Because the mall just opened.

I'll also have her character meet up with a new AI that's developed out of code. When she does, it'll give a Matrix: Reloaded-style speech on what Resonance is, and what it plans to do.

The new AI will be so cool; he'll kind of be part of an evolution from the previous 3 AI. All the AI's so far have been characterized by their incomplete understandings of the physical world. Mirage thought of the world in terms of protection of the home grid; hence his crashing of the Matrix when Fuchi broke. Megaera thought of the world in terms of Dodger and protection of people, hence her attachment to Dodger and her inability to see beyond him. Deus thought of the world first in terms of loyalty to Renraku and then in terms of self-protection and survival; hence its takeover of Novatech's stock exchange server. The fourth one will think of the world in more philosophical terms, as a world separate from the world of information that it inhabits. I'll call him Eidos, after the Platonic idea for "perfect, ideal form."

His explanation, and a very likely one, will be that Resonance is the "information in itself." While binary computers will measure the distance between A and B in centimeters and fractions thereof, resonant computers and individuals will see them in terms of "the distance between A and B." Information will be itself, knowledge will be itself; they record and manipulate, but they don't quantify.

Eidos will see the world of information as a perfect one that, however great it might become, is forever subordinate to the world of matter. He will wish for the power of "information over matter." Because of this, he'll try to take control of vehicles and drones wherever possible, which is made easier by the fact that everything's wireless nowadays. Eidos'll use slave mini-AI's to gather information on everything, and the one in the Novatech server will say that "I am one of the many, and the many are of the one." Then the server will open a horrible gigantic eye in the middle of VR space and knock out Fangirl.

He'll spend his time looking for ways to make the world of Resonance superior to the world of matter, capturing mages and studying their biologies. In the end, the home server will have enough power to have limited psychokinesis and manifestation; his weakness will be in discounting the individual self-aware systems that served to give him information.

The party will come out of this with awesome bleeding-edge stuff.

I just got a new idea for a run; it's based off the story "Spew" by Neal Stephenson.

A group of hackers and mages running random hotels all over Seattle organize soundproofed rooms that are always occupied so that they can party, party, party. Horizon wants to find them, the last unexploited niche, so that it can exploit them and use them for marketing. The hackers want you to stop them so they can keep on partying unwatched.

I am a fucking genius.

What do you think of my assessment of the AI's? Too Master Shake-ish for your tastes?

After glancing in the general direction of that thread?

You go right on ahead with your Crazy Awesome ideas, Emo. Until you start posting ~4000 word responses about random esoterica, you could propose that Artie had his brain put into a stripper catgirl fembot with an anchored blood spirit offering immunity to love, kindness, and kittens.

And with shotguns for nipples.

If you pay me a six-figure income, I will make sure your books sell. They will sell like hotcakes, and I will use the profits to research wing grafts for pigs. The pigs will fly.

Do you think this is too much of a letdown after Invae in a Mall? Because I base the awesomeness of my campaigns on their weirdness; I think, in a way, this Happy Jumper campaign is much weirder than Invae in a Mall.

hell steal my Universal soldier Shedim ripoff idea

that should frighten the Sammy

"It's not hard to knock em down, it's getting them to stay down that's the trick."

I have a new idea for an NPC that ties into the "UO blood mage cybermancer" plot thread; he'll be the host for the blood mage. In return for possession of the man's body, he'll get implants and money from the mage. Eventually, he'll move into cybermancy; they'll have multiple features for his arms. They can fold between where the joints would normally be to crush limbs caught in a hold and shoot behind him with ease; they'll have a very baroque, Warhammer 40K look to them and will have gas vents and hydraulics. He'll be the scariest bastard in the Sprawl and will be a strange mixture of adept and robotic warrior. He has a very survivalistic point of view and wishes only to kill or be killed by the best. The fact that he gains his power through effectively selling his body to a horrible bastard rather than practicing is very symbolic of how most people gain power in the Sprawl.

Also, for the "soundproof a hotel room and always tell people it's occupied" crowd, the nominal leader will be something of a social theorist who talks about what the information age should have been. He'll say that the advent of the Matrix should have seen a huge fracturing of the monoculture into millions of subcultures, but instead, we have corp-run media, multinational networks, and Shiawase and Aztechnology buying up every small bar, store, and restaurant they can get their hands on, integrating them into a culture that, no matter how much it tries to simply make money off their schemes, is essentially monochrome and everpresent. For him, these partyers are the last untapped subculture, one of the few things that has stayed safe from the blinding light of media scrutiny. The irony of this will be that they have grow new branches in other parts of Seattle and are quickly spreading outside of the UCAS borders. They themselves are blending in the formerly unique cultures of other parts of the city and can now barely, if at all, be called a subculture.

If the runners try to sell to Horizon after they've been paid by the vampire, they'll most likely meet with a single executive. He'll tell him that he won't deal; the niche exists only because no one pays and no one makes money off of it. If a group of them looked at the idea, though, they'd probably go into groupthink mode, try the idea, and waste a million dollars ruining it.

I can't think of anything epic for Johann; for Vranton, I have the exposure of the foveae by his awesome master. For C's character, I have the extraction of stuff from his brother's apartment and their scramble to hide him. For FanGirl, I have Eidos, the 4th AI. For my dude, I have the quest to ruin his parents financially and kill off their uber pet mage. What should I do for Johann? He has a very cliched backstory with his dad being held hostage by the Mafia so that he does jobs for them for free. Thoughts?

And none of these are nearly as epic as FanGirl's; this annoys me, too.

Ummm... Maybe rescuing his dad? Or is that too obvious?

Too small...

Rescuing his dad from the cyberzombie ninjas the new Godfather (Lofwyr) assigned to gaurd him?

Maybe he stumbles across some info that a hive is starting to infiltrate the mafia and he has to get to his dad before the spirits decide to use him as a host as well.

Nah... already used insect spirits... Hmm... Maybe he'll rescue his dad but find that he's secretly addicted to some horrible drug? Then he'll have to do a run for S-K for them to make up a cure for it. The drug was stolen from the lab and Lofwyr wants you to kill off the sons of the local mafia solely for his amusement.

Silly me, I was looking for something to tie runs together.

Does he have any background on his dad, or is it just a faceless blob he tossed in to give you some leverage for future runs? Finding something in his dad's past to tie to might be a good place to start looking.

Yeah, his idea was really thrown together rather crudely.

Then you have free reign to pick and choose anything crazy you want for his dad to have been mixed up in. Maybe someone hires them to extract a mafia prisoner that turns out to be his dad. Legwork could turn up all sorts of stuff on the guy, who all they know about is his codename: Wolverine.

Ok, maybe not Wolverine...

Codename fucked up origin?

I have a new idea for the female mantid and her shaman. Should I let the mantis shaman live? He'll have about a minute to talk even if he dies; that's plenty of time for magical healing, even with a bigass hole where his intestines should be.

If he lives, he'll drop the ward; I don't think I'll let him participate, since he'll have, like, 4 physical damage boxes left. He'll also tell everybody to attack, since this is when they are at their weakest; they expected him to keep the ward up, so in order to not have a huge tactical disadvantage the likes of which ruined the shit of the shamans themselves before, they'll have to attack within 4 hours.

When they escape and the shaman announces his intention to work for Ares, they'll taser him to the ground and his mantid if she attacks. She'll be the basis of a future run in which she tries to extract Daddy from Ares.

Then they'll invent Black Hammer and I'll kill my naysayers over the Internet.

And my campaign ideas don't seem like they'll blend together any better than the "Hijack that truck/Kill this guy/steal that thing/protect this thing" campaigns people hold up as foils for my own. The, you know, archetypal ones that by definition blend together.

And Geekake, you only despise my exuberance because it so clearly illuminates that cavernous pit of despair you call a heart. I visualize you making a Magneto Almost-Fist with all the muscles in your hand contracted to the point of breakage while calling out "EMO SAMURAI" in red lettering.

I was wondering how sympathetic I should make the mantis shaman; if I make him really sympathetic, I can easily make a "Grrr, Ares" ending in which he gets tazered and kidnapped after trying to sign up for work with them. I'm thinking I should do that; if I make him just creepy, then their involvement ends with his death, since no one will want to heal him. Then again, there's the problem of making him sympathetic in the first place; he killed his woman to get her. I'm not sure the players want to feel sorry for a guy like that.

Go ahead and give them the chance to feel sorry, but don't hang any hopes on it.

I think they'll feel worse for the mantid than her shaman.

You should plan for all possible reactions - maybe they will feel sorry for the shaman and/or the mantid spirit, and maybe they won't. It's a distopian world with lots of shades of gray, so the players may NOT always agree with you on who the "good guys" are.

Like, maybe you will do a run where an eco-activist is on the run from Ares because he stole a super-weapon from them. He plans to use it to blackmail the corps into using more environmentally friendly processes. Only, when the group hears his sob story, they stunbolt him, and auction him and the prototype back to Ares! Their rationale? They feel a weapon prototype is safer in the hands of a reputable weapons manufacturer than it would be in the hands of an unstable eco-terrorist.

Now, a lot of times, the players may wind up being wrong on which side they pick, and will suffer some consequences (or at least twinges of conscience) for it. But try not to "punish" them for disagreeing with your choice, if that happens. I know I've had to fight the tendency to be a less-than-neutral GM enough times myself.



Now, as far as crazy ideas in general, they work - but pace yourself. If you throw one crazy idea after another at the players, then the game could degenerate into desperate one-upsmanship on your part, and a jaded sense of wonder on the players' part. Mix in enough "normal" stuff that the crazy stuff will still seem crazy. If they go from fighting bug spirits to battling zombified mercenaries, it won't seem as shocking. But if they fight the bug spirits, then do a bodyguarding job, then fight a gang encrouching on their neighborhood, the zombified mercenaries will seem crazy and off the wall.

Male mantis shamen do not live long. If no one else kills them then their mother spirit will. And since all female mantids are mothers, any male mantis shaman who summon's one is destined to die very soon.

They have a complicated relationship. She's more human than the average mantid; that doesn't mean she doesn't like eating the faces off of people who irritate her, which is exactly what she does. And the gnome dude tries his best not to irritate her.

And what if I vary the weirdness? Follow my mantis spirit girl with the "Happy Jumper" campaign and the fight to keep the secret partyers off of Horizon's radar?

I have an idea for a rigger contact. His name is Scarecrow, and he'll float in a vat and will have badly atrophied muscles. Because he does all the technology mods and stuff for the Yakuza and even redirected a power cable to their building, they constantly supply his vat with top-of-the-line nutrients. He mods their cars for free, which takes up about 5 hours a week. On his off time, he modifies cars and drones that other people give him in exchange for pieces of tech. So if you want him to mount a hidden minigun on your Ares Citymaster, you bring him a box of car parts and a Doberman. Any tech you want modified you bring to him; he rarely if ever uses his own parts except in exchange. This is the only type of payment he takes. That, and weapon and vehicle specs, and services. Since he has all the simsense he wants and all the basic needs gratified, the only thing he could be short of is technology. He even has a gigantic modified underground forge that constantly experiments with new alloys.

He'll come into conflict with another rigger named Mungo. He lives in a junkyard and has multiple sniper nests in the myriad gigantic piles. He's an expert with demotions, heavy weapons, and military vehicles. His crown jewel is a chopper, which he never flies. Scarecrow wants the chopper so he can modify it and make it better; he has really nothing else he wants to do with it. He wants you to steal it, which will inevitably bring down the wrath of Mungo and his fleet of modified military vehicles. If you negotiate with him well enough, then he'll make a little arrangement with Scarecrow and allow him to work on his vehicles. He'll also work as a rigger for the players if no one wants to play rigger.

Bad Mungo - gonna kick you in the face!

(close to Turbonegro)

Ok, now I'm stumped on this one... how does a rigger, with attrophied limbs, floating in a vat, do any kind of vehicle modifications?! That would require oh, say mobility, and say muscles in order to work with the parts and componets of the vehicles and drones... All the things your suggesting would require some sort of manual dexterity and/or strength. (which is why many mechanics are pretty buff, all that manual labour and all)

My second question is: why would someone let themselves pretty much rot away to such a degree? What does he benefit from it? Why does he do it?

I mean I could see if you have a rigger or decker that is always plugged into the machine, and rarely if ever leaves it.... and I don't think I want to know how/when he eats or where he goes to the bathroom, one possible thought makes me absolutely sick to my stomach....

BTL's and VR addiction. And people in RL have IV's. I'm sure you know that. And any waste could probably be taken out with tubes. It is, after all, cyberpunk, where they have things like vats and creepy medical equipment. Like, you know, cyberware.

And he'll rig with drones; they'll be controlled by his brain. See? Simple. Simple explanations for simple people.

I have an idea to make the technomancer in my party awesome. She'll have a home server on which to maintain a Resonance entity. The more money she spends on it, the more sprites she'll be able to register; it'll be like an insect spirit Queen for technomancers! She'll get potency and everything from it. How about that? It'll help her submerge and everything.

potency?

so this thing is evil?

remember potency is the advantage evil gets to counteract good getting more karma

Gods MITS was so alignment filled

It will be. Then again, you don't get good karma just for doing good things...

The AI she helps will be more like a Matrix horror than a matrix god.

awwwwwww That's sooo sweet

Artificer wants to be friends with FanGirl

Say hello to Artificer kiddies

*Sounds of children screaming, chainsaws, and other mechanical torture sounds*

THE NET WILL RUN RED WITH THE BLOOD OF THE MATERIAL

ALL WILL BE KNOWLEDGE AND SILENCE

I didn't mean Eidos would be a horror; it would just have horror-like propensities and lure people into helping it with gifts and influence. It'll start with the Novatech server; the AI on it will make its matrix icon one of a small dog wanting to get in a glass door, which will be the reality-filter metaphor for FanGirl's firewall. Her head will hurt for a few days until she uploads it onto a server that it has her build in her sleep. Ever night in her sleep she will make random upgrades to its hardware. She'll build it out of parts from a personafixed toxic shaman who makes fucked-up Artificer-like contraptions. It will be a hulking monstrosity of steel and smog. Nobody will touch it. The free sprite on the server, though, will be her loyal friend. It'll probably be killed by Eidos, though.

Maybe I won't give power to FanGirl directly; I'll just make the puppy more powerful over time. She will be able to use it like a registered sprite. It'll grow into a large protective wolf, but there will always be a sense of a large presence off in the distance that it absolutely has to go back to.

At the end of the day, it'll always go off into the distance and look sorry, as if was called by a master whom it has no choice but to obey. Its home server is, of course, the steampunk engine, but she'll have no way of knowing how to find it until someone reads her with a Geiger counter and follows her back to the thing.

Out of curiousity, have you ever read Snow Crash, Emo?

It seems like your last couple ideas have been cribbing from it, somewhat. At least in the way of vat-flavored riggers and radioactive 'dogs'.

The vat-flavored rigger was partly Snow Crash. The radioactive dog had nothing to do with Snow Crash; it'll just be the icon of a free sprite that lives in FanGirl's head every so often. Its server will be some freakish thing made out of parts made by a toxic shaman.

Speaking of powergaming differences, there's a player in the party who wants to be a physad in the Hong Kong movie tradition. How do I make it up to him? Johann will get awesomely upgraded bioware; Vranton will get foci for half-off and freaky chaos spirits; FanGirl will get a powerful free sprite friend. Should I give him a free spirit friend? That feels too much like duplication. He's not into weapons; he likes hitting people more.

How about an awesome-ass teacher who gives him crazy good adept powers?

Bruce Lee's training gear

It still has resonance and thhus a Background count from the Great Master's death

Training in uit reduces initiation cost as if you have a group and It allows for the astral quest and Meditation ordeals even for an adept wthout astral perception

Seriously?

That was part of the inspiration...

Emo I came up with the Bruce Lee thing off the top of my head

but it should work for SR

It also adds just a touch of ED flavor

Hmmm... cheaper initiations... would this stack with ordeals and stuff? Groups, even? If so, this really, really makes up the difference.

In a general sense, this is a great idea. I'll allow him access to a Shaolin monestary that has a background count to help him initiate. He'll travel the world looking for senseis.

Dude, I said it would be LIKE potency. You know, because resonance is like magic and stuff. I don't think even you lack the imagination necessary to imagine vaguely malicious beings giving people power in return for their souls in the Matrix. Like insect and toxic spirits. Because those can't, in any way, resemble sprites, and the artificially inflated powers of said magical threats can't in any way resemble those of a technomancer.

I know they aren't good or evil by design; this one wants information to be the new truth. Hell, Plato wanted that to happen. Eidos isn't necessarily "evil," either, just lacking in concern for the meat.

I KNOW all this shit, Dranem. I'm just saying that entities on the Matrix could, conceivably, artificially manipulate technomancers to their own ends with promises of power that they can, at any time, take away. If there weren't insect spirits or hell, potency, you could still have this concept applied to technomancers. I'm not giving FanGirl the ability to summon sprites and have them materialize; I was going to give her Matrix potency which would increase as she did tasks for her horror-like benefactor. And if you read my post, you'd realize that I gave up on the idea of Matrix potency, so from a grudge standpoint, your behavior doesn't even make sense.