u/MrApophenia

I am confused about something for netrunning. I have searched past threads and it seems like people run this differently, so I wasn’t sure if there is an “official” answer.

I know a Netrunner gets 1 action per turn, and that running a program counts as an action. The question is, if I run a defensive program - a stealth program, or a shield program - can I only keep it running until I want to use a different program? Or does it stay running until I deactivate it, or something de-rezzes it?

I know that in the Programming rules, programs can have an Endurance characteristic which means they keep running independently once activated, but the sample programs don’t actually tell you which programs have Endurance and which do not.

I have seen posts on this subreddit saying you need to drop Invisibility or Shield in order to break a code gate or run an attack program, and ones saying the opposite; the rulebook seems entirely silent on the question.

It does seem like the former interpretation basically makes Shield and similar programs almost useless, so if it is purely ambiguous I would probably go with the latter, but I was curious what folks think, or if the designers ever spoke on it.

So, I have been reading Majestic Fantasy: the Northern Marches, and I am actually finding myself a bit overwhelmed as to how I would actually use it at the table. Don’t take this the wrong way, I think this speaks to how much there is here to work with, which is a good problem to have.

Just to say up front so this doesn’t get buried - this is a very good book, and I am not complaining about it. I suspect the conceptual difficulty I am having is on me, so wanted to pick others’ brains on how best to make use of what is clearly a pretty impressive game resource.

But I am struggling a bit to see how best to actually start a game with it. For a sandbox campaign setting like this, do folks just pick a starting village, read the nearby entries, and wing it?

What is striking to me in particular is that over on the author Rob Conley’s excellent blog, Bat in the Attic, he has written about something that really stuck with me, the idea of the “initial context,” which as I understand it, is that sandbox games fail if there isn’t some very immediate, engaging stuff to hook the players into the setting and give them some good ideas for things to go off and do right away, so they aren’t just wandering around the map.

I have this suspicion that I am being dense and missing something obvious because there is so MUCH going on in this book that I don’t immediately see what the actual play process is for setting that up for session 1. Let’s say I pick a random village for the players to start out in - I am not sure which of the many events and factions and setting details are the ones I should be using to grab people right at the get go.

So I am curious how other folks are planning to use this, or for Kickstarter folks who had earlier drafts, how you already did.