Posts
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Let's Read Neverwinter: Beyond Evernight
The last couple of posts have already covered all important locations inside Evernight, so now we leave town to look at its surroundings.
Burning Woods
Turns out the surroundings are mostly on fire!
The Shadow reflection of the Neverwinter Wood started burning when Mount Hotenow erupted and never stopped. The fire spread through the whole forest and the trees still smolder decades after any mundane plant would have been reduced to ash.
Travelers going from the city to the Wood first wade through a wasteland where they’re calf-deep in ash sprinkled with embers. The smoke in the air becomes thicker and thicker, with a color identical to that of the ash on the ground, resulting in very poor visibility all around. Sometimes they’ll get ambushed by burrowing undead jumping from the ash.
At the forest itself the road splits into several twisty forest trails that weave through the incandescent trees. Despite being a navigational hazard themselves, these trails are the only usable paths through the forest, and the many bandits and predators who somehow live here know this. Where the world has waterways, the Burning Wood has rivers of lava streaming from Hotenow.
Most of the Burning Wood has the extreme heat or pervasive smoke terrain features, often at the same time. There might also be some squares with more active fire-based hazards like cinder falls, caustic geysers, or the lava rivers. And there are stats for an Ash Tree hazard (har har) that will try to slam or grab passing PCs with its burning branches.
Den of the Hunters
Some sample opposition/dubious allies for the area. This band of erudite hunters has a temporary shelter in an earthen cave that’s protected from the heat and cinder falls. They’re made up of several mortal species, but their leaders are shadar-kai. They have a pack of “hounds” who are former humanoids corrupted by the Shadowfell, robbed of their sapience and reduced to walking on all fours.
The hunters welcome visitors, and would be happy to chat with the characters and provide them with shelter and a place to rest for a while. That peace is unlikely to last for very long, because soon it will be obvious that these hunters hunt people, and they’ll either invite the characters along or decide to hunt them. Either situation is likely to lead to violence.
Mount Hotenow
This Mount Hotenow is still erupting, making it much more dangerous than the one in Toril. Some of its caves are still navigable, and might contain portals to the middle world or the Elemental Chaos. These portals are usually controlled by elemental creatures from the same group that inhabits the mountain in Toril, but some of them also contain fire-themed undead.
Characters who have already fought and killed some of the elementals over in Toril’s Hotenow might find themselves having to fight their ghosts here. There’s also a small table with fire-themed heroic undead that could be found in the place.
There doesn’t seem to be much of interest here, despite all that. Most parties will only come here via a detour from the Toril version of the mountain as they descend to Gauntlgrym. Perhaps this detour is the only path forward, as the corresponding passages in the world are blocked by a cave in or some such.
Shadowfell Road
The Shadowfell Road is a ritual path. If you start at either end and follow the proper boundary markers (alleys, tree arches, mountain passes), the space-warping properties of the Shadowfell will carry you for a much larger distance than the one you end up walking. The Road starts at the Thayan outpost in Evernight, and ends in the Thayan city of Surcross.
Supplies for the Dread Ring arrive from Surcross via the Road, and then are taken to another Shadowfell portal just outside Evernight that leads directly to the fortress over in Toril.
To follow the Road you have so start at either Surcross or Evernight, otherwise the magic has no effect. Not all of the intermediate stops are in the Shadowfell either, or even located between the two physical ends. The Thayans usually travel in high enough number to discourage attack by monsters, but small parties of PCs won’t be so lucky.
The route along the road is not obvious. PCs who wish to follow it to Surcross will likely need to track a Thayan caravan that’s heading there to pick up supplies, or locate the next portal via applications of the Arcana skill. If they can’t find their way, they might need to travel back to the campaign area the hard way. This is an excellent opportunity to include Shadowfell-based side adventures, though I imagine your players might not be as happy about that as you.
The book presents some of the stops along the way, in the order one would find them when going from Evernight to Surcross.
Endless Alleys
The portals leading to this place are easy to spot, because there will be a bunch of empty Thayan wagons parked near them, probably guarded by undead. They keep them in reserve at both ends because this area has to be traveled on foot.
This is an endless series of alleys. The buildings on either side are tall and have no windows or doors. They go on forever - turning a corner leads only to more alleys. It’s possible to climb to the roofs, and the view from up there is an endless expanse of nondescript roofs with alleys between them.
After they’ve been here for a little bit, the PCs will start to see phantom children holding toys. Their faces are expressionless but they giggle in an unsettling manner. The ghosts will try to hug the characters, but their touch inflicts necrotic agony. When one is destroyed, the child vanishes and the toy drops to the ground, whining in disappointment as it dissolves. You can use any kind of level-appropriate incorporeal undead stat block for them.
Still Waters
This stretch of the Road is a swamp that looks exactly like you’d expect a Shadowfell swamp to look. The road is made up of a bunch of logs lashed together, and it branches off at points, going to gods-know-where.
There are small communities living here in small villages that can be seen off in the distance. Their inhabitants move around on pole barges and keep to themselves, but if you look closely you’ll notice they all wear blindfolds. That’s because if you spot your own reflection in the water it will animate and try to drown you.
Obsidian Ziggurat
This part of the Road goes through an abandoned village, cutting right through its center. The village itself is unremarkable, but the giant obsidian ziggurat looming just outside it is very noticeable. The platform at the top of the pyramid sometimes shows torchlight and moving shadows, though there are no shapes casting them. They dance to the beat of an unhread drum.
The shadows make an attack against the Will of anyone watching them. Those who are hit feel compelled to climb the steps of the ziggurat and join in their dancing. Those who end up dancing for a minute or more are teleported to a similar ziggurat in the world, in an area called the Lake of Salt. They’ll appear among the snaketongue cultists and were-snakes that were performing a ritual and are the ones actually casting those shadows in the Shadowfell. Hilarity will ensue.
Those who get trapped like this can return to the Shadowfell Road by destroying the altar in the Lake of Salt pyramid.
Village of the Mad Druid
This is a peaceful village full of people who are thriving as much as can be expected in the Shadowfell… except that they all wear hilariously bad undead disguises. You see, the village’s protector is an eladrin druid named Shalanka, with stats as a twilight incanter. She went insane and has come to believe that undeath is the natural order of things, therefore she must protect the undead and kill the living. She is aided in this by a menagerie of undead animals.
Shalanka’s grip on reality is tenuous enough that the amateur hour disguises of the citizens can fool her, and she does act as an effective protector for them. She lets the Thayans pass through unmolested because she doesn’t have the strength to oppose their large force, but she’ll feel pretty confident about her chances of killing the PCs. Shalanka isn’t really evil, tough, and PCs who don’t want to deprive the village of its protector might get bad disguises of their own to avoid a fight or perhaps even try to heal her mind.
Impressions
I love the idea of a ritual road, and I love that it seems to be a license to add surreal and bizarre locations to a campaign. While I wouldn’t call the other locations in the campaign “mundane”, the example ones here stand out for how evocative and weird they are.
I also really like the imagery of the ash-choked, eternally burning woods. The book really sells how dreary it is, and how hard it is to see anything. But there’s not much reason to go there unless the GM places an important objective somewhere in the woods. I wonder what Shandarar’s Shadow looks like.
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The Great Tabletop Hackaton: Cyberpunk RED, Part 2
I still think this cover is cool. After creating both our netrunner and the systems she needs to hack, we can start the actual run.
Run Summary
G0blin Jr. goes in with the physical team, they get past the reception, and as the rest of the team pretends to work she locks herself in the bathroom to try and hack the security server.
We are cheating a bit here, because it turns out you need to be within six meters and within line of sight of an access point to hack the corresponding architecture. I don’t want to actually map the whole office out like I would in a real adventure, so we’re kind of assuming the wireless networks here have the same coverage as in the SR 4 version. They want to track where all guards and guests are at all times so there are security server access points in each room, covering the whole office.
G0blin Junior’s strategy is to be meticulous and defeat each piece of ice as it comes up, to avoid having them pile up on her. Still, even a meticulous approach looks like a brutal all-out-assault here.
Security Server
Junior has no problem dealing with the Skunk ice at the top layer in the first turn. She then uses the Pathfinder net ability to see deeper into the server and rolls well enough to see the whole thing, even past the Password wall. She now knows the exact route she must take - down the left branch to disable the alarm and camera, and all the way down the right branch to unlock the back door and plant a Virus to keep these things disabled after she logs out.
A quick peek at the files on level 3 sees they’re worthless, and then it’s on to the main event: the fight against the Hellhound/Killer pair.
She beats the Hellhound in the contested roll, but loses to the Killer and so loses a program at random: the Eraser. It’s completely destroyed. We’ll be generous and assume she has backed-up copies at home, but they can’t be restored within this run.
Fearing for her software more than for her brain, Junior focuses her attacks this first turn on the Killer, destroying it after 2 Sword attacks.
After that we’re in for a slugging match with the Hellhound. It attacks once per turn but always goes first, with Junior spending her 3 net actions per turn on two Sword attacks and one Zap.
A good roll by the Hellhound in the following turn deals only 3 damage to Junior (thanks to her Armor program), but also sets her on fire. She will begin taking 2 points of damage per turn until she spends a Meat Action to deal with that. And she can’t afford to spend any Meat Actions now.
A series of bad rolls on her part mean she misses her first turn of attacks, so has to take more burn damage next turn. Fortunately the Hellhound fails to damage her, and she can finish it off then. But she needs to wait for another turn and 2 more burn points to be able to put out the fire: you cannot spend a Meat Action in a turn where you spend Net Actions and vice-versa.
Junior is down a program and 20% of her HP so far. Fortunately she doesn’t have any problem going down the Architecture’s left branch and disabling the alarm and camera.
The Skunk at the top of the right branch doesn’t give her any trouble. Turns out Skunks are harmless when fought alone. The Asp in the next level beats the initiative contest and destroys her Armor program, though it goes down to the usual Sword, Sword, Zap combination.
Junior reaches the bottom of the security server, unlocks the door, and spends 2 Net Actions creating a Virus that will keep the security devices off after she logs out. She then Cloaks her efforts and jacks out.
Total time taken for the security server: 19 minutes.
Secret Server
A slightly singed G0blin Jr. follows her teammates to the records room and jacks into the secret server she finds there.
The password is a breeze to blow through, and a good Pathfinder roll lets her see all the way to the bottom of the server. The Skunk is easily defeated by turn 3 of this hack. The Wisp loses initiative and goes down before it can act. The Hellhound wins initiative and further burns out poor netrunner’s brain, leaving her with 17 remaining HP since she has no more Armor program.
She manages to kill it with lucky Sword strikes before it can attack again, but has to take 2 burn damage and spend a Meat Action extinguishing the fire. She successfully IDs the evidence file and copies it. She knows there’s a Killer further down but she’s hurt and down 2 programs, so she doesn’t risk engaging it in order to cover her tracks. Junior jacks out.
Time for this hack: 10 minutes.
The team has fulfilled their mission, but unlike the hackers of every other game, G0blin Jr. decides discretion is the better part of valor. She’s half-dead, down two very important programs, and that office net might have another Hellhound like the two others she jacked into today (it doesn’t, but the doesn’t know that). Plus there’s a chance that a firefight is ongoing in the meat world.
The team leaves with the evidence, but without the money.
Junior deciding to give on the money and just leave is the sensible roleplaying choice. All netrunners are brave folks by definition, but someone who names herself after a goblin would probably not be suicidally brave.
But What If She Was?
What if our Goblin had decided to brave the office network in her present state, after all? What if she had thrown caution to the wind, messaged WITNESS ME to her companions, and dove in?
She would have succeeded in 10 minutes, but just barely. The Asp takes out both her Sword programs, and two max damage rolls from the Wisp leave her with a measly 3 HP before she could derezz it and drain the office accounts.
Junior is probably not making it out of the office if any sort of fight erupts. And if she does a good chunk of that money is going to pay for her hospital bills. Her teammates will probably begin calling her “Crispy” if she survives.
Total Time Elapsed: 29 minutes if she doesn’t go for the money, 39 (and a lot of pain) if she does.
Analysis and Impressions
29 minutes is well within our tolerance for a manageable amount of time, so we can say that CP RED’s system remains fast. It took around 12 minutes for Junior to disable the camera and alarm, which is about what I consider the upper limit on the time you can keep the rest of the team waiting. You could cut to the physical team at that time and go turn by turn to keep everyone moving.
Disabling the door has to happen in the same hack because the system resets when the netrunner jacks out, but that’s an additional 7 minutes so it’s OK. The secret server hack takes 10.
Going for the “easy” office server after being beaten up by the first two does indeed border on the suicidal. It’s fast at 10 minutes, but not worth it. Cutting your losses and leaving is a perfectly rational decision.
Because ye gawds is this system brutal.
Stealth is not a thing in these rules. The closest thing is the Slide ability, but that apparently only works to escape combat, not to avoid it. Most ICE threatens to either permanently destroy your programs or directly damage your HP, and if I understood the rules directly they get a free and automatic hit against you if they beat that contested initiative roll.
So avoiding combat is impossible, and getting out unscathed is extremely unlikely. I feared I made the CP 2020 data fortress too easy, and here I think I made things too difficult by having three decent-sized Architectures generated with the random system. It looks like CP RED wants a single big Architecture per adventure instead of a bunch of scattered smaller ones. If there are smaller ones, they should be tiny with at most a single piece of ICE or Demon, to help preserve the netrunner for the main event.
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The Great Tabletop Hackaton: Cyberpunk RED
I still think this cover is cool. In this post we’ll take a look at Cyberpunk RED, the current edition of Cyberpunk-the-game. It’s meant to be the followup to Cyberpunk 2020, and in a nice bit of synchronicity it was published in 2020. It’s kind of a companion piece to the Cyberpunk 2077 computer game, since according to the foreword the two works started being made at around the same time.
CP RED provides what the critics of previously attempted 2020 sequels most wanted: more of the same. It takes the 2020 setting forward to 2045 by essentially doing a copy-and-paste on the timeline to extend it, so you have a new and improved ecological collapse, a new and improved corp war that leaves plenty of cybered-up veterans, and so on. Of course, it’s not an exact copy and a lot of things are different, but the tone is almost exactly the same as 2020.
One of the things that underwent a big change was the Net, which we’ll look at now.
Setting Overview
The Net of Cyberpunk RED contains about the same amount of space magic as its 2020 ancestor, but it looks different. Somewhere around 2023 or so, iconic netrunner Rache Bartmoss releases a bunch of data-destroying rabid AIs into the old Net. They do so much damage that the authorities who oversee the old telecom grid decide to shut it down entirely, in the process undoing the spell that made the use of virtual reality possible.
Nowadays there’s still the notion that the Net is a parallel dimension, but it’s a dangerous and fractured one. Each city has their own small Net realm, isolated from the world by firewalls, and in between you have the wild and wooly domains of rogue AIs and demon programs. Why do we need firewalls to keep them at bay if there are no physical lines connecting them to us any more? Shut up, that’s why. Any similarity between this and Shadowrun’s deep astral planes is probably a coincidence, which is kind of a waste in my opinion.
Inside the city nets, someone came up with a new spell in 2035 that once again let people see the virtual aspect of the Net in a simplified form. Now you can put on a set of “Virtuality” goggles and see the parallel dimension of the Net overlaid over the physical world, with every connected object having a corresponding icon. The main difference here is that more things have icons, and you can no longer leave your body behind.
Standard users mostly use the city nets through devices called Agents, which are a bit like slightly smarter smartphones. They can use these for pretty much everything we’d use the Internet for, except that they’re just accessing the local city net.
Hackers are still called netrunners, and they still use cyberdecks. The servers they hack are named Architectures, and can represent any device complex enough to be the target of a netrun, not just mainframes. Due to the even stronger “parallel dimension” metaphor here, you can only hack an Architecture if you’re within about six meters of one of its physical access points. Netrunners can no longer work from home. Devices not complex enough to warrant an Architecture (including Agents) can be tampered with using electronics skills.
Mechanics Overview
Hackers are still named netrunners. To do their job they need the Interface skill, interface plugs, “Virtuality” glasses and a cyberdeck. Cyberdecks in RED look like their portable ancestors in 2020 and come in three generic tiers that differ by the number of Option Slots they have (5, 6 or 7). Each Option Slot lets you install a program or hardware expansion in your deck. Decks are not uniquely expensive - their prices are in line with other types of specialist gear in the book. Once you earn more money you can perhaps buy an armored jumpsuit with a deck compartment that gives it an extra slot.
Most actions you can perform in a netrun can be done with the Interface skill alone, including a basic attack. The roll is almost always 1d10 + Interface against a difficulty set by the Architecture you’re hacking. Programs come in three categories: “boosters” that can give bonuses to some of those basic rolls, “attackers” that act as better weapons than your basic attack, and “defenders” that reduce or negate damage while they’re active.
Netrunning happens faster than physical combat. Characters only get one “meat action” per turn, but netrunners get a number of “Net actions” proportional to their Interface skill. Some net tasks require meat actions, but you can’t use net actions to do physical tasks. Programs that need to be actively used take a net action to activate and can only be used once per turn, so there’s an advantage to having multiple copies of the same attack program loaded. Controlling a physical device takes a Net action, but each device can only perform one action per turn as well.
Architectures are relatively abstract and modeled as tables. Each row in the table is a level in the architecture, and it contains one thing. That thing could be a file, a controllable device, or a security program. Netrunners start at level 1 and can move down one level at a time. They don’t know what’s in a level until they get there for the first time, and possibly pass some tests to analyze the thing they find. If it’s a security program, it will prevent them from descending further until dealt with. The stuff they want to steal or sabotage tends to be in the middle or lower levels of an architecture, protected by a few security layers. They can move through already-explored layers freely.
Security programs range from password barriers to Black Ice, which is very dangerous and can move through the architecture to chase a netrunner. It’s pretty much a monster that you need to fight or die trying. Netrunners can also run Black Ice from their decks, and order them to kill other netrunners or programs in combat, but they take up 2 slots instead of 1. Black Ice tends to attack right away - forget stealth for the most part.
Another type of security program is the Demon, whose main purpose is to control physical devices like turrets, drones, and traps to fight intruders. They’re relatively weak at Net combat, but it’s hard to find and destroy a Demon that’s shooting at your meat with a pair of heavy machine gun turrets…
Run Parameters
I don’t think there’s a ready-made sample netrunner in the book, but the book does include all we need to generate a quick-and-dirty one so let’s do that. I think I do have some supplements that might have suitable ready-made Architectures that fit our purposes, but if they do not then we can generate one.
Our Netrunner: G0blin Jr., daughter of G0blin.
Proudly carrying on the family tradition. Lazy but lucky.
INT 7 REF 6 DEX 7 TECH 7 COOL 6 WILL 3 LUCK 6 MOVE 5 BODY 6 EMP 5
HP: 35 Death Save: 6
Cyberware Capacity: 14/60
Skills
Interface 4. Other stuff from the Netrunner Street Rat Pack as it becomes relevant.
Cyberware
Neural Link, Interface Plugs, Shift Tacts.
Equipment
- Very Heavy Pistol with 30 rounds
- whole-body Light Armorhack (SP 11)
- Agent
- Cyberdeck (7 slots)
- Virtuality Goggles
- Programs: Armor, Sword x 2, Worm, Eraser.
- Clothes.
Our Target Systems
As for our target system, I could have made a single architecture for everything, and the examples I have here kinda point in that direction, but I really feel like this would benefit from the same approach as Shadowrun 4th Edition.
So we’ll have three Architectures here. One for the office network, one for the security server, and one for the secret server. All individually small, but the latter two with somewhat elevated security for their size. I’ll use the random generator to help me with this.
Office network is Basic and has 7 levels, Security server is Standard and has 9 with a branch, the secret server is Standard and has 6.
Office Network:
- Password DV 6
- Skunk
- Asp
- File (DV6) - Worthless
- Password DV 6
- Wisp
- File (DV8) -> Accounts
Security Server
- Skunk
- Password DV 8
- File DV8 - logs, worthless
- Hellhound, Killer
Left Branch
- Control DV8 - Camera
- Control DV8 - Alarm Sensors, as Camera.
Right Branch
- Skunk
- Asp
- Control DV8 - Door
Secret Server
- Password DV8
- Skunk
- Wisp
- Hellhound
- File DV10 - The Evidence
- Killer
We’ll soon see how Junior manages these systems. I relied more on the random generator here than on my own judgment, it might be that this ends up being too hard.
My predictions are: since there is a lot of black ice in there, we’ll see plenty of combat, but I also expect this to go fast. Either Junior kills everything and completes the objective, or she dies fairly early while hacking the security server. Probably while fighting the Killer/Hellhound duo.
If the worst happens, I’ll adjust the difficulty down a bit and try for a successful run, timing how long that took.
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The Great Tabletop Hackaton: Shadowrun 4th Edition, Part 2
Shadowrun 20th Anniversary's cover. After setting up our parameters in the previous post, we start the run here.
I actually ran this one a couple of times, because it took me a bit to fully internalize the rules. My main mistake was assuming I was familiar with them already and only reading them superficially to “refresh my memory”. This made me get some crucial basic facts wrong, causing my first run to be really fast but incorrect.
So I made an additional run where I tracked the die rolls accurately and got detected in one of the hacks. Then I read the rules outside of the Matrix chapter more closely and made another one where I spent Edge more wisely and accomplished all goals without being detected. I’m referring to these as the loud and silent runs. They are recorded below as a single account with notes on how they diverge.
Diff-merging Timelines
Our hacker enters the building with is team. They get past the reception as usual, receiving temporary badges. Once inside, he feels a “sudden” need to go to the bathroom, and locks himself inside a stall. He spends a couple of turns scanning for the badge’s wireless signal, and finds it.
He then tries to hack into the badge, still using AR because it’s a fragging’ badge. He succeeds quickly. As expected the badge can’t do a lot, but it knows how to talk to the security server and now so does the hacker.
Our hacker then switches to VR and goes hot, after bracing himself so he doesn’t fall down in the stall. He tries to get himself security-level access because he knows from examining the badge that user-level accounts do nothing in this server.
This is where our timelines diverge. In the loud run, he gets in but also gets detected. The server issues a restricted alert against his persona, triggers the Blackout ice, and pings the guards. Restricted alert means the server’s Firewall increases by +4 against the hacker.
The hacker and the IC go into cybercombat, with the hacker winning initiative. Cybercombat here resembles the SR1 version a bit, though the exact things you roll are different. With the expenditure of a couple points of Edge, our hacker manages to destroy the ice at the start of the second combat turn, without suffering any trauma to his brain meats. Still, in this timeline the guards are suspicious of the team.
In the silent run, luckier rolls let the hacker in without being detected.
In both, the hacker manages to disable the camera and alarm, letting the team move into the records room. While they perform a physical search for hard copies, our hacker jacks into the secret isolated server and goes into hot sim VR again. He manages to get in undetected, though in the silent run he has to spend the Edge he didn’t spend in combat to do so.
I rule that finding the files requires no tests, as this is only a single node and the existing data search rules are for searching the Matrix.
Still in the records room, our hacker decides to be daring and hack the office network in search of those drainable accounts. This network has a wireless signal covering the whole office and is quite visible, so he gets right to it.
At first, our decker easily hacks himself a user account. From there he runs a data search on the network’s user directory to find the one who has access to the bank accounts, and then attempts to gain access to it. I give this a low Threshold because it’s a small intranet.
Finding the accountant’s profile, the hacker attempts to hack into it. That’s like starting from scratch, this time going for a security account. Again the hacker manages to get in undetected, and again in the silent run he needs to spend Edge to do this.
Draining the account requires no additional rolls. And since our hacker retained his account at the security server, unlocking the back door requires no rolls either. Of course, in the loud timeline there’s a very high chance that they’re doing this during a firefight, as the guards are extra-suspicious and would have known to check the records room…
The loud run that had cybercombat and an alert took 31 minutes. The silent one took 17.
Run Analysis and Impressions
This system is my personal favorite so far, and I had to actively keep myself from adding little cool bits that kept appearing in my imagination, because I’d otherwise would have found myself running an entire solo adventure, controlling the whole team and imagining dialogue in my head.
Having “my” character be present with the group certainly helped stir the imagination, because he wasn’t sitting pretty at home. I had to think about how he navigated the physical site with the rest of the group, and from where he’d jack into VR to avoid suspicion, and so on.
I do love that the system was very fast compared to the other ones so far, but I wonder how much of that is down to the design of the target nodes. I’d love to hear about how people design their own adventures.
We can see how Shadowrun’s system still favors silent runs here. Cybercombat against even a single instance of ICE takes a while to resolve, and the more of it there is the longer the run will take. Careless hackers could easily find themselves having to deal with multiple ICE cubes at once, perhaps even in different hosts, and that will drastically lower their chances of success. More advanced rules let hackers run their own agent programs, which helps fighting the icy hordes but makes things take more real time to solve.
That said, let’s see how our sample runs here fit with the physical team’s.
If we again assume the physical part of the run takes 50 minutes for a perfectly stealthy team and 90 minutes with a firefight on the way out, then it’s also possible to correlate our diverging runs to each of these scenarios. The perfectly sneaky run would mean a perfectly sneaky hack. The loud run would almost certainly be caused by that alert we got, unless our talker was amazing at their job.
So, in the more common silent/silent and loud/loud scenarios, our hacker took up around 25% of the total session time, which is pretty close to ideal in a four-player party. In an anomalous loud hack/silent run scenario, they take up a little under half the run time. And in a silent hack/loud run situation, they take around 15% of the time hacking the objectives and can spend the rest of their spotlight time helping out in physical combat.
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The Great Tabletop Hackathon: Shadowrun 4th Edition
Shadowrun 20th Anniversary's cover. For this post we’ll be using Shadowrun 4th Edition, published in 2005. More specifically, we’ll be using the 20th Anniversary core book published in 2009, which uses the same base rules as 4th Edition but incorporates errata and some material that was previously published in supplements.
Setting Overview
If Shadowrun 1e’s Matrix was inspired by 80s mainframes, then 4th edition’s is inspired by the Internet as it was in 2005, plus some reasonable extrapolations of things that were in fashion among futurists then but didn’t necessarily pan out in the following decades. It does end up looking a lot like what we actually have here in 2023, with a few important differences.
Instead of being built around high-speed cell towers, the mobile Matrix is a ubiquitous wireless mesh network. Individual devices in a mesh cooperate to route its network traffic without the need for central coordination.
The Internet of Things was also in fashion, so every object that could possibly have a use for built-in computing and network capability has that capability. Most of those devices are fairly limited, but computer hardware is apparently so cheap and standardized that many of them have unused capacity that could be repurposed by a clever hacker. One example is someone converting cheap appliances into mesh routers to to bring connectivity to a “dead zone”. It’s also easy to turn off a device’s wireless capability with a simple command or in some cases a physical switch.
Almost everyone carries a commlink, a device that’s equivalent to a real-world smartphone in form factor and usage. They often connect to a variety of peripherals, more limited devices that are built to talk to commlinks and not to the wider Matrix. These range from augmented-reality glasses to that smartlinked gun your character owns. A big server of the sort that’s the target of a hacking run is called a nexus. I will just say “server” instead.
Augmented Reality is a big deal here, with most things connected to a mesh having some sort of AR presence, and general interaction with your commlink and the Matrix happening through AR interfaces. If you can use AR to help with your current task you gain a bonus to the roll. Examples include finding your way around town with that handy videogame-style minimap, overlaying a blueprint and instructions over the thing you’re fixing, firing a smarlinked gun, finding someone in a crowd when you have a face-recognition database, and so on. One can also choose to go “full VR”, which more useful for certain applications (mainly hacking).
Secure facilities of the sort shadowrunners are hired to break into have internal mesh networks. They use tactics like limited signal ranges and radio-blocking paint to keep their signal contained to the physical space they service, and might not be connected to the wider Matrix at all. In some the paydata is going to be in a server that’s only accessible via wired connection or even via its own terminal. While sometimes it’s still possible for a hacker to work from home, they will most often have to hoof it alongside the rest of the team and take on devices and intranets as they come.
Just like it happens with Shadowrun 1e, a lot of criticism of this model comes from a mismatch between the person’s understanding of the modern (2023) Internet and the model they used to build the Matrix in the books. It’s a bit worse here both because of the usual edition warrior shenanigans, and because the differences are more obscure. On the bright side it’s a lot easier to change the explanation behind the Matrix to a 2023-current one here than it would be to do the same to Shadowrun 1e’s 80s extravaganza.
Mechanics Overview
Hacker characters are called, well, hackers. They use powerful commlinks and a suite of specialized software to hack mesh-connected devices. Most often this means some peripheral or commlink-level device like a camera, alarm, door or handy pieces of scenery like unattended cars and other things that can be used to ruin an enemy’s day. It can also mean hacking into a big nexus to steal data and generally do the same things you could do back in SR 1. All devices are described by the same set of attributes, and use the same types of programs.
Stuff like memory, storage, file sizes, and download speeds are still considerations in the fiction, but they don’t get detailed rules. Unless the GM judges a given chunk of data is too large, you can download it in one turn and store it in your commlink. Some really huge files might take multiple turns to download or might not fit your storage at all, and the GM decides when that’s the case based on common sense. You don’t need to worry about storing your run’s paydata, but you also can’t try to get cute and download the entire public Matrix into a talking teddy bear.
Hacking a device means obtaining illicit access to a user account inside it. If you have set of legitimate credentials for your target account then you don’t need to roll anything. Otherwise you can gain access by either probing the device over a period of hours or days, or by hacking on the fly. The latter is an aggressive approach that happens in combat time and carries a much higher risk of detection.
Hacking can be done in AR or VR. There are several advantages to doing it in VR, and even more for doing it with the safety limiters turned off (a condition known as “hot sim”). Hot sim is the preferred way to hack important nodes, but it also leaves you vulnerable to lethal damage from Black Ice.
There are three types of user account. Standard accounts can view and mess with their own data and perform basic functions of the device. Security accounts have access to more sensitive functions and thus are more protected. And administrator accounts are the most protected and have full control of everything. Individual nodes in adventure descriptions should also include a description of which account tiers they support and what those let users do.
It’s also possible to use a technique called “spoofing” to send single commands to nearby devices by pretending to be someone who’s authorized to do so. This is probably what you’re going to use for one-off environmental fuckery.
There is no Hacking Pool here, but all characters can spend Edge to boost any roll by doing things like rerolling failed dice.
Run Parameters
For the first time in this series our Hacker will be joining the physical team on-site. In this game, it’s common for a site to have more than one server, and for the really important ones to be isolated from the outside Matrix. This means the servers containing our main mission objectives can’t be hacked remotely.
As usual the core book provides us with a very handy sample Hacker which we can use for our run. This one’s an ork dude with an implanted commlink with all attributes at 5 and a full set of programs whose ratings vary between 2 and 5. His skills vary between 4 and 5 too. He’s better at sneaking around than at cybercombat, so we should take care not to trigger any alerts.
I don’t have a ready-made target site for him to hack, but I found this free document with some example sites and I’m going to take inspiration from this, from the SR1 mainframe, and from what little I know of real life to design a target network. Here it goes:
This company has a public site but that doesn’t get stats here because it’s hosted in some cloud provider elsewhere. It has an internal office network for its day to day business, separated from the Matrix by a beefy firewall. The firewall node is also not relevant to us because we’re hacking the site from the inside.
We’ll treat the entire office network as a single node: System 4, Response 4, Firewall 3, Analyze 2. User-level accounts allow each user to perform their daily work. The company’s accountant has a Security account that can access and manipulate the company’s money, and we need to breach it in order to steal that money. The network’s standard ice has Pilot 3, Analyze 3, Attack 3, Armor 3, and triggers when the node detects any unauthorized access. There’s another piece of ice here (Pilot 4, Analyze 4, Stealth 4, Track 4) that gets activated if the system detects unauthorized access to the security-tier account. It tries to trace the intruder’s connection and notifies the authorities when it succeeds.
Separate from the internal network, there is a security server in charge of alarms, cameras, badges and lockable doors. User accounts in this server let employee badges open some doors, but not the one that leads to the record room. Security accounts let their user operate alarms and cameras. The security server has its own wireless signal that covers the entire office, but it doesn’t connect to any other server and accounts on other hosts aren’t valid here. We want at least a Security account to perform most of our objectives. If the hacker is on site they might also try to spoof the individual devices.
The security server has System 4, Response 4, Firewall 4, Analyze 4. Its ice, which activates when an intruder is detected, has Pilot 4, Blackout 4, Armor 4. Any guards currently connected might also be alerted to the intruder. The server operates in hidden mode, so our hacker needs to find it before trying to hack it.
Cameras, alarms and doors attached to the security server all have Device Ratings of 3 and can be individually hacked or spoofed. Employee badges have Device Ratings of 2. All are subscribed to the security server.
The secret file server containing the evidence is located in the records room. It has no wireless interface at all, only a cable jack and a physical terminal. It has the same stats as the Security server: all stats at 4 plus Analyze 4. Its ice has Pilot 4, Black Hammer 4, and Armor 4, and is of course illegal for the target to possess. It has only security and admin accounts.
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