SPOILERS Review of CMP 2011-01 Moving Day, Spoilers here Options

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Spoilers below

[ Spoiler ]

I suggest you never contact your friends again, but that is outside the scope of my mission

I played Moving Day with Geoff Raye as GM. He did a good job with a well written adventure. There was one thing that I disliked, but on the whole it was a solid adventure that I recommend everyone play.

Things I liked:

You have to extract willing targets and non-willing targets. There are NPCs to interact with who have distinct goals. You can reason with them, you can shoot them, you can hack them, it is very immersive.

You have enough information to make a plan, stick to it, and have it work. You can make meaningful choices and they feel meaningful.

You can avoid combats if you so desire.

The pay is good.

The daughter (Angie? Annie? Bartlby) is a great NPC. I would like her to show up again in later missions.

Things I disliked:

Again with the RFID tags! We forgot to sweep them for RFID tags which was totally our fault, but after that she had a burst RFID tag hidden that we couldn’t have found. The Johnson got aggressive and accused us of a double cross. We almost had a shootout over nothing. Johnsons need to be more trusting of the hired killers they hire off of name recognition. Cypher has only betrayed Johnsons that were Neo-faschists or double crossed him, stop treating me like an unprofessional.

Other than that, it’s a great run.

[LurkerOutThere]

[ Spoiler ]

"Too many variables I can't control."

My team really balked at the mission setup provided by the Johnson, there just seemed to be too much that could go wrong with it. Instead we looked at our skillsets (A hacking techno, a fighting techno, a hacker with sniping capabilities, and a voodoun mage) and being the group of trench coated pros we were we decided to instead hit the compound that night trusting the abilities we brought to the table to overcome security rather then relying on the guards at the compound being inattentive. We presumed that even a well meaning willing extractee can be a hindrance due to inexperience on a stealth mission so while we were hoping to explain the score to mom and dad and have them ensure the childrens co-operation we came prepared for an eventuality of having to stun them all and leave. I need to give massive props to Kent/Direradiant here as even though we went off the rails right away he came up with reasonable security precautions for the instalation ont he fly and I really felt that all of us had something to do. He also avoided the urge to have implausible things randomly go wrong with our plan and instead kept it in the realm of the possible which I appreciated. Mom and Dad were too freaked out during the extraction to calm down and not scream so we tranqed one and pulled the other into hot sim VR to meet Mr. Paladin sprite with Blackout. I then repeated the same process with the children after re-sculpting my bionode for something that would hopefully leave them with a minimum of mental trauma. The realization that girl was a technomancer could have been worse but fortunately a newbie technomancer being pulled unprepared into a boxing match with a moderately high rating combat sprite doesn't fare that much better then anyone else does. We filed that bit of information away for later and carried everyone out to the compound. We did think to check them over for tags before turning them over and thought we'd got them all. When we did the exchange with Mr. J he found one more tag which he tried to use as a justification not to pay us along with the mental anguish of the kidnapping. Our arguments were as follows:

-Tag sweeping was not part of the package, we provided best effort on this as professionals but if something was missed that is not a game changer
-Our plan meant that the family likely wasn't even missed yet making the tag irrelevant at least for a bit
-If we were to use his plan exclusively that should have been specified, it would have cost for (stupid plan fee)
-Fighting us (and getting killed by us) takes valuable time that he could be escaping with the targets)

On the whole the attempted weaseling felt about right for Shadowrun so i didn't have a major issue with it. The technomancer girl being revived and announcing she called the cops ddin't endear me to her and any sense of technomancer solidarity I had with her was gone so i outed her to our J as a bonus. Again thanks go to Direradiant for putting up with us and flowing transparently from what may have been (i have no way of knowing) a fairly scripted chase mod into a espionage mod easily, it is a testament to his craft as a GM.

[squee_nabob]

[ Spoiler ]

My team went with a different approach. We had a Hacking/Face Technomancer, a Pixie Mage, and a pair of covert ops people (one was the premade character). We waited for dad to give us the RFID tag, put on a face mask and pretended to be him (spoofing bioscanners as we went), then entered the compound in a rented truck (his car was in the shop and we had him rent a truck). We walked to his apartment, took off the disguise, flew casual the whole way, then told his wife that she had to grab the kids and leave.

The mom and son were fine (son got transformed into a lizard and his RFID tag hacked). The girl decided to whine. Luckally Cypher was there with his ever so endearing bedside manner. He scanned for her comlink to quash it as soon as he wen to her room to tell her to leave (with the mom). When he didn’t find it, he immediately jammed her, and intimdated her into not doing anything stupid or she’d get the Slab. When she agreed, he hacked her anyway and pulled an “Intercept Traffic” action to keep her from calling the cops.

A cop car and a low force spirit picked us up after we left in a casual fashion (just walked out and used the mom’s credentials). Our mage and his spirit dropped their spirit, and Some Gremlins caused the cop car to do a barrel roll and crash.

We then got to the meet point and got chewed out for leaving the RFID tags that we had used to get past security.