Nothing to fear if you’ve got the gear!
Nobody can do a brisk business in the field of shadowrunning without the right kit. A commlink to organize and communicate with the people you like, guns, ammo, blades, and other weaponry for the people you don’t like, armor to deal with the people who don’t like you, and maybe a few precautions to keep the whole thing in the shadows and completely out of the light of day. Having the right tool at the right time—whether it’s a stimulant patch, gas grenade, riot shield, miniwelder, maglock passkey, or a disguise kit—can mean the difference between being a legend in your own right, or a fading stain on the pavement.
Many runners love their equipment, playing favorites and installing flashy and impressive customizations, from a street samurai with gold-plated Predators to a techie pimping out his cyberdeck case. Others disdain this hardware fetishism and take a more pragmatic “toolbox” approach—it’s not the gadgets that matter, it’s the skill needed to use them right. But either way, there’s no getting around the fact that shadowrunners need specialized equipment to do their jobs.
This section introduces all the rules you need for gear—concealing, carrying, buying, and selling—and includes a representative, but not exhaustive, selection of the toys that runners, gangers, mob and metroplex soldiers, corp-cops, and other hardcases play with on the mean streets of 2075.
Every item described in this chapter includes a set of statistics. Every item has a cost along with an Availability Rating, and most non-weapon, non-armor items, except those that simply confer an ability or don’t, have an overall Rating, usually between 1 and 6. Often a gear’s Cost and Availability are functions of its Rating.
The other statistics that depend on the type of item— damage for weapons, capacity for firearms, armor value for protective clothing, and so on—are explained in the Gear Ratings Glossary.
Gear’s Availability Rating determines how easy (or hard, or practically impossible) it is to acquire a needed or desired piece of equipment. Availability is an abstract amalgamation of factors like rarity, legality, distribution issues, supply, demand, and so on. The letter that follows an item’s numerical Availability Rating shows whether the item is Restricted (R) or Forbidden (F). For this reason, the gamemaster should feel free to modify an item’s Availability Rating—either the numerical value, or its legality code—in situations that would warrant it, like if the runner is in a war zone or in a country with a restricted economy.
Standard items with no Availability rating can be purchased at your local Kong-WalMart, Stuffer Shack, or Microdeck, or perhaps ordered online or picked up from a vending machine. All you have to do is pay the cost listed in the book for the item (with adjustments from the gamemaster if she wants, according to local market fluctuations or other extenuating circumstances she deems appropriate).
While easy to buy, standard goods are eminently traceable. Records of legal purchases are almost always kept, shared, and cross-indexed; whether this datatrail gets stuck to your fake SIN or, worse, a real one, it’s a potential liability. Purchasing habits are valuable to marketing companies, so you’ll start seeing AR advertisements tailored to what you buy and what you like. And since Big Brother Commerce is watching, remember that the Matrix host that knows and remembers your favorite store to buy sneakers at isn’t necessarily as secure as your commlink. Fake IDs can be used to shield yourself from this pervasive data-mining, but as long as you’re on the grid, even fake IDs will accumulate profiles of their own after long-term use. And there’s always the chance someone can find out more about you than you want to let go.
Of course, standard goods can also be purchased on the black market to avoid traceability, but the gamemaster may decide that the latest copy of Miracle Shooter is more expensive with the digital serial numbers filed off and apply a surcharge for your paranoia.
Like it says in character creation (p. 62), starting characters may not purchase items with a rating greater than 6 or an Availability greater than 12 during character creation. You don’t need to worry about your purchases at character creation going on some kind of permanent record (although there are some qualities you can take that would). Once the game is on, you can beg, borrow, and steal whatever gear you can get your grubby little hands on—at least, you can certainly try.
When you get to the good stuff, the higher the Availability Rating is, the harder it is to acquire the item. To purchase an item off the books, make an Availability Test. This is an Opposed Test of your Negotiation + Charisma [Social] versus the item’s Availability Rating. If you win the Opposed Test, you find the gear at the listed price, and it is delivered in the amount of time given on the Delivery Times table divided by your net hits. If you tie in the test, you find the gear, but the delivery time is twice that listed on the table. If you fail the test, you can try again after twice the amount of time on the table.
As they say on the street, money solves all problems. If you’re willing to throw money at the situation, you can increase your chances of finding a willing seller: for every additional twenty-five percent of the item’s value you are willing to pay, you get an additional die on the Negotiation Test. Once you get up to 400 percent of the item’s value (12 extra dice), throwing money at the problem doesn’t get you any more dice. Even if you had money left to throw.
If you roll a glitch on an Availability Test, your inquiries may have attracted unwanted attention. This could be law enforcement like undercover Lone Star engaging in a sting operation (can you spell entrapment, omae?), your local Yakuza deciding not to shoot straight in their dealings, rival runners or enemies twigging to the deal, or something similar. The exact consequences are up to the gamemaster, but things do not go smoothly as planned. If you roll a critical glitch, the most extreme iteration of the above possibilities occurs, and you stand no chance of actually acquiring the item in question.
You probably have a fixer, talismonger, deckmeister, or other contact find the gear you’re looking for. Contacts are better than you at acquiring the gear they specialize in. They spend most of their time making and maintaining their connections to the rest of the world while you’re out shooting corp security or banishing evil spirits or hacking hosts or whatever you’re doing on your shadowruns, so they’ve had time to hone their gear-acquiring abilities. When contacts look for an item for you, they use their Negotiation and Charisma for the Availability Test, with their Connection Rating serving as a bonus to their Social limit.
If the contact hasn’t done a lot of business with you, he might ask for a finder’s fee. That’s not how contacts make their money on reselling, though. Most of it comes through fencing goods on the cheap.
You can fence some of the loot you’ve obtained on a shadowrun as a way to scrape together a little extra operating cash during runs (just make sure looting bodies is a lower priority than finishing the run alive and out of jail).
The value you can get for used gear depends on its Availability: the higher the Availability Rating, the better chance the character has for getting a good value from the sale. As a rule, standard goods (legal items with no Availability Rating) can’t be fenced for more than a couple nuyen; no one wants your “near-mint” medkit. Fencing gear is a two-step process. First, you need to find a buyer. This is a time-consuming process that takes an Extended Etiquette + Charisma [Social] Test with a threshold of 10 and an interval equal to the delivery time on the Delivery Times Table. You may use the item’s Availability in a Teamwork Test if you like; the more rare items you bundle together, the easier it is to find a buyer.
The second step is to actually sell the item. You and the buyer make Opposed Negotiation + Charisma [Social] Tests. The final price the buyer offers is twenty-five percent of the item’s listed price, plus five percent for each of your net hits, or minus five percent for each of the buyer’s net hits. Once you have a price, you can sell, or you can take your item to another potential buyer and start the entire process over again.
If you get a glitch or a critical glitch on an Etiquette test to find a buyer, then your attempts have attracted unwanted attention from the authorities (or other parties), similar to a glitch on a Black Market Goods Test (at left). If you roll a glitch or a critical glitch when you’re haggling in the Opposed Negotiation test, then you’ve managed to insult or otherwise piss off the buyer, and the deal might be off—or worse.
You can always go to a contact such as a fixer or relevant specialist to fence a hot item for you. He or she will happily take your item and offer you five percent of the item’s value times your Loyalty Rating with the contact. You might be able to get more selling it yourself, but your contact will take it off your hands, no questions asked.
Most of what you do is illegal … or at least extra-legal … well, let’s just go with quasi-legal. Basically, operating outside the law is your bag of soychips. It’s not just what you do that’s against the law, but the stuff you use to do it can be questionable as well. Your job often requires the possession of an array of shady, restricted, or flat-out illegal items. Some of the gear in this chapter is considered illegal just to own.
Items are classified as legal, restricted (R), or forbidden (F). A legal item can be purchased freely, and owned, transported, and used—legally—without restriction. Of course, if you commit a crime with something that’s not normally seen as an illegal item—like killing a random passerby by applying blunt force trauma with a medkit—you will still be subject to prosecution normally, if they ever catch you. But at least you won’t face an extra charge for the piece of gear you used!
A restricted item can be purchased, owned, and transported only under special circumstances. You are allowed to purchase and own a gun with the requisite firearms permit, and you can carry it with you with a special concealed carry permit. Of course, if you threaten someone or—heavens forefend—shoot someone with your gun, permit or not, you can expect to spend a long time in jail before or after having your permit revoked. Licenses and permits can be obtained through legal channels, as long as you’re a solid citizen with a legal SIN—of course, that goes for shadowrunners with fake SINs acquiring fake licenses, too. A fake license is connected to a fake SIN, and if one of them is exposed, the other becomes worthless (see Fake SINs, p. 367).
Forbidden items are never okay for anyone to own or buy or have—at least not for you, a private citizen. No amount of licensing or permits will make owning one anything like permissible in the eyes of the law. Don’t get caught, chummer.
The law varies from country to country, and with megacorporate extraterritoriality muddying the waters, things are even more complicated in Shadowrun. Extraterritoriality means what’s a misdemeanor here might be a felony three blocks over. Police officers in some jurisdictions will draw down on you for possessing an item in one jurisdiction that wouldn’t merit probable cause in another. The practice of magic in Egypt is banned entirely and active foci could land you in jail, but toting an assault rifle in certain parts of Chicago isn’t looked on as a crime—it’s just common sense.
The legality restrictions in the book use the basic Seattle, UCAS, guideline as their point of reference. Gamemasters should feel free to adjust legality and availability of certain items in other regions of the world as they see fit, and future Shadowrun products may contain alternate availability and legality ratings for different jurisdictions around the Sixth World.
It’s not just about firepower; sometimes you need to choose the right tool for the setting. Failure to do this can mean getting arrested for carrying a deadly weapon before you make it from the meet to where the job is supposed to go down. Surprise is a shadowrunner’s best friend, and carrying a properly hidden hold-out can mean the difference between life and death. As a shadowrunner, you commonly tote around things you don’t want casual onlookers to observe. Things that would attract unwanted attention, even if they aren’t technically illegal. Or hidden “equalizers” you want to act as your ace in the hole. Some items are easier to hide than others, obviously: most hold-out pistols can be stowed away in a bathing suit if that’s what you happen to be wearing, but as awesome as it would be, hiding a katana under your long coat isn’t easy.
The Concealability Table lists a selection of items and the standard modifiers that apply.
Have the observing character make a Perception + Intuition [Mental] Test with a dice pool modified by the item’s Concealability to determine whether they notice the item. This test should be penalized normally by distractions, distance, and visibility modifiers (p. 175). If the observing character generates at least one success, they notice the item concealed on someone else’s person.
If you’re intentionally trying to hide something on your person that somebody else is looking for, and you’ve taken a little time to hide it (like a Complex Action or so), make an Opposed Palming + Agility [Physical] v. Perception + Intuition [Mental] Test. The observing character’s dice pool is modified by the item’s Concealability, and he can use Palming in place of Perception if he wants.
If you’re being physically patted down, the searcher can use Agility and his Physical limit instead of Intuition and the Mental limit. Additionally, any negative Concealability modifier is cut in half, and any positive Concealability modifier is doubled.
As long as the players are reasonable and don’t perpetually carry around every firearm and toaster in creation (with enough ammo and bread to operate them both continuously), weights and encumbrance aren’t important. There may, however, be circumstances where knowing roughly how much your character can carry may have an impact on the story—like if you break into a vault full of heavy gold bars and need to figure out how many guns you have to drop to haul out the maximum amount. The rules for Lifting/Carrying, p. 152, provide the basics, and here are some more details.
Characters can carry their Strength x 10 kilograms in weight without any sort of test—this is your carrying capacity. Lifting and carrying more calls for a Strength + Body Test. Each hit increases the weight you can carry by another 10 kilograms.
If a character overburdens himself with gear, he suffers encumbrance modifiers. For every 15 kilograms (or part thereof) by which you exceed your carrying capacity, you suffer a –1 modifier to your Physical Limit (minimum limit of 1). This means that a character with Strength 3 (Carrying Capacity 30) that is trudging along with 50 kilograms of equipment suffers a –2 penalty to his Physical Limit.
Trolls have incredibly large bodies and hands, while dwarfs have rather small bodies and hands—consequently, both have trouble using gear built for human dimensions. Corporate initiatives like Evo’s MetaErgonomics division have helped a lot; most products are available in dwarf- and troll-friendly sizes. This is reflected in the Lifestyle costs for dwarfs and trolls. Dwarfs have to pay twenty percent more on Lifestyle to make sure they are getting things that fit them, while trolls need to pay the troll tax—their Lifestyle costs are doubled.
The extra costs dwarfs and trolls pay mean they have equipment that fits them. When using an item not customized for their hand sizes, by contrast, dwarf and troll characters receive a –2 modifier on their dice pools for using human-sized weapons and equipment. This modifier also applies in reverse; an elf trying to use a dwarf-modified weapon suffers a –2 dice pool modifier. This effect is also cumulative, in the unlikely event it comes up, so a dwarf forced to use a troll-modified tool (or vice versa) suffers a –4 dice pool modifier (and possibly a hernia). In some cases it may be simply impossible for a dwarf or troll to use the other’s gear, like armor constructed for completely the wrong build.
The world is wireless. Almost every device you can think of has been computerized and equipped with a wireless link, including your microwave, your gun, maybe even your eyes. Every gear item has a wireless-enabled computer built in. Even non-electronic items without any moving parts have built-in computers, so now your pants can store your favorite music (and tell you when it’s time to do the laundry). The few devices that are non-wireless are most likely tagged with RFID tags (p. 440).
Wireless-enabled items can prevent theft or monitor the item’s functionality and alert the user of any malfunctions via their personal area network. For instance, in bone lacing, sensor tags are a convenient way of monitoring for stress fractures and other complications. A hacker can’t hack into your bone lacing and break your bones, but a hacker can tell your bone lacing that your bones are broken, causing your bone lacing to tell your commlink to call DocWagon, or tell your medkit that you need painkillers.
Every item being wireless means that nearly every item has a device rating. Unless otherwise specified in an item’s description, the general Device Rating can be found on the Device Ratings table.
Because nearly every piece of gear and ’ware is wireless capable, it means nearly every piece of gear and cyberware benefits dramatically from being “meshed” into your wireless personal area network and the Matrix as a whole.
When an item has additional functionality when connected to the Matrix, it’s described under the “Wireless” entry in the item’s description. This functionality only applies when the device has access to the Matrix, which is most of the time unless your gamemaster says otherwise, like if you’ve entered a wireless static zone. If there is a Noise Rating from a situation that is greater than the item’s Device Rating, not including distance, the item temporarily loses its wireless functionality (see Noise, p. 230).
These benefits only apply when the item’s wireless mode is on. Your Ares Alpha can’t auto-adjust for the wind direction and speed if it can’t download local upto- the-second weather conditions, and your Eurocar Westwind 3000 doesn’t know the status of the next three traffic lights if it’s not connected to GridGuide. A wireless device is always vulnerable to subversion and control by a hacker within wireless handshake range. You can defend your gear with a good commlink and a personal area network (see PANs and WANs, p. 233). Even better, defending against threats from the Matrix is part of your team hacker’s job. If she’s not available, you might occasionally want to turn wireless off.
Toggling an individual device’s wireless functionality off is a Free Action, as is toggling all of your wireless devices to “wireless off.” You lose wireless bonuses, but the items can no longer be wirelessly hacked. Otherwise, you can rely on your team’s hacker to provide wireless defense to your personal area network and get the best of both worlds, keeping your wireless bonuses on while maintaining a defense from the digital world.
Some devices are throwbacks, devices that do not have wireless capability. While they still exist, they are becoming more and more rare in the 2070s. Throwbacks cannot be accessed by wireless connection, and so can neither be controlled remotely nor gain a wireless bonus.
If you consider a device’s wireless link to be a nuisance, you can turn it into a throwback with a Hardware + Logic [Mental] (8, 10 minutes) Extended Test—or simply purchase the device as a throwback in the first place (always an option, though it may get you some funny looks).
While throwbacks are immune to hacking via the wireless Matrix, all devices have a universal access port. Devices can be connected with a data cable with little problem. If you’ve got a datajack, you can use its included spooled data filament to connect to a throwback directly, which means nothing is completely safe from a hacker with a datajack. Of course, if a hacker is able to sneak up to you and plug into your gun, you might have bigger problems than hacking attacks from the Matrix.
When two items are incompatible—like a shotgun and a laser sight, or wired reflexes and synaptic boosters—you cannot use the effects of both items at the same time. If one item of gear says it’s incompatible and the other doesn’t, they’re incompatible. You can have both items if you want, you just have to pick what piece of gear to use at what time.