COMPONENTS
The Matrix is designed to be used for commerce, enter-tainment, and education. The megacorporations have spent a good deal of time and resources to ensure that it is an environment safe for their customers and their purposes. Their goal is to contain the wild and illicit aspects of the Matrix and restrict access to the grids, ensuring that it is an environment safe and easy to use.
A good Shadowrun story is outside the bounds of such normalcy, featuring deckers and technomancers break-ing corporate laws on a run. This section is an overview of the various components of the Matrix and how each of them might contribute to a scenario for your players.
PERSONAS
Personas are the movers and shakers of the Matrix.
Most of the time, a persona is a person logged into the Matrix through a device or by using the Resonance, but some personas are actually agents or sprites—sophis-ticated programs that serve specific functions in the
Matrix. If the Matrix is a play, then personas are all the characters that might populate it and further the plot.
Users experience the Matrix directly through their persona, translating the flood of data into sensations that the user actually feels. This can be a double-edged sword. The environment in which a persona finds itself can change in the blink of a well-sculpted digital eye.
Sensations of delight, joy, and triumph can be simulat-ed just as easily as those of pain, fear, and humiliation.
As a result, the experience of running in the Matrix can range from addictive pleasure to trauma-inducing hor-ror. While the average Matrix user doesn’t typically have this type of turbulent experience, gamemasters are very rarely concerned with average personas having an aver-age day in the Matrix
A device or program may only project one active persona at a time (and conversely, a user can only use one device at a time to create a persona), but users may alter their personas to suit their needs to adapt to the local host (see p. 217, SR5). This allows for a certain amount of intrigue as players navigate through the host, uncertain whether the personas with which they are in-teracting are enemy deckers, dangerous agents seeking to harm them, or some other, more advanced manifes-tation of the Matrix.
HOSTS
A host is a domain—a virtual world—contained within the Matrix designed to provide a select experience to users.
Users must navigate according to the host’s own rules.
This could range from mimicking the real world’s laws of physics to a surrealistic, Dali-inspired dreamscape.
When entering a host, a player’s persona might pass through a fancy doorway like that of a nightclub or a storefront, or might simply find itself randomly insert-ed into a section of the host. Once inside, the persona must follow the laws of that reality as constructed by its programmers. Since most hosts are designed to sup-port multiple users, these rules generally follow patterns of interaction established in the physical world. Even the rules of the most outlandish host will be intuitively known to users. When brainstorming a host, gamemas-ters should remember that this technology is designed to be easy to use and accelerate work and play. A
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ping mall’s host is going to be designed to enable sales and encourage return visits; it’s not going to be a dimly lit maze filled with dead ends.
The appearance of a host from the outside can be deceptive but often is related to its importance and in-fluence in meatspace. A megacorporation-owned host might appear in the Matrix as a colossal construct that dominates the horizon, such as the Renraku Pyramid or the Lone Star building, whereas a local store or a private hangout might be the relative size of the local water-ing hole. The Matrix conforms to recognized standards, but the interior of a host may be sculpted to project any sort of setting or environment. A host can contain an ev-er-changing maze, a re-creation of a horrid nightmare, an adaptation of a favorite book, or a mirror of the real world. Any experience that can be seen, heard, or felt can be sculpted within a host. The owner of the host may adjust the laws of that reality to her whim. Changing a host’s iconography is a tactic that some owners employ to catch unauthorized users unaware. If the theme of the host switches from feudal Japan to a baseball park and your persona is stuck wearing samurai armor in center field—well, that’s probably going to draw some atten-tion. Since this tactic can be disorienting for those not expecting it, it’s almost never used on high-traffic hosts.
Many Matrix scenarios will involve shadowrunners attempting to explore and master a host in some fash-ion, such as learning the secret rules, breaking security protocols, or stealing important files (see Deeper and Deeper, p. 106).
GRIDS
Grid is short for local telecommunications grid, a wireless data service that connects to the whole of the Matrix and is accessible by devices. There might be multiple competing grids in a specific geographic area, each appealing (and unappealing) in its own way to shadowrunners. Some grids are considered a free public utility, but typically the service is less than ideal.
Megacorporations build their own secure grids for their purposes, but while these grids have better service than those freely available to the public, the thought of wandering around MCT’s backyard can make even the most veteran decker a little nervous. Think of grids like neighborhoods. Some are nicer than others, some are bigger than others, and the populations of each one tend to share certain similarities. Working on a local grid in a strange country is likely going to be as foreign an experience as walking down the street outside your hotel window. It is possible to hop onto a grid without a mark, but for many hackers, this act marks the start of the ticking clock. The smallest of ripples can begin to draw the attention of the Grid Overwatch Division.
Hackers risk getting caught by GOD if they make too many waves in a short amount of time.
DEVICES
The world of Shadowrun is saturated with devices. Just about everything is a device in the Sixth World: a toaster, a gun, a cyberdeck, and much, much more. The constant communication between devices forms the backbone of the Matrix, and it’s also what gives hackers paths of ingress into places they aren’t supposed to go. Exactly what a device does can vary wildly. A plant in a lobby may be in a wireless pot that alerts housekeeping when more water is needed. A refrigerator may read the RFID tags on the food wrappers it contains and create a sug-gested menu for its owner. Gamemasters should en-courage players to think about not just the devices that make them better shadowrunners, but also those that transform how life is lived in the Sixth World. Alternative-ly, gamemasters should also think about what it means to not have access to devices, either through choice or circumstance. Players may opt for throwback gear and eschew devices as potential security threats. Let them do this, but make them realize the consequences of their choices. One way or another, life in the Sixth World is mediated by devices. Opting out isn’t just a professional precaution, it’s a social and cultural statement.
FILES
A file is a collection of data packed into an icon that can easily be accessed or carried by a persona. The data enclosed in a file can be anything you might find on a computer—a video, song, document, spreadsheet, or image. For story purposes, a file can be what Alfred Hitchcock termed the MacGuffin, the item of inter-est that competing parties wish to claim as their own.
File icons can look like anything in the Matrix, from a shimmering polyhedron to a duplicate of the Maltese Falcon. The Matrix is designed with a certain level of virtual physicality in how users manipulate files and in-teract with the host. This leads to a number of possible scenarios with real-world parallels, including noir-style investigations to locate the right item, pursuit through the host from other deckers or even the host security system, or a classic thriller standoff against competing personas trying to take what they think is theirs.
MARKS
A Matrix authentication recognition key (mark) is a mechanism the Matrix uses to determine which perso-nas have access to which files, hosts, and grids. Marks are normally invisible to all but their owner and always have some sort of thematic tie to the persona who placed them—a six-gun-toting cowboy persona might place marks that look like bullet holes, for example.
Millions of people begin their workday prompting their employers’ hosts to Invite Marks (p. 240, SR5). Based on their persona, and perhaps other levels of securi-ty for the truly paranoid employer, their particular host
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will grant them access to the appropriate files, icons, and so forth. Shadowrunners rarely have the same lux-ury and are rarely interested in the access levels of a bank teller. A decker needs to make each mark she may need, which can be quite a balancing act as spiders, Patrol IC, and GOD all keep a vigilant watch for unau-thorized users. It’s important to note that while placing a mark with either an Attack or Sleaze action is illegal, actually having a mark is not illegal. Marks are the first line of defense that hosts use to verify personas, but by no means the last. Security spiders weren’t born yes-terday, even if that’s when the bleeding-edge attack programs they use were developed. SOTA, chummer.
SOTA.
OWNERSHIP
Essentially the step beyond the tiered system of marks, ownership grants various unique special privileges (p.
236, SR5). Ownership is linked to a persona. Much like thumbprints, each persona has some unique element to it that grids, devices, and hosts use to recognize
le-gitimate users and owners. These elements are gener-ally invisible to other personas, so they can’t be used by a hacker to distinguish two identical-looking icons from one another. Simply stealing a wageslave’s commlink doesn’t mean you’re the proud owner of his fancy new car. In fact, there’s a good chance that he’s using his ownership privileges to trace his car’s icon this very moment. Changing ownership legally takes roughly a minute, while changing it illegally requires an extend-ed Hardware + Logic [Mental] (24, 1 hour) Test (see p.
237, SR5 for more details). Performing this test requires access to the Matrix. While an icon can have only one owner, that owner can be anyone from Mr. John Doe to more abstract concepts, such as Saeder-Krupp Schwer-industriegesellschaft (three guesses who owns all their drek). For all intents and purposes, spiders operate with owner-level privileges within their employer’s host.
NOISE
The new Matrix is a web of overlapping grids that often compete against one another, creating a phenomenon
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known as noise. Noise is unwanted data or wireless signals that make using the Matrix slower or more dif-ficult. Noise follows guidelines according to distance and local traffic, but it also can be a story tool for the gamemaster to increase or lower the difficulty of a spe-cific scenario as he sees fit. If a run requires access to a specific grid, noise might necessitate the shadowrun-ners breaking into a secure building to escape a spam zone in order to access the files they need from a cor-porate host.
OVERWATCH
With the advent of the wireless Matrix, earlier hackers were able to take advantage of its ease of access, cre-ating a chaotic landscape that was simply bad for busi-ness. The megacorporations finally became desperate enough to cooperate in creating new security protocols that monitor and track illegal behavior throughout the