I'm a newbie to the SR setting -- I'm reading 4th ed. and love it -- and I'm curious about what lies beyond Earth. There isn't much in the core about the solar system. What's going on in orbit, with the Earth's moon, Mars, the Jupiter system, etc.? Is there a resource I should be looking for that provides some of these answers?

Thank you for any help.

- Ian

Shadowrun doesn't really deal with areas outside the solar system. As far as SR3 goes, there is some comments about lunar mining and other mineral exploration being conducted by some of the megacorps, S-K comes to mind, found in the corporate Download sourcebook. Also in the Target:Wastelands, some other background info can be found regarding orbital space stations and such. Hope this helps.

Target: Wastelands provides the most info, but in short:

A mass driver was built on Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa, lowering the cost of boosting material into space.

Earth is orbited by a shitload of satellites, space stations, and factories. Most prominent of these is the Zurich-Orbital Habitat, home of the Corporate Court. All of the LaGrange points are occupied to some extant.

Luna hosts several megacorporate mining operations.

Evo has established a facility on Mars.

Couple others rumored.

Ares' Helios?

I don't know about SR4, but in SR3, magic wasn't possible in outer space, due to the lack of the astral, living plane that surrounds the Earth and so forth. Not sure what goes on in SR4.

However, if you are interested in going on something outside Earth, CP2020 did a couple good books. Deep Space and Near Orbit. They are older books, but they can help give you some options if you can find them.

Hah I remeber when I first found out about Shadowrun.

I was so intriqued by the Backstory info in SR3 I later bought that book just to read about the rest. My first Shadowrun experience and purchase.

Street Magic has a story at the begining of the chapter on astral space involving specially-bred plants that replicate earth's astral biosphere, or some-such. They don't have mechanics for this as far as I know. The story has to do with bug-hunts through astral projection.

In SR3 the max background count of a manawarp was 10, the condition in space. The moon was 8, presumably because unliving rock is worth something. And: "Certain stations, due to their population and activity, may have a lower background count (8 or 9)."

I'm willing to handwave that Ares has developed specific plants/techniques that can improve on that 1-2 point benefit an ordinary station might receive. But the max warp is also a 12 now, so I'd guess Helios is still somewhere in the 7-9 range and still a mana warp. Since metaplanar quests go directly to the metaplanes, that's not really a problem, and in fact is an advantage if you're hunting bugs - if they follow you back to your point of origin, they die damned fast from exposure to the warp in regular astral space.

In my game world, i move away from Cannon a little by having space exploration. The earth has more than a few space stations, the moon has a couple dozen bases, the asteroid belt has over a dozen mining operations already set up and the race is on for Mars. Most corps are actively recruiting colonist for exploration.

This is all background info right now since the group hasn't expressed interest in leaving the planet, yet.

Mars has pyrimids and dragon bones. Or were those photos taken on another planet other than mars or earth?

For a bit of cyberpunkish flavour, Neuromancer has some near Earth space action.

Also SR history diverged in 1989 or thereabouts so Pluto may still be a planet which could have ramifications for your "Troll Cyber-Astronomer" archetypes.

Too late, too late. he found interest in this thread and will come back...

What I said.

Thanks very much for all the info! It's very helpful.

- Ian

...I've actually been working on a more well defined presence in space for an upcoming campaign (SR3 ruleset). I liked the Near/Far Space supplements in Cyberpunk and wish that SR would have developed more in this direction. The game system actually lends itself well to a futuristic setting (when you remove Magic from the equation).

I actually have some of the basics worked up for a futuristic space campaign using the SR3 game engine & BP systems from the SR Companion (and no, I do not have Psionics which IMHO always seemed like a half baked substitute for magic in other SF game systems).

...For a future campaign arc that is in the works (SR 3), I have designed quite a bit of space hardware & systems including:

Surface to high orbit spaceplanes
Heavy lift unmanned boosters
Personal Maneuvering packs
Earth-Lunar transfer shuttles
Planetary Rover vehicles
Long duration autonomous survey craft.

There are two large installations, one a free floating Stanford Torus design and a sub surface Lunar complex.

I also wrote (before Target wastelands came out) my own version of the Neo Anarchist's Guide to Real Space.

I've alwasy wondered, could you creat a powerful ward, say force 15, in the form of a box, then say summon a spirit or just make the ox ward on a power site, then shoot it up to the space station, and ward that station up the wazoo, and eventually clean up the mana in the station, assuming the ward is strong enough to resist the mana warp, say 16+?
Sort of like cleaning out a polluted lake. You know, do lots of cleansing , bring in fresh mana, cleanse again, so on an so forth, and not letting in more warped mana because of the stations wards? Sorry if its a bit off, just somethign that was bouncing around in my head. I ran a game on Daedalus station once, having to do with Project:Artemis, and was thinking about that.

As someone noted, space is no longer a mana warp, it's a mana void. There's no magic rather than too much of it. Even if a ward could "protect" an area from high background count, it wouldn't do anything for an ebb/void. And I doubt it could do anything for a high background count - the count should be generated pretty uniformly over the space effected, not radiating from one point. It's either a natural phenomenon of astral space or stuff oozing in from the metaplanes (or even emotions from the physical plane). It's not an astral form or concentrated energy that should be inhibited by a mana barrier.

And in any case, the number of mages willing to resist 15p of unhealable drain to create a ward that will last a few weeks should be...few. Even Centering and power sites only go so far, and if you routinely force your spirits to take physical drain doing anything but directly saving your ass (and only maybe then), I'd start you off with your bound spirits automatically causing sustaining penalties when present, and move you up to a Spirit Bane negative quality or two if you persisted.

@Kyoto Kid: do you know Transhuman Space, a GURPS-setting? It set in 2100 and has a a lot of information about space stations and all that.

SD: Sorry, I haven't got to read through Street Magic much, so I hadn't noticed that it was an ebb/void now. Basically though, all that means is that is that you need really strong wards, something stronger than the ebb. This is , of course, assuming that you have a strong enough mage or group to create the force 15+ ward and resist the damage. So we'll stick to hypothetical for now.

If you could get such a spell caster, or perhaps creat the wards on the pre-fab station parts on groundside, then would it be possible to , for lack of a better word, import mana, and make magic a bit easier to use in orbit?

Sorry if it seems like I'm beating a dead horse here. Just something I'm trying to figure out the details of.

If you take a Force 15 ward into a Force 12 mana void (space), you've got, IIRC, a Force 3 ward. How the existence of a ward would help reduce the void is somewhat beyond me. I regard them as a shaping of existing mana, not a source that will radiate stored mana into the emptiness around them.

You can't clean ebbs/voids like you can background count/warps. You need some way to create mana, not calm/clean what's already there and out of control. The only way to do that appears to be by changing the mundane physical environment by putting in lots of living biomass. But even on earth their are unexplained "holes" that can't be filled in or fixed.

The ward wouldn't actually keep mana in. Even in the harsh mana void of space, it would persist if it was large enough to begin with. But that's all it would do - the mana on either side ofthe ward would still be a void and anything else that projected there would still explode.

I honestly have no idea whether a Ward would get shredded in a Mana Void. As written, it appears not. A Mana Void inflicts 12 DV damage to the astral forms of "characters", apparently "all" it does to Wards is reduce their Force by 12.

But that wouldn't keep the Mana Void out, it would still be a void inside the ward as wll as out. I'm sure that having something that powerful sitting around would help stabilize the mana on your space station though, so the mana would doubtless strength over time much faster than it would if you didn't do that.

-Frank

It's funny but with a lot of the new stuff they put into Fourth Edition and then reading about Evo Corporations new interest in transhumanism, Transhuman Space readily sprung to mind. Prabably helped that Tzeentch/Kenneth Peters was also in to the game as well.

Yeah, but the last thing he did for SR was, what, SoNA?

That's what they tell us...

The most that I've seen is in the Missions book. There's an adventure that details the Mars missions from an Ares ops POV. I thought it was a pretty neat run, all x-files-ish.

...and all the runners who played it with me died horribly during the run or afterwards. But for one, the hacker (then a decker) who is still hiding (character retired)
Got to keep the X-files feel.

Cheers

Max

Personally, I love the idea that space is a mana void. That makes it the perfect place for norms to go when they are tired of magic fraking with their lives...no HMHVV in space for instance...

Hmm, that's an interesting idea. Since HMHVV is an awakened disease, would the infected be cured by living in space for say 2-3 weeks, where the lack of mana would kill the mana dependent organism's that cause the HMHVV?

Old thread necromancy. I'm pretty sure infected would be killed along with anything reliant on mana.

I am very disappointed at this whole Filtering Doesn't Fix Mana Voids thing, and may have to change it. It utterly KILLS the plan Ihad for a player's PC to previously be trained on Ares' L5 station and brainwashed into forgetting it.

If the station is large enough and has some kind of ecosystem, you have a weak but usable mana level.

If I remember correctly in one of the background short stories in Street Magic Ares maintain precisely this kind of facility up there for their Firewatch teams. Any bug that could trace back the mana trail they use of metaplanar expeditions to the Hive would end up stuck in a dead end - and go "plop" in the mana void if it could not be contained there and the area is jetissoned.

It could be higher than -12/12. It's just that's deep space, a place where there isn't an orbit of the space station, and the lack of life/emotion makes it a pure baseline leve- hm. What about a Sterile Toxic who was aspected to deep space flavoured astral space?

Nope. HMHVV alters the genetic code of the victim on a permanent base. But he would get rid of the virus and could live his life as sterile whatever.