For the past several weeks a team of three seven-year-old human girls have cut a swathe of death and destruction throughout Desert Wars. This group was the brainchild of a middle manager in the PR division of a major Megacorp.

The girls themselves are corporate brats who were chosen for their sickeningly sweet cuteness and possess no innate combat abilities. Likewise, their deltagrade cyberware was spcificly designed to augment their cuteness first and provide combat abilities second. In all fairness, these children should have been slaughtered within minutes of first touching the sand. They weren't simply because opposing forces have standing orders to avoid harming them. You see, their age their cuteness and their popularity together mean that whichever Mega is responsible for their deaths will face considerable PR backlash and since esert Wars is televised there is no way to cover something like that up.


The runners are hired by a mysterious Johnson supposedly in the employ of the child soldiers' families for the purpose of extracting them and taking them to safety. This requires infiltrating a warzone and taking capturing some heavily armed and heavily cybered children who's actions are constantly recorded and broadcast over live trid and simsense. The Johnson, of course, works for a rival mega and may or may not butcher them for their 'ware.

Is anyone else highly disturbed?

No. This idea is awesome. But why don't the runners just snipe them?

probably because they've been given the cover of the johnson being a middle man for the families, who would want their darling children back alive. if they are told that they can kill the kids it would ruin that illusion and give the johnson's alterior motives away

You know, there was an anime series about this exact sort of thing...Earth Defense Force Mao-Chan, as I recall. Basically, earth (Japan in particular) was being invaded by sickeningly-cute aliens who would drop in and try to steal some cultural relic or other. The military didn't want to intervene, however, because of the PR backlash of attacking such cute aliens. So they countered by giving equipment, weapons, and (not nearly enough) training to a group of three 8-year-old girls, who would then engage the aliens. The result was a huge PR boost for the military, and some rather comedic misadventures for the three girls.

i... dunno. i guess if you're running the right type of campaign with the right type of players, the idea of fielding prepubescent kids might fly. but i wouldn't buy it. heck, i can't even see Desert Wars' target audience buying it. PR backlash, hell, most of the viewers would probably cheer for whoever popped these snotnosed brats. this isn't a family show, this is war!

the idea itself is interesting, i just can't see it in something as intentionally violent as Desert Wars. maybe if the kids were reporting on the Desert Wars, for some kind of kids' show, or something.

I would see a PR backlash against whoever fielded the 3 girls.

Morality is alive and well in the middle classes of shadow run, any evil they perseve will be stoped, buy agreement of media outlets corporate immorality is never fully exposed to this group.

Edward

I'm just wondering who'd agree to that subclause in the 3,000-page contracts detailing each engagement.

Ok three sickly cute 7 year old girls running around a war zone with delta grade cyber and who knows what kind of weapons no real compat training....eh screw PR back lash give me a sniper rifle 3 shells, a crack sniper and there location easy fix. All the more fun as every mega goes and starts blaming the others for there deaths whats not to love aobut that?

Why of course they would, but they are ordered not to by commanders who don't care if they live or die, you see. As compensation their death scenes will be immortalized in simsense and in action figure form.

And who expects soldiers to comply to an order that means their certain death? I am sorry, but this is way too much anime in SR for me.

At this point it becomes a choice between certain glorious death and certain execution for disobeying an order during a time of war. Death is certain either way but the former makes one a hero while the latter makes one a disgrace.

Ph33r the cute ones

No. It is the choice between a certain death and the slight possibility of escape. Someone following the order might be hero. But I might survive. He stupid dead hero. Me smart living disgraced. ^^

If I was another corp in desert wars I would run a public campaign vilifying the corp that put little girls in the combat and then arrange for my troupes to “be forced to defend themselves”, the footage of that fight would make it very clear who the attacker was and I my troupes would be ordered to “make it look like your trying not to kill them” lots of suppressive fire, flash bang grenades. But ultimately there was no choice but to bring out powerful ordinance

I would also hint in my publicity campaign that the girls had been on some form of personofix chip to make them act that way. Of cause there was no evidence, there headwear wiped itself on there death.

Edward

No corp would send such kid-combat-drones into the Desert Wars the first place. Sending children to war IS bad PR. And Desert Wars is not about small anime cuties, but about units of professional soldiers battling each other with hight tech epuipment in scenarios that are mostly simulated.

Whatever company butchered up 3 kids to send them into a warzone would defintely suffer from negative backlash. Look at how people feel about childhood soldiers in Afghanistan.

If these monsters were put into desert wars, then what is stopping a merc company from using stun weaponry to neutralize them? stun grenades, squirts and other meassures. They are kids ... wired to the 9's but they will still have a low body.

A nice stun bolt or two will drop them.

Ok. Even in a dystopian world, I just can't see hardened mercenaries letting themselves get killed because they're ordered to not fight back. These are not "armies", these are mercenaries, hired by the megacorps, and given cool toys to play with. The key part of that is mercenaries.
The number one rule is survive.
Number two is get paid.
Number three is shoot the person who didn't pay you.

If you are getting orders that mean you will not survive, then you "did not receive those orders" and do what it takes to survive. If you don't get paid, shoot the person who hired you, and walk away. Maybe the dedicated corp troops would follow directives like that... but the instant someone outside of the corp got involved, show's over.

I seem to recall a sourcebook of which about 1/3 was just that.

I meant in the same vane as murphy's laws to combat.... not game mechanic rules. That section was such a snore.

Whichever manager thought this idea up would become the victim of a wetwork job put out by his own boss.


Unless, of course, the "Killer Kids" don't have any official backer... But that would invalidate the ponit, unless the entire point of their operation was to disgrace the other guys, while your soldiers manage to avoid killing the Kombat Kiddies, yet not die at the same time.


Actually, I could see that happening. Imagine the following headlines, in order of occurance.

Renraku Red Samurai Raided! Three eight-year-old girls made a shock appearance on the Desert Wars scene, eradicating Mitsuhama's elite shock troops within minutes of engagement with no casualties of their own. They then shot down all the camera drones in the area and dissapeared.

Firewatch Flamed Out! A squad of Ares Firewatch units engaged in the Desert Wars competition was ambushed and anhilliated today, when the Kombat Kiddies showed up on the scene, armed with miniguns and rocket launchers. As last time, they shot down all the camera drones in the area before departing.

And so forth and so on, ad nauseium, until one final headline,

Kombat Kiddies Kaptured! A strike team of Jaguar Guard, normally not involved in the Desert Wars campaign, was flown in early this week from Aztlan. This strike team captured the Kombat Kiddies in a daring nonlethal takedown in the pre-dawn hours this morning. Though the firefight was intense and the Jaguars sustained casualties, they experianced no fatalities on the mission. Aztechnology cyberwear experts dispatched to the scene are examining the cyberwear present in the girl's bodies, but they have preliminarily stated that the girls have been more or less combat drones for the past [insert time], judging by the intense anime magical-girl personafix BTLs combined with hardwired skillwires present in their bodies. While tracking the cyberwear's source is difficult, they believe that with time they will find enough key markers in the programming style to reveal the heinous puppeteers behind forcing eight-year-old girls into a warzone.

they'd also have to somehow avoid being tracked by satellite. i can't see satcam views of the battle not being part of the coverage.

the whole "kids with implanted 'ware kicking the asses of world-class soldiers" thing is just so wildly implausible. i mean, for one thing, the level of ability these kids would have to have is just insane in order to survive long enough to be recognized as kids. most guys in Desert Wars are going to see a short person firing a gun at them and think it's a dwarf, and the kids will be dead before anybody can say "I am the fighter for justice". think about the kind of stats you'd have to have in SR3 (it's flat-out impossible in SR4) to take on twenty, thirty, or more mercenary archtypes with top-end C&C. three cyberzombies would have trouble with that. not to mention the difficulty involved in escaping afterwards.

Not necessarily.

The word pornography means "the writing of whores".

How in the hell of all that is unholy can that mean extreme violence for the sake of violence?!

We call that "snuff".