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> Offing an old friend... (Players stay away!), Hard Goodbyes.
Rifleman
post Aug 1 2007, 04:10 AM
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Basics of it, it's time to finally put to an end the adventures of my original Character, who graduated to NPC status sometime around the beginning of Second edition. (Yes, he's that old.)

The trouble is, I owe him a good send off since he has been with me and my players for that long. Heck, he's been the free contact and fly on the wall for over a decade. So, I want to run it by people for Ideas.

Basically, I'm going to turn it into a murder mystery in a couple sessions based around something the group has done (based on his last email message sent about fourty five seconds before his death.) Unfortunately between his enemies, and their enemies, the list is quite long.

For reference his name is Jack Daniel, occasionally 'Black' Jack Daniels after a bad joke started by PC's about his taste in clothes.

Azzies: Long outstanding feud with JD (he's a Mexican, not an Azzie, if you get my drift), PC's are beginning a legal action that risks exposing an Azzie operation in Tir right before the revolutions. JD indirectly will give them the smoking gun next game.

Shiawase: PC's legal action also targets Shiawase given the nature of the op and the benefits reaped after the fact. Not so much worried about any penalties they might get, even from the corporate court, but it threatens to engulf some of their best engineers. Making the players slink back into the shadows long enough to 'hide' their talent is not outside the realm of reason.

Renraku: He stole a disk back in the day that Renraku would like to never come to light, especially given current events. Now, they don't know where it is due to the players messing with events. If they were to come asking, he couldn't give them the disk because the players took it away from him.

The Mob: Did I mention the players are trying to convince one of Rowena's underlings to stand up to her, and take power? Yeah, oh, and JD has provided them missles and machine guns not two months before they started talking this smack. Yeah...

His old teammate: They know that his former partner, a Rigger/Sniper, has put him in the hospital before over an argument about 'that damn disk' (Believed to be a record of Deus' development, but no one is sure.') Players have worked with him before, and actually gave him the disk. They also know he contracts these days directly with the corporate court.

Ares: One of the runners really bit a piece off Ares, and JD has told them twice behind the scenes where they can shove it. So far, they've respected him (After all, he's a client with a major gun running operation into L.A. and the West coast of Aztlan) but two is far more than they normally give other people.

So thoughts, ideas on how I should play this?
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PlatonicPimp
post Aug 1 2007, 04:52 AM
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Have him killed by something else entirely.

No, seriously. If you are going to det up a murder mistery, you have some serious red herrings all there already. Now post-death, it's time to hit the players with something they didn't know about old JD. Like his bastard kid that he sends money to every now and again, which he fathered with the girl he never got over but who couldn't live with his profession and died years later because of something he did to piss someone off. Or whatever cooler story you can come up with. This is your last chance to flesh out this character. Be sure to tell your players something they didn't already know.

So the players are going to immediately suspect the enemies they know. They'll do their legwork, and you get to retell the stories of why these enemies hate him. But none of them did it, and it shouldn't be too difficult to figure that out once they look objectively. But the legwork turns up things the players never knew about the character, and while they go down the list of likely suspects they'll inadvertently gather the pieces to implicate the real killer. The ideal situation has them shocked when they figure it out, but then saying that it makes perfect sense, in hindsight.

I'd always have my heroes go down fighting the good fight, but that's me.

And lastly, I think few things are more cyberpunk than taking a dude who's Double dealed Mafioso, stood down dragons, fucked the megas and gotten away with it, than having some gutter punk catch them off guard and blow them away over something stupid like the shop till. YMMV.
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Sedna
post Aug 1 2007, 05:21 AM
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PlatonicPimp, I've had that same experience. (Last paragraph.) Plus there's few stronger shock moments, both IC and OOC.
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Ancient History
post Aug 1 2007, 07:30 AM
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Ever seen the end of the comic Wanted? The scary Charlie Bronson look-alike feeling his age and wanting it done right?

Double tap, back of the head. Make it clean.
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Moon-Hawk
post Aug 1 2007, 03:16 PM
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I have nothing to add other than, "What PlatonicPimp said." Good stuff!
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Chrome Shadow
post Aug 1 2007, 05:38 PM
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QUOTE (PlatonicPimp)
...I think few things are more cyberpunk than taking a dude who's Double dealed Mafioso, stood down dragons, fucked the megas and gotten away with it, than having some gutter punk catch them off guard and blow them away over something stupid like the shop till. YMMV.

Hell yeah!!!
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hyzmarca
post Aug 1 2007, 06:10 PM
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Star out by having him contact the PCs for combat support. He is going to a meeting that he cannot avoid, but he knows that it is really a set up. The PCs need to come in and covertly take out the assassination squad before the meeting begins. This shouldn't be excessively difficult , but in the end he never shows. Interrogation of the squad leads them back to one of the corporations that don't like him.

His body is found in an ally several blocks away from the meeting site, shot several times with a Predator and bare-footed.

Further investigations show that another of these corporations is backmailing the teammate with something big, and forcing him to commit the murder. He is the one who covertly arranged the set-up, trying to keep his hands off of it by letting a different corp take JD out. He know immediately when this failed and made an attempt to intercept JD.

But this attempt failed, of course. JD had everything planned out. He knew that his teammate was going to betray him and had a way out. What he didn't count on was that a guy with a gun and more bullets than scruples would like his shoes.

All corporate avenues will lead to people who tried to kill JD and who deserve to die for it, but they won't lead to the real killer. That can only be achieved through a street level investigation. A canvas of the neighborhood and interviews with people who live there will provide a list of usual suspects, including ones who were spotted near the murder scene. Further investigation reveals that it is none of the usual suspects, but interrogation of them can lead to the identity of the real killer, a child (between the ages of 7 and 12, depending on the flavor of your Sixth World, I prefer 7) wearing adult-sided shoes stuffed with paper.

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Dashifen
post Aug 1 2007, 06:15 PM
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I wonder if a ritual link could be made between the shoes and the corpse .... athlete's foot is a fungus isn't it :D
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Ravor
post Aug 1 2007, 06:18 PM
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*chuckles* Well if they were his favorite shoes then you wouldn't even need to rely on fungus for the link. :cyber:
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Dashifen
post Aug 1 2007, 06:19 PM
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True.
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Dizzman
post Aug 1 2007, 07:51 PM
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If he's really torqued off the Azzies, they might want more than his death for revenge. One option is to have the Azzies capture him. The PCs chase back to Aztlan (if high powered game) or the nearest corp Pyramid (if lower powered game) just in time to see their long-time friend sacrificed and formed into a blood spirit. Can they put their old friend out of his misery?

Or if you want to go the mystery route - have Jack disappear first. As they track down old enemies and chase red herring leads - more of their contacts disappear. The only connection - how long they know J.D. Is it someone systematically destroying J.D.'s life? No its J.D. It could be a number of reasons - he's been captured by Azzies, sacrificed and summoned as a blood spirit. Some very nasty psychotropic ICE has warped his personality. He's just plain decided to go underground for good - and is eliminating any ties. The P.C.s have no choice, but to take him out, since they're on the list as well.
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Kyoto Kid
post Aug 1 2007, 08:34 PM
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...for all the metaplots ivolving IEs, GD, & Horrors, drop bears etc. I find noting better than a good old fashioned murder mystery. Intrigue and all sorts of potential twists & turns here. Legwork would be very important, so PCs should have some supportive knowledge skills.

Damn, where are you running this in RL? Sounds like the kind of campaign I would enjoy.
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Begby
post Aug 1 2007, 08:54 PM
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QUOTE (Rifleman)
Renraku: He stole a disk back in the day that Renraku would like to never come to light, especially given current events. Now, they don't know where it is due to the players messing with events. If they were to come asking, he couldn't give them the disk because the players took it away from him.


I've no great ideas regarding his murder, but this gives me an idea for his remains. If he's seriously hurt, he could have much of his body replaced, a cyberbrain and become a construct of the Deus AI. From there he sort of just disappears... leaving players to wonder if there's a guy that looks like their old friend wandering around with Deus' personality somewhere. That would also give you a chance to reintroduce him in the future... as him but another character entirely.
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Rifleman
post Aug 2 2007, 01:57 AM
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QUOTE (Kyoto Kid)
...for all the metaplots ivolving IEs, GD, & Horrors, drop bears etc. I find noting better than a good old fashioned murder mystery. Intrigue and all sorts of potential twists & turns here. Legwork would be very important, so PCs should have some supportive knowledge skills.

Damn, where are you running this in RL? Sounds like the kind of campaign I would enjoy.

Thanks everyone for the ideas, and keep them coming.

As for when and where, I run a Saturday game at the store provided in my comment section. It's in Maryland if anyone's interested, although the game is rather large at the moment....

Also, on some of the idea's presented, a few other notes about JD's background I though I'd throw out there:

His original retirement was after a vendetta mission of him and his team against a local Azzie VP. The azzies had killed two PC's on the run before, and the remaining team was hankering for blood.

End result: Azzie local office and VP massacured, their systems fried, three dead runners, my character stabilized on a boat heading to Vladivostalk and the other two runners, X (His former teammate mentioned earlier,) and the Troll Heavy Weapons guy/Intimidator escape into the city.

X bolted leaving me, the troll, and our mage behind. X blames JD for dragging the rest of the team into his war, JD blames X for bolting.

JD is heavily cybered as is, having a cyber arm, a cyber hand, a cyber leg, datajack, and a couple other bits.

JD is a ladies man at heart, and it's gotten him in trouble before. He tried (emphasis on tried) to seduce Rowena once upon a time. Didn't really work out, as you can imagine.

My thoughts: I'm probably going to go with the idea of having someone random kill JD. The kid idea of someone around 8 or 9 sounds about right, probably not for his shoes but for his cyber. Most of it's quality synthetics, but the hand is obvious and branded with the word 'steel'. And the fact that he wears quality weaponry like the Hammerelli and a HK227X loaded with ADPS makes his, ironically, a choice target if the kid realized he could get the drop on him with a sawed off 990. Just gets scared off before he can actually get to his cyber by others investigating the corpse.

This, of course, leads people who do look to note that they saw some 'corporate types' standing around the body and rifling through everything after they heard the shots.

What do you think?
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