Contacts come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Sometimes it's the guy who sells you newspapers who sees what's happening at that Crip hangout across the street. Sometimes it's an Aztechnology cybersurgeon who likes you well enough to "accidentially" leave a door unlocked.
Contacts need maintenance. No one wants to be part of a one-sided friendship, especially when it's not one-sided in their favor. Higher level contacts require more in terms of maintenance.
Contact maintenance comes in 3 forms: Time, Money, and Favors.
Time: Just hanging out and bullshitting with your contacts can go a long way to keeping them as friends. Roll an ettiqute test with a TN of 6+the contact level (1,2, or 3) every month. No successes means you've failed to upkeep the contact. Each success provides 1 unit of contact maintenance. This time should generally be non-business related, such as going out to a club or bar, a sporting event, dinner, or watching TV, whatever.
Money: This might be combined with time, but it involves sending cards, attending sporting events together, christmas presents, flowers when the contat is sick, getting dinner together, and various other expendatures you make on the part of the contact. The shadowrun companion (I believe) gives monetary values for contact upkeep. Failure to pay means you've failed to upkeep the contact.
Favor: Just like you, your contact will occasionally call you with a favor. Sometimes this can be mundane (I need you to help me move!), sometimes it's more severe (I need you to hack into the LA police department and erase all my parking tickets), or for high level contacts, very severe (I need to you take my wife's friends out on the town, make sure they all get back safely, and by the way, the mafia may have a hit out on one of them). Generally speaking, refusing a failure is failure to upkeep the contact. Attempting a favor but failing may be considered upkeep or not as the situation warrants, and of course, accomplishing the favor is upkeeping the contact.
Failure: Failing to upkeep a contact will generally lower a contact's level. (Going from 3 to 2). A level 1 contact no longer considers you a friend and may stop taking your phone calls or helping you out.
Upgrading a Contact: A contact can be upgraded. This should generally be left up to the GM, but may include you helping the contact with a very difficult favor or spending lots of time and money towards hanging out with the contact, and usually requires some kind of etiquette or charisma check.
In game terms, this can simply mean writing a check and saying "during my down time I upkeep my contacts". Favors come up as the GM sees fit, and will probably come up about as often as the PCs request favors from the contact.
When a contact does a favor for you, the contact generally needs special upkeep. This may be in the form of a gift (money), spending time together, or a return favor. The new upkeep need not happen immediately but should be on par with the favor provided. (A guy who risks his job and being investigated by the police generally needs a big favor back, but a guy who sews you up with no questions asked could probably just do with tickets to the Nicks game).
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