Evo's Mars Base, How do I bring my players there? Options

[Muskie]

Given the fact that Evo has a Mars base, i've been wanting to get my party up there for a bit of a DooM-style Horrors run (not to mention the return of a certain dragon, but I digress), but Having a Mage and an Adept in my party provides a small problem..

I know that the Mars base has a sufficient Biopshere now to support Mages (or in any case, I'll flub the bases' stats so it has a Low Background rating), But there's the small problem of forcing my mages onto a space shuttle for 2 months without the ability to use magic.

According to one of the mages in the party, a mage is allowed to go into space as long qas he uses no magical abilities whatsoever, as spellcasting would induce the magical equivalent of explosive decompression. how do I get around this? or do our mages have to act mundane for a couple months, bored out of their minds?

[GrinderTheTroll]

[booklord]

Actually the more likely scenario is that the magicians will simply bow out and do there own thing while the non-magic characters are in space. And really what awakened character would go in space? Half their skills are useless. They're affectively reduced to pedestrian status.

Possible ways to bring them into space..

1) Abduct them

Easily the worst option since it involves major railroading. Worse if the character is severely injured or killed while rendered powerless the resentment can cause many a player to go sour.

2) Their employer insists their skills will be needed and his willing to pay handsomely.

Why would you need a magician on Mars? Perhaps the employer knows something the characters don't? As for why his skills may be needed..... Perhaps the monsters on Mars are capable of using magic. Perhaps they have access to technology that allows them to create mana-fields even in the desolate deserts of Mars.

3) The employer loans the magician a magical artifact that allows him to use magic outside of the manasphere.

Cool! Though it will make the players wonder which great dragon/immortal elf 's payroll they're on.



As for the trip itself........


1) Hibernatiion --

If the players don't mind being out of touch with the world for a few months.

2) Best of Corporate Tech plus a little alien extra

Operating at a tenth of the speed of light will get you anywhere in the star system mighty fast. Just don't tell Einstien what you're doing.

3) Gateway between worlds....

Nice, easy shadowrun and walk under this strange looking arch and whammo! The characters are on Mars. The nice thing about aliens is there are no rules. The GM can do whatever he wants.

[GrinderTheTroll]

[hyzmarca]

In the moniter you see a giant circle made out of an unknown mineral. The circle is composed of two rings. The exterior ring contains 9 glowing chevrons. The interior ring contains 36 Egyption hiroglyphs. For some reason there is a giant glowing pool of light in the circle. Your target, who looks remarkably like Richard Dean Anderson can be seen walking into the pool of light but you can do nothing from your vantage point due to the blast shield.

Also, space is just a rating 10 background count. That's reduced to 8 in a permenant habitat like a space station. One way to reduce it is to have a large spaceliner with enough people and plant like to hold its own mini-manasphere. That'll cut the BC down to 8.

There are no SR4 rules for BC yet but it is easy enough to adapt the SR3 rules. Subtract the BC from all magic related dice pools and add it to drain. This would render casting suicide for any mage and make everything else very difficult. There is also fluff about mages going insane or dying when trying to percieve or project in such powerful background counts but there were no rules for it.

But, in SR3 there were ways to cast in space without surely dying. The filtering metamagic could compensate for background count to a degree. Centering could help resist the enhanced drain. Virtuoso could replace the sterile BC of space with one aspected toward the magician which actually provides bonues instead of penalties. Sacrificing could eleminate the extra drain altogether.

Except for Centering these don't exist in SR4 yet so a ride through space would be difficult for any SR4 magician.

[Clyde]

As I recall from Magic in the Shadows, space (beyond Earth's atmosphere) is a Mana Warp - as or more badly fried than the nuclear blast sites at Hirsohima and Nagasaki. A mana warp has effects on astral objects such as spirits, astrally projecting magicians, active foci, and dual natured stuff like astrally projecting magicians. There's no harm to the mage unless he or she chooses to: cast a spell (the drain will fry you), summon a spirit (it won't work, and the drain will fry you), turn on a focus (it will die), or astrally perceive/project (you will die). The mages would be basically pedestrians. The adept's abilities wouldn't really work, either, I'd imagine.

I think by far the best approach is for you to skip the months of spaceflight by having the characters dropped into suspended animation for most of the trip. Plus, I can give you two words: dream sequence! Were all those monsters just a bad reaction to the freaky drugs needed to put you under? How's that simsense feed that was supposed to keep you occupeid? Actually, you could have the mage's body dumped in a vat and the mage interacting with the awake crews and passengers through AR, too, I suppose.

Finally, you could consider the magical/alien artifcate route. Something that protects the whole ship from the nasty effects of the mana warp (like a ward on steroids). Such might be useful in getting away from the Doom style horrors, too.

[hyzmarca]

[Cynic project]

I think that the mana warp in space is a radiation thing. THink about it, the back ground count is higher the farhter away form earth you are..Also nukes make big back ground counts.

So could mars just not be a man warp.It could just not be as friendly to mana as earth is.

[Rotbart van Dain...]

[Jaid]

you could always have a force bajillion free spirit use and sustain a movement power on the spacecraft. iirc, manawarps simply reduced the force of effects that passed through them, so anything above force 10 should have an effect of getting the shuttle to mars faster.

as far as the rest goes, just declare that for some weird reason, magic works normally on mars.

[hyzmarca]

[emo samurai]

Dude, Martian Chronicle it. Pull weird, surreal shit that involves the nature of mankind's folly and stuff. After that, magic working on Mars will be the least of the disbelief that needs to be suspended.

[Grinder]

What he means: aks emo samurai to write down some ideas :D

[Crusher Bob]

Hmm, if you are having trouble bringing the characters to Mars bring Mars to them. Their employer sacrifices many a cute kitten and causes the mars base to be temporarily co-located with a remote site in the desert of... All the PCs need to do is steal the McGuffiin, go back to the co-location circle, and wait ~6 hours for the spell to end.

Even better you can add whatever silly stuff you want to have on mars with the PCS.

It's to bad the might mojo also co-located them in time, about 65 Million years, in fact. That must be how all those man eating dinosaurs got here, but why are some of them wearing eye-patches and why do they keep saying things like, "Shiver me timbers!"

The co-location magic also opens a portal to hell, unleashing demons. Can the PCs make it back to the warded co-location circle through the city of Dis? Maybe they'll have to make a metaphorical deal with the devil, and by metaphorical, I mean grab your coat...

Or maybe you can even throw in the un-expected: no dinosaur pirates or all singing, all dancing legions of darkness, show them a better world, a kinder world, a gentler world, where they see what their lives could have been. And if they are each given an ever-blooming rose as pledge they visited that world, and awaken, back in the desert, with those flowers in their hands -- Aye, and what then?

[Demon_Bob]

You could always twist things around a bit.

Say that Evo did go to Mars, but there were a few problems that the PR guys did not want to disclose. So Most of what everyone saw of mars was filmed in a studio. It is the mars studio where the Johnson wants them to go.

Or Start one run off with, After a run gone bad you were captured. Today you wake up in a small room on a smaller bunk. A strange feeling rises in you gut as you attempt to remove yourself from the sleeping bag.
Something is definitely wrong here. Either your being "Punked" or your weightless meat puppet body is in space.
After making your way to what appears to be a main crew area, you notice a message from your new "employer" playing on the triadio.

"Greetings, my new employees." "For the next two weeks..."

[Omer Joel]

[MacMoney]

Just try an imagine a mage accustomed to his magical abilities, checking the astral every now and then for hostiles or just for kicks. For him it would be like using one of your senses could make you lose your mind. An analogy that doesn't really work that well would be keeping your eyes closed for two months just because someone told you that there you will go insane/die if you open them.

The mental stress on the mage will be pretty damn huge.

[Rotbart van Dain...]

Once I send a team to Mars, to raid and extract a person from a secret Proteus base.
(Located near the icecap of the pole and now completely destroyed in a fusion reactor 'accident')
Ares was hiring them for an 'Extraction of an unwilling subject from a remote compoud in a hostile environment, operatives have to remain on-call-on-site for about two months in suspended animation'.

Effectively, a refitted drone-suborital was used, equipped with SCRAM jets for leaving atmosphere on the way back, using a fusion reactor driven ion drive for interplanetary travel.
Any mission information was fed to them with a PAB while they were traveling in their vats. (If the programming of the memories isn't done properly, it fades away after some days... more than enough for them to complete their job.)

[Cray74]

[Ravor]

[booklord]

[Kyoto Kid]

...I would have them sign onto the Aeon-Marathon Utopia Project....

...oh crap...

bad GM....no spoilers, no spoilers.

[hyzmarca]

[Crusher Bob]

My personal favorite illusion has always be from WFRP. There was an illusion spell you could cast even if you had already been killed, that made the last few seconds not have happened, they were just an illusion. :D

[Edward]

I am the party Sharman with the initial posters game.

Making the character want to go isn’t that hard. Once he gets there he will be able to use his magic and it will be an adventure, good money and it was sujested that a contact might need help up there.

But I know I am a shadow runner. A deniable and expendable asset, every megacorp has solders including mages that are probably better trained and defiantly better disaiplened than me, they hire me because they don’t want to risk the lives or exposure of using there official force. I am a dragon slayer shaman that loves dunkulzan (ok I was 4 when he died but still) and hates megacorps, he annoys megacorp security for fun.

What is going to make him believe that there will be a return shuttle waiting on the pad when the job is done?

Edward