Elven trailer park queen, Watched Trailer Park of Terror last night Options

[Wounded Ronin]

So, last night I watched Trailer Park of Terror, and actually thought it was the pwn with attractive women, torture and gore, and honest-to-god zombie guitar players who stand in the background riffing while all sorts of carnage and brutality are going down.

Also, I could be wrong, but I believe that a sawn-off M14 with a pistol grip makes an appearance in the movie, which is pretty fukken hardcore.

It gave me the idea that an immortal trailer park queen would be awesome in a SR3 campaign. I've been thinking about it all morning.

Once upon a time there was a woman living in the 1980s and it just so happened that she was an elf and so had a very long lifespan. She'd had all kind of adventures as well as all kinds of traumatic experiences which are all based on various famous historical events. So, just as an example of the kind of events I'd put in her background, I'd say that she'd been a nurse in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and that as such she once ended up in a combat situation by accident. Basically, for the character, I'd just keep adding in many potentially traumatic events that could fit from the year 1960 through 2000 or so.

Eventually the stress from all these events kind of outweighs the RPG EXP hardassery factor and she runs away from the world by moving to a trailer park in Michigan where being an elf she reigns for over a hundred years as a mysterious ageless trailer park queen.

Fast forward to the date of your SR3 campaign. The player characters are in Michigan, hired to do some nefarious deed by United Auto Workers. However, they are pursued by ninjas sent by the Japanese auto companies that are trying to defeat the agents of United Auto Workers at all costs, and things are arranged such that it's more than likely the player characters will end up in the trailer park.

Under these dark and dire conditions, the trailer park queen realizes that the local auto workers need her and her EXP'ed out RPG hardass aspect comes out again. It turns out that in her trailer for all these centuries she's been hiding a stolen prototype of the ultimate weapon...an OICW with an underbarrel keytar.

The OICW has optics that are considered like using a scope, but at the same time the optics have reticles and rangefinders that allow it to operate like a Smartlinked weapon in terms of getting the bonus to hit the target, and with a Complex Action the person using the OICW can set a range for a 20mm grenade to airburst so as to defeat enemy ninjas in defilade, while the laser rangefinder helps to ensure that the player cannot misjudge the range and put the wrong airburst distance.

At the same time, instead of firing the weapon, someone using the OICW can choose to play the underbarrel keytar instead. This allows the keytar playing character to roll his musical skill against a TN of 6 and every 2 successes he gets adds a dice to the combat pool of all allies within hearing range. This effect only happens after the keytar has been played for a full combat turn and occurs on each turn where the keytar has been played for the full preceeding turn. If the player is hit by an attack while playing treat it like if a magician is hit while sustaining a spell for the purpose of seeing if the music is interrupted or not.

The trailer park queen shouldn't be an invincible super-NPC, just a tough person who has been around the block a number of times, has accumulated some weapon skills to around level 4, and who has lots of karma pool built up from a lifetime of hard knocks. It's "okay" if she's killed in action, but the GM should play her smart, such that she doesn't take unnecessary risks and she knows how to keep safe using cover and so on based on her life experience.

More and more ninjas keep pouring into the trailer park. At first they just try to storm the perimiter World War I style, but eventually they start trying to drop themselves in the middle of the park by riding in on giant ninja kites, and they start deploying sappers to try and bring the stockade walls down. They're like the Vietcong with attitude...and giant kites. The number of ninja pouring in should be overwhelming and it should be a true tactical challenge to defeat them all that requires a battlemat and everything.

After the player characters have defeated a certain number of ninja (say, over a hundred) and the ninja just keep pouring in, Chuck Norris ( http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...=11851&st=0 ) spawns outside the trailer park ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a1NgyzwhYc ) and goes Lone Wolf McQuade ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAgJhsnXKqM...;watch_response )on the ninjas until they are finally defeated ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLemqwnE4o4 ).


YEAH! That's my type of Shadowrun campaign!

[Chance359]

If you run it they will come.

[Snow_Fox]

We had a farmer's daughter run once.

we grasbbed an exec off of ski slopes in upstate New York and then evaded his security. but a snow storm settled in. we took shelter at a farm, not knowing the farmers daughter was a wendigo. The guys were lucky there were women in the team.

[hobgoblin]

heh, could have dropped a female mantis in their lap (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[wind_in_the_ston...]

can choose to play the underbarrel keytar instead. This allows the keytar playing character to roll his musical skill against a TN of 6 and every 2 successes he gets adds a dice to the combat pool of all allies within hearing range.

I hate Bards! Hahaha!

[Wounded Ronin]

OK, I've fleshed out the OICW w. underbarrel keytar a little more as I've started to write the Elf-Queen of the Trailer Park campaign. Does the following seem reasonable?

OICW (Objective Infantry Combat Weapon) with underbarrel keytar

The OICW has optics which provide up to 6x magnification with integrated computer-assisted targeting. This means that the optics have reticles and rangefinders that allow it to operate like a Smartlinked weapon in terms of getting the -1 bonus to hit the target as per with smartgoggles with low-light vision, and with a Complex Action the person using the OICW can set a range for a 20mm grenade to airburst so as to defeat enemy ninjas in defilade (ignore cover penalties when attacking targets with a properly-primed airburst grenade), while the laser rangefinder helps to ensure that the player cannot misjudge the range and put the wrong airburst distance. Since under SR3 rules the bonuses from smartlinks and scopes cannot be combined, the player character operating the OICW may use a Simple Action to switch from receiving a bonus equivalent to a Rating 2 vision magnification system to receiving the -1 smartlink bonus which represents fiddling with the dials on the targeting computer. The low-light vision bonus always applies and this too may be toggled on and off with a Simple Action.

At the same time, instead of firing the weapon, someone using the OICW can choose to play the underbarrel keytar instead. This allows the keytar playing character to roll his musical skill against a TN of 6 and every 2 successes he gets adds a dice to the combat pool of all allies within hearing range. This effect only happens after the keytar has been played for a full combat turn and occurs on each turn where the keytar has been played for the full preceeding turn. If the player is hit by an attack while playing treat it like if a magician is hit while sustaining a spell for the purpose of seeing if the music is interrupted or not.

After the campaign is over the player characters may keep the OICW if the Elf-Queen is slain, or else she would let them keep it as a token of thanks for defending the trailer park. As useful as the OICW may be to the player characters coming up with the proprietary 20mm grenades for future use should be extremely difficult. The 5.56 cartridges should be less so even if the GM decides they're no longer in production and that the various rifles in SR3 are firing something else, just given how ubiquitous they are today, and considering how enthusiasts today can still get ammunition needed to operate blackpowder weapons, etc.

The rifle component of the OICW uses Assault Rifle range. However, since the grenades are unusual in that they're fired from a rifled barrel and are supposed to be accurate up to 1,000 meters, the simplest solution would be to use Missile Launcher ranges for the 20mm grenades and not Grenade Launcher ranges.

Note that the OICW has a computer system that does something similar to what the Smartlink system does but that it is NOT Smartlink compatible. There's nothing to plug into your datajack or to interface with your Smartlink gloves. Since it just involves the optics it really can only act like Smartlink goggles for aiming, and cannot do things like automatically eject magazines.

Conceal – unconcealable (it looks like a giant tropical fish...of death!)
Ammo – STANAG magazines; the OICW in this campaign comes with 30-round magazines loaded with 5.56 NATO cartridges. The integral 20mm grenade launcher uses 5-round magazines.
Mode – SA/BF/FA for the rifle, and SA for the grenade launcher.
Damage – 8M for the rifle, only 7 S for the undersized 20mm grenades; treat them as Defensive Grenades for the purpose of blast radius.
Weight – 5.5 kg empty, 6.8 kg fully loaded
Avail – Of course not
Legal – LOL
RC – none

[Snow_Fox]

heh, could have dropped a female mantis in their lap (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

bad experiences with Mantids

[nezumi]

My one complaint would be that it seems the PCs actions are less than really important. If the PCs are stuck thinking "wow, we're trapped by a thousand ninjas with kites", well for one, most likely they'll want to beat feet and live another day, even if that means failing the mission. But assuming they do defend themselves that long, Chuck's entrance would seem like a Deus Ex Machina. They have to know in advance that they have to hold off the ninjas for this amount of time in order for Chuck to bring reinforcements (i.e. his pectorals).

Similarly, it seems the scenario is specifically structured to allow you to show off this cool NPC, with little more. I would consider instead making her a mysterious but important contact in the run, perhaps one they meet 'by chance' during their previous run against the laundromat. As it happens, perhaps she "knows someone" or knows a safe place or whatever and offers to help them in a crunch in their current mission. When things go bad, she surprises everyone when she pulls her giant gun out of her beat up laundry bag and starts blowing people away, while tossing a cell phone (the giant brick-sized one, perhaps that requires you to plug it in) to one of the PCs and telling him to call a friend of hers and convince him to come help (the friend being Chuck, of course, who has been leading clean-up campaigns at the trailer park lately).

Now at least the PCs feel like they have a role in things because they brought this contact in, it's their contact, and she is supporting them. It's not their randomly being thumped down in her backyard, and their effectively supporting her.

I'd have to think on it some more to make it more bullet- and ninja-proof, but in general, try to keep the spotlight on the PCs.

[Wounded Ronin]

My one complaint would be that it seems the PCs actions are less than really important. If the PCs are stuck thinking "wow, we're trapped by a thousand ninjas with kites", well for one, most likely they'll want to beat feet and live another day, even if that means failing the mission. But assuming they do defend themselves that long, Chuck's entrance would seem like a Deus Ex Machina. They have to know in advance that they have to hold off the ninjas for this amount of time in order for Chuck to bring reinforcements (i.e. his pectorals).

Similarly, it seems the scenario is specifically structured to allow you to show off this cool NPC, with little more. I would consider instead making her a mysterious but important contact in the run, perhaps one they meet 'by chance' during their previous run against the laundromat. As it happens, perhaps she "knows someone" or knows a safe place or whatever and offers to help them in a crunch in their current mission. When things go bad, she surprises everyone when she pulls her giant gun out of her beat up laundry bag and starts blowing people away, while tossing a cell phone (the giant brick-sized one, perhaps that requires you to plug it in) to one of the PCs and telling him to call a friend of hers and convince him to come help (the friend being Chuck, of course, who has been leading clean-up campaigns at the trailer park lately).

Now at least the PCs feel like they have a role in things because they brought this contact in, it's their contact, and she is supporting them. It's not their randomly being thumped down in her backyard, and their effectively supporting her.

I'd have to think on it some more to make it more bullet- and ninja-proof, but in general, try to keep the spotlight on the PCs.

Thanks for your comments.

Yeah, I've basically been thinking now in terms of having the trailer park showdown kind of be a climax part (and the "enhancements" you suggest would make a lot of sense) but there being more directly PC-driven activities beforehand, maybe some cloak and dagger stuff with UAW and the ninjas. Maybe a Japanese megacorp came up with a technology which would greatly lower the cost of manufacturing automobiles and since Japanese megacorps clearly march in lockstep cahoots with the Japanese government this technology would automatically disperse 100% to Japanese auto manufacturers and absolutely nobody else. Initially the PCs must steal copies/prototypes of the technology and bring it to Michigan, so there would be a bunch of operations with only the PCs plus the drama of getting the prototype across country. The contact originally wants to meet them at the trailer park but then the ninjas attack. Something like that.

Thanks again for your thoughts. They were good.