What's Bobby's goal with the Knowledge roll?

Just an IP check if he knows about the enmity between the Spiders and the Red Hot Nukes - nice thing about the Spiders is, that if they do go for a hit, nobody usually finds the bodies or witnesses their attack.

And iirc the Spiders aren't under Urubia's thumb, right?

No, they are not, and they seemed very kind to AM at the funhouse.

Right, AM was successful in making sure Spiders did not sign on to the syndicate.

And, yes, there's enmity between the Spiders and the Red Hot Nukes. Of course, you could say that about almost everyone and the Red Hot Nukes. Them joining the syndicate would be something of a surprise, and would suggest that something has changed with Grinder.

Just to make sure everyone is on the same page:

It's about 15:00 right now.

Andrew said he would call you back around 17:00. That's also when Cutty and Waylon think that they will be done.

Is Jawsey still planning on a pasta dinner? There's plenty of time to make a pomodoro or marinara sauce. And, from experience, the longer you let it simmer, the better.

Your invitation to the Funhouse seems to be for anytime tonight (before midnight).

Anything you want to do between 15:00 and 17:00?

No, nothing in particular - Bobby wouldn't go out before things are done and dinner has been eaten.

Double Post

@Beta
Go ahead and roll Intuition + Artisan for cooking dinner.

Anyone else with Artisan can roll as a Teamwork test.

Per the house rule where artisan goes away, will roll intuition+cooking

cooking+intuition: 9d6t5 3

Should be entirely serviceable

Teamwork dice: 5d6t5 2 hits

That's 5 hits total. You should have an excellent dinner party.

Really proud of my Sioux/sous pun.

@Jack
Bobby's sheet mentions claws, which have a prerequisite of Keratin Control. I'm under the impression that Bobby has Keratin Control but it's not listed under the adept powers. Will you double-check on that?

I was coming to this thread just to groan about that pun!

I'm not going to presume if/when Bobby communicates Andrew's message. If/when that happens, and guests are not around, Jawsey will want to discuss if they just accept the message and back off, go for revenge (risking escalating the situation), or hold off for a bit to make it look like they accepted the message, then get their revenge in a while when the opposition have stopped being so careful (Jawsey's inclination is the third option, but he considers himself fairly naive in terms of power politics, so he's open to other options)

Damn, another casualty of transcription
Luckily, I've documented its addition in the change log - got Keratin Control after Chapter 5

Beta, do you want to post about dinner since it was your idea? If not, I can. It goes well and the food tastes good.

very delayed thank you to @Jack_Spade for the tip about drone swarms. I'd skimmed over those parts before without really thinking them through I guess. Anyway, after a few weeks I finally made a dedicated search and found where my copy of Rigger 5 had hidden itself, and read over those parts last night. Now I'm almost wondering about not so much a dedicated rigger, but someone who has an RCC and some drones (i.e. not jumping into things, just a drone user).

Another rigger type question, because I find the books a bit inconsistent in how they state some things. My understanding is that when jumped in, a Rigger uses their mental equivalents of physical skills -- so gunnery would use agility when done manually, and logic when done when jumped in. All the cool driving moves listed in Rigger 5 use Reaction, but I assume that is "Reaction when manually controlling the vehicle, Intuition when jumped in." etc. Is that how others read it? (really need to decide to focus on being jumped in or not, as they build is entirely different.

Reaction is unfortunately the one attribute that doesn't change when jumped in (I remember the controverse discussions about that topic - but most people agreed that Reaction is a kind of hybrid attribute with equal parts physical and mental components)

Anybody doing anything specific after dinner other than going to the Funhouse?

What's the final plan? Bobby talks to Grinder while Jawsey introduces AM to Urubia?

That's how I understood it - getting a significant amount of dirt in a short time till midnight so we have something on Grinder doesn't seem feasible.

As an aside, the Funhouse is so Awakened-friendly that most spellcasting or conjuring is acceptable, other than obvious exceptions like combat magic or mental manipulation.

Thx for that info.

Apologies for the delay; my son had a dental emergency that scrambled the day.

Understandable, best of wishes for your kid

I hope he's doing OK. These things happen!

Best wishes to your son, and no worries.

He's better now. We had to go to the dentist and get a (baby) tooth pulled. He was a bit of a mess for several hours afterward but rallied later in the day. He's bright and happy again now.

Gilga, you tweaked your post. You nicked the piece I was going to pounce on!

Aha sorry i enjoyed working on it so much more than doing the thing I was supposed to do at that time

Posted for AM and Jawsey. Will post for Bobby and Trouble later today.

Not sure if Bobby is using "Anglo" in the sense of "not Amerind / not Sioux" but here's a rundown of the various antagonists:

Grinder: African
Andrew: Japanese
Bonita: Latina
Big Stank: technically Ashkenazi, although that's a behind-the-scenes fact
Carn-evil: Too much makeup to determine gender let alone ethnicity, although I should probably make him/her British in the name of diversity and to help explain the penchant for Shakespeare
Nightmare: Not human, so probably not fair to describe as Anglo
Urubia: Same as Nightmare

@gilga
Just to be clear, nothing actually happened on Imbolc. You don't know if it was canceled due to weather (wet, stormy) or if your intel was bad. I think that piece was from Lysander, not Black.

Nothing notable or chaotic happened (in Touristville at least) until this morning when the explosion went off in front of HQ.

Yeah, it was meant as a slur against non-natives - neither me nor Bobby would stoop as low as to use the N-word for Grinder.

Gilga, where is this sentiment coming from? Did AM just go full anarchist?

AM has a strong seed of chaos in her personality, but she is not a full anarchist. She is an embodiment of Iktomi the way I imagine him. She believes that people should always be alert and never feel too happy or safe. In the sixth world, there is always some new catastrophe around the corner, and the best thing humanity can do is improve itself by accepting the grim reality. Keep alert, flexible, and strong.

The way I read the SR lore, and then think how AM would view it considering that she worships a deity which is both Iktomi and Ksa. The deity of mischief and of wisdom - that kind of philosophy is what I came up with.

So my solution was that all these disasters came to educate humanity toward the world's true nature and prepare it for the real dangers to come. The Trickster is somehow the good person in AM's eyes; he is the one that does not protect humanity but forces it to fend for itself until it gets strong enough and needs no protection.

Recall that when AM messes up with Huge, she does not do it for vengeance, she does it because Huge has made a stupid thing, and he deserves some poking around. Had she wanted to kill him, she would have tried again and again until she figured it out. AM decides to try one idea and see if Iktomi likes the guy or not, if he dies he dies because he is stupid, and in death, he would make the rest of his gang smarter. This is her way to worship Iktomi.

It has nothing to do with a group of detectives seeking answers or vengeance for the bomb. AM believes Iktomi has sent them the bomb, not Huge or Carn-evil. They got bombed because they were stupid, and probably overplayed their hand with Carn-evil. Mato got it because he opened a package without thinking or testing it, he got careless and the Trickster has given him a lesson. AM certainly does not believe in justice or vengeance as concepts.

Notice that earlier in the conversation with Urubia, AM says that Iktomi teaches us that too much safety makes us weak. Here, AM shows her entire essence in one sentence. I understand her through that view.

She likes being in Redmond and would not like to move to downtown on the surface because of SINs and police - but deeper inside because Redmond is chaos, and chaos is good for them. It has been there all along. You can say that AM enjoyed watching the rich kids twist in the negotiations with the hacker club. You can say that it is because she grew poor and never had these things, and on some level, it is just that. On a deeper level, she does them a favor and shows them an important aspect of this world when they are still young. (This is her worshipping Iktomi again).

When AM thinks about the Haloweeners, she genuinely likes them - and would love to help them. They bring chaos to downtown Seattle which is too safe. The chaos clowns are doing Iktomi's work reminding people that they are not safe, that the world is dangerous. Of course, if downtown people organize and eliminate the Haloweeners then it is still Iktomi's work. Iktomi does not reward people for doing his plan, AM knows that Iktomi might kill her one day if she grows weak. A demise for the Haloweeners means that the rich people downtown have grown stronger. AM would appreciate that as well.

So when AM offers Carn-evil help, she genuinely is happy to help them. She personally sympathizes with the way the Haloweeners normally act. They are pawns of Iktomi's plan in her eyes and the world is better because of them. Still, when she sees them pulling their drek in Redmond, she is angry because Redmond has enough chaos. She does not feel that it needs anything more.

@Tecumesh, what to roll for trying to locate Carn-evil's link? Is knowing the number allow access to the matrix icon, or does she searches the matrix for the link? Something else?

@gilga
Thanks for the long write-up. I did not know a lot of what's going on under the surface for AM. She likes Redmond "because Redmond is chaos, and chaos is good for them" but at the same time "she is angry [at the Halloweeners] because Redmond has enough chaos." This is an interesting tension of how much chaos is good and at what point does it become too much.

I'll also note that there's some tension between AM saying "I want to find a place in the food chain where nobody tries to kill us" and AM telling Urubia, "Iktomi teaches us that too much safety makes us weak."

As for the back-and-forth between AM and Bobby, I'll hint that several correct things were said. Not everything, and investigation would reveal other things, but many observations were accurate. In the spirit of "we're all GMs" I'll give some more peeks at the end of the chapter, but will hide a few other parts unless someone needs them for their chapter.


In Mato's defense - and I admit this is not at all clear from the initial IC post - I mentally envisioned Mato being about 15 meters away from the package when it exploded. This is because he was using his olfactory sensors and scanning it with his cyberware scanner (which, despite the name, can detect other things as well). He wasn't opening it at the time it detonated; Huge triggered it early because he thought Mato was a package thief.

Some very rough back-of-the-envelope math suggests that if you're 0.5 meter away from a package when you open it then you're going absorb about 1/3rd of the blast (comparing the surface area of your body to the surface area of the explosion at that distance) but if you're 15 meters away you're only going to about 1/3000th, so a thousand times less. Still a catastrophic amount, but in my head it was the difference between turning Mato into a cannon ball and turning him into a fine red mist. Some GM handwaving about his armored cyberlimbs and maybe a boatload of Edge and here we are.

=====================

Back to the matter at hand. At the end of the last Interlude, AM traced Carn-evil's commlink. (See this post.) So it depends what you mean by 'locate' it. If you actually wants its real-world location, and it's not within 100 meters, then step 1 is Matrix Perception, step 2 is to hop grids if necessary, step 3 is to slap some MARKs on it, and the step 4 is to trace it. I imagine AM would succeed at all of that.

1. Matrix perception Matrix perception: 17d6t5 7
2. Hop Grid. buy hits or: grid hop: 17d6t5 6
3. Hacking(persona): 19d6t5 9
4. Hacking(persona): 19d6t5 3
She'll edge it not wanting to alert the guy: Hacking(persona)-reroll: 16d6t5 4
5. trace icon: 16d6t5 5

I am sometimes amazed that this game is played online - thinking about the series of rolls one needs to make, and control for each roll


Well having some experience with explosives I'd assumed Mato was much closer. Explosives are not that strong in the open, you can drop a bomb from a plane on a house and the neighbor's house would have no significant damage perhaps broken windows. Distance is dramatic and that bomb could not have been too big to be mistaken for an electronics delivery. (Mato thought comlink, not a dishwasher).

That said, Huge said that he thought Mato was going to steal the package which (I'd assume would make him hold the package or close to it). Had AM realized that Huge has built a bomb that does THAT from a range of 15 meters, she might have been more violent. So I'll just say that she was still very upset and not thinking straight at the time.

I, conversely, have very little experience with explosives. That said, the package itself was much bigger than a commlink. Mato's sensors noticed the commlink (which Huge was using as a receiver to trigger the explosion) but the package itself was much larger. How large? Bigger than a bread box, smaller than a dishwasher.

------------------------------

Yes, it's a lot of rolling.

I've been using Discord with two other games and I appreciate how it speeds both OOC communication and rolling. It helps remove the separate steps of rolling and then having to post the rolls in the forum, which I find tedious.

AM will get her MARKs.

Question, presumably for Jack:

What's the difference between rolling Matrix Perception (Computer + Intuition) to find a hidden tag vs. using a bug scanner (Electronic Warfare + Logic)?

If there's no difference, why would someone bother with a bug scanner since everyone has a commlink (that can be used for Matrix Perception) and Computer is a more common skill than Electronic Warfare? Is it just for the wireless bonus of the bug scanner's rating replacing your skill, so the non-tech-savvy can use it?

@Gilga the most common English practice these days when referring to someone of uncertain gender is to use 3rd person plural form as a singular (they/them). It sounds awkward using the plural for the singular at first, but one gets used to it.

@Tecumseh
1. with wireless on you can use the bug scanner's rating in place of your electronic warfare skill, so a substantial advantage if you don't have the skills.
2. in Gilga's IC, AM drove some distance from the Funhouse and then pulled over, prior to the hack (rather than doing it right there at the FunHouse)

=================================================

I don't have anything to add to the discussion between AM and Bobby that matters enough to tack on at this point. Jawsey can bring his points up at a future time.

@Beta thanks.

Confirming 2 - doing it in their faces sounded a bit rude to me.

What beta said, but I use EW also to find bugs that don't conform to the new matrix protocols. Those might be rarer this day with lower reach, but they can't be detected with a commlink.
There's also the fact, that you can modify tags to switch on online only once in a while to transmit data. You'd need to use Matrix Perception continuously to find those.

Is the idea for Beta to use Manascape to create an astral screen (of sorts) so that Bobby can poke around a bit as a cute little devil rat without all the fire spirits guarding The Jackal's Lantern noticing him?

Beta, let us know if you're down with that plan.

How have others GM'd Manascape? I like the concept of the spell but - like almost everything in Shadow Spells - it is strangely worded. I've always thought of it as the astral version of Phantasm / Trid Phantasm because of the area-effect nature of the spell, but now that I reread it the language sounds more like the astral version of Mask / Physical Mask, even though those spells don't have an area-effect version.

I always ruled it as a spell anchored to an existing aura (as you can only modify an existing one) that moves with this aura.
Manascape can just do that for more than one aura at the same time which is why it's an area effect

I've never used the spell before, to be honest, but my reading of it lines up with Jack's.

There are some challenges with this plan:
- Keeping Jack inside the radius, as the radius won't be large by 'outside, on the streets' standards.
- Jawsey has to have line of sight on where the area is, preferably without attracting attention from the spirits or others, interesting geometry problem in the absence of a map
- Jawsey needs to generate enough successes to fool anyone. It will be 9 dice and use of edge (given a pool of 9 and edge 4, I think we might be in the space where the median successes might be higher with re-rolling fails while average might be higher with pre-edging, and neither is a guarantee. (pre-edging also saves a few reagents, but that is small change)) Opinions on the better tactic?

You can move spell areas freely while you are sustaining as a complex action (p. 282 Core)

Also, don't worry too much about the number of hits. AM can give you a bit of Leadership teamwork.

You can move spell areas freely while you are sustaining as a complex action (p. 282 Core)

Also, don't worry too much about the number of hits. AM can give you a bit of Leadership teamwork.

Beta is asking the same questions I was going to ask.

There are other questions like "Does Bobby know where the area of effect is?" Usually the answer would be yes, via assensing, but in this case the illusion could affect Bobby too so that he doesn't know where it is and where it isn't. The way you can work around that is for Bobby to use Mind Link so that the two could coordinate Bobby's approach.

As for Jawsey maintaining LOS, it might work if he stays in the car. That way the spirits on the astral can't see him (as their astral sight will be blocked by the car's aura) but in the physical world Jawsey could see the desired area of effect through the car windows.

Jawsey does need to fool several spirits, so you will want a good number of hits.

The math behind Edge is you multiply your Edge pool by 18/7, and that's your cutoff for whether you should pre-Edge (lower than the result) or use Edge for rerolls (for dice pools larger than that result).

Jawsey's Edge is 4 * 18/7 = 10.285, so he would want to pre-Edge for dice pools of 10 and below and post-Edge for dice pools of 11 and higher.

I did not know that math, thank you!

Posted to advance things to The Jackal's Lantern.

The background count outside in the parking lot is a 2. You expect this to get worse inside the bar, and to be especially bad in the warded areas. Keep this in mind when deciding the Force of your spells.

If we want to move forward with the Bobby stealth plan, go ahead and do your rolling.

I don't know how to answer Jack's question because I never knew there was such equipment on the list. What's it about?

I think Jack is suggesting using some data cable to connect AM to the vehicle directly so that the connected is wired instead of having to go wireless.

AM's deck would come with about a meter of retractable data cable, which would not be enough to reach from the Americar to the van in question. You could go and purchase data cable, which is easy enough to come by, for 2 nuyen per meter. So you could go and get 25 meters of data cable for 50 nuyen.

It's not something you would have on you, but you could get it without difficulty.

As for the parking, the van in question (Bobby is reasonably confident in his identification) is parked nose-in with motorcycles on each side of it. So you could double-park behind it, but not in front of it or to the side. The nearest feasible parking spot that's available would be about 10 meters behind the van. If you want to park to the side of it, then you can find a spot about 20 meters away. The Jackal's Lantern is in front of it so there's no way to park in front of the van's hood.

Any way to approach the van obscured from the spirits?