Matrix

Everything in the Matrix is an icon, a virtual representation that allows you to interact with something in the Matrix. Every object’s owner can choose what the icon looks like, within certain limits. An icon doesn’t just represent a Matrix object in an abstract way; it shows you what it is and how to access it.
The Matrix is programmed to give users a context to make it easier to work and play; if a tool is hard to use, it’s not much of a tool. There are designers and programmers who deliberately obfuscate an icon’s purpose with confusing design, but for the most part, people like to know how they can use whatever they encounter. Most Matrix locations require icons to match certain visual protocols.
For example, let’s say you’re in the host of Dante’s Inferno. The Inferno is a popular and swanky nightclub with a presence in the real world (it’s on Fifth and Madison in Capital's Downtown), but it’s also got a host that looks the same as the physical club so that patrons from around the world can fly in for a visit at a moment’s notice. So you get to the club’s host, pay your cover charge with a quick transfer of credits from your account to the Inferno, and in a blink you’re whisked to your favorite spot in the club. In this case, let’s say you go to the fifth level to enjoy the iconography of angry, dead souls writhing to the beat in and under swampy water. You’re in the mood for virtual food, so you call up a menu. That’s a file, and Dante’s menu appears as a flaming scroll with a fancy script. The programmers and the Inferno know it’s something you’d want to read— and they want you to read it—so they make sure the icon looks like something you’d read, in this case, a scroll. The flames feel hot and look bright, but they’re just virtual. If you were somewhere else, like say the Club Penumbra host, a nightclub with an outer space theme, it wouldn’t look like a flaming scroll, but it would still look like something you’d read (in this case, an astronaut’s log book).
The whole Matrix is like that. Everything is custom-crafted by its owners and is generally designed for intuitive usefulness. The other side of the experience is your software. Some hackers don’t want other programmers telling them how their icons look. So they run software to impose their own visuals on their icons. The struggle to show what you want to show is only one of the battles you’ll fight in The Matrix. Most people, though, don’t bother to fight over iconography and just let the designers of the Matrix win out.
That sets up the size of things, but what do they look like? The answer is a bit more complicated than you’d think. The look of the Matrix depends on what grid you’re on, the programs you’re running, and a bunch of other factors. Luckily, there is a sort of “base version” that forms the foundation of everyone’s Matrix experience.
In this base version, the Matrix is a black flatland under a black sky. This virtual plain is lit with the glow of the icon of your commlink (or deck) and other icons around you, one for each device and persona connected to the Matrix. The plain is a projection of the whole world made flat, so the icons get more and more sparse the farther out you look. There are uncounted billions of icons in the Matrix. Devices have icons in the Matrix in sort of the same way that living things have auras in astral space. This could get overwhelming, but some background tech keeps things from getting out of control.
The first piece of assistance comes from your commlink, which automatically filters out the least interesting icons. Do you want to know the virtual location of every music player in the world? Right, neither do I. So The Matrix will usually show you an icon for an individual’s personal area network (PAN), not every device in that network (although it makes exceptions for interesting or dangerous devices in that network, such as a gun).
Additionally, the farther away devices are from you in the real world, the dimmer their icons are in the Matrix; This is partly because your commlink figures the farther ones aren’t as interesting to you, but mostly because the connection is a bit slower due to the distance. Matrix gear renders the far-off devices and personas as dim, muted, or flickering icons. Also cutting down on The visual noise is the fact that some icons are deliberately hidden from view, such as locks and other security devices, baby monitors, maintenance monitors, and of course people who prefer not to be seen.
Matrix protocols limit the relative sizes of everything to give users a standard experience they can share. If your icon was a robot version of the Wuxing Skytower, that might seem cool, but if you’re talking to someone with an icon of a dung beetle or something, then communication’s not going to run smooth. To overcome this, personas (people in the Matrix) are kept between dwarf and troll sizes, so what you actually would end up with in the described conversation is a comically small skyscraper talking to a frightfully large bug, so you’re both approximately the same size. Files and devices are smaller than personas (so you’ll never see someone reading a book the size of a great dragon for example), and hosts are larger (much larger in the case of big sites, like the megas’ corporate hosts).

THE POPULATION OF THE MATRIX

Every icon in the Matrix is one of six things: a persona, a device, a PAN, a file, a host, or a mark. Occasionally, you might also see a datastream, a transfer of data that looks like a thin beam of flickering, multi-colored light. Datastreams are normally filtered out of your Matrix view because if they weren’t, they’d be the only thing you would see. If you want, you can dial back on the filtering, but the streams pass by so quickly that you can’t tell where they’re coming from or going to without snooping on whatever is sending or receiving them, and that would be illegal (and we’d never do anything illegal in the Matrix, right?).

PERSONAS

A persona is more or less what it sounds like: a person in the Matrix. A persona is the combination of a user and a device that gets the user onto the Matrix. The fact that the device has a user overrides the device’s normal icon status, turning it into a persona. A persona is usually based on a commlink, cyberdeck, or rigged vehicle or drone, although technomancers are a sort of device-less persona. Persona icons usually look like the people they represent (although who can resist making a nip here, a tuck there, a facelift, and maybe some nicer hair?), sometimes with a splash of style like flashing eyes, hair coloring, or a tastefully understated aura. There are wilder looks out there, but shadowrunners often shy away from them, as they draw too much attention and can be considered unprofessional. On the other hand, sometimes drawing attention is exactly the point, so base your look on however professional (or distracting) you want for the situation you’re in. There’s a lot of variety to be had in persona icons. Just about any creature or animate object is fair game: animals, moving statues, griffins (popular among teens these days for some reason), steam-powered robots, zombies, aliens, just about anything that can walk and talk. The Matrix protocols will stop you from designing an icon for your persona if it isn’t intuitively a persona, so you can’t have an icon that is a dust speck, a Greek column, or a cube, for example. They’ll also stop you from making something smaller than adult-dwarf-sized or bigger than adult-troll-sized.

DEVICES

Device icons in the Matrix represent electronic devices in the real world, from your music player to your commlink to your car and beyond. By default, a device’s icon looks like the object it represents, in miniature if the real

HOSTS

Hosts are virtual places you can go in the Matrix. They have no physical location, being made up of the stuff of the Matrix itself. From the outside, hosts are as big as buildings in the electronic landscape, some of the things is larger than a person. It has controls of some est being about the size of Manhattan (a limit imposed kind, often the same controls it has in meat space, but not necessarily. The Ares Mobmaster riot control vehicle, for example, is famous for its unorthodox Roman chariot icon complete with reins to drive the vehicle. Basic Matrix protocols require device icons to provide some hint of their real-life function. A firearm’s icon looks like a weapon (even if that weapon is a tomahawk, like the icon of the Super Warhawk pistol), a vehicle’s icon looks like a vehicle, a lock’s icon looks like a lock, a refrigerator looks like a cold box for food, etc. The restrictions on devices aren’t as stringent as on personas, as long as form suggests function at a glance.

PANS

The size of a host and its virtual altitude are related to its importance and influence in the modern world. Your local Stuffer Shack has a host icon that’s roughly the size of the building it’s in, and it sits low to the “ground,” about on the same level as most of the devices in the Matrix. The Atlantean Foundation’s host, on the other hand, floats about a virtual kilometer above the twinkling datascape and is about the size of the biggest skyraker building in the physical world. Bigger still is the Shiawase Mainframe, which is a slowly rotating sphere about a hundred kilometers up and almost twenty kilometers in diameter.

Most individuals have multiple electronic devices. The host icons themselves look like just about any of them at once, and having icons for each one show up would provide too much visual clutter in the Matrix. Often, what shows up instead is an icon representing an individual’s personal area network. This icon often looks similar to the physical device that serves as master for the network, such as a commlink, but individuals will sometimes choose a design or logo that means something to them (such as sports team logos, Concrete Dreams album covers, or corporate designs). Some devices are not merged into the single PAN icon; if an individual is carrying a wireless-enabled gun—or any other wireless device that might kill you—it will show up separately so that it can be identified rapidly. Unless, of course, the user has gone to the trouble to hide that icon, but that’ll be covered later.

FILES

A file is a collection of data. It can be a film, a song, a book, financial records, an image, a news article, and so on. It can even be a collection of other files (a “foldthing the owners want. If you look up into the Matrix night you’ll see corporate logos, lavish building façades, and constellations of hosts. You might recognize the Seattle ACHE’s ziggurat shape, or the mother-and-child logo of Humanis, or (if you have access) the three orbiting spheres of JackPoint. Inside a host is a completely different story. A host can be (and usually is) bigger on the inside than on the outside. A host’s internal sculpting is internally regulated, so while outsiders’ icons conform to standard Matrix requirements, the host itself doesn’t have to. The host can be a maze, an open space, have strange gravity or none at all, be hot, cold, loud, quiet, and everything in between. Most hosts stick close to reality to make it easier and more comfortable for their patrons, but some offer stranger or even downright bizarre sculpting.

MATRIX AUTHENTICATION RECOGNITION KEYS

A Matrix authentication recognition key, or mark. Files have icons that are smaller than persona you’re not a fan of rattling off fancy technological no icons, typically small enough to fit in the palm of the virtual hand. All file icons have a default appearance in the Matrix—a glowing cube or other polyhedron that can be opened to reveal its contents—but few Matrix users are so lazy and uninspired as to leave their files’ icons with such a boring look. A text file might have an icon that is a book, a scroll, a data pad, or even a stone tablet. Sound files look like speakers, musical notes or instruments, and so forth, while video might look like a film projector, a trid set, or an old-fashioned menclature, is how the Matrix keeps track of which personas have access to which devices, files, hosts, Marks are routinely invited and given for normal, everyday, legal use of various services. They act as keys, permission slips, invitations, and account privileges on every icon in the virtual world. For example, the Seattle Public Library invites over 50,000 marks per day for its VR books, films, trideos, and other items in its collection. While the great percentage of mark traffic is legitimate, hackers try to get marks illegally to facilitate their own plans.
For example, let’s say you’re using the icon of a neon green octopus. Your marks might look like neon green sucker marks. If you had a cowboy icon, your marks movie screen. Again, the form suggests the function is the might look like cattle brands. If your icon were a vintage rule in the Matrix. movie star, your marks might look like lipstick kisses. Normally, marks are invisible to anyone except the person who placed them. To see other marks on an icon and other personas. Marks look like, well, marks—small personalized labels or tattoos on whichever icons you place them. Your marks can look like anything you like, as long as they’re small, fit onto other icons, and have some thematic link to you or your icon.

GRIDS

You need a grid to access the Matrix. The grid you’re on changes the look of the Matrix slightly, and it also can affect your interactions with other icons. There are three kinds of grids in the Matrix: the public grid, local grids, and global grids.
Different grids have different demiGODs that monitor traffic and keep an eye out for security, which occasionally causes a bit of lag across grids. When you’re attempting a Matrix action against a target on another grid, you take a –2 dice pool penalty. If you want to avoid this penalty, you’ll have to hop to the target’s grid. If you have access to the grid you want, you can just use a Grid-Hop; otherwise, you’ll have to get your access by the Brute Force or Hack on the Fly Matrix actions. Note that this penalty doesn’t apply when you’re inside a host; it’s only imposed when you’re out on a grid.

THE PUBLIC GRID

The public grid is the Matrix’s Barrens. It provides the world with just enough access to let the corporations claim that the Matrix is still free. Data traffic from paid global and local grids is given priority over information flowing to and from the public grid, so connection times are slow and unreliable. As a result, all Matrix actions are performed at a –2 penalty when you’re using the public grid, even in a host. The Public Grid allows access to other races' city grids, it shares access around all civilized lands and you can meet Troll Ork, Elf even Infected on the Public Grid. In order to get onto it you have to submit a DNA scan from whatever device you are using, this stops the AI from accessing the public grid, though rumors have started to surface they have found a way to fool this check. There are checkpoints that require to upload of blood samples taken right from the device that have started to pop it to combat this new threat.

LOCAL GRIDS

Local grids are available within a specifically defined such as a sprawl or county. You can only access a local grid if you’re accessing it from the service area, usually, the geographic area with which it is associated. For example, the Capital local grid is only accessible as long as you’re in the Capital. You can still access things on the Capital grid, but you’re now working across grids.

GLOBAL GRIDS

There are 5 known Global Grids: Humans, Elven, Dwarven, Ork, and Trolls. Then there are 2 more One that Humans, Elves, and Dwarves share and each have full access to, and one that Trolls and Orks share and use. The final one is the Wild West, where all the insane AI live and hunt. Other than the last one, which can be accessed anywhere on the planet, the others can only be accessed when in the area of the race's control, or else you are forced to use the Public Grid. Each of the ally grids have direct access to any of the race grids from the shared global ones. All the grids other than the Wild West share Overwatch data so just cause you left one gird don't think your getting away.