Hey I have a question concerning my Barrens game. Basically, I noticed that even with a maglock rating 6 lock and rating 4 anti-tamper system the team's thief managed to pick it easly using his log+hardware and basic hardware tools.

OK, this meant I had to cut the session short as I had not intended for them to enter a certain underground lair at this point in time.

The reason why I want to deny access to at least some parts of this facility is because I don't want the PCs to get too much valuable equipment too fast.

I want to include gun emplacements in order to scare the PCs into not tripping the alarm, but I don't want them to actually fire as that would probably kill the poor bastards.

But additionally, I want either certain doors or perhaps elevators to be inaccessible without special knowledge or special equipment (which will require money or contacts to get). Is there any way to do this without throwing the rules out? And more importantly, without giving the PCs the feeling of being railroaded like in many computer games (like DC 99 locks in NWN2).

Please answer quickly, as I need this before tomorrow. Note that the PCs have very little gear, for example no hacking programs (or hardly any programs at all). Also, the facility is 30y old so no wireless at all and I'm not sure if they can even jack in as they have no datajack or deck. Should a modern Sim-module do the trick?

A cardboard reading 'Plot Device - Please do not enter' will do just fine and provide great entertainment to your players.

Ok, a small suggestions then.

They have found an old security checkpoint in the basement of a former corporate building. The now abandoned building is now the home for several squatters and other unfortunate folks.

The basement contains the R&D for the corp in question and the dead rent-a-cop was just hired to watch over the building until they could move everything thing out in a clandestine fashion. Unfortunately the corporation went bankrupt just a few days before they were supposed to clear it out and someone decided that the R&D department should not be known to the public or the new owners, so they put the entire basement on lockdown status.

This unfortunately sealed the guard inside and he unfortunately starved to death and since he was working this job on the side he became just another missing persons case. (Personal information should be available on the old credstick)

There is a fine layer of dust on everything.

Inside the locked door they come into an old storage area (no reception here, this is the back door). Inside they find a large stash filled with old tech junk (it’s 30 years old…) mainly ventilation spare parts and maintenance gear. They can find various technical tool kits but not much else.

They also find a small recreational lounge for the employees and a working arcade machine (for some reason the power is still working…hmm…). They also find a stash of freeze dried food and some canned food (some is edible, but how will they know).

After this they realize that the other doors they find are of a much sturdier quality and only accept voiceprint indentification or palmprint access in combination with a maglock.

As a home it’s much safer than the street but who knows, someone might still own the place…and the power is working…and a secondary silent alarm might have told someone that someone had entered the building…

So, no guns, nothing horrible unless they become stupid.

Guards
Hardwired cameras
Patrolling drones or spirits
Entrance looks like every other cruddy building in the neighborhood
Entrance hidden behind stack of ED books
Hardwired gun emplacements
Lock requires passkey*
Any of the above

*This might give you some time, as the team has to make a run to get a copy of the passkey.

What about making the lock inaccessible from the outside? There are plenty of doors now that simply have no handle or lock from the outside, and the only way to get through them is to have someone unlock and open it from the inside.

Then, of course, you could put a lovely little doorbell next to it. /evillaugh

Otherwise, you can use actual physical means to block the door. For example, a few years ago, my house was almost broken into. Almost. The only thing that stopped the person from getting in was the fact that our sliding patio door was blocked from opening by... a dowel. All fancy-shmancy locking mechanisms, and we were protected by a dowel, which when in place prevents the door from sliding open.

Besides, who'd ever suspect that the reason a door isn't opening is because the Evil Overlord put a chair under the handle?

Biometric maglock. Authorization can't be hotwired and it could take the hacker a while to find the fingerprint/voiceprint database.

Not mentioned in the rules is the timelock (like at fast food joints and convenience stores). Timelocks will only open at a specified time - useful if your R&D team only changes shifts at certain hours.

A lock might be rigged up to an RFID scanner - which is currently switched off. There need be no physical guts to access (unless you used a blowtorch).

Another deal is being honest with your players - I hadn't meant for you to open this door just yet.

You can also have this place be empty, maybe describe the ruins of all kinds of beautiful toys gutted by fire or corroded into junk by caustic gasses, but there's a hint that there are similar facilities not too far away. . . .

If you do not want DC99 locked doors(which pisses me off in NWN2 as well), remember that SR has degrees of successes or hits. So the more hits, the better the overall result. Say 1 hit opens the lock, 2 hits opens the lock silently, 3 hits opens the door silently and bypasses the alarm etc.

The problem I see is that what you want to do is essentially railroading, except that there are multiple rails. The ways into the "hidden rooms" are fixed by you and you do not want the PCs bypassing your fixed ways. How you want to resolve this is up to you because you are in the best position to judge whether your players will feel if they were railroaded or not.

I have to agree with toturi...while I don't think "railroading" has to always have a negative connotation, and while you say you don't want to railroad, that is exactly what you are doing.

As a GM, you can't (and shouldn't, IMO) control what the players do, the vast majority of the time. You put a door there that had a lock that could be passed...and the players passed it...

If you didn't want them to get past the door, you shouldn't have put a door there:) Or you could have welded it shut, concrete blocks behind it, etc, etc...or used a suggestion above about additional security on it. But I just shake my head when you put a maglock on a door, regardless of how strong, and then the rest of your session falls apart because the players opened the door...

Sorry, for being blunt, but why did you even put the door there in the first place? Coudl have been something concealed or simply not there at all...don't penalize your players for lack of planning or not wanting them to go someplace "yet".

And if all else fails, just tell the players the truth and say you are not ready for them to go there...if they are good players and trust you, they'll let it slide:)

Thanks for all the replies. Hmm, lots of possible solutions here, but most of them seem to indicate that I make biometric locks and similar impossibly to bypass with hardwiring... I didn't get this impression from the rules but I'll check them out.

As for the reason why the thief managed to bypass the lock, he had 8 dice and even used his 6 edge a few times (like on the anti-tamper system). Basically he manged this with just a few rolls (less than 4) and didn't glitch once. Yeah he was lucky.

And I didn't say I would never railroad, just that i don't want to make it obvious to the players.


Ok since I haven't mentioned it yet here are a few facts about the facility:

1. It is located in the Barrens, in some tunnels that are linked to the sewers and the PCs squatter home. The heavy steel door was behind a regular wooden one to avoid too much suspicion.

2. It was owned by the Renraku corporation, but it was abandoned 30 years ago for some reason. The people knowing about it are probably dead now, and the corp itself has forgot all about it.

3. The personell in the facility didn't know who they worked for, they were just hired for securiy and research. They're probably all dead by now, except perhaps some freak occurrances.

4. Tech is old, but has some nice security. Staionary automated drones, alarm systems, laser tripwires, locks of different kinds. The PCs should be able to bypass most of these by getting access to passwords etc that can be found inside.

5. There may still be a danger inside (virus, dangerous magic, malfunctioning "smart" security system (or even a mad AI), critters etc.

The facility has more than one level. I want the lower levels to be inaccessible without very good hacker equipment or some such the PCs don't currently have. They might be able to live in the upper level with relative comfort but still be unable to fully explore the entire comlex.

If you haven't actually opened the door yet, I think the killbox (man trap) is a good idea, if it fits your location.

Since the hardware in this installation is 30 years old, you can say that the electronics design is foreign to your thief (who is young, correct?) and make it arbitrarily more difficult for them. If they can't figure out the design, you can make them work to find a Knowsoft about the make/model of the locks inside the facility, which, being pre-crash knowledge, can be arbitrarily rare.

That depends on your acceptance, of course, that old tech can be more difficult to bypass by virtue of its not being in use any longer.

Biometrics, by the book, are pretty secure - for no other reason than it checks a remote database for authentication. When that remote database is in a system off the matrix (especially behind your door) it becomes pretty darn secure. If your team has no hacking progs like you say, go with biometrics or make up something that works similarly.

Well it may not be what you want to do, but considering that anything they find would be 2040ish tech then rule that the 'loot' they find is all extremely outdated and worth maybe pennies on the dollars if the Runners can even find anyone who will pay them for it.

However, they can look "retro-cool" with their non-smartlinked Predator I and the cased ammo they found in their new Bat-Cave.

At least until the A.I. that evolved from the Virus which ate the Internet discovers the party...

I think a combination of things is the way to go. A one trick solution isn't the best in this case.

An idea:
Make the door look impossing; a nice lock will get you far but enough explosives can get around most locked doors. So stress to them that this door seems very solid (think bulkhead/blast door from Star Wars, or in a DnD game I played recently they had two huge Adamantine double doors...kind of kept us out) with a complex lock.

They will probably want to attempt to pick the lock (whether electronic or manual) so you can attempt to add a few layers of security on to it (the passcard/biometric works, but given time it could be bypassed).

So beyond the door I'd use the Man Trap idea with sentry guns on alert (the alarm has already been tripped). Of course this makes one wonder how they'd know about the sentry guns, you could do this by having a security monitor feed playing on a terminal (this of course makes hacking a option to disengage the security alert, this can be defeated by not making the security system on the same network) or the classic red lights flashing in the hallway to indicate the alert has been tripped, but not necessarily by the runners that could have happened back when they sealed they "vault."

Hope this helps...
Matt

Well its been forever since I've read the Arc Shutdown plot, but if I'm remembering correctly I think Deus was born from the shards of another A.I..

What I was thinking about is that the lab was studying the virus that destroyed the Internet in 2029, part of the results of the research allowed Big R to create Blackhammer, but when the lab was abandoned a researcher forgot to turn off the mainframe that was running the actual virus itself.

A few years later the virus gained total access to the facility when a group of Shadowrunners were hired to break into the lab and steal some paydata. For whatever reason the Decker decided to log into the virus mainframe at the same time as the rest of the lab's computer systems (I'd go with pure laziness, he didn't want to have to Jack Out multiple times and didn't know which computer actaully housed the paydata.), the Virus killed the Decker and also triggered a full alert which managed to kill all but one of the remaining Runners...

And since the lab was totally off the grid, the virus stayed there and at some point in time it evolved into a full-blown A.I., driven to madness by the dictates of its core viral code, to devour everything and everyone, if it were to escape into the Matrix at large, then enter Crash 3.0 and who knows what once it discovers Dues's experiments, or maybe even the group trying to create A.I.s in Hong Kong...

I dont think the AI route is the best.
A) it's cliche
B) there is not nearly enough processing power in that lab to evolve an AI. Probably barely enough for a low-level SK. It's just impossible to have an AI. You could of course have a damaged SK controlling central security with the goal of "kill everything in sight". But that's not an AI, and shouldn't be.

just don't have any outside access. if someone wants to get in, they have to ring the doorbell and wait for someone inside to open up.

if you want to make it normally accessible from the outside, but keep the runners out, combine a hidden biometric measure along with the regular lock. if someone opens the lock without looking into a particular crevice (which contains a concealed retina scanner), a 10cm-thick door slams down, which can only be opened from the inside.

Do your players hang out on Dumpshock? If so, you could just put up a sign that says "Beware of the Drop Bears" and they'll run away screaming.

The important part is that boiling oil be dumped on them.

Just as the PCs have spent edge and used the right skills to open the unlockable door, then you should let them have something before slamming their entry shut with a more unlockable door.

Let them explore the first level of the facility where nothing really important can be found, pick the katana from an old office, etc, before they found the really closed door for the next level. Yes, that door they need hacking programs to get into.

You could even fill the first level of the complex with -very vague- clues of the horrible things that happened many years ago. Just dust and some cryptic papers, yes, paper would do...

Listen very carefully to your players conjectures about what might have happened that left this facility so ghastly empty and forgotten. Sure you can make it up from there.

Cheers,

Max

I really like MaxHunter's idea. You don't have to redo any of your previous planning, just shift it all by one floor and add something spooky and cool, and a bit of loot for them to find. (Hey, they made it into the impenetrable room, they deserve something)

Bah, killer A.I.s are only cliche because they are so cool that everyone uses them.

However, I must admit the idea of a viral SK is cool, then you can watch the horror on your player's faces when it escapes and starts getting smarter as to continues to evolve...

Maybe have a display that shows an old recording from one of the scientists from the levels below who didn't get out in time. He's ranting that they should not have done it, it was something man should not have dabbled with and that he's sorry for his role in it all and that he hopes the doors stays forever shut. He keeps blabbering, obviously off his rocker. Orrr... something like that, maybe as a journal. Well, it depends on what's down below.

edit: Yeah, it's also cliche. But hey, sometimes it works.

I hadn't read the rest of this thread, so this might have already been brought up...

There is no such thing as an 'unpickable lock', at least in our modern day. Some locks are incredibly difficult to pick (such as a medeco or a thumb print scanner), but none are unpickable. If you aren't limiting yourself to picking, it becomes even easier. The monofilament chainsaw is in there for a reason.

If you want to make a door that can't be opened, look at what we currently use to do that.

Privacy locks - the lock components are on the inside, not on the outside. It can't be picked because there's no lock there to pick. The lock can only be opened from the inside.

Hidden doors - if you can't find the door, you can't really open it.

Uber high rating materials and high quality workmanship - obvious

Drop bear sentries - again, pretty obvious

Have the gun emplacements loaded with gel rounds. It make sense for a couple of reasons:
1) Some times alarms are tripped by accident, saves on HR replacement costs.
2) Most security types wear hardened armor. Gel rounds don't penetrate such armor that well (or at all, depending on the power), which allows the guns to fire rather indiscriminately without endangering authorized personnel.
3) Gel rounds don't pierce walls and destroy expensive components.

That way one or two of the runners can get really badly stunned, forcing the others to grab the stunned sacks of meat and run away.

If you have unlimited time as a runner, then you keep sending in a cheap drone to trigger the sensors and have the gun emplacements firing until they run out of ammo...

Which is why only the first several bursts are loaded as Gel in order to give the staff time to cancel a false alarm, after that the gloves come off...

Yeah, but from the scenario that's implied in this thread, it may be an abandoned facility. So maybe there'll be a staff that'll respond, maybe not.

Plus, that's why I mentioned cheap drones, (oh hell, mod them to be in a strong armored box to allow it survive longer), and again, repeat till they use up it's ammo. What else will be funny... I don't know, force a legion of weiner dogs down the hall to use up the ammo. It'll be like that scene in Aliens with the gun emplacements.

Aye, I was looking at the situation from the POV that a corp might use for loading the guns with a couple a 'warning' shots using Gel when the lab was still operating, as far as the Runners in question are concerned, they get the benefit of not getting shot with real ammo the first time they stick their heads in the line-of-fire, but it plugs the loop-hole of them running a cheap Drone around to explore the lab without fear...

Here is one idea.

Man Trap room, a button is activated to open the shiny material doors.

Remember, in the center of the room, you need to have one of these on a platform.

Here is one a man trap room, a button outside opens the door(s).

Inside the room the walls are coated with some kind of plastic like materials. Middle of the floor of the room is a 1 foot diameter floor drain. The rooms floor slopes gently towards the drain. Appears to be some eroded teeth on the drain. A faint chemical smell comes from the drain. The floor drain only goes down about a foot and then splits into four pipes, each pipe only about 4 inches in diameter. The floor drain is part of the floor and not removable with out heavy cutting type torches.

Along the upper walls are a series of small pipe like openings at even intervals. On the far wall from where they come is a coated button by what looks like a exit door from the room.

Once pushed that button, the doors they came in from close rapidly with a loud locking sounds. Anything in the way of the closing doors gets cut in two. Above the button they have just pushed is a display with a countdown timer with 10 to 20 seconds counting down.

In the corners lock mechanisms is revealed in each corner. Both locks have to be opened at the same time. The locks are 10 feet apart, so it will take two characters to "pick the locks". The lock mechanisms are each different from each other, one a voice print lock, the other fingerprint scanner. Or other variations of the theme.

If they fail to pick the locks at the same time or the timer runs down, liquids start to pour out of the pipes along the wall. Usually at this time some characters are trying to stop up the pipes, the lock pickers are finding out they only had one chance to pick the locks.

Hopefully some character is trying to bang open etc the door they entered in from. The liquid coming from the pipes seems to dissolved organic matter in a short period of time.

Let the liquid get to about their shoe's soles and let one of the door bangers get lucky on getting the door open, but he/she has to hold it open, so everyone to get out. Once out the doors close forcefully again.

I have yet to have any group go up against this man trap again, with out the keys. Which when the time is right you as the DM can supply.

Luck to you

You can also make things more difficult say this high security door.

For instance a hard wired sensor linked to a speaker by the door. The sensor includes ultrasound. Now when you approach the door it asks you to insert your card and passcode for access. If after a short time you do not, it then asks you again. The third time, the alarm is sounded. Final there is a pressure plate just below the door which is a backup for the motion sensor.

After that trick the next one gives you no warning. So your hacker causes an alarm by taking to long.
You can also trigger

An external system designed to prevent loitering around the door can make hanging around it while you work at the hardware a problem.

When you "hack" by hardware maglock YOUR NOT, say making it think a valid key, biometeric data or what ever was used. Your opening the lock by disabling the magnets just long enough to open locked thing. If security personal look at the access logs and see the door opened with out any access key number. ALARM.

This means you have to access the system and spoof in the proper logs. But if the PC's don't think of that the first time ALARM, then of course after the first alarm disaster they have to realize WHY the alarm sounded.

You need card duplicators, maglock pass keys and other devices to attempt to fool access logs

One thing to remember is that most likely a LOT of the connections for computers, electronic tools and the like have changed in 30 years so in order to be able to hack, crack, open and so on they must scrounge for old parts in retro tech shops, study older electronics and such so they know how it is put together.

I would also stress that don’t overdo it. Dont make it into the secret lair of D.USV2.0 Bot of DOOM but something that is very abandoned and forgotten.

Scare your players – Sentry guns might pop out but due to lack of service they don’t fire, ammo jams, they cannot lock targets and just track aimlessly.

When they manage to crack a lock the door opens halfway and then jam, or perhaps opens and closes slowly. They find an old uncserviced cyberzombie that utters a “Destroy Destroy” and then falls into a rusty old, cancer infected heap of old man with substandard cyberware.

2040s is too early for cyberzombies .
I was just about to post scaring them with the sentry guns One pops out of nowhere, catching them completely flat footed, and they just hear "click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click!"

On the way to work this morning I thought of something else - sorry a lot of times I just can't keep my ideas to myself.

I was thinking about that sentry gun, and how it would need to stop firing and stow itself after 50 rounds or so when it realizes it's out of ammo. I got to thinking, "why would it pop out in the first place, doesn't it already know it's out of ammo?" and that just got me thinking about something else entirely:

Mostly because I really (used to) like the tv show LOST, I was thinking that at some point during their exploration, whenever you feel like it's time, a countdown starts, announced over the station's comm system. They don't know what's going to happen - just that there's some chick's voice echoing inside the bunker and it's counting down from 60. They can react however they like, but once the timer hits zero, all the lights go out, the power shuts down, everything's dead quiet. Open doors stay open, shut doors stay shut. Magnetically sealed doors are unlocked. Perhaps some heretofore unhearable sound is audible. The shutdown lasts only a short time (few minutes, maybe... long enough at least for their minds to wander); the system is then reset and the power comes back up. How often does this happen? Up to you - every hour, every day, whatever feels right. To get the place usable again, this cycle will have to be broken - any programming changes made in the last cycle are reverted when the system resets.
Why does this happen? Could be malfunction. . . could be the only thing keeping the hostile AI/SK at bay. . .

It is plausible that it was just lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. An organization the size of a megacorp can't possibly keep track of all of its assets. Even today, there are military bases and bunkers that have simply been lost and forgotten about and facilities that people don't know ever existed. A big bureaucracy has thousands of hands and none know what any of the others are doing most of the time. Important information gets lost in the paperwork shuffle and this is doubly true for important secret information.

I tend to disagree, I think multi-million dollar secret research plants arent easily forgotten. Unless you wanted to forget them, i.e. the people in charge were so embarassed by the cluster fuck that destroyed the place they swept it under the rug with the stamp of TOTAL LOSS without even bothering to send a salvage team. Again, though, you`d probably need to explain it a little...

If you want to be evil, you could put some sort of sensor or tripwire that alerts someone shady over at Renraku once seal is breached and the runners start poking around. Maybe the corp figured it was fine to seal the place and leave everything there, AS LONG as no one else got in there either. The runners might just have attracted some undue attention by opening that door.

Thats fine for NOW. But the cataclysm happened THIRTY years ago. Salvage crews would have been sent at that time, and at that time the situation would have been closely monitored. Point is, right NOW, there should be absolutely nothing of value left in that lab. Everything would have been salvaged thirthy years ago. Unless an explanation is cooked up. There are several possibilites, Im not saying its impossible. Im just saying it has to be explained. Or doesnt. Depends on how inquisitive your players are, really.

Okay. Lets say this guy named John Peters has this big plan for some top secret research that isn't quite safe or legal. His boss, Mr. Takanaka, give him a rather large budget and cart-blanch to so whatever he wants with it. Takanaka doesn't want to get regular reports from Peters because if he does then he can't deny knowledge of the highly illegal project that will ensure them all promotions if it succeeds and get whoever authorized it killed if it fails. So, Mr. Tananaka knows nothing and this gives him plausible deniability.

Now, five months into the project Mr. Yamagato, Mr. Takanaka's boss, catches his subordinate in a compromising position with his wife. "Eatin' ain't cheatin'!", Takanaka exclaims in his defense. But, alas, it falls in deaf ears. Takanaka's division is shut down and Peters loses both his funding and his authorization. He opens the poison gas valve and seals the door on his way out as required by protocol. He doesn't bother to tell anyone about the facility. He assumes that Takana's removal was done because people found out about the project (making the infidelity public would lead to a great loss of face for Mr. Yamagato so he kept it secret) and so he never bothers to say anything to anyone about it.