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Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 21 2011, 10:42 AM

Hello; I haven't been on the forums in a long time, having taken a leave of absence from Shadowrun (and have returned due to the subject of this story).

I've recently begun running a new Shadowrun game with four players - all are experienced role-players, with multiple systems under their belts, and we were looking for a new system - well, one that they hadn't experienced thus far. Only one of the players having played a game before, and the others being interested, I broke out my Shadowrun file, full of old NPCs, books, PDFs dating back into second edition, characters, lists of house-rules, and so on. Thus prepared, our epic journey began.

THE TEAM

The party quickly came together. The party, informed by myself and the other experienced player, decided that they'd take the archetypical roles of a mage, a hacker, an infiltrator, and a street samurai. They wanted to cover all the bases, take all jobs that came their way, and built their characters to function well(ish) together. How much they succeeded is up to interpretation.

The hacker is 2-D. Played by the only experienced player among the group, 2-D is a technomancer who belongs to Chaos Engine, the online terrorist-gang-resonant collective. Fluffed as something similar to a psychotic 4-chan anon board, and full of utterly bizarre and insane characters, Chaos Engine came to play a large role in the story (so far), even as 2-D remained the sanest and calmest member of the team (as is so common with hackers). 2-D is a dronomancer, driving an old pick-up truck with a pair of beaten-up Dobermans and a Fly-Spy, with a Roto-Drone as his air-force, which never sees any action due to the expense involved in dropping grenades on people.

The mage is Geppetto. Arriving only after the first run, Geppetto specializes in mind manipulation and illusion spells (hence the name). He's a black magic tradition magician with the adversary mentor spirit, with enormous face-skills, though nowhere near the levels of a pornomancer. Still, it's quite lucky that the team has adopted him as the de-facto leader, since he doesn't like being told what to do by anyone else, and has a vindictive streak a mile wide. As the game started, he had a day job as a book-keeper at a corporate warehouse, where he whiled his days away, getting his only excitement by night in the shadows.

The street samurai is Dervish. Well, now he is. He used to call himself "Featherstep", then "Featherfoot", but changed it around a few times as people called him out on how 'gay' his name sounded. he woke up in a dumpster with little more than pants on, with a crapton of cyber- and bioware in his body, with no genetic imprint and no fingerprints, as well as expensive top-of-the-line cybereyes and ears, along with some deadly cyber-spurs in his fists. After mugging a guy for the cash and checking himself into a coffin hotel, Dervish has set out to make a new life and to find his old one.

The infiltrator WAS Trout. Well, originally "Dead-Man", but after repeated instances of getting caught and shot to unconsciousness, the party and the other occupants of their local runner bar decided unanimously that even that was too cool, and renamed him after a flopping, dying fish - and thus a Trout. Trout had a criminal SIN, used to be a Lone Star police officer (and thus had his records on file), and was wanted - REALLY wanted - for killing a guy in a daycare center in front of the kids. Why he'd done this, nobody knows. Simply put, Trout was about as silly a character as could appear, and he got exactly what was coming to him, really quickly.

THE STORY BEGINS

The party started off with the legendary starting module - the one and only Food Fight. Geppetto didn't exist yet, as the player was too busy at the time to join the first session, and thus the others made their way to a Stuffer Shack which promptly got raided by gangers looking to kill a girl there. After the ensuing fight, during which Dervish managed to clean up with his 4 (holy shit) initiative passes, the party went their separate ways, although they were soon to meet again. The next day, even as 2-D was hired to put a sex tape of a man with a whore on the man's wife's commlink to humiliate him, Trout was asked to go beat up a guy who'd insulted a rather rich kid. Trout failed this mission miserably, trying to "disguise" the target as having been beat up, and was given a speech by the rich kid on Shadowrun ethics before he was sent packing, unpaid. In the meanwhile, the other two (Dervish and 2-D) were hired to kill the man's current mistress (by their fixer, a man named Danny McReary with ties to the Finnegan family), which they did with aplomb, dumping the body in front of the man's house.

Still, it was in the party's best interests to get together, at least out-of-character, so when hired for another job, to eliminate a street gang that was causing trouble, Dervish and 2-D hired Trout along as a contractor. The three spent the next few days gathering information on the gang (including a pair of incidents where 2-D hacked 83 months of a popular MMORPG for some local kids as a bribe, and Trout got caught trailing a random unnamed ganger and was nearly killed for the third time), an then pulled their hit, quickly taking the gang's leader and hacker out (the hacker through a "bike crash" and the leader through a spray of lead), even as 2-D ended the gang's spell-knack "mage" by getting him online to play an MMORPG in Hot Sim, and then Black Hammering him into oblivion.

The party spent a little time paying off their contacts for help given during this, including a trip to Vancouver to break a guy's kneecaps and a trip to Renton (the group is currently based in Everett) to grenade-bomb a small Humanis Policlub meeting). Furthermore, they completed a short job where they had to find a runaway Bunraku parlor "puppet" to return her to the Yakuza. nice people the party ain't. It was at this point that the party met Geppetto.

Geppetto was tagged onto the party on a quick and painless job to help out a buddy of Danny the Fixer, who sold drugs. They followed a man the dealer sold something unknown to, only to find that the mystery drug (K-10) drove the troll fucking wild, and he murdered several people and police officers before jumping off a bridge and swimming onto a wildlife preserve, where the party finally managed to gun and stunbolt him to death, with Trout getting nearly killed for the seventh time. In the process of making their way through the Barrens, the party came across "John", a ghoul agent of the Tamanous Organleggers. The party, far from fighting the disturbing creature, struck up a business partnership with the ghouls - the ghouls picked up any bodies the party left behind in the Barrens, and kept some of the more dangerous entities in the area away, also acting as the party's eyes in the region. 2-D, in particular, began to take time to have drinks and hang out with the ghoul, though he was careful not to become infected.

After recovering from this terrifying run, the party was shocked, and rather annoyed, to find that they had nowhere near enough money, after hospital bills, bullet replacements, and repair costs to pay off their rent bills. With a cry (for the many-eth time) of "This is such BULLSHIT!", they managed to take a few more tiny jobs apiece to finally cover the cost of the rent, including a private investigator stakeout of a girl's home to make sure she wasn't cheating on her boyfriend (as it turned out, she wasn't). But as another month came in, they found, to their concern, that jobs weren't coming in, and they didn't have the cash to live for another month - but then came the break.

THE BIG SCORE

The party's fixer, Danny, came through at last with the party's first job that paid more than 200 nuyen per person - the party went out and bought suits, and met the Johnson at a fancy club Downtown, posing as a much classier and more experienced team than they actually were - luckily, Geppetto's skills and the rest of the party's ability to shut the hell up was such that they managed to pull it off, and got the promise of an enormous score - if only they could retrieve a piece of data on an old disc for the Johnson (here began a very altered version of the "on the Run" mission). In a minor celebration, the party spent the night at the nightclub, only to find in the morning that Geppetto had spent the night with a powerful mafia don, Rowena O'Malley. somewhere between scared to death and impressed as hell with himself, Geppetto narrowly kept his head and his balls, and life moved on, without yet becoming any more deadly.

The party went on the hunt, and from some contacts managed to find out that the disc had been offered to an orc rapper who was soon to put a concert on in the Redmond Barrens (in exchange for 2-D's contact's help, he had to pilot an enormous Mitsuhama Tomino drone against three deadly mercenaries in a competition which, with his skills, he won quite effectively). Dervish slipped into the concert as a member of the security, Geppetto under a Physical Mask as a drug dealer who sold the head of security several doses of the infamous "Pixie Dust", and Trout (supposedly) as a tac-suited shadow - until he was discovered and nearly shot again, forcing him to eject from the plan. The party, with a judiciously applied "Influence" spell, managed to get a hold of the email, and began tracing it - but were sidetracked as rent came due, with them all behind.

At this point began the stupidest plan of all time - downgrading from Shadowrunners to simple petty criminals, the party planned and executed an armed robbery on a Red Lobster in Renton. Unfortunately for them, the police were called, and furthermore, a policeman inside, off duty, stalled their escape. While Dervish, on skimmer discs, managed to escape, as did Geppetto, blending into the crowd of customers, Trout ran out the back and was shot thrice (#10) by the officer, before being arrested. While 2-D managed to extract him from this by hitting the officer with a car, the party had finally run out of patience, and turned Trout in for the reward, splitting it up amongst themselves, finally giving them enough money to make rent for April.

As May began, the party needed a new infiltrator - Dervish began studying up on the best ways to be a sneaky bugger - but the party came upon a totally different windfall, of information this time. One of their contacts was willing to tell them where the sender of the email was, if they would retrieve a distubing pornographic BTL from the worst parts of the Redmond Barrens. Looking for some safety, the party sold their pick-up truck for a Step Van, with the remainder of their bounty, and picked up a new member, recommended by their Fixer.

Tank the troll is a prototypical troll. He carries an axe and an Ingram White Knight, wears a lot of armor, and is really big and slow and dumb but hard to kill. He has a little sister who he adores, who is often frustrated by his criminal violence and negligence, and who is significantly more competent than he is - in the "Dependents" quality, it's sometimes blurred which is which. Furthermore, Tank is on the run from a team of shadowrunners who he tangled with a few times before, who are now after him with a VENGEANCE. Unfortunate for him, but now that he needed money, Danny threw the big guy a bone, tacking him onto the other guys' team as some muscle.

The party retrieved the disturbing BTL, a pornographic bestiality snuff-tastic bit of messiness, and in return were told that the sender was in Tir Tairngire, where they promptly headed, on a road trip. There, they found out the owner of the disc they were after, and the location of that owner - they set out, at last, to make a deal. The owner of the disc was quite willing to deal, and the party swapped a few thousand nuyen for the disc - just in time for things to go to shit once more. Three tac-suited men with assault rifles spun from cover and slaughtered the [former] owner of the disc and his guards. The party fought back, though an enemy mage began peppering them with manabolts and confusion spells, but they were being beaten viciously until they managed to put one of the men down and found the hidden mage, who ran away like a pussy after being shot once. Before reinforcements could arrive, they beat a hasty retreat.

The party loaded up into their van and tore down the highway, with an enemy truck following - 2-D hacked the truck and sent it off the side into the bay below, buying the party some time, but in the fight, Geppetto had been grievously and terribly injured, as had Dervish - Geppetto, though, was at the gates of hell, and the party needed somewhere to shack up for a bit. It was now that the party remembered their contact with John the Ghoul - and so they headed out to a Tamanous compound in the Barrens, with a sigh and facepalm on the GM's behalf.

On the way there, the party managed to head off a hacking attempt with the help of another Chaos Engine hacker and defeated a powerful Guardian spirit in a flat-out fight (though Dervish and Tank were left quite drained and beaten-up), finally, they managed to pull into the compound, only to be warned by John that there were several nasty strains of diseases in the hospital, HMHVV III not being the only one. With an eye towards not becoming a ghoul at the hands of his open wounds, Geppetto was infected with HMHVV I, and thus began the process of turning into a banshee instead (at least he wasn't a vampire, I suppose... or a Nosferatu - damn those things...).

In the meanwhile, 2-D made his way into the basement, where he used an ancient cyberdeck to decrypt the disc, and was promptly assaulted by another strike team - with his drones' and Tank's help, he survived and beat them off, and the team again managed to escape in the morning, calling the Johnson to meet up again. They arrived at last at the club where they'd originally gotten the job, turning in the job and receiving both thanks for a job well done (and in a week less than the month-long limit) and a significant sum of money. The party, finally, now has time to rest (well, in some cases. Geppetto's on his way to dying and being reborn, or whatever exactly happens when you become a banshee. Something nasty, that's for sure. All I know is, the poor bastard had better change out any wood or silver in his home!), at least until they run out of money yet again...

Anyways, the next session's tomorrow, so stay tuned for more! If you have any comments or suggestions, please reply - this is the first time I've GMed Shadowrun for a while, I'm especially looking for thoughts on what to do with Tank's shadowrunner enemies and Geppetto's newfound... infectedness...

Thanks!

Posted by: LurkerOutThere May 22 2011, 02:53 AM

If you guys are having fun more power to you, but damn i've never really had any desire to have my players worry about making rent on their characters. That sounds entirely too much like real life. I think only you are to blame if your players are choosing to knock over a restaurant rather then run. Your upset at them for acting like petty criminals when the only jobs you give them pay like petty criminals. Also an enemy strike team wormed their way into a tam compound in the barrens and got first crack at the decker, do you want your players not to cultivate contacts?

Posted by: Troyminator May 22 2011, 11:20 PM

At least you get to play with your group. Mine is usually too drunk to do anything coherent.

Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 23 2011, 12:17 AM

From what I can tell, the players are having a ton of fun - the goal of the game WAS largely to play in a very gritty environment, with as much realism as could be spared, hence the low payments. They've recently graduated to larger jobs, with payments that are actually big enough for them to afford new gear and all, and for them stop worrying about rent as much - part of the point was to give them the satisfaction of rising above that "street-level" issue themselves, which they have. It seems to have given them a sense of purpose that would've been difficult to instill otherwise, and since nobody's complained about it, I call it a win. I'm not upset at all about the Red Lobster job - I joke about it because the image of a highly competent runner team robbing a family restaurant amuses me.

They've managed to cultivate quite a few contacts - but what they had was quite valuable, so their opponents came after them - the compound's defenses helped, but the decker split off from the group, and had the disc, so he was the obvious target. Overall, though, the game's stayed pretty low-level, so I felt that when they were getting a significant amount of money, they should have to deal with a significant degree of danger. We are, however, getting out of that "grungy gutter-trash" portion of the game, though, so I'll have to remember to give them funds commensurate with their newfound status.

And yeah, I do particularly enjoy being able to play with my group. I find that keeping everyone sober generally helps

Posted by: Squinky May 23 2011, 01:45 AM

Good story.

I'm not sure how a sammy can have 4 IP's and still afford other ware with traditional creation rules though

Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 23 2011, 03:41 AM

He restricted gear-ed a set of Rating 3 Synaptic Boosters. Cost him most of his cash, but it was really, really nice.

Posted by: Manunancy May 23 2011, 06:08 AM

A comment about the attack on the hacker : did the opponents have a way to know he had the disk ? Metagaming isn't limited to the players and sometimes the GM slips a bit and uses some piece of information the opposition normaly shouldn't have.

Though i admit that something as small as a data disk is likely to be found on either the party's face (who will be the one trading it to the Johnson) or the hacker (it's a datadisk, he's the best placed to know how to keep it from being damaged). Of course, if it's 100lbs of antique wargaming lead figurines, an ork or troll streetsam is a better option...

Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 23 2011, 07:28 AM

They DID know the hacker had it - they were watching the buy, and saw the hacker take it, and followed him into the compound in tac-suits, waiting for him to be vulnerable - he got the Perceptions checks for it and all. But the wargaming figurines gives me a silly idea... Maybe I should... Nah...

Posted by: DireRadiant May 23 2011, 06:03 PM

The best Street Names are the ones you earn!

Posted by: Draco18s May 23 2011, 06:28 PM

Quite true. Bear Who Walks Through Walls certain earned his name.
(Concrete bunker? What concrete bunker?)

Posted by: TheOOB May 24 2011, 09:44 AM

Wait, 200 nuyen per person...my characters won't even deliver a package next door for less than 5k, they have a reputation to uphold.

Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 24 2011, 07:59 PM

Your runners apparently think they're the shit - but realistically speaking, that's 5,000 nuyen, which is enough to pay for a middle class lifestyle for a month. My runners all have/had (at the time) Low-class or lower lifestyles, so that's pay them for a nice, long while. Really, it comes down to how much someone'd be willing to pay for the tiny jobs the party was doing back then - they have NO reputation, and therefore nothing to uphold; their only option was, and is, to take all incoming jobs, so that they can BUILD that reputation. You don't get a reputation by refusing jobs and sitting on your ass, you have to get out and do the work you get, no matter how shitty that work might seem to be.

Besides, they've managed to move out of that dirt-level environment - the party's last job (the one given the major detailing) netted them about 5,000 per person, after bullet and vehicle expenses. It's more the creation of a street-level background I was interested in, rather than the intention of KEEPINg them down there.

Posted by: Kyrel May 24 2011, 10:03 PM

Damn. I want to play in your game *LOL* Sounds like a blast.

With regards to the runner team that doesn't like Tank, I suppose you have plenty of options, depending on the exact nature of the opposing team, and what Tank did to piss them off. The simple thing is of course just to try and have them kill him off at some point when he's alone. But a more fun thing might be to have the team start screwing with him, making his life more difficult. Stuff that affects him more in between runs, than during. Maybe the opposing team's Hacker keeps infecting his comlink and/or gear with malware. Maybe the opposing team's Face wreck havock with his reputation in the shadows. Maybe an opposing Mage screw with his mind every now and then, causing him to gamble away gear or money on longshot bets. Maybe the opposing Street Sam takes a potshot at him during a run, making his life a little harder on the run. Maybe a B&E specialist plants some hot goods in his home and calls in the cops, or someone who the stuff belongs to.
Eventually the player might decide to try and enlist the help of his current team mates to try and deal with the annoying former partners once and for all, giving you the basis for an operation, or an ongoing feude between the two teams.

As for the Mage Banshee, I'd say that first and foremost the player is getting a load of stuff handed to him, which he can use to roleplay the character, and create further depth in the character. How does he deal with be changes the virus inflicts upon him? How does it affect him having to drink blood to sustain himself? And where's he going to get it? How long time does it take him to find out just how to use all of his new innate abilities, and the ability to drain essence from others?
As for his surroundings, you should considder how they will react to an Infected, if they discover that he's a Banshee. How is a Johnson going to react to the spokesman for a team of runners being a bloody Banshee!? I mean, the guy could leap over the table and tear open his throat at any moment, in order to drink his blood and eat his soul! And then there's the little issue that he's now a walking meal ticket for anyone that wants to cash in on the standing bounty that is on Infected in most places, incl. the UCAS. I believe the going rate is 5k, but I could be remembering wrong. Basically, the guy just went from being a shadowrunner to being a monster that runs the shadows. He's a boogyman. Any regular person that finds out that he's infected will shun him or run away screaming, whilst calling in the cops. He's got problems operating in the day. He's got problems with his diet and eating/drinking regular food, unless he's willing to risk becoming sick as a dog. He's got some cool new abilities, but they come at a pretty significant price to his social life and how he can and will have to operate in the future. If he becomes arrested by the cops they ain't just going to lock him up and throw away. They'll shoot first, then again, and just to be on the safe side, they'll shoot him again when he's down and no longer moving. And they'll be proud of it, because they just did society a favour and protected society from an Infected monster. Basically the character just got himself a whole new list of challenges he'll have to deal with. Also, if he's got a home, how's his landlord going to react if he discovers that one of his tennants is an Infected monster? Most likely he'll call the cops and try to collect both the glory and the bounty.

Hope you can use this for some inspiration

Posted by: Muspellsheimr May 24 2011, 10:54 PM

Taking jobs paying nothing doesn't build you a reputation you want. If they are taking such jobs, it's because they don't understand the setting and you are not giving them any actual options. 5k per person is severely underpaying for anything more than a delivery.

Even in a 300BP low payout street game, I would never accept a job paying less than 1k per person. Its easier, safer, and often faster to just sell cars to a chop shop.

Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 25 2011, 12:57 AM

They actually did start with a 300-BP game, so that much is accurate. I feel like this is sort of a difference in opinions on how the world is supposed to feel, and how it works, and at that rate, it's all fluff - you and I could both be right about the ways we play the game and were taught the setting, so really, it doesn't make a whit of difference.

As I said, the incredibly low payouts were sort of a "prologue", wherein they actually WERE doing simple, low-level thug jobs, like beating a guy down for the mob, or following a guy's girlfriend to see if she was cheating on him - once they reached the level most runners are at, they're not turning back you know. I'd really rather that the low payouts at the beginning weren't the focus of all discussion of the game. The players enjoyed it, and it worked out - I'd understand if they stayed at a dirt-level for a long period of time, but they only spent about a session and a half with those jobs, so... well, it's over now.



Thanks? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic



Pretty much what he did was that he and his brother got into a conflict with them once, and shot up the team's face, who also happened to be their fixer's little brother. Those are some interesting ideas, and that last bit is where I'm hoping he eventually goes.

He has the "Vendetta" quality to go with it, and they have an Incidence rating of 4 - roughly how do you people think I should fluff that and deal with it, considering they dislike him quite a bit, and apparently will just keep coming?



Nice. I'll mention these to the player, and see how he likes the suggestions.



Hmm... didn't think about/know about the bounty, largely because I've never been in a game where Infected came up as a major thing before. The daylight operation thing is somewhat canceled out, because he's planning to cast "Alleviate Allergy" into his Sustaining Focus (are there any major limitations on this besides Focus Addiction? Also, roughly how long does Focus Addiction tend to take to become a factor, with a Force 2 Focus?)

Banshees, from what I can see, look roughly the same as they did before, as their sort of "bleached" look doesn't really come on for a long while. I'm sure some Johnsons could notice it, but it doesn't seem entirely TOO likely. Is there any 3rd-ed. or before book that has a significant amount of information on Banshees and other Infected (or even any 4th-ed. book besides Runner's Companion)?

Thanks for your suggestions!

Posted by: Bushw4cker May 25 2011, 01:23 AM

HMHVV I Is very hard to pass to another...this is from Running Wild (But I think it's in other source books as well)


The infection can be passed in a number of ways. There is often
a sufficient concentration of the virus in the saliva of a vampire, but
it’s usually tainted blood or flesh that infects the victim. In some
cases, the victim is given the blood or flesh as part of some ritual;
other times, in their sheer terror, they bite their attacker and doom
themselves. There is at least one documented case of the virus passing
from host to victim during sexual intercourse. In any case, the
passing of the virus is usually a deliberate act. It is the vampiric means
of procreation and seldom carried out randomly.
HMHVV I can express and begin its work only once the victim
has been drained of energy. Once drained, the body goes into a
coma and appears to be dead. During this coma-like state, the virus
is busily recoding the body’s DNA in its own image. This usually
takes about 24 hours, at which point metabolic processes resume
and the victim rises again.
> If it’s spread so many ways, why aren’t we neck-deep in dzoo-nooqua
and wendigos?
> /dev/grrl
> There are several forces at work in the transformation. Many
victims, for instance, don’t die from having their life drained away;
they die of shock or blood loss first. The virus doesn’t activate just
because you flatline; you have to flatline by being drained. Many
of the Infected make an “ethical” choice to kill their victims before
draining away that last bit of their aura specifically to keep from
spawning another victim of Infection.
> Ethernaut

Posted by: Bushw4cker May 25 2011, 01:25 AM

Great Story so far though

Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 25 2011, 01:46 AM

I actually read that part - HMHVV I requires intermingling of bodily fluids, much like HIV, biologically. However, if you're INTENDING to infect someone/be infected, it's thus not as difficult as you'd imagine - injecting someone with a sample of the disease, or of diseased blood works fine - and when the guy'd lost as much blood as Geppetto had, it was REALLY simple to give him infected blood during the transfusion. And there you go.



Thanks! I'll continue after the next session (tonight, actually )

Posted by: ravensoracle May 25 2011, 01:49 AM

Looking forward to it. Great read so far.

Posted by: Manunancy May 25 2011, 05:42 AM

Once the change is complete, he might be interested in a change of look : if he switches to a goth-style look, there's a fait chance that he can pass as a poser rather than the genuine good. Another option can be to rely on make up and the like for a surfer like sun-bleached hair/tanned skin look. Sure you look like a dilettante, but that's less of a problem.

No matter what, investing in the 'disguise' skill seems like a good idea.

Posted by: TheOOB May 25 2011, 06:23 AM

Too be fair, the game title is "Shadowrun", and you can't even make an average human with 300 BP. It's fair to think shadowrunners are exceptional.



I bet your mages are really overpowered now. 5,000 is nothing, chump change to a runner. Sure 5,000 is worth a months worth of mid lifestyle, but to survive in the shadows you need to always be improving your gear, so runners rarely reach that mid lifestyle, especially with bribes, ammo costs, new Fake SINS, safe houses, ect. People who make less than 5,00 arn't runners, their street crooks, and it makes sense for them to be hitting restaurants and stealing cars. You can make a thousand+ jacking a car easy, and it's much lower risk than runner work. Realistically, if the characters are taking cheapo jobs, they'll never get a rep as professional runners. Corps are willing to pay big for someone who is willing to sneak into enemy territory, steal something, and risk their lives without asking too many questions. If your runners are going bargin bin, Johnsons going to wonder where he is losing quality.

Do whatever is fun for your group, but don't pretend like your not paying them crap, and understand that the wages your make overpowered awakened characters, and encourage players to find money doing more street level criminal stuff.

Posted by: Muspellsheimr May 25 2011, 10:09 AM

It takes a hell of a lot more than that for someone to become infected with HMHVV I. Specifically, bodily fluids has absolutely no impact whatsoever. Drink a vampire's blood all you want - you will not become Infected.

HMHVV can only be spread intentionally, and doing so involves draining the subjects Essence to 0. Among other things, this means the mage will have a Magic attribute of 1 when he comes back. The character might be able to remain viable by continually using Essence Drain to boost his Magic attribute, but that is a huge loss. Even more, he's now in karma debt for a 65BP quality - 130 Karma; he will not be able to advance anything until that is payed off. And he looses any non-Delta grade implants he has, if any.

To make gaining infection during play not crippling to the character requires a few house rules, which can easily cause the character to become quite overpowered for a while. This is something that you really should have read the rules on and thought carefully about before implementing.

Posted by: baronspam May 25 2011, 07:17 PM

I will lead off by saying if you are having fun that justifies everything else.

But offering a team 200 a peice other than to maybe rough someone up is an insult. Thats street gang money. Sure, you don't want the characters gettting fat and lazy, but at the same time taking wetwork for 200 nuyen is a bad business move.

I must say, robbing a Red Lobster does, as you say, constitute the stupidest plan of all time. There is no cash any more, what where they going to do, steal the food? I suppose if it were real lobster, but you better have a buyer standing buy. Trying to move three day old lobster out of the back of a van is probably not the easiest (or best smelling) situation.

What they should have done, however, with a good hacker and a good infultrator is pull some B&E jobs. Hit something valuable but not high end enough bring in the Red Samurai down on you. Maybe an electronics store, auto parts, drone parts. Non perishable, should be a good black market, a decent fixer would be able to find a buyer for them. Or boost cars. Or hijack a truck coming out of the port. But Red Lobster?

Posted by: Squinky May 25 2011, 08:48 PM

Yeah, that whole dropping the mage's magic to one thing is kind of a bummer if you go by RAW.

Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 25 2011, 09:54 PM

Eurgh, that's a LOT worse than expected. Admittedly, *I* wasn't the one responsible for the incident - it was the party's wacky plan, but it really would've been better for me to have known the rules on that beforehand, or to look them up when the players started discussing such possibilities. Well, I'll speak to the party and see what their opinions on the matter are. Fun takes precedence overall, and if that requires reformatting the rules to let the player continue to play this character, so be it. My mistake, but I'd rather the players didn't have to pay for it



Actually not - he's been using his karma on getting rid of some negative qualities and on diversifying his skills, rather than upping his magic or whatever - he's only at his first initiate grade, to boot. Also, this Banshee thing is gonna sink a lot of Karma for him. The technomancer has been acting similarly. I *was* paying them crap, the last couple runs have paid them quite a bit more - I once again repeat that the party didn't start as runners, but as exactly the street scum it'd make sense to be robbing restaurants and all.



They were roughing a guy up for the mob for that amount, actually. But I do think robbing the Red Lobster was a bizarre and frankly stupid plan. Still, they [all but one] survived that encounter, and now they're on their way as actual runners, making a reasonable amount for their danger, so it's a bit less silly, all-around.

To give money values, to hopefully wrap up the discussion of the party's early finances:

Pre-Becoming-a-Party-and-Thus-a-Shadowrunning-Team:
2D: Made 200 by hacking a guy's commlink for the guy's wife, made 1000 on a quick wetwork job on a SINless prostitute, made 300 finding a runaway, made 50 following a druggie to see what'd happen = Total 1550 Nuyen
Dervish: Made 1000 on the prostitute wetwork job, made 300 on the runaway job, made 50 following the druggie = Total 1320 Nuyen
Trout: WOULD HAVE made 500 beating the tar out of a guy, but failed the job, made 300 on the runaway job, made 50 following the druggie, made 250 following a girl for her boyfriend = Total 600 Nuyen

FIRST JOB: Take out the head of a third-tier gang in the Everett slums: Total Pay 10,000 for a three-man-team that lacked a face and thus sucked at negotiation.

Geppetto: Was along for the runaway job and following the druggie, had his own job setting up a bit of astral security (500) and a day job = Total 850 Nuyen + Day Job II

FIRST JOB AS A TEAM: Find a missing disc and retrieve it for the Johnson: Total Pay - 5000 Nuyen in an Expense Account (Up Front), 20,000 Upon Delivery (They lost Trout during this run, but gained Tank, their Troll member)

Red Lobster Job (Actually, seriously, what DID they expect to get here, considering there's no cash anymore?): 1,560 worth of stolen jewelry off customers, rage at the realization that cash doesn't exist. 5,000 More for turning in Trout to the police = Total 6,560 Nuyen

As is visible, they've moved on from their street-rat days. Now, enough of that. I'm going to post separately with the story of the next session. Thanks for the feedback and the suggestions so far!

Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 25 2011, 11:41 PM

THE STORY CONTINUES


We take up again a while later, as the party rests on their laurels from the completion of their last job for a bit. They begin to train their skills and spend their money, cheered by the fact that for once, they don't need to worry about rent for a few months.

Geppetto, having been terribly injured and stricken with the Banshee virus (I'll be speaking to the players about this and seeing how they want to deal with this, but for now I'm going to write it as we were playing it) ends up quitting his job and pretty much sleeping and healing up over the next couple weeks. Aside from his neighborhood committee meeting (ah, how annoying living by community can), he came out for very few things - he'd earlier slept with Dona Rowena O'Malley, and needing an initiatory group (and being of Italian blood), he asked if he could get in contact with any magicians she might know. It was in this way that Geppetto was introduced to Mercury and Mars, a pair of members of the Merlyns gang. The Merlyns, as an adjunct group of the Mafia, decided to allow Geppetto to join their group, on a trial basis, if he could complete their challenge (to cast spells of successively higher forces repeatedly and outlast some of their current members), and if he'd agree to do them a favor or few in the future. Thus a member of an initiatory group, Geppetto initiated for the first time, taking the "Masking" power to hide his Banshee nature better.

2-D had perhaps the least eventful break, as he submerged after helping an entropic sprite reassemble itself with one of his registered sprites, and rested from the hilarious fading he'd undergone from binding that same registered sprite in the first place. He watched the trid, and noticed that Evo had fired a director of one of their branches who he'd never liked, and resolved to not continued his absurd blood feud with them so long as they didn't (and after all, how much does a megacorp, or even a department of a megacorp, actually care about one random terrorist?). With this, he spent the rest of the break relaxing with his girlfriend and renting a new home in a better neighborhood in Snohomish.

Dervish decided to become a bad-ass, and headed to the Barrens, where he took up training with "Sensei", an old orc street samurai who began teaching him the arts of "Sangre y Acero", which he'd picked up while in an Aztlan prison. Dervish also spent a lot of time learning about the old man's fascinating life, and went with the old man to beat the tar out of a man named "Jim" who kept calling him and asking him to bring drugs over, mistaking Dervish's number with his dealer's. At one point, Dervish found himself being followed by someone he couldn't quite keep track of, but had 2D spot the guy with a flyspy drone - Dervish them tracked him down and beat him into revealing that Dervish apparently had killed the man's father before his amnesia. Dervish, not really having anything to say about this, shoved the guy into a gutter and went along on his way.

Tank decided to be a good sibling for once, and tried to clean his and his sister's apartment - unfortunately, an enormous troll is not exactly the most effective housemaid, and so he ended up instead breaking the refrigerator. His sister reacted to this with a characteristically resigned attitude, and so the guilty troll bought a new fridge as a present - his sister, though, in the meanwhile had apparently spoken to her friend's father, who worked in the SIN registry, and the sympathetic man had offered to obtain legal identification for both Tank and his sister! Tank really, really didn't want a SIN, considering his line of work, so he went to a contact of the party's who obtained for him a fake under his own name - yes, a fake SIN using Tank's real name and information. His sister, fooled, happily agreed to a social worker looking over the house, which she did. Everything went well until one of the police officers with her scanned Tank's fake SIN - and with Tank's crap luck, his SIN failed the test. Tank was taken to the police station, but luckily 2D managed to inform the party fixer, who sent a lawyer to keep Tank... something. Tank was heavily fined, given community service, and received a real SIN. Unfortunately, most of his money from the last job had ended up in someone or the other's pocket now, but there was nothing for it.

As Tank moped around looking for solo thug jobs for a bit (he made a little bit of cash guarding a warehouse occasionally as a temporary worker), he spotted a car following him home. He ditched the tail (he thought) and headed home, suspiciously looking around to see if someone was still around, but saw nobody. Thus, he went inside, took his armor off, and began eating dinner.

It was at this point when the door burst open to reveal an elf and an ork, with an assault rifle and shotgun respectively, the ork just having blown the door off its hinges. The window shattered as well, a human flying through on a zipline. Tank was caught suddenly by two long burst of automatic fire and a shutgun blast, followed with a powerbolt spell. Barely conscious and alive, he staggered towards the window and leapt out, triggering the PANICBUTTON system as he went. landing two stories down, and luckily taking no more injuries, Tank made his way down the road, dodging another burst of gunfire. Luckily, sirens in the distance led to the assassins escaping via helicopter, as ambulances took Tank away to the hospital. The rest of the team merely waited as Tank healed up, and moved him and his sister to Geppetto's place, hoping for the best.

THE RUN

It was now, well, a week later, that Danny got into contact with the team. He had another big job for them, and they were to meet the Johnson at the Eye of the Needle in formal dress. The party suited up and headed to the restaurant, where they found an official-looking elf with a severe face waiting. The party ate dinner over small talk, then got down to business. The job, as usual, sounded simple. Another group of runners had abducted a little girl and her dog, as she returned from school, likely for ransom purposes or blackmail. The Johnson's employers wanted the little girl returned, alive. Also her dog, preferably. The team accepted (and received what information the Johnson had), and was on their way.

On the next day, 2D examined the feeds for the security cameras around where the girl had been taken - they showed the enemy van picking the girl and her captor up, then heading down the road then vanishing. 2D and a few sprites followed the subtle signs of editing and of magical disturbance, though, and determined that the van was headed into Everett. Geppetto, with a good image of the girl and dog, summoned a Spirit of Man and set it to searching for the girl. Midway into the night, it returned with a positive match.

On the next morning, Dervish followed the spirit through Everett to near a warehouse, where the spirit affirmed that the group was hiding. Dervish then decided that he'd check the warehouse out after lunch, and went to get a burrito. On his return (with the spirit watching and waiting patiently at the warehouse), he began walking down the street only to suddenly take a sniper bullet to the back of the head, nearly killing him instantly. Luckily, he was then able to have the spirit rush him back to his motorcycle, which he then rushed to the hospital, avoiding death at the hands of the team's sniper narrowly (on a side note, could someone tell me if it's possible to use the "movement" power on a vehicle? I assume it'd be subject to the body limitations stated int he power description, but we weren't quite sure, otherwise. Would the power have to beat the bike's object resistance?).

In the meanwhile, knowing that the enemy team was going to escape from the warehouse, the rest of the team hopped into 2D's Rigger van and heded straight for Everett. From Renton. This was going to take a while. Geppetto began spamming watcher spirits to follow and harass the enemy team, but found them to be getting blown away at an alarming rate - only reasonable, he found, as he was attacking in the astral by a beast spirit. Luckily, he managed to summon a fire spirit of his own to destroy his attacker, and informed the rest of the team of recent events. 2D then began scanning the feeds of cameras near the warehouse, and spotted a sedan and a rigger van leaving the warehouse. Not sure which to follow and hack, he began hacking the sedan.

The sedan's node, however, had been loaded with three mid-level Black IC. A brutal cybercombat ensued in the node, with 2D taking an absurd quantity of physical damage and coming close to dying multiple times, only to be saved by his fault sprite's medic complex form. Finally, he finished destroying the IC, only to find that inside the car, there was only one passenger in the sedan, an orc with a shotgun. In a fit of pique, 2D stopped the car on the side of the road, and the orc hopped out, running as fast as he could away. The party then realized that they could capture him for information, and sent the Spirit of Man to "Detain him, and make sure he's alive and can speak. Be creative."

[I should note that I've been playing spirits of man as being vaguely tricksterish, with a tendency to do interesting and bizarre things rather than taking the most straightforward path - Geppetto is a Black Magic-tradition caster, so I thought it fit]

As the party watched in the Astral and through a nearby camera, the spirit Influenced the orc to assault a woman on a nearby sidewalk, leading to a pair of Knight Errant [I missed until this session that Knight Errant had taken over the Seattle police. Whoops.] officers brutally beating down and nearly arresting him. The spirit then influenced the woman to tell the officers to "just throw him in a dumpster or something, please, I think the scum's learned his lesson". The orc ended up unconscious in a dumpster, and the party leisurely headed over and picked him up.

The party sent 2D and his girlfriend to take Tank's sister and several of her friends to an amusement park while the rest of the team (Dervish not included - he was still in surgery from the sniper wound) interrogated the ork. After convincing the ork that Tank liked raping prisoners (and also uploading amusement park roller-coaster software into the ork's penile implant so that it loop-the-looped painfully on the ork's crotch), they managed to get the identities of the rest of the enemy team - and their next stop, the airport. Furthermore, it turned out that there was a flyspy over Geppetto's home (where they were interrogating the suspect, for some reason). 2D tried to hack it, but set off a databomb that knocked him unconscious and deep into physical overflow, forcing the party to heal him up and begin heading for the airport as fast as they could, leaving Dervish a message.

In the meanwhile, as they headed over, Dervish awoke and leapt out of his hospital window, taking his sniper rifle and motorcycle to the airport - on the way, he phoned in a terrorist bomb threat, narrowly succeeding at convincing the Knight Errant operator that this was no joke. As he arrived there, he carefully stealthed his way onto the roof, and began waiting. In the meanwhile, the rest of the party arrived, only to find Knight Errant troopers everywhere, and they narrowly avoided arrest for Tank's machine gun and 2D's multiple heavily armed drones. They bailed and began heading away, relatively certain that the enemy team wouldn't be able to take off.

Unfortunately, this was an incorrect assumption, as the other team slid their van across the tarmac towards a private hanger in the corner. Dervish lined up his rifle and waited, even as several people hopped out with a large crate. Having turned his commlink off and unwilling to turn it on, thus highlighting his location, Dervish made the decision to go - and shot two of the enemy team members before they could react.

The enemies ran into the warehouse, and levitated their comrades' unconscious bodies and the crate inside, even as the rigger drove their van in as well. A stalemate ensued, as Dervish finally contacted his team and headed down onto the tarmac himself. The team began heading back - again. Unfortunately, 2D wasn't willing to risk another assault on the team's hacker's commlink, which by now had all the other equipment slaved to it. Geppetto tried sending a fire spirit into the hangar to attack the enemy team's plane or helicopter, but the team's mage managed to shut it down quickly. The stalemate continued, until four Knight Errant troopers entered the hangar. Dervish tried to listen in, but the noise created by the plane was too much, and he was only able to figure out that there was some sort of amiable conversation going on inside. Frustrated that the enemy team had somehow subverted Knight Errant, the team pulled back and called Mr. Johnson. Johnson informed them that apparently the girl had just been returned safely, and that the job was suspended temporarily, pending review. The team, still angry, and now without a payday to look forward to, pulled out.

The team headed to Geppetto's house, only to find it under attack, likely by Tank's enemies once more - the party scared off the two fire spirits that had been merrily burning the building and retrieved all their important equipment - just as 2D spotted yet another Flyspy in the sky. The team cloaked their van with an invisibility spell and took off to hide. Deciding that their pursuers would never check the warehouse where the OTHER team was hiding, they put their van in a parking garage and made their way into the warehouse - where they received a call from their Johnson. Johnson told them that the old job was to be cancelled - sort of. Ther were now to be employed on a new job, to be explained by a man who'd be waiting in the warehouse itself.

The party entered, to find another man, who also called himself Mr. Johnson (don't they all?). THIS Johnson explained that the girl had originally been kidnapped in a corporate faction war of sorts, as blackmail material - but that factional conflict had been dealt with, so the girl had been returned - unfortunately, the enemy team had NOT returned the dog, keeping it as a sort of souvenir.

The dog, though, was the bearer of important classified information, which the enemy runners likely didn't actually know at all - it was being kept at the girl's home by her father in hiding, and had only been snatched in the first place through bad luck. The party's NEW job, for more money (and with more difficulty and danger) was to track down the other team and retrieve the dog, dead or alive - and to kill the enemy team's hacker/rigger, who was the only one likely to be able to figure out what the dog really was.

The party, thus re-employed, said goodbye to Tank's sister and 2D's girlfriend and gathered their equipment, hopping on a plane to the same place the enemies had been headed to (at least according to the flight manifest) - Las Vegas [Are there ANY books with a reasonably dense treatment of Las Vegas? Neither VICE nor Sixth World Almanac really gave me anything, and I could use a little more information...].

***

And so there you go - the party's on another run - a particularly difficult, but interesting one. Not sure how they'll go about this, but hopefully they avoid anything too dumb or too weird - whatever it is, it'll certainly continue to make for an interesting story, I hope. Keep replying, and I hope you have some more insights you can offee

Posted by: Manunancy May 26 2011, 05:40 AM

One possibility to handle the magic loss and sweeten a bit the loss of magic would be to sum up the karma it would cost to raise his magic back to what it was and use that as a rebate on the 130 karma cost. Sur it hurts, but at least he's got less karma locked away.

Another option limit the 'can't improve anything for xx games until I've paid the 'infected' cost' would be to consider that a fraction of hte karma gains must go for it (i'd say half, up to two thirds) and the rest is free.

Oh and a note about the hacking : medic will fix the condition monitors of the programs, it won't do a thing for the hacker's 'meat' wounds, be they stun or physical damage.

Posted by: Bugfoxmaster May 26 2011, 09:26 AM

That'd work really well - it'd let him lock away less karma and while he's going to advance slower, he's not going to be frozen, at least. I'll suggest that to him.

On the other hand, the techno actually never would have gone DOWN from the damage - he'd just have a dice pool penalty of one or two, so it's no big change, though I will have to tell 2D's character tomorrow so that he doesn't make that mistake again.