Oh, I adore me some Brackhaven. Heck, I voted for him!

That right there is a *quality* villain. He's understandable, easy to hate, but thinks of himself as the good guy ... all the elemnets that you need!

Add in hypocritical backstory (He's taking the name of a man's Ork child!) and people just start CHOMPING for him to die.

And now he's governor of Seattle. Whee!

Yeah, if I were to make this list it'd ideally be filled with guys that get the PCs to say things like "Hey, we shot somebody who deserved it!" or "That guy was a real asshole."

It is unfortunate that so many people in the world have chosen violence as the only medium they will speak in.
It is fortunate that I am so much better at violence then so many of them. - Lifeseeker, Ork Martial Artist and Medic

"You can get more things with kind words and a team of Shadowrunners than you can with kind words alone." - Jon "Money" Johnson, 2055, upon leaving his Megacorporation at the end of his contract as a Mr. Johnson.

The NPC does a metaquest by the hard&fast rules, which does include a chance of failure. However, there is nothing, absolutly nothing, by the rules, that the PC can do.

What is it about the AI designed to protect and aid a bunch of people having dangerous and hostile motives?

Uh, except the rules for blood mages, toxics and such mark them as insane and inherently evil clearly. Same goes for Free Spirits - the rules are out there for all to see. Nowhere is it said in canon sources, however, that the AIs are inherently evil, far as I am aware. And I repeat: Deus did not reach godhood, his plan failed, there's no solid reason to assume everything tree-shaped in the matrix is Deus. If you're willing to go down that path, the AIs can channel any of the Greats, and there's nothing on them being inherently evil any more than humans.

Because they're not marked as such? You know, just an idea - the inherently evil options are marked as being inherently evil.

Every character is liable to "lose control of your character if [that mage] wills it", and a metaquest is more difficult than casting a single spell, without doubt.
Besides, can't you as a free spirit defend your metaplane domain?

'Bout the same way a Street Sami protects his personal cardboard box with his Ares Predator. You can only keep what you can hold onto.

There is not much an PC can do in general if you send a bunch of Magic 11 guys after him, if he is only out of chargen.


There aro no hard rules about it.


Thats the only thing I could find. And six challenges does not sound something you can do easy. (As a matter of fact, a session has often less scence)

But the free spirit rules are fucked up anyway. If you use them a player might just get a heck of pacts and a good lists of contacts having a Karma income with three digits a month.

Yes, a GM might abuse this possibility. But thats true for everything. Every runner getting some cyberware installed by a streetdoc with a loyalty less than 4 could turn up with a cortex bomb. So what?
The spirit has just to check in(in his metaplance) once or twice every day or so. Since I guess the test will take a fair amount of time.
Than he might butcher them on his "home ground".

Yes, you have no possibility to defend yourself. As you have non if a bunch of magic 11 mages try to murder you in your sleep.

On topic though:
I guess for a dystopia the more fitting question would be: Who is asking for a bullet?
I guess you could say Lofyr deserves a bullet. But it would only make im ask for ketshup.

@Brazilian_Shinobi

As did for 9/11. Only a few people know the command structure of Al Kaida. How the guys were recruited exactly. How the planes were taken over.
And a lot of other details rest in the dark. If you get yourself to investigate it you will learn more about it.
I mean there sure worked hundreds of people on this (getting to know what exactly happened) there can only be a hand full having most of the facts. Just due to the quantity of information. (And some of those are even a matter of national/international security)

Same would be with Arcologie. Yes, the complete story won't be released. But the most common stuff will be out.
It is not that easy to get a coverstory for something that big. (You may hide some frindly fire in a war. But even this is something not so easy to do if you plan to do it for some years. Because people will talk.
What should you feed to the public? It was a free spirit? A single deranged man?

Nope.


Vampires and the other (auto)cannibal PC options are not marked as evil, since they evidently were there to appeal to the oWoD fans. Neither are twisted way/Toxic mages marked as such, there's just a bunch of "you can allow them a PCs but know what you get into with this" flags for all I remember. Shadowrun doesn't suport 'inherently evil' any more than Dark Heresy does (where you can play cultists and worship the Ruinous Powers).


Which AI do you mean? Mirage? Who trapped hundreds of thousands in the Matrix to experiment on their brains? Very helpful and protective.

Mirage never did this FYI.

@hermit

Why not?
A spirit may return to his metaplain at any time. And if you are on the same plain you might get some ass kicking done.


Yeah, and just hope you do not run into a GM who likes to rule with a "realistic world".

Psychotrope = Mirage.


Sure, but it's not like a bell rings when someone is wreaking havoc on it'S plane (nothing in the rules covers that, at least, because apparently nobody writing those rules thought of the first aproach of most players when tangling with a Free Spirit). I'm not saying there should be no way, but going by the rules there is none.

Right, they just need to feed on metahuman blood/flesh/whatever. Not evil in any way, totally tame.

So, saying they are inherently perverse, hostile to any and all metahuman life and make exemplar villains is not enough for you as a warning? Should they have out up a page-wide sign about them being evil or what?

DH describes Chaos worship in no uncertain terms: corruption, insanity and damnation, forever straying from the Emperor's light. It makes no qualms labelling it as inherently evil and utterly self-destructive in the end.

Yep, him. Haven't seen that bit on hundreds of thousands in the fluff, source?

...since that article has nothing about that.

Souls. Yeah, harmless.


You are saying one kind of inherently hostile to metahumans PC is worse than others. I think they're all the same level of bad news.


Uhm, you haven't read the novel Psychotrope, have you?

The novel Psychotrope details how thousands of Matrix users - everyone in the Seattle grid - are put through the AI's little show of horrors, which makes most go insane and some become "adult Otaku". Please note how this was picked up later again with the Crash, and befroe that, Deus in Brainscan.

@hermit

So what?
You got to check every now and then.
It is not like such a quest would be over in 5 minutes. More 5 days.


Yeah. Mirage followed orders given.
Yeah, I mean how stupid is it to give someone the order to fire up the matrix equivalent of nuclear warheads if X happens, then but him in a coma and displace him and the whole missle side. Yeah, thats smart.

So the only thing to be said about Mirage is she is lawful or was.
But there is no evidence of beeing evil.

Still is a place for copious house ruling and GM's decisions, since the game just forgot all about this being possible. But yes, you absolutly should do that.

Nope, I haven't read it. The wiki articles make the results look rather positive, and
is hardly consistent with
And this is why I don't agree to accept the novels as a part of the fluff. Even if they have luscious elven nipples.

But the action in that novel is canon fluff, live with it. All the adult otaku appeared again (one, Red Wraith, even pops up in Spy Games), and Brainscan and System Failure heavily depend on the events in that novel. You can ignore some of the novels, but some like Psychotrope, Secrets of Power, The Burning Time and Dragonheart are just too entrenched in Sourcebook fluff to be cast aside (nipples or no nipples).

Besides, the results of the experimentation in weapons technology, aviation and nuclear weapons in WW2 are pretty positive too, all in all. Does that make the war any more positive, or the dead any less dead? Ends and means.

Yeah. Because progress is so much faster in times of war.
The only war really speeding development would have been the cold one.
But WW2 might have thrown humanity about 30 years back.

Not quite. Wartime spending enabled as much research in WW2 as it did in the Cold War. Research that, without the war, would just not have happened like this. Neither would the American military/industrial complex exist, which is the basis of America'S current technological edge over everyone else.

Even if we take that oversimplification as basis it doesn't jive with your previous statements. Mirage did not intentionally trap those people in the Seattle grid to experiment on them. Gadzooks man, it's a fictional world with documented history (for the most part) could you at least keep the reasons for your prejudices accurate.

@hermit

This complex seems more to be the reason america is currently going down. But anyway.

Not to say I do not understand your argument in the first place anyway.


As ist 99% of the rest of the game. So what.

Nah, the reason for that is called Wall Street.


It isn't. That's why there're rules. Though "In the end it's the GM's decision" is the cop-out of RPG writers for crappy rules ever since Storyteller.


Gadzooks man, it's an internet forum but you could at least try not to troll.

I came here with a simple dream. A dream, of killing all humans. And is this how it must end? I ask you, who's the real seven billion ton robot monster here? Not I... Not I.

This thread is locked for 24 hours to give all of you the possibility to think about your posting style, tone, and behaviour.