On Deep Ones and deep water: the abyssal zone is about 3 degrees all the time. That's
cold, but it's not
freezing cold. It's actually warmer than the North Atlantic
surface. Deep Ones would need heat sources, but not continuously. Oxygen and pressure are much bigger concerns: there is too much pressure for a human to survive and not enough oxygen for a human to live.
However, Astral Magic is all about moving shit around, and can be used out to a Deep One's aura length without a Marker. What that means is that Deep Ones can simply passively collect Oxygen from the water around them and passively reduce pressure around themselves as well. That has an additional advantage that more powerful, higher Stress Deep Ones can go
deeper, and that when you get into actual trenches you can
ancient inhuman monsters.
Now, a very real problem is the actual distribution of Oxygen. The Abyssal zones aren't much different in Oxygen content to the rest of the sea. If you can ram scoop enough Oxygen to survive as a humanoid in shallow water, you can do that a kilometer down. But the
actual sea floor is pretty much Oxygen-free. Life on the bottom scavenges Oxygen as it arrives and doesn't make any new Oxygen because there is no photosynthesis down there. Obviously, the Deep Ones have some sort of work-around. Maybe chemo-voric plants, or electolysing crystals or something. I'm not sure it actually needs to be explained, since the people on the surface might not even know. But the short version is that there's plenty of Oxygen for a Deep One to get by if they stick to the submarines and settlements, or if they swim well away from the actual sea floor. Also: you have to be more powerful and more ancient to go deeper than the "basic" abyssal depths. And the rumors of the stuff in the really deep trenches are horrible.
Lokathor wrote:...A PC obviously doesn't carry a ULS System in their pocket, they are a device within a ULS System that's all around around them and spread across the Archology/ City/ Region/ Nation/ Planet/ Star System.
Yeah. The logical extension of the world being an ad hoc mesh network is that the world is an ULS system that literally no one in the entire world understands. Things fall out of communication
all the time, either because something got turned off, something stopped playing nice, or something went out of range, or some interference picked up somewhere, or whatever.
What this goes down to is a hacking system that is way more abstract than Shadowrun's. You do not have "icons" that punch each other Tron-style. Hell, you don't keep track of the number of devices there are - let alone the stats on any particular device. The actions are
goal oriented, and the actual number of devices involved only matters when you're doing Basilisk Hacks and the targeted "devices" are actual people. As a Hacker, you are passively fucking with hundreds or thousands of devices all the time - since of course you're passively fucking with hundreds or thousands of devices continuously as a legitimate user as well.
If I knock out a guard, who notices that? how quickly? what will the automated responses be? what about non-automatic responses?
When a patrol drone gets shot and explodes, it stops transmitting, stops being part of the network. Unfortunately, technology being what it is, drones fall out of the network all the time. And while it's cause for concern, it's not cause for concern within a 12-second combat turn window, and probably not even 3. Data packets simply get lost, all the time. Sometimes for extended periods of time because The Network is way over the complexity threshold of any actor in it to competently direct.
Hackers have a couple things they can do:
- Patch The Network. This is the hardest, and may require some sort of preparation or inside knowledge. Basically, you start sending off information that the Drone was supposed to be sending, but without crucial details like the ongoing ninja attack. It's just like the Drone never went down.
- Scratch The Network. Basically, the Hacker sends out error messages consistent with shit having broken down somehow. Maybe he sends out encrypted garblefuck from the drone's IP to simulate the drone having flipped to the wrong encryption channel. Or maybe he sends out factory default startup bullshit to simulate a hard reboot. Or maybe he just fills up the area with static to simulate the area being filled up with static. Much easier than Patching the Network, but still raising flags (just yellow flags instead of red flags).
Another issue is the opposite: wireless devices
appearing where there are not supposed to be any. Shadowrun 4th tried to do something with this concept, but ultimately never really succeeded in writing up anything that made any sense.
The idea here I think is that there should be electromagnetic sensors that pick up wireless signals and biosigns. And hackers can mask those, providing Network Stealth to their team.
-Username17