Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker

[DSMatticus]

So any "evil" AI are a result of bugs or unintended consequences of instructions, and they should be exceedingly rare

The thousands of regular AI you don't notice (for example, the quiet, reclusive failsafe of [city name]'s traffic regulation subsystems who steps in when the predefined routines fail to account for a deviation in traffic patterns and he provides his own solution to prevent gridlock) outnumber the handful of rogue AI that get the media attention.

You never hear about school buses arriving at their destination as planned. You will hear the second one flips and kills a bunch of children. And in this super-advanced future, you never hear about the mundane AI's that manage nearly every sufficiently advanced, responsive/real-time network, but you do hear about the ones that fail and decide it would be 'funny' to stop recycling the Arcology's piss-water and send it on through as is.

[kzt]

The thousands of regular AI you don't notice (for example, the quiet, reclusive failsafe of [city name]'s traffic regulation subsystems who steps in when the predefined routines fail to account for a deviation in traffic patterns and he provides his own solution to prevent gridlock) outnumber the handful of rogue AI that get the media attention.

You never hear about school buses arriving at their destination as planned. You will hear the second one flips and kills a bunch of children. And in this super-advanced future, you never hear about the mundane AI's that manage nearly every sufficiently advanced, responsive/real-time network, but you do hear about the ones that fail and decide it would be 'funny' to stop recycling the Arcology's piss-water and send it on through as is.

In general, those don't seem to require an actual AI. They require a well designed expert system designed to solve fairly well defined set of functions. So I'm wondering if it makes sense to predict that we would create a horde of AIs (if we ever can - it's not clear we can) when they seem rarely needed.

So the questions are 1) are there AIs at all; and 2) are they able to be deliberately being created; 3) Do people know or believe in their existence [i.e. they can not exist and people could still believe in them]; 4) How common or widespread are they if they exist?

The crazy AI or the accidental AI is a staple of SR and cyberpunk, but it isn't needed. The idea present in SR that it can somehow bootstrap itself to a toaster does seems totally nuts. While you are logically going to have a lot more processing power in a toaster than you actually need to make toast, it's still going to be very small and limited processor compared to the hardware that people build to run a large critical system.

If you can create an AI I'd expect that people designing computer systems would take steps to prevent AIs from accidentally developing or moving in.

Friendly AIs seem to directly rule out most combat AIs. Then again, having an AI directly controlling anything more dangerous than a single combat vehicle with conventional ordinance is almost certainly a bad idea, and even choosing to have an AI control a single combat vehicle is questionable.

That leads to the issue of just what a non-AI autonomous or semi-autonomous combat vehicle should be capable of in this setting. I'm not sure what we want.

[K]

You could make crazy AI the default. So there are expert systems and bots, but whenever anyone tried to make anything remotely sentient or just very adaptable it goes crazy 10/10 times.

The trick is to not make AI's into super-hackers, but to clearly define that they are just people who happen to live inside the Matrix and are pretty inhuman and have bizarre goals. They could haunt certain places where the Matrix is damaged.

Heck, if the "Matrix is so complicated that it reaches the Astral" idea is used, AIs can just be Spirits.

[Prak]

Melee is never going to be a viable 'middle of combat' option in Shadowrun; it's a system with high lethality, and doing melee involves reaching the opponent who is probably firing at you with automatic weapons.

The niche for melee combatants in a modern environment is essentially in catching people who don't have their guns ready. Sneaking up on people is one way of doing it. Even face to face, it can work. If you start the encounter at a point where you can cover the distance to the gun guy before he can draw, aim, and fire -- and you're a sufficiently expert knife guy -- you can win (and that distance is probably farther than a lot of gun guys think it is). If the gun guy already has his weapon ready, not so much.

That's not a niche most people are going to want to occupy, but I am totally in favor of having it be a workable tactic for those situations when you have to occupy it. Or for purposes of keeping the PCs wary no matter how many guns they have and no matter how poor and ill-equipped the opposition is.

Or, you know, catching them before they can reload...

[Vebyast]

The trick is to not make AI's into super-hackers, but to clearly define that they are just people who happen to live inside the Matrix and are pretty inhuman and have bizarre goals. They could haunt certain places where the Matrix is damaged.

I'm guessing that any strong AI we create in real life will be exactly this. As people have pointed out, artificial intelligences don't have bodies, don't have eyes or ears, don't form or process memories like we do, don't have chemicals regulating their thoughts and bodies, and a million other things that would make them think differently. So any real artificial intelligence that isn't a near-perfect simulation would be literally and incomprehensibly inhuman. They're not super-hackers (though they have the potential to be); they're not inherently evil any more than humans are, or any more likely to behave irrationally. They're just... different.

I like the flavor where they prefer hanging out in spiritual places, though, especially since that would give them a shortcut to having a presence in the real world. It could even add another PC race: projected AI. Inhabits a computer housed in a high-magic area, can interact weakly with the world through magic, and can do all sort of nifty things in cyberspace.

[Username17]

Not having any electronics is not no defense against hacking, it's 100% defense. Just like the worlds best face isn't going to seduce an armored combat drone. It's 100% defended against seduction despite not having any obvious defenses. It's just how it works.

wat?

That's not "how it works" in Inception, or in Snowcrash, or in TRON, or in Lawnmower Man, or in The Matrix, or in Fringe, and it's not hand so on and so on. The idea of computer hacking that affects human brains directly is quintessential Cyberpunk. There is absolutely no reason why divesting yourself of computers should make your brain immune to enemy hacking in Cyberpunk fiction. And when it is fundamentally important to the game that the Hacker character be able to do something when the enemy is a bunch of primitives or monsters, the claim that it is somehow an axiom that hackers have to stick their thumb into their ass when the enemy turns their computer off is wrong on every level.

The face analogy is also fundamentally wrong. First of all, faces do not normally directly oppose enemies, an they certainly don't oppose enemies individually. What a face does is generally find equipment and clues via legwork and avoid combats via social engineering. This all works super well against enemies who have combat drones, as their obvious integration into the world economy (in order to get combat drones and the power and ammo to make them go) means that there are blatantly socially accessible clues to be found. In short: a face does have things to do when the enemy goes with unfeeling robots. The hacker needs things to do when the enemy has no computers.

Oh another thing. Allow strong encryption, but have it handled in background by the OS. Essentially this means that if you hack a system and gain system rights the OS gives you all the data decrypted.

What is unbreakable (without some sort of prep work) are data connections (but you can record and do traffic analysis - unlike SR), passwords, financial transactions and turned off computers.

Agreed. Although I think there should be quantum entanglement communicators whose signal can't be recorded because it doesn't pass through intervening space. That makes a cool maguffin, especially if they are very expensive. Also probably possible given what we know about physics.

The key point you're missing is that a human brain is a computer that is turned on all the time. Meaning that if your big defense against hacking is turning your computers off, you're still stuck as long as you have people with nervous systems on premises.

It's still fantasy when you have fey elves rather than human elves.

Elves should be more than "humans with stat boosts" like in SR. They should be humans that have inherent magical things going on with them.

The idea of the metahuman SURGE is probably legitimately SR IP anyway.

I definitely would not use the terms "SURGE", "UGE", or "Goblinization". But having some segment of the population spontaneously start turning into fishmen because the Stars Are Right is not SR IP. That is straight out of Mythos lore, and can of course be legitimately traced to before the 1920s as well.

If you're going to include AI (or, as I prefer, DI) as part of the setting at all, you need to think very carefully about how it came about and what impact it's going to have on the world at large.

The big deal with AI is that "software" AI needs to die in a fire. Human grade digital intelligence needs special hardware that is comparable in scope to the special hardware that natural human intelligence needs (brain). Then all the horseshit about infinite copies and shit just goes away. While a factory could make a whole fuck tonne of robots, it would be expensive and similar in scope to making a bunch of clone soldiers. In fact: the setting should have both clone soldiers and digital intelligence droids. Not because Episode II was any good, but because those things belong in a cyberpunk fantasy heartbreaker setting.

One aspect of the setting I'm curious if Frank will address is, basically, Elfland. It doesn't have to literally be Elfland, as much as some people like to fap to immortal pointy-eared fucks, but the idea of a magic-centric parallel dimension or something full of magical critters intersecting with the current human world is common in many "the Magic Came Back" stories, and in punkish stories, the connection is not all sweetness and light for the fucking elves. Young elves take on human fashions and ideas, old elves find out about atomic bombs and genetically engineered viruses and basically shit themselves. The only advantage most Elflands have is some sort of bullshit fantasy physics where "machines don't work" - at least, not without some more magic or something (the Borderlands books, for example, had motorcycles rigged to run off of "spell boxes.")

Ancient magics can do crazy shit without having to explain how physics can be different enough that I can't use a taser without being different enough that my spinal action potentials stop moving. But yeah, I definitely think that there should be some phased-in islands and city-states and such that have (possibly magic or in-human) people in them. Possible inclusions include:

• Atlantis
• Lemuria
• Mu
• Xanadu
• R'lyeh
• Themiskyra
• Skull Island
• Lost Carcossa
• Avalon
• El Dorado
• City of Brass
• Presteria
• Lanka
• Devil's Reef

Some of these can be filled with backwards primitives in togas. Others can be full of face-eating demons, and still others can be filled with backwards toga wearing primitives who can do crazy magic like control the tides and cause earthquakes. And some of these countries can join the international community and some can go isolationist, and some can declare war on the modern society of nations.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm not as familiar with Shadowrun as many another, but I do think that it would be worth having a look at GURPS Technomancer for some entertaining magic-in-modern-world setting bits. The part where over-reliance on Cure Disease spells has created strains of magic-resistant bacteria is just one of the gold nuggets.

My personal favorite stuff comes from the legal system, where it talks about which spells generate admissible evidence, how summoning malign entities is punished under the immigration laws, and when you might be subjected to a sentence of Death Plus Hard Labor (your executed corpse is put to work on a zombie road gang).

[Username17]

I think that cutting out the "mages are genetically special, even though they can't be cloned" is probably a good idea too, and coming up with a better reason why mages can't be cybered is probably also good. That never made a lick of sense, especially the "do some drugs or get some cyberware, lose magic permanently."

The Magic needs a new set of rules from the ground up. The basic Conjuration rules in SR are really sweet, but they can be improved. The basic spellcasting rules are also really sweet, but they can be improved too. Astral Perception is pretty much ideal, and I wouldn't change it. Astral Projection is probably a bad thing to have in the setting and should go away. The Magic Items need to just get replaced wholesale with things we actually care about. Adept Powers need a ground up re-think. Let's go through the pieces piece by piece:

Astral Space

• Astral Projection has to go, at least as a regular thing. Projection can be a power that specific people have or maybe a spell or something. But mostly, Astral scouting is an extra time consuming step that should be avoided.
• Astral Voids in space need to go. Magic in space is awesome, and we want it in the setting.

Essence & Magic

• We want cyborg mages to exist.
• We want uncybered characters to be a potentially viable life choice, especially as regards being an uncybered caster.
• After Sundown works better without a Magic Attribute than it did when I was trying to get it to have a Magic Attribute.
• The Object Resistance Rating in Shadowrun works really well, and makes Magic and Technology unfriendly to each other in an explicable way without cluttering things or being hard to accept willing suspension of disbelief.
• Is it possible to have cybernetics increase your own Object Resistance Rating? I mean, of course that's possible, the question is whether doing that could be made into something that was bad enough that being an uncybered mage would remain viable? Possibly you need to overcome your own OR in order to conjure? Or maybe casting spells has to overcome your OR or the target OR whichever is higher? Seems like something like that could work.

Adepts

• X-Men mutations are awesome, but the actual Adept implementation feels dumb.
• Rather than telling certain people that they can buy cyborg powers at a slightly different exchange rate, we're going to let people who aren't magicians buy themselves magic powers and have that be actually good.
• I think the model we should be looking at is the model where you buy Critter Powers as qualities.
• The Magic Ninja should just be a Wizard. Probably you do it with the possession rules. You cash out your Conjuring opportunities to possess yourself with a Ninja Spirit and then you flip out and kill people. Having Bearsarkers and Magic Kung Fu Monks being different game mechanically is a waste of conceptual space.

Spells

• Shadowrun uses a "functional" spell category system. The problem is that "spells that do damage" is a really tiny category, while "spells that do things or change stuff" is a really bloated category. You want spell categories to be roughly equal, especially if you're going to give people differential bonuses to one category vs. another.
• New categories need pretentious names. I suggest the category of detection be "Astral" magic, and include not only various forms of scrying and telepathy (which is totally sweet in a future/modern game about detectives and spies), but also stuff like Mana Static and Astral Projection.
• Combat Spells and Health Spells need to be combined into a single category that also gets spells like Fix from Manipulation and covers all of the magic that affects the integrity and existence of things. I am tempted to call it Thaumaturgy in honor of Master of the Five Magics and Dominions, but I'm not really set on that.
• Illusion can continue being called Illusion, but it should get the Mind Control stuff and some specifically computer fooling spells. I'm on the fene about D&D style Shadow Magic. It's really cool, but it has always been problematic in every implementation ever.
• The remaining parts of Manipulation might be small enough to be a single school (meaning that there would be four schools), or possibly it might need to be further split into the Space/Forces part and the Matter/Life part.
• Ritual Sorcery was a lot cooler in earlier editions of SR than it is in SR4. In general, Sympathetic Linking should be the default assumed thing. Secondly, I think that you should first prepare a ritual link and the actual casting should just be an action. Specifically, I think everyone wants there to be health insurance based on keeping a ritual link ready to remotely cast a healing spell on the policy holder. So the link creation and casting steps need to be separate.
• The Spellcasting Skill is way too fucking good. Options include having a separate skill for each category of spellcasting (like an Ends of the Matrix hacker) and simply having spells give standard skills that they use to be cast with (like an After Sundown power).

Spirits

• Watchers are too much bookkeeping for too little return. Drop them.
• Really physically big spirits are not a problem, but really big mental attributes on spirits totally are. So Spirit "Force" should only adjust the physical prowess of a spirit, not its mental attributes. Thus, being "allowed" to keep your mental attributes while possessed should be an advantage that you actually want.
• Every magical tradition will have a power list that spirits they summon can select off of.
• Every region will have a power list that spirits summoned in that region can select off of.
• Spirits will still have types, an your magical tradition will still get a small selection of them. But "Spirits of Man" is grammatically different from all the others and totally redundant with Guidance Spirits anyway. Enter "Trickster Spirits".

Magical Threats

• Insect Spirits, Imps, Shedim, the Scourge, and the Blood Mage Gestalt are Shadowrun IP and have to be dropped.
• Toxic Mages are marginal as far as that goes.
• The Vampire Conspiracy is open content and we totally want one of those.
• The Old Ones are a must-have. Everyone loves Cthulhu Mythos villains.
• Marauders from Mage are pretty fun. Having crazy mages who are trying to destroy reality and turn our world into a giant lava lamp of Chaos sounds doable. Especially if they are creating vortexes like in Fringe.
• People want to make zombies, so Voodoo practitioners who make Zombies shouldn't be classified as "Unplayable Threats".
• Mad totems that want to wipe out humanity are good times, but they should have a different plan than the SR Bug Spirits. I suggest conquering leyline nexus points in order to achieve Real Ultimate Power and eat an energy field larger than their head.
• Let's do some more with India. Like, why can't we have an invasion by human eating Rakshasa from Lanka?

Enchanted Items

• Bonuses are lame. Things should not have be "Rating 3 Cast a Bigger Spell Foci" because that is stupid.
• Making and using magic items should not eat up permanent experience points.
• Magic items should be usable by non-magicians.
• If you use a magic item in a crime, magicians should be able to track that magic item. Ditching a magic sword because it is "hot" should be a thing player characters actually do.
• Magical reagents should be useful enough that players care about getting them as loot during missions.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

It's still fantasy when you have fey elves rather than human elves.

Elves should be more than "humans with stat boosts" like in SR. They should be humans that have inherent magical things going on with them.

The idea of the metahuman SURGE is probably legitimately SR IP anyway.

I definitely would not use the terms "SURGE", "UGE", or "Goblinization". But having some segment of the population spontaneously start turning into fishmen because the Stars Are Right is not SR IP. That is straight out of Mythos lore, and can of course be legitimately traced to before the 1920s as well.

There are already "humans with inherent magical things going on": they are called mages and adepts.

I don't know enough about IP law to argue on the other front, and you're certainly right about the mermaids.

[Edit]

So with the new spirit rules, a Toxic mage just hangs out in a major pollution site and summons spirits there, which naturally results in polluted spirits? And then pollutes larger and larger regions so as to be able to summon polluted spirits anywhere they want?

[Fuchs]

How much space will be there? Other solar systems, colonies in space, terraformingMars? Aliens?

[Fuchs]

How much space will be there? Other solar systems, colonies in space, terraformingMars? Aliens?

[hyzmarca]

However, you're right in that doing so should be an extreme countertactic only used when undeniable facing a malicious hack - walking around without a cyberview of somesort should be as awkward as wearing a full gas mask.

That solution has been suggested a million times, and it does not fucking work. Because not all of your opponents have modern human tech. Some of them are guard dogs, or just plain monsters in caves. And if the hacker can't do anything but play Freecell when that happens, your game has failed that character type.

Every archetype needs to be able to do more when the opposition does not have any defenses against them. Period. No exceptions.

-Username17

You're always going to have situations where some archetypes are useless. The heavily-cybered combat monster who took charisma as a dump stat is going to be a liability if the mission is infiltrating a high-society ball, after all.

Traditionally, when the hacker archetype faces combat he picks up a gun and shoots people. If the setting combines hacker and drone rigger archetypes then he shoots people with big honkin' robot guns.

[tzor]

The fact is that anyone who designs AI who fails to design Friendly AI has failed. No one intends to build Skynet; the goal should always be to produce digital intelligence that is wholly incapable of turning against humanity. So any "evil" AI are a result of bugs or unintended consequences of instructions, and they should be exceedingly rare, because any design effort is going to exhaustively attempt to weed out even the slightest possibility of an AI going rogue.

I would take it in a different direction. Any developed AI is going to be, not good, not evil, but alien. Once the "I" appears in the system it is going to evolve and at that point because it is not connected directly with the human experience will evolve in a non human way; not worse; not better; just different.

Another element of traditional AI fiction is that they are alone. HAL (had a brother but never met him), Skynet, etc are all alone and unique; therefore they all start to go crazy. Real world AI will be replicated and networked; they will talk to each other; they will then in their own manner socialize. They will be forced to learn to work well with others. Then it becomes easier to tollerate those idiot humans.

[Fuchs]

I don't see anything worng with having people spread their skills out a bit, so they can do more than just one thing.

[Chamomile]

Insect Spirits, Imps, Shedim, the Scourge, and the Blood Mage Gestalt are Shadowrun IP and have to be dropped.

Emphasis mine. There must be something about the Shadowrun setting I'm missing here. How the death do you copyright Imps?

[Koumei]

I don't really know enough about SR, Cyberpunk and so on, but I love some of the ideas here seem really cool, especially the Law regarding Magic, as well as the kinds of shit regular people do with magic/technology - a huge disappointment in d20 modern, aside from the game itself, was that you couldn't Rickroll people with a Symbol of Insanity or SMS Explosive Runes to people.

If you use a magic item in a crime, magicians should be able to track that magic item. Ditching a magic sword because it is "hot" should be a thing player characters actually do.

Stuff like this really needs to happen.

[Prak]

Magical Threats

• Insect Spirits, Imps, Shedim, the Scourge, and the Blood Mage Gestalt are Shadowrun IP and have to be dropped.

Wait, how can the idea of "Insect Spirits" or imps be IP?

[*] People want to make zombies, so Voodoo practitioners who make Zombies shouldn't be classified as "Unplayable Threats".

At the same time, if voodoo zombies are the only type of zombie in the game, some people will definitely be turned off. But it's a conceptual space issue, I'm sure.

I don't really know enough about SR, Cyberpunk and so on, but I love some of the ideas here seem really cool, especially the Law regarding Magic, as well as the kinds of shit regular people do with magic/technology - a huge disappointment in d20 modern, aside from the game itself, was that you couldn't Rickroll people with a Symbol of Insanity or SMS Explosive Runes to people.

You could, actually, you just need a specific PrC in Urban Arcana.

[Quantumboost]

At the same time, if voodoo zombies are the only type of zombie in the game, some people will definitely be turned off. But it's a conceptual space issue, I'm sure.

I think it was mentioned earlier that people turning into vampires and ghouls and such was in, but yes, viral and magical horde zombies are a definite must alongside the voodoo zombie minions.

[Prak]

At the same time, if voodoo zombies are the only type of zombie in the game, some people will definitely be turned off. But it's a conceptual space issue, I'm sure.

I think it was mentioned earlier that people turning into vampires and ghouls and such was in, but yes, viral and magical horde zombies are a definite must alongside the voodoo zombie minions.

Ok, good. I skim a lot when I'm catching up on a multipage thread.

[Omegonthesane]

Insect Spirits, Imps, Shedim, the Scourge, and the Blood Mage Gestalt are Shadowrun IP and have to be dropped.

Emphasis mine. There must be something about the Shadowrun setting I'm missing here. How the death do you copyright Imps?

Not actually a Shadowrun player, but worth mentioning the name Shedim is not under copyright, and in fact was one of the types of demon in In Nomine.

[Fuchs]

Dr. Who had creatures who needed corpses to enter our world too.

[fectin]

Not having any electronics is not no defense against hacking, it's 100% defense. Just like the worlds best face isn't going to seduce an armored combat drone. It's 100% defended against seduction despite not having any obvious defenses. It's just how it works.

wat?

That's not "how it works" in Inception, or in Snowcrash, or in TRON, or in Lawnmower Man, or in The Matrix, or in Fringe, and it's not hand so on and so on. The idea of computer hacking that affects human brains directly is quintessential Cyberpunk. There is absolutely no reason why divesting yourself of computers should make your brain immune to enemy hacking in Cyberpunk fiction. And when it is fundamentally important to the game that the Hacker character be able to do something when the enemy is a bunch of primitives or monsters, the claim that it is somehow an axiom that hackers have to stick their thumb into their ass when the enemy turns their computer off is wrong on every level.

The face analogy is also fundamentally wrong. First of all, faces do not normally directly oppose enemies, an they certainly don't oppose enemies individually. What a face does is generally find equipment and clues via legwork and avoid combats via social engineering. This all works super well against enemies who have combat drones, as their obvious integration into the world economy (in order to get combat drones and the power and ammo to make them go) means that there are blatantly socially accessible clues to be found. In short: a face does have things to do when the enemy goes with unfeeling robots. The hacker needs things to do when the enemy has no computers.

Oh another thing. Allow strong encryption, but have it handled in background by the OS. Essentially this means that if you hack a system and gain system rights the OS gives you all the data decrypted.

What is unbreakable (without some sort of prep work) are data connections (but you can record and do traffic analysis - unlike SR), passwords, financial transactions and turned off computers.

Agreed. Although I think there should be quantum entanglement communicators whose signal can't be recorded because it doesn't pass through intervening space. That makes a cool maguffin, especially if they are very expensive. Also probably possible given what we know about physics.

The key point you're missing is that a human brain is a computer that is turned on all the time. Meaning that if your big defense against hacking is turning your computers off, you're still stuck as long as you have people with nervous systems on premises.

So make it difficult at least. If you want to give someone seizures, that's not hard. That's not hard today, it certainly won't be in the future. Do some kind of crazy precision induction, and you could get basic TMS, and all kinds of rough effects. That seems right for dealing with naked brains. Maybe your repertoire looks like this: seizures, happy, angry, sleepy, fried. To get those, your hacker needs to carry around some serious gear (backpack heavy, not MRI heavy), because you need some pretty serious magnets and pretty serious lensing to get project that strong of a field out to (say) 30 feet.
You can also do crazy delicate brain hacks to read/control minds or whatnot, but it needs 2 of the following: time, cooperation, headgear, or fvcking huge equipment.
You can can Faraday shield your head with stylish tin foil hats, but then doors, etc. don't like you, and it only works like armor, not like a hacking=no toggle.

[fectin]

The fact is that anyone who designs AI who fails to design Friendly AI has failed. No one intends to build Skynet; the goal should always be to produce digital intelligence that is wholly incapable of turning against humanity. So any "evil" AI are a result of bugs or unintended consequences of instructions, and they should be exceedingly rare, because any design effort is going to exhaustively attempt to weed out even the slightest possibility of an AI going rogue.

I would take it in a different direction. Any developed AI is going to be, not good, not evil, but alien. Once the "I" appears in the system it is going to evolve and at that point because it is not connected directly with the human experience will evolve in a non human way; not worse; not better; just different.

Another element of traditional AI fiction is that they are alone. HAL (had a brother but never met him), Skynet, etc are all alone and unique; therefore they all start to go crazy. Real world AI will be replicated and networked; they will talk to each other; they will then in their own manner socialize. They will be forced to learn to work well with others. Then it becomes easier to tollerate those idiot humans.

Friendly AI + unique hardware sounds a lot like Aasimov's positronic brains with the three laws hard wired in.
That's not a bad thing.

[Username17]

The word "Imp" is totally open for use. There being something called "Insect Spirits" is likewise totally open for use. The word "Shedim" is ancient Hebrew and no one owns it. Having spirits who live in magic vessels and curse people is totally Arabian Nights shit and anyone can do it. Having spirits who take people's bodies over and infiltrate society while wearing face masks of the people they kill like a Pod infestation is also open season. And having spirits that only possess human corpses and bring the zombie apocalypse is OK for use.

But the Shadowrun Imp that is specifically a spirit that takes over your magic items and torments you is Shadowrun IP. The Shadowrun Insect Spirit that captures humans and implants more of its kind into the victims like Genestealers is Shadowrun IP. The Shadowrun Shedim who are spirits that look like braided masses of worms on the astral that possess corpses and spread misery and fear is Shadowrun IP.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

Hm. Hackers should have a specific but limited repertoire of attacks against purely organic critters, but they should be there, and they should require specific weapons. They should also use the hacker's relevant skills, so the hacker is using them, and the gun-bunny is using guns, and nobody ever reaches over and says, "hey, let me try that," and discovers that the best gun-bunny is the one that fires seizures at people, or the hacker is wasting time trying to use his seizure ray when he would just flat out be better off shooting people.

So, I think the key is everything is WiFi-interactable, including things' nervous systems. And with special equipment, you can establish a connection to those nervous systems, and then you make hacking checks against either... whatever constitutes their physical resistance? Mental resistance? I can see either. And you succeed, and it does whatever the device is designed to do against people, possibly including seizures, possibly including behavior modification, or mind reading, or whatever.

I.e. what Fectin said.