...two words: environmental hazards.

Near the Redmond Barrens there is Glow City a toxic and radioactive nightmare. There can be chemical dumps awash with all sorts of lovely toxic cocktails (think of the final scene in the original Robocop). Don't want to deal with all the muss & fuss & expense of proper toxic disposal, theres always the Barrens. Also, toxic environments provide a favourable background for toxic magic & spirits.

...how many PCs are have you seen who have a chemsuit hanging in their closet and Hazmat gear in the footlocker? How many want to burden themselves down on a run with Hazardous environments suits and gear outside of a gas mask or respirator? How many take Survival (Toxic or Hazardous Environments) skill?

Besides toxins there is also disease. With little or no healthcare and sanitation a joke in the Barrens, disease would be a huge threat. Have that natural Immunity quality, Cure Disease spell or Immunisation Nanoware? didn't think so. Things as simple as a knife cut form a ganger's dirty blade, a bite from that devil rat, or a gash from tripping and falling in a stagnant puddle of water (I, I think it's water) can come back to haunt the character after the run is over.

...how many PCs have you seen go get a checkup at their friendly local street doc's after a run in the Barrens?

Keep in mind surrounding conditions also impact the success of First aid/Magical Healing and the Barrens would definitely be the worst of the worst there is.

Now mind you, implement too many of these suggestions and the first thing a runner is going to wonder is, "why in the hell does Mr. Johnson want to meet there? And is the payoff going to cover just the operational costs in ammo and hospital stays?"

-Siege

It'd damn well better. I don't meet anyone in the barrens without a good excuse and at least enough pay for me to throw out my old body armor and replace it

More deadlines - two words : devil rats

I've hit PCs with swarms of devil rats in barrens and sewers areas three times. One time the mage managed to quickly mana ball the lot of them, and the rats died. The other two times, all the PCs were nearly eaten alive. Demon rats are worst.

In essence, don't forget the paracritter love. Gargoyles are also urban predators.

Just make sure they're not whererats. I hate those things.

-Siege

How do you guys justify giving a group Decker something to do in the Barrens? It's a little easier for a Rigger.. I'm having flashbacks of the "Be advised, you have a large crowd gathering" line from Black Hawk Down, when the overwatch Little Bird radios in to the Delta team. But Deckers? There's not much to maintain overwatch on..

Yep, those invisible lycanthropic rodents sure do suck!

Depends on what sort of Barrens area you're talking about. The Realit Hackers have their own matrix hardware set up in TouristVille Redmond for example. Just because folks are in a Z-zone doesn't mean they couldn't have some decent gear they took off a runner's corpse. There could easily be a ganger or three with a smarlink'd SMG or pistol linked to a metalink or even a decent comm with outdated security because they took it off a runner who succumbed to a number of the other hazards listed in this threa. Cyber on gangs liek hte old school Steppenwulfs (sp?) from Prime Runners could have the hardware, with still functional wireless and not enough security built in to it to be vulnerable to a decker. As in a lot of Barrens stuff, you have to keep in mind where the gear and supplies came from, and see what might be exploited. Deckers can and should do a lot more than overwatch.
Then there's always drones too.

S'why Samurai will never, ever really fade away because sometimes it's just you, a gun and a bad attitude.



S'also why every character needs to drop a couple of points into a backup skill - you won't always have the luxury of determining the field of battle.

-Siege

Nah, bullets flying around you, or being in a burning building, those are the worst of the worst. Dirty badly-lit places where the air smells bad and is kinda greasy = still bad, though. A nasty infection won't show up until later.

I'd argue that the kinds of things that live in the Barrens are the kinds of things that might show up during the course of an extended run. And yeah, you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere that would qualify as clean enough for 0 penalties on your first aid rolls.

Hey there's an idea, keep the players in the Barrens long enough that they have to eat. Let them make hard decisions about what devil rat dish they're going to eat first . Punish their intestinal system accordingly. No one packed rations or clean water? oooo... guess you're getting a bit peckish and a little dehydrated.

I feel it is appropriate to again post the reminder that there are lots of people living, some even thriving, in the Barrens.

Starting sometime around the transition from 1st to 2nd Ed I realized that unless the GM was a total Gob, or my players were utterly noobish and unlikely to change (yeah, lets shoot some shit up! It's fun!!! types....)

That any starting shadowrunner who DIDN"T base out of the barrens was a liability. Sure, the GM may never punish players, but for my own suspension of disbelief, until the runners are worth millions per run, and are doing the sort of high level, high profile ops that justify a legitimate, if dangerous, existance...


Operating out of anywhere BUT the barrens is foolish. SINner-ville is for people who have nothing to hide, or people on the job.


Think about it: you do crime for a living, often very violent crime. Half your body is highly illegal and you've got enough guns and explosives to start a small war. Do you REALLY want to risk lonestar busting down your door some night because the neighbors saw you stagger home bloody and strapping?

Not really, and the only place you don't have to worry about it is the Barrens.

Hell, there are enough 'legit' areas of the barrens to serve as 'uptown' style locals for natives, and places where the SINners come to slum and rub elbows to making meeting the Johnson (who ALSO would rather avoid Lonestar scruitiny for the time being) feasable.


Of course, many of these suggestions are just 'facts of life' for barrens based runners, the rest can be used to illustrate that 'just cause you're a native don't mean there are places you wanna go'... areas that typical barrens rats treat as... well.. the barrens.

I believe in thriving communities in that Barren's, they've been there for years. That doesn't mean you want to drink the water or eat their food. I make the developing world parallel where they might have a huge populations but an average life expectancy of 45 and 60% of new births don't survive to the age of 5. This makes even more sense when you have ork's popping out freakin litters of kids and dying off in their 50's.

Have the target be a something like a Corporate Research Center or Unregulated Production Facility.

Going back to the earlier block housing from hell example...

You've spent the last 15 minutes trudging up 5 flights of stairs slick with horrible smelling, unidentifiable sludge, trying for your life not to slip and fall. You reach the next landing without taking and tumble and while taking a quick breather, you hear what sounds like a very loud toilet flushing. As you begin up the next flight, brackish water begins pouring down the stairs...


Having done a little bit of handyman work, its amazing what people who think they might know what they're doing will do. Including (real life experiences here)...

• This guy's siding had apparently caught fire (somehow). It was extinguished without any major structural damage, but a 3-4 foot wide, by 5-6 feet tall section of his house was blackened. So what did he do? He got some particle board, a drill, and some screws. And, I kid you not, he screwed the board to the side of his house to cover the blackened spot. He didn't paint it or anything.
• Another choice one was the guy who decided to save on plumbing costs by routing the drain for his upstairs bathtub to pour into the downstair shower stall...
• I've seen several houses where people ran extension cords instead of using actual electrical wiring. Some of it was stapled to the ceiling. A couple people bothered to use the kind of staple designed to not damage wiring. Some just broke out their Swingline desktop stapler and had a good old time...
• And last but not least, there there was the family(?) of "people" that kept their trash in the utility/broom closet. No trash cans. No trash bags. No bins. They just threw stuff in there. Stuff like mostly empty beer bottles, half eaten containers of Chinese food (crawling with maggots and cockroaches), used feminine hygeine products, and more things I couldn't identify.

That last one literally was the straw that broke the camel's back. I grabbed my tools, walked out of the house without saying a word, and drove off. After showering thoroughly, I called my boss to tell him I quit and where he could mail my check.

Gragh... Gragh...
*Is rarely glad that he gets to be an EMT in a quiet Japanese prefecture, this is one of those days*

Oh and this is how I typically try to describe the Barren's to my own group:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela
Like Fortune said, the Barren's have a lot of people living and some thriving on it's shattered streets.

This reminds me of my trip to Mauritania. They may have waste collection in the center of the biggest cities, but in most places there are absolutely no waste collection, not even containers. They just throw things out in the streets and the waste goes wherever the wind pushes it.

But the biggest trouble comes during the rain season. You've got puddles filled with litter everywhere in the streets leading to 2 things:
1. A horrible stench everywhere.
2. Flies, mosquitos, and lot of other bugs thrives there. A few days later, the town is swarming with flies and you don't want to get the diseases the mosquitos carry.
Actually a lot of inhabitants just leave the town for a few days to avoid these.

So I guess that in the rainy city of Seattle (or during the rain season in Hong-Kong), the Barrens should also suffer from that kind of problems.

Drop Bears

When I visited Rio de Janeiro I took an escorted trip through a favela and got some very interesting photos of an entire city within the city. We skirted the very lowest, most legitmate areas but we saw all kinds of things like plumbing, running water (they had dug up a water main and tapped it with a network for scrap pipes), electricty and so forth. These weren't shanty towns, people were building multi story structures using concrete and rebar. They'd leave rebar sticking out in case they wanted to expand their residency/business at a later date. It was surreal how well they were getting along without any sort of state sponsorship. That said I was told that the higher into the hills you go the more like the wild west it becomes getting to those storied heights where the gangs are better armed (and paid) than the cops/military and cops go in fire teams if they go at all.

But yeah, I only see select parts of the Barrens built up to that level, most of it would lack that sort of group organization and you'd get roving trash heaps and plagues of egypt all over the place.

...but lead flying doesn't give penalties or add thresholds to First Aid/Healing DPs (unless your doc/healer's already taken wounds himself). Now the dirty fetid places on the other hand...


...another good one to consider.

...how many PCs really purchase Ration Bars & Survival kits with purification tabs with their starting resources or before a run?

Paws2sky. Very appropriate picture. Seen this kind of thing before, and sometimes not necessarily in areas you'd consider a slum.

...and like Blade just mentioned...there'd be bugs lots of bugs (of the non-inhabiting kind). When I lived in New Orleans about the only way to kill the cockroaches was to smash them (usually with something like a heavy boot or hammer) or burn them. Pesticides...? paugh! you could almost hear them laugh at you when you pulled out the can of Raid. And some of these were big I mean 3 - 4 inches long. Think of what another century of adaptation will do.

As for the favelas/shanty towns, there'll be a big difference depending on what services (electricity, water...) are close enough to tap from and what's the education level of the population.
It doesn't take a genius to tap electricity, but if you don't know that electricity is carried in the cables, it won't be easy to do.

I'll tell you what a half century of adaption did!
*points at the bug spirit in the corner*

Blade: That's certainly true but I tend to think that a lot of the Barren's actually have "real" jobs and what not, they're just too poor to live or work anywhere else. And even in an relatively uneducated population there are still enough smart cookies to figure out some sort of hack. Of course if they're deep in the Barrens and no where need working infastructure, it simply won't matter.

The idea is that you're a professional criminal, though, not some dingus who freaked out and killed a guy with a tire iron and now has no idea what to do. You've got a safehouse in the Barrens maybe, or in a low-security part of town (that's not the Barrens but is only marginally better), you use the side entrance to the Street Doc's clinic (he's a vet, actually, and manually overwrites the security video for the side door after you leave). Your bloody clothes are sterilized, Sterilized, burned, Fashioned, replaced with vending machine flats, or all of the above.

I think this is also a good place for the Survival(Urban) skill.

Check out your players and decide what would pose a challenge to them - my gear freak almost always had a stash of supplies on hand for almost anything, so challenging me with no food resources wouldn't be a major issue.

For a PC who has nothing but guns, ammo and CLP - this might be more problematic.

Likewise, if your players aren't the kind to really put any deal of thought into environmental hazards, I wouldn't suggest turning the game into "Urban Survival 101" - it would border on insisting the players role-play forensic accounting. Fascinating stuff, to be sure...to the right person.

-Siege

You're kidding, right? At least 80% of all the character sheets I have ever seen (including all of my own) contain these at chargen.

Ideally? Yes. Most players don't want to think about that sort of thing. Have you ever asked them how they regularly get assault rifles and shotguns (much less the occasional assault CANNON) out of, and back into, their house without drawing attention to it? Have your runners regularly stocked changes of clothes to wear after the run?


Then again, most Shadowrun players (even on Dumpshock) seem to be mistaken about what a Safehouse actually is, so...



All those problems I just asked about? Neatly solved just by living in the barrens. Yes, other problems arise. But as you say, the characters are shadowrunners, not dingus's with tire irons. And in the barrens that makes them the big fish. Outside? the corps (including Lonestar) are the big fish, and at least one (LS...) has a vested interest in gobbling them up.

Fortune= That officially makes you smarter than 5 out of the 6 people at my table. The 6th guy only remembered because his character is a survival nut. oh well, one "your character is getting hungry" and I'm sure they'll shape up

Being a professional is about being paid money for doing a job. That job could be taken a weapon of opportunity and beating that target to death. Everything else is surrounding yourself with trappings.

Depends on the group. Some people want action movies. Some people want realistic games, which tend to be much more detailed and much more depressing and difficult. So long as everyone understands what game they're in, either can work.


Uh... Yeah, living in these places is not the safest thing. Driving through Baghdad is very dangerous. Living in Baghdad is far, far, far worse. Same goes for Mogadishu, Woodlawn, the Barrens, whatever.

I've been to Baghdad. While I, personally, wouldn't want to walk the streets there, that is less because it is generically dangerous and more because I specifically do not fit in.


For Shadowrunners, who are SINless, its another matter. Many will have come from the Barrens, using shadowruns as their ticket to a better life, others are deliberately SINless, which may mean they are hiding. Either way, if I was willing to toss aside everything in my life, I feel reasonably comfortable with the idea of disappearing into, say, Baghdad. The biggest obstacle is language, followed shortly by culture and lastly by contacts. Runners shouldn't have to worry about any of those in the barrens... particularly if they are made with an idea towards living there.


I should point out that the closest the real world has towards shadowrunners are the old school freelance terrorists (Carlos the jackal, for example). A LOT of that crowd got busted because they tried to live it up between and on jobs, staying in nice hotels and the like. If they'd stuck to roach infested shitholes they'd remain undetected.

In Shadowrun, SINner-ville is the nice hotels. The Barrens is where you go so the powers what be have to work to get to you, to even find you.

I got back to the favela analogy. If you live there, know your neighbors, have paid your local gang dues, and respect the "rules" as unwritten. Living in some areas of the Barrens should be manageably dangerous. If roll into the Barrens in your souped up City Master and try to set up shop in a random building, things will probably get ugly.

Blending is your friend

I figure a lot of that stuff needs to be part of early (as in chargen) discussion with the GM. After all, it's the characters who are master criminals, not the players, so you shouldn't really be all "aha! Since you didn't say otherwise, you've left a trail of bloody footprints from the server room all the way to your house". Changes of clothes could be less of a problem with Fashion and vending machine flats.



Yeah, there are benefits but also drawbacks, the main one being that you live in an incredibly unpleasant neighborhood. Really, unless you're actually on the run, or can't afford to live somewhere non-crappy, why would you do it?

Also was there a thread on how safehouses work in SR? Because IRL they're not exactly something you rent by the day or would have a Knowledge skill about.

Okay, technically "professional" can mean simply that you get paid, but I think we generally use it to mean a certain level of planning, competence, and, well, professionalism. As in "okay, I'm getting paid to go beat that guy to death with whatever is handy. How do I make sure that I, you know, survive and don't have the cops showing up at my place before I get there?".

Or "professional" as in "Why the frag are you wandering around covered with blood? You're supposed to be a professional!"

Yeah, Dumpshockers aren't the only ones who don't always get it with 'safehouses'.

Though I suppose a knowledge skill could cover knowledge about safehousing in general, rather than 'where to find me some'... which is much more reasonable.


The way I view it is this: If you ran a gambling operation in Florida, you have to choices: Run it illegally, or put it on a boat and move three miles out to sea and do it legally.

Yes, you CAN make money doing it illegally on land. You'll also get arrested eventually. Just get the damn boat already.


Ditto Shadowrunners; Yeah they CAN operaten in SINnerVille, but eventually its gonna bite them in the ass. Just bite the bullet and set up a doss in the Barrens. Pay your dues, make sure to keep your rep dangerous enough to discourage harrassment, and don't think of it as 'inconvientently dangerous' think of it as 'relaxingly removed from paranoia over getting caught being an illegal cyborg with a fake SIN'.

Nah, we just make sure we have a shapeshifter on the team. If we every get peckish we can eat their flesh and drink their blood. Since it'll all grow back in a couple of seconds, they won't mind.

Right, but then there's no point to being a world-class freelance terrorist/mercenary/assassin. What's the point in getting paid if you don't enjoy it?

"Slipping up" like that is perfectly in keeping with most characters, who are (after all) criminals. Criminals tend to be in it in the first place for the money. For all but the most monastically dedicated sort of perfectionists, there's just no point in not relaxing and living it up a little bit, and not living in a roach infested shithole.

Well if I remember correctly the Jackal was essentially sold out by the country he and his wife ended up fleeing to as a political bargaining chip. Secondly my current group runs out of their Warehouse/Bunker/Distillery in the barrens. Its good to make sure you point out that the Barrens are screwed up. One trick is door to door twisted spirits trying to be invited in, and the gang you let camp out in a lobby getting wiped out for pissing of the wrong people. That and showing up the first day to find your place already broken into by a squatter, but to be fair she now runs the distillery side of things.

...the only ones I've seen are my own characters'.

While there is something to be said for living it up and something to be said for living it down, I tend to think that the best place to live would be in some boring suburban enclave. I'm reminded of this prolific Armenian bank robber that robbed banks for upwards of two decades before he got caught (by dumb luck basically). He lived in a normal neighborhood, had a painfully moderate lifestyle, and planned everything to the T. When it came time for him to retire he could have pulled a quiet fade and been done with it. It's also impressive that he turned what is normally a losing proposition (robbing banks) into something that netted him quiet a retirement fund.

Of course he didn't take into account someone stumbling on a deep forest almost completed concealed stash. But those things happen.

It's fine for your game, but in other games a distillery run in the barrens might only have electricity 50% of the time, and the water might not always run. And when it does you may not be keen on using it for brewing. Sometimes it's best to just assume the PC's safehouse has clean water and electricity, but not every GM thinks that way and you might suddenly have a 2000 tank of alchohol ruined because the electricity cut out at the wrong time.

and again it depends on what part of the barrens you are in.
One of my favorite characters owned a strip club in the barrens and used it as her doss.
Certain parts of slums can be very nice. They're just surrounded by crap holes.

There are generators and water resevours and filters and illegal taps on the mainlines. If you have the cash, the respect of the locals, and a decent amount of personal badassery, you can live well damn near anywhere.

I suspect the Barrens does not have either electricity nor running water, let alone garbage pickup, sanitation or mass transit.

If you are running a business somewhere with intermittent power and you don't have sufficient generator capacity you are basically asking for it. Also you don't really need electricity to distill booze, although it's probably a lot easier. You just need a way to heat liquid, really (Real Men use fire spirits). In GURPS there is a Distill spell (and also a Ferment spell).

Hell, you don't see people in the Hills running wires out to thier stills in the woods. It's a wood fire that's really needed and then it just sits there. Bah, people not knowing their moonshining!!!!