In the topic "Indispensable" about what any Shadowrun chracter really needs, MaxHunter suggested:



My question regarding this was: What would you consider really hidden in the sixth world?
The basement of an abandoned building in the Barrens? Sooner or later, squatters will find your stash and make off with the contents.
Inside a bank? When you're in need of the described stuff, you definitely don't want to show ID and be recorded on security cameras.
With a close friend? Contacts are the first place, people chasing you go to and either money or torture will make them spill the beans sooner or later - or they just suck at hiding stuff, it's a matter of how much YOU trust THEM.

There were already severa points made by other posters in thatt hread already such as:

A coffin in a coffin motel - You will need to regularly renew the rent on the coffin, leaving at least a papertrail.
Lockers outsicde bus/train stations, amusement parks etc. - those are cleared out regularly.
The trunk of a burnt out car in a junkyard - which would sooner or later be scrapped for parts and/or go the way of the Terminator.

So where would you hide stuff that really only you should know about?

Well, I like to play my characters like it was RL. So probably I'd get a safe and put it under my bead. If people can find out where I live I'm screwed anyway...

Burial is a classic method; in an area of a public park that has no cameras and few visitors, and be good at concealing signs of hole-digging. Hollow trees, fake rocks, etc.

Have enough stashes that if one gets taken by other down-and-outers, you've got others. Redundancy FTW.

Figure out some place that has lots of boxes and never gets cleaned up; someone's attic or basement, someone unlikely to move or whatever. Add your box to theirs.

Commercial storage units and banks have cameras, but if what you keep is in a plain box or bag, you remove that and open it somewhere else.

There's a hobby called "geocaching" that involves hiding containers in public and semi-public areas, in ways such that other geocachers can find them, but other people are less likely to find them.

coffin hotel, commlink, agent, black credit account. put the agent on the commlink, put the commlink in the coffin hotel, instruct the agent to renew the coffin hotel as needed, drawing on the black account. recharge the black account with other black funds as needed.

Bury it in some random park unobserved in the middle of the night, in a fireproof, waterproof box....

sink it in a waterproof box to the bottom of a canal or reasonably sized creek with a weight and a growlie cover....

...and why not in a basement in the Barrens or anywhere really..., cave a secret hollow into the wall hide it in a hole in the hollow, bury it in the hole, hide something seemingly valuable and more likely to be there in the hollow on top of the covered hole, rebuild the wall, and use things to age it appropriately to match the rest... or renovate (or tag or otherwise deface) the whole wall so it blends in fine...

I would hide it in an astral rift, because nothing says safe like a crazy tear in the universe that leads into a different plain.

...conceal it in a fruitcake. Nobody in their right mind would ever even think about touching it .

I'd suggest a church. Give the Padre a nice "donation" and have him hold your package for you.

I usually set up about 12 or so stashes expecting that probably half will be found eventually. still leaves 6 ish for me in a pinch.

but then I usually play really paranoid and pessimistic.

burying has a problem that some squartter might see you or notice the ground has been disturbed. also unless using a tree or something to anchor it, things hsift underground and you might lose it.

I liked the coffin motel



Seriously, clutter. my home office looks like an explosion in a library. I can find stuff but you're looking for one particular disc or CD or page in there and good luck. my husband says he expects to someday find a japanese osldiers still fighting WW2 in there.

Rent a drone launch from one of the arcologies or skylockers with a fake SIN, registered as freelance journalist. Buy a solar-powered blimp drone with enough cargo space to fit your safety deposit box. Program a semi-random flight plan into the agent, which registers with the appropriate services as needed. The blimp transmits camera feed to a dead end uSlot account registered to the journalist while it flies around during wee morning hours. Have a backdoor into the agent which lets you take control of the drone when you need it.

The more complex a plan the more prone it is to breaking down...
I have to agree with the paranoid person though, 2 is better than 1, 3 is beter than 2, 4 is... Well... You can figure out the the pattern in there...

That's relatively simple for one of my plans.

In a locker, in a city, in a bottle, in another locker, in another city, in another bottle which is hidden in a vintage Coke machine that doesn't work. Ok, so it only works for a few really strong mages, but at least it will cause a lot of collateral damage when two (or more if you're feeling mean) cities unfurl around anyone trying to get at your stash.

Now, if you want retrievability, that's a different issue, and you face the difficult balance of accessibility vs. security. Any lock can be picked, eventually, so you can't even feign security by giving a very locked box to someone.

To give a little actually useful advice, safehouses with sufficiently complicated hidden ownership should be good at least once until you really tick off a power player.
If the important bit is the information, not the medium or authenticity of the medium the information is on, then you can have fun with split files encoded in vacation photos and things like that. I don't know how well it would work in SR, but in RL, I've wondered at the potential security of reading an entire text file as a single variable holding a number and then calculating the prime factors so that you have 30 or so numbers which would be hidden somewhere that when all of them are multiplied together, you get a really big number that when read as a text file has some actual meaning. This is a lot of overhead on the encryption, but it's at least more entertaining than the classic key and scramble encryption.

This leads me towards another interesting question that's been on my mind for some time; how are safehouses handled? Considering that money tends to flow into and back out of runner accounts at lightning speed, it never seemed plausible that runners would just happen to have another secure, unoccupied house outside of their place of residence.

?
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the obvious - inside an oblivious wage slave. Living in secure corp owned buildings, working in same, means that they aren't entering dangerous situations; while a note on their medical file from security telling their doctors etc not to mention the 'classified cyberware' means that no one will mention it to them. The operation to put it in them can be done in an hour or so; and then heal them up magically. Done at night, even if they have vague memories they'll pass them off as a nightmare.

A variation on the coffin motel and airport locker themes would be to put all the shit you need in the trunk of a cheep car, load the "automated payment" agent into the car's node and park the car in a secure long-term parking facility (such as those found at any major airport). You could even set the car's autonav to randomly change parking spaces within the lot every few days so that even you don't know exactly where the car is until you send out the proper command to the car to reveal itself. An added benefit is that if you can't go to your stash, the stash can come to you.

Another option in a totally digital world is to implant a cheep cyber commlink with a solid fake SIN, an airline ticket and a bunch of cred in your head. Keep it turned off and never use it for anything else until you need to disappear. Might show up on cyberware scans but its entirely legal and if anyone asks you tell them its broke and you don't have the cred to get it fixed.

Magic types could conjure and bind a spirit and command it to use its concealment powers to keep something hidden. This would greatly enhance anything buried in the earth or sunk to the bottom of a lake, pond, etc. This of coarse requires that you have a spirit to spare...

Where to hide emergency gear so no one else will take it?

Install it in your head. Or your leg, if you're a big puss.

Since I posted the original suggestion I may well tell a couple in-game examples...


1: A character used to work at the docks. There he noticed a couple abandoned containers and set up a stash there. He made sure nobody was watching and that if those containers would ever be claimed or something he would know. Think that Nicholas Cage film the "Lord of War"

2: Orc samurai who had helped a very minor orc gang asked them to take care of a few things he may need some time. He pays them from time to time and uses them to get rid of guns he has found at runs and are too cheap to sell. They are not a regular contact nor have much of a social life.

3: This is the best! Decker who had very hot classified data from Aztechnology and was actively being hunted by the corp. In one run he met a guy who was a renegade Renraku cyber-company man, complete with p-fix programming and cranial bomb. The decker helped that guy wipe out the programming and disable the bomb. While performing "brain surgery" he inserted his stolen information inside the samurai's headware. He used to call the samurai "my diskette". It was pretty safe to know that your information stash has 20 dice in firearms, 18 in dodge and soaks damage with 22 dice.

Cheers,

Max

In the other thread, someone suggested a post-office box and a U-Store-It. I'd also be inclined to say that with a High lifestyle, you could split it into two Middles, and use the second as your hidey-hole. Failing that, I'd expect that a High lifestyle would include a few bolt-holes.

Just put a few storm clouds in an area with a laser sensor and have them just drift around until you need to call on one of them (works better in certain areas.)

Hide a chip in someones printer in a wage slave's house.

Have a neutral 3rd party hold onto it.

Have an account hidden in a fly spy.

i would vote for redundancy. nothing is permanent in this world. everything gets replaced, refurbished, junked and whatsnot. so if one plan on stashing it for long, make sure it 3-4 redundant locations.

For me, it depends on what it is exactly.

If it is something that I do not immediately need (like potential blackmail data), I would take a nice ride out into the country, off the beaten path, and drop it six feet under in an enviro-safe box. Mark the GPS coordinates, of course, and rest assured that nobody in their right mind would see you unless you were followed and the likelihood anyone would stumble across it would be next to zero. The harsher the terrain, the better the 'security'.

If it is a more temporary stash that I need, I have done anything from false wall outlet storage bins, hollowed out couch arms, inside home theater speakers, above ceiling light fixtures, inside solar-powered lawn lights, in a plastic bag in the bottom of a koi pond, etc. Most rent-a-thugs will toss the easily movable items in search of something.

i had an idea like that once . . almost made a whole character concept out of it . .
started out as an alibi, by having a cheap cyber-deck be in the coffin motel with some agents and such software to simulate things like a receptionist and a boss who would give my character an alibi if needed by saying he had been to work at that time . . basically, a whole simulated company to deal with alibis and needed permits and the such . . all run from an coffin motel . . gives a whole new meaning to Cube-Farm neh? *g*

As for the original question: probably park some scooters/cheap ass cars with some junk in the trunk around town, all with fake ID's and licenses and linked to various sins and the such . . and of course the coffin motel *g*
else buy some street lifestyle or something like that and tell the GM that it is basically a box behind some old trash cans or below a manhole in some secluded corner or something like that . .
And if i REALLY wanna go the whole nine yards, i take some car OUT of the city and hide it somewhere in the wilderness and have somebody pick me up somewhere in the intermediate vincinity of the hiding spot to take me back into town . . one could of course go to the extreme with the right skills and just build a wooden house somewhere in the forests with an underground cellar and made out of trees one took down on his own alone a little ways off the actual house so there will be no clearing the house is standing on . . and because it's natural wood and earth it'S even hidden from magical eyes and won't get picked up much on any sensors because the surroundings are made of the same materials . .

Yeah, nothing stands out more than a metal and concrete bunker in the middle of the boonies. A random hunting blind/lodge? Not so suspicious.

i'll never forget the Face of my GM, when i told him that i had put about 250 to 500k into hiding places in my one character *g*
No, not exactly IN my new character . . but into his abilities to just pick a hiding place and make things disappear *g*