I think it depends on how freaky the shamans happen to be - if they routinely cast spells and invoke their totem masks, then yes...that'll be a little...creepy.

-Siege

But your shark shaman isn't going to be sitting in the cube farm. He'll be out at the aqua-culture research center, with people who think megalodons are cute, misunderstood fellow creatures .

And then one day, he drops a scuba tank on his foot, and chews someone's face off.

Well, continue that to working with any magic user: "Would I want to work in an office where someone can read my mind? Or control my actions?"

And then for the magician: "I'm so sick of people asking me to help them with the most sickningly simple tasks! Come on people, do your frelling jobs!"
"Jim, I've lost the credit memo from Jennifer. Can you find it for me?"
"Argh! Die!" Zzaaapppp! "...Shit, another malmagic lawsuit."

Heh, nevermind the fact the being a wage mage reduces your option. If you wnt to spend your time reasearching such and such sepll, you'll need to do it with your salary, or try and ask permission to use company resources. Do it to often and your boss might say, "Astrological Management recomends you leard three illusion spells this year, at force 6" Nevermind that you don't want to.

It is true that joncens give information to runners and it is often good.

Given this operations of similar scope may be safer with a Johnson.

I however submit that runs for a Johnson have a less favourable scope to profitability ratio.

If I am raiding security assets I don’t need to get passed security. Just annoy it enough, disable some valuable components and cart my combat drones and heavily cybered bodies away.

If I am stealing from a warehouse there is nothing in there of unusual importance. If a J wants a job done then there probably is.

Self made runes are less likely to be against highly secret facilities where planes or security timetables are hard to get.


Let me get this plausible deniability bit strait in my hed.

You don’t work for yourself becos it removes layers between the runner and the employer. If the runner is interrogated by nefarious means by the target he will know more about his employer. In fact he knows everything. Every contact, friend, sin (real and fake), safe couse, regular hangout, clothing side, sexual perversions.

Of cause s somebody that dose runs how much worse of am I really being able to tell them all this information relating to the employer. I am the employer and I am the one strapped down suffering nefarious interrogation. My day isn’t getting all that much worse when I admit I was working alone.

Edward

Plausible deniability does the J's a lot of good. Thus, it makes them want to hire you. Last time I checked, money was good.

I've always looked at the self employed route as a limited time option. If you are a heist crew, you better have damn good fences and a pretty limited line of targets. Corporations expect shadowruns as part of their business model just like shopkeepers expect shoplifting. The game all changes when shop lifting turns to cleaning out the store. Then the insurance companies get involved because they have to pay up for the loss, the Star might even get notified to watch the local fences. Organized crime will get in on the deal because large scale operations are their turf.

To steal an ass ton of whatever takes having a buyer in advance which is a pseudo johnson. You just can't flood the market with 2 million nuyen in cyber out of the blue, no one is gonna buy it. A top secret new prototype? Who would want it except another mega? Its gonna break real soon and might have serious flaws. Finished Drone? Might as well wear the I-stole-your-cool-new-drone T-shirt while you're at it.

You start stealing lots of medium priced stuff and you run into a whole new set of problems. Just how long would it take to unload 35 cyberdecks? 1000 assault rifles? 5000 Cal Hots? Now you have a traceability issue. Same two fences always seem to be selling the same damn item. Makes you easy to track and if people find out you're holding, you become the new target.

Low priced stuff just isn't worth your time, even if you steal a semi full. Again, how many pocket secs or cell phones can you sell?

Data or other information can be highly profitable but the risk in selling it could be huge. The same corp that might write off 10 fairlights or half a dozen mob masters could be willing to send operators or other shadow teams to come grease your ass if you pull the wrong data from them. Plus, its labor intensive to find good data and the best stuff is usually found by spying or decking and could involve being in the right place at the right time. Not a lot of fun for the Sammies in the group. If you let others do you leg work and provide info, again, you have a johnson by another name.

Finally, I personally just find it a bit dull. Sure, occasionally if the team needs something specific, we set up a run to go get it. Provides a nice change of pace and allows otherwise unattainable gear to get got. I don't think shadowrun is set up to facilitate this type of campaign easily plus come on, it Shadowrun. Sure they list other types of campaign ideas but one of them isn't hardcore thief. To each his own. I will still always prefer traditional shadowrunning.

Payment has always been an issue since SR is out. It costs alot to stay in business but then official sources recommend such rediculous amounts for jobs that would pay you millions if you'd do them without an employer (requiring a good fence tho)

Let me give you an example from a Con I attended last month. 'Official GM'. We were supposed to find a girl and bring her to our johnson. Daugther of some Mob boss(biggest one in town, just if you wondered). Yeah ok, milk run till now. 15k a person. Doesn't sound that bad.
Turns out the girl stole an anti air missile, shot down a corporate copter and stole a friggin nuke. We managed to find and capture her. Not that we crossed multiple borders till then, we also had to rescue her from another party who took her captive.
Well, a milk run. But: 15k a person with a 5 person crew makes 75k for a few days of work. Looks alot, but is it worth messing with 1 big corp(it was S-K's nuke i think, at least they sent a team to get it back) and 2 different mobs? and that wannabe terrorist and the border guards and paranormal critters? did i mention the three-domain-spirit? And then there was the nuke...
Selling the 3 (or 4, dunno) barghests alone would have brought us that much.
So why give a drek about 'real' runs when you just endanger yourself for nothing?
I could just go and steal cheap cars and make more money in less time according to the rules (even if i only sell at 10% streetvalue). Sure that would be boring, but hey - most of my chars do value their life.
When I offered the players in my run at a Con 30k each and a bonus if certain things will be done as well they all looked at me and were like: "ow wtf, we never get payed that much" And that with chars who had lots of karma under their belt and at least half a million of spare parts...
Fortunatly I have seen different and better paid runs aswell.

just my 2

Does anybody here make backgrounds for the johnsons and roleplay those backgrounds, contacts, favors and markers? I usually look at the J's background, figure who he's working for, what they would want, and how much they would stand to profit from the run. Then it's a matter of paying the runners a reasonable percentage in relation to what the J and his employers will make.

Usually this isn't horribly high, 10 to 30k range with an occassional 50, and that's per runner (3 to 5 people usually). Still way above the "official" pay scale.

I always the defacto rewards for risking life and limb when running were low too. I tend to dish out at least ten thousand for a job. I assume that runners living a fairly middle clss life would only need to take a handful of jobs a year.

Well, I think everyone here would like you know how you, a shadowrunner, is going to bring down a AAA corp that owns a country. Would you care to fill us in?

And yes, team goals help give the runs a sense of purpose...those games seem to last longer play-wise if not living wise.

Edward, I think you horrifically undeestimate the size of megacorporations, and drastically overestimate the influence of even the world's best shadowrunners. These are multi trillion dollar organizations. One person stands no chance of even really denting them before he is wholesale eradicated. As soon as it becomes worth it to erase him, he will be, and there's nothing he can do to stop it. Magic makes that true in SR.

There are 2 strategies. One is very difficult. Requires a larg number of quiet deckers and much prep.

You write a vires that will infect aztechnolegy systems and shut down there matrix links to the rest of the world. (hard but doable) wile simultaneously launching system destruction attacks against every AAA or AA corp other than aztechnolegy using specialty modified redirect data trail so they lead threw aztechnolegy.

If you are successful you will have an omega order declared on aztechnolegy before they have time to mount a coherent defence (remember there matrix links are severely compromised). Likely end result. Min sever damage to many corporations. Max in its death throws aztechnolegy dose sever damage to the world physically, environmentally and economically.

Chance of desired outcome. Moderately low. Chance of keeping it quiet afterwards nill. Add the corporate court to your enemies list as highly motivated.

That was something I only alf expected to work but my GM told me it could.

The second plan (the one I came up with) is pure property destruction. Obtain threw means fair or foul a number of fast aircraft with moderately high load compactly. Armour them heavily and load to capacity with high explosives, FAEs and whatever else you can get. Fly it t high speed into the largest most promenat aztechnolagy asset you can find. It should survive long enough to embed itself in the building. At witch point it all detonates. A banshee with all unnecessary systems removed should hold enough explosives to gut a pyramid. Live in a howl while you set up your next bird. As long as they don’t have a ritual link to you they will never be able to catch you

It wont take long before the only assets they have are hidden. The execs will probably strip the corp within a year and restart under a new name but they wont be a AAA any more.

Edward

I think you grossly underestimate the information trail you're going to leave trying to get ahold of all this stuff. You will always have a Judas. Somebody will offer somebody the right amount of money to sell you out and I will be suprised if either plan comes close to working. Either way, your life expectancy is not high.

A question on the subject of a lone 'runner knocking a mega-corp (AAA Rating) to it's knees ... you stated the corporation was worth how much? What is their yearly income, yearly expenses, and assumed 'real' worth? How much damage must you do to their profit margins before they can no longer pay their expenses?

Are the answers to the above listed in any of the published books for 3rd edition?

...

The reason I ask is simple. If a good decker makes a concerted effort to nail a specific corps matrix systems to the floor, well, they have a pretty good chance of success.

Satellite Uplinks absolutely kill the idea of a physical response to a matrix intrusion, unless the corp plans on nuking an area the size of a nation in retalliation; something I feel to be extremely unlikely to occur. Hack your way into a sattelite, load up a cluster of smart frames with mission-specific program payloads and instruction sets ... and watch the fireworks on the news as the 'corps matrix systems just keep shutting down. No profit, only destruction, yet it can be easily done by a sufficiently motivated decker of professional to expert skill.

I still think that some severe underestimation of an AAA corp is going on here.
Plus, where the hell are you getting all these droned-out (I assume) Thunderbirds? I don't have my books right now, but I recall them costing millions of nuyen. They would track you down and kill you, and kill any friends and family for fun.

Something else: Edward, in your first post about bringing down an AAA it sounds like Aztechnology is your really bad enemy, yet wont kill your family because they know what you would do to them if you did. That would have to be the case, right? Or else they'd just kill your family ignorant of your retaliation (your family wouldn't be safe. So, here we have possibly the evilest AAA corp out to get you, and they know that you can 'bring them down'.....why wouldn't they just kill you? I mean, hell, I'm sure that your team would do it for 1 million nuyen a piece. Its like you're a mage who knows a spirit's true name and the spirit is aware of that fact...its going to kill you because of the possibility of a problem. I guess my point is that you can't intimidate a AAA very well as a shadowrunner, especially without you being dead very soon.

Edward, I don't think you have read Threats 2.

In there there is a man that wants to take down Novatech (Smallest of the AAA's) Just reading it will make you realise how difficult that is.

The first method listed is inherently flawed because you are thinking of internet virii when the technological situation of the matrix is very different. A SR attack utility is a combination of virii and other manipulative code to destabilize a threat. You cannot make a super-virus that will mess up all of Azzie systems. You can at best make a hoard of frames (I think that's the right term) with attack programs and maybe a self-replication feature, but that is doubtful. A devoted decker can better explain the real options.

The second is inherently flawed in that you believe the visible facilities actually matter to a corp. Any publicly known building is in fact a subset of the marketing expenses. R&D, production, and all the parts that really matter are hidden from public view to make them less vulnerable to shadowrunners and news reporters. Yes, some work will be done in the highly visible facilities, but only a small percentage of what is actually going on is presentable enough to do there. Most of the time, any real R&D in a known location will be the final details once all the more disturbing bugs have been ironed out.

And most AAA corps are so widely dispersed it would take a massive, coordinated attack on a large portion of their corporate holdings for them to notice in the world of SR.

This is not to say it couldn't be done, but certainly not easily and not through a protracted battle.

-Siege

Also keep in mind that it will probably be not that difficult for them to shoot the incoming projectile out of the sky.

~J

Not to mention that the Azzies have their own drek-hot deckers to protect their systems as well.

You are correct. The systems I proposed are not necessarily going to work but thay have a better chance than a corp would be wiling to admit.

Where do you get the T birds. You steal them. from anybody that has them. and you don’t limit yourself to T-birds. You use any moderately fast aircraft that can take the load. Craft gleaned from long hall drone cargo fleets would probably be the workhorse of my fleet. To get the extra speed I will hire a shaman with a grudge against aztechnolegy to summon a high force spirit of the sky to lend it speed (movement power).

I figure I need to stay alive long enough to make 50 strikes around the world destroying there most visible sights (like pyramids). This will take out there backbone infrastructure and burocracy and they will find it hard to get new employees because nobody wants to work in a target. (if sep 11 had been repeated 3 times in 2 months how many people would still be working in skyscrapers). And thay wont be able to build as fast as I can destroy. How long can a corp remain AAA without its public face. Strategic use of retrans units will prevent them from ever catching me.

And its not that aztechnolegy wont kill my family. They don’t know my plan. The GM wont kill my family unless he wants the campaign to become me trying to wipe out the big A.

The virus was intended to be in the form of a self replicating smart frame or agent that would find and diable the slave nodes representing physical data links out of aztechnolegy.

Any script kiddie decker with a smart frame can disable any matrix host.
You send in a horde of copies of the frame (running from a low security host you infiltrated) with mission orders, crash host. On most systems thay wont crash the host. they will accumulate so much security tally between them the system will shut down tight. I don’t know enough about real world internet to be swayed but the way the rules work the matrix operates under the sufferance of every individual decker.

Edward

If the New York World Trade Center had had antiaircraft missiles and guns things would have gone very differently.

And keep tiered hosts in mind. You may shut down a connection, but the important stuff is going to keep on trucking, probably between vanishing SANs and one-way connections.

~J

You're right. I should have said:

Had the towers been armed and under the control of a corporation that does not need to be answerable in the same way, it would have gone differently.

Also keep in mind that while the first few might not get shot down, the later ones would.

I was not implying a solution for real life, but for the megas.

~J

If you really want to be morbid, since 9/11, Megas in SR would probably have means of downing such attacks in no uncertain terms since it has been demonstrated as a viable tactic before.

-Siege

Also, it would take a lot less damage against a plane loaded with explosives or fuel to make it do orders of magnitude less damage than if the intact plan had still hit. For instance, if you blow the plane up even as little as ten feet away from the building, odds are that a lot of burning fuel will end up places other than right against main structural supports.

~J

And let's face it, how many of us have loaded drones with C-4 or C-12 and suicided targets?

-Siege

True, there are other considerations (though once it was clear that this was war, I think a lot of those considerations would evaporate. A fair number of them did in real life). However, keep in mind that he's targeting Aztechnology. Anything in Aztlan is fair game for them to hit as hard as they want preemptively.

~J

I'm going to take a shot in the dark here and say that firing a SAM from the Arc into UCAS airspace is about as legitimate as the U.S. launching one into Canadian airspace.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

-Siege

Face it, a corp would probably try to override a plane's rigger before they shot it down. Better to just not have the problem, neh? They could probably spoof a drone laden with explosives, too. I mean, they have to know this kind of thing can happen.

No one here seems to think that messing with the stock market is a viable way to take down a mega? After all, it's how Damien Knight bought Ares . . . .

That was before the Corp Court nerfed the idea and Knight had a Great Dragon backing him.

With the aid of an immortal otaku, a great dragon, his own 1337 @|\|+!-\/1ru5 5|<y1z and only the authors know what else. So, yes, it can work, but it requires already having contacts who could take down the corp themselves.

You can try, but fragging with the stock market is at least as hard as launching a physical assault.

Deckers, IC and computer defenses galore - massive Matrix battles unfolding with a minimum of civilian and bystander casualties. Given the number of deckers, computer security is at a premium.

Compare that to acquiring a plane, loading it with explosives and ramming it into a building - one is far, far easier than the other.

-Siege

Edward is mis-representing me a little here.

I never claimed that his planes into teocallis idea would work, or that the "Core Wars Frame up" was easy.

I suggested that one to him as an outside possibility, it would take the resources of 2-3 data havens or a half dozen large Otaku tribes, including the faded members and their fairlight compatibles. The idea is to move a significant portion of the corp's data offline, to make it look as though Aztechnology is about to engage in core wars activity... remember the point in shadowfiles about the penalty for being SUSPECTED of such activity.

Edward being the optimist that he is wants to try it using a nova hot deck and a nova hot crashing frame, by making copies of the frame on numerous hosts that he subverted with a validate program (root access preferably) and doing a huge frame based DDOS attack on the entirety of the Aztechnology systems globally.

It is in the realm of theoretical possibility but about as likely as 9/11 or

Extraterritoriality only extends to the front gate. They have maybe 3 meters to shoot me down in. what would be the law covering somebody in an extraterritorial enclave firing out to kill somebody outside the enclave.

If they own a larger surrounding aria (azetlan) that is why I said heavily armoured. If it is moving fast (and it would be) masked with ECM, ED and magic (was part of the plan) they will only have seconds from detection to impact. A couple of shots that wont necessarily hit (ECM). They will in no way have time to defeat me in electronic warfare before impact. (I have to many ways to defend against it from scaling encryption to multiple retrains units. They probably could never defeat me even with there superior hardware, certainly not in the seconds they have

The part of the plan that might fail is not the attacks themselves. It is the raids to acquire the birds and there mods.

Also for the sake of variety not all would be birds. A few vans ram raiding the facility before detonation, an unlikely number of drone vehicles hitting pedestrians leaving facilities (and I never need to touch those vehicles. I will take them using electronic warfare.

Kremlin KOA. I never said you clamed it was easy. Just that you clamed it was possible.

The crashing frame was not for the core wars frame-up but for the simple disruption of the matrix. You wont kill any data with it but you can take a given host offline for a time. A crash frame DDOS could shut down aztechnolegy’s matrx activities for a short time. It would do no more than significantly inconvenience them and set them on your enemy’s list at full max ratings (knowledge depends what they know but they have the will and the means to destroy a suburb to get you). If combined with a buyout attempt it could prevent them from blocking you but probably get the corporate court on your enemies list.

Edward.

Like Kagetenshi implied, the armor won't help you much. If you want rating 20 vehicle armor, you're stuck with 800 Load. You can't put enough armor on any non-custom canon LAVs (thunderbirds) to withstand any serious AV weaponry. That goes for most airborne vehicles.

Assuming you get a GMC Harpy for this, rip out the seats and deck it out with RCI, ECM-6, ED-4, and 1,200kg Commercial Explosives, that's ~300,000 in parts cost for the customization per LAV -- without street index or any other mods. The ECM and ED systems (which are absolutely vital and you must have them at those ratings at the very least if you wish not to be blown out of the sky) have Avalabilities of 12/45 days and 10/3 months, respectively.

Assuming you can get those, and a few weeks' access to a Vehicle Facility, and the 2.2 million (6.6 million on the street) thunderbird without anyone getting on to you, it wouldn't be a great feat to ram it into a medium-large Aztech facility somewhere within a few thousand klicks of your location outside of Aztlan (and in a civilized western country, preferably) and blow a 50-meter hole into it -- a few to a dozen million in damages and kill a dozen or two employees, depending or where you crash it.

Now, doing that again will be orders of magnitude more difficult. Doing it often enough to make Aztechnology change their business practices, other than more aggressive intelligence work in the guise of War On Terror, and more SAM batteries with more advanced Sensors on all valuable locations... about as likely as making massive changes to the way the US society works by crashing a few planes into Manhattan. The likelihood of crushing the foundations of Aztech's AAA rating, equal to plunging the US into an extremely deep and lasting recession with the above.

The economic cost of heavily defending such an enclave would be prohibitive.

Four turrets plus powerful sensors plus some small missile batteries? Not that expensive, and mostly one-time costs.

~J