Starting with a bug haul., Show I do it or any ideas. Options

[Dumori]

I'm planing on running a campine where due to right place right time luck my team of newbie runner get off with >150mil each. And running the rest of the game dealing with the fallout of the theft. I'm not sure weather they steal forma corp or organised crime yet but a corp seam more likely.

Obviously they'll have little motive to carry on running the shadows but they will have the trouble of laundering the haul and dealing with those the stole from. So any idea as to how they get there hands on so much? Or what kind of problems going from skint to super rich would cause? As well as how you you go about trying to retrieve this money if you where put in charge of the investigation?

[LurkerOutThere]

............that doesn't make any sense.


How would you concievably luck into 150 each. For a team of 6 that starts to creep close to the big B as in appreciable percentages of GNP for some countries. I'm having trouble even mentally conceiving how you would luck into that and therefore can't much help other then they'd emmediately die. THat money is not going to go unnoticed for long and the people who owned it will start killing people in large concentric circles fairly quickly.

Also i thought this thread was going to be about a trip to chitown.

[Dumori]

Luck on to 150mil each a few ideas come to mind. And yes the whole point is that if the go for the grab they will be dealing with SO much shit. As too how they happen to hit a lab just as all of its yearly budget is being supplyed to hit and some how manage to divert it to an account they own. They hit an organised crime group just had there getting there cash ready to launder and split. ect ect

[Wiggles Von Beer...]

It's not the same scale as yours, but I ran a game where the runners stole a prototype weapons system from a AA for a terrorist group, and instead of turning it over they contacted Ares and tried to auction it off.

They set the meet for the auction in a high class "dancer's" apartment, and when they arrived they saw two people on the couch - Jack, the Ares liason, and Ryder, his EVO counterpart. Essentially what happened is that Ryder bugged Jack's commlink, and showed up to ruin the deal.They got into a bidding war, and the final offers came down to 1 million and immunity from past transgressions on Ares soil, and 1.4 million from EVO.

Being greedy, the runners took the 1.4 million and had to deal with a jilted Ares Johnson for the rest of the game.

If you're looking to pay out 150 million nuyen per player, think of it this way - runners are hired to be cheap, deniable assets. Generally their payscale is roughly 10% of what the target is worth to the company. This means that for a run where you're handing between 300 million and 1 billion nuyen, the corps would be willing to shell out 30 million to 100 million to a team of runners. And when the price gets that high, they'll just handle it through their own company men or apply legal and economic pressures instead.

[Dumori]

I'm not talking of a johnson playing 150mil each more the run they take leading down to pure luck of them having a chance of garbing ~500mil.

[LurkerOutThere]

Luck on to 150mil each a few ideas come to mind. And yes the whole point is that if the go for the grab they will be dealing with SO much shit. As too how they happen to hit a lab just as all of its yearly budget is being supplyed to hit and some how manage to divert it to an account they own. They hit an organised crime group just had there getting there cash ready to launder and split. ect ect

The questions you have to ask is:
1)If finacial transactions are so unsecure in the business world how does anyone move money at all
2)If a criminal organization was successful enough to amass such a haul how do they not have protections in place for it.

Basically 1 million is a bit more reasonable and even that pushes it. 10 Million is retirement money and might actually be around in some stealable format with a lot of work, planing and proper execution. But 150 million or a multiple thereof doesn't seem right.

[Wiggles Von Beer...]

I understand that. What I am saying is that whatever corporation or organization they stole it from is going to move heaven and hell to get it back. We're talking ridiculously initiated mages, staffs of hackers, and Fire-watch/Tir Ghost equivalent strike teams. 400 BP runners will be toasted by them.

Hell, if they leave ANY physical evidence at the scene, you can bet that forensic mages would be going over it with a fine tooth comb and grabbing material links. Then your team just drops dead, or is mind-controlled to give the cash back - and then drops dead.

[Dumori]

Aye thats my plan to some extent. I want it to be a big enough haul to either cripple a local crime syndicate and cause a power vacuum or cause a corp to have a vendetta against them.

As for why they could be able to get away with so much nuyen from a crime syndicate maybe the crime syndicate was a bit lacks known that only guy people in atendence know the money was moving hands or maybe they do up the protection. It still means the runners have there old run to do in the same place just that theres a shit load of cash to be taken as well.

May be luck was just on there side. Every one fucks ups and some times more than one person fucks up at once.

[kjones]

For two points of inspiration, consider the book/movie "No Country For Old Men", in which an ordinary guy has $20 million fall into his lap. Problem is, it's money from a drug deal gone bad.

There were also some Firefly comics about an idea similar to this - the job pays off way more than they think it will.

Note that in both cases, they didn't get to keep the money - I won't say anything more, other than I strongly recommend "No Country For Old Men" as a guideline to how this sort of thing might play out.

[knasser]

This is a great idea. If I didn't have a campaign mapped out and if my group were a bit more experienced, I'd love to run this as a mini-campaign. In fact sometime, I actually might.

I wont use 150mill each. That's overkill for achieving the "everyone after you" scenario (imo)., but it is a hilarious concept. Try to launder a few thousand, you could probably do it. Try to launder a million+ and every mobster and shark will be after what you got.

You could run this so many ways - like the movie Shallow Grave where it just falls in their lap. But what I might do is have two runs cross each other. Stat up a really elite shadowrunning group, have them maybe use the PC group as a distraction for their own operation which is the big haul job that nets the millions. But some tiny detail goes wrong - the PCs end up at the same location as where the big operation is kicking off. Maybe they're even the ones that cause it to go wrong, triggering all the alarms with their big clumsy non-masked auras or whatever. At any rate, the Shadowrun team and the corp security team kill each other off or as good as, anyway. Leaving the PCs standing there with the haul.

If you run this right, it might even take them a few minutes to realise how you've set them up. Just make sure they can't actually run away before the money drops in their laps.

Anyway, it's a great idea.

K.

[Dances with Trol...]

Basically... you're jumping the shark on this one. (Or nuking the fridge for the younger folk)

In a word: it's not believable to luck into a find of half a billion to a billion currency. The scenarios you propose just don't happen. No crime syndicate has that much money in one convenient place to fall out of the truck. No corporation transfers that much currency in one transaction without enough IC to push back global warming indefinitely. 'Robbing the payroll' makes no sense unless some company is paying 10,000 people their annual (not weekly or monthly) salaries all at once, which again, simply doesn't happen.

I understand what you're trying to do. It's the classic "be careful what you wish for" scenario. However, you're working with numbers so abnormally high as to make the situation ludicrous. If we, as players, don't believe in the situation, it is harder to become our characters. My review at the end of a game session or campaign like that would be: "The action was fun. I loved shooting the troll in the face. The plot was so so. The writing was ^&*$, which makes it harder to be in character."

It's an easily adjustable idea though. Take the advice of the numerous other people who have already posted. Have the characters luck into a smaller amount, like 20 million. That is easily explained by something as common as interrupting a drug deal at the distribution level, or accidentally landing in just the right data node, or even meeting a guy who jumps off a bridge right in front of you, leaving nothing but a briefcase behind (full of money he stole from the mob, who just killed his family).

An amount of money on this smaller scale has the advantages that
1) your players will believe it.
2) it's still large enough that each one will be making out his christmas lists and calling his contacts trying to find rare and exotic gear
3) it's still large enough that when a variety of people come looking for it, your players will believe that too.

It's a good idea. But don't jump the shark.

[Crusher Bob]

You could always have them find Yamashita's gold. They now know where several tens of tons of gold is buried in the mountains of the Philippines. What are they going to do about it? Even getting it out would attract large amounts of attention, and you can't just sell a kiloton of gold on the open market...

[Dumori]

This is a great idea. If I didn't have a campaign mapped out and if my group were a bit more experienced, I'd love to run this as a mini-campaign. In fact sometime, I actually might.

I wont use 150mill each. That's overkill for achieving the "everyone after you" scenario (imo)., but it is a hilarious concept. Try to launder a few thousand, you could probably do it. Try to launder a million+ and every mobster and shark will be after what you got.

You could run this so many ways - like the movie Shallow Grave where it just falls in their lap. But what I might do is have two runs cross each other. Stat up a really elite shadowrunning group, have them maybe use the PC group as a distraction for their own operation which is the big haul job that nets the millions. But some tiny detail goes wrong - the PCs end up at the same location as where the big operation is kicking off. Maybe they're even the ones that cause it to go wrong, triggering all the alarms with their big clumsy non-masked auras or whatever. At any rate, the Shadowrun team and the corp security team kill each other off or as good as, anyway. Leaving the PCs standing there with the haul.

If you run this right, it might even take them a few minutes to realise how you've set them up. Just make sure they can't actually run away before the money drops in their laps.

Anyway, it's a great idea.

K.

You've got my aim also I don't know why i put such a mad sum each I might just have in my 20 questions how much would you want to retire and try to 2*the highest amount each also I would love to see how far greed goses as some of my group aren't beyond PvP

[AngelisStorm]

I agree with everyone else. That is an insane amount of money. For smaller amounts, here are some ideas:

Interupt a big drug buy. (Crates and crates of BLTs. Perhaps viales of awakened drugs.)

Wake up one day, and find an extra 20 million in the bank account. (Through a lot of backtracking, eventually it is found that there was a simply massive, on a laughing man scale, bot net, which stole 1 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) from every person in North America. For some mysterious reason, some or all got dropped in the player's account. Read on citizen for the stunning conclusion!)

Have the rigger get called for a urgent ShadowTaxi pickup. Run into the barrens, to find a man in a black suit hiding behind cover as a big gang moves in. He runs for the car, only to get gunned down right before making it. The briefcase handcuffed to his wrist is very obvious. (Or have him make it into the car, then die. Point: once the suitcase gets opened (several adventures in inself), a double row of Black* credsticks are found. Who was this man, and who owns this money?)

*black, or whatever the highest denomination credstick is.

The runners are out for a night on the town (decent section of town, say Downtown Seattle perhaps), and see the normal wannabe bigwigs with their bodguards, when there is a huge explosion. Stars clear from their eyes, and they see men with rifles on the rooftops spraying the street, along with one man with a smoking missile tube. The 4 bodyguards try but are gunned down; the suit barely making it through a doorway (or at least an overhang). As the sirens sound on the approaching cops, the players grab the suit's briefcase, and duck down the sewer entrance into the Ork Underground. When opened (see scenario above), they find the true honest to goodness traditional stocks for 1% of a (relevant) umbrella AAA megacorp. "Such things are never heard of! What was this man doing with what amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars, and only 4 bodyguards!? Where was he going!? Was he defecting, or was it going to be a suprise stock release?" The players now have in their hands a significant voting block which can affect the world; do they use it, or do they sell it? Who aside from a Dragon (or Damien Knight) would have such cash, and who wants it back?

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Tune in intrepid adventurers for the exciting conclusion.

[Ghremdal]

I think there is a very large risk of runners being good little boys and returning the money with profuse apologies (if you drop it in their lap somehow).

What could be interesting if they get a mission to escort some crazy lone scientist type somewhere. He naturally gets killed, but the runners find on his body some extremely valuable paydata (like a brand new profitable tech, something that brings in mucho nuyen). The scientist was some crazy loner, that didn't work for any corp, so the data doesn't belong to anyone anymore.

As the runners start figuring out what they have on their hands, everybody else does as well. You could have all the major players after them; gangs, mafia, feds, corps, dragons. Each of them want to get the date, while preventing others from getting the data. This is a boon to the runners as the big players will focus on taking each other out, but being careful around runners to avoid damaging the data. You could have a meet with corp A be interrupted by corp B which get interrupted by the feds, etc..

This lets you:
a) allow the runners to get by with their own resources and not waving money at everything until it goes away
b) use the full corp forces without killing the runners
c) allowing the runners themselves to control the payoff (they could even publicize the data, getting no nuyen for the entire run, but probably keeping most corps from being pissed).

[Emy]

When I first clicked on this thread, I expected that it would be about throwing your players into an insect spirit hive during the first session.

Anyway... I agree with the oft-repeated sentiment that you're using too much money. Start them with a smaller, but still huge amount. It seems like a concept with a lot of interesting potential, and making it so utterly absurd would ruin most of it.