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Megu
I'm about to GM a run based on the Emergence story hook in which a Mr. Johnson hires the team to test defenses at his facility, but really the facility is testing the runners to see if they are technomancers. What should I be putting in my facility here? I'm thinking high level analyze programs in the network, but I was just wondering if you guys had some ideas. Thanks!
DigitalOYABUN
You could put them in a large Faraday Cage and see which one does the funkie-chicken
Khyron
Previous technomancer tests involved seeing if anyone did anything odd. If they did, they had to be beaten to death and burned at the stake, or moved to a secret corp torture facility. for science.
Ravor
silly.gif When in doubt, dig out the anal probes. silly.gif
Iduno
The easy way to tell a technomancer from a decker with an implanted commlink would be a cyberware scanner. There would probably be a few false-positives that way, though.

Cutting open the skull is necessary to make sure.
Cthulhudreams
It's easy: Find out whoever cannot shoot straight and has no implanted cyberware due to a lack of BP. They are either a technomancer or a mage. The ones that are magical are mages so you can cut them. Then you're done. wink.gif
The Jake
QUOTE (DigitalOYABUN @ Nov 8 2009, 06:41 PM) *
You could put them in a large Faraday Cage and see which one does the funkie-chicken


Pure Win. LOL.

- J.
Jaid
some of the simplest methods i can think of include attempting to hack the home node of the hacker, or attempting to spoof orders to his 'agents' (if they accept, then they are definitely not sprites) and such things.

however, there is an animal in running wild that can detect technomancers if you get close to them. timelinewise, they aren't common knowledge during the events of emergence (and they are, themselves, emergent) but that doesn't mean that *nobody* has them, it just means that they'll be rare and not widely known.
LurkerOutThere
Sadly while emmergance itself has several run ideas based around the players detecting or being detected as technomancers it never goes into the nitty gritty of dtermining if someone is or isn't. It also at one point vaguely indicates an assensing mage can tell although I can't fathom how that would be other then deciding anyone without cyberware but also without magic must be a technomancer. Which would be a good way to get oneself turned into somethign vaguely resembling a fried egg plant the first time you accuse a multiple-initiation grade mage with a few picks of masking of being a techno.
Tuwa
I have to say would use some witchfinder type devices. If they float and dont drown they are a witch. So set up traps if they can use technomancing to escape then they are if not they die.....
Ascalaphus
Simple. You invite the PCs to a "No Commlinks" facility. After carefully removing comms, you allow some poorly encrypted data traffick near the PCs from the security team about how they're gonna do something nasty. The first PC to react is a technomancer.*

*Use non-wireless controlled thermographic sensors to detect the panic reaction.

You might get a few false positives with deltaware commlink implants you didn't detect, but on the whole it should be fairly straightforward and inexpensive.
Xahn Borealis
Hire your own 'mancers and get them to use E-sense.
Screaming Eagle
I've generall run that is is detectable with assencing in and arround the 5 hits range. This is generally not viable to do en-mass - the number of mages with enough dice to do this reliably is rather small, one could say - no one can do this reliably, 17 dice is the cap I can come up with in my head so you might be able to get it to the 20 you are looking for with "twinkery". This is still rare as hell and few mages will know what they are looking at anyway.

I like the idea of the runners stripped of coms and bait layed for TM to take, be it wireless warnings or what have you but frankly that alone would be the deal gone bust for some opf the teams I've been with, the man ain't getting my link, he'll put stuff on it... corperate stuff. Its like cooties but they try to sell me crap too. Checking for panic will usually fail, the hacker will start to panic the instant his link is taken and it will just get worse with time. "But I can't check my trix-mail!!!"

I seriously think it is what other here are assuming: its a witch hunt, the Corps are running scared and are looking for suspects. Whether you are a TM or not is largely irrelivant to being accused of it, dragged off and tested to within an inch of your life. The corps barely even know what they are looking for, but by god they will find it. Think the Communist scare in the US during the start of the cold war and you might get a rough idea. An accusation isn't proof, but that with anything else more then enough to get you disappeared.

Set up some tests for "being a TM" without looking too hard at the rules. Point the party at the tests. See who passes.
Laugh.
Ascalaphus
You can dress up the "no commlink" thing in a way that makes it acceptable;

The PCs are invited to the visitor center of a major corp installation. It is well-known that emmissaries from other corporations come here as well. There's a front room, and a back room. No commlinks allowed backside, but that's where they're supposed to meet Mr. Johnson. If the PCs don't want to hand in their commlinks, just allow one of them to stay frontside and hold their comms. Odds are it won't be the technomancer.

The trick is to show this as a routine security measure; the corp is just nervous about on-site hackers, and this is a regular security rule. It should look like low-budget sensible security.

Just like there should be basic but not too-hard security on the spooky security transmission. When the technomancer reads it, he'll get scared, his body temperature goes up at that precise moment, and you know who your man is. If no one reacts to it, then you just give the runners a bogus milk run and they're none the wiser.
If there's a technomancer, fill the room with sleep gas and bag them. Use memory manipulation spells to clean up afterwards, if you like.
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