Shadowrun RPG Gear Page

Gear Rules Overview

• Rarirty - Item Rearity - how to find and how much it costs.
• Encumbrance - Item Encumbrace - how heavy is it.
• Qualities - Item Qualites - What each quality does.
• Maintenance - Item Maintence - How to keep it working.
• Weapons - All about what makes a weapon.
• Armour - All about what makes armour.
• Generation - All about changes to gear over a generation.

Shadowrun - Item Rarity

Some items are naturally more difficult to purchase than others, depending on where your characters find themselves at any given time. Of course, some items are rare no matter where one goes, and likewise, some items are always common and inexpensive.

Rarity in Genesys measures how difficult an item can be to find on a scale of 0–10, with 0 being the easiest to track down and 10 being the hardest. However, whether or not an item is available for purchase should never be solely a matter of rolling dice. Instead, your Game Master always has at least partial say as to whether an item is available in a certain location. Nevertheless, for simple items, rarity provides a simple way for your GM to determine whether something is available and to let you easily track items down. We suggest that you make a successful Negotiation, Streetwise, or Knowledge skill check to determine where your character can find an item.

Table: Rarity
• Rarity 0 – Simple (no dice) – Pencil and paper.
• Rarity 1 – Simple (no dice) – Food supplies
• Rarity 2 – Easy (one purple) – Pocketknife
• Rarity 3 – Easy (one purple) – Smartphone
• Rarity 4 – Average (two purple) – Automobile
• Rarity 5 – Average (two purple) – Semi-automatic pistol
• Rarity 6 – Hard (three purple) – High end computer
• Rarity 7 – Hard (three purple) – Construction explosives
• Rarity 8 – Daunting (four purple) – Military machine guns
• Rarity 9 – Daunting (four purple) – Civilian satellite
• Rarity 10 – Formidable (five purple) – Military strategic bomber

Table: Rarity lists rarities, the corresponding check difficulty to find items with those rarities, and examples of items with those rarities. The examples are all modern day examples. Table: Rarity Modifiers, lists some general modifiers that can be applied to an item’s rarity, based on the technological status and general location where your character is looking for the item. We’ve kept the location descriptions very vague; they could apply to different cities or villages on Earth, or to different planets across a galactic civilization. Modifiers can raise an item’s rarity above 10. For rarities higher than 10, the difficulty remains at Formidable five purple), but your GM may upgrade the difficulty once for every rarity beyond 10.

Table: Rarity Modifiers
• Rarity -1 – Consumer driven economy
• Rarity -1 – Major metropolitan area
• Rarity -1 – Trading hub
• Rarity +0 – Mid-sized metropolitan area
• Rarity +0 – Civilised location
• Rarity +1 – Rural or agrarian location
• Rarity +1 – State-regulated economy (modifier man not apply to basic living staples)
• Rarity +2 – Frontier location
• Rarity +2 – Laws prohibiting ownership (modifier only applies to certain items, such as military weaponry or aircraft)
• Rarity +3 – Active war zone
• Rarity +4 – Post disaster wasteland

Selling And Trading - Although we don’t expect your games to constantly involve adventures in commerce, nearly every roleplaying game involves selling items at one point or another (even if your character is just selling items looted from the corpses of their foes).

When selling an item, your character needs to make a successful Negotiation check. Use the difficulty set by the item’s rarity (as determined by Table: Rarity). Your characters can generally sell an item for one-quarter of its cost if the check is successful, increasing that to one-half with two net successes and to three-quarters with three net successes or more.

In some cases, the PCs might wish to engage in trade, buying multiple items at one location and then selling them at another location where they are rarer. We generally advise that you handle this narratively. However, if your GM wishes to use some mechanical guidelines for this process, we’ve provided some basic rules that cover trading.

Trade works the same whether with black-market items or with legal items. Selling either type of item follows the rules listed previously with the caveat that trading in legal items requires a Negotiation check, while trading in illegal items requires a Streetwise check. However, when determining the sell price based on the success of the Negotiation or Streetwise check, first multiply the cost of the item by the difference between the item’s rarity where it was bought and its rarity where it is to be sold, referring to Table: Rarity Modifiers and Table: Increased Costs When Trading. Then take the new, increased cost and determine the sell price by the results of the Negotiation or Streetwise check.

Table: Increased Costs When Trading
• Rarity increase +0 to +1 – increases the cost by 1
• Rarity increase +2 – increases the cost by 2
• Rarity increase +3 – increase the cost by 3.
• Rarity increase +4 or higher – increase the cost by 4.

Of course, these rules do not account for all sorts of details, such as buying in bulk, marketing and advertising, and myriad other factors that may affect prices. This is why the rules for buying, selling, and trading are all modifiable by the GM and subject to their judgement. It is also important to note that these rules only apply when engaging in commercial trade. So, if your group sells a load of guns in a town, then later your character buys one of those guns in that town, they’re going to have to pay the usual, listed price for the gun. Don’t try to use these guidelines for trading and selling in bulk to cheat the system!

The final thing to remember is that your GM always has the final say on what can be sold, where it can be sold, and how much it can be sold for. Because this isn’t likely to be a major part of the game, we deliberately made a system that is simple and doesn’t account for a lot of the variables that would normally matter when trying to sell an item. If your GM wants to stop your characters from selling cell phones to a village without any cell service, or have an arms dealer decide that turning your characters in to the government for a reward is a better deal than what you’re offering, they are well within their rights to do so.

Black Market Items - Nearly every setting has its “black market,” an illicit network of merchants and traders who buy and sell whatever happens to be illegal in that setting. Sometimes this commerce happens in an actual market, but more often, such deals happen through a labyrinthine web of contacts, cut-outs, and middlemen.

If your characters want to buy something that happens to be illegal, they’re probably going to have to go into the black market to do so. Buying and selling on the black market follows all the same rules as regular buying and selling, except that instead of making a Negotiation check to find items or determine the price your character can sell them at, they need to make a Streetwise check instead.

Shadowrun - Item Encumbrance

Genesys emphasizes sweeping stories, epic tales, and fast action. Keeping track of the weight of every piece of loose change isn’t fun, but knowing that your character has to carry a child out of a burning building is an important story element; so is having some idea of how many days’ worth of rations your character can carry while journeying in the wilderness.

In general, you and your Game Master won’t need to track your character’s encumbrance (how much they’re carrying on their person). Occasionally, however, it may play an important part in the story, and you need to know if the weight, mass, and collective bulk of the items your character is wearing inhibit their actions.

Encumbrance Values - Every item of gear listed has an encumbrance value. Most items that can commonly be carried have a value between 0 and 5 – from relatively light objects (such as wallets or light clothing) to heavier items (like hunting rifles or tool kits). We discuss the encumbrance value of armour in more detail later, but the one difference is that when your character is wearing armour, its encumbrance goes down. Just imagine wearing a chain-mail shirt. It’s pretty heavy, but now imagine carrying it in your hands. That’s going to be a lot more cumbersome since you can’t distribute the weight across your torso and shoulders, and you don’t have your hands free.

Encumbrance doesn’t strictly represent weight: it also represents mass, bulk, and how easy items are to carry. A well-fitting suit of plate mail adds very little encumbrance, while an armful of logs has a high encumbrance. The plate mail may weigh more, but it’s designed to be worn and fitted to a person, while a stack of unbound logs is both heavy and awkward to carry.

Small items, such as candles, most pistols, and knives, have an encumbrance value of 1 or 2. Medium items, such as rifles, a satchel of grenades, or a grappling hook and cord, have an encumbrance value of 3 or 4. Large or heavy items, such as cargo crates, light machine guns, or a heavy toolbox, are valued at 5 or 6.

If it becomes critical to the story to have more detail, ten loosely carried incidental items have an encumbrance value of 1. If they are stored in an effective manner – such as keys in a pocket or crystals in a pouch – then twenty incidental items have an encumbrance value of 1. If, for some reason, your character is unable to manage their gear in such a way, the GM may increase the items’ overall encumbrance value by several points to reflect the difficulty of managing and carrying items by less efficient means.

When carried, a living being generally has an encumbrance value of 5 plus Brawn. A typical human has a Brawn of 2, and therefore a total encumbrance value of 7.

Encumbrance Threshold - All characters have an encumbrance threshold of 5 plus their Brawn rating, which limits how much they can carry under normal conditions without penalty. A total encumbrance value over the threshold means the character is “encumbered,” and suffers a Setback (Black) dice to all Agility and Brawn-based checks for every point of encumbrance over the limit. And of course, this is cumulative with any other Setback (Black) dice the character may be suffering.

Further, if a character is encumbered by an amount equal to or greater than their Brawn rating, they no longer earn a free manoeuvre each turn. The character can still perform up to two manoeuvres, but each manoeuvre costs 2 strain. With a Brawn of 2, for example, a character would not get a free manoeuvre each turn if they’re carrying nine or more points of encumbrance.

Lifting And Carry Excessive Encumbrance - Characters shouldn’t typically carry more than their encumbrance threshold. When necessity demands, however, they can do so for a short time (suffering the effects described above).

If your character needs to lift an object with an encumbrance value greater than their encumbrance threshold, such as an ally who has fallen off a gantry or ledge, they must make an Athletics check. The difficulty is Easy (one purple) if the object’s encumbrance value is one more than your character’s encumbrance threshold. You should increase the difficulty by one for every additional point over, up to a maximum additional encumbrance of 4 and difficulty of Daunting (four purple). A character with a Brawn of 2 and a threshold of 7, for example, tries to lift a rock with an encumbrance value of 10. That’s 3 over, so the difficulty is Hard (three purple).

Additional characters may help, adding their raw Brawn to the encumbrance threshold of the character trying to lift or carry the object or objects. In the example, a person with a Brawn of 2 adds +2 to the encumbrance threshold for that specific task.

Concealing Gear - We assume that your character is going to want to hide items on their person at some point. Maybe they’re concealing a weapon, or maybe they want to sneak a valuable item out of a restricted area. In any case, we do have some simple rules for hiding stuff.

Items with an encumbrance value of 1 or less can be hidden on a person easily. You don’t need to make a check for your character to hide the item. Instead, if another character tries to search your character, the searcher makes an opposed Perception check vs. your character’s Stealth. Add a Boost (Blue) dice to the searcher’s check for every encumbrance value over 1 that is due to the hidden item. If there are multiple items, use the item with the highest encumbrance value to determine how many Boost (Blue) dice to add.

In some cases, your character’s opponents may not specifically be checking your character for hidden items, but may just be keeping an eye out for anything odd in general (such opponents could include a sentry at a city gate, or a police officer walking the beat). In these cases, the searcher would make an opposed Vigilance check vs. Stealth instead of a Perception check.

The same rules can apply to similar situations – such as hiding a rifle (encumbrance value 4) in a dumpster full of trash. In this case, your Game Master should decide what encumbrance value of object can be hidden without being noticed, and add a Boost (Blue) dice for every point over that.

Shadowrun - Item Qualities

Some equipment features special qualities that add variety and depth to the weapons, armour, and items your character may encounter. In our game, item qualities are special rules that can change how the item acts. They let us add more variety to an item than we could by only manipulating its raw characteristics. They also make the items more interesting for you, since many qualities may require you to think about your character using that item differently.

Special qualities are generally either passive or active. Passive qualities are always “on” and require no activation on the part of the user. Active qualities must be triggered by the user, often by spending one or more Advantages to activate the effect.

Item qualities usually have a number associated with them. This is their rating. Ratings affect qualities in different ways, depending on the quality in question.

Active qualities require two Advantages to activate unless otherwise stated in their description. Active item qualities on weapons can only trigger on a successful attack, unless specified otherwise.

Gear Qualities (Shared with Star Wars Rules)

Shadowrun - Item Maintenace

Invariably, items start to wear down. Rolling Despair may indicate a item has malfunctioned, misfired, jammed, broken down, or otherwise been rendered inoperable or impaired until it can be repaired.

All items, from low-tech weapons to more sophisticated devices, can be repaired with the Mechanics skill.

Item damage are generally classified as minor, moderate, or major. The magnitude of the required repairs indicates two things: the severity of any penalties applied to the user when trying to operate the defective item, and the difficulty rating of the necessary repairs. Repairing an item requires adequate time and tools, generally one to two hours per difficulty level. If a character attempts repairs in less time, the difficulty increases by one. Likewise, if the character lacks the proper tools, the difficulty increases by one. These factors are cumulative, so if your character tries to repair a pistol without the proper tools and in half the time it would normally take, you should increase the difficulty of the check by two.

The cost of repairs is equal to a percentage of the item’s base cost: 25% if it’s a minor repair, 50% if it’s a moderate repair, and 100% if it requires major work. Reduce the total by 10% for each Advantage received on the repair check if your character is doing the work themselves.

Table: Repairing Gear
• Minor Damage – Easy (one purple) repair check – Add a Setback (Black) until repaired.
• Moderate Damage – Average (two purple) repair check – Increase difficulty once until repaired.
• Major Damage – Hard (three purple) repair check – Item cannot be used.

Tracking Ammo - Combat in our game tends to be fast-paced and narrative based, with rounds lasting an unspecified amount of “game-world” time and combat encounters usually wrapping up in a few total rounds. That narrative-driven approach also means that when your character attacks with a ranged weapon, one attack could represent a single, carefully lined up shot, or a few shots snapped off with a pistol.

All this means that we really encourage you and your GM not to worry too much about ammunition. Carefully tallying how many bullets your character has in the clip goes against the Genesys game experience (and the long-standing traditions of most action movies).

A better way to approach the issue of ammo is to use any Despair generated on a combat check to make the character’s ammo run out. It’s more cinematically exciting, and certainly feels like something that would come from rolling a Despair!

The only exception is when a weapon has the Limited Ammo quality. We reserve that quality for weapons like rocket launchers, grenades, or other weapons that very obviously can only fire once before reloading!

Shadowrun - Weapons Items

In our game, weapons have a number of distinct characteristics, which is how we define them in the game and delineate their capabilities. All weapons share the characteristic categories that we cover here.

ome also come with unique rules, which we cover in the weapon’s individual entry. Those rules are so specialised that making them universal would just create clutter in our general rules, since they won’t come up often.

Name - What we call the weapon.

Skill Used (Skill) - All weapons require a combat skill to operate, and this entry defines which skill the weapon requires.

Skills also can determine whether a weapon requires one or two hands to wield. The “Heavy” version of the skill means the weapon takes two hands to use, and the “Light” version of the skill means it can be used with one hand. If the setting uses the unspecified version of each skill, the weapon can be used one-handed unless it says otherwise in its entry. Gunnery weapons always require two hands to use.

Base Damage (Dam) - The base damage the weapon inflicts. This is the minimum damage inflicted if the attack with this weapon hits. Each net Success the combat check generates adds one point of damage to this base damage rating.

Some weapons (including most Melee and Brawl weapons) have a “+” in front of their base damage. This means you add your character’s Brawn rating to this value.

Critical Rating (Crit) - Indicates the number of Advantages required to trigger Critical Injuries using this weapon. If the weapon’s Critical rating triggers, the character rolls percentile dice on Table: Critical Injury Result, on GM Screen to determine the effect on the target. A Critical Injury can only be triggered on a successful hit that inflicts wounds on the target.

Some weapons and talents modify this Critical roll, potentially making a Critical Injury more or less effective. In addition, a character can only generate one Critical injury per hit on a target. However, if the check generates enough Advantages to trigger the Critical rating of the weapon multiple times, the character can choose to add +10 to the Critical roll for each trigger after the first.

Range - The range of the weapon. Range is measured in several broad range bands. Melee weapons usually require the attacker to be engaged with the target. Ranged weapons have ranges listed as short, medium, long, or extreme.

House Rules – When squares are used for range, apply the characters most favourable Attribute or Skill to represent their ability at range.

Encumbrance (Encum) - Encumbrance is an abstract measurement of how heavy and awkward something is to carry and transport. The higher the encumbrance, the more difficult the item is to carry.

Price - The base price of the weapon on the open market. This is also the black market price for the item if it is restricted or illegal.

Rarity - The rarity of the item, before modifiers.

Special - These are the qualities or other special rules each weapon possesses. Rules specific to a certain type of weapon are detailed in the weapon’s individual description

Shadowrun - Armour Items

Now that we’ve talked about weapons, let’s cover armour briefly. What form armour takes in your game is going to depend a lot on the setting. However, mechanically, all forms of armour work the same, whether medieval plate mail or modern ballistic armour.

For our purposes, armour is pretty much anything that your character wears to increase their protection. If your game involves combat, we expect that your character wears some sort of armour. We should emphasize that the game is designed with that conceit in mind, so if your character is getting into fights without any armour, they are taking on more of a risk.

For that reason, we keep our definition of “armour” really broad. Not everyone is going to want their character to be wearing the bulkiest body armour available all the time (after all, most action movie heroes don’t!) So, in our game, even a heavy leather jacket or sturdy clothing provides some protection. Often, that’s all your character is really going to need, and narratively, it still looks like something they might wear every day.

Your character can only benefit from wearing one piece of armour. Even if they wear two or more pieces of armour, you have to choose which one improves soak and defence and provides any unique benefits.

Defence - The armour’s defence adds Setback (Black) dice equal to the defence rating directly to the attacker’s dice pool. This reflects the armour’s ability to deflect damage away from the wearer’s body.

The defence rating of armour sets the user’s defence at a certain value, while other abilities and talents may then increase the user’s defence rating.

Soak - A suit of armour’s soak is added to the wearer’s soak value and you subtract the total soak from any damage suffered. If an attack causes 10 damage, for example, a soak of 2 plus a Brawn of 2 reduces the damage incurred by four, leaving a total of six points of damage. Most armour adds +1 or +2 soak, rarely more.

Encumbrance - Each full suit or discrete piece of armour has a listed encumbrance value. However, armour’s full encumbrance rating only comes into play when a suit or piece of armour is carried instead of worn. When armour is worn, its encumbrance rating is reduced by three, to a minimum of zero.

Shadowrun - Items over Generations

In the Shadowrun implementation of the Genesys rules, I will be implementing an generation change in equipment with each generation having changes that can be felt when your using Next Gen or Last Gen items in the current generation.

Note – This is the basic guidelines here I am using to determine what is in a generation and what is out of it. I have public plans only for the first four generations as these have been detailed in Shadowrun as I wish to keep a few secrets about what is to come in the games to come.

In game terms using items from the same generation is basically the stock item, but if you use it from a different generation then there will be modifiers.

Table: Generational Modifiers
• Last Gen – Rolls using last gen have upgraded checks as appropriate to the disadvantage of the user. They have an encumbrance increase of 1.
• Next Gen – Rolls using next gen have upgraded checks as appropriate to the advantage of the user. They have an encumbrance decrease of 1.
• Maintenance difficulty – all increases by one dice per previous gen and two dice per next gen. Cost to repair is also multiplied.
• Note – Previous generation items can be upgraded, or maintained to keep up with current gen, and a item upgrade customisation does exactly that.

Generation 1 Items These items are common to what we have now, based around 2020 tech.
• Corporate Tech – Consumer services for everything you can imagine and then some.
• Government Tech – Social and most population management services and tools are driven by the government.
• Military Tech – Mostly using technology created by the corporations with some internally created custom items and modifications.
• Morphin Tech – An unknown tech that can't be replicated, repair or modified in any way currenlt known, believed to be part magic part advanced technology.

Generation 2 Items These have three main branches from what we have today, first is the corporate line of equipment, and the second is the government and military line of equipment and the third is mysterious.
• Corporate Tech – Used by everyone (including governmental military), this is the consumer product line that keeps the major corporations running.
• Government Tech – Services are being interconnected making the internet the one stop shop for all your governance needs.
• Military Tech – Used by Governmental Military units only, these items are not available for sale by the Corporations and while highly sought after is not easy to keep and usually can’t be disassembled.
• Proto Tech – A strange new technology whispered about that is said to run off magic.

Generation 3 Items Laser items are being investigated and the availability to Matrix tech is new to the market.
• Corporate Tech – Starting to see basic and unwieldy laser technology coming onto the market. Smartphones are being phased out due to legacy dependency on Last Gen infrastructure.
• Government Tech – An automated smart road is integrated in government run cities, with comlinks starting to replace smartphones separating out the communication function from the rest of technolongy.
• Matrix Tech – Allows users to visualise and interact with the digital world in a more intuitive form and touted as the Matrix and later referred to as the Matrix 1.0. This replaces the internet and redefines how the world interacts. Most connections are made using wired cables, with a few high end systems using the new comlinks for remote connection as the last gen smartphones don’t appear to be compatible.

Generation 4 Items A new type of tech emerges called Machine Tech.
• Machine Tech – A technology that appears to be AI driven and does not follow the rules of modern technology. Known to be able to reconfigure itself to suit its users better.
• Magitech - A magical technology, not considered to be very stable.
• Wireless Tech – With wireless connectivity being the norm instead of the exception and the rise of Matrix 2.0. No one uses smartphones anymore and all the legacy infrastructure died with the Matric 1.0.