Hi everybody --

I'm running a game tomorrow night in which Redmond Center Mall is overrun by dozens of gangs who begin looting the place, blowing away chunks of it, etc.

The Johnson (who represents the investment company backing the mall) hires the runners to go in with multiple objectives.
1) Rescue the remaining clerks and mall personnel who have holed themselves up in the underground tunnels/storerooms.
2) Download 100,000mp worth of records & other data from the computer system into chips.
3) Retrieve some "personal items" from various offices.
4) And a huge fucking bonus if they can actually find some way to clear the gangs out of the mall short of nuking it. (Hint: This will be next to impossible.)

I got the idea from the Seattle Sourcebook, and because the rigger's warehouse, which has become the kind of team HQ, is near the location of the mall.

As usual, there will be some bigger corp plot behind the reason the gangers were able to take over the mall in the first place, and why Lone Star isn't going in full force to try to take it back, and also the nature of the run, etc.

Needless to say, I want this to be a chaotic, semi-humorous disaster of clashing gangs, forcing the PCs to attempt to slip in unnoticed and dodge and weave throughout the mall as they attempt to accomplish their objectives. Lotsa people gonna die and lotsa shit is gonna get blown up.

So, I need a list of tons of encounters! Ideas on factions, gangs, incidents, etc. Stuff for my shamans to do, my rigger to do, my decker to do, etc. Please share any ideas with me. I have a dozen or so random ones right now, but I thought most of you have ran games like this one before and might have some ideas that worked well for you.

Thanks in advance.

My GM (emo samurai) ran the first encounter of the campaign in a Barrens mall that was infested with bug spirits. The bug shaman staged the whole thing so that he could see his beloved, who happened to be a mantid working as a special op for Ares. You can read more about it here.

As for local information, I would check out this page on the Seattle sprawl. It contains much flavory goodness about each major area, including regional gang info.

Remember that gangers love to have fun, and getting their hands on that big amount of booty is definitely an occasion for celebration. Play up on the festive aspects of the whole thing - drunk (or chipped) gangers all around, motorcycle races in the semi-evacuated parking lot, drunk fights, foodfights, gambling over the loot and so on.

However, not everyone looting the mall has to be a ganger - you'd probably meet disorganized (but in massive numbers) hungry squatters, ghouls (in the ventilation/maintainance areas), anarchists, maybe even a radical organization or two trying to get useful supplies (canned/preserved food, clothes, blankets, maybe weapons) to spread amongst the downtrodden.

If alot of the gangers are Metahuman, Humanis might try to sneak in a camera (or patch into the remnants of the security system) to have sdhots of "Barbaric Meta-scum" causing havoc to include in their propaganda. Or, if the loacl Humanis or Hands of Five are somewhat more active, they might try to "liberate" the mall from the "Meta-scum" "for the good of the (Human) community".

The gangs all sell drugs and guns for organised crime syndicates. When several of them run in to eachother at the mall, some pooly chosen words leads to bullets flying. The mall owner himself has some unsavory business partners whom he lets sell firearms out of an unused loading bay in exchange for a percentage. When the bullets start flying outside, a wired and twitchy goon fires at the other side during a firearms exchange at the loading area. Inside, the gangs have called thier buddies, and now several allied gangs from at least four seperate factions are firing on eachother, while gangs not involved in the firefight use the opertunity to go looting. Meanwhile, outside, a team of runners is shooting it out with arms dealers, while the Lonestar officers who had been running protection desperately try to prevent word of the incident from leaving the store (locking everyone inside while they decide what they are going to do). To make matters worse, night is falling, and ghoul packs have surrounded the mall, waiting for it to reopen (snacking on people who stop to watch).

The inside of the mall degenerates in to hostages being kept on the top floor, while gangs shoot it out in the food court, while the rest of the shops are either barricaded, or robbed blind. Outside, arms dealers are shooting it out with shadowrunner, while Lonestar officers engage in a quickly degenerating conflict trying to scare off Docwagon HTR teams responding to phonecalls from within, all the while ghouls stalk the perimiter, feeding on gawkers.

That was just off the top of my head, but if you need chaos, I think that will do nicely.

I'll second that chemical weapons are your best bet for clearing the mall. Something subtle (like a not-so-fast sleeping gas) would be preferable, because the gangers may get all retaliatory and cause even more damage if the realize what's going on.

You'd have to get large canisters of the appropriate gas to all the air conditioning centers (a large mall would probably have at least 10 separate air conditioning banks). If you could get enough, you could use neurostun. You'd have to release the gas all at once, and crank the AC's fans to facilitate a faster delivery.

I would also have a water-vector agent in the fire supression system and have it go off at the same time, as that is likely to take out more people quickly. The gas agent will take care of those in rain slickers or who have umbrellas.

I'm sure that sixth-world electronics are much better at handling water than our current analogues, so you should still be able to get the paydata, even after everything is soaked. Just be sure to pack rain gear and a gas mask. This plan would also allow for the easy rescue of hostages (everyone is knocked out).

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Since your the GM of this particular scenario, keep in mind that gangers may also want to cause mischief by contaminating the fire supression system, so that they can cause wide-spread mayhem once the mall is back under normal operating proceedures. Maybe a B&R chemical (barf and run -- not as in running away, but runniness as a general condition).

I am kinda thrown by this, wouldn't there be a security rigger or two, that man several of the remotely operated vindicator miniguns above the food court and in several of the corridors to make sure something like this doesn't happen? On each of the shops is a sign that says ("Shop lifters will be shot, questioned, then persecuted by the law")

I am curious as to why anyone is trying to invest in a mall in the DMZ. Redmond' a waist land. Lonestar doesn't even go in there at night unless they are rolling in fully armored vehicles and using heavy ordinance.

Because a nice area, Bellevue, is right next door, and they're worried that the gang violence will spill over.

The problem with massive knockout-gas applications is that they don't go smoothly all that often. Remember the theater in Russia a few years ago? A number of the hostage fatalities were apparently caused by the agent that was pumped into the building to sedate everyone. Not everyone tolerates anaesthesia well, and not everyone tolerates being laid out on their backs (slack-jawed) in the rain while they're unconcious so that the building can be bomb-searched afterwards very well, either.

It also sounds like a bit of a game-killer. My initial inclination would be to allow the players to get ahold of *some* stun gas, but not enough to do the whole mall. "Sorry, guys... you need that amount of gas, you're gonna have to wait a while, so I can get ahold of my bro down in Phoenix." You're talking about enough gas here to fill a large mall, which if I were to bullshit a volume for, would be more than a tanker-truck full of the stuff pre-release. Not exactly an amount you can get at the corner store.

Let's put it another way. Band-aids are something you can buy over the counter. Ten million Band-aids are not an amount you can feasibly come up with in a couple of hours.

Why bother with stun gas when blister gas is so much more fun. Sulfer mustards usually aren't deadly but they're painfull enough to incapacitate. The cancers would be facing massive wound penalities.

Some other options, cut the power, start a fire, an auto dealership in the mall (racing!).

You could make it the factoria mall down by 405 and I-90, if redmond doesn't cut it for ya.

I like the idea very much of a chaotic free for all in a mall with weapons free. It reminds me of an old cartoon that once ran in the New Yorker called "the Great Santa Shootout" which showed a large number of santas having a John Woo style gunfight in a mall with rifles and pistols.

Now, if the PCs just wanted to clear the mall the obvious answer would be chemical weapons. Easy. Seriously.

Ideas for encounters that would be a bit unusual:
*Someone could be driving a motorcycle around inside the mall and use it to ram the PCs.
*Enemy gang members in hand to hand combat range could attempt to throw the PCs off of vernadas and overhangs which would seperate the party and of course cause extra damage.
*The power in the mall has probably been cut. Inside it's probably actually quite dark. The air is probably thick and rancid with the smell of rotting food and unwashed bodies. Visibility should be very poor.

Food Fight writ large. neat.

Perhaps when the gangers realize they're screwed, they start flooding the tunnels that the staff are stuck in, creating a race against time to save them.

Perhaps the runners have a contact among the gangers that they can try to communicate with for intel.

Maybe the plan involves getting to the security booth and reactivating some defensive measures that were installed.

There's always the gun-to-the-head hostage situation.

Maybe a pet store in the mall included a relevant critter or two. Blackberry cats or Nimue's salamander or something.

Prepare for the runners to be tempted to do some looting of their own, and have some fallout in mind.

Maybe the cops eventually show up once the runners are in. Can the cops tell the difference between runners and gangers? Would they bother to?

If your shaman is conjuring a hearth spirit (or would it be city?) you could present it as a stereotypical "mall-rat" teenager with an appropriate personality.

Hyzmarca has caught the correct, as usual. Mustard gas. Maybe you can't get enough stun gas to get the whole mall but you probably could get enough assorted gasses to do something to everyone.


The more I think about it the more knocking PCs off of balconies sounds like the way to go. Use Knockback rules as well as melee combat to do this. Should the party be so foolish as to stride in guns blazing they'd kill a lot of unprepared gangers but eventually because of the volume of enemies there should be a situation where someone closes to melee and tries to throw them over a balcony.

Once the party is has been partially thrown over a balcony it's split up and a lot weaker since each party "fragment" can be engaged simultaneously by large groups of enemies.

Then you could have a funny situation where, say, the decker gets KOed by three gangers with baseball bats and they loot his unconscious body before throwing him in the fountain.

There's also the point of "How long ago did Redmond become so bad in your game?" If it was only a few years ago that Lone Star threw up their hands, it might not be so unreasonable that there's still a lot of good stuff in there under the feet of unwitting gangers.

Thanks for all the discussion, everyone. It has helped out immensely.

So I ran the game Monday evening.

The party looks like this:

Beeph, human street samurai
Fortis, human leader/electronics specialist/former merc
Octo, dwarf decker/demolitions specialist
Kino, elf bear shaman
Olga, troll rigger
Lux, elf cat shaman

Somehow they decided the best way to clear the entire mall of gangers was amassing as much firepower as possible, loading up Olga's Bison with an HMG and a case of AK-97's (which they obtained from one of Fortis' former merc contacts), and just plowing into the mall in the truck and opening fire.

They DID manage to find six canisters of neurostun gas from another arms dealer on short notice. I'm ruling that the mall has 10 A/C centers and they need 3 canisters in each one to fill the entire mall. So they're only going to be able to substantially clear 20% of it that way.

They got to the mall to see a few huge bonfires going up in the parking lots. Gangs holding street races. Half the parking lot and part of the mall are flooded from some burst water pipes. (The gangs were trying to deactivate the fire suppressant systems.) The stores and outside of the mall have already suffered several layers of graffiti.

Lux managed an insanely good roll defaulting to her Bikes skill while driving the Bison through the gothic palm tree gates of "Hot Tropic". (They wanted Olga with AK-97 ready.) They decided to enter the mall nearest the knife/weapon shops. They went in guns blazing, and completely blew away the gang (The Slicer Dicers from Food Fight) holding one of the weapon stores. Fortis and Octo took light wounds.

Kino summoned a City Spirit, who took the form of a coat-rack with eyes. (I really hope he uses it's conceal power...)

The Merry Metamen (with choppers painted like horses) are trying to steal supplies to spread amongst the needy and downtrodden.

Here's the map I made of the mall. (Everyone's welcome to steal it.)

We had to take a break there, but all hell is gonna break lose this next Monday.....