Move Your Body: Traveling in the Flesh
It is an undeniable fact that the differences drawn between rich and poor in the Shadowrun world are stark and appalling. It's part of the dystopic charm. But the worlds of rich and poor are actually far away from one another in space in addition to any other adjective you choose to use. See, if you're a corporate citizen and you want to visit another corporate citizen, you just do it. There's a high speed tube from your arcology to the airport, and you can just wave your credstick and get on a high speed transport to another airport somewhere else in the world and get on a high speed tube from there to another arcology. On the flip side: if the same Aztechnology citizen wanted to go out and visit someone in the Redmond Barrens, a place which he can physically see from the window in his apartment, he would need to go to customs and be screened to make sure he wasn't taking classified corporate property out of the compound; he'd need to rent a vehicle and get a validation for it to enter Z zones; he'd need to drive it through non-gridlinked areas where some of the streets have actual barricades set up on them and many others have paralyzing foot traffic clogging them. Even not including the bureaucracy, it takes more physical time to drive across town into a place in the Redmond Barrens than it does when traveling from the Aztechnology Pyramid in Seattle to the Aztec Pyramid in Tenochtitlan. Seriously.
Airplane security is basically a thing of the past in 2071 if you happen to be a corporate citizen. If you're walking in from corporate controlled territory, the RFIDs on any weapons you happen to be carrying will tell the computer system whether they are allowed to be taken off premises, which is the only thing that really matters. A corporate wage slave can pretty much walk onto an airplane with automatic weaponry if for some reason they decide that this is what they want to do. The assumption is that anyone doing that is probably required by their job to carry such weaponry, and it's just not worth anyone's time trying to keep people from breaking airplanes from the inside (it's just too easy to destroy them from the outside; airplanes stay in the sky because international mobility is pretty much in everyone's interests these days).
Matrix Dialects: 133+ and lol
“N0 U”
Every metahuman literally creates a new language internally as they grow from a baby to a child, and they do so based upon the inputs they receive growing up. Because the inputs are generally from people around them who speak to and mostly understand one another, it is a historical fact that children generally grow up speaking a language that is similar enough to those around them that misunderstandings are rare. But misunderstandings do happen, and languages do change over time because each newly created language in the brain of each child is a new and somewhat mutated version of the languages that came before. Metahumans who have a need to communicate can create pidgins out of the languages they speak and children who grow up amongst these speakers will form true languages out of those inputs and such is the manner in which new languages are formed.
So what does this mean for people who grow up in a world where concepts can be literally projected directly into the brain and essentially instantaneous communication exists around the world? Mostly it means that language continues to evolve and change – only now it does so across cultural groups which have little or nothing to do with geographical distribution or historical parental languages. Over the last decades, several dialects have sprung up that are formed entirely from inputs passed to children through the Matrix. Adverts, trans-continental game pidgins, and matrix flame wars are as good a scaffold for children to form their lingual formations as anything else; and so it is that the world has seen the creation of 133+ and lol. 133+ has several roots going back as far as the telegraph, but most proximately is a combination of text pidgins created for the limitations of archaic commlinks and obfuscatory hacker slangs created specifically to limit comprehension and confuse older search engines. lol is a language composed primarily of stilted matrix humor and advertising jingles.
There is a pervasive idea amongst the speakers of older languages that the people who speak and read these new languages are illiterate and uneducated. And while many of them actually are uneducated, literacy rates of this younger generation is actually incredibly high. It's just that the accepted spelling in lol is so different from the spelling in English or Nipponese that the assumption that the lol speakers are writing “wrong” is very common. But lol speakers do spell consistently with themselves and thus any linguist will tell you that they are not writing badly, merely differently (although many would grit their teeth before admitting to this).
Consumer Culture: You are what you Buy
“Have you been feeling the inadequacy of your NERPS lately?”
Corporations keep lists of spending records attached to everyone's SINs, and they buy, sell, and trade this information back and forth amongst each other a million times a second. And the reason for all of this is to better target marketing campaigns and more precisely gauge production runs of future goods and services. But these purchasing records have gained a life of their own, and become the primary tool by which the veracity of an identity is measured. A person who doesn't buy things clearly does not really exist in the eyes of the law and even in the eyes of other people. A person who drops out of the continuous rat race and goes and joins an urban tribe or whatever may well find that in as little as a few weeks their SIN will have been tagged as a possible fake all over the Matrix because of the lack of financial activity. And any such tags have a tendency to accumulate and reinforce themselves. A person's SIN can become literally unusable in a shockingly short amount of time if one doesn't continuously purchase goods and services in an extractable pattern.
And the flip side of this of course is that if one's purchases are predictable, that the same corporations whose data mining operations hold the stick of ostracization over everyone's life also hold the “carrot” of tailoring one's adverts to conform to their expected lifestyle choices. That is, from the first time you start out buying groceries and working at a Stuffer Shack, every time you walk into a Cameron's you'll see advertisements for basic and luxury goods that you might plausibly want popping up on displays pointed at you as well as projected into your AR experience as advertisement Arrows (depending upon your Firewall settings). This frankly may not seem like much of a carrot, and indeed many of the Neo-Anarchists and Pinkskins argue that it is not. There are a number of cultures and regions where this sort of practice is heavily discouraged by means running from legal injunctions to sabotage. And people in these areas are considered by the rest of the world to be SINless even if they aren't in their region of choice.
It is important to note that the strength of product liability and anti-trust legislation in 2071 is laughable. Major corporations make objects as safe or as dangerous as they think that the market will bear. If it weren't for the awesome power of modern medicine, the awe-inspiring number of carcinogens that ordinary people are exposed to on a daily basis would shorten lives tremendously. And indeed, the moment one steps outside the confines of reasonably affluent neighborhoods, the life expectations are offensively tiny. A random selection of sodas off the shelf would find many that were quite horrendous for health, but none of the cans would feel any need to mention this fact. Ironically, competition limiting rules in place at the corporate court that prevent most corporations from negative advertising campaigns make it highly difficult for anyone to raise a fuss about such things. If Wuxing's new softdrink is both addictive and toxic, the other major corporations (and their affiliates) would not report that fact for fear of running afoul of unfair competition clauses, although they might well arrange for freelancers to deliver the research data to independent news groups.
Life With RFID: It's Almost Like Trust
“Do you accept the charges, punk? Well, do you?”
The RFID is a very tiny chip that gives a very small amount of data out wirelessly and continuously. Very small amounts of data for the 2070s are surprisingly large compared to what a reader in the 2070s would think of the term, and so it is that a casual perusal of the RFID in a can of peas will tell you how much they cost, every warehouse they have ever been stored in, when and where they were canned, how many peas are supposedly contained, and so on and so forth.
All consumer items contain RFIDs, and it is in this manner that items are purchased. The days of waiting in line to “check out” are long gone. Instead one merely picks out what they want and walks out with it, with the RFIDs on all the goods alerting the store's system that they are leaving and the store responding by requesting a monetary transfer to cover the costs of everything. If you, or anyone else sends the requisite funds, all the items are tagged as sold both in the store database and on the RFID tags themselves. Getting RFID tags to mark themselves as sold without help from the store is supposedly essentially impossible, because each one is equipped with a short and completely arbitrary one time pad that would cover that particular change – but of course the realities of high density signal interaction is that one can directly flip the requisite bits on the RFID without sending the appropriate password (which of course you will never ever guess unless you outlive the sun).
And of course, sometimes things are mislabeled. Sometimes to hilarious effect, and there are matrix hosts given over entirely to AR stills from people getting sent Arrows from goods with the wrong ID tag (last month's winner was from a hospital in which a baby was mistakenly marked as a sharps receptacle: “Please Insert Used Needles In Mouth”). But human error in slapping RFIDs around is no worse than human error in running things through a scanner at a check-out counter, and the amount of labor saved by just having a lot less people working retail far outweighs any additional shrinkage from having people occasionally able to walk out with goods that got shelved without proper RFIDs. And yes, there is still work for bag boys even if cashiering is a lost art. Many classier retail outlets will giftwrap your purchases, and big box stores will help you get your stuff into bags.
Enforcing the Matrix: I fought the Law(s)
“No. You're off the case!”
The rules governing the Matrix are bewildering and perplexing. Ideally, whoever holds jurisdiction over the location where actual hardware had signal passed into it holds sway over the definition, investigation, and prosecution of crime. Mix in the fact that many matrix actions (especially data searches) involve hundreds or thousands of physical machines, and that technically any device that a AAA corp has designated as a “major” installation is extra-territorial corporate property and you've got a recipe for bureaucratic gesticulation that is hard to even imagine. Basically what it comes down to is that almost anything you do on the matrix is technically illegal somewhere, especially if you're performing data searches. The Sixth World has a lot of authoritarian hellscapes in it, and almost any information you want is probably contraband somewhere, and your computational actions will probably end up sending signal into and through some of those places, meaning that you've broken the law of someone with every blink and breath.
Of course, in practice this is merely paralytic. The fact that the Tír na nÓg theocracy has a number of portions of Irish history as criminal offenses to even talk about has little effect on a person in the United Netherlands researching Celtic culture even though their matrix signals will doubtlessly be transmitted into Tír territorial matrix hubs many times. Sending law enforcement contractors after whoever breaks these laws is usually not in the interests of anyone. In a world where virtually all activity is criminalized, it's very much like nothing is against the law. Except that occasional people are sent to the Gulag for indeterminate amounts of time in order to somehow set an example to a fearful and perplexed populace.
A GOD from the Machine: The Grid Overwatch Division
“I am the Law.”
The corporate court has their own pet matrix enforcement division, called the Grid Overwatch Division. Their jurisdiction is nominally any matrix crime which “concerns” two or more voting members of the corporate court. They answer directly to the Corporate Court, but each individual officer is put forward originally by a specific AAA corp, and honestly a fair number of them are spies.
The GOD has an extremely high opinion of itself, as do most of the spiders in their employ. They have some impressively pretentiously named subunits (such as the Artificial Resource Management division – the ARM of GOD – eyerolls are appropriate at this juncture). There are a number of things holding GOD back, which is great news for shadowrunners. The most obvious of course is that each GOD officer is sent to the agency from a corporation, which means that while they are very good they are specifically notthe top talent of their home corp (top talent is kept in-house). And the other part is that the very nature of their jurisdiction leaves them in bureaucratic limbo constantly. Any event which concerns two or more AAA corporations is usually politically sensitive, and corporations are often lethargic when it comes to actually cooperating with the agency.
WRIA: The World Recording Industry Army
“You wouldn't steal a policeman's helmet, would you?”
One of the few organizations that is actually willing to pursue the massive number of seemingly minor matrix offenses which come like a driving rain against the precepts of modern society is the World Recording Industry Army. They are a mercenary force hired by a conglomerate of intellectual property producers called the World Recording Industry Association (which is conveniently also abbreviated as WRIA). They have dubious jurisdiction and pay even more dubious attention to it. The WRIA very publicly executes people with large caliber weaponry for pirating software. The concept is that if uniformed men burst into peoples' homes and shoot them in the back of the head for sharing music files, that intellectual property will globally be safeguarded. In reality, this seems to have little effect on world wide software piracy, but once an organization like this has actually killed people, it is hard to even imagine them admitting their mistake and dong something else.
Not all countries and corporations allow WRIA hit teams on their property. Others allow them only with restrictions. For example, the UCAS recognizes the enforcement rights of the WRIA to shoot people down in the street for software piracy, but it does not recognize its investigative authority in their territory. Which means that technically the WRIA is supposed to wait around until the UCAS government tells them that someone has been pirating simsense chips and then they can go in guns blazing. In Aztlan on the other hand gives the WRIA unlimited access to parts of the Yucatan and the Panamanian Isthmus, and no access whatsoever to Tenochtitlan and the surroundings.
12.14.2009
The Infrastructure and Topology of the Matrix
Atlas is an angry titan, but it is folly to believe that we could live without him.
The world of 2071 is a wireless one. What this means is that the end users of the Matrix don't have wires trailing between themselves and the informational infrastructure of the world. This does not mean that wired connections are unheard of or even that they are rare. Indeed, even on a single person, many of their devices will be wired together. Indeed the preferred connection between the brain itself and the machine is still wired (either through a datajack or internal commlink). It's just the connections between the user's Personal Area Network (PAN) and the devices and other networks with which it interfaces is wireless. And thus, the experience of the metahumans within society is one of total freedom to access the matrix from anywhere. And total subjugation before the fact that the matrix is equally free to access them no matter where they go.
High Density Signal and Low Density Signal
There exists the possibility in the world of Shadowrun to manipulate hardware at a distance with the use of very large amounts of data projected across a signal in very short amount of time. The very most basic and obvious of these hardware manipulations is where one can project it into a metahuman brain and accent or replace their sense data. High density signal can be projected into a metahuman's optic nerve and cause them to “see” something different from that which would be expected from the colors and intensities of light striking their actual retina – indeed this is the very basis for AR Arrows. And yet, as one can well imagine this capability comes with an inherent possibility for abuse: a hacker can just as viably send fake sense data intended to confuse as a McHugh's is capable of sending fake sense data to inform one of the critical savings available on the value menu. And failing to utilize these channels is no defense against the actions of hackers. Just because you aren't projecting Arrows into your field of view doesn't mean that no one else is.
High density signal can only travel a total of about 30,000 kilometers before the propagation time of quantum effects and electromagnetic interaction actually looms large enough to render the enterprise nonfunctional. The universal speed limit is the speed of light, and while it is very fast (299,792 kilometers every second), it is nonetheless an actual speed and if signals are required to travel about a tenth of that they simply no longer can be reasonably approximated as interacting in real time.
Low Density Signal is less exciting, as it's essentially the kind of stuff we call “broadband” today. You can send basic video across it, but it skips sometimes. You can run some quite impressive networked games across it, provided that almost everything is actually run on the hardware of the people actually playing the game and not server side (and of course it limits the simsense communications between players to essentially nothing).You can send phone and text messages of practically limitless lengths across Low Density Signal just as you can across wireless broadband today. But simsense is too intense, just as it is today. Low Density Signal is relatively “safe” because it can't do any kind of crazy direct hardware manipulations, and it goes much farther than High Density Signal does because it can accept data clarity which is much lower at its final destination.
Cables and Satellites: The Spine of the World
“We have built our tower into the heavens and beyond, and now all languages are 1 and 0 again.”
High density signal can travel up to 30,000 kilometers before time delays render it meaningless. However, there are few transmitters that are capable of sending data that far, especially compared to the amount of data which is actually sent. No two points on the globe are substantially more than 20,000 kilometers from one to another but to actually get any substantial distance around the planet requires an indirect path because the planet is essentially round. Wireless transmissions pretty much go in straight lines, so the fact that you can't draw a real straight lines between most major cities without drawing it through the Earth (who is damnably resistant to wireless transmission), means that most real signal paths involve either being bounced through satellites, or routed through fiberoptic cables.
LEO and Up
“Long ago, when all the stars moved through the sky together...”
The atmosphere mostly craps out around 70 kilometers above the surface of the world, and it is at that point that pilots can see the stars in the day and astrally projecting magicians dare not travel further. But things don't have really stable orbits that close to the Earth. The first nice and long term orbits start cropping up over 1000 kilometers above sea level. And these are called “Low Earth Orbit” and comprise all of the high density signal satellites. Things lower than that are in temporary orbits, which is why semiballistic planes have no real chance to run into communication satellites.
Beyond that, there are geosynchronous satellites that orbit the world somewhere over 40,000 kilometers from the center of the Earth (which puts them comfortably outside the 30,000 kilometer cutoff for high density signal). These satellites all rotate around the Earth such that they pass over the same point on the Earth once each day at the same time. This means that with enough of them in play, you can use a sat phone to always make a phone call from anywhere on Earth. And yeah, the 2070s have more than enough satellites for that.
The Shadowrun future also has a number of space stations of various sizes. Many of these are set low enough that they can interact with high density signal from the ground, and many others are set to be high enough that they can't.
Connections
“With enough legos you can make the world.”
While high density signal can indeed forcibly transform one bit into another and manually change the results on another piece of hardware, this is very much not what people normally do in order to get the matrix working for them. Most data transfer happens across established connections where tremendously titanic amounts of data flow relatively free of constraints. These large data flows are incredibly dangerous, and so it is that most systems take a fair amount of care to limit what they open connections with. A connection can only be opened by both networks together, although of course hackers and spammers spend a considerable amount of effort in tricking or forcing other networks into opening connections.
Data connections can pass across anything that can carry signal of the appropriate density, and many connections have dedicated fiberoptic cables to them – a practice which severely limits the abilities of shady individuals to listen in to the contents of the shared traffic.
Servers
“I want all of that in here.”
Very large computers have a purpose even in 2071. Not to process the powerful equations that are needed to make the modern world go – those use a bunch of tiny computers and run it orchestral style with the awesome power of a metahuman brain. But instead in the switchbox of connections that different networks need to pass data back and forth between each other. These are expensive pieces of hardware and do a similar job to the human brain running an occupied network in running other occupied networks together. Running things through a server allows networks to have very large numbers of very fast connections running all over the place. A server can be powerful enough to run its own IC to protect itself, and most corporate servers are.
Wireless Communication: The Web Between
“The fridge bone connected to the trid bone. The trid bone connected to the light bone. The light bone connected to the washer bone. Oh hear the word of the lord!”
While tremendously large hunks of data are sloshed hither and yon through the medium of lasers fired through clear fibers, a myriad of devices share data across the medium of wireless waves transmitted at the speed of light. What goes into those wireless waves? Not really sure. It's some kind of radiation, probably lots of different kinds of radiation because the carrying capacity of the airwaves is apparently very, very high.
Personal Area Networks
“Your pen is low on ink. Purchase ink refill [Y/N]?”
The Personal Area Network is an elaborate amalgam of transmissions and conductions, using whatever form of signal happens to be available. Much of it is conducted through skinlink, a system whereby the skin's charge is modulated to send signals. And much of it is conducted through little fiberoptic cables. Topologically, these PANs are basically mesh networks where the integration of them is handled by tapping into the power of the metahuman brain that is at the center.
Since every metahuman brain gives off brainwaves, it is not really possible to hide a PAN just by wiring all the connections together. There is however massively complicated math that one can do that will hide a PAN from outside observation. But stealth in the Matrix is an active process.
Wireless Terrain
“Welcome to our secret lair. Thousands of meters below the Earth's crust.”
We're not overly concerned with what kind of waves are specifically being transmitted from one network to another. However, while devices are frequency agile and such in the 2070s, they are using some kind of radiation from the electromagnetic spectrum. And that means that it probably causes cancer. But that's a bridge that modern society has obviously agreed to burn when it comes to it. More immediately important to the modern hacker is the fact that it can and will be absorbed or reflected at some rate by various materials and electrical events. What precisely those materials and such would be would vary depending upon precisely what frequencies were used, a question which as previously noted we have no intention of answering. However, this information is known to the engineers of the late 21st century, and it is entirely possible for them to create composites that have extremely high or low transmittance of communication frequencies – and indeed they have done exactly this.
The Earth
The Earth itself has a crap tonne of crazy metals and such in it, and will absorb or reflect pretty much any frequencies you care to mention with at least some of its constituents. In general, you can assume that transmissions cannot go through the planet as a whole. In addition, it's highly likely that any particular signal can't go through a particular cross section of earth if it has to go through very much of it. Practically what this means is that if your signal goes through some part of earth your effective signal is reduced by the one more than the amount of signal that would be required to go through that amount of empty space (so for example, going through 40m of empty space would require a Signal of 1, so sending your signal through 40 meters of earth would set your signal back by 2). Practically this means that you probably can't send signals through mountains or even hills. A 1km obstruction would drop signal by 5, meaning that the base signal would have to be 9 just to get through.
WiFi Blocking Paint and the Faraday Cage
A barrier that is completely covering something topologically that is made out of something conductive is called a Faraday Cage. It can have holes in it, provided that those holes are not much larger than the wavelengths of the radiation passing through them. What it does is divert electromagnetic radiation into itself and essentially stop coherent transmissions through it. These things are not one hundred percent or anything, and short of busting out the measuring laser to determine the thickness and hole size of your mesh, the game simplifies these things to just have ratings that reduce signal ratings.
The really exciting part comes with the invention of WiFi blocking paint. That is, a flat (and thin, and light, and inexpensive) electromagnetic barrier. The physics of that sort of thing are really weird, since of course in the regular world radiation effectively bends around barriers really easily. But for whatever reason, a WiFi barrier reduces signal strength if the line of effect is drawn through it, and not if it does not. That's whacky, but it's also simple. I suggest that physicists not think about it too hard.
The world of 2071 is a wireless one. What this means is that the end users of the Matrix don't have wires trailing between themselves and the informational infrastructure of the world. This does not mean that wired connections are unheard of or even that they are rare. Indeed, even on a single person, many of their devices will be wired together. Indeed the preferred connection between the brain itself and the machine is still wired (either through a datajack or internal commlink). It's just the connections between the user's Personal Area Network (PAN) and the devices and other networks with which it interfaces is wireless. And thus, the experience of the metahumans within society is one of total freedom to access the matrix from anywhere. And total subjugation before the fact that the matrix is equally free to access them no matter where they go.
High Density Signal and Low Density Signal
There exists the possibility in the world of Shadowrun to manipulate hardware at a distance with the use of very large amounts of data projected across a signal in very short amount of time. The very most basic and obvious of these hardware manipulations is where one can project it into a metahuman brain and accent or replace their sense data. High density signal can be projected into a metahuman's optic nerve and cause them to “see” something different from that which would be expected from the colors and intensities of light striking their actual retina – indeed this is the very basis for AR Arrows. And yet, as one can well imagine this capability comes with an inherent possibility for abuse: a hacker can just as viably send fake sense data intended to confuse as a McHugh's is capable of sending fake sense data to inform one of the critical savings available on the value menu. And failing to utilize these channels is no defense against the actions of hackers. Just because you aren't projecting Arrows into your field of view doesn't mean that no one else is.
High density signal can only travel a total of about 30,000 kilometers before the propagation time of quantum effects and electromagnetic interaction actually looms large enough to render the enterprise nonfunctional. The universal speed limit is the speed of light, and while it is very fast (299,792 kilometers every second), it is nonetheless an actual speed and if signals are required to travel about a tenth of that they simply no longer can be reasonably approximated as interacting in real time.
Low Density Signal is less exciting, as it's essentially the kind of stuff we call “broadband” today. You can send basic video across it, but it skips sometimes. You can run some quite impressive networked games across it, provided that almost everything is actually run on the hardware of the people actually playing the game and not server side (and of course it limits the simsense communications between players to essentially nothing).You can send phone and text messages of practically limitless lengths across Low Density Signal just as you can across wireless broadband today. But simsense is too intense, just as it is today. Low Density Signal is relatively “safe” because it can't do any kind of crazy direct hardware manipulations, and it goes much farther than High Density Signal does because it can accept data clarity which is much lower at its final destination.
Cables and Satellites: The Spine of the World
“We have built our tower into the heavens and beyond, and now all languages are 1 and 0 again.”
High density signal can travel up to 30,000 kilometers before time delays render it meaningless. However, there are few transmitters that are capable of sending data that far, especially compared to the amount of data which is actually sent. No two points on the globe are substantially more than 20,000 kilometers from one to another but to actually get any substantial distance around the planet requires an indirect path because the planet is essentially round. Wireless transmissions pretty much go in straight lines, so the fact that you can't draw a real straight lines between most major cities without drawing it through the Earth (who is damnably resistant to wireless transmission), means that most real signal paths involve either being bounced through satellites, or routed through fiberoptic cables.
LEO and Up
“Long ago, when all the stars moved through the sky together...”
The atmosphere mostly craps out around 70 kilometers above the surface of the world, and it is at that point that pilots can see the stars in the day and astrally projecting magicians dare not travel further. But things don't have really stable orbits that close to the Earth. The first nice and long term orbits start cropping up over 1000 kilometers above sea level. And these are called “Low Earth Orbit” and comprise all of the high density signal satellites. Things lower than that are in temporary orbits, which is why semiballistic planes have no real chance to run into communication satellites.
Beyond that, there are geosynchronous satellites that orbit the world somewhere over 40,000 kilometers from the center of the Earth (which puts them comfortably outside the 30,000 kilometer cutoff for high density signal). These satellites all rotate around the Earth such that they pass over the same point on the Earth once each day at the same time. This means that with enough of them in play, you can use a sat phone to always make a phone call from anywhere on Earth. And yeah, the 2070s have more than enough satellites for that.
The Shadowrun future also has a number of space stations of various sizes. Many of these are set low enough that they can interact with high density signal from the ground, and many others are set to be high enough that they can't.
Connections
“With enough legos you can make the world.”
While high density signal can indeed forcibly transform one bit into another and manually change the results on another piece of hardware, this is very much not what people normally do in order to get the matrix working for them. Most data transfer happens across established connections where tremendously titanic amounts of data flow relatively free of constraints. These large data flows are incredibly dangerous, and so it is that most systems take a fair amount of care to limit what they open connections with. A connection can only be opened by both networks together, although of course hackers and spammers spend a considerable amount of effort in tricking or forcing other networks into opening connections.
Data connections can pass across anything that can carry signal of the appropriate density, and many connections have dedicated fiberoptic cables to them – a practice which severely limits the abilities of shady individuals to listen in to the contents of the shared traffic.
Servers
“I want all of that in here.”
Very large computers have a purpose even in 2071. Not to process the powerful equations that are needed to make the modern world go – those use a bunch of tiny computers and run it orchestral style with the awesome power of a metahuman brain. But instead in the switchbox of connections that different networks need to pass data back and forth between each other. These are expensive pieces of hardware and do a similar job to the human brain running an occupied network in running other occupied networks together. Running things through a server allows networks to have very large numbers of very fast connections running all over the place. A server can be powerful enough to run its own IC to protect itself, and most corporate servers are.
Wireless Communication: The Web Between
“The fridge bone connected to the trid bone. The trid bone connected to the light bone. The light bone connected to the washer bone. Oh hear the word of the lord!”
While tremendously large hunks of data are sloshed hither and yon through the medium of lasers fired through clear fibers, a myriad of devices share data across the medium of wireless waves transmitted at the speed of light. What goes into those wireless waves? Not really sure. It's some kind of radiation, probably lots of different kinds of radiation because the carrying capacity of the airwaves is apparently very, very high.
Personal Area Networks
“Your pen is low on ink. Purchase ink refill [Y/N]?”
The Personal Area Network is an elaborate amalgam of transmissions and conductions, using whatever form of signal happens to be available. Much of it is conducted through skinlink, a system whereby the skin's charge is modulated to send signals. And much of it is conducted through little fiberoptic cables. Topologically, these PANs are basically mesh networks where the integration of them is handled by tapping into the power of the metahuman brain that is at the center.
Since every metahuman brain gives off brainwaves, it is not really possible to hide a PAN just by wiring all the connections together. There is however massively complicated math that one can do that will hide a PAN from outside observation. But stealth in the Matrix is an active process.
Wireless Terrain
“Welcome to our secret lair. Thousands of meters below the Earth's crust.”
We're not overly concerned with what kind of waves are specifically being transmitted from one network to another. However, while devices are frequency agile and such in the 2070s, they are using some kind of radiation from the electromagnetic spectrum. And that means that it probably causes cancer. But that's a bridge that modern society has obviously agreed to burn when it comes to it. More immediately important to the modern hacker is the fact that it can and will be absorbed or reflected at some rate by various materials and electrical events. What precisely those materials and such would be would vary depending upon precisely what frequencies were used, a question which as previously noted we have no intention of answering. However, this information is known to the engineers of the late 21st century, and it is entirely possible for them to create composites that have extremely high or low transmittance of communication frequencies – and indeed they have done exactly this.
The Earth
The Earth itself has a crap tonne of crazy metals and such in it, and will absorb or reflect pretty much any frequencies you care to mention with at least some of its constituents. In general, you can assume that transmissions cannot go through the planet as a whole. In addition, it's highly likely that any particular signal can't go through a particular cross section of earth if it has to go through very much of it. Practically what this means is that if your signal goes through some part of earth your effective signal is reduced by the one more than the amount of signal that would be required to go through that amount of empty space (so for example, going through 40m of empty space would require a Signal of 1, so sending your signal through 40 meters of earth would set your signal back by 2). Practically this means that you probably can't send signals through mountains or even hills. A 1km obstruction would drop signal by 5, meaning that the base signal would have to be 9 just to get through.
WiFi Blocking Paint and the Faraday Cage
A barrier that is completely covering something topologically that is made out of something conductive is called a Faraday Cage. It can have holes in it, provided that those holes are not much larger than the wavelengths of the radiation passing through them. What it does is divert electromagnetic radiation into itself and essentially stop coherent transmissions through it. These things are not one hundred percent or anything, and short of busting out the measuring laser to determine the thickness and hole size of your mesh, the game simplifies these things to just have ratings that reduce signal ratings.
The really exciting part comes with the invention of WiFi blocking paint. That is, a flat (and thin, and light, and inexpensive) electromagnetic barrier. The physics of that sort of thing are really weird, since of course in the regular world radiation effectively bends around barriers really easily. But for whatever reason, a WiFi barrier reduces signal strength if the line of effect is drawn through it, and not if it does not. That's whacky, but it's also simple. I suggest that physicists not think about it too hard.
Why Money?
“Why rob a bank? That's where the money is.”
Perhaps the most extraordinary claim of all in the annals of hackerdom is the idea that these people get paid in electronic currency to break the laws of society and change electronic records. The extremity of this claim is quite apparent: people are breaking the rules of society to change data records in exchange for being gifted with data records that according to the rules of society entitle them to goods and services. Why not eliminate the middle man and just hack the money records directly? The fact that people in the Shadowrun universe don't is highly indicative that they can't. And the reason for this is primarily because the monetary records themselves are very far away.
Electronic Nuyen: The Ledger in the Sky
“It is the finding of the Corporate Court that the creation of a unified currency that is itself immune to the damaging effects of speculation and devaluation is an essential pillar upon which the global economy must be placed.”
Electronic money can exist in a world where people can force the changing of electronic data from a distance by impressing it with high density signal because it's actually really simple: it's just a number. That means all transactions of electronic money can be done entirely with low density signal. There's nothing complicated enough going on to actually need any of the fancy processing that Shadowrun era signaling can do, and so it lies within the capacity of those maintaining the money to block out all high density signals and still conduct business. To hack the money supply with traditional methods would thus require one to get inside the barriers and thus be on site. Considering that the money is “kept” in servers that are extremely inaccessible, this rarely happens.
The biggest reservoir of money is a series of servers maintained in Zürich Orbital, a space station which passes over the Earth at nearly 2,000 kilometers above the seas. The “money” is a series of account numbers with money amounts on servers that sit inside this well fortified bunker floating continuously in space. These servers are connected through low density signal cable to retransmitters attached to powerful receivers on the outside of signal shell. The externally available computers don't hold any account information, encryption keys, or passwords, they literally just retransmit heavily encrypted (and short) data bursts into and out of the internal server farm through a signal bottleneck. Thus ideally there is nothing whatever that an external hacker could hack that would mean anything.
Now this doesn't mean that the enterprising hacker can't steal money, just that they have to steal it from a specific account by getting a hold of an actual credstick or commlink and hack them to authorize the transfer of funds. However this is understandably dangerous, because doing so still leaves a trail of money transfers on the hidden servers that the hacker is probably in no position to do anything about. It is for this reason, that fraud of this sort is mostly confined to spending sprees on relatively untraceable goods and services rather than actually getting the money into one's own credit line. And thus we get back to the question of eliminating the middle man: it is often plain easier and safer to just hack a carpet supply warehouse to think that it should deliver you some sweet rug than it is to hack a stolen credstick to transfer money to the carpet supply warehouse and “purchase” the same rug with money that may well be flagged as illegit in days, hours, or even seconds. For this reason, personal credsticks are often left to lie by hardened criminals.
Other Currencies: ¥, $, €
ZO is not the only game in town, but the others aren't super different. The Malaysian Independent Bank operates an island fortress where they keep all the records, and while it's not actually “in space” it might as well be as far as most people are concerned. The European Economic Commission operates the Euro rather than the ¥, but its account server vault at the bottom of a mineshaft is not especially easy to crack into either. Aztlan's secret bank is so secret that they don't even tell people what is protecting the Peso accounts, but it's presumably pretty intense because all legends of people hacking that particular server are vague and unlikely.
Debits and Credits: Debt Slavery and the Credit Spiral
“Work your fingers to the bone and what do you get? Bony fingers!”
An interesting thing that happens in Shadowrun is that despite the fact that the characters are getting a brand new identity several times a month in some cases, they still feel the need to work for a living. And that's actually somewhat odd when you think about it in terms of modern finances. See in 2008 “you” can borrow fairly substantial sums of money at any time at merely ruinous interest with no collateral. The threat of destroying the credit rating of your identity is considered sufficient of a stick to make these short term loan sharking operations solvent. In 2008, identity fraud comes with a certain amount of cash money automatically. Simply by virtue of trading the credit rating in for cash advances on loans that one has no intention of repaying, someone who is already committing the crime of fraud on their identity can gain a steady income from sketchy banks and loan houses until one is caught for the first offense.
And yet, in Shadowrun that manifestly doesn't happen, because the characters are perjuring their identities again and again and they are paying money for the privilege instead of vice versa. What does this mean? It means that the credit system in Shadowrun is somehow set up so that taking a loan with an identity that is going to cease to exist long before the first payment comes due is not a no brainer. In fact, it seems that taking a loan is itself so onerous that characters just are not doing it at all – even though the campaign only takes place over a short period of the character's life and thus can be looked at as being in the disposable ID situation even if the character is a SINner. See, the campaign is likely going to end in a year of the character's life, so anything she ever has to repay at any interest in 13 months is just flavor text in any “real” sense. And yet, players just don't take loans. They spend money that they have already earned rather than drawing on the reserves of a speculative future to gain monetary advantages during the actual game.
The primary reason for this is probably linked directly to the reason that people call corp workers “wage slaves.” See, when you take a loan in 2071 you don't just get a pile of money that you are expected to pay back. You actually sign up for employment and the corp gives you an advance on your wages. Wage slaves literally are slaves. Or indentured servants. Or whatever. They work for nothing except food and board, occasionally having the number of required work hours they are required to put in go up. And that's why player characters don't usually take loans – they would actually have to show up for work in order to get the money. Which is really just like their current job as freelance mercenaries except less awesome.
Perhaps the most extraordinary claim of all in the annals of hackerdom is the idea that these people get paid in electronic currency to break the laws of society and change electronic records. The extremity of this claim is quite apparent: people are breaking the rules of society to change data records in exchange for being gifted with data records that according to the rules of society entitle them to goods and services. Why not eliminate the middle man and just hack the money records directly? The fact that people in the Shadowrun universe don't is highly indicative that they can't. And the reason for this is primarily because the monetary records themselves are very far away.
Electronic Nuyen: The Ledger in the Sky
“It is the finding of the Corporate Court that the creation of a unified currency that is itself immune to the damaging effects of speculation and devaluation is an essential pillar upon which the global economy must be placed.”
Electronic money can exist in a world where people can force the changing of electronic data from a distance by impressing it with high density signal because it's actually really simple: it's just a number. That means all transactions of electronic money can be done entirely with low density signal. There's nothing complicated enough going on to actually need any of the fancy processing that Shadowrun era signaling can do, and so it lies within the capacity of those maintaining the money to block out all high density signals and still conduct business. To hack the money supply with traditional methods would thus require one to get inside the barriers and thus be on site. Considering that the money is “kept” in servers that are extremely inaccessible, this rarely happens.
The biggest reservoir of money is a series of servers maintained in Zürich Orbital, a space station which passes over the Earth at nearly 2,000 kilometers above the seas. The “money” is a series of account numbers with money amounts on servers that sit inside this well fortified bunker floating continuously in space. These servers are connected through low density signal cable to retransmitters attached to powerful receivers on the outside of signal shell. The externally available computers don't hold any account information, encryption keys, or passwords, they literally just retransmit heavily encrypted (and short) data bursts into and out of the internal server farm through a signal bottleneck. Thus ideally there is nothing whatever that an external hacker could hack that would mean anything.
Now this doesn't mean that the enterprising hacker can't steal money, just that they have to steal it from a specific account by getting a hold of an actual credstick or commlink and hack them to authorize the transfer of funds. However this is understandably dangerous, because doing so still leaves a trail of money transfers on the hidden servers that the hacker is probably in no position to do anything about. It is for this reason, that fraud of this sort is mostly confined to spending sprees on relatively untraceable goods and services rather than actually getting the money into one's own credit line. And thus we get back to the question of eliminating the middle man: it is often plain easier and safer to just hack a carpet supply warehouse to think that it should deliver you some sweet rug than it is to hack a stolen credstick to transfer money to the carpet supply warehouse and “purchase” the same rug with money that may well be flagged as illegit in days, hours, or even seconds. For this reason, personal credsticks are often left to lie by hardened criminals.
- Equipment Spotlight: Cash
Cash is generally avoided as a medium of exchange by corporations and wage slaves alike because it is essentially untraceable. Very large piles of cash are viewed with suspicion even by shady people. The general feeling even amongst criminals is that anyone who could steal themselves a very large amount of money should be able to get themselves together to get an off-shore bank account like a respectable gangster, and that anyone who isn't a criminal should also have a bank account rather than piles of bills that could be so easily stolen or misplaced.
Other Currencies: ¥, $, €
ZO is not the only game in town, but the others aren't super different. The Malaysian Independent Bank operates an island fortress where they keep all the records, and while it's not actually “in space” it might as well be as far as most people are concerned. The European Economic Commission operates the Euro rather than the ¥, but its account server vault at the bottom of a mineshaft is not especially easy to crack into either. Aztlan's secret bank is so secret that they don't even tell people what is protecting the Peso accounts, but it's presumably pretty intense because all legends of people hacking that particular server are vague and unlikely.
Debits and Credits: Debt Slavery and the Credit Spiral
“Work your fingers to the bone and what do you get? Bony fingers!”
An interesting thing that happens in Shadowrun is that despite the fact that the characters are getting a brand new identity several times a month in some cases, they still feel the need to work for a living. And that's actually somewhat odd when you think about it in terms of modern finances. See in 2008 “you” can borrow fairly substantial sums of money at any time at merely ruinous interest with no collateral. The threat of destroying the credit rating of your identity is considered sufficient of a stick to make these short term loan sharking operations solvent. In 2008, identity fraud comes with a certain amount of cash money automatically. Simply by virtue of trading the credit rating in for cash advances on loans that one has no intention of repaying, someone who is already committing the crime of fraud on their identity can gain a steady income from sketchy banks and loan houses until one is caught for the first offense.
And yet, in Shadowrun that manifestly doesn't happen, because the characters are perjuring their identities again and again and they are paying money for the privilege instead of vice versa. What does this mean? It means that the credit system in Shadowrun is somehow set up so that taking a loan with an identity that is going to cease to exist long before the first payment comes due is not a no brainer. In fact, it seems that taking a loan is itself so onerous that characters just are not doing it at all – even though the campaign only takes place over a short period of the character's life and thus can be looked at as being in the disposable ID situation even if the character is a SINner. See, the campaign is likely going to end in a year of the character's life, so anything she ever has to repay at any interest in 13 months is just flavor text in any “real” sense. And yet, players just don't take loans. They spend money that they have already earned rather than drawing on the reserves of a speculative future to gain monetary advantages during the actual game.
The primary reason for this is probably linked directly to the reason that people call corp workers “wage slaves.” See, when you take a loan in 2071 you don't just get a pile of money that you are expected to pay back. You actually sign up for employment and the corp gives you an advance on your wages. Wage slaves literally are slaves. Or indentured servants. Or whatever. They work for nothing except food and board, occasionally having the number of required work hours they are required to put in go up. And that's why player characters don't usually take loans – they would actually have to show up for work in order to get the money. Which is really just like their current job as freelance mercenaries except less awesome.
- Equipment Spotlight: The Credstick
Credsticks are much less common in 2071 than they were in 2050, when literally everyone had one (or more). This is because commlinks now do much of the work that Credsticks used to do. But one is entitled to wonder what exact “it” is. The answer is that a Credstick carries a symmetric encryption key that is otherwise held only by part of a secret bank server somewhere on an island or in space. Each credstick sends a set of encoded low density signals to the bank that authorize the bank to move a certain amount of money from one account to another. And because no one actually knows exactlywhat your credstick is saying to the bank (without hacking the credstick), EUE (Effectively Unbreakable Encryption) is maintained as long as no one breaks into the credstick itself. Lower quality credsticks simply send the signal through a stick reader and hope that it can pass through the Matrix to the bank so that the money transfer will get authorized. Higher quality credsticks (with names like “Platinum” and “Ebony”) are able to send the information directly to the bank themselves and are able to transfer money whether there is a stick reader on hand or not. Most credsticks have some sort of system by which to verify that the right person is actually authorizing transfers of funds. Passcodes, retina scans, and even blood samples are used by various credsticks. Some credsticks send portions of the data from their activation to the bank itself as part of money transfer, while others merely require it as a check before they send the encrypted request. A “certified” credstick is actually the least secure of all – the stick doesn't correspond to any specific real person, the account is just a number associated with a credstick. So anyone can hand the certified stick to another person and that person can trade that money as if they were the original stick holder. In modern times, people quite often make use of credit modules in their commlinks. This works pretty much the same, except that the range of finding a matrix connection that is capable of reaching the (doubtless distant) secure bank servers is much greater.
Aside: The Security Camera
No single device in a modern or science fiction setting causes as much paranoia (both justified and not) as the security camera. And this should come as no surprise, for regardless of what kind of force ratios your team can bring to the party at an instant of your choosing, the fact is that the amount of force that any particular society can bring against an individual is practically infinite in any modern or futuristic setting (as opposed to medieval settings with barest nods to science fiction window dressing like Warhammer 40K). So any object which promises the heavy hand of eventual retribution by the whole of society against transgressors should be a scary thing, and indeed in Shadowrun it is.
There are three main camera setups that one must concern yourself with in the day to day criminal operations of Shadowrun: the solitary camera; the networked camera; and the low resolution camera. The solitary camera is exactly what it sounds like: it's a trid recorder that is completely self contained. It's fairly trivial to smash it with a baseball bat or hack it into oblivion and since it's entirely self contained that's the end of any data the recorder had on you. The network camera is attached to a network, which means that destroying the device itself won't do anything at all to the trid already recorded. It'll have to be hacked if you want to get rid of the data already stored (but good news: hacking any part of the network will allow you to edit any of the data from any of the recorders on the system). And finally the low resolution camera takes basic video and sends it one way by low density signal to some storage system that may be very far away. You can do anything you want to the recorder itself and it won't do a thing to any video already recorded and sent unless you get direct access to the storage systems (wherever they are). Fortunately for the criminally inclined, this last type takes the kind of crappy security camera footage that we get in 2008 – so the security forces who go back and review it will have such wonderful information as “two orks and a human committed this crime.”
There are three main camera setups that one must concern yourself with in the day to day criminal operations of Shadowrun: the solitary camera; the networked camera; and the low resolution camera. The solitary camera is exactly what it sounds like: it's a trid recorder that is completely self contained. It's fairly trivial to smash it with a baseball bat or hack it into oblivion and since it's entirely self contained that's the end of any data the recorder had on you. The network camera is attached to a network, which means that destroying the device itself won't do anything at all to the trid already recorded. It'll have to be hacked if you want to get rid of the data already stored (but good news: hacking any part of the network will allow you to edit any of the data from any of the recorders on the system). And finally the low resolution camera takes basic video and sends it one way by low density signal to some storage system that may be very far away. You can do anything you want to the recorder itself and it won't do a thing to any video already recorded and sent unless you get direct access to the storage systems (wherever they are). Fortunately for the criminally inclined, this last type takes the kind of crappy security camera footage that we get in 2008 – so the security forces who go back and review it will have such wonderful information as “two orks and a human committed this crime.”
Why Crime?
"Why yes, Big Brother is watching. However Big Brother has ADHD, so I'm going to sit here drinking my soykaf like any of a billion wage slaves are doing right now. And then Big Brother will get bored. And distracted. And then I'm going to do… anything I want."
One of the core conceits of the Shadowrun game is that crime is possible, and that crime pays. Given the wealth of potential satellite oversight (just look at Google Earth in 2007 – imagine the law enforcement version in 2070), and the incredibly daunting task that is cracking through somewhat decent encryption, it is entirely reasonable to project a future where getting away with any crime at all requires some sort of elaborate social engineering to pull inside jobs that play off of secret limits of the anti-crime system. But this isn't Minority Report or any other Phildickian setup, this is Shadowrun. And in Shadowrun: bad people shoot other people right in the face for money and get away with it to do it again.
So here are some quasi-plausible justifications for that:
A Revolution in Data Collection, a Crisis of Storage
"I'm sorry, I seem to have misplaced my 'give-a-damn'."
Throughout human history the creation of data has exceeded the capacity to store it. It starts in infancy where a babe simply doesn't remember every single thing she sees, and it continues on through the Age of Bronze where not every conversation or every play gets written down, and it continues today. It could very plausibly continue in the Shadowrun future and for the sake of playability we're assuming that it does. The cameras in the world exceed the number of people who could watch them, and they collectively generate more video footage every day than can be stored on all the world's storage media.
And that is amongst the things that makes crime possible. When you go to the bathroom, a computer is measuring the mass of your deposit. When you flee a crime scene you're being watched by every store front you pass. But likely as not, none of that information will actually be saved anywhere. Some of it may be, but it quite likely isn't organized enough to actually identify you as the perpetrator (of the crime or the leavings). More importantly, information getting deleted isn't really news. If 18½ minutes are missing or overwritten by elven pornography, that's not weird.
Furthermore remember that in the world of 2071, it is entirely possible that a "legitimate" information request from investigating authorities will simply be refused. There's nothing in it for a Wuxing or Aztechnology subsidiary to share their security footage with Evo security to assist in the investigation of a crime against Evo or one of its subsidiaries. Corporations, especially major corporations are in competition, but beyond that they actually are regularly committing crimes against one another. Even showing what footage Aztechnology has of an event would be tipping its hand to Evo and it isn't going to compromise itself that way under normal circumstances. Further, it is in the interests of Aztechnology to make investigation and enforcement as expensive a proposition as possible for Evo as this reduces the company's ability to compete with them in other areas. So even when data is successfully stored, there's no reason to believe that investigating authorities will ever be allowed to actually see that data – which when you think about it is a lot like that data being lost or simply not recorded in the first place.
One of the core conceits of the Shadowrun game is that crime is possible, and that crime pays. Given the wealth of potential satellite oversight (just look at Google Earth in 2007 – imagine the law enforcement version in 2070), and the incredibly daunting task that is cracking through somewhat decent encryption, it is entirely reasonable to project a future where getting away with any crime at all requires some sort of elaborate social engineering to pull inside jobs that play off of secret limits of the anti-crime system. But this isn't Minority Report or any other Phildickian setup, this is Shadowrun. And in Shadowrun: bad people shoot other people right in the face for money and get away with it to do it again.
So here are some quasi-plausible justifications for that:
A Revolution in Data Collection, a Crisis of Storage
"I'm sorry, I seem to have misplaced my 'give-a-damn'."
Throughout human history the creation of data has exceeded the capacity to store it. It starts in infancy where a babe simply doesn't remember every single thing she sees, and it continues on through the Age of Bronze where not every conversation or every play gets written down, and it continues today. It could very plausibly continue in the Shadowrun future and for the sake of playability we're assuming that it does. The cameras in the world exceed the number of people who could watch them, and they collectively generate more video footage every day than can be stored on all the world's storage media.
And that is amongst the things that makes crime possible. When you go to the bathroom, a computer is measuring the mass of your deposit. When you flee a crime scene you're being watched by every store front you pass. But likely as not, none of that information will actually be saved anywhere. Some of it may be, but it quite likely isn't organized enough to actually identify you as the perpetrator (of the crime or the leavings). More importantly, information getting deleted isn't really news. If 18½ minutes are missing or overwritten by elven pornography, that's not weird.
Furthermore remember that in the world of 2071, it is entirely possible that a "legitimate" information request from investigating authorities will simply be refused. There's nothing in it for a Wuxing or Aztechnology subsidiary to share their security footage with Evo security to assist in the investigation of a crime against Evo or one of its subsidiaries. Corporations, especially major corporations are in competition, but beyond that they actually are regularly committing crimes against one another. Even showing what footage Aztechnology has of an event would be tipping its hand to Evo and it isn't going to compromise itself that way under normal circumstances. Further, it is in the interests of Aztechnology to make investigation and enforcement as expensive a proposition as possible for Evo as this reduces the company's ability to compete with them in other areas. So even when data is successfully stored, there's no reason to believe that investigating authorities will ever be allowed to actually see that data – which when you think about it is a lot like that data being lost or simply not recorded in the first place.
A Life in Horror: The Good and The Bad
“Interesting fact: The Final Girl trope emerged shortly after young women became a major component of horror movie attendees.”
Life in the World of Darkness is actually pretty horrible, and extremely dangerous. Life in the World of Darkness is life in a horror movie. Or rather, it is a world not unlike Earth would be if all the horror movies are real. This means that body counts are extremely high, and it is very difficult to get help. This is good news if you happen to be a vampire, but really bad for anyone looking for a life of vaguely normal properties. Here are some important things to remember:
Keep this in mind when you're planning your nights in the World of Darkness. Life is less connected to other life in the World of Darkness and it is much easier for dangerous elements to thrive in such an environment.
That being said, it is important to remember that most horror movies begin with people thinking things are pretty normal, and end with something of a return to normalcy as well (or do they?) So it's not like Jason is running around the streets murdering people left and right. Indeed, while the death rate from serial and mass murder is large enough in the World of Darkness to compete with traffic accidents or opiate abuse, the fact is that you're still more likely to die from cancer. Supernatural creatures remain hidden and the president of the United States is openly a mundane human. A vampire can't just flash their fangs to get free entry to a movie theater, and indeed they could be in a lot of trouble if they flash their fangs in a public space of any kind.
Life in the World of Darkness is actually pretty horrible, and extremely dangerous. Life in the World of Darkness is life in a horror movie. Or rather, it is a world not unlike Earth would be if all the horror movies are real. This means that body counts are extremely high, and it is very difficult to get help. This is good news if you happen to be a vampire, but really bad for anyone looking for a life of vaguely normal properties. Here are some important things to remember:
- The Police are no help at all. Heavily infiltrated by cultists and secret societies, the police in the World of Darkness are astoundingly ineffective. Sure they will occasionally bring down a killer, but the vast majority of crimes go unsolved. Many crimes don't even get investigated, especially if something supernatural is afoot.
- Telecommunications are Shoddy Sat Phones aren't available in the World of Darkness. Cellphone coverage cuts out constantly at inopportune moments. Regular telecommunication wires go down frequently and are out for days at a time. The inability to get a call out of a building or town isn't unusual, that kind of thing happens a lot in the World of Darkness.
- People Don't Travel Much It's not weird for people to not know what goes on in the next town over in the World of Darkness. Things are just more dangerous, and people keep to themselves more.
Keep this in mind when you're planning your nights in the World of Darkness. Life is less connected to other life in the World of Darkness and it is much easier for dangerous elements to thrive in such an environment.
That being said, it is important to remember that most horror movies begin with people thinking things are pretty normal, and end with something of a return to normalcy as well (or do they?) So it's not like Jason is running around the streets murdering people left and right. Indeed, while the death rate from serial and mass murder is large enough in the World of Darkness to compete with traffic accidents or opiate abuse, the fact is that you're still more likely to die from cancer. Supernatural creatures remain hidden and the president of the United States is openly a mundane human. A vampire can't just flash their fangs to get free entry to a movie theater, and indeed they could be in a lot of trouble if they flash their fangs in a public space of any kind.
The World of Darkness is Overcrowded
You can't have been Rasputin, our guys were Rasputin!
Let's face it: the World of Darkness is cluttered. oWoD has way too many secret groups and supernaturals, and the nWoD is no better. With each group having their own sub-groups and politics and multiple groups of antagonist supernaturals it gets explosively, exponentially more complicated with the addition of every book, and no one knows how it works. That's not good for a political game. The players need to know at least enough of what's going on that they can advance agendas and make plans – otherwise there aren't any political maneuverings; it all devolves rapidly into hack-n-slash or just plain slash.
The concept is that you are a classic Universal Studios Monster and you engage in narrative driven dramatic role playing of both horror and intrigue. This is essentially impossible when there are too many world running conspiracies to keep track of or when people are going all Dragon Ball Z on things right next to you.
So we're paring things down. A lot. We don't have, need, or even want a bajillion clans of vampires, or fifteen tribes of werewolves. There should be few enough flavors of things that all the players can remember what the differences between them are. Ideally, people should be able to play whatever supernatural guys they want, sort of like the League of Extraordinary Gentleman; but in practice you have to put explicit limitations on what is part of the story or things get all weird. Like with Martian invasions and stuff. A story that doesn't have specific exclusions does not truly have any specific inclusions. It's not really a story at all at that point, it's a mess.
It is important to note that you can't take everything from myth and legend and cram it into a story. I'm not saying that your story will be completely incoherent, although of course it will be. I'm saying that you are literally incapable of doing that. The Vampire Book is an encyclopedia of just vampire lore from various cultures and it is literally over nine hundred pages long. And we're not talking about character backgrounds or rules text or any of the other crap that we know eats up word count like you wouldn't believe. We're talking about just a bare list of facts by mythical origin. So it is imperative not only that you acknowledge that you're going to have to cut things down to a manageable amount, but also that you establish specifically what is off limits and what's fair game.
Let's face it: the World of Darkness is cluttered. oWoD has way too many secret groups and supernaturals, and the nWoD is no better. With each group having their own sub-groups and politics and multiple groups of antagonist supernaturals it gets explosively, exponentially more complicated with the addition of every book, and no one knows how it works. That's not good for a political game. The players need to know at least enough of what's going on that they can advance agendas and make plans – otherwise there aren't any political maneuverings; it all devolves rapidly into hack-n-slash or just plain slash.
The concept is that you are a classic Universal Studios Monster and you engage in narrative driven dramatic role playing of both horror and intrigue. This is essentially impossible when there are too many world running conspiracies to keep track of or when people are going all Dragon Ball Z on things right next to you.
So we're paring things down. A lot. We don't have, need, or even want a bajillion clans of vampires, or fifteen tribes of werewolves. There should be few enough flavors of things that all the players can remember what the differences between them are. Ideally, people should be able to play whatever supernatural guys they want, sort of like the League of Extraordinary Gentleman; but in practice you have to put explicit limitations on what is part of the story or things get all weird. Like with Martian invasions and stuff. A story that doesn't have specific exclusions does not truly have any specific inclusions. It's not really a story at all at that point, it's a mess.
It is important to note that you can't take everything from myth and legend and cram it into a story. I'm not saying that your story will be completely incoherent, although of course it will be. I'm saying that you are literally incapable of doing that. The Vampire Book is an encyclopedia of just vampire lore from various cultures and it is literally over nine hundred pages long. And we're not talking about character backgrounds or rules text or any of the other crap that we know eats up word count like you wouldn't believe. We're talking about just a bare list of facts by mythical origin. So it is imperative not only that you acknowledge that you're going to have to cut things down to a manageable amount, but also that you establish specifically what is off limits and what's fair game.
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