So, Technomancers are something that I've read about and frequently confuse with "Wizards" from the Cybergeneration setting.

Would you be so kind to give me the low-down on them?

* * *

Context: I'm sort of semi-settled on the idea that Deckers function like ritual magicians--things require a dedicated space (server farm), certain ritual components (from dumpster diving etc.), and can get the result over time. They can also provide tech (*cough* magical *cough*) that the average 'Runner can plug and play to do what they want to do.

On the other hand, there are Technomancers that sound more like "decking on the fly" characters.

* * *

What is wrong with the above setup other than you might not like mixing your magic with your tech (potentially ironic )? Something that I've (quite likely) missed?

I can tell you about their predecessors, the Otaku: kids with underdeveloped physical attributes and overdeveloped mental attributes who needed a Datajack but otherwise were able to just plug one end of a datacable into their head and the other into the server/mainframe/jackpoint and who then got to use their brains as their MPCP. They were a bit like the Physad to the Decker’s Streetsam—simpler (stats and skills instead of gear) and with karma-based advancement instead of gear upgrades (mostly, Math SPUs and the like were still good buys), but likely to be much more specialized in terms of what they’re actually good at out of chargen. They were explicitly and resolutely mundane, but the rules definitely echoed magic rules including Submersion which was very like Initiation.

Someone else can fill you in on what happened when they dropped the age restriction and became Technomancers.

~J

I'll look forward to it. Until then, I'm doing my own reading. It doesn't hurt to do some of your own work ( ), but I truly value the perspective of someone that stuck with the system throughout rather than hopping away from actually using it as I did back in 2e days.

So bring it on. And don't worry about my mechanical takes on things. Consider them naught but a reference to show you how my (ha!) brain is working with the reference materials and mechanics.

As for a bit more of what their flavor was: they start as basically a rumor of weird kids in the Denver Data Haven (and also an indicator that Program Carriers had been not merely dropped but retconned out of existence, since SR1 had mechanics for anyone to deck without a deck). They form tribes along the lines of the feral children in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but creepy rather than adorable. There’s a while in the 2055-2059 range (IIRC) where they mostly just show up in the background every now and then, but a big tribe shows up as the right hand of Deus when the Arcology shuts down. There are various links to Megaera as well (the predecessor to Deus) but IIRC the suggestion was that not all Otaku were associated with rogue AIs.

And then SR4 happened and they grew radio brains, which, again, someone else can fill in.

Edit: it wasn’t a retcon, I forgot:




~J

All of the above doesn't surprise me given that they were described as "ageing out" from children and, further, the requirement to suddenly allow for WiFi.

I'm going to keep on reading, but I think that you're comments have fossilised my thoughts on the matter. I look forward to hearing back from others, but with how quite this board is I suspect that I've got as much as I'm going to get.

Thank you, Kagetenshi.

One more interesting historical detail: the name “Otaku” had always seemed odd to me, since we think of it as a fairly generic label for a hard-core fan of science fiction, anime, and/or manga, but while those associations are present since the label was created in its current form in the early ‘80s it was, during the early ‘90s when the term was adopted in SR, an extremely negative label with a clear connotation of “weirdo”, “creep”, “criminal-in-the-making”, and of a loss of the ability to distinguish fiction from reality, stemming from news coverage of the Miyazaki Tsutomu kidnapping/murder incidents—the term at the time carried a visceral sense of otherness, and Shadowrun just had the misfortune of adopting the term the year before fans of Neon Genesis Evangelion would start to reclaim the term as a neutral or even contextually-positive fan designation. Credit to the Wikipedia article for its coverage of the history.

~J

Honestly, I think the SR4 Core Rules Anniversary and SR4 Emergence cover this fairly well. Just read those and you should be pretty up to speed on Otaku to Technomancers.

I've added them to my reading tablet. Thank you.

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A general question for you: How important are deckers to your vision of the Shadowrun setting?

If they were absent from an interpretation of Shadowrun, would that be a deal breaker for you and, if so, why so? They're clearly iconic, but are they necessary?

I'm trying to wrap my head around the nature of what is essentially a super-hacker as a character and what they do, and Technomancers as another form of super-hacker and what they do.

I can and am reading (or rather re-reading) the materials, but I want to get past my personal bias to re-love them as a PC class and not just relegate them once again to a Contact.

I believe that they are necessary, at least in the SR3verse; IMO the standard Shadowrun four-man-band has always been Rigger, Decker, Mage, Sam-or-Adept-who-goes-into-places, so it’s a pretty big disruption to cast one of the four into the outer darkness. I don’t immediately have a persuasive essay on why, though, I’ll have to think about it.

~J

As I noted, it's a pretty iconic role especially if you take into account the SR2 front cover with Decker, Mage, and Sam. It's also a thorny question to ask because it brings into question some of the retrofuturism and VR tropes of the 80s/90s (that you've mentioned before as a feature rather than a bug, contra my own opinion).

I would disagree that it's going to be a disruption, as every group that I've ever played in (or GM'd for that matter)--note a large sample I'll admit--the loss of the decker has done literally nothing to the game, mostly because the PCs have hired one and they're supporting them (GM makes a few dice rolls).

(In a similar fashion, a mage that cannot fully astral project is also not an issue.)

With that said, I'm trying to re-negotiate how I think about this. My previous experiences were nixing the Decker as a PC--a solution that many people end up with, at least in the earlier days (SR2 and 3, IIRC), come up with--created zero problems. Or null problems, if you must.

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As an icon, what is it about them that make them so? When playing a Decker character, what is it that are the highlights that would link "awesome" to mechanics?

Sorry, I'm throwing questions against the wall to see what sticks.

In the 80s imagined future, the Matrix is where there truly valuable McGuffiins are stored, so the Robin Hoods of the future would have to be able to (risk their lives to) access those data somehow (not to mention all the practical uses, e.g., to control the elevators in Nakatomi Towers). Meatspace is, in many ways, secondary to that vision of the future.

This is why the decker is THE iconic character of the cyberpunk genre. So if you come up with a way to make them A: Playable, B: Fun to have at the table, and C: Seamlessly integratable in the overall narratives, you will have found the Holy Grail of Shadowrun. In my opinion, of course.

Reminder that Cyberpunk is not primarily about cyberWARE but rather about cyberSPACE, at least in the original sense
Molly is not the protagonist, it's Case.

Demoting the decker/hacker to NPC status in such an environment basically makes the player spectators and contributors to the cool stuff, but not the protagonists.
That said, many people do not play that way, so I guess it depends partly on the setting and partly on the table environment.

Thank you all for engaging. Again, I'm trying to figure out the best way of doing this for me, so that means interrogating the themes (etc.) to figure out the best way--especially when it comes to representing Deckers vs. Otaku.

I hope the fact that I'm asking these questions illustrates that I'm acting in good faith since, as above, previously when using Shadowrun I've just removed them from the game. I want them to be a part of the game, but trying to to figure out how to do so without it becoming a nightmare is another issue.

(FWIW, hence my mention of astral projection and full magic users. I'm totally fine with them not taking astral projection and just removing that whole can of worms.)

* * *

With the above said, I'm not wedded to the retrotech of "cyberpunk" in its totality as envisioned back in the day. I do want there to be a difference between Deckers and Otaku/Technomancers.


Literally, I agree. But they were so easily sidelined in Shadowrun, which is probably why SR4 exists. At the same time, I worry that the whole notion of the PAN and hacking people is more annoying than fun because it focuses on the gear rather than the person? Maybe I'm must channeling too much Ghosts in the Shadow with an (un)healthy dose of Cryptomancer.


One of the major themes to me, especially as a child of that era, was the whole Gen-X "sticking it to the Man"/punk approach. The aesthetics of how one did that was not central, though.

With that said, you've reminded me that it has been years since I've read the novels and so perhaps I should treat myself with a reminder of the materials. And while I'm not going to inherently bind myself to them, perhaps it will give me some insight into how to move outside of the problem that I'm having.

I will say, however, that while my memory says that you're right about Gibson's novel(s), I'm not sure that you're right about how it plays out at numerous tables around the world? For example, are the main issues "cyberspace" or the degrading climate and how one handles that? (I might be mixing in too much Cybergeneration, but please remember that I'm system agnostic in all of this.)

*shuffles feet*

I'm still not a fan of the "super hacker" as presented in SR, but with the above arguments and my own reading I am forced to change my tack. Dang'nam'it.

Yes; Deckers were seen as borderline unplayable for most people and impossible to integrate in most groups, so in order to play Shadowrun at all, the easy way out was to just NPC the decker. The SR4 solution was not a bad attempt to address that issue, but I agree that the whole 'any 13-year old can hack your wired reflexes at will'-thing made SR4's solution almost as bad as the problem it addressed.

So, technomancers...

In SR4, it's revealed that the wireless Matrix allows a bunch of people to use their brains as a deck (technically a comm in that edition, since comms replace the functionality of decks in SR4). It's implied that many of these people were always latent technomancers, and that it required the Matrix "reaching out" (i.e., being omnipresent) to make them work as they do now.

One theory is that they're just mutants -- sort of Matrix X-Men, who represent the next stage in human evolution. That was hinted at a lot in early SR4, and fit the more "realistic" wireless Matrix of that edition.

The other is that they're basically "information wizards" but channelling Resonance instead of mana. The latter interpretation has become the prevailing one (since late SR4A/SR5), and SR6 clarifies that there's a "noosphere" with "nous" that mirrors the astral plane/metaplanes and mana, respectively.

The idea is that technomancy is powered by mystical information rather than mystical, err, magic. They're different forces which behave similarly, but operate in different realms.

The origin of technomancers has always been tied up in AI, too. Otaku apparently could arise independently of AIs, but AIs did a lot of experimentation to make their own otaku servants. When the old Matrix died (in a sort of AI singularity event like the one in the backdrop of Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy), suddenly all these sentient AIs appeared and so did technomancers. So there was this suspicion that technomancers were an evil AI plot, and technomancers were persecuted as a result.

Some otaku became technomancers; others were people trapped in the old Matrix when it died. But many others were just ordinary people who one day realised they could talk to toasters and summon sprites.

By the time SR5 came around, the Matrix was reworked again. 100 technomancers were allegedly captured, imprisoned, connected together and turned into a "Foundation" for the new Matrix, to make it harder for 13-year olds with a commlink to hack things. As a result, the bottom layer of the new Matrix is made up of the Resonance, rather than the Resonance merely being something that started leaking into the Matrix as it was in SR4. That means none of the megacorps, or even GOD, is entirely in control of the Matrix -- and weird *things* pop up all the time.

One useful analogy for the distinction between deckers and technomancers is that deckers are described as divers in the deep sea of the Matrix. Technomancers, however, are squid. They belong there, and move through it intuitively.

That's it in about a nutshell. Sorry it's not very chronological or well organised, but I'm replying on my phone. Hope it helps.