What was your favorite run?, Reminisce with me Options

[Mercer]

In my friend's Boston game, I was playing the sam and the other four players were all full magicians. Talk about a sick level of buffing. They would jack me up with Spell Defense, Armor, Enhance Aim, Combat Sense and spirit powers like Concealment and Movement. This was in SR3, and the character I was playing was pretty close to a baseline SR2 sam, so power-wise decent but not crazy. They'd load me up and that character was effectively Superman.

The best moment for me in that game; we interrupted a kidnapping, and my character goes alone (though fully buffed) around the back of the house and runs into the kidnapee, six Yakuza sams with SMG's, and an invisible leader. I miraculously hit a TN 14 perception test to spot the guy, so I'm on held action to shoot the leader and the six Yaks are on held action to shoot me and we stay frozen like that for a good fifteen minutes of game time-- say five combat rounds, while the rest of the group is still trying to get to the house.

It was a precariously balanced situation. If I hadn't spotted the leader (and was therefore able to threaten him), it would have just gone to a bloodbath. Once the rest of the group got there (elementals started showing up, the mages were wiping up some other Yaks in the house), the Yak leader decided to let the kidnapee go-- which was a little funny because it turned out the kidnapee was actually a willing extraction who had hired us to have someone to blame for the kidnapping. That was probably one of the most tense situations in a game I've ever had, and no one fired a shot.

[ Spoiler ]

A few years later, my friend runs the sequel to this game. Turns out, our old boss was still alive, he had arranged his own kidnapping and "murder" and was being hidden by another corporation. They offer us X amount of money for him alive, half if dead.

I end up on the run to go get him, and the group hits the safehouse which is a mansion out in Snohomish. My and another character actually make it into the house, everybody else leads security on a wild goose chase in the front yard except for the troll who charged the front door, killed a couple of people and was taken out by sustained gunfire. We capture my old boss, escape and evade, and turn him in to the old corporation he had betrayed.

"So this means my friend's will get out of jail?" I ask. The Johnson looks at me blankly. (These characters had been out of play for several years by this point, having been put away for our target's fake murder.)

"No," he says, "this man is worth more to us if he remains 'dead'."

I say, "But you said if we got him, we could clear the guys convicted of murdering him."

"If he was dead it wouldn't matter, but since you got him alive we'd rather keep him a secret."

So my character mulls that over, tucks his duster back over his hip holster and says, "Hell, I'll take half pay."

The two guards putting the old boss up for travel freeze, the Johnson freezes, the old boss freezess, the whole group freezes, and then one by one, the pc's all say, "Yeah, I'll take half" as they start readying their actions. So the Johnson relents, thinking its better to have the guy alive and known about than dead, and we turn him over to Lone Star.

I don't know why my favorite moments with that character always seemed to be standoffs.

[Hank]

Thanks, all. That was even better than I expected it to be.

[Black Irish]

"Hell, I'll take half pay."

Bee-yoo-tee-full. Love it. I had a (rather amoral) group one time faced with a Johnson who tried to renege on part of the payment on a run gone bad.

The group's shaman had assensed the Johnson earlier and determined he was something of a foci-junkie -- a non-initiated mage, but carrying several hundred thousand nuyen of goodies. A couple perception tests by the party face determined that the Johnson's three bodyguards likewise were little more than trumped-up gangers carrying Ares Alphas and a few other wiz toys.

The group decided to accept payment in goods, rather than credit. Mr. J. and his buds got a one-way ticket to Puget Sound.

[Kyoto Kid]

[Daddy's Litt...]

Is that the run in Hawaii? We only got out of that because a street sam stayed behind to cover the team's retreat then counted on the lush jungle's aura to hide from the dragon.

[Kyoto Kid]

...if you're inquiring about Paradise Lost, yes it is.

[Mercer]

Paradise Lost as I said is the module I have been run though three times, although technically the first two we never got out of the 3rd section and the third the GM just said, "Screw it" and was using the module as a basis for his Hawai'i homebrew, so I don't know how much of what we did was in the text. But that was the game where I got into a boxing match with a feathered serpent.

It was the same character as above, the "Hell, I'll take half pay" guy, and the feathered serpent was in human form. I thought he was a phys ad. In was in some mountaintop fortress on a small island. I was sam, so I had more actions than him. I'd attack him all out and use up all his combat pool on the first action then try to weather his attack (I have no idea why he was humoring us, other than his being a feathered serpent was supposed to be a big secret), and then our phys ad would ping him from 3 meters away with distance strike doing a maybe Light wound. This goes on for three rounds, with me doing no damage to him but keeping him occupied and the phys ad lightly whapping him. Then our phys ad gets lucky, gets a Moderate and puts the guy up to five or six boxes, so the guy takes a running leap for the ledge. We all take whatever attacks we can to stop him, but he breaks free, leaps into the open air, and takes the form of a brilliantly hued feathered serpent. That was a weird moment for my character, when it hit him he had been boxing a dragon.

One of my favorite moments came way back in SR2, when we were getting the group back together after a long break playing other (lesser) systems. I had retired my 400-karma ork private detective (no cyber, bio, magic or anything), and I ended up making a ork street sam with a 16+3d6 Initiative. (No Wired Reflexes, but Reaction Enhancers 6, Synaptic Accelerators, and a lot of the reaction boosting bioware, Muscle Aug, Enhanced Articulation, the thing that boosted all physical stats and so on.)

I think this was my second run with that character, and it was a throw-together because only two players showed up that week. So it was me and a Combat Mage, right out of the book. The combat mage took two deadly wounds on this run in the space of about a week, lost magic on both, and my friend was about pick another archetype when I persuaded him to implant the Wired II we got out of a the second guy who killed him. There was a bit of salesmanship on my part there, but once that character initiated it got pretty sick. That's how we became the Shaman with Wired Reflexes and the Samurai Without'em. But that's here nor there (except to say that those characters, Slagiron and Sandman, are pretty much the reason my GM stopped running SR2).

But in that first game, before he had taken those deadly wounds (right before he took one, in fact), our characters had stopped at a bar frequented by a particular gang. (We were trying to stop a gang war between them and another gang, with us being hired by a neutral 3rd party who couldn't get her groceries delivered. As I said, throw-together.) So we're having a beer, getting a feel for the place, and two big honkin' toxic spirits manifest and go to town on the poor dumb ganger bastards. Our characters hide under the table. While mass, irradiated chaos is going on around us, we're trying to decide if this is the best time intercede, because hey, gang wars are one thing but toxic spirits are a whole nother. So my character pops his dikote cyberspur and from under the table, starts going through the cinderblock wall of the bar.

It was at that moment, hiding under a table with an SMG in one hand and a cyberspur in the other, while a combat mage was held action to fry the toxics if they noticed us and the rest of the bar was getting torn to pieces that I experienced a mild epiphany, where my love of Shadowrun that had gone dormant blossomed anew. I mean, where else are you going to get into a situation like that?

(We crawled into the parking lot, got hit with Confusion, the mage astrally perceived to fry the spirit and got soul-bombed by the toxic shaman in astral space, which was his first Deadly wound and magic loss of the night. But after that-- and his next deadly wound and magic loss of the night-- we did okay. Over the next few months he initiated-- including a run of mine where he lost his geas'd focus and was reduced to yelling to the other mage in the group, "Phyllis, blow this guy up!"-- and turned out sicker than me.)

[MaxHunter]

sounds like fun. Crazy, but fun :D

Cheers,

Max

[tete]

We were hired by a Johnson for a typical B&E this time the target was something that looked similar to a cheap coffee can with some extra dials and hightech drek. It was stored in the vault. We had time so we took the time to do it right. We staked the place out for a week got the regular shipment patters and found out it was in a vault near the roof. Easy money chummer, or thats what it seamed. The final plan was to hijack the delivery truck a few blocks away and drop the decker off inside. Once he contacted us we would head in through the back door and make our way up to the vault. After that we would head up to the roof and call a rigger the Johnson gave us. It seamed simple but we made the biggest mistake of trusting the Johnson. We made it to the roof but the rigger decided to greet us with a firestorm. We ran back inside and down through the floors in a few moments lone star showed up and the building was surrounded. The building was getting shredded by the cops. The sammi decided if they wanted the coffee can so bad they could have it, and threw it out the 20th story window... It went silent the demolition guy threw some C4 out and hit the electric detonator, nothing happend. We then noticed nothing electrical was working. EMPs aren't they grand, thats what it was a EMP bomb. We hoofed it out under the cover of night that Johnson was going to pay...


As for published adventures I think my favorite concept is Mecurial. There are parts of it that I think need changing but the basic premise is awesome and body guard to a rock star makes a good first run.

[ShaunClinton]

Published adventure wise it would have to be Double Exposure... Bug Spirits were new and my players had no exposure to them. They had a great time infiltrating the camps and doing the whole investigation angle. Then they started to get worried, jittery and began asking the wrong people the wrong questions. They thought they were going to get cut up for cyber-implant experiments and when the truth started to emerge (so to speak) it was like all hell breaking loose.

Harlequins Back is another fave, but there are some weak planes in there that probably stop it reaching the top.

Campaign specific stuff involved the end of Deus and the Network, which we ran prior to System Failure coming out after having been through Brainscan. The PCs were tracking Deus and the banded and eventually set up a climatic showdown just before he put himself back together. Surrounded and outnumbered by banded and drones they looked like they were going to go down fighting, but somehow managed to turn the situation around despite the terrible odds. Beaten within an inch of their lives they split into three teams - one group entered the Matrix to try and stop Deus, the second group went for the satellite uplinks whilst the third headed to cut the hardlines in an attempt to strand Deus in the local hosts. All three areas were well protected and with some awesome heroics Deus was cut off from all the hosts he was drawing processing power from and most of the external deckers (Dodger, Cham Lam, Pax, etc.) were removed from the scenario. This just left 2 PCs in the host against a weakened Deus (think of the most brutal SK you can!) They reached up to jack out, looked at each other and decided to take him rather than just blow the servers. They managed to defeat him and the teams got out before the whole place blew around them.

We've also done a couple of huge metaplanar quests which were great fun. We used a mix of alternate systems (including Warhammer, AD&D, SR4, Champions) for each plane and it was great fun.

One of the PCs was responsible for resurrecting Deus at a later date and events are now building towards the conclusion of System Failure which I'm hoping will match up. With the boys globe-trotting in a desperate effort to halt Winternight's plans they might just be blind-sided by Deus.

[MaxHunter]

I kind of agree with you. I have Gmd several published adventures and the one I remember most fondly is Double Exposure. I was gming two groups at the time and had the two running the same module at the same time. One group was hired by Renraku, the other one by Juarez using the blackmail angle.

They eventually met in the final Camp (hope? faith?... can't remember) and after some cloak and dagger action decided to cooperate. It was good enough because out of a combined pool of 11 runners only three survived the run. Well, five survived, but one got all his cyberware removed in medical experiments before being rescued and the other was killed right after the run.

There were many highlights in that run, for example, well before project Hope's secrets were revealed the runners were witness of a gang attack to the camp. I carefully described the guards' coordinated response to the attack and how they wiped the gangers out. I was in mid-description when one of the players says, IC: "fuck, these guys move like ants" At the moment nobody gave it a second thought, but later... :biggrin:

PC's deaths were quite cinematic too... :rotate: The runners who survived became quite important characters. Unfortunately one of them got killed some time later by a japanese vat job samurai. The one who had had his cyber removed eventually got some implanted back and ended his career as a shadowrunner to enter the Mob. The other two? one got to Renraku Arcology on time for the shutdown and the other went for a run in Bug City (we never got to play those runs so I wouldn't know)

Runners don't die in their beds.

Cheers,

Max