In reply to Sunshine (msg # 11):

Okay, let me try and elaborate; so you can pick it apart and give me a better idea.

What's been brewing in my head is that the target location of your first run is an old abandoned U.S. research facility.   Upon reaching the appropriate point in the run, you'll be flung backwards (i.e. a time skip).   When you arrive, you find yourself surrounded by soldiers in US Army uniforms.   Lots of soldiers.

So, I'd expect an initial interrogation and things will work out the way that the group had decided to go.   If you'd like to take the easy route of working for the U.S. Government; then we can spin the story-line as I've previously outlined.    If you'd like an alternate story-line, then I'll need to know that before we get very far into the actual game as I'll have to manipulate events so you can do that.

I'll add a few more things then let the group hash out how they want the campaign to unfold.  I'm not a big fan of "rail-roading", FYI.

If you remember, I asked for a "goal" for your character.   If s/he'd like to see that the mega-corps never became mega, what avenue(s) might they prefer to explore?    How about preventing the planet from becoming a toxic wasteland?

And so forth.

The setup sounds fine! I could see the government trying to undo the mistakes that led it to becoming sidelined next to the power of the megacorps and essentially at their beck and call.

I am actually pondering if we could just let the roleplay dictate our fate - death, vivisection, escape or working on the governments' leash.



For my part in this game..
IC goal - preventing the premature death of my characters' birth mother.
OOC goal - To return to the 'present' time period and see what changes our activities hath wrought to the time line - if any at all. Nothing more, no thing less.
This message was last edited by the player at 05:04, Sat 05 Aug 2023.

Add to that the fact that I have 12+ die in making/understanding most of that tech... (assuming I am as per vision). Both the science behind it and the skills to make it. The GM said 'we couldn't go to a Walmart and get gear' but I'm expecting to be able to make quite a lot of stuff.



My preference is for it to be a game with plenty of downtime. As a technomancer it takes a lot of time to register sprites, and I am also a person who can make/repair stuff. I'd like to do that :) I'm good if we have a 'no it's going to be half a day downtime at most' but then I'd change the character a lot. So it's nice to be able to talk about it here

My goals
IC goal - Pretty simple. Stop Universal Brotherhood in it's tracks. But just stopping them isn't enough: it has to be 'stop the insect spirits'. And maybe things like them. As the magic level increases more things like them will come through.

OOC goal -To have a fun time RPing. I want to explore technomancy and tech making rules because I've not done that as a Shadowrun character before. I like the idea of this kind of time travel. I also like the idea that we could be the tipping point that makes a difference in mankind surviving the horrors in this magic cycle.

Railroading
Nothing wrong with railroading in the prologue which is what we are discussing. It's really just a way to get us to the start of the campaign. We could get here just as easily with the GM saying 'hey this is what happened to date' but I do like the idea of RPing through it. I personally fully support the idea of all the metagaming in the world to get it so that we (at the end of the prologue) are in the campaign the GM wants to run. After the prologue of course I'm a fan of letting the players do what they want, with some steering.

In reply to Angel 316 (msg # 15):

I'm going with the "Can't get more gear at Walmart" because it has to do with tech level.  I'll just point out the discussion about Christopher Columbus building a nuclear submarine; and stop there.  I had several rather simple reasons for the characters ending up working for the government; again, I'll try to be brief.

• First reason: the government in it's current form already has laws and systems in place to prevent the kind of monopolies that a mega-corp would ultimately require.
• Second reason: the government can put the necessary resources into black projects under the guise of "National Security" and already have the tech before the corps could possibly develop it.
• Third reason: it's the easiest way to integrate the characters into society as it stands today.
• Fourth reason: the character can trade not only tech but knowledge, which has been touched upon already.  They could easily acquire the equivalent of a High or possibly Luxury lifestyle: think about the first time going to the grocery and realizing that "real food" is affordable by everyone....How much steak can a troll eat at one sitting, anyways?

500 years tech difference.. Not forty. And physics is approaching fundamental limits already in the areas we are talking about.

A better example is 'can Christopher Columbus make a Cannonade instead of a Cannon because he knows wrapping wire around the barrel is awesome, that if he mills the gunpowder it will double in strength and that using standardized ammunition will increase his firepower by a factor of four'. All of that is 'just knowledge' that you can do stuff that wasn't known. Another example is that you could make a pipe organ or a telescope in the stone age. They just didn't know they could.

Go back twenty years and very little has changed in tech capability. Things have got a smaller. They haven't got much faster (fundamental limits in physics are preventing them getting faster). Sure you have more memory but programs are bigger and we have more waste consuming that capacity.

I'm not challenging your game world by the way. It's your game and if it can't be done, it can't be done. I'm just hopefully triggering thoughts

In either view of the world I can make a drone with a forty years old CPU. It just won't be as good. It will work though: the lunar lander program as an example was pretty awesome.

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Working with/for the government. I'm all for it. Your reasons are all sound. I could easily come up with just as sound counter reasons, but we have to make a choice. And 'go with the campaign the GM wants to run' is a great reason for the choice.

One of the interesting outcomes is the ability to swing enormous research budgets. And research works a ton better when you know what you are looking for can be found: the manhatten project was immense. Copying was far far easier.

In reply to Angel 316 (msg # 17):

I'll get a little geeky then put it aside.   As far as I know, we don't have the capacity to run small electronic devices purely on bio-electricity nor the DNI interface.   Until those two hit common use, there's no datajack.

I'm thinking we'll need to go back a bit further than 2030.  From the reading of the timeline, the U.S. more or less starts to disintegrate around 2018; and the first successful cyberware in 2019.  So, I'm thinking we'll need to either be hitting somewhere in the mid-2010s or fudge the timeline so that stuff happens 20 years later.

I'd be a lot happier going further back. It makes the tech discussion much easier among other things. (because I can answer your questions but what's the value in that... it's off topic. But see the example of the Cannonade. And the pipe organ. And the telescope.)

I would be cautious about having Trump as president for all sorts of real world politics (I have that in another game so I speak from learned pain). It's explosive and there's no need for those explosions when we can have more fun with C5.

I wouldn't go back further than 2011 for obvious reasons :) But again your call.

That sounds like 2012/2013 would be great times. I'd prefer that to changing the time line so I personally don't get confused and there is a lot of material made by others to help us

Okay, so unless there's an objection we'll go with 2012.

Looks like the first elves and dwarves popped up the year before, which is also when the Awakening seems to occur.   Yeah, I pretty much picked 2030 out of a hat before I looked at the actual timeline.

One thing - Ironside was going to be a troll, wasn't he? But trolls only showed up in 2021. It would be possible to play one even before, of course, but he would stick out even more.

Interesting. BUT he's going to stick out anyway :) Flaunt it! Own it!

Maybe one of our mages can do an illusion? Plenty of karma for spells :)

Oh, and first cyberlimb was made in 2019. So, if Ironside is sporting those, it's going to be even more obvious he's not from around this world. Maybe it would be better to push the time to after goblinization?

Ok, so here's the big question from me: How will the rules of time travel even work? There's three options that I can see.

1. We go back, change something (no matter how small, 50+ years is enough for small changes to lead to wildly different outcomes), leading to us or our parents mostly likely never been born, leading to us never going to the past aaaaand we have a world-breaking paradox on our hands.

2. We go back, but whatever changes we make were already accounted for in our original timeline. In other words, we can't change anything. And if we try to break the timeline in a big way, something will stop us. I don't know, maybe time police or something.

3. We go back, but not in our past, but to a world identical (or close enough that we can't tell the difference) to the one in our past. However, since this isn't actually our past, changes are possible and will not result in a paradox. Our own timeline carries on without us, safe from any change we might make.

GM, I am guessing we are going with option 3 here?

In reply to Raven (msg # 23):

4. The GM had no plans having you time slip forward....so hadn't planned for that?

I think that the answers to that question are 'best not know' :) We can ask and ponder in character. The only way we'll time travel forward is one day at a time, and to us there is little difference in which it is.

Of course... philosophically it's really important. And Angel 316 for one will be contemplating that often

Yeah, this are mostly just philosophical musings, though it might still have effect on our characters. Sunshine has a goal of saving her mother... but if option 3 is true, then the person living in this world is not really her mother.

Eh, probably best not to overthink this.

A good book that is very similar to the plot of this is 'The Appocalypse Troll' by David Weber. It covers that philosophical. And then comes to the conclusion 'it doesn't matter'. If you can't tell the difference there is no difference.

Now I've got to go read it again...

Ironically, I have a copy sitting on my bookshelf.  Completely forgot about it....

Well I hope no one told the characters this would be a 1-way trip :)
Although, 40 years, its possible that the characters could return to their own time period but by the process of natural aging, if nothing else. Forty years of being in the shadows.... that is a long time.
This message was last edited by the player at 14:31, Sat 05 Aug 2023.

No we can come back. One day at at a time. It's only 60 years to get back

We'll just use magic to make a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff to get back home!

Kind of like a 'suspended animation sleep spell'? Sounds easy enough. Enough drugs and a life support machine can do it

Trolls stick out normally anyway, and I have a rather nasty habit of taking distinctive style etc so yes, I think the massive almost three meter tall mountain of a creature with goat horns is going to stick out a touch......

2012 is it?

What you said Iron sides :) Besides at least one of our mages has invisibility...

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Just a thought. 2012 is ours for the taking computer hacking speaking. Turns out (who would have through it) a Technomancer hacker is OK at hacking. So... how much money do we want to steal from the bank? Or do moderately legal things... Like buying bitcoin... We could buy our own government and then we would be working for the government. Just saying

Actually the GM wants us to go government. So we should. But ... wow I am tempted with the idea of owning the worlds IT systems and using them to build factories with the tech advantage we have from 40 years advanced tech.

Hmm...do I have a badge that says 'kidnap me' written on my forehead?

Hmm. I'll admit I'm still not completely sold on that going all the way back to 2012 is a good idea. In 2012 a three meter tall mountain of a creature with goat horns is going to do more than just stand out - he is likely to draw all kind of attention on us everywhere. As in terrified people with guns attention, both civilian and police.

Now, we could keep him hidden, sure. Raven will also have invisibility and physical mask as well.. but besides needing to sustain the spell, isn't using magic all the time to hide the fact that Ironside is a 3 meters tall troll kinda defeating the point of him wanting to play a 3 meters tall troll in the first place? Where's the fun in that?

I don't hink we get to pick IC :)


I have to admit it sounds fun to me. Go back and look in this thread where we talked about it to see why