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Fridge Brilliance
- In most role-playing games the trope of classes is Fighter, Mage, Thief. In Shadowrun, it's samurai/mage/decker. Why replace thieves with hackers? Because not only are deckers doing the stealing uniquely (stealing data), but everyone on the team is expected to have physical stealth skills and often steals objects on a job. While only deckers have the expertise and tools for consistently (though not always) getting past your average megacorp's state-of-the-art security systems to shut down surveillance cameras and wipe away the group's digital trail, which serves as a decker's own unique brand of stealth. Similarly forensic abilities are far more limited in general in most other Fighter, Mage, Thief formula following roleplaying games.
- "Ghost" or "Spirits" is used by some at times where typically "god" would be used in oaths. It seems a bit cheesy censorship at first until you remember that the Great Ghost Dance and the Spirits destroyed entire towns, made armies look like fools in what should have been easy wins, and helped to essentially bring down the old USA as a first general cultural exposure to magic as a real force. There weren't any recent examples attributed to God showing anywhere near that level of power or impact on the world. It also fits in well with the rise of shamanism, having been demonstrated as something very real, powerful, and worthy of respect.
- Things which the rules specify as turning the player into a NPC are actually a form of Gameplay and Story Integration. Becoming an insect shaman, toxic, or blood magician while Darke's bridge is being built with every act of blood magic all involve contact with directly or attract darker forces which take away free will. Players cannot control PCs without free will, just like how they are unable to choose actions when the PC is under mind control.
Fridge Horror
- The Troll Grandmother's suburban house mentioned in Safehouses where everyone, even the kids was armed? Given the timeline she would have lived through the Night of Rage. Other vignettes showed resulted in situations desperate enough that average bystander trolls beat lynch mob members using another lynch mob member as a club and still wound up murdered. National guards and the police just drove them from their homes herded them like cattle to the slaughter and abandoned them to rioters. No wonder why everyone at her home is armed, especially her! Given the size and density of the mobs for active/awakened metahumans with a lethal area of an effect damaging spell at the time or a summoned elemental may very well have a body count which would put veteran mercenaries, assassins, and shadowrunners who regularly do lethal jobs to shame. Just from self defense on one night. Combine that with implications that Nomads or the Horrors sparked the riots and thus could potentially spark something like that again....
