Run idea: Advice requested., My players: you know the drill. Options

[ShadowDragon8685]

When you say link, what exactly do you mean?


Do you mean material link? Because that genetic therapy that renders skin cells/hair you leave behind useless as forensic and material link to you would also work for whole corpses.

And any cyberware in them could be specially manufactured to be absent of identifying markings, and to melt down (acid) when they flatline.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Exactly what effect does electrical damage have on vehicles? It's hard to find. Is it intended to shut a vehicle down so folks on foot can storm it, pull the driver out and shoot him and claim the vehicle? (You know, standard Lone Star operating procedures?) Or is it more permanent than that?

[FuelDrop]

Exactly what effect does electrical damage have on vehicles? It's hard to find. Is it intended to shut a vehicle down so folks on foot can storm it, pull the driver out and shoot him and claim the vehicle? (You know, standard Lone Star operating procedures?) Or is it more permanent than that?

It shuts them down for a few rounds. that said, if you're targetting a combat vehicle heavier than a body 3-4 drone with full armour then the odds of you doing anything to it quickly become negligible.

[ShadowDragon8685]

It shuts them down for a few rounds. that said, if you're targetting a combat vehicle heavier than a body 3-4 drone with full armour then the odds of you doing anything to it quickly become negligible.

What if you had something bigger than Stick 'n Shock, though? Like say, a Stick 'n Shock rocket, or those electro-zap feelie strips?

[kzt]

When you say link, what exactly do you mean?


Do you mean material link? Because that genetic therapy that renders skin cells/hair you leave behind useless as forensic and material link to you would also work for whole corpses.

And any cyberware in them could be specially manufactured to be absent of identifying markings, and to melt down (acid) when they flatline.

I really doubt that you are going to get and pay for people to go into a tank for a month before hitting them with some sort of magical/biological transform. And it doesn't matter anyhow, the person who created them is obviously causally linked to the target. Hence a ritual team can find them in short order.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Nah, they're clones. Born and bred Infected with but one purpose in life - to kill people and scare the living daylights out of the survivors. Think Gnomes that look suspiciously like Greys and shit.


And honestly, the setting breaks down if you say "a ritual team can find the guys who made this and nuke them." Did a ritual team nuke the scientists who made Surtr? No. Did a ritual team nuke the guys who invented Thor shots after one was used on a target in Downtown Seattle? No. Did a ritual team... I could go on.


Lots and lots of horrible things are created in Shadowrun, and Ritual Teams don't nuke their creators.

[kzt]

Very few of the writers and even fewer of the developers understood how the various elements of the setting would interact. AFAIK, all the ones who did have quit or been fired.

The fact that ritual magic can't be used effectively by PCs doesn't mean it doesn't work very well. Ritual magic is crazy, crazy powerful. It's whole toolbox, ranging from research tools to magical nuclear weapons, though these nukes are much more usable against people who can't retaliate than traditional nukes due to the reduced signature.

And remember that in the 6th world, a corporation got away with setting off an actual nuclear weapon inside the 3rd largest city in UCAS. Not only did they get away with nuking it, they got paid big bucks to clear up the mess.

[Manunancy]

You might not be able to pinpoin the peoples who supervised the proces, but in my opinion it's very lilkely you could find the facility where they've been crafted, equiped and probably at least somewhat trained and tested if they were up to spec. It also seems like a failry pointless waste of time of money for something intended to hit soft targets. I mean if you want to terrorize unarmed (or at leat very poorly armed) civilians to get them out of your ways, gangs like the Halloweeners are far cheaper and just as effective. Just give them a few crates of the 2070's declinaion of chinses AKs and ammo, a good dose of their favorite booze and drugs, maybe spiked with a few unlabled extras to make them even nasiter than usual and voila, quick and ready atrocity for a dime and with very, very little to trace the problem to you (a bunch of guns that were stolen from a chinese army depot 20+ years ago and have moved through a few dozen traffickers and a batch of drugs cooked by street-level chemisty won't exactlu pinpoint who's behindthe affair).

Also without the problems of a bunch on freshly infected feral ghouls to complicate your takeover or leak all around and draw the sort of attention you'd rather do without. Sure the UCAS prefer to catter favor from the corps than their own citizens, but crafting a horde of remote-controled ghouls to send them munching on thousands of peoples is the sort of thing that can drive them to bring out a governement-sized and wrighted boot to stomp on the problem. Hard. Particularly as it's the sort of shenanigans that can bring an Omega Order on the offender's head if you sounds like you might be planning a repeat performance, which means the other corps will stand aside and record it all for their own proganda mills to tar an feather the offender.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Honestly, ritual magic enabling a scry-and-fry is one of those things that has no place in the setting. You want to scry, use a spirit or a spy satellite. You want to fry, use a spirit or a cruise missile - both things which reasonable precautions can be taken against. Or hell, use a THOR shot - not something against which a reasonable precaution may be taken, but potentially something against which unreasonable precautions may be taken.



Also, the idea was explicitly not to use ghouls, because ghouls are infectious. Destroying ghouls with an area is easy, just round up a bunch of ghouls and extract bodily fluids until you have enough, then crop-dust the area with HMHVV III. Hell, put 'em in weaponized nanites that introduce ghoul matter straight to victim's hearts and brains.

The problem is that ghoul-bombing a place pretty much area-denies it to pretty much everyone forever. The idea behind this was to just sow panic and chaos and make people want to leg it when the creepy little things with innate Concealment (Self) show up and start eating their family members in dark corners, but since you know what they are, you can easily control them, by, say, releasing the chemical triggers that make them go docile.

I just don't want to use actual, normal ghouls, because one scratch from a ghoul is game over, roll a new character.

[kzt]

The idea behind this was to just sow panic and chaos and make people want to leg it when the creepy little things with innate Concealment (Self) show up and start eating their family members in dark corners, but since you know what they are, you can easily control them, by, say, releasing the chemical triggers that make them go docile.

No, then Ares dumps their cute little bioagents and all the magical threats rapidly become dogfood.