Hi all, I've had an idea which I thought you might be interested in.

Imagine for a moment that, back before the awakening, one of the world governments was experimenting in long term cryogenic status. Now imagine that during the confusion that followed the awakening, then the crash, then... well lets face it, things got a little hectic around that time. The facility got lost, then sixty years later the time lock opens and our guy thaws. He wakes up in a world that's massively different from the one he went to sleep in. He's got no friends, no knowledge of magic or the matrix, and only whatever obsolete gear was left in his facility before it was abandoned. Basically, he's got to live on his wits in a brave new world.

So my question is this: would an unaugmented mundane like this be playable?

Sounds fun. High LOG and INT for sure.

Flavor first!

Don't forget a high Edge. he'll need it!

How did you think he survived experimental cryostatus?

Hrmmm...

Have you seen Idiocracy?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

Just wondering.

-D

my thoughts exactly

My thought exactly

WELL worth your time, i can recommend that movie.


Ontopic: The mundane unaugmented human has been discussed plenty of times already.

realistically, he won't survive in the shadows very long. He lacks all understanding and skills. Even Edge 8 will only get him so far. He'd be better off teaching History.

That'll depend on what he did before he got frozen, and who he runs into when he gets out. He's SINless, got no job history or... anything. Someone like that today is suspicious, in 2070... yeah, I don't think honest work is actually a viable option.

How he gets introduced to the entire concept is important too. Our group had a civilian get drawn in when his car broke down outside a facility we were hitting (K10 experiments) and we managed to convince him that we were legit and there to clean up an outbreak for long enough for him to get too deep to back out (Long story short: having the car you bought on a legitimate SIN broken down outside a top-secret facility that just got raided is great leverage for the people who're more savvy in the shadows. you do what they want, or they turn you in for the bounty and you spend the rest of your life in a hole... if you're lucky). People don't usually end up in the shadows by choice.

However, the thing to hope is that our friend is a fast learner. a very fast learner.

Give him the obsolescent "upgrade"

Actually, i was thinking of a Colt M1991 with a red-dot laser sight. Old school, sure, but you can still kill someone with one.

I once flirted with the idea of taking this concept to it's ultimate extreme - an Earthdawn era champion who somehow appears/wakes up in the future Shadowrun era. Specifically I wanted a T'skrang swordsman as expressed via Surged qualities and adept powers, but the GM didn't care for the idea.

~Umi

I've done something like that twice, once with an entire D&D party consisting of a paladin, cleric, rogue and a couple of dwarf warriors. That campaign unfortunately didn't go very far although I do have some fiction based on the characters floating around somewhere.

The other time was when we converted my brother's gnome fighter/illusionist to SR and integrated him into an existing party. He discovered magic was a lot easier, not all orks were bad, but had problems with a few of his team-mates (the ones with names like Medusa and Succubus). Turned them all into the feds in the end, in exchange for a free pass to Tir Tairngire. Now that was a fun campaign!

After all, if runners can cross into other metaplanes, what's to stop the inhabitants of those crossing into ours?

On-topic: while the man out of time might start out at something of a disadvantage, there's nothing to stop him getting cybered up to close the gap. And if he was ex-military, he'd at least have some skills to survive any initial encounters with the 6th world's predators.

Plus, drugs.

What's going to hurt him the most, in the beginning, is going to be the lack of initiative boosters and extra passes.

Even a "simple" fight with some wilderness critter will go south fast if he only gets one pass before it closes to melee range unless he's firing a battle rifle or a shotgun, and really knows what he's doing.


Also, what happened to his family and friends? Were they just wiped out in the chaos - Crashs, NAN, Awakening, VITAS 1 and 2, etcetera? Lots of chaos to wipe out a family in.

Maybe he has a nephew that used to work in a robotics lab for a megacorp and now owns a delivery company that finances his own quirky research.

Gods damn you - was about to post similar

Hrm, not exactly going to have 2 billion in the bank, considering the Crash 1 and Crash 2.0......or maybe he's got access to stuff that's worth a fortune (Original recipe for the popcorn that Dunkie was so hot on?) and can get him...well, going so he might at least be a moving target.

-Tir

Remember that this is the Sixth World.

A corporation can literally have him shot in the streets and that stuff confiscated and it's not even a crime if he's SINless.

Whatever he has, it needs to be something that only he can access and can't be simply tortured out of him.

I think a latent mage or technomancer + having him goblinize while frozen would be good not only does he have to adapt to a new world but a new self.

I had a theme going for that - I just took the timescale and upped it...a bit.

This was a group of Geomancers and Matter Shapers - or simply "Shapers" that designed many of the Cairns to hide from the Horrors.

Deep down into one of their more secret laboratories they created crystal chambers hidden behind veils of mana static and made their sleep chambers.

The only survival of this ordeal slept until the 2060's when an earthquake lifted the entire chamber closer to the surface. Barely escaping with his life he emerged in a very changed world.

Qualities:
Magician
Aptitude: Spellcasting

Phobia, Moderate: Drones & Vehicles (They are unnatural, unlike Golems and Elementals - They are dead inside)
GEAS: Can ONLY cast shape material spells
Uneducated [What does he know of the modern world...]

Spellcasting Specialization: Shape [material] spells

These guys where the sculptors of their age and could twist the hardest materials into putty or transform it into something else. Their combat knowledge was limited but training in staffs, unarmed and bows were common. There was a high chance that they simply just cast a spell and buried their enemies underground.

He has extensive knowledge about end of the last cycle, a good comparison is the Prothean from ME3 - he saw his world devoured and escaped with his life.

Shape Spells
-Metal [Any kind of metal]
-Earth [From Diamond to Sand]
-Water [From Ice to Water]
-Fire [From hot lava to an open flame]
-Flesh [Body will be the opposing roll] - Flesh shaping would be similar to Bloodmagic and frowned upon
-Knit Flesh [Treat as a heal spell but higher drain as it is still a physical manipulation]

Exotic Shape Spells [I had to customize these with explanations]
-Composites [Any Ceramics, Kevlar etc]
-Fused [Concrete / Tarmac / Plascrete / etc]

Transform matter
This spell is unique to their kind and is extremely taxing. Required Force and successes is equal to the difference in barrier rating - a good comparison is Shapechange spells since it will be almost impossible to change a reinforced steel door into cotton.

Yes... I am currently playing an Unaugmented Mundane, and he is totally awesome (even with his "minimal" dice pools of 8-12 Dice).

8D6 for the above average guy without any aid is damn good. Its Attribute 4 / Skill 4.

A damn well trained person with good physique is 6+6 at 12D6 and at best 14D6 with a smartgun link for example.

I personally think minmaxers kind off ruining the game by saying you must have minimum X to be a runner.

I think that your shape categories are a little broad, personally... But they look okay.
Earth? I would go Mineral, Stone, Sand, Earth - After all, they are different.
I like the Composites.
I also like Petroleum (For Oils, Fuel, Plastics, etc)

I prefer Base Materials, because then you can affect things by the amount of OR involved.
For example. Glass is just a processed form of Sand. If you have Sand, you can affect it and Glass. Thje Petroleum example is an obvious one with a lot of applications, based upon processing level.

I thoroughly agree with you. The Unaugmented Merc I am playing has over 50 Skills (Counting Languages and Knowledge Skills) and his average rolls fall in the 8-10 range for most of them, with a 10-12 in a few (I think he has 15 Karma)... He is exceedingly fun. So, he only has a single pass for now. So what...

That's why you need a high edge and possibly drugs. The nice thing about SR4 is that there are other reliable methods of gaining extra passes

His Edge is only a 2. Edge is Highly Overrated. He does use combat Drugs when he absolutely MUST have that extra action. Pretty rare, really.

One problem wit the concept is that it's very dubious a research facility could stay off teh grid for 60 years with his freezer in anything like working order. The main issue there is power - sure a freezer doesn't eat much of it, but the whole thawing process is likely be be another kettle of fish. It might work with a radioiostope generator and probably a bank of batteries for the high-wattage phases, but even there it's surprising the installation is still working.

I'd rather go for some sort magical mishhap into the beginning phase of the Awakening, maybe with the army fiddling with things it doesn't understand squat about to find some way to neutralize Howling coyote and his bunch. Afterall what 'magic experts they're likely to get their hands on are more likely to be con men or insane (or both). And the 'lucky' guinea pig might not have been told the experiment would be about magic - if it's early enough in the process, he might still believe whatever explanation the government spouted at the time to explain Howling Coyote's deeds.

I think the "Escaped Clone" quality can be modified here. The facility doesn't go under, per se, but he breaks out of it ahead of schedule.

Philip J. Fry wakes up in 2060 instead of 3000. Contacts: An AI could inhabit an industrial robot, a street doc (a horrible one) could be surged to have crab qualities, and his own hermetic nephew. Could be a helluva good team, with a T-bid cyclops rigger.

Anyway, I think this could work. I'd do the whole "frozen till a cure was found" bit too. Give him the Trustfund quality as well. It doesn't have to be "secret" so much as "not everyone knows about this".

I had an idea for an elf spike baby born in 1910. He fought in WWII and Korea. Then retired. He keeps coming out of retirement out of boredom. Then in 207X he decides to try this runner thing. There's alot more backstory but that is the gist of it.

In my first shadowrun game we had a character like that. He was a retired grumpy old spanish mage that swore like the devil, and set everyone on edge because he used swear words from a handful of decades ago mixed in with everything else he'd picked up along the way.

I am of the same mind. But I was thinking that the story could be that instead of the facility being lost or forgotten the freezer could have been forgotten. The idea being that through numerous buget cuts, changes in management, and lose of records the freezer was kept at some low security facility run by a subcontractor and everyone just thought it is an experiment on freeze-dried food-stuffs. When the timer ran out the subject awakened and in his confusion, he just wondered out of the facility without anyone really noticing.

You could give him some gear that he "stole" on the way out and just limit yourself to a much lower restriction level. Also being frozen like that doesn't preclude him from being an awaken character. He just didn't know (and may never have known) until the Awakening. It would be easier for him to be an adept than a magician, but still an option.

If you already go for a military background (experimental cryo-stuff) you might go all the way.
Make him some special forces guy knowing about some safehouses or bunkers.

A lot of them will probably be just forgotten and still usable. Well, if you do not mind the smell.


Depends.... You could pull it off. Using nuclear energy or "green" energy.
Just build it at some place, where you may harness thermal energy or even simpler Hydropower.

Yeah, it would be a miracle that this stuff does still work after that time... But stranger things happen. And I know a lot of machinery which is up and running for 40 years...


Or you go the "escaped" clone route with the fringe "genetic memory" twist. Some people cloned somebody from the past to get a certain information... And your are this clone...

I was actually considering that he'd know of some old cold war fallout shelters that have long since been forgotten. as to background, I was tossing up between high end black ops military and the whole 'man in black' type government agent. either way, an exceptional individual with a high level of skill in his chosen area and a tenancy to get things done no matter the odds.
I'd start him with low physical and high mental scores (his muscles wasted away somewhat in cryostatus, but they had a demolition man style subliminal learning thing going to keep his mind sharp. not necessarily up to date, but it at least prevented him from turning into a vegetable.)