oooo now there's a thought... Possibly the closest thing to a benign agency in the SR world... Thanks, I'll run that idea past the other players.

I hope not. The Jihadist's player and myself have been gaming together for over 10 years and between the two of us we're typically the ones who keep inter-party conflict to a minimum. We've metagamed in the past to overcome differences between our respective characters, I can't imagine that would change now. In fact we've already been co-ordinating on the phone about what exactly our next step is going to be.

So, how do you prove you dpn't have it anymore if folks come looking for it? You said you're trying to get rid of this hot stuff before someone catches you with it. How likely is that? Anyone know what you've got, or any good leads to your team?

What makes you so sure that someone in the UCAS government (or just someone at Ft Lewis) wouldn't use it?

Okay so gassing little ethnics and taking their stuff it is!

Because if they wanted to use nerve gas they already have more than enough of their own for any viable plan.

But this batch wouldn't be directly tracable back to them, which opens up new possibilities when it comes to usage.

Besides, I'm not necessarily talking about policy, or command decisions. All it takes is one small element inside the government (or Ft. Lewis) in order to make use of it. And neither the UCAS government, nor the military (especially that stationed in Seattle) are the most trustworthy of organizations lately.

By the time you get anyone to roll out on it it is traceable. Your going to have dozens to hundreds of people involved, with lots of reports and video from the call they received to the guys who went in the the level A suits to get it and the people who get it out and put it in the bunker.

If you can manage to misappropriate this under these conditions you can certainly get easier access to vastly safer to handle agents.

And if you did that, you'd be a real idiot, at least in my opinion. Hence my statement concerning method of contact.

I highly disagree. Our team has stuff like this happen all the time. There was that time with the weaponized HMHVV a couple months ago, and the nukes we built after that... of course my team is on Mars now. We play for keeps.

Here's uncle Draconis' primer on weapons of mass destruction. Remember kids, you're not a terrorist until you deploy your weapon.

This entire scenario is called "WMD Poker"

Simply set up mutually assured destruction. If anyone comes after the WMD let them know in plain terms that you don't possess the weapon but if anything happens to you and yours, plans will be set into motion to retaliate with said weapon against the aggressors. Ergo you up the risk in the risk reward equation. Get them to write off the aquisition of the lost weapon as economically unfeasible. They'll go make or obtain new ones.

Now your best options are:

1. Sell the weapon on the black market. This may chafe your morals but if you don't have a problem with it there's Madigascar or my personal favorite, Vladivostok. VBAY rocks woohoo. Just remember to hint that you didn't sell all your stock and have some in "reserve" should someone come a knocking. I did this with a nuclear weapon myself we had lying around.

2. Give it to the Draco foundation. They're touchy feely and while rather curious as to where you obtained the weapon they'll generally leave you alone and can publicly announce the destruction of said weapon to get people off your back. Just remember to hint you may or may not have more in your secret stash. Don't expect a large reward but you will be able to sleep at night.

3. Deploy it. This is completely crazy but it'll definately keep your neighbor from blasting his stereo at 4am anymore. I suggest mid grade targets, no governments or corporations for you. Because you ARE going to cause escalation. You need to cripple or destroy the people/organization you're going after in one fell swoop otherwise you've now got a shadow or hot war on your hands. Of course if you already have a shadow/hot war on your hands this isn't much of a problem (we did in the past). In this case I suggest you actually do save some in reserve as you're going to need it. Make sure to not step on the toes of any of the big boys or even hint that you're a threat to them. I suggest that you frame some other group for the act. That way you take care of two birds with one very large stone. Oh and don't deploy it for cash or some other group. They will turn on you in a heartbeat when the heat is on. There are better ways to make money.

4. Bury it figuratively or literally. This is really just a delaying option until you decide on one of the first three. Still it is nice to have an "Ace" up your sleeve when you need it. Remember to set up MAD of course otherwise you can only bluff.

Now in our current campaign we chose option 1. Hey what can I say rent isn't free
. In our SR3 game we chose option 3. Of course it was called the "Berserk antipathy tour" for a reason. Our final "concert" was nuking a south african UO facility.
I wanted to send a message to them that they couldn't ignore.

Oh and congrats on the yacht. Sweep it for bugs/malware, spoof the registry, change the color and sell that baby in the philippines, the carib, Vladivostok, or your favorite cyberpirate hang out.

Heh I knew you'd ask. Now why should I take all the drama out of it all?
But the short vague answers are 1. not as bad as some places I've been to on earth and 2. The early bird catches the bones.

Now stop hijacking the thread, there's another for this. Where's my rolled up newspaper?

The GM in question chiming in here!

They are just working for themselves, or more specifically their common hatred of Ares. Well Imperialus' PC has sort of an employer, the remainants of the Seraphim, but he's mostly driven on this by a hatred of Ares. They intercepted this shipment without knowing what was in it based off a tip from a tip one of the PCs (the NIJ one) recieved from an informant. From a metagame standpoint when I feed them the informant's info to kick things off --I-- didn't know what they'd find in the shipment. Hadn't yet decided that at that point.

Just like I'm not certain yet whether or not the hit on the storefront has killed the doublecrossing buyer.


A few other things that have been left out here:

- the PCs don't know each other very well, they met each other less than 24 hours prior.
- the canisters were a covert Ares shipment into the Kowloon Walled City.
- the Agent Blue canisters are marked with military script that is a number of years old (pre-revolution Poland)
- Agent Blue is near statless, however it is not nessasarily unstoppable. The PCs recovered a chemsuit each from the shipment they suspect would protect them....and then burnt all the rest.
- when they openned the shipping container with the canisters in it they noted the smell of fresh, drying enamal paint
- the NIJ is by himself at his apartment (that Imperialis' PC does not know the location of) with the canisters, and the other two PCs are in hiding after capping a couple Black Chrysanthemum members due to an escalating feud
- the only PC that has put together an understanding of the above feud is the NIJ PC, and he's not talking about it ...although all the players know
- the NIJ PC has now, on his own initiative and without consent from the rest of the "team", arranged to sell the canisters to his NIJ Phillipine contact for 150 per! I'd like to say more, but the player mentioned something separate from the other players. I'm going to urge at our next session that that be public to all the players, I really don't like the "table secret" thing. But I'm not going to spill the beans yet till we all have a chance to talk.
- the session ended at the last above point, the pickup was suppose to be at the NIJ PC's apartment....ETA not yet determined
- all the players so far have been focused on moving the gas, there has been no talk (that I know of) regarding WTF Ares (and their subsiduary Knight Errant has the police contract for all of Hong Kong) would be involved in transporting this into the Walled City
- oh, and Jean's friend-of-a-friend contact was gained from a failed Clout roll....I plead innocence, the dice told me to do it!

Nah. I'm just giving them rope. They are the ones that seem to have decided to hang each other with it.

To be fair we didn't have a clue what was in the shipping container we hijacked until we opened it. Not that we hadn't tried to find out, but other than the fact that Ares knew it was important enough to pretend it didn't exist we couldn't figure out what was up with it.

Personally I figured it was part of a black ops deal to arm one of the local chinese warlords or resistance armies (we're running in HK) with some new small arms. I figured we could take our time picking over for some choice peices of hardware that we wanted, then fence the rest a crate or two at a time without any issues.

Yeah, so far he's not played that one "smart" IMO. He has basically tipped his hand by phoning [repeatedly] the doublecrosser from his own previously confiscated commlink, effectively letting the doublecrosser know he should be doing something to remotely screw with the boat. Or at least get a lock on the boat and send a Wasp or something over to discuss highseas property rights with Jean.

So now it's up in the air whether or not he's going to get back to shore, as he is currently a number of miles off the east coast.

EDIT: Of course if the RPG attack on the storefront succeeded then he's golden, and the proud owner of a new yacht.

Wow you're cruel, I like it. Still that is going to make for a short game. 24 hours? I mean they're going to be turning on each other soon enough. I couldn't imagine such disparate people actually becoming cohesive, especially when they find out what the NIJ guy is up to.

Thanks. Seriously though, I really didn't mean or expect it to turn out like this.

That's just game-world time. Keep in mind that this is 3 full sessions in. Hey, look at the TV show that managed to squeeze entire seasons out of "24 hours".

Yeah, I can't imagine it either. Which is going to make it all the cooler if they pull it off. EDIT Or one bitching blood-bathed, nerve gas drenched, body strewn crater if they don't.

D'OH!!! I forgot about the spoiler tag. Ok imperialus, you absolutely must not open this SPOILER!!!! If you want to know the contents before next Sunday you know who you have to talk to.

Cool let me know when things hit the fan.

I'm a fan of Reservoir Dogs.

What you mean is you are playing James Bond in a sci-fi setting.

It's fine and that's the way I play Spycraft (And D&D for that matter). But it's not very cyberpunk, IMO. In SR, When I break out the world shattering event or the armageddon plot device it's usually an end of campaign schtick where most PC will die or retire by the end of this event, which would be a multipart mission over at least 3 session. A last blaze of glory, basically.

The PC needs to be freakishly good by that point, too. I can't involve WMD in the tenth session of a 400 BP group. I'd have to tailor the threat level so that they have a fair shot to pull it off and then what the heck am I gonna have them do when they are REALLY good? Hijack Zurich Orbital? Assassinate Lofwyr?

So these kind of things do not happen all the time in my campaigns.

That was kinda my reaction, and I expect part of the reason why the assorted PC's have reacted to this in such a schizophrenic manner. None of us have the contacts to move this sort of stuff and we havn't developed any kind of trust or cohesion within the team. Looking at it from a purely in character perspective I expect that Jean would probably just leave the rest of the team hung out to dry and use the yacht to make his escape before laying low for a while and re-emerging with a new identity. Unfortunately that sort of plan doesn't work too well from a metagaming perspective since either myself or everyone else is going to be rolling up new characters.

Ahh well perhaps it's time to bust out the ex-Winternight hacker I have sitting on my computer.

You might feel that you have to describe it as such, but he's still just playing a Shadowrun game. To me, it's silly to think that a roleplaying game has to follow a certain type of play or story line in order to "still be X game".

Even with the horrible way that d20 promotes, if not flat out propagandizes and is written specifically for, the "kill, loot, buy new magical item, kill, loot, buy new magical item" style of play, you can play other kinds of game with it. Other systems might seem to work "better" for another kind of game, but playing that kind of game in Shadowrun doesn't mean you're no longer "playing Shadowrun".

So the canisters are old, but freshly painted such that the "Agent Blue canisters are marked with military script that is a number of years old (pre-revolution Poland)"

Hmm. Hmm I say.

I bet nobody had the guts to pull a sample?

Eh more like Fear and Loathing in 2072.
Admitidly Scratch is Street Cred 13.
Hmmm James Bond, I like that. Bond gets all the chicks including the catgirl strippers.
Z-O? Maybe, I did bring that up offhand and that's what led to the whole space thing.
We did need an encore after we stole the feng coin of luck. You don't want to know where it was hidden.

Oh and just so you all know we started a looong time ago, in a sprawl far far away, delivering garbage to people in the london sprawl and beating up spammers. See what hard criminal work will get you if you live long enough?

I see your point though.

Who says crime doesn't pay?

I'd suggest that you'd be better served by using a mass spectrometer or an optical spectroscope at a lab used to handling corrosive toxic substances.

Wouldn't it be amusing if they were full of HF or some other commonly available toxic substance?