This may be a really dumb question but it's late again...

I found it pretty hard to build up some kind of element of suprise when having a mage or shaman in the group. Every time their about to hit a building, they do some astral scouting, which is only natural. Of course, there are ways to counter this, but I can't have every building and every room warded, guarded by spirits, elementals and watchers as well as initiated mages or shamans. Nor can I have biological security measures to make doors and walls "mage-proof".

Last time we played I had the players run against a small gang. Something they should really be able to deal with but I included a few twists, that made it essential for the players not to know everything about the gang. However, since their mage did some scouting, they knew about the initiate, they knew where everyone was, they new that the passed out guy in the tub wasn't dead...

How do you deal with that?

Unfortunately, the way to deal with it in my experience is not to put them in a situation where you need to hide that information from them. That's not very useful, I know, but for the most part, that's the way it goes.

Ward the important areas, give the initiates masking, give them misleading information when possible. Have astral security notice the astral form of the magician- either a perceiving corp mage or a watcher.

Lots of places will be able to afford watcher spirits, maybe a bunch of mom-and-pop businesses get together to hire a mage to have a watcher or elemental patrol the whole block or something.

One way to cut down on the number of times they go astral is to introduce Shedim. I'm sure the mage/shaman is going to think twice before going on a quick scout around after the first time they come back to find their body not where they left it.

The Abstruse One

I know you didn't say what the initiate was, but assuming he was a mage or shaman capable of summoning, any that can WILL have watcher spirits anywhere that's important to them. Assuming a decent charisma again (let's say 5) that's 5 watchers to keep astral watch.

Sometimes knowing everything can work to your advantage too. Ya see, if the initiate KNOWS the PC's know everything...or even suspects, he can plan for it.

So, let's say the initiate finds out the PC's are coming, armed with Knowledge. What would he do? Likely, escape, taking whatever he had with him and plan to nail them good in the future. He'd probably try and deny the team any spoils as well. Remember, astral scouting can be noticed too. So goes the element of surprise, eh?

Oh...another nice thing for initiated mages...a quickened Detect Enemies spell! Never fear surprise again!

Using Shedim would certainly increase the "creep" factor.

Can you imagine how many bodies are located in and around the Barrens at any given time?

The only thing I've missed from d20 -- the random encounter tables. I'd enjoy a random complication table for those special moments in Shadowrun.

-Siege

I've seen the Shedim mentioned, but there is more. It says in the books that the astral is alive with beings. Introduce your players to those beings.

To be honest I had the very same problem about a year or so ago when I was GM:ing and I used just that. I remember one run when the mage wanted to astrally percieve/project (can't remember which) and there was this force 6 spirit waiting in the astral... as soon as the mage whent active BAM! He took quite a beating before he managed to get rid of it.

I don't know if you have any of the animal books, but there are creatures that exist purely on the astral and they can be curious/annoying/harmful. Just add some into your game along with the Shedim and I guarantee that your mage will be a lot more careful.

There are lots of ways to surprise the runners, even if they think they have scouted everything. Some have already been suggested. You say they know where everyone is in your example, well have them move around after the astrally scouting mage leaves, so that the runners won't know where they are after all, or if they are so close to the place that the gangers won't have time to move around, have one of the gangers spot them, fudge the roll if you have to, not because i advocate screwing the players, but you can do it once in awhile without the players knowing, its just you know, even the best laid plan rarely survives contact with the enemy. OR maybe one of the gangers have a couple of grenades, that he found at some point, in his jacket pockets, won't show on astral, and he's saving them for that special occasion, such as when the runners come by, really you can do this with all sorts of stuff, and if you bothered to have an initiate there, have him have a great form elemental or nature spirit on call, remeber great form nature spirits can cross domains.

Remember the limits on what an astrally projecting mage can and cannot detect. He can manifest to investigate some things, but then he's visible on the physical plane.

Also: you don't need to have everything guarded by capable spirits. Lots and lots of watchers as astral patrollers will work fine. If the mage takes an astral peek and sees a dozen watchers patrolling the facility, he'll think twice about trying to sneak in and triggering an alarm.

No you are right BitBasher, you don't see anything new, as far as i remember the only reason for manifesting would be to communicate with people, who are not able to astrally perceive. But Cain is right about the limits on what you can and cannot see when astrally projecting.

do all the assensing rolls behind the screen, that way if they fail, you can shovel any amount of crap to them and scare them real bad

You can always make up your own astral obstacles to make life interesting. In our home group we have some magicians who've created a beastie called a trap ward. Basically it's a proactive ward that attacks anyone who touches it, and will pursue combat if it wins. If the magician loses the fight and is reduced to 0 Magic then the ward has caught them and they are trapped until one of three conditions are reached - 1) the ward's creator lets them loose, 2) they run out of Essence as per standard rules and die, 3) they succeed at a once only test to voluntarily disrupt themselves. This ward becomes even more nasty if it's created as a masked trap ward.

Just an example of how making up your own unconventional stuff can keep people on their toes. Another option - give some NPCs the astral hazing effect from SURGE. Have a gang of 'astrally dirty' folk who've gathered together.

There are plenty of choices that also make the game fun and challenging to the players.

Don't forget the best Astral Security.... Mother Earth. If a complex is underground, all you need to ward is the entry way. digging through Earth as an Astral being is a sure-quick way to end up.... lost.

Sphynx

i don't have MITS, so i don't know what "shedim" means. so this idea might already be suggested, but here goes:

have the mage be constantly reminded about how vulnerable his body is, just lying around.
every time i play a mage, i am very careful about this ('cause, put yourself in his shoes: what IF something happened to his body while he was away?). this is unlikely, but so is an accident on a plane. still, people can be scared of flying.

and if the player doesn't act his character this way (either the char is fearless, or the player just doesn't care) then you could give the player some nasty experiences with htis problem.
seriously, anyone can harm a mage who's projecting. and if his friends are protecting his body, then there's other ways of harming him. just don't overdo it. you only need to put the fear in the player that it COULD happen to him.

and otherwise, you could follow some of the excellent advice already given.

sounds that your astral is quite empty.

mine is full of partoling lone stars mages, watchers on their masters erands, sprits, elementals, other mages...

the higher rated place you go, the more populatio nthere is in the astral.
and in barrens... who endares to go astral?
some punk sees that you go astral and he kills/robs/mobs you.
are you sure you want to take that chance?

Well, actually, most of the time it goes like this: the group finds a secure place (like, they all sit in their van around the corner out of sight of the target) and the mage goes scouting, while the rest of the group sits quiet and guards the mage. Usually they manage to find a place where they won't be seen but which is still close enough to be busting in once the mage is back.

And, I must admit, I'm not that experienced when it comes to the astral. But then again, what would it matter to my scout if there where other mages, watchers, spirits etc. around going abou their business? As long as I don't get into their way, they shouldn't mind, right?

I don't know... for this special occasion it was the whole point for the band to be surprised as well as the runners. The fun in the run was that the gangers would be caught in all kinds of awkward situations, like playing poker, in the shower, the initiate teaching a kid...
So I didn't really want them to be noticed.

I mean, probably it was my fault (again...)
I just wanna find out what to do better next time.

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the astral equivalent of noise pollution and fog - background count. The more sterile or degraded the area, the higher the target numbers to notice things.

Shouldn't background count only be an exception? Only in extreme situations? I don't see why I should give a gang headquarter in the lighter zone of the barrens any background count. Of course, right down in the dumps where human misery is flourishing (sp?) it might be reasonable.

Why don't you attack the party as soon as the mage goes astral and wanders off a little ways? The mage doesn't know anything's going wrong until she catches a bullet or three.

I have a few tricks to help cut down on the astral scouting.

On a corporate site that you want to keep hidden you have to come down hard on astral scouting. The corps have the resources to do this. When a site spots an astral snooper and you want to discourage this set the gears in motion. Even if the only astral security is a single screaming watcher. when the watcher yelps, the corp mage comes. or sends elementals. If the player is scouting this normally is good enough to send them running. Shortly after that bring in an extra squad of goons with guns to the site, and triple the watcher detail there for a month. Even a small corp with a decent security contract would be able to afford this kind of protection and it makes the PC's run harder. So they will be a bit more shy to scout.

As for your gang holed up in the building. You probably gave too much information. Astral space is a much more vauge world in my game. Things of technology are hard to distinguish appearing as masses of void. So you could see a car, but it would be difficult to tell the make, and near impossible to get a model year and outright impossible to read the plate. Distance is kind of elastic and flowing So once inside the building the character should only get vauge notions of where he is. Descriptions like "Around the first and second floor you can find several people gathered, going underground you see that there are two people making love sending out pretty trails of positive energy. Scattered in some of the side rooms you will find some people who you think may be drunk or out of it by the dullness of their auras. Passing upward toward the top the building you are greeted by the flare of someone magically active" This gives him somewhat of the same information you gave before. Number of people, initiate, passed out guy without being too specific. They can't nail down the locations of everyone, when he spots the initiate he should be warned that he is running the risk of getting spotted.

Astral space is the land of the dreamtime and of the living world around us. It isn't a ghostly shadow world that exsists to give the players maps of the inside of buildings. Describe things that are alive in great detail and nearly ignore the enviroment that they are in. Think about dreams you have. How the scene can shift effortlessly without being confusing or contradictory, traveling is astral space should be similar. It should be like walking a hedgemaze on really good drugs.

On a somewhat related note, as people should have a hard time relating to astral space, things in astral space have an even worse time with our reality. Bug spirits need bodies so that they can figure out the world around them. Watcher spirits are completely confounded by most tech. Tell a watcher to follow that car, what car?, follow that thing, ohhh that thing! A player of mine once had to spend five minutes with his watcher to tell him essentially "When person X answers the phone, come tell me" The whole concept of a phone and why you would answer it was beyond the watcher. Elementals are a bit brighter but similarly limited. They think in terms of astral sigs rather than reality. So it is much more effective to tell them to kill the rigger inside a helocoptor than to attack the helo itself. The only exception to this that I like to use are spirits. Spirits come from their enviroments and tend to know them intimately. Another bonus to shammies to even out perceived advantages of magehood.

Shedim appear in Year of the Comet and Threats 2, not in MitS.

Shedim are spirits that escaped through the DC astral rift when Ghostwalker came through. They're weak on the astral plane and lose force points as they're on it until they're disrupted/die, but they can inhabit any body that doesn't have a spirit in it -- be it a dead body or an astrally projecting mage. Pick up Year of the Comet for the skinny on all their powers and a way to seriously scare your players.

BTW, the old first edition book Sprawl Sites had an extensive list of random encounters for Shadowrun. It may take a little work to update them to 3rd Ed, but it was something like 60 pages worth and went into a lot of detail.

The Abstruse One

Cain,

Not necessarily. In the middle of a metroplex, astral space is likely to be fairly dirty. It is nowhere near as dirty as in Earthdawn, but you can't have watchers go screaming over every Tom, Dick, and Harry spirit that comes along the premises either. [OK, you could but you would get so many false alarms to make your security pointless.] Also bear in mind that watchers are dumb with truly hideous perception ratings....and they are weak to boot *and* there is a very limited number the mage can have active at any one time.

Don't get me wrong; watchers are great. I use them all the time, but they don't prevent astral recon.

In addition to that, the astral mage (or shaman) is likely to know he or she has been detected and if the mage is properly made, is more than a match for even the toughest of astral elementals or spirits since elementals and spirits don't have armor in astral space while the mage can (and often will)....and the mage can (and usually will) use sorcerery as unarmed combat and thus be vastly superior to all by the strongest of elementals.

I mention this because sending out even a guardian spirit of elemental after an astrally intruding mage is a good way to kill the elemental and it may or may not set off the general alarm. Even if it does, so what? Unless your goons are dual natured, there is nothing they can do to help.

In addition to all of *that*, an astral intruder using fast movement can be long gone....long before any called elemental or defending mage can arrive and watchers are too dumb to give a very good description of the intruder.

In short, even with Shedim, astral recon is here to stay and is the staple of a good solid shadowrunning team. You need to get used to it and adjust to it. The defenders will know this just as much as the shadowrunning team.....

-Polaris

ok, I know this is kinda like the preverbial (did I spell that right?) cow from space or panther-hold-out-pistol-out-of-nowhere on the fly story saving type game mechanics, but what about using a powerful negative background on the area to prevent astral recon? Would it not be like a flashbang on nightvision kinda thing, if it was a particularly nasty background?not only could you stop a crucial part of your story from being given away (which you could us this maybe like once every few games to kepp from cheesing it up), but you might set up an interesting backstory when your team tries to investigate later, or if a tozic mage taps into it later or something. Another idea would be a random encounter while the astrally projecting players are out and about, and make sure (gm's are allowed to fudge on occasion, when necessary for story) that the meat bodies get hit. That should bring their attention away from anything else, and if they're on a mission based on a time factor, could prove to waste enough time to make the astral recon no longer possible.

Danbot,

There are rules for astral hazing and background count in Magic in the Shadows, and a high background count can make astral recon dangerous.

However, it applies to astral defenders as much (if not more) than astral intruders. After all, who is more likely to have cleansing and filtering, the shadowrunning initiate, or the corp security mage?

In addition to that, it takes an unrealistically high background count before astral recon is no longer worth doing (4 or 5) and that is Auschwitz territory.....


-Polaris

Wow, thanks! There where a few good ones since I came by last time!

Yeah, I guess setting the run up differently would have been a possibility. However, one of the fun points was that they were supposed to acquire a chip which the gang leader has hidden in a pretty awkward body cavity.

And when it comes to the haziness of astral space, dead matter is just as opaque in astral as in reality. You just can't make out what it is. But you can still count the rooms and have a general idea where they might be. Even if you don't know how they are connected, if all doors are closed (you won't be able to distinguish between walls and doors).

The point isn't to make astral recon impossible, but it shouldn't be a piece of cake, either. Legwork is a whole set of challenges in and of itself. An astral mage can (and likely should) be able to deal with astral security, but there is the risk of setting off a general alarm, making things more difficult for the insertion team.

All recon needs to be balanced against the possibility of discovery. How much are you willing to risk for how much intel? Sure, you can astrally discover the entire layout of the facility, but do you want to risk warning your target in the process? Each team will need to make that decision for themselves.

Fast movement prevents mages from learning anything useful, so I don't consider that a problem. However, you're spot-on about the background count. You'd honestly need a mana warp to be certain of scaring off astral intrusions; and since those only really occur on Earth around nuclear blast sites, I wouldn't think it makes for any sort of desireable security.

Cain,

My point was that you could use fast movement to escape long before anything capable of detecting you and realizing what you were could find you. In short the guardian comes along and finds nothing.

This is not so different from a Decker with a bad login-to-host check. In both cases you jack-out (and fast movement is the astral equivalent of jacking out) and wait a bit for the furor to die down and then try again. Usually this is NBD since you will be reconning well in advance of insertion (or at least my teams do).

-Polaris