Shadowitz 2e: First Playtest

Our regular group hosted a guest recently, and so we took a break from the regular game to give Shadowitz 2e a trial run. I used a Die Hard like scenario, where the players would be inside a tower that got taken over by terrorists, initially separated from their weapons and with all their cyberware locked down. The idea was to have them sneak to the security station at the base of the tower, recover their gear and unlock their ware, and then have a series of running gun battles with terrorist groups as they tried to diffuse a bomb set to blow the top 15 floors off the building.

Instead, they jumped the first guys they saw regardless of the fact they had no weapons and little in the way of augmentation. The scenario ended before it began, and we instead settled in for a 90 minute fight that ended with a whole lot of dead hostages and an exploded building. But hey, the combat system got a hell of a workout.

The first thing I noticed was that wounding hurts a lot more than it used to. A lot more than it used to. Maybe too much. I'm not sure. In a single fight it really slapped the group around, but it was a situation that was stacked with near impossible odds (in the hopes they'd decide to do something other than overtly rush the bad guys) with no down time with which to recover from even stun injuries, so I'm not sure it's a fair test of how the penalties impact regular play.

That said, getting hit really messes you up now. You can't blithely ignore the flying lead anymore. Defensive actions are really a must. So much so that I'm thinking that dice put toward yin shouldn't be eaten up by an attack. While I prefer to shade things in favor of offense to move the game along, wounds are simply too crippling to nail someone with without providing a hearty defensive option.

Raising seems pretty cool, but again, with wounds locking down your pool, once you take a big hit, you're not raising anymore. I'm actually fine with that.

The new shot clock works just fine. I didn't expect any problems with it. In fact, the multi-track approach was very well received by any who had a comment about it.

Physical mages are powerful. I had adjusted the rules from what I posted here to make the magic rules a little more forgiving, but with the right suite of powers they are monsters. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, since the group never unlocked their cyberware I can't fairly compare them to the samurai, who never got to cut loose. That's a comparison I'd really want to make before deciding what, if anything, needs to change with the physical mages.

With a flat target number of 4 and wound penalties changing way more dice into wound dice, I think my initial assessment of the knack list and pyramid is correct. Knacks need to be more specialized and more numerous. There's one other major revision I think I need to look at though, and that's the attempt to keep all pools at 10.

See, when the game judged the level of success based on the number of hits you rolled, having a massive pool just became cumbersome after a while, and once you exceeded a certain number of successes, you hit a point of rapidly diminishing returns in terms of how long it took you to sort your pool. For that reason, keeping the knack ratings capped at 10, and limiting them to 7 to start, was a good idea. But that's not the way the game works anymore.

Now, no matter the hits you roll, you only score a minimal success. If you want more, you have to raise, and to raise you have to drop dice fro your pool. Now, a massive score in a knack doesn't mean lots of sorting. You're looking for the task threshold and that's it. In fact, the new raise rules don't just mean that large pools aren't as cumbersome, but I think they require larger pools. If you want to really shine, you need spare dice you can throw away on raises. The existing knack pyramid needs a revision. While 7 dice to start is probably still okay, if lower powered than it used to be, I think there needs to be more slots for higher rating knacks, and maybe a higher ground floor. Knacks of 3 aren't very useful.

What surprised me most, however, was how many comments I got back immediately upon wrapping up the session about how people would readily return to this game to test it further. One big fight scene didn't give people opportunity to play with their demons, and that was something nearly everyone wanted to explore more. They saw a lot of potential in mucking about with questions of edge and punk and worldliness. I'm not sure when or if that'll happen, as this was a sort of design on a lark and one I wasn't planning on returning to, but hey, you never know.

Other Mechanical Changes

With that core engine in place, I can begin looking at the rest of the Shadowitz system and see what needs adjusting. The answer is a whole hell of a lot.

Remove Methods
First of all, it's now gone to a roll over vs a roll under system, and Punk and Demon have become the core character attributes. Methods don't mix into that well, and so I think they've got to go. Just straight out gone. A character now has knacks and a single target number he's looking for on all dice, regardless of his approach.

New Dice Rules
Speaking of which, impairment dice need an overhaul too. If higher dice are better, and the target number is 5, what do we do about injuries. I still think changing the pool composition to keep the possibility of action alive but  less likely is a solid mechanic. So let's change the target number to 4, make d6 the base die, d10 the edge die, and d4 the impairment die.

1s glitch instead of 6s.

Finally, I'd like to shift the degree of success away from luck and into the realm of player choice. So I'm going to take the raise mechanic I used in 7th Sea and introduce it here. Any roll gives you basic success, regardless of the margin by which you beat the target threshold. If you want to achieve more, you need to raise.

Remove 1 die from your pool for each raise; it doesn't matter if it's a d6 or a d10, but you can't remove d4s to raise. You're stuck with them. If you succeed in your roll, you can get additional levels of performance based on the raises you made. In combat, this means raising is the only way to deal additional damage. An attack deals base damage + raises.

Fewer Aspects
In the original game, you started with 5 aspects. That's a lot, and they didn't get used much because there was a lot else going on. Now, you get 2 plus your demon. If you want more you can get more later, but start with 2 and learn to work them both.

Likewise, starting karma (which used to be called Edge) now starts at 2 points, not 5. A smaller pool means you're more likely to work those compels more often to earn more karma.

Shot Clock Revision
I've rejiggered the shot clock to give it multiple tracks. Now, your initiative score doesn't reduce the number of shots an action takes, but tells you which track you're on. Higher tracks have more spaces, meaning you still proceed around the clock more slowly, and thus get to act more often than slower opponents. This lets everyone use the same list of shot costs without the need to do any calculations that might foul things up or slow them down.

Knack List Revision
Resources is gone as a knack, since it's now based on your Worldliness score. The knack pyramid remains, but with the loss of methods, I'm wondering if making knacks more specific and increasing their number is a good idea. When making a few NPCs, I ran out of knacks to take a few times. Food for thought.

Contacts Overhaul
With Fixer gone, there needs to be some other way of making contacts important to the characters. Fixer was a neat idea, but it always bothered me that contacts were still only capable of doing the things characters could do already.

So now, every character gets 5 contact aspects. They can use these to build their contacts, giving them access to knacks (probably different ones than the character has himself), as well as certain other abilities like resources and position. These are part of the character sheet though, and a character can spend money and experience to increase his contacts just like he can himself. While the GM might play the contact when the character speaks to him, the player is responsible for the mechanics, advancing the contact, and making all the necessary rolls.

The Inner Demon

Let's move on to the second aspect of the mission statement: the inner demon. This is the means by which the characters maintain their individuality. Characters in Neuromancer did it through drug addiction, death wishes, isolation, extreme body modification, and sheer insanity. There wasn't anyone in that book who was just a little quirky. They were either faceless and forgettable, or they had something really wrong with them. So we need something similar for this game, something to give players the power stay themselves, but to do so in a way that breaks them.

 

Okay, so there's clearly got to be some kind of disadvantage tied to a character's inner demon, but again, it needs to be mechanical. The 90s were strewn with RPGs that introduced disadvantages that you were just supposed to role play, and while they were a big step in the direction of thinking about your character's personality and not just his combat stats, too often these disadvantages were banks of points that you got for free and proceeded to ignore in actual play. A character's inner demon needs to inflict a mechanical penalty to the character, while at the same time it needs to provide some mechanism by which a character can increase his punk rating.

 

So, each character has a demon, defined along theme appropriate lines. This gets a variable rating (um... 1-5 maybe?) defined by the player at the start of each adventure (I'm still assuming this being a Shadowrun game, that it will be built around specific missions/jobs). The rating determines how hard the demon is kicking at that particular time. Sometimes it's nice and placid and behind the scenes, and sometimes it's a raging beast. Take for example the demon "drug addict." At a rating 1, the character might feel the occasional pang, but he can pretty much white knuckle his way through the job. At rating 5, he's jonsing for a fix constantly. Time that should be spent gathering intel on the team's target is spent instead scoring a fix and blissing out. He's walking into firefights high, and he's going through withdrawal when they need him driving the getaway car.

 

A character's Edge is equal to his Punk + Demon. Yes, this does mean that the more messed up a character is on any given run, the better he'll be performing, but we're going to chalk that up to him being less distracted by all the trivialities of the world. Demons are an aspect with only a downside. The GM can compel the aspect, just as any other, and you are free to resist if you like. However, it costs you a number of points equal to your demon rating to avoid succumbing. When it's really kicking, you're going to be spent just keeping it at bay, and if things get too rough, you are going to give in. 

That should make the "brokenness" of cyberpunk characters a more front a center thing in this game. With rare exception, players want their characters to be good at what they do. That means high edge. But that high edge comes with a price, and I'm willing to bet people will pay it, which hands the GM the tools necessary to help players explore the dark parts of their character's unique snowflake of a personality. 

The Core Mechanic

So, with a core "about" statement, let's move on to question 2. How is this game about that? First and foremost, if it's going to be about avoiding being a mindless drone, there needs to be some kind of identity score, an "individuality" stat, maybe we can call it "punk" in homage to the literary source. That stands for how far apart from being a mindless consumer you are, and how outside society you are. That, by extension means that being a part of society has to be bad, as in mechanically bad. Remember, it doesn't matter what the flavor text of your game is, if there's no rule for it, your players won't care. Thus if being acclimated into pop culture is a bad thing, there needs to be something in the rules themselves that make it bad. 

One of the terms you hear time and again in cyberpunk RPGs is "edge." It's something that you're always after, and even if you're on it one minute, you might slip and fall behind the next. It takes constant work to stay on the edge. I'm thinking the more you're into chasing down the latest Brittany or Justin Beiber video or voting for the newest round of American Idol or whatever, the less you're keeping your edge, so maybe your punk score has something to do with either setting your max skill rating or the threshold over which the cost for increasing a skill jumps dramatically. Or maybe, like tech, you need to work just to stay relevant (think computing speed, and what's considered average now vs, five years ago), so there's a maintenance cost for your skills just to keep them the same (as in relatively effective given a growing world), and your punk helps offset that maintenance cost by preventing you from sinking too much time into consumerism that doesn't promote personal growth.

Hmm... I'm going to flash forward briefly and look at question 3, which asks how that's fun. While the idea of maintaining your skills relative to a growing world is realistic, and there's a thematic resonance between that mechanic and the tech industry to which cyberpunk owes its existence, I don't think working to keep what you have makes for a fun game, so let's jettison that.

Okay, so we're back to punk vs pop culture. I'm a big believer in rewarding player choice rather than penalizing it, so I'd like to make this conflict one that gives the player a bonus of some kind, rather than takes something away. The loss can be the forfeiture of the potential bonus. It's easier to swallow. Since I'm on a dual die design kick these days, I'm going to make some assumptions for the moment just to put some ideas down and move on. Let's say this is a die pool system, and that 5s and better are successes. You roll a number of dice equal to your skill. Dice up to your punk rating are d10s, because that's your edge. Anything over that are d6s. This means that you won't lose your character if you fully acclimate into pop society, but you'll be soft by comparison to those living on the edge. There's a mechanical incentive to staying individualized.

Hmm... maybe we should split the edge and punk ratings. That is, make punk = edge in the beginning, but allow some method of growing edge beyond punk. Punk then creates some sort of insulation, but doesn't create a ceiling. Eh, it's a nebulous idea to let circulate in the idea cloud for now.

Shadowitz: Mission Statement

So... what should Shadowitz really be about? Yeah, there's magic in a modern cyberpunk world gone wireless, and it needs good combat rules along with easy speed tracking and all that jazz, but none of that is what it's about. I remember reading Neuromancer only a few months ago and thinking how much Shadowrun wanted to be like this book, but shot well wide. Why? The why, the thing Shadowrun's missing is what I think Shadowitz should be about. 

The game should be about characters living in a world populated in large part by mindless consumer drones drifting through a shallow pop culture that robs people of any individuality. The thing that keeps these characters separate and individual, however, is an inner demon that compels self-destructive behavior. Characters struggle between losing themselves to the wider world and the end their inner punk pushes them toward.

In a nutshell, I think that means the game is about struggling to maintain your identity through the use of an inner demon that might kill you. Everything else, the plethora of guns, the magic, the wireless matrix, the cyberware, the sorcery, the metahuman races, all of it, are irrelevant to the core of the game. All of that stuff is in there, and there will ultimately be rules for it, but first and foremost there must be a mechanical system that represents that core mission statement, and it must be at the forefront of the game. Shadowitz doesn't have that, and that's why it's a failure.

Shadowitz: Second Edition

A friend of mine introduced me to someone recently who shares an interest in game design, and we've been corresponding, talking shop, for a while now. He's scary smart, and perhaps because of this hasn't read as widely as I have in the area of game design, content to work on his own material without outside help. Thus, when I mentioned the three questions to him, it touched off a long discussion as to what they were really asking and what they meant. It was great.

In the course of this discussion, Shadowitz came up, and through the back and forth, I wound up hitting on the thing that I felt the original design was lacking. Namely, an answer to those questions. Looking back to the beginning of this blog, I see I asked and then chucked those questions almost immediately in the design process. The goal became modelling everything in Shadowrun with an alternate set of rules, but it wasn't about anything. My game ultimately didn't see characters any more true to the cyberpunk genre than I'd gotten before. It worked as a resolution engine, but as for creating a particular feel, it was a failure.

It was the conversations with this new friend that smacked me in the face with that, and then just as suddenly, the answer came to me. What followed was a flurry of ideas that lead to a new core of the old game. I never really finished Shadowitz; the initial draft retains plenty of rough patches, but I decided to go about revising it according to these new answers anyway in the hopes that what came out the other side was closer to what I'd been searching for all along. Stay tuned.

Physical Mages

Long ago on this blog I said that physical adepts were my favorite character type to play in Shadowrun. That's only technically true. From the moment I read about them I've been fascinated by physical mages. The idea of a character who has the full understanding of mana manipulation and channels it though his body to physically augment it lit my mind on fire with possibilities.

But anyone who knows anything about Shadowrun knows that's not what physical mages are. Instead, a physical mage is a physical adept who can spend his power points to pick up one additional, special power: sorcery. His score in this power is his effective magic score when determining what spell force he can cast safely. In all other ways, he's a physical adept like any other.

Again, after all the whining I've done about the complexity and variety of mechanical systems in Shadowrun, I should be lauding the hell out of this. It introduces a new idea, but it does so in a mechanically minimalist way and makes heavy use of existing rules. Use standard sorcery rules for the physical mage when he casts spells. Use standard adept rules when he uses any of his other powers. Nothing new to learn outside of that one little note as to how he straddles the line. Really, as far as rules in any game go, it's pretty simple.

Unlike technomancers, I've gotten to see a physical mage in play. I myself was not allowed to play one in college (the GM outlawed the character type; I think he was sick of sourcebook material by then, since we had a werebear and otaku in the party already), but in a semi-recent game one of my players selected that as an option. My first thought was "awesome!" Awesome, unfortunately, didn't describe the final product.

That physical mage took 4 points of spellcasting and sunk the last two into astral perception. Totally by the rules, but I defy anyone to tell me that's the concept this archetype was really designed for. After a few sessions the player converted to a full mage and got the ability to summon and astrally project in exchange for giving up, well, nothing. Woo! Rad.

It's true, that's not the way the text implies physical mages will typically turn out, but it is true that they will most often be mediocre spellcasters and mediocre physical adepts. Oh, it's the power of generalization, Cliff! You want to do lots of stuff in a game of specialists, you need to suck at them! I disagree. No, you can't have a generalist who has the same level of ability in all his fields as a specialist has in one, but I maintain that a physical mage need not be a generalist. After all, an even more fundamental rule of the game should be that the options are fun, right? If an option doesn't add to the fun of the game, what's the point?

To that end, I propose the following redesign of physical mages: instead of making them adepts who can also cast mage spells, let's make them mages who can cast spells that boost their physical performance. There are some out there already. There's a small spate of attribute boosters, armor, increased reflexes, etc. Adepts have a few powers that function like spells also. Boost, for example, gives you a temporary pump in an attribute, but it wears off and inflicts drain afterward.

I started with that idea, but eventually drifted a little farther afield from this. I like the idea of a physical mage's powers being temporary, invoked boosts, I'm just not sure I want there to be a success test for every single one of them. See, when a mage casts a spell, he's often using his magic to accomplish an action. If a physical mage casts a spell, it's going to be to boost his own capabilities. He'll then roll a skill or an attribute to accomplish his task. A mechanic that doubles the number of rolls a player will make to accomplish something isn't one I want to introduce into the game. But that temporary, invoked boost, that's spot on. That makes all a physical mage's powers feel more like spells to me. The adept subconsciously channels magic through his body, turning it into a sort of supernatural talent. The physical mage, on the other hand, sculpts the magic into whatever he needs it to be, using his own body as the lens. He's the master of somatic sorcery.

My mind wandered to some of the other incarnations of Shadowrun I've run in the past. One of them used the Feng Shui system. Now, I like Feng Shui; I think it's approach to things actually fits my current group very well, but they insisted that it didn't feel much like Shadowrun using those rules. And, well, I can see their point. You know what though? The fu powers of that game use exactly the mold I'm talking about here. Those who are properly trained get a chi pool, which they can use to fuel a variety of fu shticks. Pay the points, activate the power. No roll required.

How do you get that pool? Excellent question. Let's base it on your Magic score to start with, and then throw in a power that adds to your pool instead of giving you a new ability. Speaking of which, these will advance like physical adepts. While they are mages, they're not really throwing around spells the way sorcerers are, nor are they peeking into the astral plane, binding spirits, enchanting talismans, or anything else like that. The more involved rules of initiation are there specifically to put the brakes on the rampant power growth of full mages. Physical mages, as described here, aren't mechanically primed for that kind of power leap, so let's advance them the way we do physical adepts.

Now, in Feng Shui, you get your chi back every round. This being Shadowrun, and sorcery being something that comes with a price, I think that creating some other kind of recovery mechanism is in order, probably something keyed off a character's Resolve knack. Maybe you get your Resolve step rating back in magic every round. That's right, round. Not action. You've got to make it all the way around the shot clock before you get some mana back.

You want more? I think there should be a way for you to get it. Let's call it a centering roll (which would normally mean that only initiates can use this, but let's make centering available to them without making them initiate like mages, since they're not using sorcery) that uses the following procedure:

1. Select the number of mana points you want to get back.
2. Roll centering with that number as the threshold.
3. Divide your pool between yang (which go toward your threshold) and yin (which counteract drain)
4. Success restores the mana to your pool instantly. Failure means you recover nothing.
5. Succeed or fail, you now take drain equal to the amount of mana you attempted to restore.
6. Resist drain as normal. 
7. You may choose to take injuries instead of marking wounds after the drain check, just like a normal wound.

While I haven't done it, I'd seriously consider modelling physical mage powers off Feng Shui's fu and gun shticks. Many of these abilities have a structure like: "Hit x mooks with your attack, where x is the amount of chi spent on this action." Others have a flat cost associated with them, but that needs to be paid every time you want to use them.

Creating a separate list of powers for physical mages serves to not only tailor them to their specific mechanics, but makes them mechanically distinct from physical adepts. Much like the new rules for adepts set them apart from street samurai without either hobbling the adept or overshadowing the samurai, the rules for physical mages provide another avenue in which a player can play a physically powerful character who is distinct from those who follow other paths. That's the hope anyway. Obviously I've tested none of this.

Technomancers

Technomancers are a relatively new phenomenon in the Shadowrun universe. The idea of people so gifted they could interact with the electronic world of the Matrix without a cyberdeck first appeared in the Sixth World over a decade ago in the form of pre-teen super-deckers called otaku. Technomancers are what happens when both the kids and the technology grow up.

Technomancers are the grown up version of otaku. They can interface with the Matrix without electronic assistance interface devices, and they're old enough to drive and buy beer. Also, since the world's gone wireless, so have the Technomancers, who all have the biological equivalent of a wireless ethernet card buried in their gray matter somewhere.

Mechanically they're extremely similar to mages. Where mages cast spells, technomancers manipulate code. Where mages can perceive and project into astral space, technomancers can interact with the Matrix in augmented reality or full immersion virtual reality. Mages summon spirits; technomancers summon sprites.

Truth be told, it helps a lot to flatten out the learning curve. After all, didn't I just spend last post lamenting about the nightmare that was trying to learn a series of unrelated game systems all to run a single session with a diverse group? Yeah, I still don't miss that.

However, I'll also admit I'm torn on this one. From a straight game rule perspective it makes whole tons of sense. But from a setting perspective, there's a cognitive disconnect. Shadowrun has, from the very start, drawn a stark line between magic and technology. You can't establish line of sight on a target for purposes of spellcasting using electronic surveillance. Cybernetic implants detract from your ability to perform magic. Etc. Technology and magic have been at odds and utterly incompatible from day one. You could dip into both worlds; I've known many a character who did. But there was always a fine art to pulling that balancing act off. The system didn't support the idea that such a decision was easy.

Making the newest, super high end hackers feel almost exactly the same as mages flies in the face of that. It just doesn't feel right. You want to begin moving them closer together as the 6th world grinds on? I'm okay with that. Really, I find mixed genre worlds fascinating more often than not. So sure, let's do it. But maybe we can start the integration with something a little more granular.

My idea for a technomancer rewrite is pretty simple: pattern the new hacker after an adept, not a mage. In essence, a technomancer under this system is a near supernaturally gifted hacker. He still needs a commlink to get online, and he still uses programs (though he can opt not to, like anyone). However, he's so talented that he can make Matrix constructs roll over and beg. He's the wunderkind who's going to debug his utilities and tweak his firewall all while disarming the databomb on your target paydata and crashing the black IC protecting the node. And yeah, he might have a kick ass agent program loaded up with custom software, but it's still a modified agent program, not a sprite summoned from the depths of the Deep Resonance like an elemental spirit.

Again, let me state that I'm not opposed to technomancers who are so attuned to the wireless world that they work it like magic. However, it feels like an awfully big step to take given the decades of stark divide set up in the cannon literature.

So, mechanically, how does this technomancer work? He gets access to special skill booster powers, all of which key off Matrix skills, or have to do with Matrix only actions. I've got nothing more than sketchy notes on this, but I can provide some examples:

• Hardware - this category encompasses all the custom Matrix surfing 'ware that the technomancer made or modified himself. A few of the powers I began to write for this category included things like Overclocking, which gave a boost to Matrix initiative at the cost of program load capacity, and Networking, which let him link multiple links together in order to get a performance boost.
• Software - the programmatic version of hardware. Rather than just provide bonuses to existing programs (because while the whole +1, +2 thing is useful, it's also kind of boring), I tried to introduce new options here. File Compression added to a link's program capacity, but increased the load time to bring something online, for example.
• eSocial - this category didn't have anything to do with using computerized tools. Instead, technomancers who dipped into this power pool were masters of interpersonal relations, as long as they occurred online. They could utterly burn someone in a Flame War (allowing them to accomplish the nearly impossible: win an argument on the Internet), charm someone via chat window, etc. None of this worked face to face though. It needed to be the kind of anonymous interaction you can only find online. 
• Hacking - like software, I tried hard to stay away from simple bonuses to mundane actions, and instead tried to make this category one that emphasized how amazing the character was at infiltrating secure systems in other ways. Mostly I did this by finding more ways the character could use Hacking. For example, once per session per level of the power, the character could roll his Hacking knack instead of Resources when buying something, representing the spare cash he managed to pick up on an incidental, on-the-fly hack.

Under this system of rules, technomancers would still lose resonance, or whatever else you want to call it, for cybernetic implants with one important exception: any cyberware that is primarily used to perform or augment Matrix tasks does not cause this loss. Cranial commlinks are kosher, as would be the math CPU and encephalon implants. You want a datajack? Perfectly cool. You want a cyberarm with internal shotgun and integrated smartlink? Go right ahead, but it's going to knock points off your resonance and cost you some natural edge you've got when running in the wireless world.

Yes, this begins to blur the line between magic and technology. I'm fully aware of that. Truth be told, I think that's an interesting way to go, and I applaud Catalyst for taking that step. It's been more than 60 years since the first UGE births, and the Great Ghost Dance didn't follow all that much later. Moving these two setting elements into closer alignment is a good thing. I'd just prefer it took a few baby steps in between first.

New Character Archetypes for Shadowitz

In one of my last mentions of Shadowitz, I made mention of a new take on physical mages and technomancers, and promptly said no more about them. Oops.

Now, I don't have hard rules for either of these, because my group is pretty happy with the characters they have and no one wants to play one of these, but I've kicked around the ideas anyway. While both would require more development to flesh out the specifics and turn these into character packages that offer the same robust options that other character types have, I think there's a lot of work done in the system to support them already.

See, while I've read endless pages of posts on various Shadowrun forums about how it was a feature, not a bug, that the game was actually a 4 in 1 kind of system, with rules for running the Matrix having nothing in common with rigging, which was entirely different from physical combat, which only had some minor similarities to magical and astral tasks, I claim from nothing more authoritative than my own personal experience that it didn't come off as much of a feature. I didn't like it. In fact, the last by-the-book Shadowrun game I ran ended not because the story ended, and not because of some irreconcilable intra-party conflict (a historical favorite), but simply because I couldn't stay on top of the rules anymore. The decker had bought the advanced Matrix books, the mage was looking into metamagic options, and then the rigger bought a drone and wanted to start getting into electronic warfare. When a physical adept killed a dragon with nothing more than a knife and some externally sustained spells, I knew I was clearly missing some very important stuff in the flow of the game, and no matter how much more I studied, I was going to get buried in the details, so I called the campaign to a close. Besides, that intra-party conflict was coming soon.

That experience has led me to design rules with a particular methodology. All aspects of play don't have to be identical. In fact I think mechanical differentiation is necessary in order to emphasize character differences. That's my big complaint about technomancers as written in 4e, in fact. While I haven't given the rules a thorough playing, on the page they look and feel an awful lot like sorcery, just in a different setting. Anyway, there should be mechanical differences, but, and here's where I break from many prior versions of Shadowrun and a whole lot of other games too, those differences should be on the character side. On the GM's side of the screen, I'm shooting to make everything pretty close to uniform.

From my own experience, I know that I'm not going to use a ton of fancy mechanics in a fight. I might trick out a couple of NPCs to try something in a scene, but if I go into a combat with 6 NPCs each loaded up with options as richly as my PCs, 90% of that's not getting used. Either I'm going to forget about them, or, more likely, they'll get mowed down before they get to most the fancy stuff.

And to be completely honest with you, my "to do" list for my campaigns does have NPC creation at the top, but it's to create interesting, recurring characters. Yeah, I do prep for my adventures, but often I'm scribbling down combat stats an hour before game time. It's much more important for me to get the personalities of play in place, and maybe review whatever notes I had on ongoing PC plot threads and the like. That sort of thing will see more use in the game, and will make the game better than any number of mechanically intricate combat opponents will.

So what's any of this got to do with technomancers and physical mages? Truth be told, not much. However, the above explained stance informs my design ideas for these two concepts in that any additional options will all be on the player side to manage. If one of my players does wind up playing a physical mage or technomancer, my job in engaging him will not change. I'll still be rolling the same dice in the same way for the situations. The same basic system runs all character types now, and will continue to.

Recovering from Stun

With all this talk of wounding and healing, it dawned on me that stun damage gets left out in the cold a little bit. There's a note in the healing section of the book that notes you can drop a stun wound by 1 per hour of rest, but outside of that, nothing.

The primary reason for this is because my group doesn't deal in nor receive a whole lot of stun. That's partly my fault. After all, I could design opposition that's not using kill tactics, but so far lethal responses have been par for the course in the team's runs. Whether they're breaking into a clinic that's secretly doing blood magic in a secure basement level, taking down a bigoted policlub, or breaking into a megacorp site, lethality seems to be the proper way of things.

Actually, there was one place where tazers and gel rounds were appropriate, which was when the team broke into a publisher's building to steal a manuscript, but they so overwhelmed the opposition between fast talking and local Matrix control that they were in and out without firing a shot, so they didn't deal with stun in that run either.

In fact, since we lost the mage, stun's pretty much disappeared from the game. But it shouldn't, and that's certainly no excuse not to have clearer rules on how to recover from it anyway, because it's a fundamental mechanic and the need for it will arise eventually. Sooner if said rules aren't in place, I'm sure.

The thing is, recovering from stun doesn't have to be hard, mechanically I mean. Stun damage knocks you around a bit, maybe leaves some light bruising, and either gives you a headache or leaves you exhausted, but in the end even the worst of it is still superficial damage. You can drop from it, yes, but you're going to snap back from it pretty quickly.

Recovering from stun wounds is automatic with rest. No rolls needed. How about stun injuries though? I think the easiest thing to do is take the recovery rates for physical injuries and translate them from days to hours. As long as you rest in that time, your injury drops a level automatically. So if a physical injury takes a week to heal, it takes 7 hours as a stun injury. Laid up for a month? That same injury on the stun side sticks with you for 30 hours. In other words, take some ibuprofen and take a very long nap.

And that's stun. Simple and about as complete as you'd ever need. Done and done.

Changing Penalty Dice

Last time I talked about increasing the number of penalty dice a wound slaps you with. This time around, I'm going to throw out a small rules tweak mostly geared toward cleaning up play a little, but that also adds a splinter  to the pain wound penalties inflict.

Penalty dice are d9s. Roll a d10 and reroll if you come up 10. Just ignore it and roll again. We did this because my group thought d8s didn't inflict enough of a penalty and d9 was 33% worse than a d6. Sure. Okay.

But why not just make it a d10? Mathematically speaking it's a little less clean, but in gameplay itself it's smoother. I've seen a lot of rerolls to get around those 10s, and while some people have die roller apps that they can program to use a d9, there's still plenty of people who like picking up oddly shaped plastic pieces and tossing them on a table. I'm one of them.

So let's skip the rerolls. Penalty dice are now d10. Yes, that worsens your odds a little more. They're penalty dice. They're supposed to hurt. And hey, it's not like you're rolling pools of d12s. That would hurt for all sorts of reasons. You ever notice those dice have a tendency to keep rolling right off the table? It does so more than any other shape, except for maybe that golf-ball looking d100 one of my players has.

Bigger Penalties?

Something I've noticed in combats is that some of my characters are very good at what they do. I mean very good. No one's got a knack higher than 7, but between cyberware and aspects, some of them can chuck some mighty die pools indeed.

Now, when they get hurt some of those dice transform into penalty dice, and this does cut into their odds of success. But let's face it, when you've got 12 dice in your pool, transforming 4 of them into penalty dice doesn't have that much of an impact. Especially when those penalty dice can come up successes, just less often than regular ones.

We've been playing this system for a little while now. I've given out karma a number of times. I don't think anyone's bought anything with it yet. At all. The sam at one point asked about getting an implant upgrade, but outside of that, everyone is so confident in their abilities that they've not even considered trying to learn what it takes to increase anything on their sheet (even though it's not hard, I swear).

Clearly, being hurt doesn't hurt enough. I wanted to avoid a death spiral situation where the heavily wounded had no chance of ever succeeding in anything, but in so doing it looks like I've soft-peddled the characters to the point where they aren't bothered by wounds at all.

What to do?

I like the idea of penalty dice instead of straight up die pool reductions. Penalty dice mean that the player will always have something to roll, even when badly hurt. The odds go down, certainly, but they never go down to nothing, and with a decent method they even stay pretty reasonable. This means that a horribly wounded character can still accomplish some of the simpler tasks as long as he stays within his strengths. If he needs to venture into unfamiliar territory, he might be hosed. But hey, I'm okay with that. As long as the character has some recourse available to him, it's up to the player to leverage his remaining strengths.

So I'm pretty committed to the idea of keeping penalty dice for the moment. This means the easiest way to make wounds matter more is to increase the number that each wound category inflicts. Right now it's a simple 1-4 for light through deadly. Clearly that's not enough. So I'm proposing a new scale:

• Light = 1
• Moderate = 3
• Serious = 6
• Deadly = 10

That ought to bring the pain much harder without installing a death spiral. It also makes the prospect of taking an injury more interesting again. When I made injuries worse, it took away their appeal. After all, you can just suck up the wounds and just deal with it until you think you might get taken out, and then take the injury. Now you're looking at way more die penalties. Maybe taking the injury early is a better idea. Of course, taking that injury means more now as well, since it'll stick you with any subsequent wounds for that much longer...

My real hope? Making both more painful makes combat itself more meaningful and promotes a slightly more defensively oriented combat style. Months of play and the only person to ever generate yin dice on a roll was the mage when he cast spells. We'll see.

The Heal Spell Revisited

When I first converted the much valued heal spell from Shadowrun rules to Shadowitz, I left it largely unaltered.

1. Choose the wound box you want to heal and roll your dice. 
2. Divide your hits between yin and yang.
3. Each yang die drops the wound by 1.
4. Each yin die drops your drain by 1 (drain equals the wound you tried to heal).

And that's that. Truth be told, it means that magic's pretty good for dropping a single wound down to more manageable levels or getting a single low to mid ranked wound off your grid entirely. But if you're really chewed up and have more black on your condition monitor than white, magic's a pretty poor alternative to medical treatment. I liked that. Not only does it keep the science aspect of the sixth world up there in importance, and along with it street doc contacts and DocWagon contracts, but it also balances the load contained within my own party. We had a mage at one time (he's since left us, though we don't take it personally outside of one player looking at the empty chair every game and saying "douche"), but we also have an adept with a skill focus on doctor. This breakdown of ability made both mage and medic important in their own ways, with neither better than the other. 

Except that the heal spell didn't have any rules in it for healing injuries. With the ratcheted impact injuries have on the healing process, that's a question that's going to come up, if we ever get a mage at the table. But hey, I'm an optimist, and I've got some time to spend answering these potential questions, and in general it fills out the game even if we're not using those rules at the moment. So I'm going for it. 

Injuries are supposed to be a big deal. Wounds hurt. They replace your normal dice with penalty dice and make it harder to succeed. Injuries hurt in more ways. Though they don't change your die pool at all, they are negative aspects that can give your opponents bonus dice when whupping up on you. They also make those wounds, which give you penalty dice, stick around for much longer. And they themselves have abysmal recovery times, so you'll be carrying them around for a while.

So why would I want to make them easier to get rid of? I want to give the players options. More than that though, I think that magic needs to be able to deal with injuries in order for it to remain anything close to respectable when compared to modern medicine. Still, I intend to keep the cost high.

If we're going to do this, we need a couple of things:

1. How to assess the target threshold
2. How to assess drain

The rest, factoring in the target's essence, rolling the dice, etc., can follow the existing procedure. No need to completely reinvent the process. 

So, threshold. When healing wounds this was really easy, since each wound has its own number. Subtract the yang of the spell from the wound number and drop it that many levels. Injuries, however, don't have numbers. They have levels. Still, these levels represent a range of wound boxes they encompass, so let's say that the threshold for healing an injury is equal to the lowest wound box in the injury's range. 

Why the lowest? Honestly, it's because of one thing: I want there to be more than a single point difference between serious and deadly injuries.

This makes the target thresholds for injuries as follows:

• Light = 1
• Moderate = 5
• Serious = 8
• Deadly = 10

Now, there's a big difference between magically healed wounds and medically treated ones: success on a magical healing check means the wound is completely healed. As in all gone. Medicine drops it by a level, where it can be treated again. Magic makes it all go away at once. It's a pretty hefty difference, but that's part of the reason for those target thresholds.

Yes, this means a light injury is ridiculously easy to heal, but a medic can heal these without making any roll at all, so I'm okay with the low threshold there. On the other end of the spectrum, you need 10 hits to get rid of a deadly injury. 10 hits is a lot. Even if you do manage to make that, it means you probably aren't saving any of those hits to help you with drain. And that means you're taking some hardcore mana burn to pull that off. 

On that topic, let's talk drain. While the idea of being taken out trying to heal an injury has its appeal, for the sake of simplicity let's say healing injuries causes injuries, in this case stun. So drain for healing injuries is a stun injury of the same level you are attempting to heal. Your yin dice can reduce this, however it's not a 1:1 reduction in drain the way it is for wounds. Again, injuries have ranges of wounds they encompass. For drain reduction, start at the highest wound rating within an injury, and drop it by 1 for each yin. When you run out of yin, find the corresponding injury level. That's what you take in drain.

For example, let's say your friendly mage chummer is trying to heal a serious wound. He generates 3 yin on his test. He starts at a serious stun injury in drain, which includes box 9 at its high end. Subtract 3 from that for the 3 yin, which brings him to 6. Wound 6 falls within the aegis of a moderate injury, so he takes a moderate stun injury in drain.

Since a mage doesn't take any wounds from healing injuries, he's never going to be taken out by doing so. While that may seem weak, it also means that it locks his stun boxes in place, meaning that a simple rest after combat might not have him up to full capacity when it comes time to start slinging the mana again. This means that the party needs to judge whether it's worth knocking their caster down a few pegs for the next few scenes every time.

More Healing Pain

I've been going over the new healing rules I laid out a few weeks ago. The ones designed to make injuries more painful, and I'm wondering if they need an even sharper edge. I don't want the entire party sitting in traction for the duration of every session, but clearly making combat something from which you can bounce back with ease has robbed violent altercations of any sense of danger. Most times it's all guns and attitude from your best mindless action movie. That's cool every so often. Really. I'm a big fan of big action sequences. But when that's all you've got, like anything, it tends to get old.

So, a few weeks ago I tossed out the idea of making injuries lock all wounds in that level in place. A serious injury would prevent any wounds in the serious range from healing, for example. Moderate and light wounds would recover normally during that time, however.

How'd that work out? Well, honestly, I'm hoping someone could tell me, because I haven't had an opportunity to playtest those rules yet, and right now it's looking like my Shadowrun group won't have some communally open time on the weekends until next year. We're looking at another 2 months before we get together again at the earliest. Bummer.

In the meantime, however, I'm giving some serious thought to tweaking those proposed and entirely theoretical rules again. It's a simple tweak, easy to implement, but with an even greater impact on injuries and wounding. It is, simply, this:

Injuries lock in place all wounds at their level and lower.

Thus a moderate injury prevents not only moderate wounds from healing, but light ones too. A deadly injury means none of your wounds can begin healing until you recover a little and at least drop the injury a level, at which point your deadly wound can drop to a serious, but is again stuck until that injury drops another level.

This makes injuries hurt. The bonus dice I can get by tagging the condition is a mechanical price players have to pay, but they're willing to hand me that capacity quite readily. It gives them a few extra rounds of action, and then they'll drop anyway. Following the fight, they hole up for a few days, clear out their wound track and head back out there to bust some caps and some heads. Couldn't be easier.

Now, it's entirely possible that with this set of rules in place the players will continue to engage in frequent, all offense combat with no thought to self-preservation and just sit as invalids for longer stretches of in-game time. Getting hammered in rough combat isn't always a deterrent. I remember a supers game in which I was a player. I was the most violent member of the group (always against the bad guys though), and when confronted with tough opponents, I'd frequently just continue to hammer away at them even when it didn't work. That, however, was largely because I was frustrated with the game and it's complete lack of consequences and character.

I've talked to my players in this campaign, and they assure me they love the story and the developments that have arisen with certain NPCs recently (a character's daughter who had been missing turned up as a new member of the Universal Brotherhood), and they really look forward to what else is in store.

So if I take them at their word (and I've got no reason not to), I have to conclude that their combat actions are a result of mechanical implication. That is, getting hurt doesn't matter. You might drop in the fight, but you'll be back up in no time. If I want fights to be tenser, I need to make the damage matter more. And since I'm not willing to introduce harsher wound penalties (death spirals have never proved fun to play in any game I've tried), I'm left with making the characters suffer their wound penalties for longer periods of time. Using this new method it's entirely possible that the characters will enter into a second combat still wearing the marks of the first.

My own playtesting begins whenever I can gather the troops again next year. Until then, if anyone else gives this a whirl, drop a comment and let me know how it worked for you.

Playtest Results: Aspects - General Guidelines

We've tackled aspects as contacts and aspects as a way of fleshing out your magical abilities, but that still leaves the broad expanse of everything else. That's a lot of ground to cover, and it contains a lot of possibilities. Thus, it's harder to break into neat little categories. Something I discovered as I began reviewing the aspects that one of my players sent me is that there's such a broad array of possibilities here that its best to provide a better idea of how aspects are supposed to work in broad terms and let the specifics fall out in a case by case basis.

Double Edged
Waaaaaay back in the beginning of this blog I listed some of the components I considered essential to this particular game. Among them were broken characters. In cyberpunk stories everyone's got personal problems, and deep ones. Eventually I decided that instead of creating some sort of disadvantage system, I'd roll the "broken" idea into aspects. Thus aspects give you some cool bonuses, but they also drag you down, and since the only way to power those bonuses is to compel those penalties, you get reason to play those flaws.

The key here is to make the advantage and the drawback revolve around the same theme. The two don't have to have anything in common mechanically, but they should derive from the same source.

Expand Your Character, Not His Abilities
Aspects give you mechanical bonuses, but their real purpose is to make portions of your character's, well, character pop in the game by attaching a mechanic to it, not to jack up your already boosted knacks to even higher levels. Thus you should draw your aspects from who your character is, not what he can do. Yes, a kickass hacker might have a customized commlink that he can really redline, but at that point it's just a bonus and it's boring. But if your hacker was a child prodigy who created a new kind of microprocessor for Renraku, and then fled with the prototype installed in his 'link, that's different. Now the aspect is about his genius and the trouble it caused him. The downside of the aspect could be that Renraku's again located him, either on the Matrix or in the physical world, and they'll be dispatching some Red Samurai shortly.

Be Flexible
In general, aspects give a +2 die bonus to a specific kind of die roll, but it doesn't have to be that way. These are narrative tools, so start with the rule-less description of the aspect. You're writing a mini-story about something to do with your character. From there you can extrapolate the rules as you need. You'll probably need to write some original rules material at some point following this approach. That's perfectly fine.

Something I noticed is that a lot of people assumed that since aspects typically add 2 dice to something when invoked, they must subtract 2 dice when compelled. Not necessarily true. In fact, in most of the aspects I provided to my playtest group didn't inflict any die penalties. They put the characters in difficult situations, either by the reactions of others or forcing destructive behavior on them (that whole "broken" thing again). These kinds of flaws impact the game much more than a simple die penalty, so don't be shy in keeping the drawbacks in the realm of role playing. Unlike traditional flaws which may never come up, the role playing difficulties of aspects have to come up if the player wants that edge point.

Since I work well with examples, here are a few from my game:

Drug "Expert"
You've got a monkey on your back, and his name is Morphine. Somewhere along the way you got hooked on the painkillers you administered to your patients and now you use a whole lot more on yourself than to assist those under your care. However, it's given you a lot of practice in how to best administer the stuff.

Invoke - +2 dice when using painkillers as part of a medical check
Compel - the craving calls and you get high. You'll function at reduced capacity for the remainder of the scene

Warbringer & Peacemaker
This customized pair of pistols was a gift from your fiancée, before the team got burned and possessed and you had to go on a manhunt to kill those infested. They're high quality and made specifically for you and your smartlink, meaning they just feel "right" when you fire. Unfortunately, you used them extensively when on your manhunt, and they're better known than you are. Someone sees those and they think "team killer."

Invoke - +2 dice when firing the guns
Compel - you've got an awful reputation, and these guns are tied up in that. When this aspect is compelled, someone recognizes the guns, and therefor you. That's the end of any negotiations right there.

Sahsa
You've got yourself a girlfriend. Not just any girlfriend though. She's a serious hottie. Oh yeah, and she's a porn star. She gets around, no, not like that. Well, yes, like that, but in other, more professionally useful ways as well. She knows lots and lots of people, many of whom would love to do things for her, and she's not only got access to money of her own, but can smile up dough out of many adoring men as well. Unfortunately, she knows she's queen of her world right now, and expects to be pampered and treated appropriately, which means you must be ready to drop everything at any time and attend to her.

Invoke - gain +2 on any spending roll. She may serve as a fixer, putting you in contact with others, especially those in the entertainment industry. Finally, if the risk isn't too great, she can do a little work herself, posing as the attractive girl who distracts the guard with flirtatious chatter while the team sneaks past.

Compel - Sasha wants attention in all its forms. Thus she tends to call at odd times, like when you're in the middle of a negotiation or a job. And if you don't respond to her demands right away, you're likely to pay for it, literally. She got all the access codes to your accounts from you a long while ago, and despite your promises to yourself that you'll change your passwords, she always gets the new ones out of you. If you don't give her what she wants when she wants it, you can expect to take a big financial hit as she engages in intensive retail therapy to sooth her hurt feelings. Credit injuries are not out of the question.


Automatic Jack
As the proud owner of a surplus Russian Federation SPk-23 "Stali Bagor" combat-ready human augment, you're used to getting admiring looks and confused stares.


Invoke - Among the savvy, this has a certain chic to it and to the posers, it just says badass milsurp. To say nothing of its vastly over-engineered robust qualities far beyond a modern namby-pamby unit, this thing takes abuse. It is the AK-47 of cyber-limb replacements. When you get hit, you can take an injury to the arm instead of to your meat. It costs 1 edge point per level of injury, and that injury will knock your arm offline, but it can be repaired with much more ease than your body can. 


Compel - Cutting edge? Sure…30 years ago. Its been well used, and its been known to have the occasional minor glitch in use, make the odd noise, etc. To say nothing of the fact of the matter of having an inelegant piece of Soviet technology grafted to your arm, in the wrong circles, it might be considered….gauche. Some call it retro, others call it ancient tech that only gutter runners would stoop to.

Playtest Results - Aspects in Magic

Once you delve into it, magic in Shadowrun has a lot of nuances and options to it. Aside from the two big areas of sorcery and conjuring, there are a ton of ways to customize your mage. There are traditions, gaes, and fetishes, each of which have a number of options within them. There's a good reason why every edition of Shadowrun has had to publish a separate book on magic, and it's not because they had a ton of spells they couldn't cram into the main book.

Rather than try to reproduce all of that material in Shadowitz, however, I'm attempting to recreate a lot of the feel these rules and options provide using existing rules, specifically the aspect rules. Since each of these tweaks, in broad terms, gives a bonus with an attached cost or limitation, with a little creativity we should be able to represent nearly all of this material using aspects.

Traditions
Let's start with the biggie: magical traditions. In the beginning, there were two: hermetic magic and shamanism. Though the game has subsequently expanded this to many other areas, most players who have come up through the SR editions seem most comfortable sticking with these original two. In 15 years of playing this game, I think I played with one voodoo priest once. Every other time the party only had hermetics or shamans.

Hermetics don't need any aspects applied to them in terms of basic tradition. They are the well rounded mages who suffer no penalties and receive no bonuses. Their sorcery has always been a straight roll of the dice, no extra considerations needed.

Shamans, on the other hand, traditionally get a bonus to one kind of spell, a penalty to another kind of spell, and some other behavioral quirk. Wolves might frenzy, dogs can't change their actions once a plan is set, lions need to buy the finest goods, eagles suffer twice the essence loss from cyberware implants, etc. The drawbacks are many and varied, so you need to stay flexible in your mechanical implementation, but it can be done.

The most obvious way to apply the aspect is to make the invoke portion grant a bonus to one spell category and the compel to another, thus giving bonuses and penalties to certain kinds of magic. However, this turns the penalty into something that's optional, and the bonus and penalty granted by a totem can be kept as is (1-3 die bonus or penalty) and active all the time.

The behavioral penalty, however, is fertile ground indeed. Here's where you find material that guides a character's actions, and by extension his identity. A wolf shaman's tendency to frenzy when a member of his pack is hurt tells a lot more about who he is than the fact that he gets +2 dice on combat spells. Here, I think, is where you'll find the best stuff for making tradition-based aspects.

Let's take that wolf drawback: you must pass a willpower check or go into a frenzy when one of your friends is taken out. Reading the entire wolf entry, you find this is because wolf is a pack hunter who shows great loyalty to those he runs with. That attitude is is the thing from which we'll build the totem aspect:

Wolf
You have been touched by Wolf. It is through him that you learned to talk to the spirits and work magic, and it is his eyes through which you peer when you look into the astral plane. Contact with such a powerful, primal force has left an impression on your own mind, making you aggressive, yet team oriented. Most times you can control the feral urges you carry, and can channel it especially well when working with others you are close with. But when one of your own is hurt the rage boils hot and you sometimes see red and lose control.

Invoke - Gain +2 dice whenever casting a spell that is specifically used in conjunction with a teammate's attack. A fireball might flush opposition out into a kill zone, a manabolt can fell a gunner who has a comrade pinned down, etc. Note that this must directly aid another member of your team; you cannot apply this bonus to every attack against an enemy and claim downed enemies help your side.

Compel - Wolves are pack hunters, but they are also savage in combat. You can remain cool under fire when taking the lead yourself, but when you see one of your own hurt (injured or taken out), you sometimes lose control. When this aspect is compelled you abandon all tactics and become mindlessly aggressive toward the force that felled your friend. You must use the most powerful spells you can cast at full force rating, your most powerful weapon, etc., and attack relentlessly (no hiding behind cover or being cagey) until either you defeat the opponent or spend edge to recover.

Geas
Geas are restrictions that mages take in order to preserve or gain magical power. When faced with magic loss, a mage can opt to take a geas instead, and mages seeking to initiate can take one as an ordeal to reduce the cost. I haven't dealt with ordeals in Shadowitz yet because our mage doesn't look like he'll be initiating anytime soon, and I didn't include rules for magic loss because in general I've felt mages have gotten the shaft mechanically speaking (especially because no sam ever had to track ammo in the games I played, but I took drain for every attack I made).

However, even though there's not been a lot of call for these in my games, turning them into aspects doesn't seem like something that would be too difficult. Like traditions above, not every geas need be turned into an aspect. Some, like not being able to cast spells when wearing green, don't need any further mechanics. Is your character in a green jumper? He can't cast spells. Done. No more is needed.

But how about those that involve things that are a little harder to adjudicate. I remember seeing an example once of a geas that restricted access to magic after the mage ate meat. On the surface that's simple. Don't eat meat. Let me ask you though, how many games have you played where the dietary composition of the team ever came up? Do your characters ever eat in game? Sure, the lifestyle guides give you an idea of what their daily fare looks like, but is it ever present? Outside of an ongoing joke that "purple is a terrible flavor" in one of my games where everyone was poor and had to buy flavoring in concentrate and apply it with an eye dropper, people tended to focus on running the shadows. You know, the namesake of the game.

The reason I bring this up is that if eating's not a part of the game, then the mage gets the geas for free. He gets a benefit without any consequence. And while you can put him in a position where he might struggle with it now and again, such as meeting a Johnson who takes offense if you don't eat the steak he bought you, you can only emply that method so many times before it gets ridiculous.

What to do? Make it an aspect. You compel it at some random point in the game after there's been enough down time to assume the mage ate something and when he next summons his magical power you toss the edge chip his way and say it's not working.

Wait, what? No, says the mage. I don't ever eat meat. Well, yes, that's what you think. But if you ask most people today, they'll swear they don't eat rat, but if they've ever eaten a hot dog or a Butterfinger, odds are they had a few rat parts in their past. In the days of processed food and lax production oversight (which is Shadowrun through and through) you can't really say with certainty what's in anything you're eating. Bummer. You ate something with enough animal byproducts that it messed up your mojo for a little bit.

Now stripping a mage of his magic is pretty severe, so giving the player an edge point and then relegating him to a crappy gun skill with a light pistol for the next 24 hours of game time isn't a good trade off. If you're going that route, I suggest making the compel worth more points, maybe even upwards of 4 or more.

Another way of doing it is reducing the penalty for violation. Instead of barring the mage from all sorcery and conjuring tasks for the duration, you could instead inflict an ongoing die penalty. In this case, you should still give a couple extra edge points for invoking the geas, but not as much as if you strip the mage of magic entirely. In this case he's hurt, but he's still functional.

Fetishes
Fetishes are objects that a mage uses to boost his spells. They're similar to foci, except that they're not overtly magical. Instead of tapping into the extra mana that foci bring to a magical process, mages instead learn to use the mundane fetishes to increase their own power. They are parts of the magical process, but are themselves not batteries of mana.

As aspects, fetishes are the opposite of geas. Where geas only have a compel portion, fetishes only have an invoke aspect. There's no downside to using fetishes outside of the fact that you can run out. (Yes, I know some editions have included non-expendable fetishes, but those always seems like cheap foci to me, so I kept fetishes to the expendable variety in my games).

Since fetishes get used up in the casting process, you need some kind of ammo counter. Or, really, you don't. After all, if a fetish aspect gets you a bonus when casting a particular spell, let's just say your edge pool represents your fetish supply. Spend the edge, get the bonus. When you run out of edge, you run out of your fetishes too. If you later get more edge, you've managed to find some more fetish material as well.

Playtest Results: Aspects as Contacts

Of the playtest feedback I've received to date, the most expansive request for more material and explanation was regarding aspects. They've really lit a fire under some of the players, but while the players are pretty clear on how to use them mechanically, they remain mystified as to how to make a good one for themselves, and in fact I received an email from a player who was trying to do just that and instead felt he was "just flailing."

So, clearly, aspects deserve their own chapter. Not only would a discussion on their creation and use benefit players, but as one of my own pointed out they're a narrative tool that has everything to do with defining a character even as they give a mechanical benefit. If I want deeper characters who have more to them than their ability to beat ass, I should be pushing the aspects pretty hard.

I'm going to spend this week on aspects. This post and the two that follow later in the week will go into more detail on how I envision aspects being used in Shadowitz, including eventually a sample run through of creating a couple aspects for a character.

Now, let me throw in this statement as a starter: because aspects are largely narrative, I don't think there's ever going to be a single set of hard rules that govern their creation in this game. You won't find point values by which you can guarantee that every aspect is 100% balanced against every other. Done right, they're not formulaic and resist such mechanical rigidity. If you approach them as ways to make the most important parts of your character matter in the game rather than a list of bonuses you can gain to boost your preferred knack rolls, the process becomes smoother.

That said, let's start with a relatively simple application of aspects: contacts. Shadowrun has had contact rules for as long as its existed. When I first started playing they were just a pair of names and roles that I slapped on my sheet as the last step in character creation. Later, as I got more into the game, I found levels of contact (associate, buddy, etc.), which even included some guidelines as to what it took to elevate a contact to higher devotion levels and keep them there. Finally, the latest edition of SR added yet more granularity by giving contacts a pair of scores, which quantified the raw capabilities of the contact, and how willing the person was to do anything for you (so you might know a CEO, but she's not interested in taking your calls very often).

The thing is, we almost never used our contacts. Usually someone would take a decker contact so that no one else would have to run the Matrix, and someone else would have a fixer so we could get jobs. Past that, no one bothered, and rarely did anyone look at the list of who they knew when presented with a tough situation.

This stuck out all the more when I read Neuromancer. That book has a scene early in the story in which one of the characters uses her contacts on a very Shadowrun-ish mission. During that mission the contacts don't just provide information and let the runners go on their way, but they instead become a critical part of the mission, creating a big distraction that allows the runners to slip deeper into a secure building. As soon as I read that scene, two things struck me:

1. This is what contact use in SR should feel like. Maybe that's even what they intended when they included contacts as part of your character.
2. There was no mechanical element in the game that supported this. 

Further reading showed exactly how much the street sam of the story relied not only on her own skill and cybernetic edge, but leveraged how many people she knew and how diverse her web of contacts was. More and more I was convinced that there needed to be something like this in my game.

That's where the Fixer method comes in. That rule allows characters to utilize their contacts as something more than information banks. They can get directly involved in the action, but by making it a stat on the character sheet, does so in a way that keeps the player involved in the scene instead of relegating everything to the GM rolling dice against himself behind his screen.

So what does this have to do with aspects? Aspects can be used to add color and depth to your contact base. While the Fixer method still has a lot to do with the number of hits you wind up rolling, you're still using the same method no matter the contact, since Fixer represents a mix of contact competence and the level of personal connection you have to them. Aspects, however, can make exceptions, and exceptional contacts.

Like any aspect, contact aspects have upside and drawbacks, which can be invoked or compelled respectively, and it is these qualities that can make a contact truly stand out.

For example, one of the characters in my game has a Vory boss as a contact. I've been urging him to make him an aspect, and recently we worked out the details. The two shared a prison cell for a while, and the character, a hacker, managed to do some creative accounting from his cell for the Vory, which prevented the boss from losing any ground during his incarceration. He's developed a soft spot for the character, and has done him the favor of making him an exclusive employee of the syndicate without the need to go through the standard ranks of promotion. The problem is that the character never wanted to be in the Vory, but he never cultivated any other fixer contacts upon being released, and has done nothing but Vory runs since hitting the streets again (something the player himself was unaware of until I brought it to his attention).

As an aspect, Mr. Ivonovich looks like this:

"Old Roommate"
You shared a cell with Ivonovich and did good work for him while incarcerated. He's paid you back, making your original agreement complete, but there's a genuine affection that remains between the two of you, and he's gone out of his way to help you whenever he can. Unfortunately, he seems incapable of understanding that you don't want to join the Vory, so his help has the tendency to get you ever more deeply involved in an organization you want to avoid.

Invoke: The Vory are excellent data miners. Given enough time and money, they can get the goods on almost anyone. They've also, in more recent years, developed a successful smuggling operation which specializes in weapons trafficking. Whenever you ask Ivonovich to provide either information or weapons, you can invoke this aspect.

Compel: Ivonovich is fine doing favors for you, but he does take heat for it. You have, after all, not gone through the normal ranks and don't technically deserve the treatment you get. Ivonovich is a big enough man to fend off most of the problems that come his way for the continual favor he shows you, but he does require you to show your loyalty to the Vory as a whole every now and again. Most of the time he calls with job offers like any other fixer. Sometimes he calls with Vory assignments. Those are not optional, and they are guaranteed to be heinous, even for a Shadowrunner.

As another example, the party as a whole has a contact named Icelady, who is a former Johnson of theirs. They did good work for her, and even went over and above the call of duty to help her out when the job became WAY bigger than what they signed on for. As a reward, I said they could automatically add her as a contact in addition to receiving pay.

Icelady
She hired you to invalidate her dead boyfriend's will. Instead, you found he was still alive, was framed, rescued him, and even put their relationship on a better track, and this after you protected her store from looters and saved her from an assassination attempt. She might still be rough around the edges, but she's eternally grateful.

Invoke: Icelady is a store owner specializing in talismongering. If you need magical supplies, from fetishes to magical reagents to foci, she can either hook you up or knows someone who can. And she's willing to give you a big discount. Whenever purchasing magical gear, you can invoke Icelady for a bonus to your resource roll.

Compel: Since the run's conclusion, the heat's cooled on Icelady, but the woman has a knack for getting into trouble. Her store's still right across the tracks from Redmond, and she ruffles enough feathers on a regular basis that there seem to be no end of people who want to cause her trouble, either by ransacking her place or even roughing her up (it's possible the bassist from her boyfriend's band is still interested in giving her drek out of jealousy too). You've been there before, and you're kind of friends now, so when in trouble, guess who she calls? Wouldn't you know those calls happen to come in only when you're in the middle of trying to outrun a Lone Star HTR team or trying to sneak past a pair of sentry guns.

Playtest Results: Size

Size rules, which appear in the vehicles section of the main book, haven't had a whole lot of use in my game so far. Perhaps it's conditioning from other games, but my players never shoot at vehicles. They'll always take the higher threshold penalties to fire at the driver, or, at the very least, shoot out the tires. Called shots like that don't impact the vehicle's health meter, so we've had very little use for the size mechanic.

Be that as it may, there's plenty of description on how to use it, but none on how to derive it. I always intended it to be a quick and dirty evaluation, but for some reason that never made it into the text. So, here's my quick and dirty attempt to put that down.

A quick note: size isn't a reflection of the inherent toughness of a vehicle, that would be armor and the damage meter. Size instead reflects the difficulty in shooting something worthwhile on the vehicle. An 18 wheeler might be pretty easy to hit when you spray it down with automatic fire, but most those bullets are going to punch through the side and hit nothing but air. Even if you concentrate fire on the cab, you'll chew up upholstery and the like, but a whole lot of those bullets won't actually do anything more than cosmetic damage. Thus, size is exactly that: size. It's not toughness.

So, with that out of the way, here are my previously unwritten thoughts on size:

Size 0 is the baseline. This means there's no modifications to the attack and damage rolls in combat. Characters, even trolls, are size 0, and by extension so are most small vehicles. By small I mean mostly motorcycles. Even if a bike is significantly heavier than a character, there's not a lot of empty space on these vehicles, so a hit probably means a real hit.

Size 1 are vehicles with just a little storage capacity and empty space around their shells. I'm thinking something like the Jackrabbit here.

Size 2 is getting into car territory. 2 door, 4 door, compact, sedan, all of that. At this point there's a fair bit of air enclosed in that body, and there's probably nothing but a bench seat behind the driver. You can tag the people on a called shot, but there's nothing back there worth hitting otherwise. This category also covers 2 seater helicopters and speedboats. This is going to be the most common size players encounter unless they're in exotic settings.

Size 3 vehicles are really big. We're talking limousines and other extended body vehicles like citymasters. Anything this big tends to stand out; people don't commute using these conveyances.

Size 4 is a category reserved for cargo vehicles. These things have a ton of open space, usually with the intention of filling said space. Cargo trucks, hovercraft, and larger troop carriers all fall into this category.

Size 5 is the biggest it gets. If you look at it and need to swivel your head side to side to take it all in, it probably belongs here, assuming most of that space isn't filled with vital components.

Now, that covers big things. What about small things? I don't have much need for that, since my rigger is dead set against ever using a drone, but I did give it a little thought at one point regardless. While it's entirely untested, I think that you can reverse the size rule and apply it to smaller vehicles such as drones. Negative size modifies an attacker's roll as follows:

• Add the absolute value of the size to the threshold required to hit
• Increase the method by 1 when determining damage for every 2 points of negative size 

For example, lets say a rigger's using a rotor-drone (they were popular in my group until a crazy travel schedule forced our then-rigger to drop out of the game). They're decent sized drones, but still smaller than a person, so we'll give it a size of -2.

A shooter with a Razor of 3 fires at the drone. He must score at least 3 yang on his roll, since the drone's size adds 2 to the base threshold of the attack check. If the drone also engages in defensive actions, the attacker needs to beat the drone's yin +3 (because +2 will yield a net of 0 yang, which is a miss).

The shooter hits, scoring just one yang. Normally this would mean he does base weapon damage, but the drone's negative size means he gets to treat his Razor as a 4 when looking to code up his damage score. He couldn't apply any 4s to his attack roll, but he's free to roll them into his damage now that he's scored a hit.

This means that small drones are much harder to tag, but don't take punishment as well. Now, you could just make damage meters on these things small, but this lets you have drones that can still take more than a single hit, provided it's not a big one. Plus, you could use this on a much broader scale than an ever decreasing damage track. After all, you can't shrink something past a 1 box damage track, but size could drop infinitely, theoretically.

Playtest Results: Essence to Magic

This is an easy one. A playtester asked about essence loss as it applies to magic. He knew the Shadowrun rules, but he didn't see any mention of how it works in Shadowitz, and since the adept rules are different in the two games, he wasn't sure how it worked.

So, here's the explanation, and I'll put it in the book too:

Your magic equals the whole number of your essence. A magically active character with an essence of 6 has a 6 magic. If his essence dips to 5.75, his magic drops to a 5. 3.42 essence = 3 magic.

Now, as to what a dip in magic does to your awakened abilities, that too is a straight equation. Mages need do no further adjustments; sorcery and conjuring mechanics already use a mage's magic score, so the ramifications of the score adjustment are already taken care of. Adepts, on the other hand, must do one more little adjustment. They purchase powers in whole points now, so for each magic point lost, they lose one power, or level of a power. It doesn't have to be the most recently attained one; a player can drop whatever power he likes.

Any awakened character who drops below a 1 essence loses all magical abilities, regardless of how much he's boosted his magic through initiation.

Playtest Results: Negotiation

One of the first things on the list of feedback I received from a playtester was that there was no negotiation knack. Now, that's not entirely true, since negotiation is on the knack list, but he's right in that it doesn't receive the same extensive treatment that some of the others do, with specialization options and in-depth descriptions and uses. So I sat down and started to sketch things out.

Except that everything I came up with wound up being really close to Rapport except for the one reason everyone I've ever played with has ever taken negotiation: haggling for pay with the Johnson pre-run.

This needs its own knack? My initial thought was to make a whole subset of mechanics to handle negotiations, turn the back and forth into its own little mini-game that made the process more interesting than the only kind exchange that has ever shown up at my table:

"The job pays 40k per head."
"Make it 80."
"I'll give you 50k."
"70."
"60."

Here it either stops, or someone decides to push just a little more:

"... 65!"

And if the Johnson just ever flat out says no? That's when things get really suave. And yes, this is a quote from a former party face:

"Aw, come on."

Now, a good system could put some more meat and variety to these exchanges, no question. So if I'm complaining that the contract negotiation exchanges are bland and boring, I as a good game designer should take it upon myself to create a system that adds all the spice and color I think is missing, right? That's what I set out to do.

And then I put it away.

Do I really want haggling for money to be a big part of my game? I set out to create a game about competent specialists in a cyberpunk-fantasy setting. What part of dickering over money is that? When I look at it like that, it's not. Is negotiation really vital to the game? My current player base doesn't even bother negotiating their contracts at all anymore. They trust I won't lowball them, and most of them aren't hungry for money anymore anyway. Their lifestyle is taken care of, the sam has the ware he wants, and the rigger already has two vehicles at this point, and hates drones. And really, contract negotiation could  be more interesting, if people ever thought to ask for something other than more money. Medical care, some special gear, stock options, etc. But if the players aren't interested enough to ask for things, I don't see the need for a special set of rules covering this. A straight up opposed roll using negotiation could handle things just fine.

Maybe it's sounds like a little bit of a cop out, but I think the first playtest revision is going to be to leave things as they are. Adding a whole sub-set of rules to cover something that no one at my table does seems superfluous. Not to mention that this decision staves off rules bloat. I'm sure everyone's played a game that started out perfectly fine but got out of hand as more material piled on. I'm all for having rules for stuff, but only when they're necessary. In this case, I don't see the need.