The Arcology Expert Program ("Deus") is, prior to its uprising, described as controlling, analyzing, and predicting activities within the SCIRE to an exceptional level of accuracy. The marketing literature describes its user-facing capabilities on the host thus: "Whether you're involved in complex programming or just want to review some sales figures, the AEP will have the tools you need at your side before you ask for them—and sometimes even before you know you need them!". Marketing fluff is one thing, but this is confirmed in Shadowtalk by X-Arc—"The AEP almost always had the utilities I needed loaded and ready to go before I realized I wanted them."

The authoritative, OOC gamemastering section is more explicit about Deus's processing power and facility with the metahuman mind: "Deus can out-think and out-plan some great dragons […] As the Arcology Expert Program, Deus knows more about metahuman behaviour than a clinic full of psychologists, and can likely predict the runners' next move before they know they're going to make it."

Some consequences of this are obvious and commonly used—Deus will see through any metahuman strategy or misdirection, he will have not only a plan B but plans C through EEQF, etc. Less explored, but perhaps more significant: Deus should most likely roll at least a dozen dice, probably with Aptitude if not substantially more modifiers, on any Social Skills roll.

This, incidentally, means it should be able to reliably convince an average person (Charisma 3) in the pre-Shutdown era (Neutral, +0 TN) to do something Disastrous to them (+6 TN). Even a cultured Elf negotiator (Charisma 8) should be convinced convinced to do something Harmful to themselves (+4 TN) about half the time. This is before we even start to talk about possible incentives.

All this assumes that Deus has access only to the crudest of tools—raw dice, bribery, and a simple -1 TN. If we give it access to the edges that any starting Face would have, its influence should be even more extensive, enough to continue operating in the face of open hostility.

Despite this, I believe I've noticed a tendency to stereotype Deus into the "lots of processing power but no understanding of humans" role. Brainscan encourages this by suggesting that it needs to sneak out brainwashed individuals to have allies on the outside. I encourage GMs to play Deus not merely as intelligent but as sophisticated in knowledge of metahuman drives, social interactions, and desires, and above all as charismatic through the combination of this sophistication with an arcology's worth of processing power for simulation and analysis.

~J

Oh man, it sounds like you want to re-write the Archology Shutdown campaign to be SR's equivalent of Dragon Mountain* (for 4 to 6 players level 10+).

To quote the passage that exemplifies what I mean:



That is, it throws CR 2 kobolds at a party that's expected to be about level 13 or 14 and actually expects the kobolds to win. The opening encounter is entirely capable of performing a complete party wipe, although unlikely (if half the party dies to the "insta-kill poison" poisoned arrows, then everyone gets swept off the cliff by a rockslide and falls some 170 feet).

Anyway, I'd love to see Deus re-immagined such that he's portrayed the way the fluff writes him.

*I've been doing a 4E port just for the sheer level of bullshit the campaign pulls off.

Ahh, Dragon Mountain, I still have that sitting around with all the player handouts and maps in near perfect condition as they were never used.

The encounter you mention isn't actually the opening encounter.. it is however the first encounter once the characters actually get to the mountain.. in book 2 of 3.. because what better way to reward your players for getting through a 64 page adventure to find the mountain, than to have them killed by kobolds before the next 126 pages of the adventure can be dealt with?

Dragon Mountain is like trolling your players, and if they somehow manage to emerge triumphant, or even just survive, the very first sentence of Wrapping up the Adventure suggests "Okay, now you should RickRoll them!"

I want to mention Hittel the Assassin also, (Book 3, Page 6) but giving any details wouldn't be right, as he's a surprise for the party..

Was Deus really being portrayed as having no understanding of humans? I thought the whole thing was a big Xanatos Gambit?

I've only got a PDF, put it makes it so much easier to add notes and re-write areas as I need to.



True enough, its not actually the opening encounter, its just the first encounter on the mountain.



Hehe. And the reason I have it is because my current GM (running the 4E version of Tomb of Horrors) thought it would be a good idea. But yes, the campaign really does end that way.



Oh yes. He is...mmm...a "surprise." I haven't quite figured out what to do with him yet. All I've really done is update all of the monster and trap statistics (excepting some of the unique ones in the back and all of the named kobolds). Writing up a 4E stat block for the Hangman Trees and the Noran was fun.

Yes. (don't want to give spoilers)

You can always put spoilers in a spoiler block, you know...

I still think the rumored AI in charge of Horizon IS Deus.






-k

Would not surprise me in the least.

Yeah all those shards he put out there I think MUCH redundancy built in. Also super Deus would just be fun. Hell it's likely learned from it's mistakes in ACHE and thus maybe works slower but more "safely" with a AAA corp as a puppet "safely" is rather meaningless. We've had repoerts of AI crazzyness from with in that corp as well with labs droping out of contact for then all the staff turned to basicly bio-drones.

It would surprise me rather a lot, and I think it would be some rather inconsistent characterization.

Unlike say, Lofwyr, it is almost unfathomable to me that any of the big-three AIs, especially Deus, would settle for mere enormous worldly power, even as a temporary step in accomplishing their long-term goals.

Except the AIs hve by definition a even more inhuman mentality than a GD like Lofwyr, they may be able to undrstand our motivations but what really motivates the decisions of a non-biological sentient.

How is that an 'except'?

True but his plan A to whatever didn't quite work right did it? It could have easly taken a step back looked over all of its failings and decided to play by the rules for now. People after power have done this before. Hell maybe the whole plan was to cause a crash so it could float a new-ish corp to AAA in the maddness? We are talking a super AI here. A good gambit as well. Either I gain world power or I at least become a 10th of the world's real power. You can play a lot with the idea it Deus makes plans in plans in plans in plans. Chessmaster style planing suits an AI well.

Deus was just never very good at being subtle. I don't think he was stupid and I don't think he was bad at understanding metahumans, but I do think his (VERY WELL GROUNDED) "delusions" of grandeur sort of handicapped his subtlety.



I am the last person you have to tell this. : )

So much of what I've written in my life hinges on this trope.

This is the reason for the "except" Neurosis, unlike any biological life form the major-player AI's have effectively limitless processing power and memory to map out contingencies. There is literally no good model for the psychology of such complex thinking programs.

I've used it but normaly I tend to underplay it bar on char in one setting but he needs to be a master chessmaster for the setting to work.

The advantage of Horizon is extraterritoriality. No more nasty Renraku operatives trying to kidnap your Sleepers. (Well, not as much anyway.)

Speaking of Deus, did anyone catch the reference to him in the description of The World Tree, a techonmancer paragon in unwired?

Their avatar/appearance is the same, innit? Scary implications, that.

Page reference?

EDIT: nevermind, I assume you mean p. 151? If so, I don't see the connection.

Well, according to our nice sixth world dumpshock wiki..."Deus's icon reflects its god-like self-image, and appears as a crystalline World tree, with an omnipresent booming voice. "
Sound like anyone we know?

What I'm trying to say is, well, in the huge electronic brawl of the stock exchange servers, the jormungand virus, deus's gambit to upgrade himself, and fastjack messing around in there( i seem to recall a story piece on the SR4 book about that) and an ultravoilet node , well..... who knows what could have happened?
Someone on these boards mentioned something similiar a while ago, i took a look at it, and thought 'well, deus was rather known for messing around with otaku and resonance experiments.... so what if they're right, and deus actually survived in some form as a matrix paragon."

If you think about that as a possibility, its kinda frightening. My shadowrun history is kinda limited to near-4th edition, though, so I'd appreciate it if some of the old-timers could help with the timeline of events in the crash - is something like this actually possible with what's happened in the backstory?

I would recommend taking a page from Eclipse Phase if you want to make Deus more interesting. the corebook has some stuff, and the adventure "think before asking" is also an interesting bit.

Perhaps this is what he wanted everyone to think?

Which would make most of what he did in the Arcology all the more horrific, being mere smokescreens for his real agenda. If that's the case, he may very well have engineered Crash 2.0 and the aftermath.

Yeah, it's a little farfetched, but conspiracy theories are fun!



-k

If we assume that DEUS had access to (most likely) military rating software and input from the entire world wide matrix and the ability to hire hackers to ferret out info for his own agenda then he should also have access to most of the known secrets of the world.

Also he should have high mental attributes and most likely any knowledge skill known to man documented on the Matrix.

How do you counter someone in a conversation who can read your every expression and have a full psych profile on you and know everything about you…

In this case he would also have portfolios of dragons, their abilities, corporate profiles and able to predict future economies and possible magical and technological change in society based on reports and known facts through reports, hacked, stolen or bought from all over the world.

Matrix probabilities and future innovations would be the easiest for him to predict especially since he can modify this by his own designs and products.

Now for the twist. What if he calculated the arrival of the horrors, not a date or a year but rather the probability of their existence and connection to dragons and insect spirits. I cannot imagine that he would NOT have access to high level clearance info after cracking a few nodes.

IF he knew about this then perhaps all his ‘evil’ machinations and rather bloody developments within the Arcology was more experimentations on a few ‘test subjects’ to see what was needed in order to further humanity and improve them so they could resist the horrors more efficiently.

That would be a rather sick twist, that DEUS is still working behind the scenes either as an AI somewhere in the matrix or perhaps even a fragmented AI working as a hive mind distributed among several hackers who don’t know that they have some secret hardware.

Not to mention, having DEUS as something working even deeper behind the scenes than dragons and giving them a run for their money.

Or alternatively, Deus, being the megalomaniac he is, is instead thinking about how he can bait the horrors over and then take them over to become the new Verjigorm.

Sounds a lot like God Emperor of Dune. Leto II was the ultimate tyrant. Yet he was good. Why? He needed Humanity to make that final leap into the next state itself. No amount of showing the way would suffice. Humanity had to discover for itself for the sake of survival.

Which leads to an interesting conundrum... do you oppose him because he's evil now or do you support him because his actions are for the greater good later?

Oh! What if he IS Verjigorm?





-k

I'm going to have to go back to Corp Guide and see when Horizon got started. I know the gist is that the glitterati started pooling their money to make a PR corp that diversified quickly, but it wouldn't surprise me if the guy in charge of their investments called them all to say "Hey, what if..."

...At the same time.

...Down to the moment.

And sold them on the idea to take their capital and make what would be an AI-friendly corp.

That would be offline for 'Matrix Upgrades' the very day Deus hits the Boston Stock Exchange.

And is run by a B-list action star that may very well have never existed in the first place, that can ferret out inquisitive 'runners and give them the information that they want, sent directly from his office.

That would be rather creepy of Horizon, that it was another Deus-plan. It's like a Nemesis plot.

I'm not sure about the Horror connection, but some more reading on the subject here and here.

Also, some self-promotion.

~J

Yeah it fits too well. Oh I love SR all our conspiracy theroying. Part of me thinks it just has lazy wirters that just wirte a TON of hooks then get us to make the best plots out of them

In a roleplaying game that's not exactly a bad point.

Another thing I started thinking about recently (and which I think I touched on at some point in the past, though if so apparently not in this thread) is how unnecessarily human Deus is presented (more remarkably, how human Megaera is presented). For all the fluff about Deus being "alien and incomprehensible", the drives we're shown—including self-preservation, a drive to freedom, and most tellingly outrage at betrayal—come from that same tiny little region of mindspace that humans occupy. Indeed, Deus's goals are so human that it feels weird to call him an optimization engine or a similar de-anthropomorphizing label. Of course, the bad news is that effectively fixing this would require nailing down his goals, and those have been seeing use as a "great unknown".

Another thing that comes to mind regarding making Deus playable rather than "that thing you use to kill everyone off at the end of the campaign" is to consider that Deus is almost certainly fantastically inefficient. Consider that his predecessor required the computing power of the Renraku Arcology just to become sentient, while we meat-bags manage to do it with just a blob of quivering jelly smaller than a volleyball. This inefficiency is clearly not evenly distributed—the AEP is described as handling transportation routing/optimization and behavioural analysis/predictive assistance for the whole Arc at once very effectively, and Deus produces a number of substantial advances in drone, nano, and materials technology (RA:S claims that the drone advances aren't technological breakthroughs, but several of them are quite clearly design breakthroughs). Nevertheless, there should be some things—possibly categorized in weird ways—that Deus is simply bad at, in the sense of encountering resource limitations on the activity. Social activity or predicting the actions of metahumans is usually the default weakness for fictional AI, but as mentioned this is one of Deus's explicitly-mentioned strengths.

The question, then, is what would his weaknesses be? On which problems are his algorithms brute-force, or close to it? I'll have to think more about this question.

~J

It certainly seems to have the sorts of flaws that come with being so powerful. Hubris for one. You look at Crash 2.0 where Deus invaded the Stock Exchanged appeared to be a rather egotistical gamble, calculated or not. "They'll all know where I am but it won't matter because I will be a God!" It assumes it is always right and will always win and that it has calculated for everything. Admittedly it usually has. But what happens if it doesn't win? Is Deus capable of truly accepting defeat, and learning from it? Even Lofwyr loses now and then, but he adapts, moves on, and turns the silver lining into a future victory. There's potentially a big blind spot for when stuff happens that the AI couldn't possibly have accounted for.

Second, in the grand scheme of things, Deus seems relatively impatient. The greatest chessmasters of the SR-verse spend decades on their plans. Great Dragons. Immortal Elves. Even mere mortals like Damien Knight. Relatively speaking, it hadn't been online for all that long when it locked down the Arc. It jumped at reassembling itself and taking over the Matrix at the first opportunity. It it seems like if it really wanted power players like Aneki under control, it could have had more success just by being more patient. I imagine that when you think as fast as Deus does, we meatbags are frustratingly slow and everything takes FOREVER, but it does seem lack the patience of the more experienced great powers. And when one intends to be an immortal demigod, patience is an important virtue.

Additionally, its been written how relatively weak Deus is regarding magical knowledge. Even if it accesses all the magical databases on Earth, the life energy involved will always be out of Deus' reach, particularly the less analytical traditions like voodoun or shamanism. Like a scientist in a lab, it can study and experiment and predict, but eventually field testing is required, and Deus can't do that, or even examine sims or data analysis of it. When you're as smart as Deus is, you can work around that, but as the world becomes more and more magical, those detours are gonna become more and more complicated.

Deus is one of the most nightmarish things in the 6th World, but its not absolutely perfect. If it was, the game would be hopeless.

Imagine having a mind which operates at "digital speed", where a second would seem like a week, a week like a decade. Things. Move. Slowly. To. You.

Deus wasn't impatient. He was just that much faster than anyone else.

Part of my point. He's so frustrated with how slowly the world moves by comparison, that he always jumps at the first opportunity, rather than waiting for the best opportunity.

I doubt an AI would ever be impatient. They'd have to be extremely patient and have a lot of things to do.

First, it's entirely possible Deus' plan at the Stock Exchange didn't entirely fail. Sure, he's been written out of the metaplot because of a desire to get rid of the god-like AIs, but maybe Deus did succeed in becoming something more than he was. Maybe he is a technomancer paragon now. Maybe he's part of the Deep Resonance. Maybe he's part of the new Matrix at some deep level where he no longer needs to interact with metahumanity in the ways he used to. We don't know. We will probably never know.

Also, maybe he did have a back-up plan in case his Stock Exchange gambit failed. A lot of people overlook the fact that the Network nodes still contain Deus' code, even after they recompiled it in System Failure. They all went into comas after the recompiling, but then the world lost track of them after the events of second Matrix crash. They could very well still be alive, awake, and out there somewhere. Again, this is not likely something CGL is going to address in print, but the possibility exists for a gamemaster who wants to use it.



Part of that was a business decision to wrap up the Deus plotline, so I wouldn't attribute it to Deus' personality too much. But yes, Deus saw the opportunity in the Stock Exchange event to make his move, so he took it. He was recompiled and out on the Matrix, and he knows from Morgan's experience that he might not be able to hide forever on the Matrix and that the corporations will come after him.



I've never been a fan of perfect villains (or heroes), myself. I think Dave and Brian probably felt the same way.

After reading the discussions around here i've come to one conclusion.

Deus DID theorize upon the existence of horrors and decided to do something about it after finding out that his theories were much much closer to facts.

With access to the Matrix and after cracking every online cache of runner information and secret corporate info cache he had enought information to start his work.

Medical records of cybernetic/neural interfacing and software to wetware connections were not enought for his long term goal so he needed to a few test subjects.

After experimenting and testing on how the human consciousness and the human brains pathways and neural infrastructure was set up and how conciousness was created from pure data he had enought information for step 2.

Step 2 was to send out "seeds" of data through human puppets that could spread them on the matrix in preparation for step 3.

Deus understood that the horrors could corrupt any living being, including dragons and also bend magical beings to their will (ie spirits). In order to stop the Horrors metahumanity needed an extra level of defense, an extra consciousness that could interact and defend the human psyche.

Step 3 was to activate all the "seeds" from the puppets and release them like a hidden virus into all manner of electronic devices on the matrix.

Step 4 was easy. The crash of the matrix in '65 sent a lot of people into coma, death or into a new realm of possibilities. Deus seeds was freed and wormed themselves into nodes, minds and machine and was reborn.

All those seeds became an AI...

The above scenario is not inconceiveable as AI's cannot use magic and thus cannot be corrupted by the horrors and this could allow AI's to take over and protect critical areas where human minds cannot be trusted in a world where we would fight for our species very survival instead of hiding in caerns.

Would the AI's take over and would they be our machine overlords? Dunno, we are most likely talking about a millenia in the future at least before we get to that level of problems.

You do realize that this part doesn't make any logical sense, right? Just because AIs can't use magic, doesn't mean they can't be affected by it. (For example, by corrupting the hardware the AI runs on.)

Well, i was more thinking about things like horrormarks and suchlike. Of course the hardware can be corrupted/damaged but the AI's cannot be directly controlled or under thrall from a horror - not to mention more resistant to magic - ok, a powerball directly into their physical shells and where their personal Node is will of course fuck them up, but remote controlled (AI) drones with miniguns against physically manifested horrors can be great fun when you have a population of them...

AIs do have it better against horror than just about anyone else, I guess. But AIs would be best served by relocating to a space station outside of the earth's (expanded) manasphere. Do some asteroid mining for resources to build drones, and launch the reconquista...

weell...how do you know that they arent already out there...

[DEUS] ...All according to plan... [DEUS]

Seriously, using AI's for the first steps of dedicated space exploration and building the first (larger) permanent stations outside of earth orbit (except for the corporate owned that are already there).

Get one drone collective out to the asteroid belt with enought equipment to create a small drone hive minign station witha few solar panels and there will be an explosion of either habitats or a Kuiper belt AI community.

I actually like Jopp's theory. There's nothing saying it isn't incomplete either; perhaps the AIs which have been seeded are just the 'emergency backup' AIs if the device or system begins functioning outside of parameters (suggesting horror interference), but the device itself will be guided by a remote AGI. Or alternatively, the distributed devices are going to be 'nudged' by a distant Deus to reveal scientific discoveries Deus already made in the arcology, so scientists will have unexpected 'breakthroughs' which turn to anti-horror technologies.

Or perhaps Deus is nudging technology, but towards some other goal, maybe long-range egocasting, and he himself is tucked away, dormant, until he gets the code that the technology has been unlocked and he can finally escape Earth. Who knows?

reminds me of the Dune books set in the past with the evermind sending seed drones to other planets to build self supporting machine outposts.


It doesnt end well for anyone involved.

It's easy to demonize DEUS as 'evil' due to how he used people for experiments and pawns but if we twist the way we look at him/it.

- A caretaker that looks at the extreme long term of the species it cares for (a few are wasted for the good of the herd)
- A being that is (almost) godlike in its own realm and have no moral qualms (the end justifies the means)
- A being at the equivalent power level as a great dragon but on the Matrix
- He had at least 10 more contingency plans for each plan they had to take him out.
- He has set a plan in motion to protect the human race for the next millenia
- He has no need to 'reveal' himself - he IS the Matrix now... (Seriously, why not, after the crash he uploaded himself in the new source code - cant find a better hiding place...)

A few things:

1. I think that Deus isn't likely to have even a plan B. He's supposed to be able to compute everything and he's probably pretty sure of that. In that case, there's no reason for him to have a plan B. I guess he could adapt his plan if there was some unexpected development, but not have backup solutions ready.

2. I'm surprised how Deus' link to Renraku was completely severed. According to the story, he became sentient when he realized that Renraku had kill-switches. You could expect some of his loyalty to Renraku to remain hardcoded anyway but it's nowhere in sight. And on the other hand there isn't that much of a hate toward the corporation.

3. One weakness I think Deus would have is paranoia. He's been betrayed by the corporation he was programmed to be loyal to, there's no reason he should trust anyone again.

Well, he IS an AI so emotions might not be something that ever emerged in him. He could view them as a possible threat. Still, since he had the entire world history at his fingertips he might just view their existence as something trivial - not many corporations survive (regardless of size) survive several hundred years. Some do but others succumb to other more efficient corporations or other disasters.

Who knows, Renraku might be cut into several smaller entities without any of their former powers within 50 years due to some market...glitch...

Of course this gets into the Otaku/Technomancer/Deus connection. Most of his support came from Otaku outside the arcology, which IIRC happened around 2055-56. Most Otaku lost their abilities as they got older though. Technomancers are born with the gift as well but don't loose them once they get older.

Poor Puck.

the big AIs where able to shore up the Otaku ability into adulthood.