[X] My Assistant

[toturi]

[Crusher Bob]

Now we're cooking with gas or at least what could have been our paychecks :(

If the PCs come into town in a car, you may want to have the 'only road into town' be blocked by a landslide (with maybe a the bodies of a chewed up utility crew). This means that the PCs will have to hoof it into town (it also prevents them froms taking one look at the place and then driving away. Make the town around 30min to 1 hour walk past the land slide, so any running back to the car can be an extended chase scene.
If they are comming in in some else's chopper or LAV have then agree on the time that the chopper will come back (so they'll need to survive until then).

If the PCs have a drone rigger, they may try for a high recon or similar of the town (or an astral one). Be sure to think up what they will see.

Maybe make them deal with one or two crazies first (and see if you can get them to shoot at anything that moves, even if they had earlier made the 'moral' choice) :vegm: This way, when they meet the people who are still in control of themselves, the meeting will be that much more tense. Notice that any surviors might be pretty close to shooting anything that moves too.

Don't forget to add a level of background count or 2 (recent mass murder).

If you feel the characters are having too easy a time (or you are saving the people and the gun bunnies are unhappy), you can throw in some infected animal life (dogs, cats, mountain lions, bears).

If you PCs fly (via levitate, or drones) make sure you have some ideas to threaten them (otherwise, it will just be: hover over town, cut yourself a bit to draw out the crazies, then gun them down. All from safely 100 feet up). Maybe they get super-leaping too?

[Jason Farlander]

I... actually quite like this run idea. I think I will steal it in large part as well... with a few minor modifications. Good job. Give yourself a star.

As for getting the PC's to accept the run if they are in any way moralistic, you could simply have the person hiring them say that the village is the source of a new dangerous viral outbreak, and that they would like it quietly contained for X :nuyen: . That way even morally-minded characters might think theyre doing more or less the right thing by protecting others from infection.... and those morally minded characters would then be more inclined to listen to the owl spirit.

You could even have the scientists offer the runners a *vaccine* that *only works if administered 3 days before infection* This "vaccine" could be whatever they want, be it nothing at all (if youre a nice GM) to a dose of carcerands/Ebola Plus (if youre a particularly mean, evil GM).

[Austere Emancipa...]

With Bob's and Jason's addition, this run just seems to perfect to be true! (Or maybe I'm getting too damn tired to think...)

[DamienKnight]

[DamienKnight]

[Austere Emancipa...]

[Crusher Bob]

Oops, what if our enterprising teams wants to 'roll in a couple canisters on CN-20 and nerve gas the whole nest?'. Thay wouldn't be too much of a run. Hmm.

[Austere Emancipa...]

If they managed to get their hands on enough of the stuff and a way to use it effectively, I wouldn't mind. Perhaps not a whole lot of karma though...

[Crusher Bob]

I'd imagine it would be:

summon great form sky spirit to control wind.

Deploy gas via smokescreen generating drone upwind of town.

Wait...

Roll in and clean up.

[Austere Emancipa...]

The government of whatever country this is done in would suddenly generate a lot of interest in the particular spot of real-estate... I can't think of any good reasons why that wouldn't work though. If the runner team really doesn't care about destroying just about all forms of life withing a few (dozen?) square miles, and the fact that it'll be really high profile. Even more high than just going in with guns blazing would've been.

[Crusher Bob]

Yep, I just seem to be bloody minded today and am itching to kill 20 or 30 people. :oops:

[DamienKnight]

[Austere Emancipa...]

There aren't that many ways you can kill 20-30 people without attracting much attention. But that's OK, makes the team think more.

To attract minimum attention, would the best approach be to leave no clear evidence of the runner team having been there (which makes killing them pretty darn tricky), and then making the corpses disappear completely? A few barrels of some good corrosive substance and then dump the chemical/human mixture into a nearby lake or something. Make sure to clean up any clues that might lead people to suspect something HMHVV-related.

It'll still attract attention once everyone figures out that a small village has suddenly gone missing, but this might take a while, and they should optimally not have any clues about the involvement of the runner team or the lab/firm in question.

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: Jan 24 2004, 09:44 AM

[DamienKnight]

Making the slaughter not attract much attention should be a good challenge for the team. There are several ways they might want to play it, and giving them hints may be in order.

They are dealing with primitive native americans, maybe a good ghost story would serve them well. They could ditch the bodies and maybe carve in some Sioux symbols of some totem, and make people think that a spirit got angry at them.

Maybe they could just leave a few mauled bodies behind and let everyone assume it was awakened creatures that did it.

I think burning the whole place down or blowing it up would attract too much immediate attention from NAN forces, so have the scientists discourage this.

It shouldnt be too hard though, seeing as this is a remote location without any easy access except for choppers (which arent cheap to fly into the mountains, we arent talking taxi fare prices).

Maybe the need to dispose of bodies could be the trick a group that chooses the moral option needs. They tell the scientists they will need two choppers to pick them up when they are done so they can remove the bodies from the site, and when the choppers come, they could have the uninfected hide, and have the infected pretend to be dead so they can be transported back for cryogenic stasis.

[Velocity]

What's stopping the team's resident Awakened PC from assensing a few villagers and figuring everything out real quick? I mean, if there aren't any Awakened PCs, then you've got a nifty little pressure cooker of paranoia, mayhem and desperation cooked up, à la Resident Evil or The Thing. If there is someone with the team who's capable of scanning auras (and lets's face it, every good shadowrunning team has one), wouldn't that take away much of the mystery and terror?

[DamienKnight]

[Digital Heroin]

Here's a question... what time of year's the run at?

[Phaeton]

[RedmondLarry]

Joker9125, I think the scientists have to inform the Shadowrunners that the target and his village are likely infected with something. If they don't inform the runners, they should know that one or more runners is likely to leave infected and spread it further. And that angry runners might come seeking them afterwards.

Most shadowrunner teams are likely to take a job of preventing the outbreak of a terrible infectious disease, without thinking of it as wetwork. The scientists should give advice on protective gear to wear, and not to stand down-wind during the burning of the infected bodies. The moral dilemma still exists, and it's a good run.

[Crusher Bob]

Hmm, some other commentary:

What if the PCs say no to the job (of the killin') I assume that the owl shaman will contact them afterward, but how does he know the right town to go to?

How are they going to keep from being chewed on during the chopper ride out? Maybe KO the people?

If the PCs provide 'their own' chopper (as opposed to one being supplied by the scientists) then they probably won't have too much trouble getting the chopper to carry some more people. However, the chopper might not be able to carry 10 people and the team all at once. (Sheep, wolf, lettuce, river :grinbig: )

Personally, I'd probably work on the choice a bit more, so that it's not the good and the evil choice. That tends to make choosing a bit too easy. The good choice with no reward and the not as good choice with a reward is the sort of thing that tends to make people pause.

[mfb]

bah. as The Terminus Experiment teaches us, even a strain of vampirism which has no negative side effects--no need for bloodsuckin', no allergy to sunlight, etcetera--turns its hosts into undead spawns of satan which must be murderized at all cost.

stupid-ass book.

[Joker9125]

[DamienKnight]

[k1tsune]