SPOILERS Review of CMP 2011-03: Threads of the Past Options

[squee_nabob]

Massive Spoilers below:

[ Spoiler ]

I played this mission as Cypher with John Schmidt. I enjoyed this mission, and thought John did a very good job with a mission he had just received and had a few issues.

This mission is a basic dungeon crawl, where you are hired to go into a cave, fight monsters, take their stuff and escape. As a D&D plot, it would have been a formulaic adventure. For shadowrun, it fulfilled my “non-urban railroad” quota for the season.

Things I liked:
All of the players at my table were fantastic, and really brought quality up. One of them wasn’t even jaded, and took his time to smell the roses, even as the rest of us wanted to press on to the unavoidable combat somewhere in the cave.

I like flying in a T-bird

Language Skill: Spirithiel was actually useful. It came up a few times and that was good.

Compared to “SRM02-09: Tunnel Vision” (my other railroady non-urban adventure), it has fewer combats that boil down to: A thing jumps out and attacks you. You then paste it with 6 people worth of guns.

Things I didn’t like:
This mission makes the terrible mistake of giving you really poor starting money, in exchange for loot later. While this works for D&D adventurers who expect to find magic items and gold in a dungeon, Shadowrunners don’t. I got offered 5,000 to be inserted into Tir Tangeir, and then explore a cave full of Elven ruins.

5,000 is not very much, for a mission that basically asks you to stick your head into a hole in the wall and hope there isn’t a guy with an axe on the other side. Less loot, more up front cash. Several players remarked “we’d walk if we hadn’t just paid $4 to be here”.

The 14 zombies in the upstairs zombie room should be aspected towards the background count. We decided they were halfway through the fight and their mojo-slinging made the combat better as there was a risk of damage.

After the combat with zombies, we went downstairs to a room full of lava, in a volcano which was past due to erupt, with an obviously glowing magical jade sarcophagi atop a pyramid. Our response to this was “ok, we scouted the place out, we’re done here.” 5,000 base was waaaay too low to go screwing with a glowing jade sarcophagi. In retrospect, it was loaded with money, but we had no way of knowing that, and no motivation to open it. One of the players even remarked that it was obviously a “load bearing sarcophagi”. The GM had to consult Bull to have the Johnson offer us 1,000 more just to poke the sarcophagi.

Inside was treasure. Which was load bearing treasure. One thief with the movement power later, we escaped an exploding volcano while undead elves tried to do… something to us, we didn’t want to figure out what.

The ending looks like a backstab with rentacops. We almost killed them all out of habit. Mr. Johnson needs to just show up in a wheelchair with a big pile of cash.

This adventure relies on the PCs doing obviously dangerous things for little money. Because money is the only motivation (the guy who contacts you isn’t part of any group you care about), and there is so little of it for an obviously dangerous activity, it feels like you have to be out of character for a professional shadowrunner to play the mission.

Also, hackers had nothing to do on this mission outside of locate the Johnson so we could punch him in the face if he didn’t pay. It was a good thing I was also a rigger. There was basically no-one to interact with, so faces also had very little to do.

I just want to repeat, that I’m ok with being an explorer, who jumps on the underground railroad and goes choo-choo for great justice, I just want a better reason to jump on the railroad and possibly a chance to hit the horn.