Yes (Unwired p. 173).

the endless archive? looks to me like a fluff building block to stack the search and retrieve data tasks on top of...

At p.173 Unwired states that the datas go back as far as computers do, so you can add a century worth of datas.
Seriiously, the Endless Archive, along the Great Connection and the Sift echo poses serious problems to the GM.

so it all hinges on someone managing to gain access to the "endless archive"...

sounds very similar to how the path to "real ultimate power" is found up some stairs in a valley in tibet, in some cloister in the clouds...

have fun finding it...

The mechanics to access the Endless Archive are described on p. 173 Unwired. It's a metaquest in all but name. Not really difficult for a TM.

Add a few Sift echoes and it is even easier.
Also the Great Connection (p.175) has a quite terrifying potential for exploitation.
Great Connection and Endless Archive are potentialy world breaking when the power that be has so much to hide (just think what happens if the TM finds the section in which are archived the schematics of a nanoforge, or the trasfer protocols of the ZO bank, or even better the file that the Big D left to Hestaby).

Or, worse, if the TM starts to use Erase Data (p. 175) on select pieces. I am not thinking of "erase all our criminal files" or such, but what if bank data is getting erased? Control programs for nuclear power plants? What about erasing the data for ICs protecting military launch sites?

I've never really allowed technomancers, drakes, AI players, free spirit players, or any of that in my games either. I guess I'm a bit of a purist that way.

Who's the idiot that leaves a nuclear plant connected to the matrix? If the system is isolated it won't work, otherwise Mitsuhama would have already lost bilions worth datas (as copyrights start to get erased by ticked off TMs).

Why Mitsuhama is still around, with ticked off TMs, is another question. Did they put all their data completely offline? Or how else do they protect themselves against such attacks? And banks need to have access to other banks, so erase data could wreak havoc on financial transactions.

And many systems are said to be online for updates and diagnosis.

TMs aren't all powerful, regular TMs are the same power level as hackers, even a little less at first. I haven't reviewed all the major juju in Unwired, but I'd bet that few if any TMs have mastered it yet, considering how new they are.

I'd be more open to the free spirit than the others, maybe AIs. Techno's drive me crazy in concept. Drakes are essentially unusable do to the astral image bit.

How many Magicians have access to the Metaplanes? And how many of them are actually criminals? And how much less Technomancers are there than Mages? And how long have they been around?

because there's lots of places in the SR world where people don't have the nuyen to get modded to look like a cat, or have crazy bone spikes sticking out of them all over the place, etc?

i mean, sure, if we're talking about a bunch of gangers in seattle, that's not unlikely at all. but deep in the barrens, where the poor and uneducated will follow anyone who promises them a better life? persecution of those who are different can be an extremely social tool, you know. having a convenient scapegoat for when 3-year-old billy got bitten by a devil rat and died may be a horrible thing to do, but that doesn't mean people won't do it to guarantee they continue to hold their place of power.

if it makes you feel any better, in such places they would probably also persecute those who get body mods to look like "freaks", for being sympathisers with the cursed ones though.

TMs don't even need it to be connected to the Matrix. That's the problem. With a metaquest, they can access ANY computer system on the planet. That's what makes it game breaking.

It clearly wasn't thought out.

- J.

or it was expected that the GM would basically say that "sorry, your quest turns up no available connection".

both the great connection and the endless library are, from what i can tell, described thru a in-character voice. so the capabilities of both places are theorized by a TM thats been there, but have i no way checked every last mm of the place, if thats even possible.

Indeed hobgoblin. Realm Searches are bound by what the GM wants.

What I disallow:

Infected. Even SR4 is not oWoD. No vampy-heavy games with me. Infected are monsters, and if they appear they will act as such, as intelligent, but fundamentally monstrous individuals driven well beyond the brink of sanity by their horrible disease. Putting them down is ultimatly doing them a favour. The way Infected PC are given in RC - how they <are retconned to be more in line with the player-friendly oWoD crap incarnations of the undead, is propably the single worst design decision SR4 has made so far. Also, it's pretty hard to rationalise anyone wanting to work with a wendigo - which, inevitably, you have to if some fool at the table really needs to play one.

Drakes. Now, they're not such an imbalance by themselves, and while being able to shift into a mini dragon is cheesy, it's of so limited practical use that cannot see why anyone would regard them as overpowered. mThey're not. However, the bad thing about them is how they, by their very being, are immense spotlight hogs and force the campaign in a way that revolves only about them and their troubles with either being a dragon possession (giving the PC much more power than is good) or being hunted by all dragons, inevitably dragging the PC down with them.

AI. Aside from being severely limited as PC, they also, like drakes, hog the spotlight and force their nature onto the campaign. Also, I never felt well with how people just accepted AI as a great new addition to society despite every singe AI prior to Emergence had been homicidal on a Stalin scale of horrible, their entry into the world involved one happy to bombard earth with bioweapons because it could not have it's way, and despite the new AI acting like their forefathers (Geneva from Feral Cities). Because they've got fluffy icons and Horizon says so don't cut it for me.

Technomancers. The third kind of character who forces a campaign a certain way, being either hunted like a drake or mind-bogglingly badly written into the setting like an AI. Also, I'm wholly with the OP that this is just a lame Matrix rip-off.


They have biochips in their heads that make them talk to the fractures of Wintermancer (or maybe Neuromute) pretending to be voodoo gods because they really liked the wiki article about them? Eh. No, sorry. If that's what technos are supposed to be, the writers failed to get that across.

Free Spirits. This is a personal pet peeve, but just no.

Got nothing against SURGEd, on principle, though, or funny animals. Of course, you don't want to play a Naga on an antarctic run unless you just want to die, a centaur isn't useful in an urban setting at all, a Pixie will take massive damage and likely be a goner soon, and a sasquatch will suffer from noone speaking his sign language, but hey, you get what you bargain for.I will flat-out disallow four-armed nagas or other such ridiculous concepts.


Of course, this would be post-Puppetmaster Major, which isn't the Major anymore anyway. And post-Puppetmaster, she (it) should be a Xenosapient AI.

Re realm searches: The trope that the GM should fix what the game designers screw up is really starting to get on my nerves. Would an auto company that expects you to fix various parts of your car by yourself before being able to drive it get away with it? Would a software company get away if they told you you'd propably have to rewrite parts of the code so it doesn't work abysmally bad get away with that? No? So why game designers? What sets them apart in principle?

Dear SR4 authors: Next time you want to prop up a characters class to ridiculous power levels, at elast think througfh what you write down. Thanks.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)
Ever heard of hardcopies or offline backups?
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Did you read the post? Banks need to have lines of communications open for transactions. So do other services. If you have to restore from offline backups all the time - which means pulling off the main system, or you just opened a line to your backups - you're not exactly ready to do business in a cut-throat enviroment.
Also, if it's that easy to keep data safe the erased quality doesn't make any sense - why wouldn't everyone do such things, and not just MCT?

Not to mention that there's no way to prevent the Great Connection to link to your computer, even if it's offline. And even iff you dismanteled it and burned the individual pieces in the fires of mount Doom or any other fitting place, and did that to everyting that ever had a copy of the data on it, it'd be still in the Endless Archives. Both are avwerage metaquests the Otaku can do with it's first initiation with a reasonable chance for success.

There is no definite defense against a technomancer hacker. None at all.

So what are you saying, that there are technomancers doing resonance quests to erase their data all the time (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)
There really aren't that many tm:s around.

A clan worth some dozen would be sufficient, actually.

I'm pretty much with hermit on this one. On top of my personal dislike for the D&D-like concept of allowing players to play anything just because it's cool, I've found that these special character types derail the story too much by becoming the story.

I don't cut or disallow anything in my games. I never house-rule and I hate imposing my "vision" over the shared universe concepts put forth by the developers.

However, I've noticed that players who pick the uber-cool/rare metatypes and who don't carefully plot out how they're going to play them end up with dead characters. A player's ghoul physical adept was killed in his first session by what should have been a fairly easy encounter. Lesson learned.

Drakes, AIs, SURGEd, Infected, and non-metahuman races can all be played. However they take much more thought and consideration than the typical human/elf/dwarf/ork/troll. Crunch the numbers and make sure what you as the player want to do with the character is actually feasible. And GMs, don't let any character be a spotlight hog. Give everyone his 15 minutes of fame.


They make an excellent getaway vehicle during rush hour.