I think I screwed up my Shadowrun game Options

[JonathanC]

My Shadowrun game has been on rocky footing for a few months, due to scheduling and the loss of a player due to work. Currently the group is only 3 players. All of the characters are mundane, and none of them has hacking skills (the Technomancer is the one who got a new job and stopped being able to attend).

It is in this environment that I sent them on the run in question. Combat-wise, they're actually quite competent, so I thought it would be fun to put them up against a magical foe: in this case, an evil Free Spirit. The problem, it seems, was with my execution.

The fixer hooked them up with a Johnson, but made it clear he knew little/nothing about what the Johnson wanted. They met in a park; the Johnson was an Asian woman who claimed that the government had taken her children away and given them to foster parents, and was refusing her visitation. She wanted the kids to be stolen back. The kids were still young, and were assumed to have been taken early enough that they might not recognize her, or even realize that they were adopted.

Footwork turned up nothing of interest on the parents. Corp workers, nothing special, living in a middle-class part of Renton. Records of adoption aren't going to be accessible by a Data Search check (at least, that's what I figured), and the TM left around this time, so their vague plans to hack into the records to check never materialized. I did let them gain access to some street-level surveillance photos of the area around the park where they met the lady - she never emerged from the park. They asked a hacker contact to look her up, but the hacker found absolutely nothing. They seemed to just assume that either their hacker friend sucked, or this person was super-connected; no suspicion of anything supernatural.

The kidnapping happened. They noticed that the kids were wearing biomonitors, but didn't remove them. They used tranq patches and left the house....I figured it was reasonable that exiting the house at 2am with wired-up kids would set off an alarm, so they were attacked by some drones. Very little came of it: they got to the van, the drones tried to shoot at the side of the van a little (mainly to mark it) but couldn't keep up for long, and the players easily disposed of them.

The next session was kind of fun, since we got to use the chase rules after the police started a pursuit. During the chase, one of the players wanted to fire on the patrol cars with his LMG, but it was an armored rigger van, so I was like "dude, you can't just stick that thing out of a window...I don't even think there are windows in the back". So he opened the side door and fired, but nearly got thrown off when the van was rammed. One of the kids almost flew out of the open door, but he caught them. I think it's reasonable to say that the patrol car's dash-cam would have caught him though.

The thing is they didn't seem to have a great idea of where they wanted to run to, and they ended up going to Redmond. None of the players are from Redmond, or have contacts there, so when they asked for a safehouse there, I was like "uh...wait, what?" The van had been pretty badly damaged during the case (they got rammed by a patrol car and lost half of the damage boxes on the van), so I let them find an abandoned service station. I had a police drone following them from afar after the end of the chase, and it took a pot-shot at one of them. They bailed soon after, and shot up the drone. They spent the night in an abandoned lot, with the rigger doing some basic repairs on the van.

Next morning, they made contact with a smuggler contact to try to find a route back to Puyallup, since going through the city didn't seem safe. They also heard a news report about the kidnapping, including a note that there had been other disappearances in previous months. At various times during this op, by the way, the kids would wake up, scream, beg to be taken home, and were usually tranq'd again or gagged. Anyway, the smuggler agrees to help and gives them a route that will take them briefly into Salish territory, in exchange for them delivering a small package. The delivery goes fine. I tried to spice things up with some random encounters, but the players avoided them.

At some point the players buy some food from a service station, and it occurs to all of us that the kids haven't been fed or allowed to use a bathroom. They feed the kids some snake jerky that they bought in Salish, and when they arrive in Puyallup they get some fresh, cheap clothes and wipes for the kids to clean themselves up with (looking back on it, the oldest kid was like 7, so this seems kind of ridiculous). Anyway, the brief time with the kids ungagged gives the kids another chance to ask what's going on, but no info is given. At the meet with the Johnson, one of the kids looks at the woman (by this time, the kids had been told they were being given to their mother), turns to one player, and says "that isn't my mother".

The woman comes over, hugs the kids, and soon after both kids claim to recognize her as their mother. She pays the group, gets in her car, and drives off. A day or so later, the players hear on the news that the kids' bodies were found, mostly eaten. Tests for HMHVV on the remains were negative, so it wasn't ghouls.

The players seemed a bit unsatisfied, and I definitely was. Suddenly they cared that they handed the kids over to a child-eating abomination, but various times during the op when I dropped hints that there was an odd lack of info about this woman, and no reason why the family would be a target of corporate espionage, nobody was suspicious or thought to question their Johnson's motives.

I'm taking responsibility for this, though. I think I just ran a crappy game, and the gaps in play sessions didn't help at all.