This is something I've been thinking on buying for my character since a kidnap gone south (due to our lack of experience).
Get a Mana-coffin with a faraday cage treatment. Now, would this prevent both Matrix and Astral tracking?
I've been wondering about this for sometime and I'm even considering on doing this for my own safe-house. (I know it can get expensive, but I'm a healthy paranoid runner)

I'm not sure what you mean by matrix tracking. They couldn't find any active hardware, but you could simply stop it from subscribing to the matrix. And it's generally safer to lurk inside a lodge. They're pretty cheap, just take a while to set up.

Hmm... well, to be honest it is going to be hard to track someone astrally even if they're just in a smallish room. Since auras don't go through walls, there isn't much need to have mana-walls, especially if they don't stop an astral form moving through them (I don't think they do, but I don't remember off hand). The mana-walls won't hinder any sort of rituals or anything like that any more than normal walls, so once again, no real benefit gained.

As for the faraday cage.. just turn off you're wireless connection and you're safe. The only way I could imagine this helping at all is so that you can keep your house/apartment wireless (for convince) while being cut off from the rest of the matrix. A fiber optic cable could poke through the cage when you want outside access and withdrawn when you want the added privacy.

The only possible benefit I could imagine is that a cage might stop things like ultrawideband radar from seeing you, though it'll pick up the cage itself, which may or may not just end up drawing more attention to your dwelling. You could just get the wireless blocking wallpaper, though it isn't as full proof.

I think I didn't make myself clear. What I mean is: how can I make sure that if I grab someone he/she/it won't be tracked in someway by someone else. I know that a faraday cage will prevent any wireless-based comunication, so we are safe on that side, but what about the Astral? A mana coffin can prevent a mage from peeking inside or that a mage inside won't be able to project outside?

A hermetic or chemical seal would probably be a fairly inexpensive addon to that.

I don't know about a mana coffin (or what that is really, so I may merely be describing it's effects here), but I know that if astral forms can't pass through living material of a given size (thus why macro-bacteria can either slow them down, or stop them entirely depending on the concentration). If you have a coffin that is lined, either outside or inside, with some kind of vine plant such that it's entire surface is covered, then astral forms won't be able to pass through it's surface, and astral vision won't be able to view it. And depending on how much a mana coffin is, a few seeds and some water will likely be less expensive. Really, any plant would work for this. You could, for instance, have the surface covered with sod to get the same effect, however vines would cling to the coffin and would be less likely to leave a gap big enough for anyone to fit through. It's important to have full coverage because an astral form can pass through any space big enough for the person to walk through without moving the object in question. If you'd have to push the branch aside to get through the hole, you can't pass through astrally.

And a faraday cage is a good idea. Even if they don't have any known ware, that doesn't mean someone didn't plant a tracking device on them without their, or your, knowledge.

SR4 removed the barrier effects of living entities, unless they are dual natured.

btw, arsenal have prices for biofiber, and unwired have prices for faraday cage setups.

I think that's a great idea. Better yet, You could turn the back of a van into a no-chamber. Separate the front from the back of the van[Sheet metal? Check. Welding gun? Check.] Line the inside with biofiber[by inside, I mean the gap in the walls of the van] and add the faraday cage. Run up, grab, throw into van, close the door. When the door's closed, the faraday cage is active, and the entire back of the van is boxed in with biofiber, preventing wireless communication and tracking and at the same time preventing astral travel, perception, and spell casting from one side to the other.

do note, biofiber have a max rating of 10, and acts like a astral barrier. So while it makes things hard, it do not make it impossible.

True, but with all the other things, it would be difficult for a mage to know that the person they're looking for is behind that F10 astral barrier, and so generally isn't going to exert the effort to check behind every barrier she runs across.

Edit: Also, yeah, I did totally misunderstand. I thought you were trying to make something to hide yourself, not to hide someone else. In that case the faraday cage is a good idea to stop any sort of tracking devices, commlinks, or anything else the person might have on them. The only problem is that if you try moving them at all (From the back of your van to a holding cell type thing) then then they are going to show up for a few seconds or so at least, which is plenty of time for a tracking device to give away your location.

why not make the van the holding cell?

Well, you certainly could, but a van is just generally less secure than a room.

Certainly could leave the van as the holding cell. Largely depends on how long you need to hang on to the person. If it more than a day or so, little things like plumbing will become an issue.

I finally had the time to take a look at Manahazard Containment Devices (MCD for short) on Arsenal. They give a -2 dice pool modifier to Ritual Sorcery and Astral Tracking. While barriers (like the biofiber) add to the threshold to detect.

So, a coffin has 5.8 squared meters, a troll-sized would have at least twice: 11.6. A biofiber barrier enveloping a mana coffin would cost 11.6k and 580 of nutrients per week. The manacoffin costs 1.2k the faraday cage would 200 .
Total: 13k plus 580 per week to keep the biofiber alive. Sounds a little expensive to keep this as a full time since the nutrients for the biofiber cost as much as a Low lifestyle.
Any suggestions? Is there anything I might add from Street Magic?

Highlighted the suspect area.

Where does it state that it adds to the threshold?



All I see is that barriers add or subtract from dice pools not thresholds. Is it in Street Magic?

try the astral tracking modifiers table, page 192 SR4A, or page 184 SR4.

Thanks, missed it.

funny enough, a rating 10 fab2 barrier is easier to get hold of then a biofiber barrier, as the fab2 is flat availability of 16, while the biofiber is ratingx3...

still, the fab2 is a pain to line the inside of a van with

hmm, i think i just found a "solution" to the sneak while under astral watch issue.

fab1 + some kind of uv light source.

On a similar note, for those magic-phobic(?) runners, take some high force Glow Moss and place it in a container with a simple RFID Sensor equipped with a Camera. It will glow when any magical activity happens within Force meters that is connected to your PAN. It is fairly cheap, you can get Force 12 Glow moss at character creation for just 300 plus the cost of the camera.

Although you will have to deal with all the false positives in a magically heavy area.

basically, a scaled up glowand?

interesting, at first i thought the glomoss had to be sized by its rating (so to get rating 12 you have to get a very large patch of it), but it seems its ratingxpricexsquare meters. So you can get a large area of low force, or a small area of high force, or anything in between.

and heck, 12 meter radius, would mean you could stand outside a residence and detect magical activity inside the whole building. Rating 3 or so would be more then enough for sneaking around a office. But it will still not tell you where there is activity, only that there is. Still, its better then going blind...

maybe use a glomoss setup for first detection, and then deploy fab1 for more detailed info if nothing obvious (like say a mage walking around) can be found. The interesting thing about fab1 is that unless the area sprayed is sterile, it will just show up as a slight thickening of the existing microbial background glow on the astral, and the uv light wont register on the astral at all.

I mistyped it is Force X 10 meters for Glomoss. So that would be 120 meters.

heh, i would say thats more likely to be useless then useful, as 100 meters in a urban setting can result in a lot of false positives...

i do wonder tho, would one have to roll the rating of the moss to see if it detects the magical activity?

A faraday cage only works if it's grounded, which might make transportation difficult. The better the grounding, the more efficient of a cage.

Plus, it has to be a fine enough mesh cage to intercept the wavelength of the wireless signal, which if memory serves in the cell phone band range is in the centimeters.

How about a box that hits you with an EMP wave when you close it and hit the button on top? It's only 23% likely to mutate your genetics!

Yes the cage does need some form of grounding to operate, but it isn't all that difficult to ground something. I'm sure any electronic engineer worth anything could figure out how to ground the cage in a car.



Actually a standard wireless signal is about 1 foot wavelength, so the mesh barely has to be small enough to contain the person (Which is the range of centimeters, about 30 of them)

Or start dropping lucifer lamps all over the place

not if your plan is to have look for astral activity, without tipping said activity of that someone is looking...

in other words, lucifer lamp light is dual natured, and would be the equivalent of turning on a flashlight in a darkened room to look for a security guard you hope to sneak by...

Well, sure, but the fluff says lucifer lamps work like insect light traps for spirits. They all go "ooo, shiny-shiny light". So it would be like dropping a hustler magazine in front of a bored guard

to bad going for a choke hold on a spirit is somewhat pointless...

still, now i have the mental image of rolling a blinking blue led thru a room of geeks...

Well, if it is a chokehold, then you are screwed already, unless there is some kind of cover you can use to pass the spirit, otherwise it will see you anyway.

A background count will make astral tracking harder. Haven lillies are tailor made for this, but you could also find a hideout in an area with a "natural" BG count, or create one yourself with an Astral Static spell, metamagic, or maybe even by some "emotionally intense" activity. One time when we had a chatracter who knew he was being targeted by ritual magic / tracking, he went to mass in a cathedral. It also happened to0 be x-mass eve, so... yeah, that worked pretty well.

IIRC, magical lodges also have a similar effect (due to creating a ward, perhaps). I think a mundane can buy and set up a magical lodge, could be wrong. FAB walls and such are probably cheaper and faster anyhow.

Faraday cages don't need to be grounded. If you completely encase your cellphone in tin foil (you may need double or triple layering to prevent "leaks") and put it on a rubber mat, then try calling it, it won't ring. Try it. Its clearly not grounded, but the tinfoil acts as a Faraday cage.

Well, I don't know about background count, don't they make wizzos and adepts feel uncomfortable? Also, if the background is generated by the same tradition, wouldn't it give a bonus instead of a penalty for a tracking mage of the same tradition?

sorry, it was a poor attempt at a metal gear solid joke

Don't worry, I don't know much about Metal Gear except that you can use cardboard boxes to hide from people. Walks with wifi even quoted me on his signature about this.

I suppose you could create a capacitor/battery system of sorts to store up a charge when moving for a coffin-sized solution that needed a momentary discharge every few hours. Otherwise you literally need something to discharge the current into, and the more grounded the path is, the faster it discharges. Wireless is a light enough current that you could probably discharge into the metal frame of a van if you had a cage-on-wheels setup going.