Organ Markets in Shadowrun

[Murtak]

K - clearly your organs do NOT contain your magic. The whole aura / essence theme means that the entirety of your body creates your connection to your magic.

So - removing your arm doesn't reduce your magic. Replacing your arm with a cyber arm does. This is a weird disconnect, and mostly game balance, but it clearly shows that your aura doesn't stick with your arm after it gets chopped off.

Earlier editions had deadly wounds cause potential magic loss - they ditched those rules when they changed the damage system - but it was a more logical extension of the "body changed = aura changed" than the current "no legs and arms is still the same"

I remember the logic being "does it feel the same for you?". Basically if your body does not conform to your self-image you lose essence. So getting your arm chopped off = essence reduction. Getting it replaced with a cloned replacement = you get your essence back. Replacing it with a cyberarm does not feel right, so you lose essence. Advanced cyberarms feel more like natural limbs, so you lose less essence. Presumably a really good cyberarm would not cause you to lose essence, but in order for that to be true it could not have increased strength, the ability to turn off pain and so on. So basically there is not much reason for such a cyberarm to exist.

[Parthenon]

You could think of it this way:
In terms of the magic breath it's not replacing your lungs with that of a dog, its replacing everything except the lungs with the PC's body.

If replacing an arm reduces your magic then replacing everything except the lungs will reduce the magic so much that there'll be no fire breath anyway.

[Surgo]

Essence is a mechanic that doesn't make any sense anyway. This is like trying to argue that an action is lawful or chaotic.

[CatharzGodfoot]

K - clearly your organs do NOT contain your magic. The whole aura / essence theme means that the entirety of your body creates your connection to your magic.

So - removing your arm doesn't reduce your magic. Replacing your arm with a cyber arm does. This is a weird disconnect, and mostly game balance, but it clearly shows that your aura doesn't stick with your arm after it gets chopped off.

So you're claiming that if you cut off a dragon's wings it can still fly, because the wings are just decoration? And if you replace the wings with cyberwings, it might not be able to fly because essence loss could have messed up its innate magical flying powers?

[Crissa]

Well, it probably can't fly if you chop its wings off because it can no longer complete the somatic portion of the spell.

It's just, if you replace the arm or whatever with cyber stuff, your aura tries to spread out over it and fails or something.

Anyhow, binding the hellhound's spirit still means you can't chop of the hellhound and make magic items of it - you still only get one hellhound.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

I was always under the impression that getting your arm chopped off would reduce your magical ability regardless what you did afterwards.

When you stick things off of it you're trying to recover the essence that you lost. For example, you get your arm chopped back and install low-grade cyberware, you don't get any of that lost essence back. But if you get your arm chopped off and have it replaced with awesome deltaware your essence score creeps back up again.

[Username17]

Dragons do indeed fly without any wings at all. Eastern Dragons for example.

It becomes a harder question to answer for things like the Greater Roc. I genuinely don't know what would happen if you cut its wings off.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Back to the original topic, organ bootlegging traces back to early Cyberpunk literature, which is probably why it's in Shadowrun still.

If memory serves (It's been a year or two since I read Neuromancer, I try to read it once a year so it's time), organ-legging was referenced when Case saw a Sarariman who was so "pure" and genetically engineered that he had a toxin sensor on him to alert him when he was absorbing too much pollution and crap from his environment. Case remarked to himself that the man in question could get rolled straight into a clinic and end up as spare parts.

Hell Case was pushing pituitaries before he met Molly et al.

So, that being said. Historically organ-legging seems to concern itself with "purified" organs in back-alley clinics, which leads to the only reason why I could see organ-legging functioning in Shadowrun. I imagine vat-grown organs are tracked, have serial numbers, hell even probably have DNA tracers implanted into them. Even if they don't, getting one implanted probably requires you to answer questions: "Why did your liver get shot seven times?"

So a black market for organs would avoid A) messy paperwork trails for the truly paranoid, and B) questions asked at the hospital.

As for second-hand cyberware, I'm okay with 5% return selling 'ware to a ripperjack. First, it makes sense that crap like bone-lacing and wired reflexes can't be sold back. It's systemic to the person. Second, I can't see too many fences actually *purchasing* a cyberhand with bloody stump still attached to it. When there's only two or three purchasers in an area, it's kind of a buyer's market. Prices will go down.

Finally, you'd be surprised at how cheap most stolen items get pawned/hawked/fenced for. A 2000 dollar TV *might* get sold for 500 bucks, most likely maybe only 200. If there's a glut on TVs, yeah I can see it going for 100 bucks. The person selling usually really, really needs/wants the money, and isn't in a position to haggle. If you're literally ripping off body parts from someone to sell them, you probably need the money too. The seller really doesn't want to cart a television (or in this case an arm) around the city from fence to fence looking for the best deal, and that's making the massive assumption you know more than one professional criminal fence that you trust enough to do business with. In all reality, a professional shadowrunner probably will ask his fixer, who will suggest *a* fence/ripper. Going back to your fixer and saying "he wasn't going to pay me enough" is not conductive to a healthy relationship with your fixer.

Overall, remember: the way you get paid more is to either sell a rarer product (deltaware might, for example, go for 10% instead of 5%, simply by being *that* rare), or have more buyers competing with each other. In such a rarefied market as selling off used body parts/cyberware, I can't see there being many purchasers.

[RandomCasualty2]

Overall, remember: the way you get paid more is to either sell a rarer product (deltaware might, for example, go for 10% instead of 5%, simply by being *that* rare), or have more buyers competing with each other. In such a rarefied market as selling off used body parts/cyberware, I can't see there being many purchasers.

Isn't deltaware custom tailored to a specific person though?

[TheFlatline]

Overall, remember: the way you get paid more is to either sell a rarer product (deltaware might, for example, go for 10% instead of 5%, simply by being *that* rare), or have more buyers competing with each other. In such a rarefied market as selling off used body parts/cyberware, I can't see there being many purchasers.

Isn't deltaware custom tailored to a specific person though?

Probably. I was taking examples out of my ass while in the middle of working. Let's say Betaware then.

[Username17]

Yeah, SR tech is weirdly inverse from the way you'd think it would work. The higher end stuff (cultured bioware, beta and delta grade implants) are tailor made for the recipient, and worthless to anyone else.

So you'd think that taking out someone with a million nuyen reflex system would be a pay day - but it's actually not. Pulling out the melon baller and regifting the cyberware of fallen enemies is small money when you're low on the totem pole and chase after small pay days, but when you're a big fish and no longer care about small money, you're up against people whose ware is so expensive and awesome that the resale value is... nothing at all.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

I have a few criteria for a cyberpunk game with dragons. One of them is that the dragons can fly around with cyberwings. Ideally they would be cyberwings with cyberscramjets.

[TheFlatline]

I have a few criteria for a cyberpunk game with dragons. One of them is that the dragons can fly around with cyberwings. Ideally they would be cyberwings with cyberscramjets.

The idea of a dragon going mach 20 somehow fills me with a dark, deep dread.

[Username17]

I have a few criteria for a cyberpunk game with dragons. One of them is that the dragons can fly around with cyberwings. Ideally they would be cyberwings with cyberscramjets.

The idea of a dragon going mach 20 somehow fills me with a dark, deep dread.

In Shadowrun, magical and technological methods of travel time reduction are multiplicative. Lots of things can go mach 8 or so (mach 20 is fairly hard to arrange).

The standard of Shadowrun armored presence is the "T-Bird" - an armored vector-thrust flying tank essentially. Those Low Altitude Vehicles fly around at 960 KPH, which is Mach 0.78, which is just below Transonic. But if you slap a Force 6 Spirit in them (which must point out: every one of them has), and crank on the Movement accelerator and they are going Mach 4.7. Get a "large" spirit and you're going into the realm of Hypersonics. In a flying tank.

Hypersonic travel in armed military vehicles that have gauss guns capable of leveling mountains really isn't a weird thing, and pretty much every major nation can and does field those. The wanking over dragons has always been pretty mystifying. It's like they never read what the military equipment did.

-Username17

[Murtak]

With the exception of that Ghostwalker crap dragons in Shadowrun are either behind-the-curtain schemers or regular (though somewhat harder to assassinate) corporate CEOs, aren't they? Heck, we have a single street samurai taking out a dragon in the first Shadowrun novel. The Dunkelzahn assassination was really only memorable because no one could figure out who had done it, not because they managed to kill him.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I have a few criteria for a cyberpunk game with dragons. One of them is that the dragons can fly around with cyberwings. Ideally they would be cyberwings with cyberscramjets.

The idea of a dragon going mach 20 somehow fills me with a dark, deep dread.

This is including the magical multiplier, right? Hypersonic speed starts around Mach 5.

In Shadowrun, magical and technological methods of travel time reduction are multiplicative. Lots of things can go mach 8 or so (mach 20 is fairly hard to arrange).

The standard of Shadowrun armored presence is the "T-Bird" - an armored vector-thrust flying tank essentially. Those Low Altitude Vehicles fly around at 960 KPH, which is Mach 0.78, which is just below Transonic. But if you slap a Force 6 Spirit in them (which must point out: every one of them has), and crank on the Movement accelerator and they are going Mach 4.7. Get a "large" spirit and you're going into the realm of Hypersonics. In a flying tank.

So SR hovertanks are actually designed to tolerances that they achieve without magic? Unless I'm mistaken, if you were to just slap a powerful spirit into a plane and send it hypersonic you'd end up with a very fast plane that is rapidly falling apart.

[Murtak]

The movement power just reduces the time travel takes, it does not speed up the traveling entity. That means you can not have mach 12 rifle bullets, but on the other hand you also do not have to worry about your vehicle being able to handle 8 times its usual speed.

[RandomCasualty2]

The movement power just reduces the time travel takes, it does not speed up the traveling entity. That means you can not have mach 12 rifle bullets, but on the other hand you also do not have to worry about your vehicle being able to handle 8 times its usual speed.

Unless you're traveling through some kind of pocket dimension like the shadow plane in D&D, it's speeding up how fast you're going.

[TheFlatline]

This is including the magical multiplier, right? Hypersonic speed starts around Mach 5.

No... The upper limit of a scramjet's performance today is around mach 24 according to wikipedia.

However if memory serves you have to be going at least supersonic before the scramjet will even begin to operate.

[Username17]

Use of the Movement power does not make things impact any harder or fall apart from stress or become impossible to control. Primarily a balance issue with speeding up weaponry (and I include ramming people with drone cars as "weaponry"), but also to prevent arguments about what the fastest speed a garbage truck could handle if hypothetically it gained a whole lot of velocity without actually heating the engine any hotter.

Basically, Movement is just movement. You cover more distance and nothing else happens. Meaning that yes, it doesn't make any physics sense. It's Magic. It's written that way to be easy to adjudicate at the game table, not to be easy to do physics equations in reference to.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

I am more and more convinced that the movement power itself was a mistake.

[CatharzGodfoot]

That makes a lot more sense; thanks.

[TheFlatline]

Use of the Movement power does not make things impact any harder or fall apart from stress or become impossible to control. Primarily a balance issue with speeding up weaponry (and I include ramming people with drone cars as "weaponry"), but also to prevent arguments about what the fastest speed a garbage truck could handle if hypothetically it gained a whole lot of velocity without actually heating the engine any hotter.

Basically, Movement is just movement. You cover more distance and nothing else happens. Meaning that yes, it doesn't make any physics sense. It's Magic. It's written that way to be easy to adjudicate at the game table, not to be easy to do physics equations in reference to.

-Username17

That's cool. It's closer to warping space/time around you than actual moving. To an observer you're travelling fast, but you still maintain no forward intertia/force.

[Crissa]

Ooo. Magic as relativity example. Awesome, Frank.

In the real world, when you move, time slows down for you. This is so that no matter how fast you go, the speed of light is still the speed of light.

So as you accelerate the speed of light, your time is slowed down so your very atoms aren't violating the speed of light!

In your example, magic doesn't actually accelerate an object, it merely displaces its time so that it arrives sooner than it should, and you experience less time consumed. You never actually 'go faster'.

Neat!

-Crissa

[老子]

Speed = distance / time. Saying that you can reduce travel time without increasing speed is literally nonsense. A 2=3 level of nonsense.