Maybe some of you have been in this position, but I am doing up a little fanfic and I need some ideas. I've always been better at shooting things than figuring out puzzles...I can't even play the Monkey Island games. So please, lend me your imaginations.

Here is the situation: A troll sammy who doesn't run with a regular team loses a good friend when a run they are on turns out to be a set-up. He escapes and buries his friend and then finds out that the entire fragged run was just the result of two corp bigwigs having a pissing contest.

He's pretty mad about his friend getting geeked and at first he wants to track down the team of runners who killed her. He finds out that they are corporate sell-outs who work directly for one of the feuding execs and that in the week since the set-up, they have gone to Europe with their boss. He doesn't have the connections, yearning, or the cred to follow them there so he decides to wait them out. As the days pass he begins to think that if he kills the runners, the corp exec will just hire some new ones. The sammy starts to think that it would be better to do something that would seriously hurt if not kill the exec along with his personal dirty-work team.

Now how does he do it and still have a chance of escaping? he'll want something more personal than a bomb or poison, but he wouldn't walk up to them on a street and blow them away either. If you're interested, please tell me what you think.

Thanks.

Neurostun VIII, rope, and torture apparati of your choice.

With a corp exec, the best thing to do is discredit and disenfrachise.

So, make it look like he's stealing from the corp, sabatoging the corp, and otherwise doing exactly the opposite of his job. Then the runners who are corporate shills will probably be hired to kill their former boss, and good times will be had by all.

personally, i think, that if he's also a runner, he would understand that the runners are just doing what runners do, corp sell outs or not.

But beyond that, i would think that maybe doing what they did to you.. grab someone "special" preferabbly to the entire group, and do the torture ruetine.

grab some valuable information and wideband it.

The troll should stalk the exec, figure out what he's doing wrong (mistresses, stealing from the company, chip habbit, cult membership), and offer to sell the information back to the corp exec, with a condition that the bad runner team be the ones to come do the exchange.

The troll then has a third party that the exec trust call to warn him that his team of runners killed the seller and plans on using the information for themselves, and if he hurries he can catch them in the act. He would send another group to get the data back and kill the bad team. Some might survive and then go after the exec.

anything less than a few million, a corp will not notice.

if you want to hur a corp, the best thing you can do is to get a datasteal of proof that they did something illegal in a big way. public outcry and lots of lawsuits, legal problems, the works.

of course, its much more practical to simply find the individual responsible for what happened to you, and destroy their life. frame them, blackmail, whatever works. just make sure they live long enough to be fired in disgrase, lose everything, and have to live on the streets.

going after the exec directly is a good idea. but do interrogate him before he dies, to see if he was under orders from higher up.

Grab a voice synthesizer and break into his apartment while he is out. Call the CEO/CFO/Other corporate big wig and make some nasty threats. Download gay elf-midget pyro-necro-bestiality porn onto his office pc (it would take something like that to get anyone's attention) and e-mail it to everyone in his address book. When he gets kicked out on his (ahem) ear, you'll be there waiting with your duct tape, condom filled with C-12, a radio detonator and a trideo recorder to capture the moment.... Have I said too much?

I agree with Aku. Aside from that, vengeance runs tend to become clusterfucks unto themselves because if one runner does it, there is a tendency for it to compound itself because and blow up in their face.

So she got capped. It's the price of doing business. Kill the runners, walk away.

Agreed. Becoming another Neon Samurai doesn't do anyone any good.

To hell with professionalism is what I say! In this particular case, taking the cool and detached route makes for a very boring story. And that's exactly what this is, a story - he's not asking for advice for one of his characters.

Well initially, I think the troll would be all like "I'm gonna kill that sumbitch reeeal slow". But as he waits for the team to return to Seattle(?), the initial wave of anger subsides. How can he kill him? What's the point? It won't bring his friends back. The exec will not learn a lesson. If he kills the runners, more will be hired. He's so tiny, so alone. Killing the exec will get him eventually arrested. The exec is legal, not like shadow scum whose murders the cops don't even investigate. He could slowly stalk the exec, waiting for the perfect moment. But that still won't bring his friends back, corps will continue to kill off runners without a second thought and runners will continue to kill runners.

So basically, I'd say he'd get really depressed and possibly become addicted to something. Hey, the shadows ain't pretty.

Yeah, that's one way for the story to go. But just because his story begins at the same place as yours doesn't mean it has to end at the same place - I can imagine dozens of different outcomes, each depending on how your world works and how you choose to play the murder. I know that in our games, killing a suit definitely does not guarantee a certain death sentence for a runner.

And even if it does come to the same conclusion, it doesn't mean that it isn't a tale worth telling.

How our team played out a somewhat similar situation:
1) It wasn't an executive, it was the owner of falafel stand in a mall that our team got a job providing security for ratting out one of the our team members, street name of "The Colonel", for being slightly over the line in dispelling a door-crasher rave party. The Colonel tossed a couple of frag grenades when things had got hairy and full out rioting began.
2) Nobody died [initially], but The Colonel burned a LOT of cash just to get out on bail to begin with. There were no [living] witnesses at that point. Unfortunately when the falafel stand owner came forward, and we were unable to get to the witness initially, The Colonel decided it best to jump bail. So became a known printed, pictured, and DNAed fugitive. He ended up dropping a bunch more cash on a new look, Lifestyle, etc.
3) The Colonel had the Vindictive Flaw, occationally the player does as well. The Colonel felt betrayed by the man he had been working to protect from "those damn hippie-freak scum".
4) The Colonel coaxed the rest of the team into helping with revenge by a mix of blackmail (he was the only link to the rest of the team) and political support for pursuing the personal goals of other individual members.

Extended brainstorming by the team evetually lead to a plan personifying some of the worst aspects of group-think, the Car-battoir.

A car made to look like a high-end taxi/low-end limo. There was a large blade hidden flat just below the surface of the rear seat that ran the entire edge of the rear seat. The upholstery was highly flame resistant/retardant. The falafel stand owner was duped into taking the cab ride. Once the door was closed, with the windows rolled up, the blade would come forward fully severing just below the knees. A short blast from gas nozzles from the back of the front seat then created a momentary flame curtain in an effort to cauterize the stumps and keep him alive for further "discussions".

As an afterthought an extinguisher system was also installed. Likely the only brightspot as the initial gauging for the flame curtain came out a bit high effectively flash BBQing the freshly delimbed falafel stand owner. The fire extinguisher system managed to keep the car from being torched in the process.

However with that initial field test out of the way, the nessasary flame curtain adjustments made, and the upholstery redone the Car-battoir entered into the team's arsenal of infamity to await anyone that dares cross them.

My personal route would be to set up proof, that the execs behaviour was severely damaging for the corporation. After finding and creating enough evidence I would send it as an email to a number of known enemies of the concerned exec. That will possibly have some serious effect on his career. And it will withdraw a part of the protection he might have had before. Afterwards I would go for the straight "single bullet to the head". Quick. Professional. Safe. No unnecessary violence. Therefore no rise in notoriety. Possibly even a bonus in street rep for setting things straight and putting the as***** to the graveyard. And word will get out in the streets that crossing the team is a bad idea.

My guy would just creep onto the roof of a building that gives a clear view into his house, and snipe the bastard.

He never sees me, and the ballistic evidence is destroyed by the fact the bullet's explosive, and fragments into dozens of tiny pieces. The silencer muffles the sound of the shot, and then he disassembles his rifle, and high tails it out of there on his motorcycle.

Thanks for all the responses guys. They are helpful.

I forgot to mention that the troll sammy has a long-standing grudge against the exec's corporation. So, killing the rival runner team = good, hurting the exec = better, doing it all and making the corp hurt (no matter how insignificantly)= best.

Hire other Shadowrunners to do the job. Get a decker to pull off a novahot datasteal of anything and everything he or she can get his or her hands on about the corp in question, the exec in question, and the sellout team in question.

Then fucking wideband it. Broadband it. Open-source it. Shout it from the mount to everyone from Azzies to Zimbabwians. Did I forget to say don't forget to pay the team you hire well?

Don't do it yourself. Chances are (especially if you're a troll,) you'll be far too recognizable, and that you'll lose your head at a bad moment. Hire another Shadowrunner to put a cap in him. Take out the sell-outs, too. (Alternatively, you can assist in this venture. Bring all of your surviving teammates with you, too. )


Why, by the way, does the OP story read suspiciously like you're continuing the story in the front of the SR3 book?

Ok, I can handle going on a suicide mission, but giving away information's just too much for me.

~J