It was okay. I would have had a lot of fun playing it instead of GMing. I think I stacked the odds WAY too much in favor of my dad and younger brother. They were playing 500 BP characters with 1 million nuyen saved up and 150 karma. Even though they were going against, like, 14 Red Samurai, they had the jump on them, they were hidden in a crowd, and my brother had 8 bound spirits all at Force 10. Of course, it was all my fault, and I did everything in my power to make things easy.

This was basically the Champion of Japanese Economic Superiority campaign, without the badass Initiate grade 10 toxic shaman with channeling. The Champion was parading around on a tank in the open, and for some reason, I let the party's rigger have a small submarine right up next to the pier. My younger brother used his crowd control spell to get the adoring peasants to swarm the line of Red Samurai and break through them. When everyone was in position, my brother called down all six of the spirits that could engulf and told them to head crunchy 6 Red Samurai. They basically destroyed the rest.

How do contracts with spirits work? Do they just wait for you to think of them appearing and doing a task, and they do it, or do they hang around in astral space? Could he just suprise them with a spirits swarm? I'm iffy on that.

Um.

"Um..." what? "Um... don't play games with people who don't know the system?" "Um... you're crazy and don't know the system yourself?" "Um... learn to use paragraph breaks?"

Here's how it used to work, anyway:

unbound spirits hang around you, in astral space, waiting for you to tell then to do something. They normally do not materialize unless you tell them to.

Bound spirits hang out 'elsewhere' (the metaplanes), you spend an action to call them, and they show up instantly. Also, they do not have to contend with any wards that might be 'between' them and you. So, for example, if you are inside a warded box, and call your bound spirits, they will show up next to you, without having to cross the ward first. However, you can't generally exploit this form of travel by asking them to return to the metaplanes and then show up somewhere you aren't. So, say you are buried in a warded coffin and slowly running out of air. You can call you bound spirits to you, and they have no trouble getting inside the warded coffin, but you can't, say, get they to carry a message out to your buddies without them having to cross the wards going out.

You can have your bound spirits hang around you in astral space (so you don't need to spend an action to call them first, before giving them orders. In general, hanging around like this for 24 hours uses up a service.

Note that for bound spirits, you have to take an action to call them, then another action to command them to do something, if you are in combat time, the time lost calling the spirit can be important, so it might be worth calling all of your bound spirits before hand. Of course, then they'd have to cross any wards you ran accross, and some yahoo with a spiritball could seriously put a hurt on your investment (bound spirits/elementals used to cost $$$).

I neglected to use any mages to guard the Champion of Japanese Economic Superiority; they were annihilated.

Congrats on your first successful run with your family! I hope that they liked it enough to continue.

Not really. I didn't really balance anything, and I eyeballed everything. I had to give them the cues on pretty much every course of action, so they won't be extracting anyone anytime soon. Plus, they knew nothing about the universe.

Let everyone read the first few chapters of the the book and that should significantly help them on the universe. Barring that, the Sprawl Survival Guide, an old book for SR3 has a great deal of information about the Shadowrun setting and universe which would help them out as well.

It also helped fill in the flavor and feel of what a criminal does in the game. It's tough the first time through when you've got no life experience your first time through