From Sprawl Guides to Mr. Johnson's Little Black book, we've been given little run ideas. Sprawl Guides has dozens of gang encounters, police encounters, racial encounters and even magical encounters. No matrix encounters, though. Virtual Realites 2.0 doesn't seem to yield anything either, as that's more of a crunch book. Target matrix has personas and grids and hosts, but no ideas.

I've got a new player who's starting as a hacker, and I want to throw him at Knasser's small corporate system. I'm drawing a blank on what exactly he needs to do there, though, and I can't find anything to inspire me.

So consider this thread just like our mcguffin thread, except with paydata. Just keep throwing ideas and bits of paydata that might need to be stolen at me.

Everything is worth something to someone when it comes to paydata. Find a buyer is actually the most important chore, or figuring out what is worth something and what is almost worthless.

Now if you go in with a specific target to steal stuff, that's possible too, but that's not actually the same as paydata, that would be a data package.

As far as I see, paydata is whatever might be worth something to someone.

1.) The "small office system" from Knassers collection of matrix sites, not the Sample Corporate Enclave, yes? Slight difference in scope, there.

2.) Matrix runs that are done while the team is onsite, or solitary runs?

1.) Yes, the "small office system"

2.) This would be a straight Matrix run.

For paydata, financial bookkeeping is somewhat useful since it reflects the activities of the departments the office is responsible for. Hackers should probably want to take Accounting as a knowledge skill to actually translate this into useful information.

I hate to say something so obvious, but every hacker should be raiding mail servers for paydata. In the real world email gets used for all kinds of quick notes that contain references to upcoming policies, clients, releases and a bunch of other stuff. If you're lucky there'll be a large email debate about the topic that manages to serve as a pretty good guide to understanding it in detail.

Equally, raiding the drones' file server will likely give you a lot of information to work through that could help you understand what's going to happen. You can do this in less time by stealing their managers' files, but that will provide a distorted view of the situation since no manager is going to give every report equal favour.

Since offices will be responsible for a number of different locations, you can get a good idea of the activities of a number of local sites at the same time. The policies they implement may reflect larger scale changes, too.

Ok. Knassers Sample Matrix Sites, as hosted by Aaron.

Site Structure:
Node 1: Matrix Chokepoint, connected to: Matrix, Node 2
Node 2: Office Cluster, connected to: Node 1, Node 3
Node 3: Regional link, connected to: Node 2, another corporate matrix system
Node 4: Security Cluster

Some ideas:
Node 1: Disable part of the defenses against Intrusion, load a weaker analyse into the node to facilitate a later job (simple)
Node 2: Steal or manipulate Fiscal Report Q4/2070, Spoof an order "someone was not supposed to give but now has" (Incrimination)
Node 3: Take down the node to disturb time-critical accounting work
Node 4: Disable part of the defenses against Intrusion; crash the node at a specific time, after setting the ARC to "shutdown/stay down" (hard)
all: Analyse all nodes and constructs without being detected, again a preparation for some other run.
all: Get a complete user list for all nodes (requires Admin, can likely be found on the security server)

General ideas for paydata:
Shipping schedules - always handy for later runs or selling. I've used this to equip runners with stuff not normally available to them.
Codes - Codes for other systems, subsystems, offsite plants, security drones.. and so on.
Images - Incriminating images from last office party? Desperate stalker wants a few unique photos?
Upcoming prooducts - Plain old industrial espionage.
Inside info - Anything that can be an edge when trading on the stockmarket.

Ahhh, I thought my ears were burning.

Here are a few suggestions from me (you might want to beef up certain areas of the system if it's the real target of the run).

• The building access logs on the security server. The manager claims that she was working alone that night. Her husband suspects she smuggled her lover in for a little discreet romance. Get the logs, prove that she was with another person in her office that evening, and you will be paid well by her husband's lawyers who will be reaping the rewards of a violated pre-nuptial agreement.
• The network has a ghost in the machine. Whether the company knows about it or not, someone does and is willing to pay the hacker fat nuyen to go in there and catch it. The hacker must locate and capture the AI that is nesting in the unsuspecting corp's network without alerting it. Because the AI has long since subverted the local network security and can use the corp's own IC as its pets.
• One of the corp's employees is a vaguely known ex-musician who still has a permanent distribution contract with a Horizon subsidiary. They suspect her of still performing and composing secretly and having been unable to find illicit recordings on her home network or with her MSP (they've legally scanned both with a court order), the Hacker is hired to see if any such recordings have been secretly stashed on her work network. If she's been earning from performances / recording on the sly, or worse - doing so for just the fun of it, that's a clear deprivation of their legally entitled earnings and by Jack Valenti's ghost, they're going to get it!

Just a few off-the-cuff suggestions. Thanks for letting me know that you're using my example network. I always like knowing something has been useful. Now that I have Unwired I'm actually going to do some expanded examples (including filling in the blanks in that corp enclave).

K.

I have a link to that file in my matrix introduction thread, so yes, I consider it useful. Good job.

(And keep the proper format, let them have "legal" issues until they adapt. )

My 2 cents is that SR4 is moving away from the paydata paradigm. Back in old editions a decker just needed more money than the others, and deckers were fairly rare due to the drastic cost of equipment. Therefore corps were more willing to put important stuff online and decker players had to go for it, taking up valuable game time with their side runs and such.


Anyway in SR4 hackers don't need extra cash. Actually they like as not started with a full set of rating 6 programs. So after they upgrade their comlink to a rating 6 model they're more or less set.

However especially with Otaku and TMs running around corps aren't putting the juicy stuff out on the grid either. In my games all the really good stuff is on other other side of the RF paint in the corp buildings.

Therefore hackers not involved with infiltration are tweaking things that have to be online, shipping schedules, tapping comcalls, that sort of thing.

Also some places aren't always using full RF paint but might still have some data worth getting. I.e. hacking the cameras in a hotel to spy on a suspected cheating wife.

That has been changed with the coming of Unwired. Software degradation makes it really hard to run around with rating 6 programs constantly. And Technomancers should still be very rare.

Now did it? I prefer to pay 10% base and about 1-2k¥ upkeep. If you have trouble financing that (which can be a problem in street-level campaigns), doing one hacker job per month will pay for everything. Dicerolls can be made by agents, buying hits. If you have a somewhat flexible GM, SOTA can be glossed over pretty easily. Still, I like the presence of those rules. Hackers that don´t pay much, because they have a warez ring going. Who knew!

With me as a GM, that would be a rating 4 program. Unless you'd find yourself that really cool awesome friends who can also code just as leet as you can.

Warez = cracked softs. Programming yourself indeed suffers from the (Software skill) cap. In my game, the Open Source rules are in effect, so getting rating 4 is indeed what you can expect from a standard coder ring.