This isn't referenced much in Advanced Lifestyles, but we do have some hints in SR4 Runner's Companion. Under Necessities, it does make some general references to how large your backyard or grounds are, but that's it. SR5 Run Faster has the Yard Asset, but I don't see that scaling up very well.

The reason I want this is I'm thinking of building a safe house in the middle of nowhere. I'd want to own 100+ acres and build a concealed cabin. Very off the grid and no close neighbors because the size of the property makes a buffer zone against easy observation.

Does anyone have any ideas for house-ruling this?

When this happens to me I don't try to use the lifestyle rules. I generally do some quick internet searches to get an approximation of what something similar would cost in the present day and then extrapolate from there. I've heard a wide range of opinions on exchange rates, but I usually convert $1 (current USD) to ¥1 (future Shadowrun) for simplicity. That has worked well for me over the years.

For example, a quick search just suggested that 100 rural acres in my corner of the world (Pacific Northwest) could cost anywhere from $100k to $700k USD. I'll usually start in the middle of that range and then go up or down based on how desirable the land is. It can be fun coming up with a list of things that affect the land value, like ready access to clean water, or nearby paracritters. I usually try to cook up three options for the players, none of which are perfect but each of which have fun trade-offs.

(I once was in a game where we needed to rent a warehouse. The GM served us up the perfect place... except it used to be a black site for Aztecnology ops and the background count was, mm, undesirable.)

Then a cabin might cost anywhere from $100 to $300 per square foot to build. The usual Low/Middle/High is usually enough to tell you where you should be on the range and then you'll multiply it out from there.

So, you're saying you assess it as a one-time cost? Given that there will be property taxes and presumably some upkeep I would think this would tie into your monthly Lifestyle cost.

Or am I misunderstanding you?

Does SR4(a) have an extension of the SR3 SSG Detailed Lifestyles? If not, take a look through SSG p127 onwards. It splits a Lifestyle into Area, Comforts, Entertainment, Furnishings, Security and Space. It sounds like you'd be having Area of Z/E since security is all down to DIY. Comforts covers necessities: food, clothing and shelter. If your bush shack is intentionally leaking and windswept with a few rusty cans of baked beans strewn around, that'd be Comfort: Street. But if that's just a facade covering a trapdoor into an abandoned mineshaft where you have food on shelves, you've tapped into a nearby spring, and organised drainage, it could be quite a bit higher. Entertainment is going to be Street: you can look out the window and count sticks. Furnishings covers whether you sleep on the floorboards (if you can even afford floorboards) or if you have a bed, cupboard, sink, washing machine, etc. Security covers how much you've invested in camouflage nets, tripwires, bear traps, etc. to detect and dissuade intruders (it sets the TN for intruders to circumvent your defences). And Space would be Luxury: "more room than you'll ever really need". At this point, that's looking like 1,000Y / month, give or take.

Then on p137 you can add Edges and Flaws to the Lifestyle. Give it an Escape Tunnel, Inconspicuous Housing, No More Neighbours, but Cursed Amenities, Infestation, and Middle of Nowhere.

IIRC Running Wild had some extra rules for rural lifestyles with enough room for larger critters, maybe those fit your bill.

I had completely missed the rural Lifestyle qualities in this book. That said, you can find the oddest things tucked away in the corners of SR4 books where you never thought they'd be...

This is very useful though, so thanks.

Oh, yes. The Advanced Lifestyles in SR4 Runner's Companion are the direct successor to the Detailed Lifestyles in SR3 Sprawl Survival Guide. And I'd planned it to look like Low Lifestyle on the outside while being High Lifestyle on the inside.

...taking a Born Rich- Quality and max it gives 50K..littke bit of help..

You're not off the grid if you pay property taxes. If you do, there's a record somewhere of someone owning that piece of land, and that's not what you want.

Find an abandoned farm with a well. DIY or pay people you *really* trust to repair, add and refurbish as needed. Make sure the end result doesn't look too shiny, and that you have means of transportation and safe places to store them in the vicinity. Then install passive defenses. Nothing electronic, of course, but potholes, streams of water, piles of 'fallen' trees to make it difficult for trespassers to even get there without making a lot of noise.

With my GM hat on, consider the effects of the rewilding spawned by the return of magic on the household and surroundings.

What might have been patchy forest, might now be a dense area of growth, for example.

For the record:



Also, am I missing something or should the last sentence say "with a Necessities category two levels lower than required"?

Yes, I was thinking about the one-time payment for the property.

If you want to represent ongoing costs maintenance and/or taxes, then I would use the same approach and come up with broad estimate. Where I live the property taxes range from 0.6% to 1.2% depending on the county. For simplicity, I would just take 1% of the purchase price as the annual 'cost' and divide it up into monthly payments from there. My goal is to get something close to correct, not precise. That keeps the focus on the game rather than the bookkeeping so that we're playing Shadowrun and not Quicken or Small Business Administration.

But to Lionesque's point, it's up to you how legal/you want this all to be. The NAN lands are full of ghost towns and empty plots that might suit your needs without having to pay someone for it.

If you want to do this via the Lifestyles rules, I would do something like:

Comforts +2
Entertainment +2
Necessities +2
Neighborhood +0
Security +1
Homegrown Farming +1
No Neighbors +1
Rural Home +2
Inconspicuous Housing +2
Green Plan –1

That's a total of 12 LP, or ¥3,200 per month. Use the Buying a Permanent Lifestyle rules to multiply that by 100 to get ¥320,000, which is right in the middle of the range I tossed out earlier. Boom, you're done.

@Sengir
That is what the last sentence says. Do you think it should read differently? It makes sense to me. It means you can have a horse or a cow with Middle Necessities rather than Luxury (as it says on p. 34 of Running Wild). I was scratching my head about why they would need Luxury Necessities before I read the Rural Home quality.

So - who's tending to the crops while you(-r team) is hiding out in an illegal clinic in Chiba?

There are plenty of low-maintenance crops. There are lots of set-it-and-forget-it options that don't need much attention between planting and harvesting.

Garlic, onions, potatoes, and sweet potatoes grow underground and need nothing from you in the meantime.

Squash is easy to grow. Summer squash are prolific; winter squash are very durable.

Fruit trees do their thing without any outside intervention. Apple and pear trees are hardy.

As a GM, I wouldn't have any problem with it. Homegrown Farming has a mechanical cost (in LP and thus nuyen) with a mostly narrative benefit (boosting the food aspect of Necessities, which isn't otherwise tracked separately), so I personally wouldn't twist the reality screws too tightly on this one. If the players pay the price, I'll let them enjoy the benefits.

As someone with potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, and squash-growing experience, I would say this: all of these crops are quite demanding if you’re trying to get enough to live on through the winter, or to sell to market for money to buy other things.

If you’re just looking for a modest supplement to your nutritional balance without further expenditure, most of the time, yes, brain-dead simple, just let them do their own thing.

With the exception of squash, which whenever I grow them always get devastated by powdery mildew right about the time the blossoms start turning into gourds.

~J

Ok, I think I've got a simple fix for this. Thanks to Sengir pointing out the Rural Home quality in SR4 Running Wild, I can use that as a base.

New Lifestyle Quality - Large Country Property
Prerequisites: The Rural Home quality at minimum, and also the No Neighbors quality if your property is at least 100 acres in size.
Cost: +2 per increment increase
Description: The Rural Home quality notes that "lot sizes are at least ten acres or larger," so we'll take 10 acres as the baseline for a Middle Lifestyle. High Lifestyle is 100 acres and Luxury Lifestyle is 1,000 acres. Each level of this quality increases your land size by a factor of 10, up to a maximum of 10,000 acres. So you could have a Middle Lifestyle cabin on a very large estate if you pay enough for it.

For purposes of anonymity, I was simply going to have it officially be owned by some foreign corporation in a country with decent investor privacy laws (Belize would be a good bet, from my past research). It would only exist on paper and I'd be the only shareholder. If need be, I could daisy-chain ownership between a few countries / offshore corporations to further muddy the trail.

And as for the Homegrown Farming issue, I've come across outdoor maintenance drones in the books (the Horizon LeafMan in SR4 Runner's Companion, p. 152 stands out) so I imagine there must be a "Basic Gardening" drone that could tend to a large-ish garden in my absence. In the Sixth World even the large farms are almost entirely automated and farmers are more mechanics than growers so I don't imagine it would be difficult to obtain one.

Looks like a good start.

Are you saying that Rural Home, as the prerequisite, gets you 10 acres? And that each level of this quality would get you 10x more? So you could potentially have 3 levels of the Large Country Property quality - for +2 LP each - which correspond to 100 acres, 1000 acres, and 10000 acres respectively. Is that right?

Would you say that this automatically incorporates the No Neighbors quality?

*facepalm*
I meant to write that it should say "an animal with a Necessities category two levels higher", because I originally interpreted "an animal with a Necessities category" to refer to the animal's requirement, so the original wording would not allow you to get an animal requiring higher Necessities than you have. Looking at it again, "Necessities category" obviously refers to the Necessities category of the character's lifestyle, so it works as intended as it's written.


@JanessaVR

Just make sure you come up with a good story for the people on the adjoining plots ("neighbours" seems like the wrong term). I'd go with the exec with too much money who chases the health fad of "real food", even though he has no time to care for it

Yes. That's as per SR4 Running Wild, p. 40.


Correct.


That's a very good point and I've added that in.