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• Oct 23, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Evernight Overview

  Evernight is Neverwinter’s reflection on the Shadowfell, but it’s also a city in its own right, inhabited by a large number of undead and undead-adjacent people (cultists, necromancers, and the like). This book doesn’t go too deep into its history, but it does give me the impression Evernight has existed for a long time. It was probably described in a previous edition when the Shadowfell was called “the plane of Shadow”.

  Evernight is ruled by a Tribunal composed by its most influent citizens, all of whom are ghouls and ghasts who worship Orcus and his exarch Dorensain. The Tribunal makes the laws and settles disputes. It does the latter by deciding who is right and eating the loser.

  The city is very dangerous for living mortals who aren’t citizens, though it’s a bit less dangerous than you’d think. Only its vampire and ghoul inhabitants feel the need to feed on the living, and since the ambient energies of the Shadowfell help sustain them this happens much less often than it would in the world. Mortals and undead alike can apply for citizenship. Mortal citizens gain legal protection from random attacks on the street, though they should probably keep their token of citizenship within easy reach at all times. Living merchants who pass through the city on the way to other locations can also acquire tokens of safe passage.

  The legal status of a mortal who doesn’t have any of that can best be summed up as “fresh meat”, but even that isn’t an automatic death sentence. Undead who see the living brazenly walking down the streets of Evernight tend to assume they belong there, and will only challenge that assumption if given reason to be suspicious. Such as when the “tourists” make horrified faces at the deeply fucked up stuff that happens in the city’s routine unlife.

  There are no official portals between Evernight and Neverwinter, but the planar membrane separating the two is awfully thin and becomes fully permeable in certain places known as “dusk crevices”. These crossings link a place in Evernight to its corresponding worldly location, which is always in dim light or darkness. Some are fixed, some temporary or mobile. They’re the true cause of most spooky stories about disappearances in Neverwinter since before the Spellplague. Mortals who fall through these crevices into Evernight make up a significant portion of the diet of its ghoul and vampire population.

  Despite its (literally!) ghoulish culture and society, Evernight is a major Shadowfell trade hub, so it often sees passing caravans that link it to other settlements in the plane. One of the trade routes passing through here is the Shadowfell Road, a mystical path that has a ritual component. It only exists if approached and traversed in a very specific way. The Thayans use it to supply the Dread Ring, and the Tribunal allows them to use it for that purpose because the Thayans pay them in people. A similar arrangement allows the Netherese to maintain an embassy in the city and use their own share of trade and supply routes.

  Part of the reason the Tribunal accepts these deals is that both factions represent powerful nations who are very adept at necromancy, but the ghouls still draw the line at permitting hostilities within city limits. Evernight is neutral territory, and violating this edict is one of the things that would cause the Tribunal to take drastic action against the rule-breaker. In practice that means conflict within the city takes the form of sordid spy stories of intrigue and assassination.

  The city did suffer some changes during the cataclysm. A reflection of the Chasm, known locally as the Demon Pit, opened up in the corresponding Shadowfell coordinates. And while the eruption of mount Hotenow was a quick affair in the world, its shadowy counterpart continues to expel a slow and steady stream of lava that flows through the equivalent of the Neverwinter River’s bed. Sometimes you can see crew-less ghost ships sailing the lava, docking in abandoned piers, and leaving after a few days. All of the other horrific stuff we’ll see in the following posts was already there before that.

  Impressions

  Evernight comes as a bit of a surprise to me, since I think it was only mentioned in one place in the book before this section and that mention didn’t hint at the full scope of the thing. I’m guessing old FR hands already know all about it, though.

• Oct 16, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Gauntlgrym, Part 02

  Here we cover the lower strata of Gauntlgrym, where the place’s greatest dangers live.

  Duergar Mines

  The duergar of Gauntlgrym live in this sector, which lies deeper than most of Gauntlgrym. The book says they’ve been here for “a few generations”, which is a lot longer than I thought before even if these are human generations. Their situation, however, still matches: they’ve taken over old mining tunnels and dug new ones under the direction of their leader Kholzourl.

  They’ve unearthed several veins of useful metal, including iron, silver, mithral and hellthorn (the one that likes infernal enchantments). Their work is ceaseless, grueling, and mostly done by slaves, which they replenish by capturing any non-duergar they lay eyes on down here. Tunnels built by the original dwarves show their characteristic sloped walls and tend to be both safe and clean. Duergar tunnels are slapdash and hazardous, sometimes nearly vertical due to their leader’s need to go ever deeper. Some of these shafts are so deep that they contain semi-permanent work camps where duergar and enslaved workers live instead of going back to the city at the end of every day.

  The duergar don’t care about the big mithral gates. They got here from below, via tunnels that link their camps to the deep Underdark. Some of these tunnels have since been taken over by plaguechanged mind flayers, which are as much a cause of injury and death as the work itself.

  Somewhere in the mines is also a temple to Asmodeus built from desecrated material taken from the Iron Tabernacle, which Kholzourl uses to commune with his god and summon the occasional devil.

  And why exactly are the duergar so intent on digging ever deeper? Only Kholzourl and the GM really now. The book gives us several possible reasons - GMs can either pick one or use them as inspiration for a bespoke sinister plot.

  • Hellthorn comes from a meteorite that fell here in primeval times, and the main body of the thing contains far more power than the mere shards that have been found so far. Maybe it contains an alien diabolic entity, millions of years old, waiting for the moment when it is found and awakened.

  • The duergar want to drain the magma from Maegera’s resting place and transport her slumbering form to some place where she can wake up and destroy an enemy of Asmodeus.

  • The mining is just a cover and their actual goal is to observe the mind flayers and track down their aboleth masters. The duergar suspect they want to open a permanent portal to the Far Realm and want to hijack the procedure so the portal leads to Hell instead.

  • Or maybe the interaction of all the different types of bad magic that bathe this region (infernal, aberrant, necromantic, oh my!) has created something terrible underground that they wish to claim for themselves.

  The Fiery Pit

  The lowest halls of Gauntlgrym are occupied by this enormous lake of magma, at the center of which spins a white-hot whirlpool that marks Maegera’s resting place.

  The prison devised by the ancient mages if Illusk used bound water elementals fed by a continuous stream of sea water pumped here by magical means. The system could only be turned off by a true heir of Delzoun. The cataclysm happened when Valindra found one to pull the lever, causing Maegera to nearly awaken. Drizzt and his buddies prevented a full awakening back then, but the partial one was still enough to ruin Neverwinter.

  Unfortunately one of the channels had been destroyed, and so was not reactivated when the rest of them were. This caused the binding to become imperfect and to slowly fade over time. Now Maegera is dangerously close to another awakening.

  Maegera is meant to be used as a looming threat - the bad guys want to wake her, the PCs want to stop that from happening. PCs could fix the broken arcane pump by using the notes found in the Waterclock Crypt in Neverwinter, which would make the whole thing stable once more.

  Unless of course the Heir of Delzoun PC is foolish enough to pull the “off” switch again, causing another cataclysm. Then the whole Sword Coast is due for a TPK.

  The Great Forge

  In addition to the water elemental-based restraints, the structure around Maegera also contains a complex network of pipes and wires made from all sorts of enchanted and rune-carved metal, from copper to adamantine. These act as conduits for the primordial’s power, which was siphoned to this sector of the city.

  The heat arrived at a great adamantine pyramid known as the Burning Heart, which collected it and distributed it to the various forges and manufactories in the sector. This heat could melt through any metal in short order, making it extremely easy to shape and ensuring the resulting products would carry a little of Maegera’s power with them.

  PCs investigating the Forge can find remains of an ancient battle here, and will find with the appropriate skill tests that the bones of the invading force belong to legion devils.

  The Heart itself can also be investigated by characters competent in Arcana. Beating a DC of 11 reveals the obvious (lots of fire magic!); beating a 16 reveals this fire magic is being moderated by water magic; and beating a 23 reveals that the energy is being drained by a third party (the aboleths, which use it in their research).

  “Normal” areas of the Forge are subject to the Unearthly Heat terrain effect, and since Maegera is partially unbound some terrain here can display more overtly supernatural fire features.

  Breaching one of the conduits from the Heart or the Forge will bathe the offending character in primordial fire magic, making them resistant to fire and better at using fire attacks, but vulnerable to and worse at using some other element of the GM’s choice. Also, they get a bonus to Diplomacy with elemental creatures and a corresponding penalty when dealing with immortal ones.

  The character loses three healing surges when this happens, and it wasn’t clear to me whether they could be recovered normally. The mutations are permanent until cured by Remove Affliction or an equivalent power. A cure removes all effects - there’s no way to keep just the beneficial ones!

  The Deepest Depths

  This is the part of Gauntlgrym that connects to the Underdark. The duergar originally came in through here, but the place has since become very inhospitable even to them. Many species of aberrant creature dwell in these dark passages, chief among them the plaguechanged mind flayers that are giving the duergar trouble. Their mission is to prevent anyone from messing with Maegera, and thus from getting in the way of the AbSov’s remote experiment with her.

  This means they fight the duergar, but they aren’t any less evil than their foes. Like most Underdark villains mind flayers are fond of slavery, and they keep their captives here as well.

  This region is also where the dwarves built secure vaults to store a variety of horrors they found in their delves. Most are still secure, but some have been opened over the centuries. One of the vaults that are already open is the one that housed the original population of dire corbies, and which has become their largest nest. They keep a lot of treasure there that no other faction has managed to claim yet.

  Beneath even this, you get into tunnels that aren’t part of Gauntlgrym, and which snake their way downwards to the Underdark. Whatever is down there is out of scope of the campaign. It could perhaps be an interesting segue into Paragon Tier when the PCs do finish it, should the group be willing.

  Impressions

  The areas detailed in this post have a definite “endgame” feeling. Whatever your reasons for coming to Gauntlgrym, if you’re here you’ll need to deal with the mess of adversarial factions described in this post, finish what Drizzt and company could not, and make sure Maegera stays asleep.

  This would be a fitting end to a campaign centered on the Heirs of Delzoun, but others might go from here to the bottom of the Chasm as they follow the clues left by the mind flayers to their real masters.

  Conversely, if the group doesn’t include any heirs or anyone else who’d be interested in the lost city, Gauntlgrym can be safely and entirely removed from the campaign. Just say that Maegera is in no danger of waking up, and focus on those elements that are relevant to your players.

• Oct 14, 2023

  Let's Read Neverwinter: Gauntlgrym, Part 01

  This part gives an overview of the fabled lost city of Gauntlgrym,and goes into detail about its “upper” strata.

  Historical Errata

  There’s another bit I missed when I glossed over the big-ass timeline at the beginning of the book, and now I must correct that here.

  The dwarves of Gauntlgrym found the primordial Maegera early in their habitation of the city, but they left her sealed up for a few hundred years before messing with her.

  The massive project that bound her into a sort of arcane power generator was a three-way joint project between the dwarves, the mages of Illusk and the elves of Iliyanbruen. As we saw in the post about Shandarar, they were still around for a few centuries after the fall of Netheril, so they took part in this as well. The book describes this as a positive example of what the three peoples can do when they work together, though it outlived their friendship.

  Maegera’s power allowed the dwarves of Delzoun to create inumerable wonders, in the form of both potent magical items and marvelous works of infrastructure for their capital and their empire. Gauntlgrym became a big center of trade and even saw numerous human families moving there.

  The reason it fell was because of the Orc Marches, a massive region-wide invasion by an army of orcs larger than any seen before or since. By the time this happened, the three peoples were no longer on speaking terms, as each had grown more arrogant and mistrustful over time. They could have banded together to repel the invasion, but each thought they could go it alone. Illusk fell first, and Delzoun was next, and only at the gates of Shandarar was the already-weakened orc army repelled.

  Iliyanbruen would end up dismantling anyway when it tried to take the fight to the orcs in Illusk, as we saw earlier. Gauntlgrym was left alone since no one seemed to be coming up from there. Its dwarven and humans refugees scattered all over the Realms, with many of the humans joining Uthgardt tribes on the surface and the dwarves ranging out further to move to their surviving nations.

  The empire of Delzoun and its capital of Gauntlgrym are today kinda like the dwarven equivalent of the Roman Empire in that stupid meme. No dwarf living today has ever laid eyes on the lost city, but they think of it regularly and describe it as the height of their civilization.

  Gauntlgrym Today

  Despite being lost to the surface, Gauntlgrym did not remain static in all these millennia. The orcs were kicked out by mind flayers; the mind flayers by derro; and the derro by duergar. That last one happened fairly recently in historical terms, so the duergar still consider themselves masters of the place. However, they are not the only people living there. There are other groups seeking to control the city, and literal multitudes of ghosts belonging to its original inhabitants.

  Let’s take a look at the city from the outside in.

  The Great Cavern

  Whatever paths to Gauntlgrym exist in your campaign, they will always end here. This is a massive natural cavern filled with alien Underdark vegetation and labyrinthine formations of stone pillars and stalagmites. Small forts and balconies are carved into the walls and around the largest pillars - the remains of former guard posts. The bones of ancient battles litter the floor.

  There’s a small lake at the center of the cave, and on one of its walls stands the massive mithral gate that leads into Gauntlgrym proper. It’s nearly impossible to open by mundane or magical means, but a true heir of Delzoun can open it with the slightest push. The cave is filled with your preferred selection of Underdark monsters, and also with two sapient factions.

  The first is a group of old Ashmadai who came here with Valindra when she first tried to free the primordial in that Drizzt novel. The tunnels they used filled with magma at the end of that, so they became trapped here. Their first reaction to any strangers they spot is violence, though some of them might be prepared to surrender or betray the rest in exchange for a way back to the surface.

  The second faction is the House Xorlarrin expedition, who arrived recently and built a hidden camp. They’re spying on the Ashmadai while looking for a way to open the gates. Their reaction to intruding PCs will be to remain hidden and spy on them as well, waiting to see if they can open the gates. If they can, the drow will follow them covertly, scattering if spotted, and will only attack if the PCs become distracted by some other enemy inside the city.

  The Iron Tabernacle

  The Iron Tabernacle was Gauntlgrym’s temple district, and was both the city’s physical and spiritual center. Its many temples and shrines were dedicated to Moradin and other good gods, and attended by a sizable contingent of dwarven and human priests. This enormous multi-leveled district was a marvelous sight to behold in its glory days, but now most of it lies ravaged by both time and by duergar impiety. The city’s new occupants have defaced every religious image and statue they could find, and stolen anything of value here, from precious relics to the mithral trim in the walls.

  Still, the Tabernacle is so vast that some hidden shrines remain untouched and could be reconsecrated by PCs. There’s a text box here detailing the minor boons they can gain from doing so. An extended rest next to the restored shrine takes only three hours instead of six, and has no danger of being interrupted by wandering monsters. And if a member of the party is a non-evil dwarf or a worshiper of Moradin, they might gain the attention of one of the city’s ghosts, who will help them in battle the next time they fight (using a level-appropriate incorporeal undead stat block). Both benefits only happen once.

  The Tabernacle is also the hub of Gaunglgrym’s ancient mine rail network. The rails connect directly or indirectly to every other district in the city, and are meant to be traveled by self-propelled mine carts that were used for bulk cargo transport back in the day. They still run according to their ancient schedules and could be commandeered by PCs. A big switching station in the Tabernacle can let them switch carts from one track to another. It’s an easy way to get around this vast city.

  Or perhaps not so easy - there are some rules here that might come into play when a fight happens during a cart ride, or when a cart derails during a fight.

  Ancient Cemetery

  The lowest level of the Tabernacle is a massive collection of crypts, laid out according to a now forgotten scheme or tradition. Some are simple, some very elaborate, but all of them have the names, titles, and lineage of their occupants carved on their stone.

  Unlike the upper levels, the crypts are intact. The many, many ghosts who roam the place attack any would-be vandals and thieves en masse, so the duergar stay away from here.

  The ghosts will not bother the PCs at first, but will attack as above if they try to damage or steal from the crypts. The group should take care to remain on their best behavior while in this area.

  Theme Tie-Ins and Impressions

  The PC theme that’s most interested in Gauntlgrym is definitely the Heir of Delzoun. Finding this place is their life’s goal, so if your party includes one or more Heirs Gauntlgrym is going to be a vitally important place for the campaign.

  For the Heir and most other characters who might be interested in finding the city, the true treasure here is all the historical and genealogical information contained in the crypt walls. It’s a major archaeological finding all by itself, which is reason enough for Oghma’s Faithful, but it’s even more valuable to the Heir and perhaps even to the Neverwinter Noble. All dwarves, and a lot of human nobles, keep pretty detailed genealogies of their own clans and families and these would be easy to connect to the ones in display here.

  If the Noble could prove that their house is older than Neverwinter itself, then they might have an unassailable claim to the throne! And if the Heir’s ancestors are important enough, they might have a strong claim to Gauntlgrym’s throne, or perhaps to that of one of its successor states.

  Of course, not everyone would be happy with these findings. There are plenty of dwarven nobles out there who built their prestige on forged lineages, and who would not want the world to discover this fact. And many others who would be more than happy to pull a Beloq and kill the PCs before they can announce their findings to the world, so that they can claim the credit.

  The “default” way to arrive at Gauntlgrym is to navigate the river of flame beneath Mount Hotenow, but there could be other paths as well. Maybe they could take a detour through Hotenow’s Shadowfell reflection, or maybe there’s a mystical path similar to Shadowfell Road that takes those who follow it properly to the mithral gates.

  In the next post, we dig too greedily and too deep.

• Oct 10, 2023

  The Coiled Spring

  

  The Coiled Spring is an amulet made of brass. It’s disc shaped and about an inch thick. On its front, there is a relief of a snake eating its own tail, the classic Ouroboros. The inside of the ring formed by the snake is a clear crystal panel, through which can be seen a spring like that of a watch.

  That spring can store up to ten Fatigue Points which can be used to enable bursts of extra effort - most often Extra Effort in Combat (p. B357), but also other athletic feats. The stored FP can only be used for those purposes, and is not affected by negative effects that would sap the user’s own FP. In other words, it works just like the Heroic Reserves advantage from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 20: Slayers, and almost like a power item for martial characters.

  The main difference between the Coiled Spring and a normal Power Item is that it hijacks the natural recovery processes of the wearer’s body in order to “wind” itself, and cannot be recharged by the usual methods for power items. While the Spring is not at full capacity, its wearer is unable to recover their own Fatigue Points, and the amulet gains 1 FP every 10 minutes. This is a constant rate - traits which speed up FP recovery for the wearer have no effect on the amulet. The wearer regains their usual ability to rest when the amulet is fully charged, or when it’s removed (which stops the charging process).

  While this does mean recharging the Coiled Spring in town is effectively free, it can make dungeon delving more complicated for martial characters, particularly if the GM enforces rules like fatigue costs for fighting a battle (p. B426 or DF Exploits p. 60). Characters who normally can’t use Fatigue Points can wear the Coiled Spring and use it to benefit from the Extra Effort rules in and out of combat, though they can’t recharge it.

  Scholars who know of the Spring speculate that it was originally meant to allow golems and other constructs to surpass their limits. In an adventure, it will most likely be found worn by such a construct, or by an elite warrior who figured out it works just as well for organics. If found in a chest or hoard, though, it will always start out empty.

  If the delvers try to sell the Coiled Spring, or if you decide it’s available in shops, its monetary value is twice that of a Power Item of the same capacity. That’s $3400 for the 10 FP version described here, though you could have versions with greater or smaller capacity. Note that you can’t double-dip and use the Coiled Spring as a Power Item.

  Variant Springs are possible. Maybe the Flywheel of Faith can power divine magic, the Arcane Array wizardly spells, and the Goddess Gyre druidic ones. The recharging mechanics and all other restrictions are the same. They could allow a construct who can’t normally cast spells or use casting magical items due to a lack of FP to do so.

• Oct 8, 2023

  Hacking Without a Hacker

  

  Whether called a hacker, a decker, or a netrunner, the person who invades computer systems and makes them do things features prominently in the stories most cyberpunk RPGs take inspiration from, and so often ends up being a vitally important archetype in those games. However, they tend to have a very mixed track record when it comes to actually presenting you with a hacking system that’s fun and bug-free.

  This means there are many possible reasons for why you might find yourself planning a cyberpunk game but have no cause or wish to use its hacking rules. Maybe none of the players wants to be a hacker, or maybe the group just doesn’t like the rules of the game in question. In those cases, a popular suggestion is to include a NPC hacker, and in this post we’ll discuss a way to do so that keeps the rest of the group reasonably involved in the hacking. Rules are for GURPS, but the concepts can be easily translated to other systems.

  Work From Home

  The current best practice in games that include hacker PCs is to devise ways to keep the hacker together with the rest of the party, so that they can fully participate in the game even when it’s not hacking time. When your group’s hacker is an NPC, however, the best thing to do is the opposite. Hacker NPCs should always do their thing remotely.

  Managing NPCs who constantly accompany the party is a tricky affair. A character who’s much weaker than the party runs the risk of turning the adventure into a video-game-style escort quest, one of the most reviled types of mission in existence. One who is strong enough to protect themselves can end up becoming a GMPC, a label reserved for annoying characters who overshadow the players and make them feel like the support cast of someone else’s story.

  All of this is subjective, which makes it even trickier. Your group’s fun will be hurt if they feel either of those scenarios is happening, even if the math is well-balanced.

  A remote hacker removes most of the risk. They’re in communication with the group, and they can do the jobs covered by their niche, but any other challenge that can be handled by the PC’s own skills should be, even if it’s technological in nature. And there are things the hacker can only do with on-site support from the PCs, which keeps them involved in the actual hack even if you’re not engaging with those rules.

  The exact nature of these support tasks depends on how your specific setting handles computers and hacking. Most games either go the same Retro way of early Shadowrun and CP2020, or a more “Modern” way that uses more recent tropes such as the ones employed by Shadowrun 4th Edition or CP2077. We’ll look at how you can accommodate a remote NPC hacker in both.

  The Future of Another Timeline

  It’s not immediately obvious to us here in 2023, but the earliest iterations of Shadowrun’s Matrix and CP2020’s NET were based on a pre-Internet model of networked computing. Strip all the futuristic terms from their description and you’ll find out you’re dealing with 80s mainframes. This lies at the root of a lot of things there that can look a bit weird or silly to modern readers¹. Here’s a short and approximately correct explanation for how that works:

  Mainframes are huge (and hugely expensive) computers that are usually responsible for handling all data processing for an entire company or organization. They were the dominant form of institutional computing from around the 1950s to at least the early 1990s, and never really went away.

  A mainframe is operated through remote terminals, which can be in the same building or even off-site. Therefore, it must be ready to receive connections and requests from these terminals. And the way you do that in the 80s is through phone lines and modems. They do have internal security measures to authenticate users and prevent one user from seeing or changing other users’ data, but there is no such thing as a firewall because permanent Internet connections are not yet a thing for mainframes. The most security you can add to the connection step is to keep the numbers for your mainframe’s phone lines unlisted².

  And this is why both Shadowrun’s and CP2020’s descriptions of their “global nets” are so concerned about splitting them into geographical regions and assigning codes to them and the servers within them. That net is not the Internet, but a world-spanning phone circuit. The first step to hacking into that corporate mainframe is to dial the unlisted number of its modem³.

  Old-School Remote Hacking

  When you have a PC hacker in these more “retro” games, the number of the target’s modem line might be included with the mission briefing, letting them hack removely. It’s more likely that no number is included, then the hacker has to go in with the group and find an terminal in the target facility through which they could connect.

  With a hacker NPC and they have the number, the reason the adventure is happening at all is because the mission objectives have a physical component that must happen at the same time. The typical setup is that you need to steal the physical prototype while the hacker grabs the research files.

  If they don’t have the number, then discovering the number becomes one of the physical mission objectives! The place the PCs are infiltrating might not even have any direct relation to the real, final objective, but it could be a place that also uses the same mainframe remotely. The number is going to be written down somewhere in there, either in an official manual, some employee’s personal notes or even a scrap of paper that was carelessly thrown away⁴. Some non-VR-dungeon hacking of a physical terminal to peek at its configuration might be necessary, which might be resolved by a couple of rolls since dumb terminals are less secure than the mainframe they talk to. Or you might need to find a way to scam the info out of an someone who works there (“social engineering”).

  This fact-finding expedition could be a whole adventure in itself, or it might just be an intermediate step in a more complex operation where the group must also infiltrate the final target facility at the same time as the hacker does their thing, as outlined above.

  Twenty Minutes From Now

  More recent cyberpunk games tend to base their networks on the real-world Internet and the technologies that support it. This means that every individual device attached to a network is effectively a full-feature computer, be it an employee’s workstation, a security camera, or a guard’s smartphone. Different departments have their own private servers and their own internal network that doesn’t necessarily connect to the others or to the outside world.

  Less sensitive facilities might allow employees to work remotely from their homes or from other buildings by letting them connect via virtual private networks. These connections to happen over the Internet, but they’re encrypted and protected from general snooping. Realistically, our dastardly hacker would need to steal valid credentials to be able to access a VPN.

  On the other extreme, a top-secret secure facility might be air-gapped, which means it’s isolated and sealed in such a way that no signal can enter or leave the building. None of its internal networks are connected to the outside world, and they are not connected to each other either unless this is absolutely necessary. The servers controlling the security system are isolated from the servers housing sensitive data. Each has its own independent set of protections.

  This is both realistic according to our contemporary understanding of network security, and an excellent way to make sure PC hackers stick with the group and have plenty to do once inside. Individual hacking attempts tend to be shorter but more numerous, and made against devices that are within the hacker’s immediate reach⁵. Shadowrun 4th Edition goes deep into this (5th and onwards go back to the retro model), and it’s also more or less how things work in Cyberpunk 2077.

  New-School Remote Hacking

  In an environment so full of incentives for the hacker to stick with the party, how can you accommodate a remote NPC hacker?

  If the target facility has a VPN that contains the data you want, then many of the same “classic” techniques for acquiring those old-school mainframe phone numbers might also work to acquire valid VPN credentials, allowing the NPC to hack the place remotely.

  If it doesn’t have a VPN or is completely isolated, then we need to resort to quantum bullshit. Below we’ll see GURPS stats for the bullshit in question, imported directly from Warframe. It’s easily usable in other systems, though.

  

  A datamass is a device similar in concept to the causality communicator in Ultra-Tech page 45, but much cheaper. It consists of an armored, briefcase-sized device that incorporates several kinds of data cable plus laser and IR micro-communicators and a small radio (GURPS Ultratech pages 43-44). All of these are connected to a sizable amount of quantum-entangled matter.

  Datamasses are made in entangled pairs that allow high-bandwidth communication and data transfer between elements of the pair through any amount of barriers or interference. They have DR 10, HP 8, cost $5000 for the pair, weight 5kg (10 lb) each, and are LC1 (AKA super illegal). They also include an emergency self-destruct switch that melts the internals of both elements of the pair and can be triggered from either side.

  In your typical cyberpunk setting, datamasses were first invented as super-secret espionage tools by a major government or computer-focused megacorp, and initially gave them a major leg up in one of the many ongoing cold wars between such entities. The secret of their existence soon leaked, however, and an enterprising independent engineer figured out they were quite easy to make with a properly modified home 3d printer. Yes, even the entangled matter. The plans for a home-baked datamasses were soon made widely available on the Net, and they keep popping up no matter how much effort the corps spend to squash them. That’s why they’re relatively cheap.

  Datamass technology is going to be really revolutionary when FTL travel is invented in the distant future, but for now it’s mostly used for its original purpose, and allows teams of plucky street mercs like the PCs to operate at the same level as crack corporate commandos when it comes to high-level espionage. If the PCs are hired to do a hacking mission, they will usually be provided a datamass pair. PCs can also buy their own through the usual illegal channels available to PCs in these games. It should be difficult, but not impossible.

  In a setting that has datamasses, hacking missions look a lot like the Warframe “mobile defense” missions these devices come from. The PCs need to sneak into the target facility carrying a datamass, and find a place where to connect it. A direct cable connection to a machine in the target network is best. A wi-fi connection will do in a pinch, but will make everything that follows take longer.

  Since the hacker is an NPC, you don’t need to roll anything for the actual hack - you just need to give the PCs a time frame for when it will be done. And then they must stay near the datamass and guard it until that much time has elapsed. If they snuck in, they need to find a way to maintain stealth and divert security attention from their access point. If they’re found out, it turns into a fight, but they still must stay until the hack is done or it will fail. For added Fun(TM), a difficult mission might require the party to do this several times from different access points.

  The self-destruct switch is useful for when the hack is done, as it allows the party to leave without having to lug the datamass back out. It can also prevent the hacker from being traced if the device is captured. Or it can be used in a double-cross that leaves the team stranded in enemy territory without network support. Use that last one sparingly!

  1. Alas, it’s not related to the whole VR Dungeon thing. That’s weird and silly for other reasons. ↩

  2. The real-world practice of wardialing consisted of dialing every number in a big list or an entire area code looking for accessible modems. ↩

  3. And you can absolutely go wardialiing there. The Genesis version of Shadowrun even implements it. ↩

  4. The real world hacking practice of dumpster diving consists in searching a company’s trash for discarded papers with valid passwords and credentials written down on them. ↩

  5. Anywhere from “directly plugged in” to “in the same local wi-fi network”. ↩

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