The Matrix is full of information, but the things shadowrunners need to know are not the kinds of things people put up on their personal or corporate websites. Word of available jobs, news about what street lowlifes and organized crime figures have been up to, dirt about who’s just snuck into town and who may be looking to make a quick getaway—this is stuff you’re not going to find through a quick data search.
To get this information, you need contacts. Contacts come in a lot of forms. They may be the arms dealer who has a knack for coming up with armor-piercing bullets right when you need them. Or the underground journalist who is willing to share what she knows if you give her some inside info about upcoming juicy stories. Or the old standby, the bartender with the watchful eye and the listening ear. Shadowrunners have a roster of personal contacts that they can turn to in order to help them find jobs and provide useful information about what’s going on in the world.
Buying Contacts
At character creation, each character receives Contact Points equal to their Charisma × 10. Characters may purchase additional Contact Points at a rate of 1 Karma for two points. Barring qualities, a character may spend no more than 11 Contact Points on a single contact.
Each basic rating point — Connection, Loyalty, Expertise — costs one Contact Point. Size greater than zero multiplies the combined cost (see below).
Two characters (but no more) may share a Size 0 contact. Each character pays for Loyalty separately (and they can be different values), but divides the Connection and Expertise cost evenly between them. Should anything untoward happen, the impact is applied to both characters.
Improving Contacts
Characters may increase the rating of a contact by spending Karma. It only costs one Karma per increase, but it may only be done with the GM's approval. Depending on the value being improved, it may also require the expenditure of time or cash, aiding the contact in some way.
Contact Ratings
While some contacts may be fully stat'd out characters like any other, how they interact with the shadow community at large is encapsulated in four special attributes — Connection, Loyalty, Expertise, and Size.
Connection
Rating 1-12
This rating reflects the contact's level of influence — the higher the rating, the more juice that the contact has. More specifically, it's the amount of that influence the contact is willing to apply in the character's favor. Just because Joe Runner is Damien Knight's third cousin twice removed, that doesn't mean Mr. Macrotechnology will put the full weight of Ares behind him. He might let Joe borrow a megayacht for the weekend, though.
While not a requirement, a good rule of thumb is that a contact's Connection should not be more than it's Loyalty+6. If it has Size greater than 1, Connection probably shouldn't be less than Size+3.
| Rating | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Virtually no social influence; useful only for their personal abilities. |
| 2 | Has one or two friends with some useful abilities, or has some minor social influence. |
| 3 | Has a few friends, but not a lot of social influence. |
| 4 | Knows several people in a district: a borough mayor or a gang leader. |
| 5 | Knows several people and has a moderate degree of social influence; a metroplex councilman or a low-level executive it a small-to-medium corporation. |
| 6 | Known and connected across his state; a city/sprawl mayor or governor, notable fixer, or a mid-level executive in a medium-sized corporation. |
| 7 | Knows a lot of people over a large area, and has considerable social influence; often holds a leadership position in a national corporation. |
| 8 | Well-connected across a multi-state region; an executive in a state government or a national corporation. |
| 9 | Well-connected on his own continent, with considerable social influence; a mid-level executive in a small national government or AA megacorporation. |
| 10 | Well-connected worldwide, with significant social influence; a senior executive in a small national government or a AA megacorporation. |
| 11 | Extremely well-connected worldwide, with significant social influence; mid-level executive position in a major national government or AAA megacorporation. |
| 12 | Global power-player with extensive social influence; holds a key executive position in a major national government or AAA megacorporation. |
Expertise
Rating 1-6
Expertise defines how good a contact is at whatever they do. It's the primary source of dice in any rolls the contact might make. The exact way Expertise manifests is dependent on the specific type of contact.
Loyalty
Rating 1-6
Loyalty is an indicator of how much the character and the contact trust each other. Mechanically, it may serve as die bonus in negotiations, a modifier or Threshold (as appropriate) when someone else tries to put the squeeze on a contact about the runners, or a friends-and-family type discount.
| Rating | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Just Biz — The relationship is purely mercenary, based solely on economics. The people involved may not even like each other, and they won’t offer any sort of preferential treatment. |
| 2 | Regular — The relationship is still all business, but the parties treat each other with a modicum of mutual respect. |
| 3 | Acquaintance — The people in the relationship are friendly, but calling them friends might be stretching it. The contact is willing to be inconvenienced in small ways for the character, but won’t take a fall for him. |
| 4 | Buddy — There’s actual friendship here, or at least solid mutual respect. The contact will go out of his way for the character if needed. |
| 5 | Got Your Back — The parties know and trust each other, and have for some time. The contact will back the character even in risky situations. |
| 6 | Friend for Life — The contact and character will go to the wall for each other, if that’s what it takes. |
Size
| Rating | Membership | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | ×1 |
| 1 | 5 – 10 | ×1.5 |
| 2 | 25 – 100 | ×2 |
| 3 | 125 – 1,000 | ×2.5 |
Rating 0-3
Sometimes a contact represents an organization rather than a single person. These contacts have Size greater than 0. Each level of size is roughly an order of magnitude larger than the previous size, so anything above 3 is pretty unlikely.
This comes with a few benefits and a few drawbacks.
- Every point of Size grants the contact an additional Type — for instance, a Size 1 group contact could be both a Gear contact and a Service contact or it could offer multiple Services.
- Add Size to the contact's effective Expertise; many hands makes for light work.
- Subtract Size from the contact's effective Loyalty; anything more than one person knows just isn't a secret.
Contact Types
Fixer
Every working member of the Seattle shadow community — a.k.a. shadowrunner — has a fixer. Fixers are the people who connect 'runners with Johnsons. Every character needs to know at least one fixer, or they'll never work in this town again... er... in the first place.
While contacts can be gained during play by making nice with amenable people, fixers can be used to put a character in touch with other members of the shadow community. This works in two different ways.
Friend of a Friend
A Fixer can facilitate making new connections during downtime between runs. For (6-Loyalty)×1,000¥, the Fixer can introduce the character to a new contact. The Fixer then makes a series of tests to determine the properties of the new contact:
- Loyalty + (Expertise × 2), limited by Connection — The new contact has Connection equal to the hits scored.
- Expertise + (Expertise × 2), limited by Expertise — The new contact has Expertise equal to the hits scored.
- Connection + (Expertise × 2), limited by Loyalty — The new contact has Loyalty equal to the hits scored.
If any of the tests fail, the Fixer doesn't have anybody willing to deal with somebody new. The money is not lost, but the character cannot reroll until after completing the next job.
The character can spend Edge on one or more of these tests, but will start the next run with that Edge spent.
Shadows as a Service
For the same (6-Loyalty)×1,000¥, a Fixer with Connection and Loyalty of at least 3 can replicate the abilities of any other type of contact. This could take the form of the Fixer fulfilling the request personally or simply reaching out to a contact the player has never met before (and will never meet again). Either way, it only works for a single task and has an effective Connection and Loyalty two points lower than the Fixer's ratings.
This ability can only be used when the character is participating in a job brokered by the Fixer in question.
Gear
Gear contacts have the things a shadowrunner needs, or know where to get them. Each specializes in a particular type of gear, though well connected gear contacts may have a secondary specialization.
- Armor & Clothing
- Critters
- Drugs & Toxins
- Electronics
- Implants — This contact can get Used-, Standard-, and Alpha-grade implants. Instead of picking up an additional gear group (described below), the contact can gain the ability to acquire Beta-grade implants using the same Specialization bonus. If the contact is upgraded a second time (therefore minimum Connection 8), they may acquire Delta-grade implants requires Connection 8. Anything they can acquire, they can install. In addition, this contact can function as a Street Doc, but will never make house calls and won't shelter a character from the authorities or other hostiles.
- SINs & Licenses — In addition to the normal gear acquisition process, this contact can provide burner SINs and licenses. They're only good for the duration of a given job, but there's no delay and they cost 20% of what a full false identity does. The maximum rating available is equal to the contact's Connection.
- Talismonger — Magical gear is a tough market, the specifications are often exacting and the items are always handmade. Regardless of Availability, a Talismonger can only acquire Power, Metamagic, and Weapon Foci with a Rating equal to their Connection. Other foci are limited to Connection × 1.5, rounded up.
- Vehicles & Drones
- Weapons & Ammo
| Connection | Groups | Bonus |
|---|---|---|
| 1-3 | 1 | +4 |
| 4-7 | 2 | +4, ±0 |
| 8-11 | 3 | +4, ±0, -4 |
| 12 | 4 | +4, ±0, -4, -8 |
When making an Availability Test, a gear contact has a dice pool equal to Connection + (Expertise × 2) + Specialization.
The contact's first gear type has a Specialization bonus of 4. For every four full points of Connection, a Gear contact gains access to an additional type of gear, with a Specialization bonus four lower than the previous group.
Legal Only
In exchange for no ability to acquire Forbidden merchandise, a Gear contact increases their Specialization bonus by 4. The choice (and bonus) applies to all gear groups the contact has access to.
Legwork
| Connection | Skills | Expertise | Dice | Loyalty | Discount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 | 1 | 6 | 1 | 0% |
| 2 | 6 | 2 | 9 | 2 | 10% |
| 3 | 8 | 3 | 12 | 3 | 20% |
| 4 | 10 | 4 | 15 | 4 | 30% |
| 5 | 12 | 5 | 18 | 5 | 40% |
| 6 | 14 | 6 | 21 | 6 | 50% |
| 2+(Connection×2) | 3+(Expertise×3) | 10×(Loyalty-1) | |||
Legwork contacts don't have things like Gear Contacts, instead know things and can be paid to share that knowledge. Each legwork contact has a number of Knowledge Skills based on their Connection at a level determined by their Expertise. The selected knowledge skills should have a particular theme. For instance, an police contact is like to have skills relating to procedure, law, and the kind of beat they work, which could include multiple organized crime syndicates. By contrast, a yakuza contact would have knowledge of Japanese culture, customs, and history, but would only know about their own syndicate or possibly direct competitors.
| Information Needed | Cost per Hit |
|---|---|
| Legal | 300¥ |
| Illegal | 500¥ |
| Obscure or Hard-to-Find | +20% |
| Privileged Information | +50% |
| Risky to Contact | +50% |
The GM will (secretly) determine the Threshold for the desired information. The base cost is determined by the number of hits needed to answer the question posed, modified by the nature of the information:
- Legal — The information is neither illegal to know nor about an illegal act.
- Illegal — Possessing the information is inherently against the law, or the information is about a crime.
- Obscure or Hard-to-Find — The information is not something that a general member of the contact's profession is likely to know.
- Privileged Information — The information is something that only members of a particular group, of which the contact is a member, are supposed to know.
- Risky to Contact — If word gets back to the subject of the question that the contact talked, there's risk of injury (physical, emotional, financial, etc) to the contact.
If the contact's roll is successful, the character pays only for the hits needed.
As long as the information sought is not Obscure or Hard-to-Find, the player can opt to have the contact use Buying Hits[1]. If the player chooses Buying Hits, the character must pay for all the hits, whether they're needed or not — reducing the risk of the dice increases the risk to the character's wallet. There is still no cost on failure, but also no option for reroll from this contact.
Service
| Connection | Range | Availability | Expertise | Dice | Loyalty | Discount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Neighborhood | 10 | 1 | 8 | 1 | 0% |
| 2 | District | 12 | 2 | 10 | 2 | 10% |
| 3 | Metroplex | 14 | 3 | 12 | 3 | 20% |
| 4 | Country | 16 | 4 | 14 | 4 | 30% |
| 5 | Continent | 18 | 5 | 16 | 5 | 40% |
| 6 | Global | 20 | 6 | 18 | 6 | 50% |
| 8+(Connection×2) | 6+(Expertise×2) | 10×(Loyalty-1) | ||||
Service contacts are the people you go to when you need something done, generally anything short of bleeding for you. A service contact has access to two skill groups other than Driving (see Transportation Contacts), with anything from the Combat class counting as both selections.
Connection primarily covers the area in which the character does their work. Depending on the exact nature of the services the contact provides, this may require the character to travel to the contact or pay more for the contact to leave their comfort zone. In addition, Connection determines the quality of gear the character has access to — if there's a specific piece of gear that the contact would use in conjunction with the task, they have it as long as the Availability is equal to or less than indicated on the same table.
While some service contacts may have fully realized character sheets, most will not. When called to task within one of their skill groups, they roll a number of dice based on their Expertise, as indicated in Service Contact Properties Table. This does not include any benefits from gear their Connection might provide.
| Test Duration[2] | Cost |
|---|---|
| Fast, Quick, Short (10 minutes or less) | 100¥ |
| Average, Long (30 minutes to an hour) | 500¥ |
| Consuming (Days) | 1,000¥ |
| Exhaustive (Weeks) | 2,000¥ |
| Mammoth (Months) | 5,000¥ |
| Short Notice | 1,000¥ |
| Long Distance | ×Insufficient Connection |
The pricing for the work is based on the Extended Test Intervals Table[2]. Tasks that would only be a brief interruption to the contact's day are relatively inexpensive, while longer term activities carry a commensurately higher cost. In the case of something that actually requires an Extended Test, use the interval that reflects the total expended time.
Example Service Contacts
This does not reflect all the possible combinations of skill groups, only a sample of the possibilities:
- Chauffeur (Driving & Influence) — Unlike a Transportation contact, you have to provide the ride, but they can take you where you need to go and do it in style.
- Combat Engineer (Engineering & Military Science) — While they won't go into battle for you, the skills other than Gunnery in these two groups have plenty of applications for setting fortifications or ambushes.
- Escort (Influence & Stagecraft) — A higher end human resource specialist is good for more activities than those behind closed doors. They can provide social lubricant for a wide variety of social affairs.
- Infobroker (Computers & Influence) — An infobroker won't do your legwork for free like a team's decker, but they can dig up information for a price, evaluate what you have, and help you deal with the people who might be interested in it.
- Prostitute (Stagecraft & Stealth) — These contacts tend to ply their trade behind people's backs as often as on their back. Beyond the obvious calls, they're often good for unobtrusively observing a location.
- Street Doc (Biotechnology & Stealth) — A street doc is able and willing to get to the character and help them out of a bloody mess, as long as they're in the contact's operating area anyway.
- Thief (Prowess & Stealth) — Basic breaking-and-entering or even second-story work, this is somebody who can help a 'runner get past anything but full-up matrix-backed security.
- Urban Explorer (Outdoors & Stagecraft) — Some people are less about hiding than they are about blending in; this is the kind of person that can find interesting places and help you get access to them.
- Wilderness Guide (Prowess & Outdoors) — This contact can lead a group through the wilderness with the knowledge, fortitude, and equipment to allow them to survive natural hazards. Paranatural hazards, like critters, are a different story.
Transportation
| Situation | Cost |
|---|---|
| Same Metroplex | 100¥ |
| Same Country | 500¥ |
| Same Continent | 1,000¥ |
| Same Planet | 2,000¥ |
| Air Transport | ×2 |
| Prohibited Border | ×2 |
| Short Notice | ×3 |
| Hot Extraction | ×5 |
| Loyalty | Discount |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0% |
| 2 | 10% |
| 3 | 20% |
| 4 | 30% |
| 5 | 40% |
| 6 | 50% |
A transportation contact owns a vehicle corresponding to their subtype and Connection rating, and has the ability to transport a team and smuggle their gear to a destination. How much gear, what kind, and how far determine the cost per passenger.
In addition to a discount for high Loyalty, there are a few other situations that affect the cost.
- Air Transport — Aircraft are expensive, and so is riding in them.
- Prohibited Border — While transportation contacts regularly cross normally restricted borders, this modifier applies when the border to be crossed is particularly dangerous or well patrolled. Examples include getting in or out of Chicago Containment Zone during the insect spirit crisis or the Yucatán Peninsula during the insurgency.
- Short Notice — Contacts have lives, too. If the 'runner needs them to drop everything and respond immediately, it's going to cost more.
- Hot Extraction — Some, but not all, transportation contacts have a combat-capable vehicle. Those that do charge a princely sum to actually use those capabilities.
These modifiers can all be applied to the same trip. For example, an immediate helicopter extraction under fire from a location in Puyallup to someplace else in Seattle is going to cost 3,000¥ per person, but at least nobody gives a shit who comes in or out of the Barrens.
Groundcraft
- Connection 1 — Owns a car, van or other cheap equivalent, can transport basic weapons and armor from the district they're based in to any adjacent district.
- Connection 3 — Owns a larger truck or equivalent transport vehicle, can transport the team and any equipment anywhere in their respective country or metroplex and into the surrounding areas (such as the Salish-Sidhe or Tir Tairngire if based in Seattle).
- Connection 5 — Owns a very large truck and/or several transports that can carry the team, any gear, and even smaller vehicles overland anywhere on the same continent as their base location.
Watercraft
- Connection 1 — Owns a small dinghy, speedboat, or equivalent and can transport the team and basic gear anywhere within the same sprawl/metroplex and nearby islands or neighboring harbors.
- Connection 3 — Has access to or owns a small motoryacht, sailboat, small submarine, or equivalent and can transport the team to any location within the same hemisphere, as long as no deep sea travel is involved. For example, they could take a team from Seattle to anywhere on the Pacific Coast, but not to Hawaii.
- Connection 5 — Can offer access to a large container ship or equivalent transport that can carry anything the runners require to any port or other suitable location in the world.
Aerospace
- Connection 1 — Owns a small plane or helicopter, can carry one or two team members and basic gear to places within their home sprawl that are flight accessible. They will not be able to land or smuggle into major airports or corporate facilities, limited to smaller airfields or remote areas only.
- Connection 3 — Has access to or owns a mid-sized plane or helicopter that can accommodate the entire team and their gear anywhere in their city including major airports as well as nearby countries. For example, they could fly a team from Seattle to Los Angeles, but not to Neo-Tokyo.
- Connection 5 — Has access to or owns a large transport plane, LTA, or other flying vehicle and can reach any location worldwide including remote areas while carrying the team and their basic gear as well as large drones, multiple small vehicles (motorcycles, trikes, etc), and one or two full-size vehicles.
| Situation | Cost |
|---|---|
| Same Orbit | 1,000¥ |
| Between Orbits | 2,000¥ |
| Space-to-Surface | 5,000¥ |
| Surface-to-Space | 10,000¥ |
- Connection 6 — Has access to a small shuttle in either Low Earth, Geo-Synch, or Lunar Orbit and can transport a team and very little gear within that orbit. They cannot travel between orbits.
- Connection 7 — Runs a proper transport shuttle that can travel between orbits with the team and their basic gear.
- Connection 8 — Has a larger transport or armed shuttle that can travel between orbits, to the Moon, and can transfer from Earth to Space and vice versa.
Loose Lips
Any time a character interacts with a contact, there's a chance that somebody hears about it. Afer all, these people are able to do what they do because they're connected to other people. Unfortunately, that means that the character's needs establish a pattern.
Each time you use a contact for anything illegal (Gear contacts getting Forbidden gear, Transportation contacts crossing a closed border, etc), the contact also makes a test with a pool of (15-Connection) against a Threshold of (7-Loyalty) to reflect how careful they are. In effect high-Connection contacts go wide because that's how they got so well connected in the first place, while high-Loyalty contacts are more careful because they like you.
On a failure, some undesirable get's word of the character's activities. How likely they are to do something about it depends on the margin of failure. On a glitch the interested party could even be so bold as to show up at the meet.
References
- ↑ Shadowrun Fifth Edition Core Rulebook (p. 45)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Shadowrun Fifth Edition Core Rulebook (p. 48)