A foreign concept:, compassion Options

[Dog]

I'm gonna put out a challenge to tell a different story from the typical "how I fried the biggest meanest shedim/dragon/CEO with my cyber-troll strength/custom assault rifle/fireball, without losing my shades and delivering clever movie quotes all the way."

Instead, what's the most selfless thing you've seen happen in a game? Keep in mind that giving away 12 000 :nuyen: when you've access to 300 000 :nuyen: is not so impressive as a squatter who gives up his space under the warm vent to the new kid. Also, nothing done with the intention of a karma reward counts.
Has anybody's character made a real big sacrifice just because it was the right thing to do? I'm curious. How did the GM or other players react?

[fistandantilus4....]

couple actually. For one, have a character that's hunting down Tanamous in his area on his own. Same character is doing his own run to get a (now deceased) friends kid out of a de-magic-ing camp. Remember the de-gaying camp? That's where the run idea came from apparently. The little girls mother died in a random (so far at least ) car crash, and the will dissapeared. So the Great Aunt, who hates all thigns awakened, has put the five year old into a de-magicing camp.

At this point, my character, (my fav gargoyle shaman) is in Japan, about to kill on Oyabun in order to get the will back. LOOOOONG story there. Completely self motivated run.

[Dog]

Interesting. What about all the other kids in the camp? What's gonna happen to the little girl once she's rescued, if the will doesn't turn up? Great plot idea. Mind if I steal it?

[fistandantilus4....]

actually, the little girl was someone that I kidnapped/rescued from her criminal father for the mother on one of my first runs. The GM ruled that she was magically active ,although not really 'active' yet, so I've been tutoring her ever since. So the character is a 'friend of the family'. My gargoyle shaman acutally has a voodoun girlfriend, and had her summon the mother's spirit back from the dead, and got the ok to adopt the kid, as was written in the will, hence why I'm going for it. Apparetnly the Aunt is a big nasty back in the U.K. and has some Yak connections that owed her big.

On a side note, also liberated a couple of 'indentured' 'yaks', like a geisha that was mutilated so that she could no longer hear so that she was safe at meets, and her brother that was forced to serve the clan by threatening the family. My character is brining them back to Seattle with him. Already 'liberated' the family.

As for the camp, he's also already been on the phone with his fixer, setting up some runners to do away with the camp. First, hack it to get the names of the kids / families, and see if there's any way to leverage them out. THen bankrupt/destroy the camp it's self. Bankrolled all by my character off of the last few runs I've done.

And feel free to use it. It's a really great run.

Edit: Sorry, dind't answer all of your questions. I know for fact that the oyabun has the will in his safe at his home. I think because the Aunt has something over on him, and he wants some leverage of his own. I'm planning on taking him out if I can because of how nasty he is. If the will doesn't show for any reason, I've got plenty of safe houses in a few different spots around the world.

Also, I already hired a runner team to sneak into one of her manions (summer home in France) and release a few (read: 15) jars of termites. So I'm fighing the good fight back.


Also a contact of mine form the beginning of the game was a small time yak Oyabun in Sewattle, that was mysteriously murdered. I investigated on my own, because , believe or not, he was a pretty nice guy. I was pretty sure it was the son, but couldn't prove it. So I helped the Voodoun chica of mine summon him up as a zombie , and then put a a hefty ward around us, then dowsed her w/ DMSO. Instant Grande Zombie. Suffice to say, now the Oyabun has a lot more power, and the son is a lot more not around. He's .... an ... interesting ... contact.

[nick012000]

My group bodyguarded a chick who used to be the girlfriend of one of the Seoulpa Ring's head honcho, after she ran away. This was mostly because of the badass free spirit (to whom we refer to as Mr. Sandles, due to the fact his metahuman form has a proclivity towards doing Jesus impersonations) paid us with 50k nuyen worth of gemstones (not that we knew that at the time, we just saw a pile of bigass rubies he just created), and insinuated that we would all come to painful deaths if we didn't.

So, we ask her about what she knew about their operations, and she told us. We then had a decker contact rig up a program to send this info to every other organized crime syndicate in Seattle.

Around this time, we began getting hounded by watcher spirits announcing the time of our deaths. So we had the decker set it to send at the time the watchers were telling us that we were going to die.

Fast forward to the next day, and one encounter with Seoupa Ring hitmen (including the initiated Shark Shaman who summoned the watcher who were pestering us) later, the program went off, the data was sent, and gangsters started dieing in an all out gang war.

In a different run, the group's shaman grabbed a kid with Levitate to save him from a drifting motorcycle that belonged to a Halloweener that aforementioned shaman had just stunballed.

Our shadowrunning team's name is Collateral Damage. We live up to that name.

[Ophis]

I remeber one "run". One of the characters Metatron my other half's blue elf sniper was poking around the old funfair in denver Ute sector that GW trashed, he'd noticed a while befor that the place was weird so wanted to get an idea of what GW was up to. He runs in to the Guide who asks him to find Nicholas Whitebird(GW eventual translator). Because it needs doing. Metatron goes out to find him. Does so and gets the rest of the group help run security on picking him up and delivering him to the guide secretly. This the group jump too with speed and grace. On the way there one of them says "So how much are we getting payed for this?" Metatron replies "Nothing, it just needs doing..."
The group seem to go along with this, but then is Metatron said we do something they did, and he had a tendancy to do freebies to those in need all the time. His girl friend almost killed him when he lent their bed to friends in need of crash space.

Edit - remebered the name.

[mfb]

i didn't (attempt to) shoot my Johnson in the face after she sent us to a remote Indonesian island that convulsed in Awakened revolution and shedim invasion 12 hours after we arrived. not even when i realized that we got paid 40k, but i lost an 80k sneaking suit and assorted other gear when the rebels hit my hotel with a cruise missile.

the most selfless actual act (as opposed to omission of an act)... hm, back when my char was just starting out, he solo'd a force 8 earth elemental for a few rounds, buying his team time to put down the group of ex-red sam blues and their pet medusa. damn thing took me to S+3, even though i got two free passes while it finished materializing.

[mmu1]

I had a character save a random ork ganger from getting beaten to death, then use his Doc Wagon contract to get him emergency trauma surgery, and pay for his hospital stay afterwards - all of which eventually cost him around 15,000 :nuyen:, roughly 1/3rd of the money he had saved at the time.

He did end up paying me back eventually with some information that led to a lucrative run, and ended up a contact/dependent, but at the time, I just spent 15,000 on a random act of charity...

Oh, also - after capturing a Johnson who double-crossed us, we let him pay us and set him loose instead of killing him. ;)

[Dawnshadow]

Two characters.. one hovering on the edge of passing out. Has a few seconds left conscious (timed stimpatch), and the adept..

We had a split second warning, then we were about to become roasted. The adept made the dodge, the almost passed out guy didn't. At all. The adept used his successes to throw his partner out of the blast of flame.

Otherwise.. hmm..

We went on a trip to Amazonia to find the adept's brother. And then helped the Yucotan rebels on an assault (which would have been a suicide assault, they were that bad..) to break out said brother and a few others. Then we .. erm.. helped the adept fulfill his initiatory group obligation and kill a toxic shaman. We sortof got paid.. there were two foci that the metalhead looted.

[Velocity]

The street shaman in my group effectively roleplays the 'Day Job' Flaw, although he doesn't have it (and got no points for it at character generation). His "day job" is patrolling the barrens with an eye towards helping those in need. He's charitable with local itinerants and uses his 'Create Food' spell to run a little mobile soup kitchen. With minor magic, he's been able to winterize peoples' clothing, diagnoses ailments, treat injuries, resolve arguments, return stolen property, repair shelters, etc.

It's presumed that the character does this during his down time and the PC regularly explains the sorts of things he's doing. Every few sessions, we'll roleplay through a little scene wherein he engages in some of this stuff. It adds a lot of colour to the campaign and has created some really interesting exchanges within the group: witness the compassionate Monkey shaman debating the validity of charity with the mercenary decker. :)

[nezumi]

Once, when I was done holding up this stuffer shack, on my way out I said 'thank you', and I helped up some old lady I'd bowled over on the way in.

[Leviathan]

I'd organised for an 'information gatherer' to get some info for me, and him and his crew got into a fair bit of trouble, adn we had a run to pull them out.
He lost his van and most of his crew, but at least one member of my SR team thought that he'd set us up (long story), but I refused to let the gun bunny shoot him.
He paid the rest of the group (I refused), and gave us info for our next run, I promised (and delivered) 20% of my share of the run so he could try and get back up and running. (may not seem like much but at that point I had a total worth of about :nuyen: 15,000, after three odd runs.

[JesterX]

Doc. Raven and his team...

[Arethusa]

Closest I've got was my first (and, thus far, only) Shadowrun character. We got a job to locate and retrieve a family's daughter who'd been kidnapped. After a lot of poking around, we found she'd been taken by a cult. We surrounded the place and surveilled for a while before sending in one member under (hasty, sloppy) cover while I slipped inside unnoticed and found the girl— with her mother. Only, this was a different mother, as she'd been adopted. Seemed her biological mother decided she was ready for parenthood now.

There were a number of cultists around, all armed, paranoid, and devoted enough to make forcible retrieval possible, but difficult and bloody. After talking with the girl and her mother for a few minutes, I called abort. Too many complications, and a brief moment of humanity. So we walked away and scrubbed the job.

Not that that was the end of it. Two team members decided they didn't much like not getting paid and went back to the parents who'd initially hired us and sold the girl's location to them. Then we got a call for another job, and it turned out to be an FBI sting, only they were more interested in information we had about a previous employer. Didn't help much as it turned out to be an ambush from a third party. We got out barely and made it to a safehouse. One of the same team members tried again to go behind our backs to deal, and met up with the former employer that the FBI wanted information on. Last I recall, he got eaten by a fleshform bug spirit.

[Critias]

I can't think of very many nice things most of my characters have done. Maybe WK or MFB have a clearer memory of such nonsense than I do -- but pretty much all of my main characters' actions have been largely self-motivated, even the "good" things they did were mostly in there for largely selfish reasons.

[Kagetenshi]

Hm. I think the nicest two things I've done recently were only running over a mage's legs instead of his torso, and shooting someone in the back of the head with a rifle bullet instead of blowtorching his head off.

~J, getting lumps of coal every December since the Awakening.

[mmu1]

[Kyoto Kid]

The little wiz kid inventor/demo expert Leela retired from active shadowrunning to save the rest of the team as well as the NPCs that came after us.

We were being being hunted down by the same mercenary group that pulled her out of a firefight gone sour back in Croatia two years beforehand (part of her character story). Their leader (Chicago Joe) had already managed to off one of the runners, and several days later there was a nasty fight at Leela's Caretaker's loft where she was living, which seriously injured several other members of the team and took out Joe's number one mage/ex marine Cora (the woman who grabbed Leela & carried her to the waiting LAV that night in Croatia). Not wanting this to continue Leela came to the group with a proposal she hammered out with one of my other characters (we have a very small group so several of us are allowed to 'double up' on characters). Leela agreed to go and live with this character's mother in the UK and thus give hp her SINless life for good.

Leela was a very fun character to play and possibly the best, most original character concept I came up with in a long time. She was basically an "eighteen year old going on thirteen" (due to a developmental handicap she suffered as the result of the attack that killed her family ten years ago) who was a technical genius and musical prodigy. Leela was also well liked by the other players and some were sorry to see her go. One of the cool things was that she was the catalyst for a new flaw that my GM wrote up afterwards called "Young Looking" whereby the character is looked on by others as being a young child ("...sorry kid, that Ares Predator is for grownups...").

On the bright side, afterwards, there were a couple of "transition" sessions where Leela graduated from PC to NPC. The GM had her new adoptive mother get her back on track with her interrupted musical career which culminated with a spectacular debut concert at London's Royal festival Hall (we used the old Shadowbeat performance rules to determine initial impact). She has since gone on to become Europe's "Novastar" of the keyboard and has become one of the star cast members in the campaign I have been running entitled "Rhapsody in Shadow".

[SL James]

[fistandantilus4....]

I ran agame once where the team took a job to go kill Sonadar. Fot those of you who don't know, Sonadar is(was) a feathered Serpent that fought against the Azzies until his death in 2064. Sonadar convinced them to switch sides, and they joined the rebels in a raid against an Azzie fort.

A few days later, back in Seattle, the troll street sam was gunned down by a sniper in the street. With a Barret 121. Twice. Two deadly wounds. Miracously, he survived , thanks to Doc wagon and a 14 body.

Moral of the story is that no good deed goes unpunished by the Azzies.

[mfb]

[nick012000]

[Dog]

Interesting where this conversation has led....

[Ophis]

I've just thought of another altruistic run my last big campaign group did.

They single handly defended LA from Saito's forces. More specifically they took out the running team he sent to take over LAs fusion reactors. They did this because Metatron the team leader is a North Cal Gypsy. Hell of a run climaxing with with Metatron blowing an AV Missile out of the sky with his av loading sniper rifle (he built it himself from some parts he nicked) the missile was aimed at the reactors as a final fuck you from the defeated team who where it has to be said a tad psychotic.

[pragma]

One of my players is a communist and dropped 150,000 :nuyen: to upgrade from low to medium lifestyle and bring the entire block with him.