Shadowrun 4E Question

[DeJoker]

I played this a looooong time ago and have recently picked it back up. I am not interested in making game breaking characters but I am aware that it is quite possible to do so. With that said I my question centers around basic rules as well as keeping within the spirit of the game.

It says (SM p. 105) "An ally's attributes (both physical and astral) equal its Force;"

Are they saying that the normal rules for Materialization do not apply to an Ally Spirit in that if you have a Beast Ally Spirit that its materialized form does not adhere to the outline (Core p. 302) for materialized spirits of the Beast type?

Detection spells have a Sensory Range of (F x M x 10 meters) and I can extend this by another x10 if I use apply the Extended aspect to the spell. However, I do not see any comments about whether I can apply the Extended aspect only once or if I can apply it more than once. Is it possible to have a SpellName, Extended, Extended?

In the same vein would creating a spell that simply augments anothers spells range be viable? I mean I do not see many spell effecting spells (if any) within the various books that I have.

Next how does a Material Link work in conjunction with other spell types or does it? I saw under Ritual Magic that you can use Material Link in place of a spotter when doing Ritual Magic which seems to imply that range is unlimited this way and actual LoS is not needed. But can you use a Material Link in place of LoS to use Spell Casting to cast say Silence upon the source of the Material Link?

I appreciate your input

[UmaroVI]

Ally spirit's don't have a type. You can't make a Beast Ally Spirit; you make an Ally Spirit and then maybe give it Beast powers.

Neither of your other two questions really have answers, because they deal with a Magic Tea Party area of the game.

I do not understand your question about Material Link. Ritual Magic means you are using the skill "Ritual Spellcasting" not "Spellcasting," so if you mean to say "can you use a Material Link in place of LoS to use Ritual Spellcasting to cast say Silence upon the source of the Material Link?" then yes.

[DeJoker]

Neither of your other two questions really have answers, because they deal with a Magic Tea Party area of the game.

By "Magic Tea Party" are you saying GM discretion?

I do not understand your question about Material Link. Ritual Magic means you are using the skill "Ritual Spellcasting" not "Spellcasting," so if you mean to say "can you use a Material Link in place of LoS to use Ritual Spellcasting to cast say Silence upon the source of the Material Link?" then yes.

No I was kind of looking at the application of Material Link in regards to LoS that works within Ritual Casting --- and was wondering if this could be applied to Spell Casting?

[Username17]

You can double up modifiers if you can convince the GM that you have cause to do so. There are, for example, spells that cost way too much drain that have two element types. Spells don't get cast on spells in any direct way, so there is no "spell extender" spell.

Linking only applies to ritual casting, not to regular spellcasting. A ritual spell bypasses LOS and intervening objects.

-Username17

[DeJoker]

Here is a clarification issue with Ally Spirits.

SM p. 103 "Materilizing allies start with one base form thay may materialize as. The ally spirit can have additional forms that it can switch between at will at the cost of 2 Karma each."

Then it gives the Ally Spirit the power Realistic Form (p. 102) which states:
"Note the spirits with the Materialization power normally only have one materialized form. Materializing spirits with this power can choose to appear using Realistic Form or their normal materialized form."

So does a basic Ally Spirit that did not buy extra forms only have 1 form (which I assume would have to be its Realistic Form) or does it actually have 1 Materialization form and its Realistic Form per the rules governing Realistic Form and thus start with 2 forms?

[fectin]

Magic tea party is a game where little girls sit around and describe their fantasy world. Conflicting actions are handled by competing narratives.
Magic Tea Party is also used here (and other places) to refer to parts of RPGs which are resolved in essentially the same way.

[Fucks]

Where can I find Frank's write-up on Tamanous?

[Username17]

This one?

Tamanous
“How much for the little girl?”

You've heard of them a thousand times. People whisper their names into the dark and they know fear. They're the men in gray chemsuits, the body snatchers, the organ leggers. The one, the only, Tamanous. And yes, I do some business with them, and their credit is excellent. But while they have a truly excellent fear campaign going, almost everything you have heard about them is a lie. Some of them are spread by Tamanous workers themselves, others are just the overactive imaginations of people who don't understand the business they are in. So no, they aren't stealing metahuman fat to sell to cosmetic companies or harvesting hobo organs to implant into rich Cantonese Sararimen. That stuff makes great campfire story material, but it's not actually profitable. And Tamanous are not just in the business of being scary, they are also in the business of making Nuyen.

Which is not to say that they don't run a thriving trade in metahuman corpses – because they totally do that. It's just that most of the stuff you hear about is just not practical. What would you do with the liver of a random street person? It's not gene-matched to anyone in particular, so there really aren't any interested buyers to implant it into. The days of having people choke down immunosuppressors for the rest of their lives were over in the forties. Type O organs grow in vats and are better than implanting vagabond specials. The last people to have their kidneys stolen for transplant work were some Bihari guys in 2052, and that's just because Jharkhand is and always has been a shit hole. A shit hole where it apparently takes them several years to figure out that vat-tissue has a lower rejection rate than something you pried out of some random Yadav.

But let's go through some more of the crazier myths for a bit. Does Tamanous have fetus farms to make babies to feed to ghouls or sacrifice to power magical rituals? No. Ghouls eat old dead human flesh and have no use for young babies. And there are plenty of unwanted orphans in Bucharest even today, so if you wanted to sacrifice a bunch of babies to dark gods or whatever, it would be cheaper to just steal them after they were already made. Even if there is some sort of profitable angle in there somewhere, Tamanous isn't doing it. Some female research prisoners are forcibly impregnated to test the effects of drugs and medical procedures on pregnant women and fetuses, but those fetuses are ultimately dissected to look at possible teratogenic effects. Does Tamanous keep meticulous records of the tissue profile of large numbers of people so that they can rip out their organs at a later date if a client happens to have a tissue match? No. There is no tissue match good enough to match the rejection threshold of a clonal organ – not even an Owen Type clonal organ. Sometimes specific people are kidnapped to fit required demographic profiles for a study, but that's almost always poor people who have rare diseases. Again, no one wants your squishy bits. Does Tamanous kidnap people and invest them with insect spirits? No, the more progressive hives of Australia and Chicago have turned to domestic livestock for true forms and can get volunteers to aspire to being good merges. And of course, the more bestial and aggressive hives don't have any money.

Commerce exists because there is a demand for a product and a supply for that product. And the trade in metahuman bodies is no different. To see what Tamanous is up to, all you really have to do is follow the money. There are after all, relatively few interested parties looking to buy metahumans and so you can trace things back to the supply. The biggest buyer by volume are ghouls. They need to eat metahuman meat and they genuinely don't care where it comes from. It's not a real big cash maker, because at the end of the line ghouls are usually paying about 10¥ per kilo, retail. So butchering up a human is about 420¥ (average human is 70 kilos, and they dress down to about sixty percent of live weight). But that's shared across the whole supply chain, from the razorguy who was paid 70-140¥ to bring in the corpse to the warehouse guys and the smugglers all the way to the butcher who has the actual secret menu he shows his homophagic clientèle. But while that part of the business turns a profit, it does not make a particularly large one. Tamanous mostly continues those operations because it makes them friends with some incredibly scary people and because it scares people. A lot. And Tamanous mostly defends itself with uncertainty and fear. Some guns too, of course. But mostly just by scaring people.

Secondly, some cadavers have useful bits in them that a good ripper doc can repurpose for another patient. Everyone thinks “kidneys” but that really hasn't been true for a long time. Yes, the corneas of the eye are immunologically privileged and people who for whatever reason don't want cybereyes could graft on some cadaver eyes and do OK – but that is gross, and clonal cornea tissue is cheap. No one cares. The real money is in Type O bioware, because after flushing it out with Type O blood for a few weeks you can get something that is ready for transplantation. You better believe that corpses are scanned carefully for that stuff, because that is a 5000¥ payday. Don't get excited if you find some cultured bioware, because that can't be transplanted and you might as well just sell it to ghouls as mixed organs.

• Some of the Children of the Dragon actually get cadaver corneas instead of vat jobs. Why is that?
• Groatster
• Because Children of Dragon are completely nuts. They are refusing all implants created by science, even clonal material what does not harm auras at all.
• Solution

But what about the live people that Tamanous kidnaps? What happens to them? Well, some of them get fed to the “upper tier” infected. Vampires and Wendigos mostly. Infected who need to eat the essence of living metahumans and who can keep it together long enough to realize that they have to keep their activities secret and that paying an agency a few thousand Nuyen to make their victims disappear far away from where they live is totally worth it. As you might imagine, not a lot of Banshee or Dzoo-Noo-Qua are clients. Not because they don't totally eat metahumans, but because they are generally too invested in running around like a naked beast, roaring at their victims and their hunters alike to have any money – let alone to pay anyone else any money to cover their tracks for them. But that's actually a pretty small fraction of the live abductees. Mostly they are used for medical research.

Here's how that works: Let's say you're some company like De Beers-Universal Omnitech, and you have a new drug that has passed animal trials and looks amazing. What do you do next? Well, next up, you need to do human trials, so you get some volunteers and pay them money and do it all nice and above board and you carefully monitor all of your results and submit them to the Corporate Court and demonstrate that your product is safe and effective. And you tell everyone in the whole world that this is what you are doing. But the Corporate Court's mandatory trial periods are really short, and the required sample sizes aren't very big. And in any case, if you're DBUO, you actually had several tests going and only submitted the one that looked most promising. But you still want to know what the actual side effects and effectiveness ratings are, and that requires more research. It requires bigger, longer studies with people who take weird amounts and are subjected to intrusive tests on a regular basis. So what you do, is you hire an agency that will keep people in prisons and give them medications against their will. And that agency is Tamanous.

And here's the other part: Let's say that you're Novatech, and you have a competing medication to DBUO's offering. You want to know how effective and safe DBUO's drug really is, so that you can manage an effective marketing campaign. And if it turns out that there are actually some problems with it – see if you can't put some pressure to get it recalled or discounted. So your choices are basically to send shadowrunners into De Beers-Universal Omnitech labs and try to find out what they know, or hire an agency to do the testing themselves. And yeah, that agency is still Tamanous. In fact, Tamanous may just reuse their study findings for DBUO and sell them to Novatech. It's not like Novatech personnel are going to be touring their facility.

And lastly, Tamanous just plain operates a couple of shadowclinics. They have some of the most skilled and least ethical medical professionals on the planet and substantial cloning facilities. People will pay for that. And yeah, they may tell you that the organ they are implanting into you was stolen from a Korean highschool student, but unless you're getting a piece of generic bioware, that is almost certainly not true. It's just a story they tell the patient to make them think they have done something terrible and are dealing with terrible people that they dare not double cross.

So that's what Tamanous does, now let's talk about how Tamanous is structured. The basic format is similar to the Pueblo Corporate Council: decisions are made by “chiefs”, with specialist consultants called “cacique” whether they have any magical ability or not. Members of any operation get “shares” of the specific activities and “shares” of the organization as a whole. These shares pay dividends, which are your wages. If you stop working for them, your shares are canceled. If you do good work or stay with the organization for a while, your shares can “mature” into “voting shares” (which allow you to have your voice heard in steering policy), or “permanent shares” that are kind of like a pension – as they keep paying dividends whether you are currently doing any work for them or not. Shares are given out either “lodge” or “non-lodge” and those pretty much correspond to whether the position is a “need to know” position or not. People working in peripheral capacities such as snatching, butchery, or sanitation get the “non-lodge” shares, which are primarily distinct in that while they can mature into permanent shares, they never mature into voting shares.

• ”Pretty Similar” my entire ass! That's exactly how a PCC semi-autonomous enterprise is structured!
• Green Ring

Outsiders aren't allowed to see the faces of any lodge member, which is why the gray chemsuits get trotted out. Non-lodge members are also allowed to wear the gray chemsuits to conceal their identities, as this makes the faceless creepiness even more faceless and creepy. If for some reason someone does see the face of a lodge member, the standard is the usual “join or die” choice made popular by generations of criminal organizations and secret societies. People low enough on the totem pole may not even know they are working for Tamanous, but a good rule of thumb is that if the person paying you to create or dispose of bodies is wearing a gray chemsuit or starts talking about share dividends to calculate your payment – then you probably are.

It is important to remember that when you factor in the difference in profits from the medical research angle and the body butchering enterprise, that the entire body snatching arm of the organization actually loses money. The people buying up corpses and selling the meat and salvageable parts literally make more money from their shares in the organization than they take in. That entire arm of the organization seems to exist to scare the fuck out of people. And it works. Tamanous has become a story that Yakuza killers tell each other in the dark. It is the ultimate bogey man, and the arm that provides that visceral terror even in law enforcement agencies and criminal armies is something that very nearly pays for itself. Plus, the medical research end produces a lot of bodies, and the network really can dispose of corpses more cheaply than other syndicates can – many of them even pay Tamanous to get rid of bodies for them. As an added bonus, Tamanous can call on footsoldiers and assassins who are the kinds of people that actually hunt and eat metahumans from their regular clientèle, which means that those gangs that have tried to put the squeeze on Tamanous really have met with grisly and unfortunate ends.

Today, Tamanous operates with impunity, albeit also in secrecy, in most of the world. They operate openly in Pathein, where they run a research hospital and prison. The fiction is maintained that they steal R&D data from medical companies and use it to run their own research. But the reality is that they are paid primarily by the companies whose works are being tested. Most of the inmates in the prison are random (presumably) innocent people that Tamanous goons have rounded up off the street or shanghaied out of a bar, but for a shockingly modest fee, they will imprison people sent to them by individuals or even municipalities. Other medical prison complexes are harder to find, but there is one in the Congo, another in Romania, and a fourth one somewhere in the Los Angeles basin.

[Stahlseele]

leave it to frank to make tamanous sound like your typical corp O.o
for his next trick, frank will make aztechnology look like mcdonalds!

[Otakusensei]

leave it to frank to make tamanous sound like your typical corp O.o
for his next trick, frank will make aztechnology look like mcdonalds!

That sounds entirely likely. And unlike the shit coming out of CGL I would pay to read it.

[Stahlseele]

leave it to frank to make tamanous sound like your typical corp O.o
for his next trick, frank will make aztechnology look like mcdonalds!

That sounds entirely likely. And unlike the shit coming out of CGL I would pay to read it.

oh me too ^^

[Fuchs]

That's the description that made me take Tamanous seriously. I considered it stupid before. I still consider much of SR's fluff stpid, especially when it comes to ghouls.

[Stahlseele]

Hmm, aside from the Acid Blood, Feral Shadowrun Ghouls kinda sound like the Xenomorphs from Alien Fame to me . .