My Group f*cked this one up...

Short overview: They got a lot of information out of legwork, ,then they contacted the black cats, and were told, that they don't have anything to do with the ransom demand. They followed the black cat girl (which was protected by two ghosts, i just forgott her name) back to the safehouse and just ambushed it. They incapacitated the guard on the stairs but the rest of the cats got alarmed and minutes before the elf downstairs pressed the panicbutton, because he got intimidated.

The cats were in their room, protected by mana and physical barrier ( dunno if their magician had this spell, but i think this is standard-mage-equipment)

They negotiated with them to change their prisoner (black cat from stairs) with belenkiy. Police was clearly coming (sirens).
The Black Cats wanted them to let their teammate on the stair and receive belenkiy then through the window from the outside.

My Team agreed and ran outside. Police was already there and the cats decided that they won't surrender belenkiy to them now. One of the team tried to brea into their room but got neary wasted. The fled.

after licking their wounds they found out, that the cats went to the sioux-bar with Belenkiy.....and decided to attack them there..... a full house of sioux warriors, two ghosts and the entire crew of the black cats against 5 runners..... 2 of them heavy injured.....

make a long story short: They couldn't even beat the two ghosts and escaped (because i was very nice to them...they could easily have been killed....)

CUT..... today in 20 Minutes we will start from this point...

do they have narly a chance to get this job done properly by now ?

If you are running missions as part of your group campaign setting you can take the adventure any direction you want.

Even if it's an Official Event you are doing, there's no reason to not allow the runners to fail. I think you'll notice quite a few of the Missions have a beginning where if the runners refuse the mission you just tell them bye bye, see you later.

I'd say they've wandered pretty far off the beaten track at this point. Hammerjack/Void might be able to tie them back in, if he hasn't contacted them yet. Other than that, I'd just let them fail the job.

F I Y : Well Hammerjac had already contacted them. We finished the run by now.... They were not able to get belenkiy back, but could tell falcone about his whereabouts, and they kind of found out, that hammerjack is the void....

i gave them a little karma and a little money, but not the full compensation and one point of notority.