I now finally have someone playing a Technomancer, after her Decker character had a sudden demise (ironically, we play in the PDX area too), and I've been putting her new character through some Submersion scenarios just to see how the game works in this way, but we haven't yet applied them to the table. We play both online for some things (using chat and emails) and the table for the bigger stuff. However, from my own modicum of play, I have come up with a few ideas.
Basically, if the whole session is going to be about a Technomancer doing his thing, whatever it is, it's really not that much different than either a Decker hacking his way into a system or a Mage going Astral. But I keep things simple: Sure, I can put in a lot of flavor text about how the whole thing feels, but I think the player, who are generally imaginative people already, can conjure up their own perspective of a first time experience going Submersion. In my first trial run, and mind you I still don't have any other rules or material concerning this, I basically made the character so fully aware of the system she dived into that she ended up knowing things from a unique perspective, and she interpreted this on her own to mean that the system she was interacting with, which was a seedy strip-club/brothel in North Portland, had a mind of its own, very primitive, possibly a form of Otaku, but nonetheless was determinate in its own way, to the point that she figured that it really ran the operation there, and not the owners, who were a pair of elven brothers who were neophyte dilletentes who had bought the property just a few months prior, and didn't really want to get into the minutiae of running the place. Further, after this session, and the other runners went in to meet Mr. Johnson, she was able to tell them who had weapons in the place, who was there, who wasn't there, and why, in a very intuitive way. The proto-embryonic-Otaku there was very friendly with the Technomancer in a way it wouldn't be with a Decker, who it would likely see as an intruder and not as a fellow intellect.
This was how I interpreted her increased Resonance score as a result of the session, and she rolled very well.
If the system she's interfacing with is more complex and more intelligent, if she rolled well I'd have a minor penalty attached to some of her Knowledge skills, because the metahuman brain can only accumulate so much data, and something has to give. This is a temporary situation, lasting only a couple of days, but that's my interpretation of how Submersion has an effect on the character.
Going with the notion of a Technomancer who's a Barrens Street Rat, and if you want to just have this character play around to understand what Submersion is like, have the character just walk around, kind of like in the movie Unbreakable, where Bruce Willis' character just goes around touching people, casually, not deliberately, and just linking with whatever thing they have on them, such as a commlink, or a weapon, or something, and it tells the character something about that person in an intuitive way that they couldn't ordinarily find out if they weren't a Technomancer. Say she touches someone who's using AR and she links with the personal com on that person, and she knows that the person is a corp wage slave who's sleeping with some of his coworkers, and has a BTL addiction.
This is just an example, and I could be totally wrong about how Submersion works, because I only have the Core Book and others that don't go into Technomancers too much.
