Interior Decorating for Runners, Spin-off of the attacked at home thread Options

[stevebugge]

So this is a thread dedicated to good/crazy/wacky/creative ways for runners to make their pads more defensible for if/when the opposition makes housecalls.

If you have an idea post it.
If you have useful constructive commentary on someone's idea that's cool.
If you just want to rip on people for ever letting the opposition track them down, take it somewhere else.

Stuff that I find particularly interesting is either creative modifications to normal stuff or normal stuff that has good dual uses.
Architecture and layout can be important, and escape routes too.
Do you keep stashes of emergency supplies around?

Oh and of course feel free to add any "My Char was attacked at home and did this to fight off/Escape or got totally pwned by the attackers" stories. Those could be fun too. (GM's are free to sound off from the other side of this too)

[ShadowDragon8685]

Monowire strung inside the windows is always nice. :)

If you're living in a Z-zone or a D-zone, you can probably get away with lacing the exterior walls of your apartments with something that you can electrify.

[Dewar]

I wonder, could you get that security glass they have in schools these days with the metal webbing, but make the webbing monowire instead? It would be a rude treat if someone tried to punch in the window.

[Dragonscript]

Tripod mounted auto-pistols with extended clips that will shoot at anything that doesn't pass a verification test.

[Lagomorph]

Escape routes are usually death traps if you're attacked, it's likely they'll know about them and then be waiting when you go out the back.

Thats why you should instead, have a section of wall wired to blow so that you can make an escape route with out having it known.

edit:

When my rigger's junk yard was attacked by deus' drone army, I made a maze of the yard by tipping the towers of junked cars over. Though, deus attacks don't occur every day, and if they do, you should really consider moving...

[Nim]

[PH3NOmenon]

[Emrak]

Get two apts side-by-side. Set one up with cheap yard sale furniture, lamps, and ALL your electronic wireless gizmos. Rent this one out in your "real" name (whichever one you use the most).

Then, in the closet, cut a hole in the wall through to the next apt. Put a "door" there that looks as closely like the original wall as you can make it. In the 2nd apt, board up/brick up the windows on the inside. This is where you will actually live. If you're a rigger you can prolly even run the power lines into the 1st apt so it looks like there isn't even any electric service to the 2nd apt.

Go into the front door of apt 1, flip on the lights, AC/heat, then go through the closet hidden door into apt 2 and lead a life of peace. Sure, the hidden door will prolly be found after a rudimentary search, but it'll buy you ALOT of time when your dinner is disturbed.


EDIT:
and oh yeah...C4 the hell outta the 1st apt with a remote detonator. :D

[HappyDaze]

My runnersw typically have two (or more) resudences. The first is generally in a upper-scale neighborhood (A or better) and simply relies upon local security providers. The runners never bring anything incrimnating with them (especially not the commlinks they use in conjuntion with their "Street IDs"), generally only keeping a weapon licensed to their (fake) SIN.

A variety of disposable false SINs can cover the commute to the second residence, and generally each is only used once.

The second residence is typically in a much lower class 'hood (D or lower) and is where the runner lives while on the job. They never bring their 'legit' commlinks or any other linking materials to this site. These sites are the only ones the other runners in the group know about for obvious reasons. Here much of the illegal home security might be possible, but generally its easier to just keep moving around since no matter how much :nuyen: you can put in to hardeneing the place the big boys can always put more into cracking it if they find it and really want to get you.

[SL James]

[HappyDaze]

Perhaps because most places you'd actually rent or buy - as opposed to build yourself from scratch - will have windows. They also make a fine alternate fire escape, and the alternative is having more doors. With the strength of high-tech transparent plastics in the world of SR, the window might be almost as strong as the surrounding wall, eliminating some of the perceived security flaw.

[Samaels Ghost]

[Samaels Ghost]

Plascrete can be transparent, iirc. Why have glass?

[Ankle Biter]

Ankle biter's house is a sight to behold. 2 storys of modern magnificence, with heat signatures moving around the top floor, only barely visible through the surprisingly thick insulated walls. Those would be my pet goats, living in the C12 room.

The entire house is a deathtrap, every single floorpanel, lightswitch and other actuator is rigged to go boom, or to drop you into a narrow deep pit filled with water, for extra concussion/chunky salsa fun, then go boom. Parts of the floor are not there, they are just holograms/ED countermeasures. On a semi random basis, some of the traps are only wired to the alarm, not the lethal countermeasures.

The air has a background count from the level of feverish invention I put into making that place deadly. I even have a stolen can of Strain 3 in there, I think.

It is warded to opacity, and patrolled by carefully programmed, then switched to 0 i/o Steel Lynxes.

It has a carefully concealed sewer entrance I dug myself. I use that to go to my real house in the high rent district. No way am I domb enough to sleep amongst all that boom-boom.

Some of the countermeasures in place there are.

walls with a massive electrical potential accross them. If an electrical conductor moves between them, well, you ever seen a tesla coil? The cool thing about this is that only flawless insulated armour, or what Anklebiter uses, a couple of conductive rods wired together, one in each hand, can get through this without saying "Hiya" to all the current that some carefully arranged capacators, and the national grid, can apply.

The epilepsy-inducing strobe lighting. (I rely on my silly willpower and rarely edge to get through without going "wibble")

The wall panels transparent on only the thermal wavelength with sentry guns behind them. (same temp as the wall, you can't see it, it can see you)

The cannon. Yo ho, bug spirit motherlover, let's see your hardened armour block this.

The trode netted animals on spirit watch.

The really heavy falling weights. I don't care if it don't kill you, if you don't got a strength of 24, you can't lift it.

The deoxygenated zone. I don't care if you have a gas mask, your day just got a lot worse.

The hot and cold rooms designed to ruin the day of people in ruthenium. Hot as in steam, cold as in mist from the breath. I may not see you, but lookie lookie a puff of steam, whatever could that mean?

The constant white noise generaors looking for a moving patch of silence.

Chemsniffers, in case the stealth Adept forgot his envirosealed armour, a rudeimentary MRI (big magnet) in case he has a single solitary drop of anything that can conduct electricity like, err, blood.

Radar. Cause, hey, it's a part of vehicle sensors, why not.

Ventialtion ducts. You mean those tightly packed bundles of steel rods strung with monowire, and surprising amounts of other nasties?

The cameas are pinpricks scattered randomly about the place. The cameras you can see are designed to do nasty things to anything that touches them.

The windows are just ruthenium pictures of closed curtains.

Sheets of clingfilm blocking entire corridoors wired to anything from gas traps to nails erupting from the floor.

My GM was generous with the cash, and we scored big off of big D's Will. I also had about 4 years downtime to play with.

[HappyDaze]

Ankle Biter,

How dark/gritty and/or "realistic" is your game? From the "super-house" you posted above, I'm seeing runners in your world being way above the streets and operating on a nearly super-heroic level - which is fine, but you really should spell out the context of your world to help people understand how all of that is possible.

Also, beware of opponents that simply decide to nuke your home from orbit...it's the only way to be sure. Loading an armored vehicle with 1000kg of C-12 and ramming it through the wall will be the poorman's approach to cracking "super-house". No defense in SR4 truly beats a good offense - that's why Shadowrunners live to be on the offense and generally die when placed on the defense.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Yeah. After the first guy/team who knocks on your doors gets taken out, they will fall back on the armored, airborne, or orbital options, depending on who the are and how bad they want you.

[Abbandon]

You guys suck. I ripped off a do not disturb sign from a coffin motel and now my place is damn near invincable.

[Ophis]

As Anklebiter's Gm for that house, I saw it being built (and over paid him enough on runs, to allow it to happen.) The style of the runners could be described as close to super heroic, certainly A-B's team (full deltaware packages, seven figure payouts.) He mostly bought security...

That and he's batshit mad...

[nezumi]

The first step is to look for security through obscurity. Make sure its a neighborhood where not a lot of people know your real identity, but they know you well enough to be willing to give a shout if they see something suspicious. Make sure the place is reasonably difficult to find, however you probably want it close enough to bystanders that they're unlikely to use Thor shots on you or otherwise bring out the really big guns unless it's really necessary.

Avoid the top floor and the very bottom floor. 2nd or 3rd is probably best, or underground. No windows if you can help it. Rings of apartments around you can be preferable to alert you of incoming people. If you have no exterior walls, it'll be awfully difficult for anyone to get to you without your being alerted first.

Rely heavily on surveillance measures, and try to diversify the tools you use. Dogs, cameras, wires with bells on, laser tripwires, motion detectors, heat sensors, fake locks, etc. A lot of this stuff is pretty cheap, but when well placed it can make a difference. Also invest in something to measure siesmic activity or other vibrations in the walls, in case they attempt to breach through.

Avoid keeping anything really valuable with you. All your eggs in one basket, right? Keep things with evidence or things you don't want lost somewhere else, so they can't nab that on their way to you.

An escape route is necessary, but the details of it depend on your particular situation. Setting up your own emergency breach charges can get you out fast without doing much that'd alert the enemy well in advance. But where do you get out to? It only takes two snipers to cover a small building. A garage is fairly obvious (although turbo boosting through a wall on your motorcycle so you land on the roof of the neighboring warehouse would r0x0rz). The best solution I can think of is to have something through the floor, and just make (or have) a tunnel down to that. A back door into the Ork underground will make pursuit pretty tough, although I doubt the orks will like you much either. Into a ghoul nest? An old subway tube? There are possibilities, explore them.

Of course, you also want your interior apartment somehow warded or guarded. Warding exterior walls paints your apartment, so you want to avoid that. SR2 was nice in that you could just grow biologics in your apartment and provide cover like that, but that's no longer the case. Now astral surveillance is your big enemy, and you'll have to fight hard to overcome it. Of course, hidden tunnels are still hidden tunnels (albeit, much easier to find now), but rigged walls will be spotted pretty easily. Warding, warding, warding. Ward some neighbors too, just in case.

Ultimately though, the problem is two fold.
1) Realize you're under attack with time to react
2) Escape

Odds are, killing everyone won't be an option (or at least, if it is an option, #1 was not likely to be as much of a challenge). So you need to make sure you have a plan for escaping overwhelming odds.

Edit: I look forward to the first day Anklebiter comes home toasted and gets, well, toasted by his own traps. Remember, what can kill the other guy can likely kill you too.

[Ankle Biter]

[nezumi]

Wouldn't it have been easier then to say you just have a fake house full of explosives and leave it at that? Anyway, the question isn't "how do you decorate your fake house", it's how you decorate (and/or hide) your REAL house. If Ankle biter spent half a mil on his fake house and so now lives in #41 off Mariette St., he's going to be in a heap of trouble if the guys attacking him do their research first and figure out which is your real house.

[stevebugge]

That really was more the question. Things like do you armor plate your furniture to turn it in to hardened cover? I tend to like with the early warning and escape method or live where people can't find you easily methods of staying safe, though hiding in plain sight can be very effective too, nothing like having lots of witnesses as a deterent.

[2bit]

[Gustave]

Make a house on top of a mountain. Make only one road leading up to the mountaintop villa, and wire the whole thing to explode if it's needed. Place HMG turrets around the forest, and make the whole place a mine field. Place very strong signal jammers in Fly-Spies and program them to follow any intruders spotted. Have turrets and patrolling drones have no outside connections whatsoever. If they spot an intruder, they use a face scanner, if it's your face they hold off on shooting for 10 seconds. Then you swipe your ID card and it opens panels so it can scan your hand print, DNA sample, voice, and eye(good ways to keep others from getting these are always wearing gloves, wearing masks while on jobs, and having the cybereyes that change and using false eyes when not on your property). Then it won't shoot you until you get out of it's sensor range(then if you enter again you have to do those things again). If any drones or turrets are taken out, instead of using wireless communication they send out a high pitched screech and detonate a flash grenade. The light and sound will draw nearby drones and alert you to the intrusion(via cameras and microphones set to look for these signs). In case of an aerial attack, have several SAMs and anti-missile systems(and preferably private airspace so you don't take down legit planes).

Next, the house. You can have the villa rigged up like AnkleBiters house if you really want to, but you could just leave it as a relaxing place. The real house, however, would be underground inside the mountain(free wards, woo!). There you set up several escape routes that you make yourself(in fact you should make the whole underground place yourself, it will be harder, but nobody but you will know about it). Obviously the entire place will be rigged to blow if you feel the need, nobody will be getting off that mountain alive

You could probably add several other things, that is just off the top of their head.

[Nim]

Hmm. Let's see, Gustave.

You've got a subterranean facility constructed by a paranoid recluse, below an elaborate mansion that was never actually designed to be lived in but IS a complete deathtrap. Teams that raid it will start off by trying to make sense of it all, but quickly realize it's useless and simplify their goals to: a) collecting as much useful stuff as possible and b) escaping alive.

Congratulations. I think you've just re-invented the TSR module :)