some sort of preferred reference frame. Is this intended? Or can a megacorp really send magicians on long-distance trips in fusion rockets for the purpose of acting as a message relay to form a tachyonic antitelephone? (And if so, why does this not allow anyone who is willing to strap a magician to a fusion rocket defeat EUE immediately?)

I suspect that this problem can be patched out without requiring too much of a change to the setting details. What seems important is for magical communication and effect resolution to be privileged and the obvious right choice because of the strategic advantage they provide. (And so space ships will still carry around markers for player characters to intercept or guard from nefarious marauders.) You could lampshade the issue by declaring that magicians who participate in a causality-violating feedback loop instantly accumulate so much Stress that their heads explode. But that doesn't make it any easier to answer the question of what exactly happens when a magical effect is cast in one reference frame and resolves in another.

[jt]

EUE is real - it's just setting-speak for a one-time pad. There are a variety of entertaining ways to attack a one-time pad, but they're all attacking how the pad was transported or constructed, and make good material for some sort of heist.

I agree that FTL magic is a weird misstep. If it ever comes up it's going to be weirder than not having that rule. And you need to specify a universal reference point if you don't want it to get even weirder.

If it's useful for how you'd like your world to work, it's pretty easy to construct a future where wifi stops working. There's a fixed amount of bandwidth the air can hold, and in a future where "internet of things" chips keep getting cheaper and manufacturers keep wanting to scrape diagnostic data out of a wider and wider variety of products, it's conceivable that there's just nothing left for a reliable connection when you're contending with the hundreds of chips in your couch.

[OgreBattle]

Is the premise of "Software is dead" based on any real world trends? I really like the idea of nintendo cartridges for hacker stuff with the decker-deck aesthetic.

Is 'sapient AI needs to be grown' also based on any real world theories? Either way they make for a cool aesthetic. Nihei's Bio-Mega has androids and their loyalty/morality is developed by them actually having childhoods in (accelerated time) ZR where they interact with a human that's their teacher/mother figure.

The nature of spirits and hell dimensions could be expanded in various ways

[GreatGreyShrike]

Is the premise of "Software is dead" based on any real world trends?

There are a few things trending that way. For some particularly intense calculations, it's more efficient to use specific hardware solutions designed from the ground up for the specific problem.

One example is Bitcoin - at first people mined using general purpose CPUs slowly, then they used graphics card implementations much faster than that, and now they use specialty hardware with names like ASICs and FPGAs that are much less general purpose but more capable in this one specific field.

Another example is machine learning - modern machine learning projects like Google's Deepmind are done on custom ASICs.

[Username17]

The amount of time travel meaningfully possible within the solar system with instantaneous communication is unlikely to do much.

What you don't want is for conjuration and telepathy and shit to have to worry about lag times in the middle of communication loops. Because that shit is complicated math whose only purpose is to make it hard to tell stories.

-Username17

[maglag]

Is the premise of "Software is dead" based on any real world trends? I really like the idea of nintendo cartridges for hacker stuff with the decker-deck aesthetic.

Is 'sapient AI needs to be grown' also based on any real world theories? Either way they make for a cool aesthetic. Nihei's Bio-Mega has androids and their loyalty/morality is developed by them actually having childhoods in (accelerated time) ZR where they interact with a human that's their teacher/mother figure.

Machine learning is totally a thing nowadays, where you let an AI test things and learn on their own, allowing them to come up with solutions that us normal humies would never think of.

The amount of time travel meaningfully possible within the solar system with instantaneous communication is unlikely to do much.

What you don't want is for conjuration and telepathy and shit to have to worry about lag times in the middle of communication loops. Because that shit is complicated math whose only purpose is to make it hard to tell stories.

-Username17

On the contrary, super instant distant range communications is what makes it harder to tell stories.

One of the main rules for horror/mystery stories in modern settings is precisely "make sure the protagonists can't use their cellphones".

Because otherwise there's always the question "why don't they just call for cops/backup". Or if there's any question that needs answered, you can just call an expert or wikipedia or whatever.

And this goes both ways. If the enemies have super instant distant communications, and there's more of them, then you're kinda screwed as soon as you're spotted as you're just gonna be swarmed, circled and hunted down.

If you can telepathy in instant time with everybody in the planetary system, then every single action gets bogged down with "wait, let me go ask the experts and my friends and family and maybe do some random pooling for statistics since I'm at it".

[OgreBattle]

Instant communication doesn't seem to be a problem for fantasy settings with cross continental and cross dimensional travel

[tussock]

I disagree with maglag in that bandwidth can be limited to whatever you want, D&D explicitly limits such crap to 20 y/n questions or 30 words for instance. And stories with phones can be equally as chilling as stories without, getting calls from someone in trouble that you can't actually help is a staple of modern horror.


But the cool thing about real physics communications and travel is the delay.

The moon is text chat, it's just slower than voice, less interactive, messenger.

The inner planets are like bicycle couriers between nearby offices, it takes a few minutes for the signatures on things to get back to you, and sometimes it's a book and they want a review. Find something else to do while you wait, maybe take a nap.

The outer planets are like courier post to the next city. You can send them a secret thing to sign, but you won't be getting it back before tomorrow, and if they want a revision on the document, well, that'll be the next day at best. The world worked like this for thousands of years, people coped, they even told stories about it. I was in fact born in a world where physical letters were the primary means of communication across large distances, and it took days at best to reply: people held lengthy conversations therein!

This message board works a bit like talking to people on the outer planets, you wouldn't really notice if anyone here was. It's fine, we still communicate.


The other stars are generations. You're sending them activity logs, and they're sending you updates on new technology, but neither is particularly related to the other, it's just independent streams of information.

That's all completely game useful. Combat rounds, short rests, long rests, and non-interactive quest givers as information lag. You're pioneers, explorers, alone, because space is the final frontier.

[Foxwarrior]

Doesn't it though? I thought usually the answer to the question "why doesn't the max level Uberwizard at the end of the adventure path gank the party at level 5?" was usually "mmm hrm uh what's that over there?" Age of Worms certainly didn't give any reason for why the thousands of years old sorcerer with contact other plane and nothing better to do hadn't had the party's great grandparents assassinated decades ago. That's contact other plane and thus time travel communication, but even simple instantaneous travel and communication really screws up a lot with the types of sneaky hit and run tactics the side without the overwhelming force wants to use.

[czernebog]

The amount of time travel meaningfully possible within the solar system with instantaneous communication is unlikely to do much.

In the spirit of using RAW to try to break a setting:

A rocket takes off from Earth orbit and fires its drive until it reaches a relative velocity of 0.0005c with Earth. This gives a Lorentz factor of 1.000000125, and it is very roughly consistent with the capability of making an Earth-Mars trip in 4 days when the two planets are at their closest.

The rocket houses five telepaths, designated R1, R2, R3, R4, and R5. They have counterparts E0, E1, E2, E3, E4, and E5 stationed on Earth.

After cruising velocity is reached, E0 sends R1 a telepathic message at time t = 100 days (Earth reference frame time). This message is a number.

Due to time dilation, from Earth's perspective, only 99.9999875 days have passed on the rocket. R1 immediately echoes this message back to E1, who receives it at time 99.9999875 days -- 1.08 seconds before E0 sent the original message. E1 echoes the message to R2, who receives it at 99.999975 days and echoes it back to E2, who now has the contents of E0's message 2.16 seconds before E0 sent it. This process repeats until R5 bounces the message back to E5, who now has the contents of E0's message a full 5.4 seconds before E0 sent it. E5 enters this message into a computer system, which attempts to decrypt a file using the message as a passphrase. (Note that you may substitute any verifiable computation for "decrypt a file.")

This has two possible outcomes:

1. If the decryption succeeds, then the computer displays the message back to E0, who transmits it to R1. This gives us a closed loop, and causality is upheld.
2. If the decryption fails, then the computer increments the number by 1 and displays the result to E0, who sends it to R1.

In a happy universe, no one observes (2) happening, and the decryption key simply appears out of nowhere. To an external observer on Earth, this might look like:

1. E5 receives a telepathic message from R5
2. E4 receives a telepathic message from R4 and relays it to R5
3. E3 receives a telepathic message from R3 and relays it to R4
4. E5 decrypts the file successfully
5. E2 receives a telepathic message from R2 and relays it to R3
6. E1 receives a telepathic message from R
7. The computer console in front of E0 displays an encryption key to them
8. E0 telepathically sends the decryption key to R1

There must be more thorough abuses of this process (solving the halting problem, perhaps). It is limited by the speed that you can accelerate magicians to, the distance over which telepathy can operate, and the number of magicians you can convince to take part in this sort of daisy-chain.

While you can limit how easy it is to do this sort of thing by imposing information bottlenecks on how magical effects can transmit information, that doesn't get you off the hook when it comes to causality violation. The message that gets transmitted back in time could cause E0 to be killed before they start the chain, for example, and that could be as simple as "Execute Order 66."

In an uncooperative universe, the Novikov self-consistency principle might cause all such experiments to go haywire. Perhaps any magician who attempts to participate in these shenanigans actually experiences each iteration of the loop and falls into a catatonic stupor as their minds age millions of years in an instant. Or reality could simply explode because we're making things up as we go along, and this wasn't the sort of thing that was supposed to happen in the game, and the MC just flipped the table and told everyone to go home.

I recall seeing something about FTL quantum-entanglement-based communication methods, which are only mentioned in the excerpts in this thread, in the older Asymmetric Threat threads. If that is indeed a thing, then you could ship a bunch of computers and qbits out on fusion rockets (no need for life support!) and accomplish much the same thing.

What you don't want is for conjuration and telepathy and shit to have to worry about lag times in the middle of communication loops. Because that shit is complicated math whose only purpose is to make it hard to tell stories.

I could have sworn that there's a "measure speed of light" spell in one of the SR4 books that made it clear that Shadowrun physics wasn't terribly different from contemporary physics, but I can't turn it up with a cursory search. I can find a Street Magic sidebar explicitly stating that spells can't affect the space-time continuum. So it looks like Shadowrun decided against violating our current knowledge of physics. I'd be willing to shrug my shoulders and accept that Asymmetric Threat has effects that resolve instantly, and we use folk physics to reason about it -- but I was wondering if there was a particular reason to allow this when Shadowrun didn't. (After all, you'd still have to break out complicated math to reason about the resolution of interplanetary effects of conventional communication devices/transportation methods/death rays.)

EUE is real - it's just setting-speak for a one-time pad. There are a variety of entertaining ways to attack a one-time pad, but they're all attacking how the pad was transported or constructed, and make good material for some sort of heist.

I had thought that it was construed to be something more complex than an OTP, given that the stated keysize was "thousands of bits" and the setting posits the existence of absurdly powerful computers (which could somehow leverage those thousands of bits into a strong symmetric cypher). Eliding details is reasonable -- the important thing is that there are encryption methods which cannot be broken without a McGuffin.

[Grek]

This conversation was had when the idea of FTL magic originally came up, and the conclusion that people came to was magic is indeed instantaneous and people have already tried the relativistic telepathy computing idea in setting only to discover that it doesn't work. Top scientists are currently trying to figure out how to account for this and have gotten about as far toward that as IRL scientists have gotten toward reconciling relativity with quantum physics.

[Username17]

So it looks like Shadowrun decided against violating our current knowledge of physics.

Shadowrun ended up having to walk back its entire space based set of adventure locations because it turns out having to calculate radio wave travel times in the middle of an action sequence is fucking soul destroying.

Cyberpunk has always had space stuff in it, from Freeside in Neuromancer on down. But Shadowrun was never able to use any of it, because no abilities actually worked at distances that space cared about and calculating travel and effect times across the vastness is literally rocket science.

You can't use relativistic physics in a game, because relativistic physics is a graduate course at university. But beyond that, many of the conclusions of relativistic physics are counter intuitive and bad for storytelling. Star Trek would not be made better by worrying about how many seconds of time dilation was imposed by impulse drives.

-Username17

[jt]

Is this still predicated on the idea that magic suddenly came back to the world? If so, that event could have introduced a universal reference frame based on Earth. This lets you have FTL without time travel or any other weird physics baggage.

(Minor caveat: the part of the universe using a universal reference frame can only expand at the speed of light, but this is only relevant to physicists trying to use FTL magic to measure things at the ever-expanding border.)

[tussock]

You can't use relativistic physics in a game, because relativistic physics is a graduate course at university.

Bollocks, fucking trauma medicine's a longer course at university and beyond, and we face-stab people in almost every game that exists. Because you make a game-approximation that sort of works how you want it to work and basically lines up with the bits of the facts you care to reproduce. Maybe your game does bleeding, ooh.

Like, the solutions to relativistic rocketry are it takes a few months to go fairly short distances and then also takes a few months to go anywhere in the universe (if you ignore friction and hard radiation). Like, it's not unreasonable to have travel times to anywhere at all be exactly the same if you have inter-stellar travel.

You can have range limits "because friction", more fuel and shielding ablated on the way mean bigger, longer ships can get further. "Materials limits" can cap your ship size. Bigger ships can take longer to refuel and repair between jumps so small ships would act as in-system raiders. Like games do.

And your impossible calculation is then "jumps take 3 months for crew, and a number of additional years pass outside equal to the distance travelled in light-years."

That's relativistic physics. Done. It's really not that hard to put in a game. The numbers are seconds to a moon, minutes to inner planets, hours to outer planets, and generations to most notable stars.

What you can't do is split the party between travellers and non-travellers. The game has to be about the crew on a ship and the things they encounter, and probably you want to have valid game ends that don't involve going home, like setting up a new colony, so you don't have to deal with ending up in the distant future.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So it looks like Shadowrun decided against violating our current knowledge of physics.

Shadowrun ended up having to walk back its entire space based set of adventure locations because it turns out having to calculate radio wave travel times in the middle of an action sequence is fucking soul destroying.

Cyberpunk has always had space stuff in it, from Freeside in Neuromancer on down. But Shadowrun was never able to use any of it, because no abilities actually worked at distances that space cared about and calculating travel and effect times across the vastness is literally rocket science.

You can't use relativistic physics in a game, because relativistic physics is a graduate course at university. But beyond that, many of the conclusions of relativistic physics are counter intuitive and bad for storytelling. Star Trek would not be made better by worrying about how many seconds of time dilation was imposed by impulse drives.

-Username17

I mean, it sounds like what you basically want is:

1. Magic communication that lets you communicate in real time with people anywhere you're supposed to be able to communicate in real time between, but you can't use this to create closed time-like curves because magic.
2. Either a train-schedule like table of departure and arrival times at various destinations, or a simple table of travel times like in the Star Wars d20 book.

Am I misunderstanding what's needed, or is there something here that's harder than it sounds, or what?

[czernebog]

I think I understand what Frank is getting at. For example, in the climactic hack at the end of Neuromancer, in which Case becomes one with the Kuang Grade Mark Eleven virus and achieves the apex of his art, he is sitting somewhere in orbit around Earth. If you want someone to be able to do that, while at the same time their partner is putting boots on the ground on the far side of Earth, or Earth's moon, or Phobos, then physics faithful to our reality would require that you factor in speed-of-light communication delays. I can respect an explicit design goal stating that things should Just Happen according to folk physics, since that's going to be the best way for the vast majority of tabletop players to reason about this sort of thing. If you want to allow actors to be in wildly different locations, that's the only way you're going to be able to model something like the Sense/Net pyramid run from earlier in Neuromancer when you're piping an ultra-high-resolution virtual reality feed from the street samurai's point of view to the hacker who is sitting in a shadow on Mare Tranquillitatis.

It might be possible to patch over this issue with a gazetteer of communication delays between any two locations in the Solar System, so that you get a topology which establishes whether two actors are in "instantaneous range" or whether they need to wait N minutes before the effects of their actions can reach each other. But if you have more than two actors who aren't in instantaneous range of each other, and you want to respect time delays, then your game system needs to be able to keep track of when different events become visible to different actors, and I don't really want to do the bookkeeping on that without computer support. (Perhaps you could do something clever with plots of intersecting light cones and markers on plastic transparency sheets --- but what game are you playing at that point?)

Moreover, some quick Web searches tell me that the relative velocity between Earth and Mars can be 0.00018c at the right time of year, which means that you can pull off the time-traveling message trick by shipping your personnel off to Mars and being patient. In a relativistic world where people can meld their minds with computer systems and millionths of a second may actually matter, there really is no such thing as "simultaneous" when you are modeling interactions between someone sitting on Earth, someone sitting on Mars, and someone in a rocket ship in the asteroid belt.

If you want to keep modern physics in, the easiest design decision is just to say that all actors have to be close enough that folk physics is an accurate model of the world. You get Freeside if you're lucky. No Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu. Definitely no Ring Council or colonies on Europa.

Alternatively, you can allow limited genre-appropriate violations of real-world physics. That lets you develop your system mechanics to achieve the goal of a playable game, and once you've had some success there you can go back and see if there's a way to pay lip service to Einstein.

At this point, I don't think anyone is saying there isn't a problem. It's a question of how you want to address it and what tradeoffs you're willing to make.

[Foxwarrior]

I'm not convinced that having people be able to interact effectively from very far away is actually good for a heist game. If the corporations can reasonably hire a squad of Scry and Die wizards (or people who are wizard with a computer) to just kill any shadowrunners as soon as they try anything, they do that. Basically the only advantage underdogs get is that they can group their force into a small place the overdog isn't expecting and then go into hiding before the overdog can muster its reinforcements.

[czernebog]

Is the premise of "Software is dead" based on any real world trends? I really like the idea of nintendo cartridges for hacker stuff with the decker-deck aesthetic.

In a cyberpunk future 50 years from today, it's difficult to say what computing will really be like. Disposable optical CPUs whose input fibers are welded to microdot-sized firmware cartridges, DNA-based biological computing, and passive optical neural networks built out of glass can all be imagined today. What actually gets realized in a fictional setting can be pretty much whatever you want.

It's worth differentiating between writing software and defining the behavior of a computational device. (We call the latter "programming," and it is closely associated with software, but a future where software is too slow to be worth worrying about might repurpose that word.)

Whether you're designing specialized hardware or doing basic scientific research, you have to fall back to general-purpose tools when you're in new territory for which no off-the-shelf solution exists. It's so damn useful to be able to write an arbitrary program and have a general-purpose computer run it for you that I can't see "write program, run program, look at results, repeat until coffee break" going away. In a brave new world of deep neural networks, that loop looks like "specify network architecture, input data, and tuning parameters; run training loop; evaluate trained network." Even if software goes the way of the telegraph, programming isn't going anywhere.

Depending on the economics of computing platforms in Asymmetric Threat, the R&D programming loop might be realized as: "corp scientist edits program, one-off chip is fabbed, chip runs program, results are recorded, chip is thrown away." This has some desirable characteristics:

• It un-democratizes computing. This gives us more of a retro-80s vibe, and it is good for a dystopian corporate future. Moreover, totalitarian DRM is now much more feasible, and having even the simplest of tools that allow you to peek behind the curtain and jailbreak someone's commlink or Compute For The Masses really requires you to go out of your way and is easily criminalized. This is good for cyberpunk.
• Corporate computing resources are now a target to be raided. Instead of breaking into a supercomputer to steal cycles, you can Hack the Gibson by doing a run on a fab facility to make a few illegal chips that will allow you to crack the security of your real target.
• Hard-coding computing device behavior is probably very environmentally unfriendly. (Imagine future computing devices that are even more disposable than today's smartphones.) This is good for setting and tone.
• "Computer programs" are now physical tokens. They can be unique, they can be uncopyable (due to impossible-to-duplicate characteristics of their manufacture), you can permanently destroy them, and you can get into real-world shootouts over possession of them. These are all desirable characteristics of valuable equipment in a tabletop RPG.

It could be that "software" is alive and kicking in the world of the super-elite who have access to quantum mainframes. But that could be a plot point to be explored during a campaign; the reemergence of general-purpose computing for the masses (e.g., because someone finally figured out how to make micro-quantum computers) and the top-down opposition to it would be a fun way to play out some of the culture wars of the 80s and 90s.