One of my players did something that I'm fairly sure is illegal in Seattle- he Mind Probed an unwilling and unsuspecting target in a bar. I've always played that Mind Probe is obvious to anyone who is the target of it, I recall reading some fiction on the SR4 site a year or so ago that described someone being Mind Probed by a Dragon, and it felt like someone was flipping through their memories. The whole team left the bar post-haste as bouncers descended, but I don't want to just let them get away with Astral Assault. So I'm thinking that the next time the offending magician uses the same SIN that he showed the bouncer at the bar, Lone Star is going to show up.

What I'm wondering is if there is any canon method to deal with Crime and Punishment.

Obviously the team will be searched and stripped of their unlicensed restricted items and all forbidden items (unless they figure something out), but I'm not sure about the next step. Should it be like an assault charge nowadays, where the perp would go to central booking for a few days until bail is arranged? Then he would have to get a lawyer and go to criminal court in a few months/weeks?

This all might be a moot point given that my players might just blast Lone Star and try to get away, but if any other GMs have dealt with criminal prosecution and the UCAS Justice System, I'd love to hear about it.

For those who have a legal SIN (or a fake one that beats the verification) then I'd run the system similar to today. Arrest them, take their stuff, get details about them, flag the SIN as a having been arrested, and throw them in a holding cell. Mages might be magecuffed (see manatech in Aresenal) to help protect the mundane guards from magical capabilities. If they don't have a Criminal SIN, I think they'd be fast-tracked towards a trial and re-incarceration and or fines, depending on the situation.

And, for the SINless, they'd be given a Criminal SIN (step one) and then they'd be fast tracked like above. Or, if it's a megacorp, they might be volunteered into a testing program of some kind. The Azzies might just write you down for "religious observance" on the weekend, too

Not in SR4 that I'm familiar with, but in SR2 & SR3 there were tables of Legality codes along with tables for punishment. I unfortunately don't have them with me at work.

Assuming that this did not take place on Corporate Territory where the standard of proof and presumed innocent until proven guilty standard can be pretty much anything the corp wants, figure UCAS law is still loosely based on the Canadian and American interpretations of English Common Law.

Chances are there was enough astral residue to substantiate the complainant's claim of astral assault, making your player's character a suspect. There were probably a few wittnesses at the bar as well. This would be enough to get an arrest warrant issued against the SIN the character used (be it real or a fake). Once arrested, depending on the circumstances (quality of Lawyer, previous record) he would be charged and jailed until a bail hearing could be arranged. He may be eligible for bail or not, you may want to use an opposed social test of some type (either the character's or his lawyer's) to represent the proceedings. Then the Star goes to work making a case to present in the criminal trial. The player can try to subvert evidence and wittnesses or just try to flee if bailed, but will almost assuredly have someone or some piece of tech tailing him until the trial date. The trial could be good roleplaying fun, or could be reduced to a couple of tests depending on how your group wants to play it. If convicted the charcater will gaina criminal SIN, and face punishment (fines or prison time most likely) and may have to pay restitution as well.

EDIT: Kind of lost in all that was that you can have a lot of fun playing out interations with the legal system, Canon or not if it fits your game. The legal system probably can be reduced to a single test, but it might be more fun to play it out.

Depending on the force, by the time Lone Star gets there (bringing their own mage since they are investigating magic). They can probably get the caster's astral signature off of the person it was cast on. Then its realitively simple to have a spirit track down the astral signature. If he doesn't have a record, and it was fairly low force, he's likely to get a probation officer to make sure he is using his awakened abilities within the law.

Can a spirit search based on Astral Signatures? I don't think so. I've always assumed that LS employs spirits who assense signatures so and acts as a "database" for the information. That way they can connect crimes committed by the same mage, but there's no way that I can think of to search for a person with only their signature. Now if you could get a material link off the the glass they used at the bar or something like that it'd work out ....

There isn't really any reason to use an astral search tough. If I read the situation correctly the character inquestion got carded at a bar, so had to present an ID. Additionally he probably bought a drink so his active ID interacted with something. That ID record most likely has an image of the character attached (unless it's really low rating) though maybe not the proper name and address. The first thing that's likely to happen is that the ID gets blown when the Star shows up at a bogus address. Then the Star goes to work trying to match elements of the obviously fake ID to other ID's. Meanwhile the image is uploaded to drones civering public areas with image recognition software, and the SIN is flagged so that it reports anytime it's used. Astral forensics take sometime, but would probably focus on establishing an identity first, though if they got lucky with a good link they might use a spirit or ritual to track down the suspect. Keep in mind a ritual Clairvoyance spell may require a warrant, but could be very effective in establishing the characters location.

Short version is that just because the crime was magical in nature doesn't mean that the Star will automatically use a magical response or search method.

Why would they all have their gear taken? The mage did it. Let the Star nab the mage. Any particular reason they should round up everyone and maybe get into a fight with that troll in the corner when they only have a complaint on the mage? We would let them take the mage.

How did anyone know who the "offending magician" was? Why is Lone Star involved? Did the victim file a complaint with Lone Star? How good was his evidence about the perpetrator's identity? How big a priority is this going to be to LS?


If the "offending magician" was identified, and if LS accepts the story and the id and if LS gets someone to the place where the id is used again before the "offending magician" has left, they will be questioned. Why the entire team would be searched is questionable unless they do something to prompt such a search. Depending on that, they may be searched or if the questioning is done "downtown", they will likely go through some weapon detectors which may prompt a search. Again, why the entire team is going downtown is questionable.

If the answers to the questions indicate a crime was committed, if the suspect is positively identified, or if a combination of circumstances makes it look like the suspect could be successfully prosecuted for the crime, they will be held usually pending bail. I know someone who was arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer, bail was a predetermined/set amount, and they were out of jail in a matter of minutes. So I will infer most locales will have preset bail amounts that can be paid instantly. I have even heard of places accepting credit cards.

If a search turned up illegal items, the person will be booked and probably eligible to be released on the aforementioned bail system. If not, thn they woud get a plea and bail hearing, and could be released shortly after posting bail. For someone in custody, the plea entry and bail hearing is usually the first business day. A long line of people ahead of them might cause a slight delay. If there was this much traffic, the actual trial will be months away.

Btw, the person who was arrested for assaulting an officer, was never brought to trial and the statute of limitations expired.

the obvious question is do you have lonestar or aother appropriate enforcement squad show up anytime anyone does illegal activity?
let him get away with it. people get mugged all the time and no one does anything about it, most of the time no one fills out a police report because the star is not the noble alliance of good that the police squad is. the stories I've read mark the star as greedy underhanded and selfish.
someone posts a complaint and it gets shuffled to the bottom of the stack. UNLESS that person bribed them alot.
even if the star knows everything about them, where they live where they are RIGHT NOW, they'll let it slide because they have better things to do with their manpower. iuts the same reason that warrants never get issued and the offenders arrested.

Okay perhaps an unlicensed mage might give them reason to go chasing, may depend on force and how illegal that spell is.

Also while the star might ignore it this would also depend on where it happened. If it is in a reasonable neighbourhood they might well decide to pursue it, if it was in a rundown area perhaps not.

The SIN should have an arrest warrant and the mage should bin it, then Lone Star will loose the scent. This is why you buy fake SINs, and this is how shadowrunners get away with being criminals

One thing that many people forget about mind probe is that it is not cast directly on the target. It is a detection spell. Like all detection spells, it is cast on a subject and gives that subject a new sense. In the case of mind probe, it give the subject a psychic sense that can be used to probe an individual's mind. Being a sustained spell, it can be cast on a subject days ahead of time and the magician casting the spell does not need to be anywhere near the target when his mind is actually probed. So there is really no way for anyone to determine that you did it.

I'm not convinced that Astral Assault is considered a crime unworthy of serious investigation. As Street Magic points out, magic is a topic of a great deal of ignorance, misinformation and xenophobia. Arresting a mugger or go-ganger probably won't have the same effect as arresting some mage that magically assaulted someone in public, as far as citizen perception is concerned. Magic also has far more destructive capability then, say, a lunatic with a rifle, or even an RPG. Based on the text in Street Magic, I'd say that Lone Star takes mind reading very seriously.

right but what proof does he have?
can anyone just scream out "he did it! that's the guy how mind$#(!*#% me!!!! BURN THE WITCH!!!"

News at 11


Frankly, your plahyer's mistake was to not use alter memory on the target to make him forget the mind probe.


Canonically, the PCs have no rights unless they are SINners
Summary Execution is legal, and more common than arrest of SINless. Also on the spot bribes fines are common

Canonically, SINless have few rights, but they do have some.



Can you give me a book quote for that?

Bah, in the Sixth World you only have as many "rights" as you can afford, SINner or otherwise.

it is perfectly legal to shoot a SINless as there is no SIN to associate with the dead person no charges can be pressed etc... its a dead end.
and when it states that it is common for SINless to go missing or get dissappeared instead of being arrested and tried, that kinda tells you they have no rights.

um...all of them.

I see nothing in there about it being legal to kill SINless people indiscriminately (or even not indiscriminately).



Even here, although it states that disappearances and mistreatment are common (shoplifting and tax evasion are also common, but not necessarily legal), it does not say anything about legally murdering SINless with wild abandon.

As I said, can you provide an actual book quote to back up that statement, or just spout bullshit like 'all of them'?

Wolf and Raven is the first example I would give off the top of my head. It references a young buy who was killed, the Lone Star Officer is quoted as saying "What investigation. No SIN, so it's not a murder."

I will need to scour the books to get some more for you

That's just a single Lone Star cop making a decision not to go through the hassle of all the paperwork. That doesn't necessarily reflect either company policy or the legality of the matter. I freely admit that abuses and murders happen to SINless (maybe not on the scale that some of you might think though), but the fact remains that SINless do have some (very few, but some) rights, and it is not, in any way, shape or form, legal for them to just be hunted and slaughtered by one and all.

I gave you quotes. That is what SR4 has to say about the consequences of being SINless. If it were in fact legal to murder SINless people, I would think that this little tidbit would be included in that section, or indeed anywhere in the SR4 (or any edition) books.

shadowrun doesn't deal with the how's and whys to what is and is not legal.
you dismiss one example that is contrary to your opinion but accept one example that is not....

Kind of like illegal aliens who have no SSN. Perfectly legal to shoot them.


I think I would like to see the quote and context. I could see Lone Star not considering it a crime against one of their Contracted, hence no investigation, because there was no SIN.

Under UCAS law Homicide is probably still illegal regardless of the SIN status of the victim, it's just that the response to a dead SINless Squatter in the Barrens is likely to be much smaller than the response to a dead SINner in a AA neighborhood. The amount of resources the Star would allocate towards identifying a SINless body and investigating any suspicious circumstances would be much lower than if the body had a SIN. It's unlikely that if a LoneStar employee shot a SINless person there would be much of an inquiry or disciplinary action taken (except possibly a payroll deduction to cover frivolously expended ammunition) unless a rival happened to film it for use in a negative PR campign to try to dislodge the Star from a lucrative contract, then the offending employee would be very publically disciplined. I don't think the various references to the lack of rights the SINless have is as much suggesting that it's legal to kill them or that laws have significantly changed so much as it is alluding to the fact that enforcement of laws and the workings of the criminal justices system are more selective and more focused on customer satisfaction than justice.

The only example I dismissed is a quote from a novel that basically amounts to shadowtalk, as it is spoken in-character by a person with dubious motivations and associations (a Lone Star cop).

There is a section in the SR4 core rulebook entitled 'SINless Consequences'. It is reasonable to assume that if they had less rights in regards to being killed than normal animals (who at least have to be in season, and for whom a license is required to hunt), it would be hinted at in some manner, if not spelled out plainly.

Undeniably. I just take exception to the statement that it is legal to kill SINless.

the wording of the law would be written with citizens in mind and likely to be written as individual with citizen identification number tagged. if your world is less dystopian then your laws would be written appropriately

But see, there are are seasons for animals so that they are not hunted during breeding season for conservations sake. SINless are vermin that breed year round and they need eradicated.

Please read the section in question. There are plenty of reasons for a person to be SINless, even legitimate ones. But even if the Law was written with only citizens in mind (can you give me a real life example of this phenomenon?), we have the following ...



Followed by ...



Which means, by your logic, that it is perfectly fine with everyone concerned if every single citizen of those counties that do not use SINs (or their equivalent) was murdered indiscriminately. Every visitor from such a country could be met at the airport and gunned down with no consequences. Nobody would care, right? That's just dumb! But even if we stretch that far, why hasn't it happened already? Why hasn't some Corp sent in their Desert Wars vets for some off-season training and wiped out the population, then moved in on the land?

Actually if you want a really dystopian world, there would be laws regulating almost everything. This gives the powers that be the ability to micromanage anything they want. The selective and arbitrary application of those laws can make for a very frightening world.

Not having a SIN makes you a second class citizen, not a non-person tha can be killed on a whim. Not having a SIN probably doesn't mean that you get out of paying taxes either. Not having a SIN probably means that you can't do things like:

Get a Loan
Open a Bank Account
Get a Drivers, Gun, or Professional Lisence
Go to a public school
File a Lawsuit
Get Social Service benefits from a Goverment agency (most of the time)
Trade Stock
Vote
Be Selected for Jury Duty

be american...go to mexico, there's your real life example


think a little bit about what you just said then get back to me. or see the above statement.

You are free to play anyway you like. I am talking canon though. I have provided a fair number of quotes to back up my position. You have supplied nothing but conjecture. Let's see the quote that states that killing SINless is totally legal. The book says that most Shadowrun characters are SINless, so one would think something as important as every single SINner has the right to shoot them on sight with no questions asked and no consequences afterward would be addressed somewhere. It is not, because that just isn't the case. SINless (at least in the UCAS) are considered 'probationary citizens'. There is no official and legal open season on SINless.

my response was because you don't know anything about international travel.
I'm basing it on the descriptions since there isn't any loaws written for shadowrun universe
you want to talk canon however you are making assumptions and refuse to show me a law written for shadowrun. we'll continue this way no matter what... i have better things to do

If you say so, but thanks for the insult.

I might say the very same about you, if you think that Americans have absolutely no rights whatsoever in Mexico. (Been there ... done that).

I'm out. I have backed up my point with canon quotes, while you have done nothing of the sort. Have a nice day.

A lot of you seem to be equating a SIN with an SSN for the purposes of what it does; from what I can understand, it's not even close. Without an SSN, you're still considered a citizen and have a full citizens rights. Without a SIN, *they can't even prove your exist*. You have extremely limited, if any, rights and most people will not care what happens to you. You can't get a job, legally live anywhere, ride a bus, or even buy a hamburger at the fast food joint down the street without a SIN.

While I doubt that it's technically "legal" to just shoot a SINless person if your another citizen, I have no doubts that any Lone Star officer in the UCAS could shoot any SINless person for just about any reason and get away with it scott-free. Remeber, "few to no civil rights", *especially* if that SINless person was a metahuman or Awakened (both of which, while not techinically making you have less rights, do make the normal people tend to care a whole lot less about what happens to you).

Look at it like this: In 1920, how much trouble would a cop have gotten into for shooting a poor black person that was suspected of assaulting an average white citizen?

That's actually more or less the interpretation most of us have of it, though in actuality a SIN basically is an SSN only at an international level. Yhe issue has been the suggestion that Killing a SINless person is Legal in the same sense that breathing air is legal. Sure if a Lonestar Cop shoots a poor SINless Squatter in the barrens he's not going to get in trouble for it, but there will at least be a pretense of an inquiry in to why, if it was ever reported. The Cops Partner would back him up, his Commanding Officer would say "looks like it's justified" and everyone's happy except the squatter, who's dead and can't complain. Throw a news camera in the mix catching the officer doing it followed by a public outcry that threatens their city contract and the whole scenario changes. Instead of looking the other way the Star would happily sacrifice their "Rogue Cop" in a very public show trial to show that they were very serious about safeguarding all the citizens and residents of the City.

A SIN is like an SSN on crack, basically. An SSN only effects certain parts of your life--a SIN effect's basically all of them. It's much more far-reaching and all-encompassing than an SSN.

And as far as sacrificing their rogue cop to show that they protect ALL the citizens and residents of the city--that's fine, if you're a citizen or a legal resident. If your SINless, you are neither. You're not a citizen, and you can't live anywhere without being a squatter or using fake ID, which is illegal in itself, so you're not a legal resident, either.

Most of the time those things get ignored, I'll bet, simply due to the sheer number of the SINless popupation, the likelyhood of a public outcry if they started a mass SINless eviction/slaughter/whatever, etc.

Basically, it seems the SINless exist in a sort of legal gray area where the law is allowed to do pretty much whatever they want to them...up to a point. I really wouldn't be surprised if a significant number of Lone Star officers just arrested any suspected SINless criminal, drove them somewhere disserted, shot them in the back of the head, and told anybody who asked that they "got away".

Nobody is gonna raise any great fuss about "abuses" against a number of people that are not citizens, have almost no rights, and are generally considered criminals as a matter of course, anyway.

but that has nothing to do with whether or not he had a SIN, and whether or not it was actually legal. that's media attention...
and with media attention you have to get enough people together that care enough to put the political pressure on the people in office. because those people get voted in by the voters...
in the shadowrun world, they might not even have elections where the street voters count. the only players are the corporations, they are the ones that get people elected. so if the corp doesn't care what happeend to some SINless guy then the media won't show it, because they get paid not to.

yeah juggy paying certified cred is like using a credit card now adays, you don't even have to sign for something less than $20, they don't ask for ID unless you are buying something expensive.

And especially in the fragged up Sixth World the media attention could be focused on how effective and brutal Lonestar is in protecting honest Citizens against the SINless masses for a posisitive story, remember, illegal too-the-death bloodsports are a huge hit amonst the masses, and "News Outlets" are even more whorelike in the Sixth World then they are today.

How it played would really depend on just who's media caught it. Ares owns media companies in addition to owning Knight Errant and Weapons World (and a whole lot of other things). If they got footage of Lone Star doing something questionable they certainly would use it to make them look bad, it just might help them pick up a new city contract for KE. Now if it was KE who did the exact same thing it would be covered in a completely different way, or ignored altogether.

Also you'd be suprised just what you can't do today without a SSN. It's the ID that links you to your credit rating among other things and with no credit rating you are very limited in your financial, employment, and housing options already. The SIN is just taking that and extending it for another 65 years of automation and datamining.

you all keep discussing the mage and his/her SIN. what about the victim and location and the state of the victim's SIN? the way i see it, if this happened to some SINless nobody in a dive in the barrens, the cops wouldn't even show up for the call. if it happened to some typical SINer, the cops would probably show up, arrest the mage if he's around, take a report if he's not. if you're talking about some middle manager for a megacorp that got mindprobed at some VIP hotspot downtown, the cops might show up and actually open an investigation.

like today. if my beater car gets stolen from outside my ghetto warehouse space, the cops might show up a while later and take a report. if the car happens to show up somewhere, they'll call me. but if a senator's lambirginie gets stolen from the circular drive outside his mansion, there's going to be some real action taken.

this would also affect legal proceedings. if someone rich and powerful is mad, the lawyers will walk in and make sure that the law does all the damage it can. but don't forget that shadowrunners have their own methods for dealing with the law. maybe the team has a good contact in the star. or maybe the team scrambles while the mage is on his way to lock up, intercepting the cops and taking their friend back.

also, from the description of mindprobe from sr4, "The target is aware of the probing, though they may not know the source of the spell." So if your mage was discreet, it could be pretty easy in a crowded bar to probe someone's mind without them having any idea who was doing it.