I'd recommend getting a shooter set up in a vantage point with a sniper rifle beforehand, in case things go south. Additionally, try and see if your hacker can grab control of any camera networks in the vicinity. Finally.. watchers! Use them!

How about simply not going there but send a lone spy drone to follow the person when he leaves the bar again and then pay him a visit at his home later that night?
Just use a fresh comm and rather high stealth and firewall softs for this.

Gather together all your cash.

Hire another team. I don't mean just any team either, hire Prime Runners. (They can be bought, you know!)

Whoever shows up at the meet, grab them. If they're really good guys, they'll understand the nessessity of being paranoid.

If they're bad guys, surprise! You brought backup on their level! Now you can turn the tables and be the ones doing the interrogating.

the problem with this is that a 400bp team of runners are supposed to be prime runners

Er... No.

Geeze you guys are green. Instead of this elaborate plan to meet with a man you don't know you can trust. Which has a high chance of something going wrong.

Just meet him in a public place and use a bit of tech so your conversation isn't overheard.
Wire some comlinks together use micro transceivers whatever.


If you go to meet the guy in some burned out warehouse your sure to have a fire fight with heavy duty automatics should the guy prove to be bad news.

Think of it this way, IF YOU tried to arrange a meet with a target you were planing to kill or kidnap WHAT is the last place YOU'D want the meet to be.

Uh, no. They're not. a 400 BP team of runners are supposed to be newbie runners.

Prime is like, 400 BP + 200 Karma worth of advancement.



This is not bad advice. The only problem being, if these guys are out-of-country talent, or worse, Feds/Megacorporate operators, they won't care about a little exposure.

Um... snipers? They already picked a meeting place and it's a bar, second if you give him any time to get to a meet place a sniper can always set up on a rooftop and geek someone in a public place. The meet is over and the other character walks away and your suddenly dead with a bullet to the brain pan. Meeting underground with a place painted in anti wi fi paint or just painting the room in a back of a bar with a comlink hard lined to another point and doing a few signal bounces allows for your team to never have to face what could be coming at you (and the crazy hacker can't listen in.)

Why would anyone ever want to meet this person face to face? I mean there are ways to see this person w/o ever having to meet in the flesh. A face to face meet is the green move. That means they can track you down one way or another and kill your whole team or just hit you after the meet.


"Think of it this way, IF YOU tried to arrange a meet with a target you were planing to kill or kidnap WHAT is the last place YOU'D want the meet to be."

In a public place

Having someone walk on a pressure plate armed with explosives or remote detonated works just fine if you want to kill him, kidnapping is always harder. Personally I kind of like the idea of him on one side of a huge metal door and have just a comlink slide out of a panel and use that to communicate with him. You don't need to be on the other side of the door and just have another comlink on the end of a long cable, but at least it gives the impression of paranoia when you are actually just that much more paranoid.

The basic thing to do is to firstly have your sniper overlooking the meet, and secondly have a second sniper covering the spots from which your first sniper would likely be counter-sniped.

the book seems to disagree with you. but to each their own

It sounds like they can do that already.

Plus there is not guarantee the informant is working for the bad guys.

Exactly! Which is why giving face time to the dude is just a bad idea.

Any word on how this ultimately went down and what you did?

Not yet, playing tonight. I'll update on monday.

Just to chime in, this is a fun read an I'd like to know what happens as well. Damn but this sounds exiting, and I miss my old campaign

You should have had your hacker trace that call the "informant" made to you.

If your commlink was hacked that would mean the "informant" already knew who you were before he hacked you. Otherwise, what reason would he have for hacking you? Now the question comes, since he knows who you are why didn't he simply talk to you when you went to the local Stuffershack for a bite to eat? If he has a hacker that can hack you commlink that easily, he surely also knows where you live. I think he is trying to get your whole team together all in one spot to annihilate you. The best way to test this theory would be to tell him only one of you can make it to the meet, see what his reaction is. One word of you advice, never let the GM in on your plans, especially if your GM is the type to think the game is players vs. GM. Even well meaning GMs use knowledge the NPCs shouldn't know, it's best to keep them in the dark.

to "never let the GM in on your plans." I kinda disagree. It is very difficult to improvise some things. Say, for instance the players decided to hire a SR team to handle things. If I were the GM I would hate to say something like ok. "Let me roll the stats and fluff of the whole group, meet me again next week". I would also hate to use pregen stats. Other examples could include: trips, matrix systems, etc, etc.

The idea is that sometimes it is important that the gm knows what you will do to prepare a nice gaming session. If you are thinking that the GM is going to use everything you tell him/her to screw you over, then you should change your GM; simple as that.

In my games I try to make the opposition as detailed and "3d" as possible, so, whatever plans the PC have, I can stick to what I have.

Cheers,

Max

Well, as is predictable things didn't go according to plan. So first, the important bit. What plan did we go with, and I thank everyone who responded to this thread for helping us come up with this.

Step 0. New commlinks for everyone. We keep our old commlinks, cause they have a bunch of our stuff on them which we'll transfer over sometime but not right now.

Step 1. Leave a fresh off the rack commlink at the meet with a short recorded message explaining the situation and need for heightened security. This commlink is all that is at the meet: rent back room, put commlink on table, leave room.

Step 2. Have the message on the commlink instruct the informant to goto a particular car in a parking lot a few blocks away. The commlink has the starter code for the car and the car's commlink has the address for the meet. The Car: something cheap and stolen, bought from ganger's the night before, spray it with graffiti and vandalize it to reduce likelihood of it being stolen before it's needed and to make it easy to track.

Step 3. Informant drives the real meet. Loitering Roto-Drone watches the path from the nightclub to the car, so that we can get an ID on the informant and any possible friend's he has. Loitering Stormcloud monitors the meeting site at an altitude of 1+ km. The Meet Site: An old basement pub, no longer in use. It's got heavy doors, deadbolts, and several ways out. Easy to control access and good visibility. Also nobody cares if with make a few holes in the walls.

Step 4. The Meet's Occupants.
1x Force 8 Water Elemental doorman who will only allow someone using the password provided by the short message at the meet in. Use edge in summoning so you have at least 2 services so the it can be ordered to fight if need be.
1x Astral mage, hiding in a room 2 floors up to direct spirit and monitor situation. Mage has a full compliment of watchers.
2x Shadowrunners hired as security, they will perform a physical search of the informant and will act as body doubles for members of the team. One night of milkrun bodyguard duty comes pretty cheap.
1x holo projector and camera/mic inside a back room covered in wifi foiling paint. A cable running through the wall links the projected to a off the rack commlink in another part of the building. This commlink will receive a phone call from a Sea-Tac public terminal (where team face is) when the shadowrunners radio in an all clear, that call will then be projected into the back room. Any physical evidence can be provided to the shadowrunners for delivery or loaded into the media slot on the projector to be read by the attached commlink.

I don't have time to finish this right now, so next post I'll let you know how our GM turned everything around on us.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the overall plan was to A)disperse the team B)have meet/gather information C)move to Miami where we have a drug runner friend and figure out our next step.

Ooh, that sounds like a good plan. I'm intrigued to hear how the GM turned everything around

Yep, good plan. And not too expensive either.

I knew that things weren't going to go well when I walked in and our GM said that our street sam's player wont be showing up that evening because "he doesn't have a character and there'd be no way to get him into the game tonight anyway".

We picked up where we left off. Investigating the apartment. We didn't want to stay long, fearing the sudden arrival of Lone Star but we were there long enough to discover that the assassin was very thorough. No prints, no casings, no astral signatures. All very discouraging.

We left, and starting calling people asking if anyone had been looking for us. A few hours and a some hundreds of nuyen later all we had was that our street sam's IDs were being tracked and had gotten some minor flagging a time or two without our knowing. So we decide it's time to switch to completely fresh IDs and commlinks, and then skip town once we've seen what our informant has to say.

We work out our plan and start setting it into motion with little difficulty. Step 1 and 2 go by without a hitch, the informant appears to be working alone and was on his way to the real meet. I'm sitting at the airport surfing the matrix waiting for my que when one of the team's public drop boxes recieves a message. The message said that my friends were in great danger, and if I didn't call the number given in 5 minutes they would all die.

I had a bad feeling about calling, but I did it anyway. The on again/off again girlfriend of our street sam answered the call. She immediately starts telling me about how she's been kidnapped and how she doesn't know where she is or what's happening. Now, my character had only met this girl once and I don't think she even knew that he or I were shadowrunners so I wasn't too concerned about her being kidnapped.

She starts to tells me that she has to give me a message from the kidnapper when she is then shot and drops the commlink. There's some background noise as the kidnapper gets the situation there undercontrol and then the commlink is picked back up. This time by a reporter who's a mutual contact of the team. He tells me that instruction on how to find him alive is located in the glove compartment of a car in the redmond barrens, along with a comm code number. We had 2 hours to call that number or one hostage would die every 5 minutes after that. At which point the call ended.

It was pretty obvious that this was a trap set by the assassin, and really we should have just let our contacts go. We knew who he had (a half dozen mutual contacts, some of whom he probably didn't take because they'd be too well protected to get at short notice) and it wasn't going to be too bad. But we just didn't feel right burning that kind of bridge without knowing who we are dealing with, and as the mage pointed out if we are smart about it we could get our hands on the assassin and maybe get some information out of him.

So, change of plan. we decide that our mage and his spirit should go hunting for the assassin because our mage has the most flexiblity. Our hacker and I continue to work the meeting we set up. Eventually our mage gets to the car with the instructions, he approachs with spells up (particularly invisibility, chaff, and astral static) and has the elemental retrieve the instructions. Happily we discover that it's not a car bomb and there doesn't appear to be any snipers around. It's your typical kidnapper sort of instructions, and our mage continues his tail chasing.

By that point our informant had already made it to the real meet. Turns out he's FBI and trying to track down a subversive conspiritorial group within the Seattle (and possibly UCAS) government. Recently they've started playing hardball threatening his career so he's had to start acting a bit more covertly to stay under their radar.

BTW, he never directly said it, but we think that his hacker is actually one of our hacker's contacts (a government hacker who's an online buddy). Who passed him along our contact information, it would explain how he got our info without us ever getting hacked anyway.

As a bit of background, for about the past year we've been getting hints that something like a military coup was being set up in the background. Our going theory was that Ares was going to turn UCAS into a military dictatorship and just do away with the inconvience of UCAS government oversight, similar to Aztlan/Aztechnology. Turns out according to our FBI friend it's going to be closer to what happened with the California Protectorate. He thinks that someone is setting up Seattle to cecede from the union and become a fortress of humanity.

We had thought we were just in the periphery of it all, but we had guessed wrong on the identities and true objectives of some of our Johnsons and we were apparently smack in the middle of it. The informant was just telling me that the conspirators must be getting close to putting their plot into motion as the shadowrunners they'd been using to set everything up (which included us) had been dying off faster than he could get in touch with them. He told me that he thinks we're the last ones left, and was just about to start asking me questions about our recent runs when a Metroplex Guard citymaster pulled up and dropped off a squad of combat troops at the front door.

I tell him that, instruct him to transfer any evidence he has to me and then run for it through the kitchen exit. As he leaves the room I tell him I'll want to talk to him again and that maybe his hacker will be able to get us in touch. A few seconds later I start hearing bangs and gun fire from bar.

As soon as the data finished transfering I packed my things and called our hacker for an update. When I recieve this message.
"We're sorry, due to security protocols, all non-essential cellular traffic has been blocked. Cellular communication will be restored at the resolution of the emergency lockdown." and with that, Sea-Tac goes into a Metroplex Guard initiated security lockdown.

That's where we ended things.

I'd just like to say thank you, on behalf of the bad guys, to all the folks that suggested using Sea-Tac because it's a nice public place with lots of security. It has delivering me very conveniently.

I am now being hunted by security, with limited gear, and no back up.
Edit: For clarity

Oh my gods, was your GM drinking Guiness? Because that's BRILLIANT!

See, and this is why I trust my GM. Yes it's rough that he'll kill a character without them having a chance, but he's always delievers a cool story. It's almost like you want to go along with the obvious hooks (, just to find out what he has planned.

I shouldn't have called that number, I know I shouldn't have. I knew only bad things would come of it. Not that it would have changed me being stuck in Sea-Tac but at least the rest of the team would be together and able to rescue me or something.

Yeah calling is a bad idea. Remember every time you make an outgoing call that can be easily tracked back to you an angel dies. This is why throw away comlinks are always such a good idea. You use them and throw them away to avoid detection. Multiple throwaway SIN's and comlinks = rockin' awesome sauce.

Walk into an airport as Iron Pinkerson make an outgoing call as Joe Nobody and then after you are done ditch Joe Nobody's SIN and comlink and walk out as Iron Pinkerson. Then leave the airport in a cab as Jimmy Invisible.

Man...

First, you're GM is too damn smart. This plot is great and he obvious thinks fast on his toes. You should get him to GM a PbP game here on the forums and let me know so I can get in it.

Second, you're fucked.... but maybe you are supposed to be. Which is not to say you shouldn't try to avoid it. Thats half the fun right? If I were you I'd dump the commlink you used to call the assassin into a trash can or a baggage cart or preferably something else that moves. Won't keep them busy for long, but every bit helps. Then I'd try to find some area of the airport where you can steal a uniform of some kind- an airline or a vendor or whatever. I'd try to make my way to the area of the airport that serves corporate commuters, maybe try to find a jurisdiction within the airport that the Guard has no authority over or a private jet that is going to ignore the lock down because "Mr. Big Shot So and So needs to be at an important meeting and doesn't give a shit who says he can't leave..." you get the idea.

Edit: Another idea might be to head for the Air Cargo Area and try to stowaway in a large crate or some other shipping container, preferable metal that can block wifi and sensors...

Edit: that was weird, this was supposed to be an edit of that last post. Apparently if you hit the "reply" button first and then try to hit the "edit" button as an after thought it generates another post...

the plot is excellent, kudos to your GM.

Now, it would be really fantastic if you could just escape and enjoy the rest of the excellence with your character live and kicking, neh? So I suggest you quickly become someone else and find a way out of the airport. I am sure your face has the necessary skills to steal someone's identity and talk his way out of the bear trap.

And of course, do feel obliged to keep us on what happens next. Good luck!

Max