My group wants to make a Runner team that used to be Ares Firewatch, the story being their SINs were all erased in the Crash. But all I have been able to find are small blurbs throughout a few books. Anyone know of any books I could show them to give them an idea of how Ares Firewatch is set up, how the teams run etc. Thanks.

The novel Burning Bright's where they first appeared, IIRC. They also get a mention or two in Arsenal, I think.

I don't remeber where I read it, but one of the older Corp Profile books covered Firewatch teams. They were all very skilled (rank 6 or 7 in SR4) at what they did, and were decked out with SOTA gear, and Delta Grade Cyberware. The mages were at least a level 2 or 3 Grade init, and had about an essence worth of Delta Grade ware.

Edit: Found it
Page 126, Corprate Downloads

They work in teams of 5 to 7, including at least one rigger and one mage.

They basicly have anything they ask for, and all the cyberware they have is minimum Alpha grade, with beta and delta also being common.
All the mages have to be at least initiation grade 3 or higher, and tend know Sheilding and Centering.

KE is not going to misplace a firewatch team. They are far too valuable and dangerous, and there are just not that many of them. It's like being a SEAL. There are just not that many of them, everyone knows the senior NCOs and officers, and any SEAL is probably only two people away from someone who has worked or trained with any other SEAL. And when a platoon and their gear comes up missing senior people will start investigating and asking pointed questions.

Very true. You're much better having them sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. They promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find them...

Hahahaha! Loved that...

I don't like how they went from three six-man teams worldwide who basically operated as a cybered/maged-up version of The Unit in Burning Bright (i.e., that they could and did take tactical control over any and all Ares/KE assets to lead the operation themselves straight from Knight/Soaring-Eagle) to a glorified SWAT team.

Yup... that was awesome. Thanks for a laugh!

I don't suppose you'ver got a stat list, for, say, the SASR. Or, for the inferior British version, the SAS. Curious how they stack up against an average Firewatch team.

You really can't compare. The real skills of those kind of teams don't work in SR. For one thing shooting is vastly easier in SR than it is in real life, so the 10-20 hours a week Delta spends shooting is totally not needed. Plus they are all wearing what is effectively 12 points of armor, are experts in a whole lot of skills including using support weapons, land nav, stealth, stealing cars, picking locks, etc.

Compare the Ares Firewatch in Corp Download to the other megacorps' elite security forces. You'd notice a difference.


If you read Corp Download wrt SR3, you'd know how that can happen.

KE separately formed the ACCs and then the book watered Firewatch down for basically no reason. That's what I got from CD.


I'm sure that someone has posted stats for SAS and/or other special units in SR.

Not that I ever see the equivalent level of power to a firewatch team in my game but... What about Erased(RC)?
The first sentence implies that anything, be it physical or data, in Shadowrun can be contained or controlled. I prefer to think the world a bit more chaotic. And I believe its up to each GM to decide how chaotic their game plays.

My version of the first sentence would be "KE will not willingly let go of any firewatch team, or memeber."
Could even add a second sentence, "Anyone trying to leave the program is reprogrammed and if that fails to take, they are neutralized."

I hope awolffromlife has a great game, and I don't think anyone here is in a position to tell him any thing is impossible. Improbable perhaps, but impossible is up to him and his players.

HentaiZonga, Awesome post.

The point is that:

a) Questions would be raised by important people if they disappeared. People don't really believe computer reports that say that someone they knew never existed. Particularly people worth a million or two in training and equipment each who are loaded with extremely lethal gear that needs to be accounted for.

b) They have enough skill to slip into Damien Knight 's office one night to so they can greet him bright and early in the AM and ask him to put them back on the payroll.

a) I don't disagree to any of that. I hope the edition they are playing has "Hunted", as I cannot remember if RC had it or not. The hunt would be the aspect of the campaign I enjoyed most, player or GM.

b) Who says they aren't? Sometimes when I think that I have gotten out of a trap, I find that I only placed myself deeper inside it.

I am just saying the thread as about info on the group, not a critique of their play choices. But I am glad it happened, the A-team post made my day.

BlueMax
/does that make Zonga a punk?
//"Go ahead punk, make my day"

Questions would especially if a whole team of such people disappear. One them slipping off the books and getting away with fading into the background and resurfacing as someone new might work, but even then it would really help if they had inside assistance or convincingly faked their death.

Also, from what I've read (in-game and real world), people that become members of really elite combat units are often extremely loyal to the organization they serve. While there are inevitably going to be exceptions (especially in a game) you don't invest those sort or resources into someone that you aren't pretty sure is really damned loyal. As a result, even if a Firewatch team suddenly didn't 'exist' would they leave or would they simply report it to their supervisors so that it could be fixed or taken advantage of by ARES.

If your players want that type of group my suggestions would be:

1. Take the idea and switch which organization they are slipping away from. There are lots of paramilitary or military groups that provide high end training and equipment in the SR world. You may well be able to settle on one that still gets the 'feel' the players are after but which would not be as difficult to explain them successfully slipping away. There is a difference between elite and elite but they are both lethal.
2. For your game, water down the Ares Firewatch teams so that they are not as elite as they are sometimes described so that it makes more sense that they were able to loose track of one of them.
3. Let Ares "lose" them in the Crash2.0...or so they think. (Could even go to the extreme of sleeper personalities, though I think I would just let them think they got away with it or have it be a known cover story for a still loyal team).
4. Come up with stats that look good to you and don't worry about it

Thank you all for your ideas and info. It has been a really big help.

You'll find that the vast bulk of people in the military are loyal. Yes, you'll get people who whinge and you'll get people who dislike being there in the first place, but by and large all of my mates and I went *berserk* the moment someone said something that we even imagined contained a slight against the RAAF. I still do. Something instilled into you in basic training, and not by accident, obviously.

If you want them to leave the company why not have a team of seven of them out doing sneaky-beaky stuff somewhere fairly remote and backwards when they're ambushed and suddenly get hit by massive firepower from an opposition that the intelligence bods missed, the corporate higher ups running the show have the decision to make - either write them and the mission off or send in any backup that they can even if it's a long way out and a good 30-40 minutes off at maximum speed. Unfortunately by quirk of fate circumstances have changed and what was an approved mission now has the possibility of becoming highly politically embarrassing and costing Ares a very large amount of money if it were to come out, which is all but certain if they send in extra resources.

The suits do a quick cost analysis and decide to pull the op leaving the team to die. They continue to watch, either by satellite or surveillance drone, as the team is attacked again and looks certain to be overrun and slaughtered when the Crash hits knocking out whatever they were watching via and the feed. Assuming that they obviously must have died the executives back home commence covering their arses by deleting all records of the team and start telling everyone that knew them that they were killed in a helicopter crash during a routine training exercise, no doubt helped along by the Crash screwing with records as well. The team however survived whilst still losing X number of team members and fought their way clear. Realising that they'd been left for dead they decide 'Bugger this, why keep working for those bastards I'm going freelance' and there you go.

Explains why they'd go rogue, why if you only have four players then what happened to the other three team members, gives you a get-out if none of the players want to play a certain archetype like rigger/decker/mage/whatever that a Firewatch Team would definitely have in a team, starts you off with a team of highly skilled and cyber-biowared PCs but with very few other resources even when they get back to the UCAS and why they wouldn't have any records.

Edit: Christ I'm a wordy bastard tonight. Must be all the essays I'm trying to get finished for next week.

One could argue even Firewatch teams are expendible when it comes to the Bugs...

- J.

Speaking of which, have you finished them yet? No, then what are you doing here, hmmm?

Send their whole company on a 'routine' mission that turns into an inescapable death ride. All is well, then they hit a hot LZ losing all their officers and NCOs as all hell breaks loose. They have to fight through an army and take 95% losses but complete the mission. They find out later that the mission was leaked by a traitor, and, instead of killing the sumbitch responsible the corp grants him immunity for his secrets. The survivors feel they and their dead have been betrayed and bolt. All hell breaks loose again.

(I stole this from a book. A cookie for anyone who can name it.)

Path of the Fury?

Ding! Ding! Ding!
Cookie for Fuchs!
Though 'In Fury Born' a.k.a. the full unabridged version is better IMO.
I had kind of hoped it might take longer than that for someone to get it, but, oh well.

Consequently, I may have to run that on my group just to amuse myself.

I used parts of the plot of "Path of the Fury" in a SF special game this and last week.

I just ordered "In Fury Born" - curious where it differs from "Path of the Fury"

Spoilers' good idea. OH MAN! You gotta read the whole thing! She's much more dangerous in her own person than you could know! She was death incarnate before the Cadre ever got a hold of her. I reread it every few months right after Starship Troopers. If you haven't read through the Shallingsport debacle, you're missing out. It's... just... whoa. Enjoy!

That's a damned good idea. Pulled something like that a while back with characters in a game we played SR3-style. A black-ops Marine contingent is sent in to the Tsimshian for some reason. They're ambushed, captured, most of the team (aside from 4) are killed. One escapes capture, the two are tortured, and the third - the commander - goes free because he set them up for political gain.

Now a year later, the third guy who escaped manages to hire the assets to free the other two for a plan of revenge against the (now) Colonel in the UCAS Marine Corps. A year's worth of atrophy explains away drops in SOTA cyber (still Beta-grade, though), attributes, and certain skills.

With the Firewatch guys, I can agree with the sentiment of Ares not liking the idea of losing a well-trained team of commandos. I mean, it's like the US Navy writing off a group of Navy SEALS - it doesn't happen, they're too irreplaceable. But if Ares thinks they're dead, and they're disavowing them, that might be different....

But they'd be marked as Ares Firewatch the minute they went anywhere, what with all of the mil-spec Ares gear, mil-spec Ares cyber/bio, etc. They might as well have a bullseye advertisement on their back that says, "ARES KICKS ASS!"

It's called having a break, aka. avoidance.

How much do the players know about Shadowrun history, particularly in regards to Ares and Cross Applied Technologies? See, if they're relatively new players, they could just be picking Firewatch due to the fact that they're the most commonly cited elite force in the current books rather than because they're hooked on the Firewatch flavor. If that is the case, you may want to steer them towards playing former Seraphim instead, since it's easier to justify why mid-ranked Seraphim would be out of work than an Ares Firewatch team. Besides, you could still actually play up the bad blood between Ares and the team that way, since CATco and Ares Macrotech were mortal enemies. Nobody knows what happened for sure between both companies, so you could really make up all sorts of skullduggery if you wanted.

Bar the fact that if the where disavowable then they wouldn't be that traceable. If the could say no that wasnt our team then there not likle to be wearing neon ares signs like there conterparts when out bumping ares PR swatting bugs and such.

They are still traceable, people will still recognize them, etc. "I thought you were dead!"

"After all the surgeries I've had you still recognize me by my forum signature. FOILED again!"