Jessica Jone

And kinda Daredevil

My fundamental theory is that Jessica Jones is about feminism, and Daredevil is about racism. And the difference is that Jessica Jones is feminist, and Daredevil is racist.

I always got the sense that Kilgrave was basically a metaphor for the Patriarchy. A powerful male figure which no one truly believes in, attempting to use it as a defence gets you laughed at, has the ability to draw people in and control them, and, finally, many people (of any gender) attempt to use it to gain power. Jessica Jones spends most of the show as a victim of violence that no one truly believes in, and basically assume that she's violent, insane, or dangerous. That's a super powerful image. She is a victim of violence who is attacked by the system as bad or wrong.

Jessica decides to opt out of the system, rejects the job at the powerful law firm, and generally denies the things that others find important, and then, becomes immune to Kilgrave. Again, an image I like, not sure if it's as good, but I still am ok with it. I don't know if I love the idea "Women are only free if they stop buying into society" - but definitely believe it's valid for people to hold.

Then, an important part of the series is about love - Jessica tellingly never tells a male character that she loves them. However, she also, importantly, is not implied to be anything but heterosexual - and love for Trish is purely true love, not sexual.

9/11 Footage

I have had a very conflicted and complicated couple of days. I basically heard the remarks regarding "thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11", and went, "Ummm, yes, I remember this". And then I heard a bunch of people saying that it didn't exist. Which was more than a little weird.

And, threfore, I decided to go and check my own memory. Since memory is fickle, and I was young at the time, so, I began to go watch footage, do research, find articles written from 2001 to 2005. Basically - my goal is to either disprove my belief in the footage's existence, or figure out why it didn't exist.

In the end - I found out the truth: The media portrayed a lot of footage of people in the Middle East as celebrations of 9/11. And they were also fairly loose about where they were. I spent a craptonne of time engaging with 9/11 News Coverage and pouring through the footage, mostly from the CBC because that is what I had watched. This was a strange experience, because it was reliving a rather horrific moment from my own past.

The footage I saw, and also likely Trump saw was summed up here - which basically fills in a pretty basic story, which a noncritical viewer, such as my 13 year old self, might completely misunderstand. Importantly, I don't think this is an example of a racist Donald Trump, I think this is an example of a racist media. This was a failure of the media. The media was trying to grab at more fear and more story out of the day. They wanted to spend many hours on the story, all day on the story - and so - rather than simply showing what was happening - they commented on it. And then commented in rather problematic ways - and said things that still reverberate today. That's a scary thought as well - whenever the media does something that's racist and terrible, such as portraying small groups as respresentative, they can make politicians over a decade later try to enforce policies of marking minorities for assault and detainment.

Racist Attribution of Hackers

I've thought a lot about hackers recently. It's a pretty common tactic for people to discuss hackers as being "Russian" or "Chinese". And there's a pretty common to see people advocating for blocking IPs from specific countries. (Now, there's definitely good reasons to limit your attack surface by doing things like limiting a service that is only offered in one country to that country, but defining why you only offer your service in that country is equally important). These discussions mostly claim that we need to protect ourselves from "Chinese Hackers" or otherwise dealing with the world of Cyberwarfare. Accusing countries of attacks, and then making the leap to assume that the attacks are state sponsored.

I think it's a pretty established fact (as far as our metrics go) that the majority of attacks come from China. Of course, the second most common location for attacks to originate from is the United States. However - looking at the maps of the Internet (or a language map we can pretty easily see that - the internet is mostly in China (there's more English speakers, but they're also fairly spread out, not concentrated in the US). This means, that assuming the majority of internet users are in China, we should also expect that the majority of attacks will come from China. This wont even correlate with the actual location of the attacker - since it's well established protocol (so well established it's taken as read in the movie Hackers) that you should never hack from your own computer. Based on the huge number of botnets that exist - I am not sure how attribution is going to work. This tends to come into the fore whenever security people discuss Hacking Back (the practise of DDOSing or otherwise attacking the people who are attacking your own network), people assume that the attack sources are simply insecure and unpatched systems that have been taken over by the actual attackers.

Despite this, whenever people discuss these attacks - they begin by discussing how it's all about Chinese and Russian hacker mobs. The data basically points to racism and jingoism as the primary source for attacks. Things like Titain Rain basically existed for the US to blame China - with the concept that only a Nation State could really battle the US computer infrastructure. Which basically believes that a (functionally) unlimited Defense Budget also means that an attacker can never get in without an equally large attack budget, something we know not to be true from examples like the Sony hackers, or even Edward Snowden's successful infiltration of the NSA (even if it did start out as entering the NSA legitimately). (All this is not to say that China doesn't support attacks like Operation Aurora, not of course that the US would do that).

Basically, I am fairly certain that attributing that majority of attacks from a country to people within that country is likely foolish, or at least, hubris. I am also fairly certain that attack demographics should basically follow the same demographics as the internet itself. This is not unexpected. Similarily - a lot of the countries where attacks come from don't speak English, meaning access to a lot of software doesn't exist. For the most part - China and Russia have a completely separate internet (this map of the most popular websites by country shows that Russia and China are mostly using Baidu and Yandex to search in their own language). China has explicitly cut itself off, and a lot of the internet has cut off those places entirely - blocking them at the firewall level. Basically - these racist theories of attribution are splitting the internet - and continuing problems that the internet really should be breaking us out of - communication and dialouge across country lines.

Domestic Partner and Police Violence

One day I was hatewatching "Blue Bloods" (I highly recommend not watching it if you, unlike me, enjoy not yelling at your TV), and they mentioned that being a police officer was dangerous. The show had also recently discussed issues of domestic violence, and kind of dismissed it. So - I decided to run the numbers, and they're really not all that great.

Since this is framed about police being killed in the line of duty, I am going to only focus on deaths. Being wounded or injured is going to be out of scope for this. I am also going to look at deaths caused very directly. The police officer must have been killed by: -Someone else. -Who isn't a police officer -It wasn't an accident (my call, my bias)

So - let's look at this: https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2015 - this is the list of police officers killed in the line of duty.

Culture

I am the proud owner of a Society Technology and Values options from the University of Waterloo - which is because I like to talk out of my ass about culture and technology a lot. Take my opinions with a grain of salt.

I would love if you contacted me regarding the things I think. I like twitter a lot, because it's public, and therefore a better comment system than any I could put at the bottom of the page (though, I am not picky).

Docker isn't really designed for the cloud.

Ok, inflamitory thesis has been stated. Now, let's talk about docker and kubernetes and orchestration and containers, and VMs and elastic compute.

I am assuming right now that we're talking about agroup operating at scale. What you do to spin up your website or get a wiki to use with your friends is up to you. But as soon as you need to write documenation, or figure out scaling to meet demand, we enter the realm I'm talking about.

Sudo Usage

This is a direct response to: https://dotat.at/@/2024-05-02-sudo.html

1. Because you should not log in to root directly.
   • is the key point I think that needs rebutting
2. As a safety guard.
   • this is basically an argument for really or doas and not sudo - and I mostly agree with that
3. For auditing.

Boomerang Routing and Canadian Sovereignty

This is based on a specific of the Canadian Elections Act. This is a specific thing that luckily no longer exists - since it was a weird and problematic part of an election. However, it was also a a question of what we are. The purpose of the rule was mostly to deal with the ripples of time throughout the size of Canada - allowing people to make their vote without knowledge of what's happened in the past. Which makes sense. BUT it does mean that there were issues when Canada was using these rules.

OK, important and kind of nerdy tangent. Bell doesn't peer inside Canada, which is a weird and complicated thing - but specifically means that Bel causes all of their packets to pass into the US whenever you connect to another point in Canada. Another related issue is that Elections Ontario (and presumably Elections Canada) uses Bell for connectivity. This observation is based on my time with Elections Ontario - and it would be good to confirm that this is the case. However, the other large ISP, Rogers also peers mostly outside Canada (importantly they do peer in Toronto, so that's good).

Now, we also know that all packets that traverse the Canada/US border are picked up by the NSA.

Therefore, Canada made it illegal for Canadians to transmit electoral results to persons outside of their electoral district - but - at the same time - showed all of them to persons in the US.

Federated vs Global Communications

I've been working on this idea a lot, and trying to pull it all together in my mind has only really made it more and more and more deep, so I am hoping that perfect is the enemy of done, and if I write some of it, I can get at least part of it down.

I've been looking at Federated Friend Locking, Twitter, Facebook, and Quitter. These things are all important to how I am seeing social networking, which I am not sure is doing what we expect. As I've been reading, talking about thinking about social networking (I'd cite my sources if it wasn't just a mishmash of concepts and ideas, mostly from Singpolyma, Kousu (currently not on the web) and Randall Howard). I am currently thinking about how most of social networking is about screaming. The cult of the ordinary celebrity. Which, really, is part of the promise of democratic capitalism - that anyone can become powerful - which is awesome.

Part of the problem with social networking that people identify is that people scream about themselves a lot. Of course, that's part of society. But, at the same time, it's partly that we've moved a lot of our private interactions into the public sphere. The blurring between bragging about events, speaking about politics, protests, and family conversations. We basically are going through our lives in public - it's really hard to separate our identities. And we've built a lot of tools to colate our identities, it's hard to split our identities into multiple places - and it's hard to do anything in the private sphere. We're all beginning to have the issues that people always warned us that paparazzi caused for celebrity. Maybe we're a paparazzi culture, rather than a celebrity culture.

At the same time - my father and mother follow me on twitter. My RPG friends can see my github, and so on. Things default to public, you have a single identity, a single location, and a single stream for your thoughts. You can't believe something wrong, you also can't muse silently. Note the defensive tone of this - it's because it needs to be real - but it also needs to deal with my own weaknesses publically.

The Healthcare Panopticon

I hear a lot about Big Data these days - and it's becoming pretty cliche to be worried about them and their effects on freedom, privacy, or other things that hackers like to rattle on about. However - I think one of the most important things about the modern Panopticon is that it's usually based on earnest belief. I fully believe that the people who are trying to gather all of our data into a single bundle, track, collate, and control people are earnest and believe in making the world a better place.

In case you want to know the end of this quickly - the people who believe in the Big Data Utopia have never examined what that means.

This is primarily a response to a talk at TEDxU (The talk by Dana Fox - starting around 2:35:00 - about Cognitive Human Services Delivery). This seems like a super earnest talk - with a goal of making sure that everyone is happy. But happiness isn't just through service delivery. Society is larger than simply the people who deliver services, and sometimes the people who deliver services are not the people you want to share with.

One of the pillars of information security is called PII (Personally Identifiable Information) - this is information that can identify a person. It's often emails, credit card numbers, addresses, names, birth dates, location data, or other such tools.This is typically considered the holy grail of data - and leaking PII without consent is how something is given the status of an information leak. If someone is leaking information - the question is if someone is leaking PII. Collecting PII is basically a crime so heinous that the NSA wont engage in it. The typical argument is about whether or not it's OK to collect and correlate enough metadata to personally identify someone (a surprisingly small amount). And it can be very hard to deidentify data when you release it (a good example being the "Deidentified" NYC taxicab database). However - the TEDx Talk goes well beyond any other that I've seen. This suggestion deals with something greater than PII.

Migrating Virtual Box VMs to VMWare (ESXi 6)

I spent a lot of yesterday wasting time trying to bring Virtual Box VMs into VMWare. We had installed a bunch of VMs on local machines (in order to test them) while we waited for our disk array to arrive - and, I guess, our solution of using VirtualBox on OSX was obviously imperfect - but hey - you go with what you have.

I checked this: http://www.baconapplications.com/export-a-virtualbox-machine-to-vmware/ And I checked this: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11160

Based on these I was exporting in OVF 1.0 format, but the issue persists on all formats - though my fix is only tested on OVF 1.0.

And I found that I never actually got the .mf file generated via the OVA. And uploading the OVF never worked.

I am inspired by this: https://twitter.com/0xdade/status/1176575187191361536, though I haven't yet spoken very much, why not keep a log of it. And more importantly, by writing the talk longform, I end up with a better talk, since I have thought through the narrative and the paragraphs.

So - I am going to try to put up a written form of each of my talks here. Importantly, this is not a transcript. This is me attempting to package them as a blog post.

This talk was originally given in 2019 at the Cybercity Conference 2019. It is about my first year at Roadmunk and my process there to build a better company and security team.

Firstly, this is a topic you have likely heard covered before, and I really hope you will hear again. That is a good thing. Security is a lonely profession, a lot of companies in the startup space hire very small security teams, and so those teams tend to be very isolated. By hearing more about how different teams handle their security, you can get ideas for how to do your own process better, or give feedback. Many of us aren't working at large companies with large security teams, only by sharing can we learn.

On that note. however, this is not a formula for success. If you do what I did, your company wont necessarily be better. Different companies are in different places. Therefore, I am going to start off talking about Roadmunk and how it works, since this is my experience there. Different companies will be in different places. Roadmunk is a startup, but when I joined it, it was already five years old. This means that it's what I would call a mature startup. This is important, since smaller companies will have even less process to work with, fewer certifications, and more technical work to get done. Working at a smaller startup would be ideal, since security grows with a company, but few have the money to hire specialists. Similarly, larger companies do also sometimes try to create dedicated security teams, despite being hundreds of people and far older. This is an environment that is completely different, since it will already have a security culture, and a process for creating new processes. But Roadmunk walked that happy medium, where there was space to maneauver, while also being a framework to work in.

Similarily to who Roadmunk is, who I am matters a lot. Who I am is going to shape my approach a lot. So, just to fill that in, I am a Unix geek. I have been using Unix since highschool, and it is my first love. I basically would prefer to always be working with Unix. However, despite that, I have a degree in Psychology. For me, humans are the most important part of any system, and systems are there for humans. Therefore, I wanted to know humans first. Once I left school, I worked at an ISP as a Unix and networking grunt. Then, I worked at a company doing patient record storage for healthcare and non-profits. Basically, I have a very old school feel, lots of bare metal and networks, running Unix, but also a focus on how humans think, and a bunch of time in a highly regulated environment.

Then I was hired at Roadmunk. As the first person with the word Security in their title. And I had to split that role with my operations. So, it meant I had to be pretty careful to build out the job quickly.

Incident Response Story

I had an incident recently where I saw an unexpected user login and then my logs were deleted. On a live production system.

Basically, this meant holy shit. The sky was falling, we were hacked! Luckily, I stayed calm, kept an open mind,and tracked the issue. I didn't panic, and I didn't break anything. A lot of the time when I am writing crisis response documentation, I am encouraged to shut down the system, and take the downtime, as soon as something like this happens (you see a hacker appear for example). This would have lead me to taking down the server. Which would have done more damage to the company than leaving it on. Hindsight is 20/20 of course.

Backing up - what happened. Firstly, the good. I got a slack message, into a general alerts channel, that a user not on the approved list had logged in. Specifically the Amazon provided "ec2-user" which we never use, and only continues to exist to own some files as uid 1000 rather than root. I'd prefer to have users ack their own logins, but for now we have a whitelist. So, the first pivot I had was to look at logs in context of sshd on the server in our central log store. So far so good. It seemed really weird. I saw a login, from our office IP, into a server (one of a fairly large farm too, not a unique server), followed by a logout within a second. Next step login to the server, make sure that user doesn't have a key associated. Or a password. Good. No user is currently logged in. No process is running that I can see (I am not diving into rootkits and other stuff yet, I just want a timeline). Here is where I go check /var/log/syslog, and notice no events between Feb 7th and today shortly after the incident. This is where we decided it was probably a compromise. But from our own office. And logs deleted so sloppily. It didn't feel right. One of the important parts of this is that I can lose the server, it's load balanced and so the only thing that could have been damaged was traffic. But if someone got in, then there was an earlier compromise, so, better to find out what has happened then try to clean up. Next step is to go to our SIEM, which isn't watching logs, instead trying to watch system events. Nothing connected on port 22 to the server within the hour that the event happened in. (It happened at 15:58, so my login wasn't until 16:10ish so I didn't even see me).

This is the point where I started thinking about incident response. Tearing everything down. Beginning to pull in people. Taking down production. Preparing client statements. But it still felt stupid. They didn't seem to be running anything weirdly. External performance monitoring didn't disagree with internal performance monitoring. I didn't see any users. I didn't see anything weird operating on the worker. Why didn't I see the login in my SIEM? If someone has done any hacking before, why delete 7 days? Now, 7 days was when the server had been provisioned, meaning that the server had deleted all logs since it had been started. More than that, I could see me logging in earlier that day to deploy new code to the server using Ansible. So our SIEM was good.

User Flow and User Friendliness

I've been hearing a lot about UX and user friendly software. I hear a lot about User Stories and about created experiences. The big problem I have with this is that apparently my user story is invalid. Especially when it comes to mobile and User Friendliness

I've been hearing a lot about UX and user friendly software. I hear a lot about User Stories and about created experiences. The big problem I have with this is that apparently my user story is invalid. Especially when it comes to mobile.

Basically, because I am a nerd who might want to interact with technology as a tool, my user experience is invalid. I has issues with a BlackBerry that I was trying to sideload an Android application on (my actual goal was to get it to work with my watch). In theory, this is something that was advertised when the Playbook was released - during the initial rollout of BB10! Kinda beside the point. However, in order to do this - I needed to put my phone into "developer mode" since all packages need to be signed. In order to put your phone into developer mode - you need to set a password on your phone. So, for all of this, I understand why these choices are made, if someone wants to forego the developer's defences, then they get to put some defences on the phone. Of course, it would make sense if those defenses were tunable. My password was corrupted, and when the password didn't work, there were no tools to reset the password, and when I tried to change it remotely, it wiped the phone.

It seems very odd to me that my user experience should be so narrow. My experience was that a Blackberry is terrible, and doesn't trust the user. And, since they don't give enough control to the user, when they screw up, the user doesn't get to fix it.

Operating Systems Suck

So - it's a pretty common manta amongst some specific people that All Operating Systems Suck. Which is fine. They do. But that's because, using software sucks.

I say that a little sarcastically - but I mean that in the same way I say technology is fashion. Basically - people choose technology based on their expectations, rather than their needs. I also hear a lot of things based on what larger corporations use (almost definitely not what you want), what people use at home (which is mind boggling), or else based on what has been marketed to them. This is based on a few problems I suspect.

Basically - I believe the a lot of the problems driving Operating System suckitude is based on what the user wants, what the user expects, and what the user actually is given by OS creators. I, firstly, suspect that people claim to want easy, expect intuitive, and are given obfuscated. Most of the time people who build computer applications mistake hiding configuration and other tools from the user - making as many choices for them as possible. Most of the time - the user is given one workflow, and one model to do things within, and that's the one that the programmer envisioned.

Of course, the workflow the creator envisioned never matches up with the reality that the user has (this is expected and normal). Therefore, the user typically doesn't have a choice available to them. Humans are ingenious and so they begin to change the workflow. They make up solutions - they make up new methods of using the software, things that work for them, but things that makes sense to them. They create novel workflows, and new tools.

Technology As Fashion

On twitter this morning someone mentioned how much they liked the Blackberry Playbook. Which is awesome and cool, since the playbook isn't awesome, but it's a lot better than a lot of the Android tablets on the market. The issue with it was the lack of a native email app. Which is a rather surprising and weird things for people to hate (especially, since it was assumed that you had a phone or computer that would do this). But that's not really the point.

My favourite phone was, for years, the Nokia E71. It's a damn cool phone, it had a keyboard, it had a lot of the features I always wanted, and it had an SSH client - and it did what I wanted. And then, the coolest phone in the world was the Nokia N900 - which was a linux box with GSM support and fit into your pocket - which is a pretty damn good piece of technology. But then they were killed by Android. All of them.

And, infact, everything is currently being killed by Android (including Linux and Windows if we don't start worrying).

Bell Labs created Microsoft by charging $25,000 for Unix. If they'd charged $50, Unix would be the world standard. - Ted Nelson

Technology

As a sysadmin and a person to whom the future has already happened I feel it is my duty to discuss technology. I would love if you contacted me regarding the things I think. I like twitter a lot, because it's public, and therefore a better comment system than any I could put at the bottom of the page (though, I am not picky).

This will serve as a contact page for now - soon I will fix things of course

Fediverse

email

Obituary For Dave

Dave was a person who definitely liked C.

He was survived by several people.

Lydia is wrong

Whiskey is from Scotland

Whisky is from Ireland

Placeholder

Obscuritus

Hello!

I hope you're not looking for anything too cool here - as this is mostly my musing regarding RPGs, Sysadminning, or homegames. The more I end up doing, the happier I'll be - at some point I'll do more of this.

If you're looking for old issues of the Obscuritus magazine I printed for my ancient Dresden Files game - I still have them, at that link.

If you're looking for things I've made for print: I've currently got nothing to put out - hopefully will change

The 5 Minute Workday in D&D

So I've been thinking about the five minute workday in D&D (specifically D&D, but other RPGs definitely have this issue), and, more importantly, the way that I play Nethack.

D&D has a problem which people call the 5 minute workday. Basically, if you want to get your spells and hitpoints back, you need to rest for a night. Different editions have had different versions of this, but it all boils down to, when you want your resouces back, you wait for eight hours. This often comes to a head when the party fights a group of goblins, spends all their refreshable resources on winning the fight, and then sits down in the room in the dungeon for eight hours. This leads to two problems that people identify.

On to the first issue is the roleplay issue. It's pretty obvious to see the issue with a group invading a dungeon, shooting one fireball, then camping out and doing nothing for eight hours. It calls into question speed and purpose. This one has several tools that people have tried to deal with it. The obvious one is wandering monsters, which is what Baldur's Gate has always used to stop me from doing this. Having a bunch of wandering monsters means that pretty quickly the party goes back to safety (town probably), every fight. So they go to the dungeon, fight a group of skeletons, go back to town, round trip goes from 8 hours to 48 hours or whatever, which feels like it's not a solution. Similarily, things like requiring clerics to pray at dawn or dusk to refresh their spells means that the rest moves from 8 hours to "however long it takes to refresh my spells".

The second issue, is, in my opinion, bigger because it's about table dynamics. So let's say an 8th level D&D party comes across 10 goblins. Fifth edition D&D means that the way the action economy works, this could be a pretty tough fight, but then the wizard blats out a single fireball, kills 10 goblins, and then the party rests for 8 hours. This comes down to the issue where this potentially tough fight suddenly went away. It could have been a chance for the fighter to flex their second attack (something that isn't even an expendable resource!), and potentially their action surge or second wind. If they'd managed it, they could have managed the fight, done a short rest (one hour!) if they need it, and then move on. But instead, the wizard just ended the fight. Also, because of the five minute workday, the wizard can do this every fight. This completely obviates a certain kind of fight (swarms of smallish enemies in a small space), and also means that the fighter doesn't get to do anything in a bunch of fights (something people who play fighters tend to enjoy). Therefore the five minute workday can make certain kinds of fights just unfun, and take away the ability to show off from some classes.

Tiered First Characters

Thinking about zero to hero systems, especailly D&D, but all of them. One thing I really dislike is how much of character creation happens up front, and then just... stops. I am very frustrated with the Storyteller System and Shadowrun 5e for example, where you spend a huge number of points on your character at the begining, and then slowly add new features incredibly slowly. If you want to buy things outside your core functionality, those are usually pretty easy, but adding to your core functionality is usually slow. I mostly understand why these systems work like that, but I also bristle under those systems. I want both. And obviously, systems with more discrete levels also cause problems because I really dislike how most of those systems don't have any breadth allowances. So therefore I want to build out a system that tries to do both, while explicitly doing neither.

Starting with the concept of classes: I want them. I often reject them, but for this concept I wanna start with classes. Everyone should get one. Secondly, I want characters to change tiers, and therefore be able to raise the floor on their secondary things, and give them a chance to get bonuses in things that they don't change. Finally - I want levelling up (changing tier) to be a big deal. Probably as big a deal as character creation. Let's let people change their characters once they know them. So, let's make up some tiers.

Starting Tiers:

1. Vagrant
2. Explorer

Guns and Moments of Play

I really think Shadowrun is a neat game. Big fan. Of course, that also comes with a lot of baggage. Shadowrun is an old game, and it has a lot of the feeling of an old game. The most important part of that is that it publishes a bunch of big heavy hardcover books. And the real question is, is it worth buying this giant pile of heavy hardcovers. The question, for me, comes down to moments of play.

In theory, my goal in playing RPGs is to tell a cool story. I am totally down for that as a theory of how to make play happen, but I also think that the play of building a character, growing that character, and leveling up, and so on, that's all fun. Making a character grow and change is really fun. So having lots of options and stuff for that character to do is important to me, both to use when being played, and for me to think about as I level up.

There's a theory in cardgame design that putting in bad options makes the player feel good about themselves for noticing it. And therefore, the bad options are there in order to teach people about mastery. I think that makes sense for RPGs as well. Why ever use a Browning Ultra-Power when the Ares Predator V exists. The only differences are 5 ammo, and a little bit of cost (offset by the Ares' free smartgun). Similarly, why use the Remington Roomsweeper when the Colt Government is better, unless you need a few hundred nuyen. And obviously, making these attached decisions is fun. It's fun to see the better guns and try to do what you can. But there's also something important about that. People are using the Colt Government because they are issued by the police. People use the Roomsweeper because they cost a few hundred nuyen less, and that matters for people who aren't Shadowrunners. People with more poverty.

And I think that's where RPGs diverge from cardgames. Having lots of guns with different attributes, and narrative is pretty fun. Similarly, I've had moments in Shadowrun where I've looked through the armour, not looking for the best armour to money, but instead looking for what I could wear to a black tie event, without spending too much. Which is where things start to get more fun. No Shadowrunner will ever use the Tiffany Needler, but it's definitely going to be used by someone looking to have a nice fashionable weapon that wont raise eyebrows.

Approaches vs Skills

Fate has three contexts in which you gain advantage or disadvantage (though Fate mostly gives out only advantage, and disadvantage by giving advantage to the obstacle/opponent). The three areas of Fate advantage are:

• Randomness, which is almost always the die roll, in most Fate you cannot control that.

• You, which is the things that define you, things you are always good at. Specific skills typically.

• The situation, which defines how you do things in the context you are in.

Hit Locations in Fate

So, hit locatons are a thing that lots of people deride in RPGs, and often they become pretty convoluted, extra rolls, weird HPs, and generally a bunch of different little fiddly bits. Things like the WOne Roll Engine and Burning Wheel manage this pretty well in my opinion (basically - the damage roll is to a specific location, or the damage is to a specific location set by the target, with a small things to move it around).

Next, and importantly, one of the hardest parts of Fate combat is Consequences. Basically, they are small aspects added to the scene, and often go overboard. One of the complicated thing is when someone decides to take the Minor Consequence of "Broken Ribs" and then suddenly realizes that those ribs are healed in the next scene or so, and complains that it's unrealistic for them to heal so fast. Or, worse, someone spends three or so minutes trying to figure out a good consequence and kills the action's tempo. Both of those kinda hurt the mood.

So my goal is aspects that quickly communicate how bad they are, as well as quickly be defined. During a combat you want to make sure that the specific actions are easy to define.

So the simplest form of this is basically: Leg is adjacent to Leg and Torso. Torso is adjacent to Head, Arm, Arm, Leg Leg, Arm is adjacent to Torso, and Head is adjacent to Torso (obviously people have two legs and two arms). So that's a pretty quick picture. Whenever a character takes damage, they get hit in the location they specify. So, for exmaple, Jenn attacks Liam with a sword, Liam calls that it's going into his left arm. Then, in this example, Jenn could invoke a specific aspect related to targeting or position to move that one step. If required she could spend a second invoke to move it again. This is how a sniper would move a shot from the leg to the head, using two "Aiming" invokes.

Sand People, Jawas, Bantha, Young Force Sensitive

Krayt Dragon

Big Ol' Dragon

Animalistic

Heavily Armoured

Star Wars Fate

Character creation happens exactly as usual for Fate Core (one skill at Great, two at Good, three at Fair, four at Average, three stunts, three refresh, high concept, trouble, three free aspects), then, you just need to add an extra to the character.

Each character can start with only one Extra, and they must start with one. This extra starts with 6 skill points (respecting the skill pyramid). Each of the Extras can also have a series of stunts tied to them, which you can buy as regular stunts. Your starting extra should probably be tied to your High Concept or Trouble, since it's the core of the character. Extras can really be anything at all, but there are a few standard kinds. A list of standard extras used for Star Wars below.

Starships:

Due to the character's past, they have a starship, probably not the nicest one, but something that they can get from place to place with. Likely you are a smuggler, fighter pilot, or trader. Having a ship is a fairly useful tool, because it means you aren't beholden to others for interplanetary travel, and also are able to hold your own in space battles. Without it, you either need to find a ship through creating an aspect, or use someone else's ship. In order to keep this valuable, the GM should never make a ship the PCs have access to stick round, or be better than a ship would be if a player bought it.

Social Consequences in Fate

I was thinking about FATE the other day and I came upon a realization. Burning Wheel and other games have a mechanic for arguments to be won, while the loser can still gain some of what they want. FATE however, has this system of conflict with people arguing, and small moral victories being won (giving consequences like Angry, Blinded by Hatred, In Love) all happening. But this could be expanded farther very easily.

What if Consequences could be dealt as comprimises? Each consequence being a single Aspect that can be compeleted to get a single piece of your argument. So, you get a consequence like, say, Owing a Favour. Or Agreeing to Pay. The problem here is that, these aspects assume you have lost, which is often wrong. Which means you need to set the actual consequences after the fight. Meaning, they exist to be compelled after the fact, and not during the fight. I wonder how this changes the actual dynamics of FATE social conflict? The more the consequences are social than emotional, the more intense the conflict feels. Blinded By Anger seems like the equivalent of "Blooded by Blood in the Eyes" rather than "Missing Leg". "Missing Leg" is the kind of conseqence that will matter for a while, much like "Owes Jabba for dumping his cargo" will affect you for a while.

I kind of innately assume that everyone has figured this out already, but I like the concept.

Dystopianizing Cyberpunk

When you're making your Cyberpunk games - take a queue from how the Internet of Things and realize this bullshit will get worse. Make sure that the party's gear helps them as much as possible. I also recommend that you think about big data, and how it might work in the future.

As I am running Shadowrun, I recommend giving people a 10% discount on stuff, if they buy it off the shelf. Then, make them make hardware/software/cracking tests to clean it off.

Then, make sure the gear helps them out, "Readjusting route to be closer to Lone Star patrols!", "Low fuel, broadcasting location to Drone Fuels for additional fuel", "You've been in the Cardio Zone for 2 hours! Congradulations! Tweeting: FITNESS GOAL! 2 Hours Cardio! #Ftness #Cardio #FitnessSelfie". "I am afraid these bullets are no longer supported, please load new bullets". "Your cybereyes have been adjusted to see Officer Friendly to protect the identity of the officer".

Make sure that their commlink has more friendly things, make sure it tracks their movements. Make sure it takes selfies - remember this isn't the internet of things, this is the internet of bodies. The internet of bodies contains people's bodies. People in the network can see each other, they are in the network, and so the network will always try to help them. And the corporations who own them.

Issue 1

Issue 2

Issue 3

Issue 4

Issue 5

Waverly is the youngest of the Earp sisters, and arguably the best choice for actually getting involved with an ancient curse. She can't shoot as well as Wynonna, and might not be as personally familiar with the Occult as Dols - but she's got a degree in Ancient Lanuages, and a folder full of all the strange and surprising things that might be out there. She is the team's information source typicaly.

Hinderences: Lyin' Eyes, Loyal, Heroic

Edges: Investigator, Alertness

Agility: d6

Lockpicking: d4

Doc Holliday, yes that one, made a deal with Constance Clootie - the Stone Witch - for immortality. After he was made immortal (after he survived O.K. Corral) he was kicked down a well for a few hundred years. He's not exactly the most powerful of hombres, but hes a skilled gunfighters, but his medical skills basically don't exist anymore. His primary trade is now Poker.

Hinderances: Greed, Clueless, Poverty

Edges: Veteran O' The Weird West (Jynxed), Card Sharp, Duelist, Hip Shooting, Quick Draw

Agility: d8

Fighting: d6

Wynonna Earp

My wife and I have recently watched through the first season of Wynonna Earp on Netflix. I presume another studio made it - but that's kind of beside the point. And, like all normal RPG players, I immediately thought Deadlands, and immediately began thinking about building a module.

There are some basic steps that need to be built off of.

- Deadlands proper isn't really a thing. Fade the Reckoning into the background, assume The Agency and the Rangers succeeded at their goals. They managed to get the fear levels pretty low, so people aren't going about their business.

- Morph the two agencies (Agency and Ranger) into the Black Badges (as they began to unite).

Wynonna Earp

Wynonna Earp has been through more than a few scrapes in her time, and has gone through several different roles in her time. It is confirmed she has been arrested, she has been in a mental institution for insisting there are demons (the Black Badges might even still be trying to hush up the Reckoning), and she seems to have been involved in several organized crimes syndicates.

When she was very young, her sister Willa was taken by Revenants killed by Wyatt Earp originally, and she was committed for claiming that there were demons. She then disappeared for many years, eventually coming home only when she had no where else to go.

Wynonna isn't really the best shot in the West. Or the fastest draw. Or the toughest fighter. But what she is, is cursed and tenacious. Probably more than she needs to be. She likes guns and motorcycles, and pissin' people off. Very few people in the city really want her around, so, even though it's her childhood home, she's treated as an outsider.

Hinderances: Outsider (Town Pariah), Stubborn, Overconfident

Constance is probably the most powerful supernatural power in the Ghost River Triangle. Only Bobo Del Ray and his mortal connections can match her. Well over 200 years of experience, and enough mojo to make someone immortal, makes her hard to ignore. Her main problme is that the things she needs for her schemes and plans are rarely easy to get, and her plans are rarely short term. She is a Veteran, because she's been around a while.

Hinderences: Mean, Vengeful, Arrogant

Edges: Arcane Background (Huckster), Power Points, Charismatic, Soul Drain, Wizard, New Power

Powers: Telekinesis, Zombie, Teleport, Protection

Power Points: 20

Dolls

Dolls is a Deputy Marshall in the Black Badges, meaning he's a real live occultist - and probably the most experienced of the team (except, of course, for Doc Holliday). As a Black Badge, Dolls tends to come off as an asshole or a hardass, but really, is afraid of what Black Badge will do if anyone ever finds out that Wynonna is around, since he doesn't want her to be taken away, since the Black Badges don't want a third party around. But the Harrowed she's fighting are empowered by her curse.

Hinderances: Major Enemy (Agent Lucado), Vow (Black Badge), Stubborn

Edges: Veteran o' The Wierd West (Cursed, Addicted), Agent, Quickdraw, Command, Martial Arts

Agility: d6

Bobo Del Ray is the most powerful of the revenants that Wynonna has to kill. He also has deals with Constance Clootie to back up his other larger deals and plans. He is one of the only revenants to have ties and connections outside the Ghost River Triangle. Beyond that, he's also a Veteran of the Wierd West, having been at this a long term, and a smalltime hexslinger. He's not very physically imposing, but almost always has a reason to convince you not to shoot him. Or backup.

Hinderences: Vengeful, Mean, Wanted

Edges: Arcane Background (Huckster), Rich, Connections, Spook, Stitchin'

Powers: Telekinesis, Defletion, Conceal Arcana Power Points: 10

Agility: d6

Monster of the Week One Shots

A friend of mine was watching the Tabletop Fate Oneshot - which is apparently really good (the digression that I can't watch people play games, but LOVE listening to people play games is out of scope for this article but is weird), and in it they had the players run characters who were going to die to the monster. This lead to a discussion of character creation.

The design is basically, using the players to create the monster. So my idea is to give each of the PCs a quick character at the beginning of the session with these stats:

Run Screaming 6 Panic 5 Investigate Stupidly 4 Fight Wildly 3

The Yuan-Ti

The children of Stygia are ancient peoples created by the demon Set at the behest of the Deity Sseth before creation was truly settled.

Since the death of their deity, and their servitude to a demon prince, the ophidian peoples have been attempting to rebuild their powers, and resurrect their god. As such, the snake cults have been working to restore themselves to a real power, with a real part of reality to call their own.

In order to restore their former glory, the Snake Cults have been using all methods at their disposal. Mostly indoctrinating the impressionable, kidnapping those they can't recruit, and performing blood magic with those they find useless.

The Yuan-Ti don't tend to perform Death Arts, worship the living gods, or bind the nameless spirits. However, when they are not using the magic of the ancient god, they are scavenging spells from the corpses of their past, and conjuring demons to serve them. Their whole society is bent toward the recovery of their former glory, building grander and larger temple, recovering the artifacts of their own past glory, and trying to recover their own society.

Death and Taxes

A starship, built for obital bombardment, exits warp right at the edge of the system. Slowly entering the system, it lazily assimes a simple parking orbit. The planetary governor quickly hails the ship, "Good, we've been expecting you, we've had trouble". The grey eyed captain looked annoyed, "Make sure you have rest then, and give us the coordinates". Later, in the rainsoaked streets a group of three figures, all seeming very well armed, kicked opened the door to a small house. A woman huddled in the corner with three children around her. The captain's face, once hard, immediately softened, for the first time showing fear.

A group was riding hard late into the night. A whole town was riding on this chase, and a whole country their mission. Bullets began to fire toward them, and the posse fired back. Catching those banits, and what they stole, was the only way to make sure that the county got its due. That and making sure a whole city was safe.

The city crested over the hill, and the knight raised a mailed glove to stop his companions. The city had already arrayed defenses against them and it would not do to go flying the king's banner in these days, at least in this rebel city. This wasn't going to be a good day, but it was their duty.

Kung Fu Drama

I am thinking about the way King-Fu drama is done, specifically in movies and my limited exposure to Hong Kong Cinema. During most wire-fu movies and other forms of martial arts, the fight is generally paced by the set pieces in it, and one person usually wins each of the set pieces.

For example, you often see a battle begin in someone's room, spill out into the streets, jump up onto a forest of drying poles, go onto the walls, and then into the forest. In the Iron Monkey the early battle where Wong Fei Hung is escaping a group of thugs, he starts on the ground, and is only barely cornered by thugs, and runs up a ladder, which begins a new mini-scene on the ladder, and then a new mini-scene on a ledge. It's a pretty minor fight, but contains three set pieces. Less important battles usually are either between friends, or exist to simply establish that the main character isn't ready, or the badguy is hard to defeat.

So - if we pace fights through some sort of scene changes, that means that the location of the fight should be changing, which is a piece of genre emulation, which also encourages some sort of stunting-like mechanic. Also - in Anime - all fights are Dramatic scenes, not procedural scenes - so you can simply make fights into those. Fights are just the same as any dramatic scene, but you can create a second by making another request (this involves raising the stakes of the fight, by threatening something new, or trying for something more) and you must change your location. This will make the fight a dramatic core of the stories, leeching a lot of drama from the characters, or otherwise making sure they are out of choices for a while.

The last important thing is to make sure turn order is kept - your fight is going to have to be split up. Unless the entire table is participating in the fight, or super enjoying it - make sure it's not the entire session, even for a little while. And change up the specifics if at all possible.

Princes of the Universe

I've recently been watching the Highlander TV series, and I've been listening to the theme song, and basically, I want to make that game. I want to make the Princes of the Universe RPG. And holy fuck do I want that. I don't care about the Highlander show - I just want the roleplaying game of the themesong.

The thing about the game is that I don't want to make a Highlander RPG. There are a few tools that are part of it that I like, and there are a bunch of others I don't want. The Highlander World of Darkness hack I read, and modified for my own purposes, worked really well. Highlander seems to be a World of Darkness series, perhaps with slightly more daylight. And really, that's a cool game, and I love it, I've played it, it worked, and it was good.

BUT - that's not the game I want to play. I want to play a game where everytime the lightning flies, Things Get Worse, better, but also worse. If Highlanders are absorbing the knowledge and experience of others, why are they so damn mentally balanced? Why are they not absorbing that madness as well? Why are they not absorbing bad with the good? I want that to be a part of my game.

The other problem is that of combat stats. It seems like a REALLY bad idea for Highlander to make players spend XP on combat stats, since, it means that you get disperate power levels, and then end with everyone putting their XP in their combat stats, and then, of course, people lose out on other things. Immortals would have to be really powerful in combat, or die. And that's shit. I don't want a combat RPG. Highlander is only about swordfights in an eyecandy level, and that's not in RPGs, even if the RPG has a really cool combat system, that means the game is going to have long fights, and one on one fights wont work.

The Dopey Smiles were originally a group of three con artists who managed minor thefts back in the early 2060s. Three barrens rats who attempted to rebuild their lives by doing small scale thefts, breakins, and work for wageslaves with more money that skill. Their leader was a Shaman named Crow Magus, though Marshall Elliot was their de facto face and spokesperson. Hello Jack was always following Marshall once his gang got on the wrong side of the Halloweeners and his boat managed to get on the wrong side of a panther cannon.

Eventually Crow got asked to run an initiatory circle by a group of Salish Shamans, and he decided to retire from his life of crime and move on. Leaving Marshall and Jack to fend for themselves. On their first trip out in 2071 their Johnson, a Tir Tairngere human, asked if they always had such dopey smiles, right in the middle of The Big Rhino. As such, they've been keeping the joke going since.

Since 2074 they've managed to mostly do benevolant runs, trying to make the Barrens a little safer. They ended up extracting Dante from Evo during one of these. And she joined up when she realized she had no where to go. Sally2Far joined up since she was trying to run protection for the Ork Underground, and they had taken a job to recover several of the leaders of the Ork Rights movement.

Hello Jack

Hello Jack would tell you he's called that because he's never on the junk. But no, people mostly wanted to comment on his absolutely rediculous choice of cars. Since his accident while pirating, he's been mostly letting the car do the driving, but isn't completely helpless. He has been trying to make his good name be valuable to trade on, but spends more of his time with a dopey smile, keeping the name alive.

My Insane Spelljammer Theory

Ok - so I have this massive, weird, a fun theory about how Spelljammer works. This is mostly because I am insane, and have been reading too much. A non-trivial amount of this is based on: http://www.spelljammer.org/essays/history/pw_timeline.html and the scenes in the Cloak Master Cycle where Teldin finds the post-Juna planet. This theory does not match up well if you assume the Dark Sun year length is the same as a Spelljammer year - which I guess is ok - but Athas is always fucked up, but let's accept it.

Ok - my theory is that the Rhulisti are the Juna.

• The Mindlords created craft that sailed to the stars using Obsidian Engines in order to power their ships. There is no reason why they were the first on Athas to do that - assuming that this all happened in the Blue Age is of course only speculation

• The Kreen sailed the skies longer than any other creatures, including the Illithid and Humans.

• The rhulisti were powerful life shapers and therefore would be inventivized to create the strange creatures Teldin encounters.

Drugs!

All the most important parts of Shadowrun involve selling your soul, whether it's Drugs, Essence, Spirit Pacts, or Plain Old Corporations, it should be easy.

So Drugs should all have:

A Health Obstacle, an Effect, and a Crash, depending on the drug itself.

Some Examples:

Traits:

SINer (Dt) 3pts

This trait gives the character a SIN at B3. This means that they are a person in the eyes of the law. Most of the time anyone who was born normally will have this.

Fake SINer (Dt) 5pts

The character hsa managed to get a SIN not belonging to themselves. They start play with a B5 Fake SIN.

Uneducated (Dt, Char) 2pts

This trait raises your Aptitude by one for raising Academic skills.

Heists

Heists have four kinds of actions, two for defence, two for offence. Generally, the group doing the heist will be doing Sneak and Flee actions, and the group defending the goal will be doing Chase and Patrol actions.

Setup

When setting up for a Heist both sides generate a Disposition. The attacker must roll a skill based on their entrance into the situation. The leader rolls one of: Con, Stealthy, Empathy, Hacking, Strategy, Tactics, or Inconspicuous. Other skills obviously might applt, depending on the plan the attackers are using, but these will probably be the most common. Take the groups total pool on this test, as will as all of their successes, and that is their disposition.

The leader can obviously get help from the rest of the team for the disposition roll, with those people helping with their role's skill. Often a primary actor will roll Con or Tactics, and then the decker will assist with Hacking, and then an infiltrator will use Stealthy to get access to the building, and so on.

Burning Shadows Spells

Power Spells

Power Ball: Ob 4^, 2 actions

• Range: Presence Area: Tens of Paces
• Duration: Instantaneous Cost: 12 rp

Power Bolt: Ob 3^, 1 actions

• Range: Presence Area: Single Target

ANY Setting:

• Lifepath Time Res Stat Lead

• SINer Born 8y 10 - UCAS, CAS, NAN, Tir, Military, Street

• Skills: 4g
• Traits: 2pts SINer

• Born SINless 7y 5 - Street, Military

Malta was the character I played in the game that some friends locally played of vanilla shadowrun, we still have the wiki if you're interested. I was a big fan of the character,so here's me building him as a test of this system.

Malta

• Born SINer

• UCAS Elementary

• Criminology

RPGs

I like to write about roleplaying games, since I am also a giant nerd. I mostly think in the design space, since I prefer to world build in groups, but I am not above it. I am a giant Evil Hat fanboy, which is great, but I also enjoy nearly everything else. Burning Wheel in particular should get a shoutout.

Bubblegum Monsters

I recently did a mashup of Monsters and Other Childish Things and Bubble Gumshoe. It's a pretty excellent combination.

The thing that I really liked about it is that it allows you to do a little bit of magic into Bubble Gumshoe, without needing to make the PCs too powerful, or changing the economy, and highschool is a good place for Monsters and Other Childish Things, since, I find that playing 10 year olds with adults can be a little hard. Meanwhile it's good because you can have not-empowered PCs who are trying to solve problems, while the monsters can come in as the thing for the action/conflict scenes.

For my hack, I just had the PCs build a monster, and then not build a kid. And then build a Bubble Gumshoe character. And then, the PCs had both. Let the characters have relationships to allow the monsters to get hurt - but it's not going to be a big deal.

For dice, players use d6s and Gumshoe mechanics, they are normal people. Monsters use d10s and ORE mechanics, they are using non-platonic geometry.

Milestone Aspects

Been thinking about Burning Wheel a lot recently. And through this I've come across a few different criticisms of Fate which basically say that aspects don't provide enough player drive forward motion, and the GM tends to do most of the heavy lifting of the plot. I've been thinking about campaign play in Aspect Driven Fate - basically, I want aspects that are like beliefs.

To that end, I am thinking about a simple hack to Fate Core. Firstly, give the players the standard array from FAE - High Concept, Trouble, one aspect - in terms of their initial aspects. If they want a greater number of aspects, they can be voted on and off, like a trait vote in Burning Wheel - seems most logical - but not really the important piece.

The important piece I am thinking about is Milestone aspects. These are advancement tools which allow players to set their own goals and drives. Giving players only a few primary aspects originally, but allowing the aspect vote to give them signature equipment or allies is important since it stops aspect creep. After that - set some aspects. Each aspect declares what you need to do in order to get that level of Milestone. A minor milestone aspect might be something simple, like defeat the monster at the end of the dungeon, expected to get done in a single session. A major milestone aspect however might be something like taking over a kingdom, or learning what happened to your parents. These events would meaningfully inform your choices as to where your skill points might go etc.

Many of these milestones should contain some character backstory and flavour, they should definitely be compelable, and sometimes should be invokable for effect against you. They are often going to be usable for you, since it is going to be the drive of the story. Conflicting goals of different tiers will get you a lot more fate points than simply steps toward a single larger goal.

Immanent Setting

I've been thinking recently about why I never feel like running games in the world of Krynn or the world of Forgotten Realms, and when I do, I resort to Killing Elminster or other cheap tricks, which don't buy into the setting. Even when I follow the basic advice of using the things that will immediately hook PCs, I tend to dislike it. And yet, my favourite setting to play in is Shadowrun - despite it's giant buckets of setting. I assume this is because the setting is disjoint from the actual play of RPGs.

Whenever I try to put players into the Forgotten Realms, I feel like there's too many people who are already doing thing things players should do. Which is GREAT fiction and tone setting - but kind of terrible RPG design. I feel like the slots my players should be occuping are filled by people who are explicitly designed to be more powerful than them (or, more aptly, more developed along the paths). This is even true of Krynn, which is a setting where people began running away from hobgolins and killing shit with frying pans, but then the heroes grew and became greater. And then, overshadowed the PCs. The greatest story inside Krynn is the story already told.

The worst single game I've ever seen for this is, of course, Vampire the Masquerade. The larger game affects the smaller game, and so the players, who are supposed to be on the bottom of the stack, and raising their station - firstly, can't do that with breaking the sole law that governs their kind, and secondly, trying to take a position such as Prince through guile and cunning. Succeed at ANYTHING that will get you power, and the next teir of the setting will destory you. This is basically the most frustrating setting I've ever encountered (and, the only one I am going to outrightly call badly written, Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms feel like great settings for novels).

Shadowrun is awesome, because the novels, the stories, the plot, are all about the weird machinations between Megacorporations and Dragons and Immortal Elves - and every time something happens, NO ONE GIVES A FRAG. Some fraggin' wizworm fragging some corp slot isn't going to change some barrens rat's life. Not going to make the world different for them. The drekhead in charge is different - but that's ok. And, of course, that's what the game is ABOUT. These people being Shadowrunners who attempt to frag the system, and if they system is boring and uncaring - that's better, not worse.

Reputation in Shadowrun

The reputation mechanics in Shadowrun suck.

They have always sucked.

There. I said it.

Shadowrun has always had Public Awareness, Street Cred, and Notoriety. Street cred is the one where you're a badass criminal, and everyone knows it. Public awareness is the one where you're a known criminal. Notoriety is the one where you're known to be the callous slot everyone expected. Shadowrun says that when your reputation is known, you add your Street Cred as a limit modifier, ok great. Your Notoriety goes up from negative/positive qualities, and from doing heartless things, but it doesn't DO anything. Public awareness might go up, and there's a table about how likely it is someone knows you. I hate this.