Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Erling on <06-03-15/0534:21>
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Hi!
I'm going to use Thomas Roxborough in my campaign with his eagerness to obtain new body as one of the plot's motives. Of course, his quest for new body must be full of DRAMA. But what on earth prevents him from downright buying a cloned body and inserting his brain into it? 4th edition Augmentation rulebook describes it as available treatment is 2070s. Perhaps his desease somehow prevents his brain from accepting new body?
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Any cloned body will have the same auto-immune disease as his old body and will deteriorate over time as well. Maybe there's a mega-corp (one he isn't part of) which has a treatment for his disease. the main part of the run would be to get their hands on the treatment, after which a cloned body might work.
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I tried to run a 'Freejack' with Roxborough once. Unfortunately, none of the players had ever seen the movie.
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And if Alice survived the Crash, she'll want to stop anything like that from happening.
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I've actually wondered why he wouldn't go full cyborg. My assumption is the vat he is in lets him keep his essence, which is why he's not crazy like the other brains in a jar.
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Take you pick, live life as a blob in a tank and keep your sanity....
Go cyborg, survive for 6 to 10 weeks before going bat shit crazy, killing everyone around you and then yourself....
I'd take the tank thankyou.
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Rox can pop off clones anytime he wants to. That's easy.
Moving his brain into it's impossible as his brain has disassembled and is floating in all kinds of weird gooey ways. His cells mutated and are all *over* the tank, yet somehow they keep working due to some serious vat tech. Is this slimey scoop of RoxSauce his brain? What about this scoop?
It's a mess.
Thus, his work on trying to find a way to digitally upload his consciousness into other forms, which has been prevented at every turn by Alice.
Alice, of course, is no longer with us.
...
Hmmm...
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It's explained, more or less, in Stranger Souls, and it's tied to his being a director of Aztechnology. That connection is likely why he is also no longer a director of Aztechnology.
As Wak said, they can't just swap brains because his brain is a matrix of cells within the vat. A clean body would have the same disease, maybe, but so what? CFD suggests that consciousness and memories/personalities can be transferred electronically via nanotech, but again, so what? Every digital upload is merely an impression of the person—a persona—and not his or her actual self. The single exception is Quicksilver in Imago. There could be an army of Roxy clones with the disease removed and his biological memories, personality, etc. implanted. However, none of them are Roxy because none of them has, as DeathStrobe noted, what Shadowrun refers to as his Essence.
Why Roxy hasn't availed himself of the resources and opportunities since Crash 2.0 is the billion nuyen question. ;)
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Alice, of course, is no longer with us.
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Hmmm...
Or is she? Data Trails says she might be a demiGOD for Renraku now. But unreliable narrators and all that.
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... an E-Ghost, the ORIGINAL E-Ghost, a demiGOD? I find that more than a little hard to believe.
And Roxy's already insane, he's just functional.
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... an E-Ghost, the ORIGINAL E-Ghost, a demiGOD? I find that more than a little hard to believe.
Stranger things have happened. And Alice was part of Echo Mirage, way back in the day...
Dunno if it is actually her that is a demiGOD for Renraku, but I would like to believe that she survived the Crash somehow. Maybe hanging out with Captain Chaos's e-ghost...
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Thanks, now it's clear for me.
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But what on earth prevents him from downright buying a cloned body and inserting his brain into it? 4th edition Augmentation rulebook describes it as available treatment is 2070s.
Huh?
You can take out a brain and put it into a cyborg (with an array of side effects), put I've never seen something about putting the CCU into a biological body
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Huh?
You can take out a brain and put it into a cyborg (with an array of side effects), put I've never seen something about putting the CCU into a biological body
Well, you can replace all of your own limbs, bones and organs with spare parts taken from your own full-body clone. Since mere transplants (not bioware) don't cost Essence, the sky is the limit. Changing every part of the whole is pretty much changing the whole.
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They have not yet gotten to the point where they can transplant brains from one organic body to the other, I believe. And Roxy doesn't have an intact brain any more. Just soup that is somehow kept alive in a tank.
Now, they COULD try and do the same trick on him as they tried to do with Eliohann in Boston, and use modified CFD nanites to imprint his mind on a new body, but we've all seen how that's gone down.
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Well, you can replace all of your own limbs, bones and organs with spare parts taken from your own full-body clone. Since mere transplants (not bioware) don't cost Essence, the sky is the limit. Changing every part of the whole is pretty much changing the whole.
OK, the tit-for-tat way obviously works, but I was thinking about doing the complete overhaul all in one. Say some killer AI sends out buzzsaw-equipped drones to hunt heads and stick them on new bodies ;)
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OK, the tit-for-tat way obviously works, but I was thinking about doing the complete overhaul all in one. Say some killer AI sends out buzzsaw-equipped drones to hunt heads and stick them on new bodies ;)
Oh, god...that brings back some memories of the Renraku Arcology, and some of the artwork in that campaign book. Now I need some brain bleach! :-\
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I was reminded of Half-Life 2 and its buzzer drones, but of course every feasible nightmare in drone form came out of the SCIRE
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what is the origin of the beef between Alice and Roxborough? I've been using him as a secretive villain (funding some creepy cybermancy programs), and the runners just recently uncovered his name, and are digging into his past. So time for me to learn more too....
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Short form is that he unleashed teh Crash Virus onto teh INternet. Alice was a part of Echo Mirage and the Virus killed her. An entity that calls itself Alice later sprung up and has haunted Roxy ever since, proclaiming that "He knows why" and bedevilling him at every turn, ESPECIALLY when he tries to get out of the tank.
She may have died during Crash 2.0. She might have become Cerebus. She might be connected in some way to something in 10 AIs. No one knows for certain, yet.
But if she *is* gone, then no one's holding Roxy back...
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10 AIs? Is this a new book on the Horizon (pun very much intended :) )?
And having just read System Failure, I'd be surprised if Alice is still... "alive". Unlike the other entities and/or people who were hit by Jormungand and ended up in a grey, featureless place, Alice was seemingly torn apart. I believe a phrase stating something like "before blackness closed around her and everything she was ceased to be" was used. I specifically took note of this, because the others all had some sort of experience after the Crash in a grey area, while Alice just ceased to be.
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Only to reform as something else???
You can never truely delete the digitial.....😈
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Possible, but I'm not sure I'd call it probable.
The common thread in the fiction is the grey, featureless locale the personalities described are, presumably, written to by the JackBNimble program. The Captain Chaos backup, for lack of a better term, seemingly had a flaw in the recompile process, as the imprint was self-aware unlike the others. But the Alice snippet showed no signs of her imprint being stored at all, as her story ends on the note that she's going down the rabbit hole.
I guess time will tell. I for one fervently hope she's still around in some way, shape, or form.
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Thanks for the info! I'm looking forward to 10 AI's, whenever it actually comes out
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Has been out for quite a while.
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Has been out for quite a while.
10 AIs? It's been in development for a while, but I haven't heard of it being released.
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Has been out for quite a while.
10 AIs? It's been in development for a while, but I haven't heard of it being released.
Indeed. It's still in the pipeline.
But if she *is* gone, then no one's holding Roxy back...
That's not entirely true.
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*headsmacks* That's what I get for referring to my own damn computer. Tha's it, I'ma goin' ta bed.
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Yeah, I wasn't on teh Data Trails team, so I should probably eyeball it, figure out the current AI rules, and make everything align (unless the upper-chair peeps have already done that, of course!) Some of the stuff in there has been referenced in other books, since I did it a few years ago, so some passages in Shadowtalk that you may have stared at will make sense. (Of course, it's entirely possible that everyone's just glossed over them. That works too!)
I'm not authorized to talk about what's in there tho. Heck, I couldn't even say the name. :) Once it's up and out, I'll try and have a lil' Q&A period where people can ask me stuff. Obviously, I can't answer some of it because of metaplot reasons or the like, but where I can, I'll be happy to. Y'all can feel free to speculate until then, tho!
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Hey Wakshaani, is Deus "alive"? How about Morgan/Maegera and/or Mirage?
:D
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Agh so excited..... I just love some high-level AI nonsense. Looking forward to the Q&A
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Hey Wakshaani, is Deus "alive"? How about Morgan/Maegera and/or Mirage?
:D
That is an interesting question! One that I cannot answer without getting an axe in the back of my skull before finishing. :D
However, in a book called "10 AIs", there might be a conversation about the big guns, not all of which are even publicly known. Shadowtalk loves rumor-mongering, after all, and there're few things I enjoy writing more than Shadowtalk.
But by now we are *way* off-topic. More on this should probably be a thread in and of itself.
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This is a bit of an old thread. But this plot line got a mention of a major update in Falling Points. Just a passing mention. I don't want be specific since I don't know how to get spoilers working on this forum.
But does anyone know where it talks more about it? It just casually throws it out there like it's already happened and I can't find it in the source books. Was this plot thread mentioned in a novel recently or something?
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This is a bit of an old thread. But this plot line got a mention of a major update in Falling Points. Just a passing mention. I don't want be specific since I don't know how to get spoilers working on this forum.
But does anyone know where it talks more about it? It just casually throws it out there like it's already happened and I can't find it in the source books. Was this plot thread mentioned in a novel recently or something?
If I recall correctly from Discord, it might have been planned to have mentioned somewhere a few books ago but that fell through?
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This is correct. A one-page story would have reintroduced him, but for some reason I'm not sure of, that page wasn't in the final product.
So, trying to find out if I can share it, since it was purchased and no longer mine. It doesn't *explain* it, but it sets it up.
(It was a set-up which would have gtten *so* many people talking. Gah.)
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Just glad to get some confirmation to be honest. It was bugging the hell out of me. Thank you.
I'm relatively new to Shadowrun lore but this has been a long running plot thread hasn't it? A passing mention by a jackpointer talking about it in the past tense had me do a spit take.
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I need to doublecheck what book his return was supposed to be in, but it's recent.
More when I have info.
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Going to derail this thread to say:
Wak's back!
I know it happened earlier this month but I didn't notice you were posting again until just now.
(This post is my first in twelve months so I'm in a similar boat.)
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I forget that we have forums tucked away i here every now and then. Between the day job, writing, and far too many hobbies, I can wander off the rails sometime. Always able to be poked, tho! I'm always happy to chat about whatever.
(HOPEfully, I can get a webcam up and running in the future so I can do more online stuff. I had an interview a bit ago, but I felt bad that I wasn't on camera like the host.)
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Well hopefully they find a way to work your story into a future book. Or figure some other way to fit the event into the future narrative. I mean at this point we can all just sort of assume Dis did it since we have established they are really good a bioengineering and making deals with bad people. Which is to bad since it seems like you were going for some sort of mystery about his return? Would have worked better if it had been a few books ago before we got the low down.
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Is there a singular source that explains more about why we care about Roxborough? I played back in 1e then picked up the game again a while into 5e, so I missed out on whatever documented him as being notable originally. (I've read about his weird survival and existence, and that he was a notable shareholder in Aztechnology and Universal Omnitech. But it sounds like that he is 'on the loose' again is a big deal, and I'd like to read up on why he is considered to be of such note).
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Head of Aztechnology, one of the main people behind Cybermancy and trapping Alice in the Matrix, lots of bad stuff.
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Sounds like the kind of guy where turning him into a Cyberzombie, trapped inside a mostly-mechanical body being controlled by someone else, is the best way to go.
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Well hopefully they find a way to work your story into a future book. Or figure some other way to fit the event into the future narrative. I mean at this point we can all just sort of assume Dis did it since we have established they are really good a bioengineering and making deals with bad people. Which is to bad since it seems like you were going for some sort of mystery about his return? Would have worked better if it had been a few books ago before we got the low down.
Yeah, him being back was portrayed as a Big Deal, leaving open the questions of how it was done and what he'd do from there. With that Big Reveal, it would have started people speculating and waiting for the next part, getting people involved in teh story.
With that first part missing, now it's just ... oof.
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Is there a singular source that explains more about why we care about Roxborough? I played back in 1e then picked up the game again a while into 5e, so I missed out on whatever documented him as being notable originally. (I've read about his weird survival and existence, and that he was a notable shareholder in Aztechnology and Universal Omnitech. But it sounds like that he is 'on the loose' again is a big deal, and I'd like to read up on why he is considered to be of such note).
Arguably he greatest hacker in the world, Roxy used to be a high-end corporate raider who got into a tussle with an asset of Dunklezahn back in the day over buying something, got furious when he wasn't able to acquire it, and lashed out in revenge. Depending on who you believe, he unleashed the Crash Virus itself, which brought the world to its knees. (It very quickly went way, WAY out of his control, but no one alive knows that he is connected to it and can back that claim up.) ... that virus, of course, killed Alice Heffner, and the eGhost, Alice, is based off of her brain. (If it was her actual ghost, haunting teh Matrix, a shard of teh Crash virus that became sentient and based itself off of her, or something else entirely has neer been revealed.) ... unfortunately for Roxy, he also developed a unique, and rathe rhorrible, genetic condition which resulted first in him being bed riden, then worse, before finally being moved into a giant vat where his body just ... unravelled. His mind managed to survive, even as his body turned into a bunch of fillament and jelly, and he manage dto get a datajack implanted into his, let's say mass? which gave him access to teh Matrix as it was created. He's been on teh Matrix for 24 hours a day (even when asleep, he's jacked in) since Day 0 of the Matrix existing, and due to this, and the money he's pumped into his tech, he's arguably the greatest Decker in teh world.
He's also ruthless and immoral, and has been hungry for both a cure, and revenge, ever since his "Boxing". He's nearly gotten out several times, but Alicehad always been lurking in the background, undercutting his escape attempts. His most infamous was in trying to be implanted into Ryan Mercury's body (Part of teh DragonHeart trilogy, which gives you most of his backstory), but Alice was able to stop that and is quite happy to see him tortured and suffer.
When Alice died (or "died" depening on your reading, more on that in 10 AIs), Roxy no longer had an active agent as skilled at teh Matrix as him working to block his every move, but was also cut off for the Matrix for the first time when teh Second Crash happened. Once he got back online, he was free to start solving his big problems.
He also needed to make money.
Roxy's infamously ephermeal with alliances, and while he had worked with Aztechnology in the past, their relationship had soured. He briefly got a controlling stake in teh Bank of Japan (which underwrites all teh the Japanacorps and should be utterly untouchable), but that quietly went away not long after he got it... it's assumed that some kind of deal was made, but no one knows what.
So he's been quietly lurking in his box, a corporate raider whose humanity has long since vanished, teh world's greatest hacker and a high level corporate raider who ignores all teh rules, Doing Things for a while. Him showing up in teh flesh out of nowhere has shaken a LOT of people (not the least of which is KAM, his ex-wife, and teh Smiling Bandit, who's currently hooked up with KAM), and there's wild speculation and just how that's possible.
(And it SHOULD have had a ton of fans speculating as well, but.)
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Thanks Wakshaani!
Where is the first part of his background covered? As I said, I'm happy to go pick up PDFs of old books, and sometimes there is no better way to get a feel for someone than to read the early material about them.
(I'm interested because he sounds like a someone that would both utterly fascinate and utterly revolt one particular character in my game, so I'd like to have him influence some events and eventually cross paths, but I want to get a good feel for him first).
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The earliest mentions were in Aztlan, Corporate Download, SOTA: 2064, and Runner Havens.
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Thanks Wakshaani!
Where is the first part of his background covered? As I said, I'm happy to go pick up PDFs of old books, and sometimes there is no better way to get a feel for someone than to read the early material about them.
(I'm interested because he sounds like a someone that would both utterly fascinate and utterly revolt one particular character in my game, so I'd like to have him influence some events and eventually cross paths, but I want to get a good feel for him first).
Went to check the Wiki to make my life easier. :D (He was diagnosed with his disease in 2049 and given one year to live, but soon after went into the tank where he's been until his return, which should have been the latest Cybernetic book whose name escapes me right as I need it. Ack.
As for earlier stuff?
Augmentation, 59
Aztlan, 62-64
Corporate Download, 44
Man & Machine: Cyberware, 54, 88
Runner Havens, 122
System Failure, 102, 104
State of the Art: 2064, 153
Target: Matrix, 107, 108
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Body Shop
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Thanks for the infodump. It has been very helpful. So is he still considered out of the box as far as the metaplot is concerned going forward? Even without the official reveal?
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Yes, the reveal was official. We're just missing the set-up to the reveal.
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Thanks for the infodump. It has been very helpful. So is he still considered out of the box as far as the metaplot is concerned going forward? Even without the official reveal?
Yeah, he's up and about and doing things, but for the most part has just been seen being super-hedonist.... he's not looking for revenge right now as much as he's just enjoying having a body again, so it's sex, food, drugs, whatever. He's got a lot of LIFE that he missed out on, so he's going for it, HARD, right now.
Of course, the real question is when he finally gets his fill and decides to get some revenge ...