Hey guys,

So I just started a Face, but I'm a little uncertain about my contacts.
I understand how important they are for gathering data and access, but what do they do when you've asked them for help and basically made them an accomplice?
Not everybody is a Johnson or a Mechanic...what happens when that corp exec you met gets you into a secure building and it blows up or when that entertainment blogger gets you someone's schedule and that someone gets kidnapped?
Is it just assumed that contact don't care or do you need to cover your tracks?

They are human beings, not numbers!

This being said, you can represent this as a GM by lowering their loyalty rating or even their contact rating (if they are implicated and reprimanded, e.g.).

I would have them call up your character though.
"Dude! That was you, wasn't it?! And I helped you! Now I need your help to get out of this mess!"
If you help, all is fine. If not, Loyalty goes down and no favors for the foreseeable future. Also, they'll remember.

Given a low enough loyalty rating, they might even rat you out.

One of the contacts for a character I write works road construction. The Shadowrunner is a Courier, so knowing which streets are in bad shape, horrible shape, and closed for repairs is an important part of his job. And his contact doesn't care who drives down those roads.

But a Beat Cop paid to look the other way and finds out it was a drug deal to a Grade School? Yeah, not a happy Beat Cop.

Everything has it's place and price.

I've always considered that the difference between a friend and a contact in SR. I'd like to think my character who's lived in Seattle for 24 years knows more than 4 people. But he only knows 4 people who will help him out in his criminal endeavors, and those are the ones he paid build points for.
Now, getting them burned will cost, either loss of loyalty, loss of his connection rating because he got in trouble, or loss of the contact as a whole because he's dead or in jail.

The corp exec getting you access is better not tied to you getting access. Frame someone down the chain your contact wants to get rid off.

A corp rigger looking the other way will have question to answer, so maybe ask for gear and pro tips instead of access to the workplace.


The entertainment blogger is mostly safe since you could have gotten your intel anywhere.

All of the above, plus that magic word that forms the basis of so many corporate shadowruns: deniability. To paraphrase Fox from Batman Begins, "If you don't tell me what you're doing, I won't have to lie." If a contact that gets picked up by Lone Star or Knight Errant can honestly say they had no idea any criminal activity was happening, it becomes a waste of time for the cops to try to prove otherwise. (Of course, they might be pressed into turning into a snitch, which makes for great plot hooks...) Likewise, a contact that's willing to do more than provide information or other innocuous services (people like armourers, drug dealers, prostitutes, Tamanous organleggers, etc.) aren't generally going to object to lawbreaking. It's not like the contact's interactions with the PC are any more illegal than what they'd be doing anyway, right?

I personally find this easiest to deal with from a roleplaying perspective, on the basis of "contacts will support a character as long as the benefits outweigh the risks". Being able to get away with doing things your contacts don't approve of is the entire purpose of the Loyalty rating, and there's always the possibility that the GM could reduce the Loyalty rating of a contact if you're not keeping up your end of the bargain (whether by doing things they actively object to, or just not putting any effort into staying on good terms with them).

If you have access to it, the It's Who You Know section in Attitude discusses relationships between characters from a fluff perspective, and has some stuff on contacts you might find handy. The subsection on "Protecting the Asset" is basically an in-universe answer to your question.