u/ProblemDue7111

Does anyone have any experience with and/or opinions on the *Shadowrun: Takedown* board game? Catalyst has got it on their website.

The Wasp, Yellowjacket, and even Hornet rotorcraft have prices and availabilities that make them obtainable in chargen. Do many of you see brand-new riggers starting off in helicopters?

The Hornet is the most expensive, but also offers the most utility. It is the most durable; it's seating is 2/8; and it can be easily kitted out with enough guns and drone racks to provide very effective close air support. With a rigger pilot, it can travel much faster than any ground vehicle, and pick up and drop off in just about any parking lot.

It also has Sensor 4, making it very good at arial surveillance.

As long as the rigger has whatever fake SINs, licenses, or whatever is required to pass the chopper off as a legitimate aircraft most of the time, this would be awesome for an SR team.

Considering how lab-grown specimens have caused the price of diamonds and other gems to plunge in real life, it's reasonable to suppose that gem stones are cheap in the Sixth World. So, diamond-studded cyberarms? Elaborate dental implants made of ruby? Dragonfly drones glittering with sapphires? Why not?

The Gryphon LAV t-bird, DC, pg. 74, has seating of 2/10. So one obvious task for them is fast-response APCs.

A megacorporation could load one or more of them up with a rigger, a decker, a drone rack, and ten elite soldiers (why not include a conjuror?). Park them somewhere. They have a top speed of nearly 600 mph, which means that they can respond within 11 minutes to any problem inside 100 miles.

What is a thunderbird, really? There are stat blocks for a few, but I am still confused.

They are fast aircraft, but are they jets? They aren't categorized as jets. They are categorized as LAVs, low-altitude vehicles. So what's their altitude ceiling? Do they have a stall speed? How are they propelled?

The astral plane makes an excellent place for covert meetings. Two or more astrally projecting characters can easily meet nearly anywhere in the gaisphere with little fear of being surveilled.

Do you want to have a secret conversation with the Rat Shaman living in the basement apartment three floors below yours in New Jersey? You can meet in Antarctica, or the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

But of course it is best to meet somewhere where you can cut off line-of-sight, to eliminate the possibility of being watched by someone in the astral distance. Bathrooms are great for this purpose. You and the Rat Shaman can have your astral meeting in the men's room in Hyde Park, while mundanes coming in to use the facilities are totally unaware of your presence.

Explosive Decompression makes several references to the Skyhook I and II space elevators. But it does not seem to list the location(s) where they touch the surface of Earth. Can anybody help me with this information?

Glancing over Explosive Decompression, I see a lot of interesting opportunities for space without the PCs ever having to take their feet off the ground.

A lot of the aerospace/space industry happens down the well, planetside. There are endless opportunities for the PCs to be involved in sending or receiving personnel or cargo, in defending or attacking spaceport assets, in simply gathering information about who and what is coming and going.

Also, planetside runners could have contacts in the void, with whom they communicate via satlink. There would be many Johnsons in the Big Black - people with money and clout who need cat's paws on the surface.

And Street Samurai, too.

ECM exists, which means that anti-vehicle guided munitions can be neutralized with that. But an Adept or Street Samurai could be built to specialize in using any of the line-of-sight weapons - HMGs, chainguns, rocket launchers, miniguns, rotary cannons, CRB, FS, DA, there are plenty of options.

That person could then do a pretty good job shooting down aircraft, and have no worries about ECM at all.

Explosive Decompression just dropped on drivethrurpg.com.

In a recent post where I discussed the effectiveness of HE grenades with the gecko modification against vehicles, several commenters earned a number of likes by saying, "Don't do anything you don't want the GM to do to you."

I am writing this post to say: this idea is the definition of bad gamemastering - abandon it immediately.

So, you present the player with all the many options available to their character. The player says, "May I take HE gecko grenades? They look like they would be hugely effective against vehicles!" And you say, "Yes, they are available at character creation."

Then, you present the player with a combat encounter that includes an enemy vehicle. The player says, "I know just what to do!", and uses their grenade.

Or, put another way, they built an effective character, and used that character effectively. Which is how you succeed at TTRPGs. The player feels like they are living in an heroic power fantasy! You, the GM, will have none of that.

You promptly create an encounter where NPCs use this very effective tactic against the PCs. You think to yourself, "Haha! That this MCT security team used HE geckos against the PCs will teach the PCs a lesson - THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE USED HE GECKOS AGAINST THAT STREET GANG LAST WEEK!"

It won't. It will teach them that they definitely need more of those sweet, sweet HE geckos.

How far shall we take this idea? Don't use burst fire against enemies, unless you want them to use burst fire against you? Don't use your Con skill against enemies, unless you want to be punished for your lies!

If you feel that any game element is overpowered - a piece of gear, an implant, a spell - ban, nerf, or rewrite it, and explain why to your players. That is good gamemastering. But don't let them take a solution, then present them with the problem, then make them suffer for solving the problem.

HE grenades (CRB, pg. 263) with the gecko grip modification (FS, pg. 38) are cheap, easily available, and a hideous nightmare for vehicles in urban terrain.

As long as the grenade's operator can hit anywhere on the vehicle (how would the scatter rules apply? Many vehicles are 2+ meters long or wide), the grenade sticks to the vehicle. Which means that the vehicle resists 16P ground zero damage when the grenade detonates. On the average, a Body 18 Ares Roadmaster would take 10 damage from just one grenade.

Don't forget, you can throw the grenade, or you can simply attach it to the vehicle by hand, assuming you have some method of getting close to the target.

So here's a fun idea. Attach three or four HE gecko grenades, then one or two fragmentation grenades. Detonate the gecko grenades to get a kill (or a mobility kill) on the vehicle - then, when the passengers bail out, detonate the frag grenades.

So, foci are priority targets for theft. They have a high monetary value compared to their weight and size.

Also, walking around with a wizard staff or a ruby tiara will tend to signal that you are a magician, a fact you may wish to conceal.

And here's a question: would an active focus in the shape of say, an amulet, be visible on the astral plane if it was carried in a pocket? The 6th edition rules are vague about astral visibility.

In any case, it is wise for magicians to favor foci that can be easily concealed in pockets, bags, or pouches.

Does anyone get any use out of the groin panel, Deadly Arts, pg. 175? Described both as a "piece of armor" and an "armor modification", and listed on a nearby chart headed "Armor Accessories", it costs 75 nuyen with an availability of 2, and gives 1 point of situational edge "for resisting damage".

Even assuming that the entry is merely badly written, and that what is meant is that the groin panel grants 1 edge to resist weapon damage, unarmed combat damage, and combat spell damage, not falling damage, toxin damage, and damage from being trapped in a burning house, this thing seems like an absolute must-have.

You could center an entire Shadowrun campaign around the construction of a skyscraper. If you look at the histories of real-life high-rises - the Chrysler Building, the Saint Regis Chicago, the old World Trade Center, the new World Trade Center, the Burj Kalifa - you will find a tangled epic of ego, hubris, political horse-trading, financial sorcery, epic failures and periodic bankruptcies stretching over decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands, reputations ruined and made.

So just imagine a new PC team going on their first missions to influence the design, financing, and permitting process for a tower that isn't there yet. Then, as construction progresses, the PCs gain karma in any number of runs related to the project, and all the players involved - the people who own the ground, the people who own the air, the architects, the construction company, the city government, the people who have put millions of nuyen down on an office suite that won't be there for two more years.

And the fun doesn't stop once construction is completed. Now there are runs to keep tenants, to gain tenants, to get rid of tenants, to influence everything from taxes to permits to inspections, to protect the building from terrorist attacks or ghosts or an insect shaman or anything else you can think up. You could run a campaign for years like this.

When I typed "what is a semiballistic aircraft" into Google, the AI summary promptly informed me that "semiballistic" in science fiction "generally describes hypersonic transport concepts (like those popularized by Space X or in universes like Shadowrun)".

Could anyone point me to the latest info about suborbital and HSCT travel times? I can't seem to find it. Is there a chart or something?

Slip Streams is on sale and I'm trying to decide whether I want to buy it in order to have the info about mana flows. Can anybody tell me what mana flows are?

This 2026 film with Noomi Rapace seems pretty on theme for the 6th World. What do you think?

Visible on the astral?