A trope of every crime drama is the inevitable 'bag of money'. American Gangster has a scene where the main character discovers a trunk containing several hundred thousand dollars and, as an officer of the law, must turn the money into the evidence room. Problem is, he is part of the dirty, filthy NYPD in the 1960s and 70s. By not taking a taste, he not only screws himself out of a 50 footer and a nice house in Florida, but ensures that he will never have a partner again.

Way of the Gun has a whole series of scenes dedicated to the troped Bagmen of the crime drama.

The Wire has scenes based around DEA money going native after a sting operation goes south.

Problem is that 2072 Shadowrun doesn't really use cash anymore. This makes no sense to me. Having come back recently from the developing world - a close analogue to the underclass in SR4 - I can say that the only currency used is hard, dirty cash. I realize that SR4 has the certified credstick, but even that, so the book says, is going the way of the do do. There are passkeys, hard drugs, BTL chips...

What is in your brown bags / locked briefcases / spare tires?

Does your SR universe have hard currency still in wide circulation amongst the underclass?

The best kind of untraceable money - Certified credsticks.

Alternatively black certified credsticks, which have a minimum balance of 100,000 Nuyen.

Why would any corporation try to phase out untraceable funds? They couldn't pay shadowrunners otherwise.

They could just wire the money to your numbered one time account.

Also I don't think anyone is "trying" to phase out credsticks, it's just a matter of hardly anyone using them anymore.

I find that part hard to square with how the majority of the world does business. All of SE Asia, outside of Thailand and other well-greased-tourist-chutes run cash only. You leave the cities and it is cash only. Hell, you go into lower class parts of town here in the US and things rapidly become cash only. Cash is great. Cash isn't going anywhere. Am I crazy?

I can mug you and steal all your cash.

Isn't that great?

It doesn't have to be outright money that's in a bag -- though I'm a big fan of paper scrip, myself -- anything valuable will do. Diamonds, drugs, chips, electronics...

You should really get your hand on Feral Cities, the wholly electric funds think is only true on the first world countries and i would say that even in those only on upper-middle echelons.
In places like chigaco and lagos electronic nuyen is even more useless then a bag full Zimbabwe dollars is today as you cant even wipe your ass with electric currency.

APDS rounds work for currency in my book.

I will accept payment in APDS ammo and I will compensate others for their goods with slightly used APDS ammo.

What's in the bag?

A five pound brick of orichalcum.

(I HATE THAT STUFF I CANNOT SPELL IT ARGH)

Fine, money is gone.

Jewels, artwork, coins made of valuable metal (Or bars for that matter), bearer bonds, truckloads of pawnable goods, beer, food...

In one of my stories, I comment about a Mr. Johnson that hunts for a hobby, and paid a group of Ork Smugglers with deer meat.

The use of only electronic funds is one area I seriously break from FLAW (FLuff As Written)

In my game Nuyen is exclusively electronic, but local currency is pretty much still available in notes & coins (BTW Crossing US & Canadian Cash creates a truly hideous hybrid note that is a running joke in our game) and used on the street for minor transactions and (by some types for much larger transactions). Mostly this is a nod to the fact that a Bag of Guns and a Bag of Cash are such classics that removing them detracts from the game more than it adds.

Yeah, I love Feral Cities. We have a huge African hub in our current campaign world and excursions into Lagos are some of the most terrifying/fun times we have. Everyone hates the money and have taken to ironically calling the various trinkets Lagosians call currency 'Uncle Hawala Bucks'. Those things will fill up a briefcase pretty fast (and they rattle!). Another favourite in my group, is a package full of low-yield certified credsticks. You pull out something with 10k Nuyen on it, and it might attract attention. If you ask for your payout in small, easily divideable sticks that makes everything easier and helps keep it low key. Finally, I am a huge fan of the previously mentioned barter culture in the shadows. Why must every shadow commodity being moved about be cash. You can just as easily be paid in weapons, ammo, drugs, alchemical reagents, software or lifestyle commodities, etc. After a particularly grisly run against an organized crime racket in Loveland, my team received no direct payment, just some incredible household appliances that happened to have fallen off the back of a truck.

I am totally using that in my upcoming arc.

'Off the back of a truck,' indeed.

I'm a big fan of payment in stuff too.

Random Tangent, did the section of Lagos Port named Tin Can Island manage to make it in to Feral Cities? The fact they have an entire city region called Tin Can Island probably goes a long way to explaining the trrinkets.

Bag contains mafia bosses surrogate child.

Pre or post fertilization?

Addendum - We did have a story arc where a Yak's tragically sterile wife finally agreed to a surrogate mother, but the surrogate (chosen because of her race and magical proclivities) had an unpleasant habit of walking the ley-lines. Group was sent to the British Isles to try and track her down before 'something' happened to her. Nothing makes a group medic jittery like the thought of an unplanned mid-trimester delivery of a million dollar baby in the middle of Tir wilderness.

I believe it is also referred to in some places as "The Five Finger Discount."

(Virtual hugs if you can name a game this appeared in, bonus points for the race).

Technically, that's not what the term Bag Man means.

A bag man is the guy who handles all the dirty baggage for a boss who can't afford to be connected to criminal activity.

Mr. J is a bag man.

I trade you chicken for gun, da?

Is very nice chicken.




-karma

How many cows did you pay for those rifles?

If I'm not mistaken, the UCAS still has paper currency, just very little is a circulation. I could imagine a series of runs about finding a jackpot in bills, then trying your damndest to launder it.

A real chicken, made from real meat? sure, have my holdout.

You handing it over full of ammo? He'll probably just pop you with it and take his chicken back. And sell your meat to a goul for a little extra.

Of course not with the bullets! What do you think I am?

He didn't pay for them.

Bullets require some cooking oil, flour, and a fryer to go with the chicken.

If you miss the hard cash, just say that physical currency has become more popular since the 2nd crash, after loads of virtual cash went unaccounted for due to matrix mayhem. Corps would be in favor of virtual cash, but if enough people lose funds, things can change.

According to Mercenaries 2, all currency is rough diamonds.

I feel like Shadowrun is a bit more "WHAT'S IN THE BOXXXX?!"; scary.

"I use poker chips.

Assuming Vegas uses some technology, they can use a master poker chip to keep track of how much you have left. You can carry the poker chip from table to table.

Someone hacks one, and finds that due to some interesting tax loophole, casinos don't have to follow any tracking laws about the ownership of any given master poker chip. They become the de facto currency of the Vegas mob, and spread from there to the rest of the shadows. The Vegas mob has to protect the validity of the data on the poker chips so that they are the only ones that can hack them. They enforce this with lead clubs applied to slightly crunchy parts of metahuman anatomies."

//Plus, you get the cool Noir feel where you can be tossing these poker chips on the table. Most of my characters have the Knowledge skill Gambling, so I'm a little biased.

And if the Mob does find people hacking their chips... Well, there's always the short guy that puts their head in a vice, then tightens it until (s)he explains how the hack was done, so defences can be made against it happening again.

This will most likely ellict a "bullshit" response from most hacker players.
If somethink can be hacked, then my hacker/TM can hack it.

Except Fake SINs for some reason, which can be made in a week. Or years if a player is the one doing it.

Fake SiN
Forgery+edit extended test.
Threshhold of 32Xrating with an interval of 1 week.

A rating 5 SiN would have a threshhold of a 160.
Even if you're a stud and you specialize in forgery and edit. You've got /maybe/ 16 dice.
That means on average you get 4-5 successes a week. That's 40 weeks. That's /insane/

Macguffin scary. And that pallet of bills I airlift is not rough diamonds.

You forgot about the part where you only get 16 rolls.

If making a fake SIN were profitable or easy, there'd be no reason for 'runners to worry about SINs, nor to even really shadowrun as such.

If SINs aren't difficult to make (reasonably so, even! a SIN should be a colossal undertaking!) and players are SIN makers... who is shadowrunning? I often take a look at characters and ask the presenting player 'why is this person running / alive'. The most anti-social types would have been dead a long time ago (no one is so badass as to survive in a world full of enemies) and the more wage-slavish types (read: SIN makers) have no reason to run the shadows.

Well, they are profitable. Just not easy.

It would be far easier to get a dead man's SIN and fudge the details to fit the person you're selling it to. It wouldn't be surprising if that's exactly what the syndicates did for the higher-end ones.

While true, its a discrepancy in the ease of acquiring a fake ID and the near-impossibility (even in the fluff) of creating one.

Someone is obviously making fake IDs that the players can get a brand new one in only a week or two of poking around, yet that same ID took almost a year to make.

So basically what it comes down to is a game balance thing. If players could make their own IDs the game would become unbalanced.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that ID theft of persons both living and deceased is how the syndicates get a 7-day turnaround. The quality of the theft is the amount of time spent checking the backtrails.

A rating 6 goes nearly all the way back. Backdoors they've built into the systems allow them to toggle Alive/Deceased on the SIN in the federal databases, new licenses are carefully inserted into the system as if done by actual personnel working there (or perhaps they are, for a nominal bribe), and dummy accounts are set up and transaction histories created by people on the inside. Pay a premium, get a SIN that can withstand AAA scrutiny. Probably a country on the edge of industrialization - or a Free City with their own SIN database. Perhaps even a corporate ID with ties to the Yakuza, the HKFTZ, or perhaps even some enterprising chums in Caracas with ties to the elite.

As you go down the line, corners get cut. Things get skipped. The account may have a transaction history mirroring a previous job - not handmade, but a scan. Licenses may be copies of other citizens. At Rating 3, it's decent enough for border checkpoints out of the Barrens that checks for 'Alive' and 'Citizen of'.

At rating 1, no work has been done. They went in, toggled the SIN to 'Alive' and changed the name to whatever you want. Congratulations, you've just nabbed JetBlack's SIN, with his picture and bio, but the name is now Christmas Jones. It'll get you into a nightclub, and that's about all.

anyone considered what effect a teamwork test would have on SIN forgery? Not everyone is working solo, after all.

I could be wrong but I believe hard money still exists.. but using it gets you some questionable looks from any 'legit' citizen as they immediately suspect you of being a criminal.

I forgot where I read it, but I'm pretty sure it's in one of the main books.

Well mostly the think is that nuyen is the universal money of upper/middle class first world and its purely electricall and has always been, there no such think as physical nuyensand never has been.

i could have sworn that physical nuyen was mentioned in some earlier book, complete with a artist rendering of coin and paper versions.

Neo Anarchists Guide to Real Life is the most likely culprit if this is the case, I'll have a look tonight to see what it turns up.

corp scrip

Bearer bonds, provided they still exist.

Good gods... Nothing says 'bought' like having corp scrip on ya. No thanks.

Haha, Fallout style.

"Hey! That's a nice gun! I'll trade you everything I have for the gun. Thanks!"
*bang*
"Aww you're getting blood on all my stuff!"