Help breath life into my game! Options

[Yoan]

Luckily none of my players have been active here lately... ;)

Our last game was about, a month ago... I was running my 4th-edition converted version of that run in South America/Guyana found in Wake of the Comet (or is it YotC? I keep confusing the two... :rotfl:), etc...

They got their mark (it`s an extracation) but were basically chased into the middle of the jungles after a surprise attack by the parent corporation.

What can I throw at them?

Poor weather... sure. What kind of paranimals chill in the jungle?

What kind of cool/dramatic/dangerous/cinematic events? Ie: abandoned something or other... what kind of opposition (Paranormal or not)

And more importantly, how do they leave the country?

:D

I have a few of my own ideas, but anything you can add would be much appreciated. It`s been a long time since our last game, and their first, and likely last, foray into South America not to mention the stinkin` jungle...

[FrankTrollman]

Flying Candiru. They wound animals and spread malaria. It's in Augmentation.

-Frank

[HappyDaze]

[Simon May]

1) First thing I'd do is throw an abandoned temple at them. Think Incan ruin. Because the team is not natural to the jungle, throw a few spirits (perhaps the same ones fighting against the toxic spirits up north) at them. You may want to consider treasure, or perhaps a secret cult trying to summon a great insect spirit into the middle. They could always choose to run instead of stopping the ceremony, which leaves the angry insect spirit after them for witnessing its rebirth.

2) To get out, you have several options. My personal favorite is hijacking a drug smuggling boat. They find a camp with boats near the coast packed with cram and AK totting baddies. If they destroy the camp, more power to them. Regardless, when they hop the boat and take off, a coast guard search reveals it's packed with drugs. Of course, if they run whe the coast guard tries to pull them over, they might get away. Either way, there's now a drug lord on their ass.

[sinthalix]

Chupacabra attack.

I threw a handful of them at my party while they were in the jungle and the party still talks about it today. With concealment, darkness, etc, chupacabra are vicious. I wanted to play a clip from Predator to put them in fear, but I couldn't find one right that moment so I just had to describe it that way.

It made the party paranoid for the rest of the trip...and it was a long trip back out.

[Kyoto Kid]

...tropical diseases & poisonous critters. Especially if their mage doesn't have a Cure Disease or Antidote spell. Their Medikit (if anyone thought to get one or haven't left it behind) can't last forever. Poisonous critters don't have to be big or very noticeable either. Think arachnids, snakes, insects, even poisonous plants.

[JBlades]

Don't forget the nastiest thing about the jungle, foot rot! Big bad shadowrunners better remember to change their socks! :evil:

[Kingmaker]

[apollo124]

If only there was some canon book dealing with South America..... :D

Do they have a reliable GPS with them? Simply getting lost in the middle of the jungle, with no knowledge of how to get out could be pretty effective, especially if they can't find a river. (Dry season?)

Don't forget non-Awakened critters. Jaguars, piranha, disease-carrying mosquitoes, and alligators can be effective and scary, especially if the party is already running low on ammo/mojo.

[Crusher Bob]

Depends on what you think your players want, I guess. Personally, I think using the jugle as just another environment to shoot thing in is kinda lame. I'd want to know how actually being in the jungle affects me rather than noticing that the skins on all the mobs have changed.

So:

It's hot, this means that any moving around will make them sweat, a lot. Since the humidity is very high too, you can't cool off very well. All that armor you might used to be wearing will make you require lots more water and eventually wrack up the fatigue penalties.

It rains quite heavily basically every afternoon/evening. This can play hell on your equipment, depending on where you got it from. Generally, milspec equipment will be fine if properly cared for (do they have the skills to care for it? even a point of the relevant B/R skill would really help). On the other hand, civilian spec equipment made for use in temperate zones will have plenty of trouble. After few days in the rain and abuse, are your shoes falling off your feet?

Water
You'll require at least 6 liters (kg) of water every day (or a lot more if you are really running around) to stay healthy. Do they have enough containers to carry that water? Sure it rains every evening, but what about your water needs during the day?

Do they have the survival skills to make sure their water isn't contaminated? If not, have them make body tests at threshold 1 or 2 to not get diarrhea. This greatly increases your water requirements and probably gives you some penalties as well.

If you want to be graphic, you can describe how sore your ass gets after constant walking, constant diarrhea, and having real trouble getting clean.

Line of sight
LOS is very restricted in the jungle, this makes planning a travel route very difficult. You can find you've walked to the bottom of a cliff and have to backtrack considerably to find a way around (or will they just try to climb the cliff?). A character with navigational skill is a real boon here. Do they have a compass?, map?, GPS? are they following a river? How do they know where they are going?

Note that at night during the rain, visibilty is even more limited. Especially since the jungle canopy blocks out light from the sky. (highlight utility of thermographic vision and astral perception/detection spells)

Noise
Just about every animal in the jungle will make noise. There will be all sorts of bird calls and so on. If the call stop, this usually means the animals are afraid of something. (good roll on survival skill detects ambush be some predator)

So, to recap, highlight how the jugle is different from the city street with some more tree on it. Highlight how much easier things are if you have a couple of points in skills like navigation and survival. When the characters get out of the jungle, they should be thinking about how much the jungle sucked to be in, not how much tougher those green devil rats were to kill.

[PH3NOmenon]

what? nobody mentioned drop-bears yet?

[Zhan Shi]

Sangre Del Diablo. Flesh eating trees. See Year of the Comet.

Nasty awakened spider larvae that live in fruit...or kiwis, at least. See Predator and Prey.

EDIT: Several species of shapeshifters.

[Mercer]

I notice that jungles are listed as "Moderate", although I'd consider upping the South American jungles to Tough (unless that would be a complete death sentence to the characters). I could see the heart of the Amazon being a little tougher to make it in than "foothills", particularly with the extreme heat and threat of dehydration.

One thing I'm not wild about is that Stun from Survival Tests can't be healed until the character is back in civilization or no longer has to rely on their Survival skill. I'd be willing to let characters who bivouac regain some Stun, even if it isn't exactly civilization and they're still relying on their Survival skills. Two reasons for that, 1) I think people can regain Stun in the wilderness, and 2) It gives the characters an incentive to bed down in the jungle rather than trying to push on when they're dehydrated and exhausted.

Predator is a good movie for inspiration, as is Romancing the Stone, Sniper and pretty much the whole Vietnam sub-genre. Anaconda is as well.

For critters, I'd probably use regular animals mostly, and then a few awakened threats here and there. I prefer to use the magical stuff as a seasoning rather than as the main course. Black Caiman, jaguars (which are sticking in my head as the largest of the man-eater cats, like to jump down out of trees onto people), and what I'm sure is a wide and terrifying variety of snakes and spiders.

Another thing is that not every wilderness encounter has to be a great cat landing on your head. Animals don't exist for the sole purpose of throwing themselves at heavily armed psychopaths (at least, not in this system), so I'd include some fluff animal encounters. Every nature film I've seen of anacondas involves a park ranger type coming across something that looks like industrial piping, following it until he finds the snake's head, and then lifting it up for the camera. So they are apparently not the whirling tornados of death the movie Anaconda would have us believe. (It is possible that anacondas, like all right-thinking beings, merely become violent in the presence of actor John Voight.) I remember when I was running my African game, I kept including a species of awakened cockroach from Cyberpirates that's one power was to soothe emotions by trilling. Granted, SR is not the system to be a large soothing roach, and my players always answered their trills with full auto-fire because they thought they were insect spirits trying to take over their brains, but the roaches meant well.

I didn't know where Guyana is, and this is what I found on wikipedia trying to find out:

[Riley37]

I proposed some optional Qualities a while ago about meticulous habits of keeping your equipment in good condition (inspired by kzt's posts on what it takes to max out the accuracy of a sniper rifle), and alternatively, the Sloppy Maintenance quality which has an effect kinda like Gremlins.

I was in a campaign in which some of the ghosts of Jonestown had a tendency to possess people, then re-enact suicide by drinking something toxic.

I know a great Jonestown Massacre joke, and I would tell it here, but the punch line is too long.

[Riley37]

oh yeah. ants. army ants. indeed, the infamous Guyanese army ant death spiral:

theantroom.blogspot.com/2006/11/ant-death-spiral.html

shadowrunners who are adapted wonderfully for shooting large animals (eg metahumans) will have a challege dealing with swarms of ants. although magic might do just fine, eg 2 points of Armor = totally immune to anything an ant can do. even if the ants have tiny dikoted katanas.

[Mercer]

It would seem like armor would be less effective against tiny ants, unless it was chemsealed or something. They'll be going up the pants leg, in through the sleeves and neck, any place they can find a gap. At the very least, the pcs could try to seal their clothes up with duct tape.

Of course, going all "Lennington vs the Ants" leads us to Ant Spirits and Ant Shamans. That way, you can have swarms of army ants and still have some big nasties to shoot.

[Moon-Hawk]

[Kyoto Kid]

[Mercer]

[Apathy]

Uggh. I remember the army ants from jungle school. There was actually a variety that nested in the trees and dropped on you from the branches in large quantities. Not really dangerous, but got us running like hell outta there. If you were forced to stay in the area for an extended time (pinned down by enemy fire, hiding from bad guys, etc.) then I expect the damage would eventually add up.

[Buster]

You've got to check out Les Stroud's blog about his time surviving a week alone in the Amazon jungle. His Survivorman show is great, but I think his day to day blog is more visceral and is a more detailed descriptor for your players.

http://www.lesstroudonline.com/blog/?p=5

All I can say is: if you want to be in the jungle, you better not be afraid of bugs.

[Riley37]

I capitalized Armor to mean the spell, since I imagine that as working like a full seal against ants (though not against gas). An armored vest would not make any difference. If they're wearing armor with chem seal, I'd give them really harsh penalties for overheating; maybe jungle-optimized armor has chemseal capacity but you can mostly open some vents for perspiration, then "button up" with a free action to yank a tag which makes all the vents close and seal.

Also, it can be fun to put wierd dangerous things in front of the players, without actually having them ambush the players. Say they're moving alongside a river, in a canyon, and an army ant death spiral blocks their path. They can try to just walk through it; they can cross the river to go along the other side of the river (crossing river exposes them to leeches and/or pihranas); they can kill it with flame; they can just sit down and wait for the ants to die; they can turn back and retrace their steps for a kilometer to go around it; they can try something else. (Fly over it?)

Most likely, they'll stop to argue what to do, and by the time they agree on the plan, it'll be three days later and the death spiral has died off or broken up and moved on. :)

GM: Someone opens fire - apparently you've walked into an ambush or stumbled across a guard - you can see muzzle flashes through brush 30 meters ahead, but you can't yet see more. It might be either suppression fire or aimed fire. Roll initiative, please.
Player1: (rolls initiative) Okay, I drop prone, then Observe in Detail with my telescopic goggles and ready a smoke grenade.
Player2: I drop prone and roll, as full defense; Reaction + Dodge yields 4 hits.
GM: You drop prone. You drop onto an anthill. Many ants bite you in immediate defense of their nest. Gimme Will (2) to avoid jumping back up into gunfire. If you get a third hit on that test, you can also ignore the +1 Threshold on all actions taken while being bitten. Also, gimme a damage test vs DV 1; armor counts as half impact for now, but will stop helping once they get inside your clothing.

Hilarity ensues!

DV 1 is trivial, once, but over time, sooner or later a low-BOD player will roll no hits, and/or a glitch. In this scenario, the guard knew about the anthill (he has Home Ground), and was Taking Aim at that spot, to open fire at the moment the intruders were above it. Neither the players nor the guard know about the Ant Spirit... yet. Or, alternatively, the Spider Spirit that's currently in the nest, happily dining on ants.

Hm. A troll has high BOD and dermal armor, and can crash through brush. Advantage: troll. But a troll also has a higher-than-human ratio of mass to surface area, which makes it easier to overheat, and cannot skulk so well through brush.

[stormcrow]

Hmmm, i'd probably have the party run across a downed plane.
1) If recent, i'd have decaying bodies and battered cargo, with the cargo consisting of weapons, drugs and broken open cold storage containers. The plane is a common small commercial variety. I would have it be a missing shipment of Awakened drugs with it being searched for by a nearby Ghost Cartel branch. Paranoid, drugged-up narcotrafficos would be Antagonist B (the jungle is Antagonist A.) Antagonist C would be the a local critter (monkeys?) that broke open the cold storage and are either hopped up on killer drugs, going through bad withdrawal or infected with a disease from the cold storage. You could also throw in some of the transgenic infusions from Augmentation. Antagonist D would be a local jungle spirit or shapeshifter investigating the changes in the local wildlife (ie. raving aggressive transgenic monkey butts killing the fuck out of everything else.) Have the party find ripped apart animals and discarded vials. Near brushes with B, C and D, perhaps giving the party (if they're stealthy) the option to sneak away or surveill, maybe giving them the option to ally with any they choose to (though cold chillin' with either the paranoid combat-drugged narcotrafficos or the raving drugged-out transgenic monkey wouldn't be my first choice.) Maybe have a clusterfuck of an encounter with Antagonists A, B, C and D--ie. run into one and start a running fight through the jungle (both sides maneuvering for better cover or fire angles,) then another one shows up to see what the noise is about, then another, and soon the whole jungle scene is rocking! This also allows you to have opponents of much higher lethality than the party--they're just spreading that lethality around each other, too. Very dramatic to have the diseased Kamikaze-crazed monkey chewing on the screaming troll's head get shot off by a stray bullet or to have the narcotraffico manning the HMG that is chewing its way along the log a character is hiding behind get jumped by a diseased Kamikaze-crazed monkey.

or 2) if the crash is old the plane would have skeletons in the cockpit, slightly outdated maps and it could be anything from a 1980's era CIA/drug cartel shipment, with old weapons and ridiculous amounts of (now worthless) paper money and soggy (or pristine) cocaine to a crashed CDC investigation team that was bringing back samples of Ebola-F (the F stands for Fucked) to a former head of state of a small country that Aztlan or Amazonia swallowed (he was trying to leave the country with the people's money, his best mistress and maps/entry codes for secret military bases (now badly outdated, but possibly still useful.) The latter two options (CDC team and fleeing head of state) could even have survivors who have adapted to the jungle--like the bodyguard to the head of state (SOTA 20 years ago, but now just a low-essence slightly malfunctioning 'borg who's gone native.) The plague monkeys from option 1 above could be infected with whatever the CDC plane was carrying.

Whichever way i went, there would be a scene of the party having a ridiculous amount of wealth that is now entirely out of context, and therefore worthless, like the US cash or a metric ton of moldy cocaine. Any loot would probably be that which they pillaged off of opposition bodies or that was indirect (like the maps/pass codes of now defunct (or maybe still operational, but updated) secret military bases or the goodwill of a local spirit/shaman/shapeshifter who defends the area and can guide them out.)

Wow. That got long fast.

[Riley37]

[hyzmarca]

Remember, Hitler fled to Argentina after the war. His descendants still live in South America in real life. So, have them run into a short Germanic fellow with a weird mustache who says "heil".