(Shadowrun 3e) Rigger 3

 Whew! I made it. Rigger 3 (John Szeto with Rich Tomasso) is the last of my rules-heavy Shadowrun books. It's all lore from here on out!

The biggest challenge facing me right now is just resisting the urge to copy and paste my post about Rigger 2. The books aren't exactly the same. It's been half a decade between the books. Technology has advanced. Rigger 3 has rules for airbags and a strangely detailed procedure for resetting your wi-fi mid-combat. But the gist is essentially the same. This is the book you pick up if you want to be a total nerd about your fictional vehicles.

The most excited I ever got while reading it was in the gear (I refuse to call them "New Toys") chapter. You can outfit your car with an oil slick and a smoke screen and a forged license plate made of smart materials that can morph into any other fake license plate, even changing color if necessary (ejector seats were inexplicably in another chapter, but don't worry, they're here). And to me, that's the essential Rigger fantasy. I want to drive the car from Spy Hunter. For other people, the fantasy is apparently to track your fuel consumption with a spreadsheet and that is what the bulk of the book is geared towards, but in that moment, I felt seen.

So half my notes are some variation of "hey, get a load of this hyper-specific rule, can you believe they expect us to actually use this" and somewhere in the middle of the book, I started to satirize myself about it (real example: "gotta have all the dongles for your cyberware, manage your ports, oh, yikes, I'm still doing the thing"). And given that I even started to find myself tedious for this type of commentary, I think I just have to stop commenting on the book's mechanics entirely. Suffice to say, Rigger 3 is a book for players who want to get into the mindset of their gearhead characters by being gearheads about the game's rules. It has a niche.

The main thing I appreciated about the book was the snippets of setting that would pop-up in the implications of the rules. Naval combat gets its own chapter because commercially available submarines have led to a new age of piracy. A humanoid drone with a high enough pilot rating can act as a butler. Self-driving car technology exists and apparently there's a hierarchy at work here - regular human drivers < state of the art autopilots < riggers who use cyberware to fuse a network of sensors into their organic proprioception. It's a little disappointing to me as a sci-fi aficionado that Shadowrun focuses on criminal subcultures rather than the day-to-day lives of law-abiding citizens, because I think a world where they can replace your skills with software but they can't cheaply build a computer more efficient than your peripheral nervous system is both fascinating and topical.

I guess, on some level, I get that the criminals make for a more exciting game, but I couldn't help but notice that sometimes the technology worked in precisely the way it would have to work to guarantee niche protection for an rpg class. Like, interfering with a rigger's drone network requires entirely separate equipment than the core book's electronic warfare rules and that's handwaved away by saying that, despite being based on radio waves, rigger networks used a different protocol than standard transmissions. 

And the robotics technology has the precise level of utility that you need a rigger character to operate them. You could, theoretically, buy a robot with a high enough pilot rating and enough installed autosofts that you essentially have an extra member of the team, but it's not cost effective. Even a good robot is going to be hyper-focused on its Prime Directive, making a rigger who can directly control the drone chassis immensely valuable.

I can't help feeling like this is a volatile time in Shadowrun's history, though. Maybe the autopilot only needs to get a little bit better. Maybe data-transmission needs to get just a little bit more efficient before you can justify hot-swapping Prime Directive packages. Maybe it's a race to the bottom as human labor needs to be cheap enough to keep the robot butlers from taking the jobs at Stuffer Shack. And what would a rigger be in a society that crossed that line? A neural network, optimized through 500 million years of evolution to run on 20 watts of power, a human being reduced to the reality of meat, a piece of bulk capital to be used and expended by the logic of the balance sheet. 

You have to figure that's something that the corporations would notice in this setting. Criminal riggers are probably only a 1-in-10,000 phenomenon when it comes to people who use the Vehicle Control Rig technology. The other 9,999 are probably controlling drones in a factory or cargo transports on the road, their bodies a mere hardware platform for an economic system whose benefits they will never see. OMG! Grid Guide is made of people!

Or, at least, I have to assume that this is going on in the background. Rigger 3 only briefly talks about it and doesn't really explore the broader implications of the technology. But it does suggest a form of cyberpunk that Shadowrun could probably stand to go to more often. Usually shadowrunners are portrayed as paramilitary professionals using unregistered military equipment, but what if the basic shadowrunning kit was primarily hacked and corrupted civilian technology and your average shadowrunner was actually a piece of rogue industrial equipment that broke free and was trying to live a human life at the fringes of society.

"What's your rigger's backstory?"

"I was strapped into a chair for 16 hours a day while my VCR repeatedly ran a box-stacking algorithm at a fulfilment warehouse. One day, there was a fire and luckily my Reticular Activation System Override failed before the flames reached my pod. I fled to the barrens and was presumed dead. Now I drive getaway for the mafia."

Overall, I'm glad to have Rigger 3 in my library, as a reference book, but reading it once was probably enough for a lifetime. I'm really looking forward to doing story-focused books from here on out.

Ukss Contribution: I think I'm going to go with "the concept of riggers, as a whole," or at least an abstracted fantasy version of the concept - a school of adepts who can merge their mind with a vehicle and control it as if it were their body. I imagine it takes a peculiar sort of person to choose that as their career.