Mercury Deliveries
Purpose: Mercury Deliveries is a semi-legitimate front company for an initiatory group of Adepts who specialize in personal message and light-object delivery in urban environments.
Members: Total count unknown. Small-to-medium presence in most cities with an appropriate urban geography.
Strictures: Secrecy, Service (Taking Regular Contracts), Limited Membership (Adepts).
Resources/Dues: Medium. Mercury Deliveries is first and foremost a company, with limited office space typical of a small delivery company. Use for magical purposes is incidental and at Mercury's discretion but generally allowed. No dues are required of members, but part of the company's profits come from reasonably discounted tutelage in relevant skills (Martial Arts, Parkour), as well as equipment. All new members are given a mandatory course in basic Parkour and hand-to-hand sparring upon acceptance into the group.
Patron: Mercury
Description and Customs: Mercury Deliveries is a small delivery company. While it operates a small fleet of delivery vans and messenger drones for reasonably secure urban areas, the majority of the company's resources are used to facilitate the side business of an Adept-driven roof-to-roof item delivery service. Mercury acts as a fixer, arranging work with a wide clientèle, including other fixers (both Runner and Merc), Johnsons, Gangers, and more. Deliveries are executed by Adepts through a combination of Parkour and Awakened talent. Any Adepts can theoretically be taken in as messengers, although the overwhelming majority walk the Path of the Athlete. Mercury leaves most of the specifics of a contract to each individual messenger, although he maintains good relationships with hacker groups and data brokers, ensuring secure communications and up-to-date security plans spanning the entire sprawl skyline.

Have fun with it, everybody. It's a natural fit for the Shadowrun environment. I intentionally didn't tie it to a specific location so a group could inject it as convenient.

Nice, i also immidetly thought about shadowrun when watching the videos for the game.

Mercury Couriers is a named Ares subsidiary.

Actually it's Mercury Express, at least according to corporate index i have.

It is, you're right.

Still, the similar names may make for a good plot point. It'd be easy enough to scale the initiatory group down into being a smaller, unofficial outfit, and it'd be easy to imagine the local Mercury corp riggers as having a low key rivalry with the Mercury runner outfit. I mean, hell, the idea of running into an unfriendly corp rigger in his tweaked out delivery van would definitely explain why runners prefer to stick to rooftops and tight alleyways. God knows that even relatively small aerial drones could be bad enough for your health. Besides, what would be the point of changing your name just because an Ares subsidiary came into town? You're still competing with the big boys; they'd try grinding you into dust no matter what you called yourself. Keeping the name partly as an act of defiance is very shadowrun.

Fun Thread! Even though I don't know the concept behind that new game, I have seen the commercial advertisements for it. And considering that I've been playing an adept whose background was as a small package deliverer / smuggler for months now in our current campaign, I want to join this group!

Vital stats of Flux, my adept.

Imp. Ability Gymnastics(3): 10 skill base total
4 levels of Great Leap
1 level Agility Boost
1 level Reaction Boost
Traceless Walk

2 Alpha Modular lower Cyberlegs
: Raptor Cyberleg Add-Ons loaded with
+ Hydraulic Jacks:6
+ Grip Feet
+ Ultrawideband Radar (in left leg)
+ Orientation System (in right leg)

End Result for jumping? Base 24 dice + agility (5 on my char, subject to boost of the moment) to jump (I should take the time to specialize in jumping for 2 more, hehe.)

Max meters on a full running jump: [Agility + 4 (great leap)] x 1.5, then add 120% of that because of the hydraulic jacks... 29.7 meters maximum (15 successes needed)... + 3.3m to max for each bonus point of agility I have from attribute boost at the moment.

Recently I escaped an exploding pirate boat (my team redirected heavy weapons fire to the boat while I was on it, ugh) by leaping 26 meters to our player char cheapo fishing boat without using edge (13 hits on 32 dice). Made it easy to claim 1 karma point for a dramatic moment in game!

With all the talk of crazy die pools here on dumpshock, the rest of my char seems to only clock in around 10-12 dice, but for occasional jumping I have a great place to shine. I thought it was viable backstory to say that this character with good stealth and outdoor navigation and survival skills would have been easy to run as a low-profile Seattle/NAN border hopper until he found more serious work in the shadows.

So, I bet my char could join that courier service... now I just have to raise my magic by one and get Gliding, and I'll be able to run and leap across water in true Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style...

Actually, Gliding and Wall Running seem sort of useless considering the distances I am able to jump - unless I can run across water, jump, and then keep running, etc. Not sure how that works according to RAW, perhaps I'll have to post in a diff topic to find out general consensus on that one.

Thanks for posting this group idea, if it seems like a valid magical group I'll approach our GM and ask if I can join because I honestly don't want to form a "group for no reason other than convenience" with our party mage just because he's a 'party' member.

Take care all.

I don't see why you wouldn't be able to jump at the end of gliding, but I may be mistaken.

And I doubt they would limit to just adepts considering the OMFGWIN of the movement power for these guys

Quicksilver Messenger Service

Adepts on combat peddle bikes. 'nuff said.

Ok, to do this concept of the ultimate messenger adept, let's see if I am missing anything:

I already took Knowledge Skill: Parkour Philosophy at rank 3 during chargen. Should it be Parkour maneuvers/techniques instead?

I also have Navigation (going to specialize in Urban after I raise group to 3) as part of my Outdoors Group, though the whole thing is only at rank 1 now. I figure that the Survival at 3 will be good for when I decide to live on the streets for Asceticism & Meditation ordeals, and the Navigation (Urban) seems appropriate for someone who always knows the best way to get somewhere.

I also have a Street Area Knowledge of Seattle, perhaps I should take more specialized knowlege skills for rooftops, etc.?

Since I have an Orientation System in one of my cyberlegs and a penetrating ultrawideband radar in the other: could I have stored maps of rooftops, buildings, alleyways, etc. and use that as a bonus where just a regular Seattle Streets Mapsoft wouldn't give one?

Any other skills (or adept abilities) that would be essential that I'm missing? (I know I don't have Free Fall yet, I don't think I'll be able to afford it and initiate for a while, so I'm looking the cheap route of skills first.)