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• Nov 16, 2023

  The Great Tabletop Hackathon: Neon City Overdrive

  

  Neon City Overdrive is a game written by Nathan Russel and published by Peril Planet Game Studio in 2020. This is the smallest core book of all the ones we’ve seen so far at 72 pages.

  We’ll also be looking at a supplement named The Grid, which focuses on hacking and has another 60 pages.

  Setting Overview

  Most of those 132 pages are dedicated to the setting and to a set of adventure seeds, both of which are largely based on vibes instead of relying on laboriously crafted timelines or detailed maps. This is the game of stylish cyberpunks running dangerous jobs in a neon-lit sprawl. The reader is expected to take it from there to add details as needed.

  The setting as provided is just a basic sketch. The game takes place in The City, which is divided into dense residential and commercial zones called Metroplexes, equally dense hellish industrial blocks named Grinders, and the Streets that flow in between. The City and the world it’s in are covered by the Grid, a global computer network where nearly every device that can be described as “electronic” or “computerized” has a presence.

  The Grid gets a somewhat more detailed description because I’m using material from the supplement here. Like the physical world it has several components. The Signal lets all those devices connect to the Grid. It’s maintained by an army of antennas, and repeater drones. The devices attuned to the Signal generate The Overlay, which is projected into the physical world as a combination of holograms and augmented reality. Most devices have an augmented reality interface instead of physical controls, and most signage exists in the Overlay only. Hubs are big static computers. Some of them help route and maintain the Signal and the Overlay, or host public virtual environments, but others are private servers used by the sort of organization your cyberpunks need to hack.

  You can use the grid through an interface that resembles a real-world smartphone or desktop browser, but it’s also possible to go into full immersion VR. This works as you’d expect if you’re familiar with the genre (and if you’ve read the other entries in this series, you are). We have our Gibsonian matrix here, with wireframe or low-poly graphics by default, but with specific hubs represented as more realistic environments. The more powerful the owner, the more realistic their hubs’ presentation.

  A lot of social events happen entirely in the Grid’s virtual reality, from important business conferences to sport tournaments and nightclub gatherings. Virtual reality ensures they feel mostly like physical events. That sure would have been handy during our real world pandemic.

  The downside is that “common” grid users are constantly monitored and tracked. Player characters and other dirty criminals have their ways of evading this, and despite the efforts of law enforcement agencies and corporate security, grid crime is very common and not going away any time soon.

  When you go into VR, you emerge at the Local Area Zone corresponding to your physical location but can move to any other LAZ you can access with a thought. Movement within a LAZ is restricted to the sort of thing a real person would be able to do in the physical world, and the landscape reflects this. Want to go to a site in your LAZ? You need to walk. The book recognizes this is inconvenient. Some area zones are private, either disconnected from the public Grid entirely or separated from it by virtual gates that admit only those with the proper credentials. A skilled enough hacker might be able to break through a gate. Totally isolated networks can only be accessed by physically jacking into their hubs.

  People can access the grid using wearable computers, which are cheap and widely available. Serious hackers (called codeslingers here) have an implanted interface chip that has all the same functions and allows diving into VR as well. Those who can’t or won’t use implants can make do with a “Grid-box”, a VR helmet that also covers the mouth and nose. And both can further benefit from a sensory deprivation chamber if they’re really serious.

  This default presentation is subject to change, as GMs are encouraged to tweak the arrangement to get the right vibe they want. By tweaking the list of available technologies and how common they are you could get anything from mainframes-and-telephones with a chrome veneer to a Ghost in the Shell-like ubiquitous net where everyone has implanted computers.

  Mechanics Overview

  From what I understand the rules of Neon City Overdrive belong to the lineage of Forged in the Dark games. There are no specific mechanics for the Grid here, not even if you use the supplement. Hacking uses the exact same mechanics as everything else.

  Tests use six-sided dice. You start with one Action Die, and gain more for each factor in your character sheet or the story that helps you succeed, and a Danger Die for each factor that gets in the way. Then you roll the resulting pool. Each Danger Die cancels an Action Die that rolled the same value. You take the highest value rolled in the remaining Action Dice, and use it to determine the result. A 3 or less is a failure, a 4 or 5 is a partial success with a cost attached, and a 6 is a complete success. The book goes into a bit more detail than this, but we don’t need it for this article.

  Narration and the fiction it creates are supremely important because they’ll set the stakes for the roll and inform you of which positive and negative factors are in play to build your die pool. Players are the only ones who roll dice. Enemies and obstacles are a source of Danger Dice but the GM never needs to roll for them.

  Hacking also uses those rules. The additional rules material in the Grid supplement is just a clarification that purely physical traits and tags don’t apply to tests made in the Grid, and Grid-specific ones don’t apply to the meat world. Can´t use your muscle grafts to hack the Gibson, can’t use your fancy programs to lift a car. Mental traits might apply to either “reality”, though. The book encourages focusing on the imagery of the simulation and making it as close to the physical world as possible, to make it easier for the group to describe actions without needing to know a lot about computers.

  Run Parameters

  We’re supposed to set the exact shape of our Grid when we play, so let’s say it’s more or less the same as Shadowrun 4th Edition’s. It’s not a pure mesh network, there’s cell tower hubs and such, but it’s close enough for our purposes.

  Our hacker will be going along with the physical team. The target office’s Grid layout is the same as in the SR4 version. The physical location surely has its own set of tags but the one that affects us is that our good disguises give us the element of surprise. Losing this might be one of the consequences for a hacking complication here. In a real game that’d affect the rest of the team too.

  Target Systems

  We have an office intranet that’s connected to the general Grid through a firewall, which we bypass by being inside the office. Its security from the inside is nothing special except that access to the bank accounts is well-guarded.

  The internal security wireless network covers the office but not connected to the outside. It’s hardened against intrusion and has a piece of Blue ICE that will trigger at the first complication.

  Our secret server in the records room with no wireless network at all. Our hacker must physically jack into it. It’s also hardened, and has Black ICE constantly watching over it.

  Our Hacker

  Pixie (non-binary human)

  Trademarks and Edges: Metroplexer, Codeslinger (Hacking, Cyber Combat), Infiltrator (Alarms, Locks)

  Flaws: Greedy, Socially Awkward

  Gear: Interface Chip (Fast, Advanced), Icebreaker (Silent, Deadly), Stealth Program Suite (Mimetic, Subtle), something else non-hacking related.

  Pixie is kinda min-maxed to fit our scenario, to be honest, with lots of traits that would apply to hacking. They’re a passable sneak in the physical world but not very good at physical combat and bad at social interaction. That’s what the rest of the team is for.

  Run Summary

  Our team gets into the office as usual - we always assume this part works out. Pixie hides in the bathroom to find the security network and hack into it via VR.

  I decide to roll the security server hack as an extended task, since those require three successes and we have three goals in here. Pixie decides to use Infiltrator instead of Codeslinger for this, since it is an infiltration of sorts and that’s where they put put their Alarms and Locks edges. I’m being lenient towards my player (who is also me) here. Those traits plus all other relevant tags give Pixie a total of seven action dice.

  Pixie is opposed by a single danger die, from the server being Hardened, but that die rolls a six and eats the one I rolled on the action dice. They’re left with a 5 and a 4, which count as successes towards our goal but apply consequences as well. So I rule we lost our Element of Surprise and that the Blue ICE on the server activated.

  I rule that the ICE hasn’t found Pixie yet, but it does get to add its relevant tags as danger dice on the next roll as it looks for them. Fortunately none of those roll a six and the action dice do, allowing Pixie to unlock the final door ahead of time. Tests from this point on are made using Codeslinger as expected, since they deal purely with stuff that lives in the computer.

  We get to the secret server and I rule that the Black Ice in there is already active but will only spot Pixie as a consequence - they start out stealthy. The ICE however does get to add its Counter-Intrusion and Scary tags as danger dice even so. Fortunately its rolls are crap and Pixie gets a 6, finding and downloading the evidence.

  Finally, let’s go for the money! This means the office network’s Well-Guarded tag becomes a danger die, but as before the ice only comes online as a consequence. We roll a 5 here, so it does come online, but not before we transfer the money.

  The physical team proceeds to try to leave the office, but as usual we stop our simulation here since the main hacking bits are done.

  Total elapsed time: 15 minutes.

  Run Analysis

  I love engaging with crunchy mechanics but narrative systems do have their advantages! 15 minutes is the fastest time we have so far, beating the “silent run” from SR 4th Edition by 2 minutes. And this only took so long because I have absolutely no experience with Neon City Overdrive and had to keep looking at the books.

  It’s possible this run was too easy, but it’s okay because it’s inserted into the larger context of the physical break-in. Pixie would have plenty to do in that part of the run. I might have made a mistake here in simply having “unaware” ICE add some of its tags to the hacking roll. The system is abstract enough that I could have ruled slipping past the ICE undetected would require “fighting” it and filling its Harm boxes while describing it as a sneaking attempt. Whatever form it took in the narrative, combat would have made things take longer, but not by much.

  The mechanical bits of the run would probably be much faster than the 50/90 minutes I’ve been assuming here, but this would be offset in all cases by the extended narration and roleplaying the game demands to frame those mechanics and establish all the influencing factors for each roll.

  Our experiment however does allow us to conclude the obvious: when you use the exact same simple resolution mechanic for everything, everyone has more or less the same spotlight time and the classic “Decker problem” won’t manifest.

• Nov 13, 2023

  Underwater Dungeon Fantasy 2: Items and Artifacts

  A while ago I posted a compilation of methods and tools for underwater adventuring. In this post, I’ll add a few items and artifacts that further help with that or that make sense as possessions for underwater people. This is a grab-bag article without much direction, but I hope it will be useful nonetheless.

  Alchemical Pills

  Any drinkable concoction (including magic potions) might be made as a solid pill instead. Pills tend to be round, thumbnail sized, hard, and meant to be swallowed whole. Pills are popular with alchemists and herbalists who don’t have a line to a crystal vial supplier, and with underwater civilizations since liquid potions don’t really work there.

  A pill costs the same as the equivalent liquid potion. It’s waterproof and not at risk of breaking from falls and the like, but it also can’t be put into bandoliers for easy access during combat. Dry-swallowing a pill during a fight requires either two Ready maneuvers or a single maneuver and a HT roll.

  You can put each of your pills into a separately-purchased crystal vial (DF1 p. 111) in order to have them in your potion belt, but that does add an extra Ready maneuver to the process of ingesting it since you have to open the vial first.

  Elixir of Water Breathing

  This alchemical elixir can be found on GURPS Magic, and is “reprinted” here with additional options. It’s a drinkable potion that lets you breathe underwater as if you had Gills for 1d hours.

  The GM rolls the die in secret when you drink it, and you remain unaware of how long you have… until 5 minutes before that time expires, when you get an instinctive mental warning that you only have 5 minutes left.

  GMs who dislike the randomness can set a fixed duration based on how much they want their PCs to spend on these potions. I suggest from 1 to 3 hours.

  Purely aquatic people can instead get Elixirs of Air Breathing for the same price and with the equivalent effect for air. Both variants are very likely to be found in pill form (see above).

  In all cases, the potion is $600, 0.25kg (0.5 lbs).

  Coral Items (+4 CF)

  Coral is a new implausible material: items made from it have a somewhat porous texture but are covered in intricate natural patterns of bright colors. Coral comes in rough or polished varieties, though both cost the same. Surfacers value it because it’s pretty, underwater civilizations value it for its incidental properties.

  Coral items can be made without fire, though they do require special magic and techniques known to underwater armorers. They also have neutral buoyancy: their weight does not count towards Encumbrance when determining the user’s penalty to Swimming. Anything that’s usually made of metal or wood can be made of coral instead. Being made of coral adds +4 CF to the item’s total cost.

  Artifact: Atlantean Armbands

  Origin: Divine.

  This is a pair of gilded orichalcum armbands decorated with reliefs of sharks and other marine creatures. The Atlantean Armbands were said to be a gift of the gods to a human hero destined to become the queen of a great underwater nation. That did indeed happen, and since all of the queen’s descendants were born with the ability to live underwater the armbands became honored museum pieces.

  That ancient empire has long since fallen to the tides of history, so who knows where these artifacts might surface next?

  • Sell Price: $50.000.
  • Weight: 0.5kg (1 lb) for the pair.
  • Power Item Capacity: 20 FP.

  Properties

  • When worn (one in each arm), they allow the wielder to freely breathe and move underwater as if they had the Gills and Amphibious traits.

  • If used as power items, any FP from the armbands that’s spent on the Swim and Breathe Water spells is worth double the energy.

  Variations

  Some legends tell of another pair of armbands, of silver-plated orichalcum and decorated with land-animal motifs, that would allow an aquatic wearer to breathe air and walk on land, assuming a humanoid form if necessary. These were created by an evil but powerful witch for a mermaid that wanted to walk among humans, and are Druidic in origin.

  Instead of armbands, you could have rings, piercings, or amulets with the same enchantments.

• Nov 13, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Thay

  The Shadowfell Road ends in Thay.

  This is where the book technically breaks its promises. While every other place so far has been presented as somewhere the party could go, the text here sounds almost scared when it talks about the Thayan heartland because that’s where Szass Tam and all his epic-level wizard buddies live. It makes it very clear that the PCs should not go there.

  Fortunately, the bulk of this section is not actually talking about the massive plateau that makes up the Thayan heartland, but about the peripheral areas surrounding that plateau. Special attention is given to Surcross and Veil, a pair of fortified towns at its base, as well as to the Netherese flying fortress that’s currently besieging them.

  Veil is where the Shadowfell Road ends. Surcross is a short distance away and is where all of Valindra’s supplies come from. The main reason the PCs would want to come here is to disrupt that supply network in order to defeat her back in Neverwinter. Depending on how the GM sets things up, it’s also possible her soul vessel is hidden somewhere in Surcross.

  The area around these two cities is a horrifying wasteland of destroyed nature and abandoned villages whose ground is coated in bits of bone and flesh that were too broken up to animate. We’ll take a look at the general area here, and then zoom into the cities and fortress in future posts.

  Overview of Thay

  In editions past, Thay used to be a slave-holding nation of evil wizards whose schtick was over-specializing in one of D&D’s schools of magic. Their ideology was very similar to fascism with wizards at the top of the heap, but they tried to present a more “friendly” face to the outside world, setting up trade enclaves while keeping their dastardly schemes secret.

  I believe the lich Szass Tam used to be a member of Thay’s ruling council, but now he’s taken over completely and became its supreme leader. He turned Thay into a “nation of undeath”, equally devoted to necromancy and conquest. Why pretend to be friendly to other nations when you can just invade them and take their stuff? The only deity whose worship Tam permits is Bane, the evil god of conquest, and he’s suspicious of even that. Yes, worship of Vecna is completely forbidden - I think Tam sees him as the competition.

  Thay remains in this state when we switch to 5th Edition, by the way - it’s one of the things they didn’t change back.

  Climbing to the top of the Thayan plateau is discouraged not only by the book’s scared tone, but by the many defenses placed around it. Its walls are almost vertical and the only ways up are a set of narrow switchbacks that leave characters exposed to artillery fire from both sides of the ongoing war.

  Both Surcross and the Netherese fortress of Kolthunral have amazingly powerful weapons and defenses at their disposal. Kolthunral’s mission is to cut Valindra’s supply line by destroying Surcross and/or Veil, which is why it hasn’t moved away. The PCs arrive to find them locked in a prolonged siege, as neither is able to fully overcome the others’ defenses.

  A significant portion of Thay’s forces are composed of undead, both at the grunt and officer levels. Their living soldiers are mostly humans, orcs, and gnolls, with plenty of spellcasters.

  A character like the Renegade Red Wizard could be very helpful here if they still have friends in the region, but they’re also coming back to the lion’s den and if the Thayans realize the renegade is here they will be relentless in their pursuit.

  In addition to any friends of the Red Wizard PC that might be here, the area also contains a bunch of spies and infiltrators sent by Dempharis Sibront, an elderly Red Wizard who escaped Tam’s conquest of the nation. Sibront considers himself nobility in exile and his network of infiltrated rebels is looking for any way to weaken’s Tam’s hold on the country. The PCs can form an alliance of convenience with him to fulfill their own goals, since they align, and his forces will be genuinely helpful in that situation.

  However he is likely to interpret this situation as the PCs agreeing to serve him indefinitely, and could become an enemy in future adventures when he realizes that wasn’t the case. That seems like an interesting opportunity for continuing the campaign past the material in the book.

  The Charnel Fields

  The horrifying plains of death in the area surrounding the two Thayan towns are a product not just of the war, but also of Thayan fuckery. Since right after the first battles, the Thayans started hauling corpses from the battlefield for animation. But since some of those battles happened far away, they decided to enact a “little” ritual to make things more convenient, using the blood of the fallen as a focus.

  Any corpse left on or under the earth within a hundred miles of Surcross will be sucked by the enchanted soil and transported to an area near the city, where it will be extruded to the surface. This makes it easy for Thayan necromancers to haul them back for reanimation, and it also attracts all sorts of natural and supernatural predators who want to feast on the remaining bits. The Netherese have also started hauling corpses away from the charnel fields, to deny the “raw material” to their enemies and maybe animate some of it themselves.

  Relsforin

  The desperate inhabitants of this small village survived by making themselves useful to Thay. They make up the bulk of the labor force that hauls corpses from the Charnel Fields to Surcross, and in exchange receive some protection from Netherese attacks. They fear the Netherese more than they resent the Thayans, and if they think a group of strangers (such as the PCs) are likely to be enemies of their masters, they will turn them in.

  Echo Village

  This village belonged to the neighboring nation of Thesk until a short while ago. The mercantile Theskans built it as a trade post near the Thayan border, to facilitate commerce with the wizard nation.

  Shortly after the war started the Thayans invaded the village and slaughtered all of its inhabitants to turn them into more undead soldiers. They left the village behind as an empty husk, but the angry ghosts of the inhabitants soon appeared to haunt the place and wail about the hatred they felt for their murderers. This attracted the spirits of other Thayan victims, turning Echo Village into a sort of gathering point for ghosts with a grudge against Thay.

  The ghosts’ default reaction to any living people approaching their village is violence - they’ll attack while shouting rants against Thay. PC groups who are perceptive and diplomatic enough might be able to figure things out from these rants and convince the ghosts that they too are enemies of Thay.

  This would ironically make Echo Village the safest refuge for the PCs in the entire region, as the ghosts would allow them to stay while still attacking any intruders. It’s an interesting contrast with Relsforin, which seems safe but is not.

  If the PCs then manage to lure the Thayan legion that contains the villagers’ original bodies back to Echo, the ghosts will be able to “repossess” their bodies and turn against their commanders, potentially slaughtering the whole legion. This will finally let them rest, and they will inform the PCs of any sensitive information their bodies learned before moving on from the world.

  Impressions

  Yikes! War crimes as far as the eye can see. It does put the events happening in Neverwinter into context. GMs and players might be used to thinking of heroic-tier campaigns as being “no big deal” in the grand scheme of things, but everything that’s happening here in Thay is a B plot for the events in Neverwinter.

• Nov 12, 2023

  The Great Tabletop Hackathon: Shadowrun 5th Edition, Part 2

  

  We set our parameters in the last post, so let’s do the actual run in this one.

  Run Summary

  Our decker enters with her team, and they get past the reception as usual. This time I decide to do things a little bit differently and go for spoofing peripheral devices over trying to control them from inside the host. This seems to be the correct way to do it in SR5, judging from the examples in the Matrix chapter. The Control Device action is only used for things that would require a conventional skill test if done in the physical world, like shooting a turret’s gun.

  First, the camera. It’s visible both in the real and in the Matrix, since running silent would harm its functionality. Ms. Decker always prefers to use the “quiet” Hack on the Fly action, since that’s her specialty. The camera and other devices are tied to the office’s host, so they use the host’s ratings instead of their own to resist. But when Ms. Decker places a mark on a device, she automatically places a mark on the host as well.

  She manages to place a mark on the camera, and therefore on the host. This means she can dispense with silent running from this point on, since the Patrol IC can’t tell the mark she has right now was illegally obtained and will no longer try to raise an alarm. She uses a Spoof action on the camera, disabling it. Our tally sits at 6. We do not want it to reach 40.

  Ms. Decker knows there is an alarm, but it’s not immediately visible as an icon on the Matrix. Unlike the camera, the alarm is running silent. A Matrix Perception action reveals that there is indeed a hidden icon nearby. A couple more attempts at it reveal the alarm’s icon. None of these perception tests accrues Overwatch, since they’re not tied to the “illegal” attributes.

  She tries to mark the alarm, but fails! I spend 1 Edge to roll an additional 2 dice (her Edge score) on this, and get 2 extra hits. From what I understand, a tie here isn’t a victory for either side, so ms. Decker still fails to mark the alarm but the system does not detect her. Whew! The next attempt succeeds, but both sides roll really well. The spoof attempt succeeds handily. Our tally sits at 17 after all of that.

  Ms. Decker disconnects from the host at this point since she needs to move with the physical team. But since she does not reboot her deck, all of the marks she placed remain on the host. Her Overwatch Tally also stays at 17.

  The team enters the records room and begins the physical search. Ms. Decker spots a physical jackpoint here and uses that. She’s inside the host again, and now she is able to see all of its remaining files and devices automatically since none of them are silent. This includes the evidence she’s after, which is only accessible from this jackpoint.

  Downloading a file is automatic, but it requires a mark on it first. She manages to mark and download the evidence, and then decides to go for the money. I rule that this will require marking the account file and then editing it to transfer the money. The marking goes smoothly, the editing runs into a tied test first, succeeding on the second attempt. Fortunately only the marking accrued Overwatch, which at this point sits at 23.

  Finally, still jacked into that physical access point, Ms. Decker attempts to mark and spoof the exit door to unlock it. The marking succeeds, and the spoofing gives me a bit of stress as again the first attempt ties and the second one succeeds. Good rolls all around here, so our final Overwatch tally is a dangerous 37.

  Our hacker has time to safely jack out, and the team gets to walk away through the now-unlocked door. All mission goals have been accomplished. She waits until they’re out to reboot her deck, since that would erase all of her marks.

  Total time: 31 minutes.

  Analysis

  31 minutes is something I consider fast, comparable to CP 2020 and CP RED. It’s also about as easy to slice up into manageable chunks as CP RED’s and SR 4’s runs were.

  However this was a near-perfect run, with our decker remaining undetected throughout the whole thing despite a couple of close calls. If we had been detected at any point there would have been cybercombat and things would have taken longer.

  Unlike most of the other games we’ve looked at so far, it’s impossible to simply kill all the ice, since each one a hacker destroys is just going to be relaunched at the start of the next turn. The occasional assurances by the book that you can rely on brute force alone to smash through a host ring a bit hollow, since that seems like it leads to combat sooner even with good rolls from the hacker.

  Had she activated the host’s ice, Ms. Decker would need to spend actions to hide instead of just attacking. That Patrol IC would be trying to find her every turn and she’d take a universal -2 dice penalty for silent running. I could see this maybe doubling our run time, but I’m not going to count that as an official timing. It’s just a guesstimate.

  Even with this near-perfect run, we ended up with a tally of 37. With even slightly better rolls from the host in a couple of places we’d have hit 40. This wouldn’t have meant instant death since we’re inside a host, but it still would have placed 3 marks on Ms. Decker at once, and let the host see her and start activating IC. She sure hopes the team doesn’t get into a firefight on the way out, because if she has to do anything else Matrix-related to help then she is definitely going to draw the ire of Overwatch.

• Nov 9, 2023

  The Great Tabletop Hackathon: Shadowrun 5th Edition, Part 1

  

  For this post we’ll be taking a look at Shadowrun 5th Edition, originally published in 2013. The book we’re looking at is the Master Index Edition published in 2016, which is largely the same but incorporates some errata and includes an index of supplementary material.

  I’ll confess I have some reluctance to tackle this specific system, because its return to expensive cyberdecks was part of what made me kinda stop paying attention to Shadowrun at all. But I’ll read it with as open a mind as I can manage and give its rules a fair shake just like I gave all the others.

  One thing I notice is that they have switched back to the more “conversational” style employed by SR1, which makes it much harder for me to understand the rules. It’s more of a problem here than it was in SR 1 because there are a lot more rules and concepts they’re trying to get across.

  Setting Overview

  Visually, the Shadowrun 5th Edition Matrix is a complete return to The Full Gibson Experience. An infinite black plane criss-crossed by shimmering silver lines, upon which swim thousands and thousands of icons representing small connected devices and users. Way up above in the sky float the giant geometric shapes of corporate hosts.

  Descriptions focus almost entirely on the visual, with the technical bits boiling down to “it’s everywhere” and “no one fully knows how it works”. “Civilians” still use commlinks like they did in 4th edition, and “smart” devices that are currently online around them show up as icons in augmented reality. The descriptions we get for the uses of augmented reality here are actually pretty good and evocative. However, it’s not the main event. It seems that any time someone would use a web browser for something in the real world, they go into full VR instead.

  If this Matrix has any basis in reality, it would be on the popular perception people had of the Internet in 2013, and the fears they had for its future. Cloud computing is a concept that looms large here despite not being explicitly named. A Matrix host is a location that doesn’t have a 1-to-1 correspondence to a single physical device. In other words, the reason they’re all up in the sky and visible from anywhere in the world is because they’re all in the cloud. Access to cloud services also tends to be the explanation for why certain devices gain mechanical bonuses when they’re online.

  The Matrix is split into Grids. When you connect to the Matrix you are in whatever local grid services your physical location. Big Corps have private global grids where all their stuff lives. You can access stuff that’s in other grids without going there, but for the best connectivity you’ll want to grid-hop, which requires some hacking if you’re lacking credentials.

  The “fears” part comes into play when the book says the Matrix is almost entirely locked down and under the control of the megacorps. Those everyday civilian uses are allowed, provided people pay their fees or consent to getting bombarded with ads. The entire Matrix is watched over by the Grid Overwatch Division, an organization composed of law enforcement and corporate specialists whose job is to sniff out and eliminate any and all hacker activity.

  “Hacker” here is an umbrella term that covers both deckers and technomancers. Deckers use cyberdecks, devices which are a little bigger than commlinks and have extra hardware that lets them be used for hacking. Technomancers still use their quantum-bullshit-powered brains (and I still think they’re cool).

  Cyberdecks are back to being super-expensive, with prices comparable to those of SR1. The cheapest deck costs the same as an armored cargo truck, the starter used by our sample character costs a bit more than a luxury sports car, and the best one costs the same as a couple of light military vehicles. Fortunately it appears they no longer require much in the way of optional hardware enhancements, and programs tend to be much cheaper, but still the price of a deck is once again the main thing making “decker” an exclusive specialist niche.

  Mechanics Overview

  Devices have Matrix Attributes that dictate their base capabilities. All of them have a Device Rating that represents their general robustness, a Firewall attribute that is used for defensive rolls, and a Data Processing attribute that gets used for searches and other generally lawful operations. Cyberdecks have two others, Attack and Sleaze, which are used for hacking. Hosts have also have these so that they can fight back against hackers. The full array is abbreviated as “ASDF”.

  Most devices, including hosts, have “static” attributes, but cyberdecks have an “attribute array” of four numbers that can be allocated dynamically between those last four values. Their device rating is still static and cannot be changed.

  Instead of having user accounts, each icon, device or host has a single owner that has full control over it, and it might accept marks from other users on to grant them more limited levels of access. An example is a social network host lets users register by placing a mark. More marks means more access, and the limit is three. The owner counts as having four.

  Hacking a device means placing uninvited marks on it, and using the access those grant to perform Matrix actions that get you closer to your goal. Different actions require a different number of marks to attempt, and unless those marks are legitimate most of them still require hacking tests to perform and might fail. They’re opposed by the host’s rating and its ASDF attributes.

  Hacking actions use either the Attack or Sleaze attributes. Attack actions are “loud” and alert the host that it’s being attacked when successful; when they fail, they cause Matrix damage to the hacker. Sleaze actions are “silent” and don’t increase the hacker’s visibility when successful; when they fail, the host becomes aware of the hacker, places a mark on them, usually triggers IC.

  With both types of action, successes on the target’s resistance rolls increase the hacker’s Overwatch Tally, even when the hacker wins the contest. When this tally hits 40, GOD’s eye is upon the hacker. They take a boatload of damage, get forcibly ejected from the Matrix, and their physical location is instantly traced. In other words, game over¹. If inside a host when this happens, they’re “merely” instantly detected and have 3 marks placed on them at once, which makes all the host’s IC extra effective against them. And you bet all that IC will be activated at once.

  Rebooting your cyberdeck resets Overwatch Tally to 0, but it also erases all marks you’ve placed, so while you’ll usually reboot right after a run is finished you’ll need to wait a bit longer if you still need those marks.

  IC fights using the host’s rating and ASDF attributes. Some variants try to place additional marks on the hacker, while some attack either the hacker’s deck, their brain, or both at the same time. The more marks IC has on the hacker, the greater the damage they do. It’s possible for the hacker to spend actions removing these marks, but this ironically is also an illegal action and accrues Overwatch. It also doesn’t make the host or the IC forget about the hacker, it just makes enemy attacks less effective.

  Matrix perception works a bit differently than in the past. Most icons in close proximity (and there are several ways to define this) are automatically visible and identifiable unless they’re running silent, which means they require a Matrix perception test to notice. Running silent gives a penalty to all of that icon’s rolls, so the hacker is usually the only one running silent during a run, and that only when necessary.

  Run Parameters

  We’ll be using the sample decker from the core book, a dwarf lady. She has a Hermes Chariot starter deck with a device rating of 2 and an ASDF of 5-4-4-2 (which is dynamic, as mentioned before). She has a few programs that help with cybercombat but her specialty is still stealth, with an effective skill of 9 for that approach.

  It looks like our host design philosophy is The Full Gibson once again. A given location will have a single host that takes care of all of its business and is connected to the wider Matrix, only this time it represents a set of servers in the cloud instead of a mainframe. Nevertheless it is considered to be at the same physical location as the office.

  There are rules incentives to being in close physical proximity to your target, and our hacker lacks the accessory that would let us ignore those rules (a Satellite Link), so she will be joining the physical team and hacking from the inside.

  This is a private business, so we’ll give the host a rating of 4 according to the guidelines on page 247. Its ASDF ratings are 5-4-6-7, which gives us the “surprisingly high security” requirement. Cameras, alarms, and door locks are Rating 3. The alarm is running silent.

  For IC, it runs Patrol at all times. When it detects an intruder it launches Killer, followed by Track. When it detects unauthorized access to the buried evidence it launches Sparky. As usual, whenever one of these is destroyed it’s immediately relaunched at the start of the next combat turn.

  The file containing our target evidence would normally be archived and thus impossible to access without some social engineering, but we can cheat a bit here and assume there’s a physical jack point in the records room that allows access to the files.

  With all this in place, we’ll see how our decker does next post.

  1. Petty rant time: Many Shadowrun GMs love the idea of omniscient and omnipotent organizations that stand ever ready to squash players, and I guess GOD made it in either because of their demands or because some of SR5’s writers were ascended GMs themselves. ↩

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