I've tried to clean up the formatting to make this more readable. I'd love some comments from the more seasoned GMs here; I've been running Shadowrun in some capacity since about 2001 or so, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert. This is the story of how a halloween party lead to me getting roped into running On the Run for a group with a pretty wide range of experience, from total tabletop newbies to a guy who used to play with a some SR writers.
Mechanically, this was a mess. Some of the players were using old sheets they'd made for my previous game, so we retconned this in as a run that had happened prior to that game; this turned out perfectly, since that game started out with the players in prison, and this game wound up explaining how that happened perfectly
The mechanical mess occurred because the other players had to run with the sample characters from the Food Fight handout that was released a few years back for Free RPG Day. Among the many things not listed on these mini-sheets are Edge and Lifestyle. Likewise, the Hacker has Hacking and Hardware but no Computer skill. We didn't get bogged down in the rules though, because we were having too much fun.
I ran them through On The Run, and had we started the game on-time (we were supposed to all meet at 3pm) we might have gotten through the whole thing. Instead, some late arrivals and me having to duck out to pick up the pizza resulted in a late start, and we only got as far as grabbing Nabo's Commlink. But it was the road that got us there that was the important part.
The initial team was:
- Jackie (human male), a Face with a strong focus in martial arts (from the old game, which started in prison)
- Machinegun Macabee (ork male), a cyborg with two extremely expensive cyberlegs and a focus on heavy weapons (new character, built for the next ongoing game I'm running)
- Joe Nobody (ork male), a disgraced bodyguard from Los Angeles (joined the old game late, so he was never in prison)
- Sam (human male), a Street Samurai using the stats from Food Fight 4.0
- The Seeker (elf female), a hard-drinking ex-cop (player made a character for the old game, could never make it to game, was never in prison)
All are mundane.
Jackie's fixer calls him up and offers him the job with Darius St. George (as "Mr. Johnson" of course). Before the meet at Infinity, the players all meet up in a bar in Puyallup to discuss the situation. On their way to the pre-meet, The Seeker and Sam both (separately) witness an 11 year old boy running for his life from a pack of hungry devil rats, and some locals betting on the outcome. Sam, who is on foot, puts money down on the boy, planning to toss the kid a gun (yeah, I was like "WTF?" too). The Seeker, who is riding by on a motorcycle, takes pity on the kid and fires off two shots at the rats, hitting one rat and scattering the pack.
After the pre-meeting, it is determined that the only people with the appropriate clothes for Infinity are Jackie and Joe, but Sam decides to come anyway. Jackie and Joe can't really say anything about it, since Sam is the one with a car (as compensation for the horrible optimization of the pre-mades, I let him swap the motorcycle for a van). He lets them off in front of Infinity and then, to their chagrin, tries to follow them inside. Jackie gets past the front with a warm smile and a few words, and Joe gets in on Jackie's word, but Sam gets caught up at the door with his weapons.
Inside Infinity, Jackie and Joe case the joint looking for the elven bartender. I took some liberties here, since the adventure says there's only one bartender and only one bar in the back, while I pictured Infinity as an enormous, crowded, chaotic club with multiple bars. Joe catches sight of the elven bartender first, flirts with her a bit, and she points him towards the private conference room where the meet will occur. Joe is wearing image linked glasses and sharing info with the rest of the group. Macabee is back in Puyallup watching all of this from his commlink with mild interest. They go inside and just before they start to meet, Sam bursts into the room, having finally passed security. They get the scoop on the job, and the pay is 10,000. Jackie tries to negotiate, but he winds up tying with the Johnson, so they amicably agree to 10,000 nuyen and depart. Their job is to locate the person who has stolen an optical disc, and then retrieve it, either by negotiating to buy it or thievery.
The team spends the rest of the night hitting up their contacts for legwork. Macabee calls up his hacker friend/ex-girlfriend Sasha Greyhat, but she tells him that the info is nowhere online, and she can't find any evidence of anyone trying to sell an optical disc, or bragging online about stealing one. He seems annoyed with her perceived failure. Sam calls up his fixer friend, who is also named Sam, and who apparently looks a bit like Sam Waterson. He thinks he might have a lead, and says he will follow up with Sam after he finds something actionable. Jackie tries to see if his fixer, Johnny (who got them this job in the first place) has any leads, but Johnny has nothing. The Seeker goes to sleep, and the rest of the group soon follows (Macabee drinks himself to sleep, feeling the re-opened wounds of his failed relationship with Sasha Greyhat).
The next morning Sam wakes up early and hits the bar, drinking the morning away until the other Sam calls him. Macabee is hungover, and Joe Nobody, who spent the previous night doing a datasearch for machines that could read such an archaic data media, makes plans for an expedition to an old junkyard in Redmond that might have what they're looking for. Sam gets the call he was waiting for and learns that an up and coming ork rocker named Nabo has been offered the disc, and could be their only lead on finding the seller. Nabo has a show at a warehouse in Redmond that night, so the group piles into two cars and drives into Redmond. First stop: the junkyard.
They drive into the barrens, noticing as they pass by that there are eyes on the street watching them: hustlers and gangers on the corner watch them pass, and may even be reporting their movements. In a separate incident later on, they hear loud engines coming up behind them as a contingent of Crimson Crush gangers ride by on their choppers. The Seeker and Sam both ready weapons, but keep them out of sight, and thus avoid provoking a fight. The Crimson Crush pass the players by, riding the streets like they own them (because they basically do). The players finally arrive at the junkyard, in search of a reader device.
Now, On the Run doesn't get too specific about how to find a reader; I believe if you track down the hacker there are some possibilities for obtaining the hardware, but the players were looking for the hardware early, so I accomodated them and created the following encounter out of whole cloth. Calamity ensued. Also, around this time the group was joined by a new player, playing the Hacker archetype from Food Fight.
The junkyard was run by a decrepit, possibly senile old man who was, when the players arrived, fast asleep in a poorly-made rocking chair. He awoke long enough to point the players to a warehouse at the far side of the junkyard that housed a lot of the smaller, electronic junk. He didn't follow them, and said he'd settle up with them money-wise on their way out. I tried to make it clear that this old man was way too old for this kind of work: joints swollen with arthritis, slow movement, etc. He probably hadn't done a proper patrol of the yard in who knows how long. So The Seeker and Jackie decide to race to the warehouse, both running ahead. The Seeker gets there first (didn't make them roll, the player just said they started running first) and finds a rusty unlocked door. Opening the door, the inside of the warehouse is dark, but her low-light vision picks up movement at the edge of her visible range. So she takes out a flashlight and steps inside, coming face to face with.....a ghoul!
Neither party was expecting this encounter, so they roll a surprise test. The Seeker wins, but I think I flubbed a rule and ended up allowing the ghoul to both roll defense and act during the surprise round. Anyway, the Seeker panics, draws her pistol, and shoots the Ghoul. In the brief moment of light from the muzzle flash, she sees another six ghouls. The Ghoul swings at her with his claws, but misses. Right around this time, Jackie catches up and decides to bust out his martial arts on the Ghoul. He somehow winds up with like 15 successes or something ridiculous, and the Ghoul is just boned. Knocked out, probably some physical....but of course, HMHVV III is spread by contact with bodily fluids.
Punching a Ghoul in the face opens you up to quite a bit of contact, and Jackie is a human with a body of 2 and no protection. HMHVV III has a penetration of -6, so even with protection he'd have been hosed. The players were suitably frightened, lesson learned (don't get near ghouls), so I allowed Jackie to burn an Edge to auto-avoid contracting the disease, reasoning that he immediately tossed his jacket and gloves the moment he saw ghoul blood on them. Jackie and The Seeker then fled the warehouse, shut the door behind them, and fled at top speed, screaming "GHOULS!" at the top of their lungs.
Macabee and Sam both hear this. Macabee moves to cover his fleeing teammates, while Sam turns to the old man and, without any preamble, shoots him dead (I didn't bother having him roll; it's an old man). At this point we've had two shots fired. The players regroup, and Jackie decides to go back to the warehouse (with backup) to negotiate with the ghouls to find the device.
Using an odd, largely counterproductive mixture of negotiation and intimidation ("We just need this device that could be inside, it reads optical discs....we are prepared to blow up the entire warehouse around you, and my friend with the machinegun will put holes in everything inside.....I view you as human beings, and I want to treat you fairly, we aren't going to hurt you...."). The players initially offer to trade the old man's corpse for the device, however:
- The intelligent ghoul they are talking to is shocked that they killed what he considered to be a harmless old man that he had no intent of hurting
- There are 7 ghouls inside, so they need more meat. They ask for another six bodies, but the players balk.
After a period of negotiation, the ghouls agree to keep their distance while one unarmed PC searches the warehouse; at the first sign of attack, the other PCs will either blow up or open fire on the warehouse. On the ghoul's end, the players must wait while they create a barricade to protect themselves. So after about an hour (including 10 minutes for the ghouls to move locations so Jackie can search the area they were hiding in before) Jackie finally finds the device, and very gingerly (now aware of the dangers of ghoul contact) retrieves it.
Meanwhile, at the entrance of the junkyard, Knight-Errant (I moved the timeline forward, so Lone Star is out of Seattle now) shows up to investigate the earlier shots. They see Sam hanging around, and ask him where "Earl" (the old man) is. Sam responds with "who's Earl", and the officers begin to suspect something is up (point of fact: nobody disposed of the body during the previous hour). While the officers are trying to get Sam to let them pat him down while one of them searches for Earl, Sam gets testy with Knight-Errant, back-talking the officers and then blatantly signalling the rest of the group on his commlink. One of the officers radios for backup and is about to shoot/subdue him, but loses the surprise test to Sam, who draws down on the officer and puts him down (well, 8/10 boxes) with one good shot. The Hacker, who had been inactive up until this point, notices the confrontation and films the whole thing on his commlink (he doesn't know the rest of the group).
The
other officer then unloads on Sam with two bursts from his SMG, dealing a mere 6 boxes. Sam then flees towards the rest of the group, while the remaining Knight-Errant officer fires on the fleeing Sam, but misses. Joe Nobody, who was covering the warehouse from a perch on top of a stack of junked cars, turns and tries to fire a gel round at the remaining K-E officer (Macabee warns him not to go lethal on K-E), but even using only lightly modified LS officer stats, the gel round pings off with a mere 2 boxes. The K-E officer, now aware of a sniper, takes cover and drags his injured partner to safety. He also tells the hacker to GTFO.
K-E backup arrives fast. Macabee sets off several smoke grenades to cover their escape, and since I don't want this to turn into the main part of the adventure, I offer the players a simple infiltration test to slip away into the Barrens before the net closes in on them. Anyone with 4 hits is scott free, anyone with 3 hits is photographed at the scene, but probably not that well, and anyone with 2 or 1 successes escapes the junkyard but is hotly pursued by drones (and is definitely identified if they have a SIN). The players results:
- Joe Nobody escaped scott-free.
- The Seeker escaped, but was photographed fleeing; if she keeps a low profile, it could blow over in a few weeks.
- The hacker escaped, but was photographed. He's unlikely to be implicated in the shooting, however.
- The rest of the group were all chased down by drones.
Wanting to give them a second chance, I asked the players for a Running test (threshold 3) to sprint fast enough to lose the drones in the barrens (it was daytime, so there are theoretically crowds to get lost in, alleyways, etc.). Everyone manages to make this test except for Sam. Even Jackie, who has a Strength of 2, manages to make it because he has Running as a skill and is rather lucky. Still, Jackie has a SIN, failed the infiltration roll (and had to go soon), so because it fit so well with how his character would eventually wind up in jail, I ruled that Jackie was picked up a few days later, while Sam was arrested on the scene and charged with both the murder of the junkyard attendant (which he was certainly guilty of) and with murdering a warehouse full of ghouls (Knight Errant did this, but pinned it on him). Ghoul-Rights activists were furious, etc. etc.
This junkyard scene was, without a doubt, the highlight of the evening. I'm sure mechanically this ought to have been handled differently, but the players didn't feel that I was unfair to them, and I didn't feel like I was letting them get away with too much. Everyone had fun. The players regrouped for the Nabo show later that night, but by then it was getting late and we had to shut it down shortly afterwards. We were, however, joined by two more players (which is handy, since Sam and Jackie's players both had to go home):
Mad Monkey (female troll), a bounty hunter (Food Fight premade)
Burner (male elf), a combat mage (Food Fight premade).
Not much else happened; Joe Nobody used his natural orkness, a prepared study of the fashion sense of Nabo's entourage, and a nanopaste disguise to infiltrate the concert as one of the guards, while the rest of the group bribed their way in. The hacker jumped into Joe's commlink node, Joe stumbled into the dressing room where one of Nabo's buddies was getting down with two half-dressed ork ladies, and with some nice social rolls he faked dropping a pile of stuff he was carrying and placed his commlink near Nabo's unsecured commlink, allowing the Hacker to retrieve the e-mail from the seller. We closed the game down there.
My Halloween GMing adventure, as seen on that "other" forum
Nov 2 2011, 08:46 PM
JonathanC My Halloween GMing adventure Nov 2 2011, 08:46 PM
