Web Systems

From Ascension Sojourns

Access

  • Sensory: VR gear; +1 to all difficulties; Intelligence = Strength, Wits = Dexterity; no physical presence in Web. No magick necessary.
  • Astral: VR gear; Correspondence 2; Intelligence + Computer, difficulty 7, three successes minimum; Intelligence = Strength, Wits = Dexterity; astral presence in Web. Coincidental magick.
  • Holistic: Trinary computer; Life 4/ Correspondence 2/ Forces 2; Intelligence + Computer, difficulty 7, five successes minimum; normal Traits, full physical presence in Web. Vulgar magick.

Icons

  • Basic Creation: Intelligence + Computer, difficulty 5. Three successes minimum.
  • Changing Icons: Manipulation + Computer, difficulty 5.
  • Appearance or Intimidation: One dot added per success.

Whiteout Severity

Successes Effect
One The mage responsible for the crash suffers a soft de-rez.
Two The responsible mage suffers a hard de-rez.
Three That mage and all icons with 20’ of him get booted to another sector (soft de-rez).
Four Every icon within 50’ suffers a hard de-rez.
Five Every icon in the sector gets a soft de-rez; the responsible party suffers a hard de-rez.
Six All icons within the sector endure a hard de-rez. The sector itself fuzzes and goes offline, as per Duration, below. The offender gets booted to a lost sector (Corrupted Web, Hung Sector, etc.).
Seven+ The entire sector crashes, goes offline for the duration, and suffers long-term damage. All icons within the sector get de-rezed hard; offender may be chaos dumped.
10+ Sector trashed forever. Everyone inside that sector suffers hard de-rez. Offender disappears.
Paradox Pool Duration
1-3 Less than a minute.
4-6 One to five minutes.
7-10 One to six hours.
11-13 One day.
14-16 One week.
17-20 A month or more.
20+ Trashed forever

Vocabulary:

  • Hard De-rez - strikes someone who violates a major protocol in a Restricted sector, crosses the wrong netizen, provokes a minor Whiteout backlash, or sustains enough damage to take him to Incapacitated while online. The effect boots him out of Netspace and leaves his physical body and consciousness scrambled and hurt.
    In game terms, a hard de-rez inflicts two automatic health levels in lethal damage. A sensory or astral netizen gets a soak roll against this damage (difficulty 7, not the usual 6) because of the distance between his icon and his physical form. A holistically immersed visitor does not get that roll, however, as his body takes the full effects of the dump.
    In either case, the player must also make a Stamina roll, difficulty 7, or else lose two points from a Mental Attribute. These lost points heal like health levels lost to lethal damage and reflect the egg-frying intensity of a hard de-rez.

  • Icon Death - The fate of netizens who get cacked in sectors that haven’t been designed to protect them from the consequences of mortality, icon death fries the icon and boots the traveler back into Meatspace.
    Story-wise, the icon explodes in a shower of screaming pyrotechnics or CGI gore while the person on the other end wakes up back in material reality, probably suffering minor burns and a major headache… and possibly suffering a lot worse than that. (For the record, a holistically immersed traveler who gets killed in Netspace dies. That’s that.)
  • The Chaos Dump - The dread of every netizen alive, a chaos dump blasts both the icon and its user’s consciousness into fractals. The meat and the mind remain connected through the process, which results in an awful kind of Internet oblivion. An Arete roll (difficulty 8) sends the traveler’s consciousness into an immediate Quiet, from which he may eventually escape. Success inflicts aggravated damage on the body as above. Failure or a botch on this roll cooks the mage from the inside out… Fortunately, chaos dumps are rare – typically the result of a huge Paradox backlash in the web.

Ref: M20 Ann, pg 472-473