And ICQ is.....what exactly?

(once again please excuse my ignorance)

(Please excuse the momentary thread-jacking in order to educate)
ICQ is a program that uses the OSCAR messaging protocol. (Yahoo (YIM) and the MSN Messenger, for example, use different protocols.)

A number of other programs like Pidgin & Trillian are able to login to the ICQ network (amongst other like Yahoo's & MSN's) allowing users to instant message.
OSCAR is the same messaging protocol used by AOL/AIM.

I've been pretty happy with Trillian, which can be downloaded Here.

My own AIM/ICQ contact name is just my name.

-Frank

When are you thinking of starting the game up for real?

The Saturday after people get their character sheets in.

Edit: So it looks like 4 people are fine with Treasure Hunters and with Impending Doom. Can I get a roll of hands?

Also, what power level do people want to play at?

-Frank

With your houserules 400bps looks about spot on for Impending Doom. The higher amount skills and nuyen characters start with would make sense since it'd be dumb as hell to expect Evo to hire a bunch of green gutterpunks for a big job like that.

For Treasure Hunters I'd slightly prefer to keep it at 350 but 400 sounds pefectly fine too; I generally prefer playing slightly inexperienced guys rather than playing prime runners right out of the box, and that particular setting sounds like it could support any power level pretty easily.

Neither setting or power level is likely to be a deal breaker for me.


The more I think about it, the more I believe I want to play Treasure Hunt. I vote for that and 400 bps.

I'd like 400 or maybe a bit more power level wise. I'll tentatively vote Impending Doom.

400BP and T.Hunt.

I'd go for the 350 BP, as it tends to keep things a little tighter, but I'm more interested in how min/maxed people want to get. I mean, are we talking deckers with Hacking dice pools of 9 or 15? Again, I'd lean towards the former, but both options can be fun.

I'm also going to take a wild guess that a lot of the people interested are going to want to play hackers, at least in part to flex the house rules. If I'm right that might be significant in to the scenario.

"Impending Doom" sounds rad, but it seems like it might take a different skill set. I guess what I'm saying is, I'd like to play and anything sounds good. But playing a hacker of some kind would be cool. That or a Radiation summoner. Fuck yeah!

I was thinking technomancer actually, but that might not be suitable for the front running games.

I'd think a TM would work out just fine. If anyone is helped by the skill cost reductions, the removal of Agents and the elimination of BP-to-Karma inflation, it's the Technomancer. Then again, I'm not terribly certain what you mean by front running either.

Warning! Rant Incoming!
I have a hard time putting into words how much I hate the standard TM complex form costs; I can't decide if they're merely asinine or filled with draconian malevolence aimed directly at new players and those who just don't feel like min-maxing. Complex forms range from costing an arm and a leg at chargen to prohibitively expensive once you switch over to karma. It always appeared to me that the only rational way to build an effective TM was to pour every potential BP you had into your powers and then bootstrap your way up to being a reasonable facsimile of a well-rounded human being through play- provided you lived that long, of course. Considering that TM powers have been expressing themselves for well under a decade by the fluff, it is incomprehensible to me why the devs would construct the BP/Karma system in such a way that "beginner" Technomancers whose primary skills lie elsewhere would have near insurmountable hills to climb in developing their powers later through karma.


Uh, yeah, rant aside, I wanna play a mage.

If it's Saturday afternoon at GMT -7 I'll give it a shot. My regular group (which played then) seems to have melted down. Never done a chat game before, so I might bail after a session or two.

My actual interests in order would be Eden Station, For Love and Justice, Impending Doom, Ghost Cartels, Privateers, Expatriotism, Night Hunters, Treasure Hunters, The White Flower Benevolence Society, Trick or Treat!. But I'll play whatever.

400 pts is good for me. Lots of languages are expensive if it's going to be treasure hunters.

SR4 has the bizarre rule that you can NEVER speak a foreign language fluently like a native. How do you handle languages?

My vote is for Impending Doom at 400+ BP (keeps the magicaly active from being seriously gimped).
If we run treasure hunters I would prefer something along the lines of 350BP. I can certainly work with 400 though.

I tend to end up with dice pools closer to 9 than 15 as long as I keep my munchkin tendencies firmly squashed.

Oh and um, I think there would definitely be networks on mars. Research base implies computers which imply networks. Security employees implies really useful networks that we probably don't need to hack into. If we played impending doom I had a nice Matrix sec. specialist concept kicking around, but for the sake of not being overly redundant I'll figure something else out. My current thinking (for T.Hunters at least - could probably be adapted to Impending Doom) is along the lines of Adept. [although the prospect of initiating at chargen makes mages really tempting.]

You guys do realize the Impending Doom is all a faux Doom 1, 2, & 3 make up, right?

Regardless, with the new rules for matrix, Treasure Hunting wouldn't terribly ruin hackers.

Matrix penetration in the former PRC is highly variable. There are essentially zero computers per square kilometer in Tibet, while most of the states in the Canton Development Council have full matrix penetration.

The Poles have a pretty decent set of Chinese history in Shadowrun on their wiki:
http://pl.shadowrun.wikia.com/wiki/China

The Mars base of course has the latest and highest tech computers available to the Evo corporation.

-Frank

I actually view that as a plus. This is an online game and they tend to benift from a tightly focused and short story arc. We might actually get to finish it!

But yeah I'm pretty much equal on both.

Yeah, I'm more of a sandbox type player who's perfectly used to having sessions that go from "let's pursue the plothook" to "let's go steal that Westwind... I always wanted a Westwind". Not that I endorse derailing games here, mind you, but I must admit that I've always been rather more interested in collaborative problem solving than collaborative storytelling. Focus and direction in a campaign is a beautiful thing, but the ending has never really been a motivator for me.

400 BP seems to be a clear victor. We'll work with that.

Currently Impending Doom is very slightly ahead, with Treasure Hunters close enough behind that it could go either way (several other settings have two votes, but that's basically out of the running at this point). So here's some backstory in either case:

Impending Doom
The Hellas Planitia Research Station is located near the middle of the largest crater on the planet. The ridges of the crater are 1100 kilometers away the short way. The rim is 9 kilometers up from the facility. The crater is deep enough that ambient pressure can sustain liquid water when the temperature rises above zero degrees. It does this for about two hours each day around noon (longer in the summer, shorter periods during mid-winter, but about 2 hours right now). 7 kilometers up and pressure is low enough to hit the triple point of water, and partially due to the amount of water the station ends up pumping into the air the ice clouds at that height are continuously shifting in phase. The result is a prismatic haze which casts a rainbow pattern in the sky whenever the tiny and distant sun deigns to shine through it. The facility itself generates enough waste heat that the water around it is always liquid, giving you several meters of sloshing before you hit the ice even in the middle of the night.

Thaumaturgical surveys located this region as a point of interest as it represented a relative mana spike: for a hundred meters in any direction the background count measures at only a mana ebb of -1. Digging down it was discovered that a stable mana region was available 10 meters below the surface. The excavation began almost immediately. The first stage of the mission is essentially an open pit mine. Massive drilling machines operated by riggers cleaved the stone down to the perceived mana source: a small set of caves with some interesting artifacts going back about 7000 years.

The base has three layers. The external layer is a series of individual buildings which are each separately pressurized. The main base is a complex built into the rock itself which is continuously pressurized and has most services in it. And the Dig, which is pressurized with nitrogen gas in order to facilitate work and minimize damage to the artifacts. The base has a very helpful and powerful network overseen by an AI. As an Evo construction, it runs Orb. The total staff on site is 50 people, including security staff. The next supply comes in four months, and the requested supplies must be finalized in 94 Earth days. Satellites are in place which supply a GPS system and limited remote power, but the base itself runs off of a fusion reactor.

Treasure Hunters
Before 2011, no substantial archaeological evidence of the Xia Dynasty or the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors had been found. Since that time however, substantial numbers of relics have been found from that period. With newfound arcane insight, a number of sites have been reinterpreted, and the racial type of various historical and mythical figures has become politically important. There is more to be collected than can be taken in a lifetime, the team will have to pick their targets. Here are some examples:

Writing on a shell in oracle bone script indicates the existence of an additional Daxi walled city whose walls were made of wood. Unfortunately, it is presently under water behind the Three Gorges Dam.

Continued fighting in and around Chengdu over the succession of General Liang threatens the existence of pottery and other artifacts from ancient Baodun settlements. Lung could clearly save these pieces of history, but for whatever reason he does not.

The Guwan Shichang of Tianjin is going to be holding an auction selling off some of the weapons recovered from the tomb of Qin Shihuang Ti. Some of those should probably not go to just anybody.

A wealthy and mysterious benefactor is willing to finance your trip to Tibet in order to reclaim a statue of Buddha which he insists is in a temple that was revealed by receding snow caps in 2035. It is the stated policy of the Theocracy of Tibet that noone is allowed entrance to that or several other temples without being a hereditary priest lord.

The bloody ethnic purging of Hui people from the Gansu region continues unabated, and the ethnically Han Army of Insurmountable Wisdom has declared that relics of non-Han cultures are abominations and are to be destroyed. This includes Majiayao bronzes, Dadiwan stone blades, and Mongolian tapestries.

The Empire City of Beijing is under siege. The Forbidden City subject to shelling. When two thousand years of history resides in a building, what can you save before the mortar rounds destroy it?

Language Information: I would consider anyone who had a 4 in a language to be “native� in any living language. However, dead languages such as Oracle Bone Script, Bronze Script, and Xia Script are never “native� no matter how many point you have in them.

-Frank

The Guwan Shichang of Tianjin Auction and the Infiltration of Tibet sound cool.

It's somewhat limited for actual negotiations, but I'd be willing to take the Translate spell on my Mage if that's a concern. My goal as a mage is typically to be exceedingly useful rather than a combat monkey anyway. A full suite of combat spells is nice and all but frankly, it's the samurai's job to handle that crap. I say let his dermal plated ass get shot at, and besides, full bursts don't require drain tests.

Oh, I should probably state that while I currently reside in GMT -7 (U.S. Mountain Time) from approximately Dec. 15 to Jan. 15 I will be in GMT -9 (Alaska Time) and will probably have a harder (although not insurmountable) time making the scheduled game times. I may be in transit Dec. 15th and unable to make that game. I will have to check my ticket.

Aha, wireless power projection exists?

Anyway, again, I'm in for either game with potentially with a slight plus vote to Impending doom 'cause of the defined structure, though raiding an auction has fun 'hudson haw' feel. I'll definitely play a technomancer in either.

In Impending Doom, what would the PC's role be that they should be competent in? Are the PCs supposed to be multi-talented "expert in one field, plus ok in combat" or something else? Is it reasonable to assume that Evo wouldn't staff a 50 person team on Mars with people who couldn't do something useful every day, so no hyper optimized combat monsters?

The blurb mentions evo security employees, so I'd imagined that we'd either be top shelf evo commandos similar to the plot line presented in Doom the computer game, senior evo corporate staff to oversea operations, similar to the guys you only find when they are dead, or highly rated evo research scientists working on evolutionary weapons programs or whatever.

But thats just what I'd imagined, how do you guys see it?

I don't really see top shelf commandos. Certainly most people posted to mars will be higher echelon personnel in their usefulness, but it could also be seen as a backwater posting for security personnel (actually I think that was the reason Doom's protagonist was on Mars). So I see definite needs for: highly skilled Thurmatugical/Magical (cause that's one of the primary researchers, and Matrix defense specialists (I am assuming that the station has a link to the wider matrix, as well as some VERY secret data on its networks. Of course there would be a time lag on outside attacks, but still the threat would be appreciable, things like agents only need to transfered once before they start working in realtime.) also talented security would be needed (risk of physical attack is rather low, but reinforcements are a LONG ways away) Highly skilled riggers (they're just really useful when short on manpower), of course fusion reactor engineers and research station managers would also be necessary although they make less intriguing PCs.

The primary survival concern in Hellas Planitia would be the low level of atmosphere. Mars is actually much more habitable then other extraterrestrial objects in that you could actually survive a short period of time unprotected during the nice part of the day. I'm guessing form the fact that the atmosphere is about 1% of sea level (at the bottom of Hellas)earth atmospheric pressure and that it is only 0.2% oxygen that you would asphyxiate long before you froze. I'm guessing that the next biggest threat to survival is the lack of pressure in the thin atmosphere. It would probably cause Ebullism which would probably be fatal. Much later you'd freeze.

Oh, one more thing. The only ShadowRun books I have are SR4 and Street Magic. That won't be a problem will it?

EDIT: This won't be like doom in that switches in one place open doors several hundred meters away will it? Who the heck designs facilities like that anyway?

Bleh, we'd be company men? I must have skimmed that part... I won't be playing a mage in that event. The mage concepts I have floating around in my head atm just wouldn't really fly with that. I have a neat li'l designer baby samurai in mind though that would make sense as company man though.

Agents are not a feature of Frank's rules for 'trix stuff.

Onto more serious stuff - don't multiple corps have bases on mars? If you are working on a top secret project, you might want to be able to fend off the others if they get wind of it.

The top shelf commando in doom is actually the guy that is body guarding the 'review team' leader.

But you do make some really fair points.

(Also, I'm still keen for treasure hunters too guys)

Frank, I was thinking of taking some genetech but noticed that the prices in the book don't all match up. Would you prefer us to use the prices listed in the chapter or the prices listed in the back of the book? Provided you really want us screwing around with Aug at all, of course.

Speaking of the movement power, how do you handle the whole "within terrain it controls" portion of the text? It's pretty cut and dried with the elemental spirits, but pretty vague with stuff like Guardian and Beast spirits (most Spirits can take Movement as at least an optional power). Frankly, if you ruled that the Movement power is essentially useless for such Spirits outside of their home plane, I could hardly blame you. Movement is a great power, and with a strict interpretation, it makes Hermetics/Chaos Mages into unparalleled masters of terrain instead of merely being saddled with a fairly redundant Spirit selection. On the other hand, that'd still leave me puzzled to just what exactly it is Beast Spirits are supposed to be good for if their movement power is crappy (animal control is alright, I guess, although Guardians can get it too, for some reason).

"Within the terrain it controls" is flavor text. In previous editions, some spririts (notably Nature Spirits and Loa) were limited to specific terrains while using their powers. But Elementals always controlled the terrain wherever they happened to be. Now all the spirits do that.

-Frank

Are there any wacky things about summoning spirits on mars that we should know about?

So I sent my (mostly finished) reactor engineer in to Frank and was wondering if anyone else had actually put together and submitted a character?

I'm working on one as we speak - I wasn't totally sure we'd committed to Mars, but I might just get onto it then.

I'd have a character done but all the sheets I keep coming up with are leaving me cold or else would be fairly worthless anywhere near a mana ebb.

Warning, I didn't actually get kzt's submission. I haven't been able to adjust my controls in some time and I don't think I get the emails through the "send mail" button in Dumpshock. My current email is:

ftrollman @ gmail.com

(No Spaces). My AIM is:

FrankTrollman

And sending it to me through either should work. So it looks like we have an Engineer and a Janitor so far. Looks like it's going to be more Half-life and less Doom, which is fine. Once everyone gets their sheet in or at least declares their occupation I put together the whole roster of the base staff. I should be able to have that up by Friday because I don't have an Anatomy test this week.

-Frank

Hmm. I did send it to that address, which looks like the same one from your insane journal. But it's not in my gmail sent folder... Odd.

I guess I'll try again.

<--- Mage

I've decided to basically just sheet up one character that I could use for either setting; I still favor treasure hunters. I'm also busy trying to figure out just what the hell a 400 bp janitor sheet could possibly look like.

how about a rigger with a PhD in microbiology and several useful PS like Life support systems, plumbing and cleaning. And possibly an unusual, shall we say neuritic, interest in cleanliness. They are unlikely to haul someone to mars who can just clean floors. Even though supervising the cleaning robots might be his main job.

Agreed. I'm just willing to bet that calling the character a janitor will be in many ways akin to saying Jesus was a carpenter.

Are useful drugs (i.e. cram & long haul) available at the station? It looks like I'm going to play a local netadmin or tech, and therefore also a communications guy, and I'm wondering if the usual combination of programmer drugs will be available

And Psyche! Don't forget Psyche. Gotta have Psyche!

Well, as for the Janitor concept I was thinking of taking things like:
Exotic Ranged Weapon (Chemical Spray)
and probably a smattering of technical skills.
Don't worry, I'll find some way of using all 400BP - even if it is just having tons and tons of contacts.

If you want to call them "sanitation engineers" that's fine. I'm sure that their actual job title is something like that, but in Russian.

And yes, you can get drugs for free for as long as you are on the mission. When you get back to Earth you'll have to pay for any you still want out of your own pocket, which is part of why they do that.

-Frank

Oh, and something Kzt stumbled upon: If you write up your contacts before the roster gets finalized, then you can grandfather in characters to specific tasks on the base. For example: the cook is named Elizaveta Katenin, and she's from the New Soviet near the Mongolian and Turkestan borders. That means that when left to her own devices she makes Uighur food although she is trained in classical Russain Haute (similar to French Cisine as it happens).

-Frank