Rules

Many commercial active systems are absurdly easy to hack if you know how – reverse one and you might as well have reversed most of the rest of them too. The ubiquity of computer technology these days makes it impossible to guard all systems as well as they were protected a decade or two ago.

Although the commercially available casual protections are far stronger than they used to be, a skilled hacker can still break into email servers or company data with little trouble.

Accessing a secure active system – like the ones in govern­ ments, corporations, Technocracy Constructs, and so on – is far more difficult. There, folks are expecting trespassers, and they’re ready for you. Developing or exploiting a crack for a Technocracy Construct is nowhere near as simple as hacking Facebook, but because almost every piece of important infor­ mation is online these days, few secrets are truly safe from a dedicated hacker mage.

To access a secure system, the intruding player makes an initial Intelligence or Wits + Computer roll to get past the firewall. Failure at that point blocks the attempt, and a botch indicates that the intruder has been discovered. The Storyteller might choose to adjust the difficulty of that roll based on the character’s preparation, reconnaissance, and reversing.