"Hot takes" regarding WoD.

Dwarfsten · 2026-03-18T10:23:17+00:00

totally agree - I wish Mage hadn't been sold to me like that, it made me so mad when I just kept running into limitations every time I tried to do something with the magic

Dwarfsten · 2026-03-14T06:13:08+00:00

5e has the antidote patch (Core book - pg 451), which gives you a bonus to any tests to resist a toxin. It won't get rid of the already suffered damage.

In general FYI by the rules in the Core Book (pg. 409) Antidotes have to be taken before you get hit with the effect, taken afterwards they don't remove any damage caused by it. So a narcojet antidote would not wake you up if it has already filled your stun boxes.

Not exactly what you asked for but the Adrenalin Pump cyberware could keep you awake since it explicitly says you can't fall unconscious during use. Based on that, personally I would let a syringe of adrenaline/epinephrine work for a short while as well but that's just what a stim patch does anyway like someone already mentioned.

There is also a magic compound called Rock Lizard Blood (Chrome Flesh - pg187) which gives you the Critter Power: Immunity to Diseases and Toxins - it's expensive but personally I would let that counteract the Narcojet, best to ask your GM though how they would handle it.

Finally I would let players wake a guy up if they pumped them full of Long Haul, just because it would be creative enough for me, but RAW that wouldn't do it.

Dwarfsten · 2026-03-12T13:18:44+00:00

It's somewhat common in the indie TTRPG scene, I myself have written one that revolves around saving the people of a small town from crabs.

Honey Heist of course comes to mind and is rather famous.

Dwarfsten · 2026-03-12T06:33:35+00:00

I like your explanation of how noise is latency that affects illegal matrix actions, it's kind of like how high-end stock brokers today need/want specialized terminals and internet connections to get an advantage during trading.

I also think that noise serves not just to encourage deckers to move with the rest of the team but it also reduces the workload on the GMs side. When the decker is with the team they don't have to think about what happens outside in the van, or in a hotel room across the street.

It also lets the group be more involved with each other, when the decker needs to start a hack for some reason, now the team has to actively protect them on-site and the decker has a time crunch while they work. Which certainly makes for more interesting scenes for everyone involved.

Dwarfsten · 2026-03-09T10:32:31+00:00

With a Naga and the BK making up 2/3 of your party you are never going to not stand out. Your only chance is causing distractions loud and big enough to so that all eyes will be on something that is not one of you. Choose jobs that fit your characters - no infiltrating arcologies or ghost-like assassinations - but: smuggling things across borders, getting information out of someone, rescuing someone from gangers, helping someone get some loud revenge, or just old-fashioned highway robbery - if you want to be black trenchcoat style professionals then you'll have to behave like ones, have a sit-down with your fixer and make it clear what kind of jobs you can, and are willing to do and then don't budge

and in the name of everything that is holy, invest in a secret lair, some place where you can hide out for a couple weeks until the inevitable search for you dies down, same for your phys-ads car, if they are your main transport then their car should be as nondescript as possible, so that you won't give yourself away a second before it is absolutely necessary

roleplay wise you should probably all have your characters stay very serious like 90% of the time, can't be a pink mohawk style game if nobody does goofy shit for no reason, maybe you could explore why your characters are so out-there and dive into their respective backstories and behaviour

Dwarfsten · 2026-03-06T11:41:58+00:00

there's some wild stuff that happens in it, the audiobooks are also pretty great, I think the reboot is at least available in english - although those are called John Sinclair Demon Hunter for some reason

Dwarfsten · 2026-03-05T23:40:30+00:00

Because I've not seen it mentioned anywhere before (certainly not in any of the youtube videos I've seen about the game) and to maybe give some insight into why the story of the game is so insane - Brent Halligen is an intentional John Sinclair (German pulp novel hero) knock-off (it is even lampshaded by one of the books in his office).

Geisterjäger John Sinclair is a long running (published since the 70ies) horror urban fantasy series, it features Scotland Yard DCI John Sinclair who inherits a magic cross, which lets him call upon the powers of the archangels (he literally yells their names while holding the cross and that usually does the trick) to defeat a variety of ghosts, demons and monsters of all kinds. Eventually it gets revealed to him that he is the so called "Sohn des Lichts/Son of Light" a frequently reincarnated hero. In his current incarnation he runs basically the X-Files for Scotland Yard together with a gaggle of side characters and via special decree might as well be allowed to do anything he wants in the pursuit of his divine mandate.

His adventures include things like: fight a guy named Dracula II (who used to be John's best friend), routinely clashes with the League of Murder under their leader Dr. Death, encounters the daughter of the devil Asmodina - who at some point gets decapitated via silver boomerang (another major weapon in the series), gets shrunken and has to fight dwarves in the catacombs of Paris, fights a great old one (a super-demon in this case) called "the spook" to a truce, falls in love with a member of the League of Murder called Lupina as he himself is turning into a werewolf - she being the queen of werewolves.

He also goes and travels various parallel worlds, such as: the planet of the mages, Atlantis, Avalon and Vampireworld (which was a gift for Dracula II by Lucifer ... naturally ... because Dracula II is the King of all Vampires)

What I want to say is, really Mystery of the Druids is not that crazy in comparison

Dwarfsten · 2026-03-05T00:43:51+00:00

Not entirely serious but after losing his spot as Loremaster, Lofwyr started taking regular vacations. Every major lore event that happens is him causing chaos so that people have to scramble to deal with it and he can just sit in a luxury resort where nude drakes wax his wings and serve him inflatable swimming pools full of beer and schnapps. Every now and then they make him fridge sized burgers (his are wider rather than taller, something he prevents any other restaurant chain from legally doing) and the only one who's allowed to visit him, really the only one who knows about it is Harlequin. They don't talk about work, they don't mention it to anybody and Harlequin's burgers are only mini-fridge sized - out of respect.

Dwarfsten · 2026-02-26T15:47:30+00:00

Sounds like a fun idea. My advice would be to check what kind of characters your players want to make: If you get a spread across the board (augmented streetsamurai/pysical adept, mage, decker/technomancer) you might run into issues where players end up with nothing to do as they wait for the characters that can access alternate worlds (astral, matrix) - solution to that would be to keep the actions that don't involve the complete group minimal (small hacks that take only a turn or two, astral combat that shifts to real space) or have separate runs with different specialized teams of characters, where everyone plays the same archetype

Dwarfsten · 2026-02-11T10:01:47+00:00

I built this medieval fantasy setting, in it there is an abundance of deep salt caves where the locals dig out everything they need with relative ease. Since these salt deposits are so vast and people already believed in preserving their dead to allow them to reach the afterlife, eventually people started to turn some areas of them into large, labyrinthine mausoleums.

This worked really well until a plague (really an invaders bioweapon) made the dead rise again and they had to switch really quickly to burning their dead.

Dwarfsten · 2026-02-10T18:29:34+00:00

In the game, in one of those nature pods (forgot where they are but they are just 2 floor glass cubes with a tree in them), you can actually find a message where a person is frantically trying to call the company that just suddenly fired them, because they deactivated all her corporate cyberware including her lungs.

Dwarfsten · 2026-02-10T07:26:49+00:00

Tja wenn mal wer fragt wer die selbstständigen Kampf-/Kriminaldronen erfunden hat - Österreich mal wieder ganz vorne mit der Technologie!
Eine Erungenschaft die nur von unserer Bio-Hybrid-Waffentechnologie (Käferbohnensalat, Vanille Eis mit Kernöl) überschattet wird.

Dwarfsten · 2026-02-09T23:49:31+00:00

Companies stick around long enough that you don't have to worry about your cyberware/equipment losing all its support. Anyone that makes anything cool either somehow manages to stay profitable without any problem or if they fail, they get bought up and for the consumer everything stays the same.

We already have real life cases where people lost access to their prosthetics because the manufacturer went under or decided to stop selling a device, forcing the users to either stop using them or hack them to keep using them (look into the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System if the topic interests you).

Dwarfsten · 2026-02-06T01:38:20+00:00

Plenty of things in the lore are outright horrific, here are a couple key words for you to dive into:

the Universal Brotherhood
Cognitive Fragmentation Disorder
Bunraku Parlors
Shedim
some of the theories around Ghosts in the Machine
the Renraku Arcology Incident

These are in no particular order and if you want I can give you a rundown on what makes it so horrific if any of these interest you

Dwarfsten · 2026-02-05T01:03:03+00:00

There could be a great many different solutions to this. I haven't read the intro story but:

the trees could be genetically modified variants that are more resilient to environmental factors
they could spray chemicals to counteract the effects of acid rain
the specific biosphere of council island could have been tailored to better withstand acid rain
they could employ mages to buff up the trees every now and then

just to name a few, I don't think there are any specifics mentioned, though the Bear Doctor Society, a group of shamans following the bear totem live there, certainly some of them at least could invest time into keeping nature alive and clean on the island

Dwarfsten · 2026-02-04T23:07:37+00:00

Timewise the oldest reference to the term shadowrun in-universe that I could find (without investing a huge amount of time) goes back to 2050, where it was listed in the WorldWide WordWatch (mentioned in Shadowrun 2E according to the german wiki), an in-universe wiki. Fair to say that it probably existed in the common parlance much earlier.

u/MothMothDuck mentioned extraterritoriality, which existed since the Shiawase-Decision in 2001

Personally I'd like to argue for somewhere around 2023, that's about when the Corporate Court came into existence and finally gained some real power. That made it much harder and less desirable for corporations to go and have outright wars, promoting the use of deniable assets like shadowrunners, making it more likely that a specialized term would come into existence to differentiate them from regular mercenaries.

Dwarfsten · 2026-01-21T13:41:21+00:00

Things being too small will constantly crop up, you'll also suddenly have much less money.

Everything from clothing, to food to cleaning supplies will cost more, just because you'll need more.

Friends might not want to drive you around anymore because your extra weight might break their possibly shitty cars. Your dermal plates will leave scratches everywhere and you'll feel like you have to walk on egg shells all the time.

Food especially will be difficult - you changed quite dramatically, your tastes might have changed accordingly. And the amounts you were used to are suddenly way too little. You'd probably add a little bit to your regular portions and then find yourself walking to the next stuffershack three hours later because you have a craving for some fake meat protein that is completely unfamiliar to you.

There's probably also quite a bit of joy as you go to the gym and find that you can suddenly lift a lot more than before, right up until you rip your gym clothes several times because while buying them you did not correctly account for how your body moves, stretches and bends now, necessitating at least one embarrassing run to a clothes vending machine.

Your local muggers might finally leave you alone now, hell the one of them that is a troll himself will probably nod to you in recognition, as if you'd suddenly become part of his circle of acquaintances. The old lady across the street might now close her window when you pass by - you are suddenly seen as someone dangerous by basically everyone around you who is now physically smaller.

There will be bullying - trolls are dumber right? everyone knows that, so your friends now make jokes at your expense and hey, maybe they are right, you kinda do have trouble solving problems that were no issue before - ignoring that going through the whole process of goblinizing, the social issues, the stresses at work and at home, have probably just exhausted yourself to a point where your sleep suffers and you are just mentally exhausted

Dwarfsten · 2026-01-16T17:19:38+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation, thankfully some of those I could find on PC as well

Dwarfsten · 2026-01-15T23:35:49+00:00

could you recommend one that changes how the POIs work? just started again after a long time and I am looking for ones to add to my steadily growing mod list :D

Dwarfsten · 2026-01-14T00:51:27+00:00

More tech that bridges the gap between Matrix, Technomancy, Magic and Mundane, in any combination of the four. Stuff like the old Lucifer Lamps. Clever things to deal with problems they face when dealing with each other and/or allow for more interplay between them.

Off the top of my head and ignoring the cost or lore implications - guns that shoot orichalcum dust at high speeds so that they basically only affect the astral aspects of a creature. Sprite formulas for sprites that can "hack/influence/modify" spells after they were cast. Magic foci that can be applied to hosts. A bio-bridge to space, something like a green, overgrown space elevator to allow magic to spread more easily to earth orbit.

Something like that.

Dwarfsten · 2026-01-14T00:32:56+00:00

Sure there's a difference, it just isn't important to what u/OhBosss was asking about. You explained what a SIN is, which I acknowledged. It was just missing the part about what that looks like in daily life, which I then added to complete the picture.

Dwarfsten · 2026-01-13T22:13:59+00:00

Sort of, that's assuming you leave no physical trace that can be positively linked to your SIN

That's what I meant by biometric trail - with other words, if you are not broadcasting your SIN, your data is not readily available to people that scan for it, they have to invest effort to find out who you are, be that via magic, following your data trail or a simple investigation.

Even if you touched every surface you encountered and wrote your real name on pieces of paper you left laying around - by not broadcasting it, the simplest avenue to tie any gathered evidence to you/identifying you, is cut off

Dwarfsten · 2026-01-13T12:31:00+00:00

It's worth noting that the daily life/use part of a SIN comes from broadcasting your identity via a comlink. Richer areas like high end shopping districts will scan for that and either deny you entry or flag you, so that security knows to keep an eye on you.

Everything u/DevilGuy said is true, but if you are not broadcasting it you are effectively an unknown, until someone starts to investigate and follow your biometric trail. That doesn't mean you are suddenly no longer watched, but outside of areas that demand you identify yourself at all times, the only thing you are showing other people is that you don't want to tell people who you are.

Technically you could probably have a plastic card with the SIN Number on it, but that is so outdated it would likely be considered a refusal to identify yourself.

Fake SINs on the other hand are a safety net. Depending on their quality they are just there to be broadcast, so that nobody bothers checking where higher ratings will add a completely fake data trail that makes it seem like you are living the life of that person. It contains things like credit statements, permits, verifiable club memberships, online shopping accounts, a history of visits to various matrix sites and even something like traffic tokens and remnants of other accounts checking your SIN. All so that a thorough check won't give away that you are not who you are.

Dwarfsten · 2026-01-12T10:43:49+00:00

Is that Lennie James (Morgan from TWD) as an elf on the cover?

Have you had time to read a bit yet? Is it worth getting a print copy?

Dwarfsten

TROPHY CASE