This forum gave me a lot of help with my last topic on a zoo heist mission. My players elected to turn on their employer and sell her out, but that's the brakes and they'll face consequences for it soon enough. Anyway, I wanted to bring another issue to this group to get some feedback since it was helpful last time.

My game takes place in LA and the runner's fixer is an aspiring media producer and talent agent. He's not working as a fixer so much to pay the bills as to gather footage of shadow activities for the purpose of editing together a multi-part reality trideo show. It would be easy enough for him to film the meets and work that into the sort of "confessional" time we see in most modern reality TV, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing how he could stealthily film any part of their planning, legwork or runs. Does anyone have any thoughts on how this might happen? I was thinking the double-cross might incorporate a hacker who plants recording programs into the runner's cyberware, but I'm not sure how reasonable that would be given the setting and the abilities of hackers and cybernetics. Any ideas or feedback would be most appreciated.

It's not hard, camera's in shadowrun can be made the size of a fingernail no problem, and you can stick them anywhere, accessing them via wireless link latter(or physical access if you don't want the hacker to risk detecting the wireless signal.)

Also, anyone with an image link and a commlink can record video, so that bum on the street can make videos too.

Actually the "bum on the street" concept is really cool. It would make it so I could randomly introduce characters that appear to be of no consequence and they could sort of form together in a flashback during the quintessential "villain's explanation" soliloquy.

Hack the party gear and use the recording features of any SIM Rig, Sensors, or Cyber-sense, etc. It's a bit more subtle then trying to plant various recording gear on them, and if they don't have much of a hacker or technomancer, it should be easy enough. Also consider hacking just the non-techies. The team hacker may not be checking the Street Sami's gear for back doors after all.

Mix this in with airborne drones. Use ones that fly high up but have image magnification, and follow their movements when out side. Use a Directional Antenna to pickup their radio chatter (likely need to decrypt it, but that's not so hard in most cases.) If they are running a tactical net and you pickup on the feed, you can get a lot of feeds from them through their various systems as well. Low flying drones could trail them with using Chameleon coating and Sensor defeating materials. Equip these drones with parabolic mics and the like so they can get close up shots.

To be really nasty, he can get them with Infecter Nanites to get some of these hacks and back doors. That photo, data chip, or handshake may have just been a way for him to get nanites into the gear/cyberware of the team. Those nanite might then put in back doors which a hacker could use to hop in and get access to their sensor feeds. Again, stick with the non-hackers/technomancers of the group and they may not even notice because they are depending on the Hacker to stop them from being compromised.

He would also look into some way to coat them with Stealth Rfid tags. Or feed them to the team. Meetings at bars and restaurants can be fun this way.

If the Fixer isn't trying to disable them in combat or runs, they won't go looking for hacker attacks in most cases, and you can get your feeds and data. A smart Fixer trying to do this kind of thing would send them on runs where he doesn't expect them to encounter dead zones or wifi-defeating wallpaper/etc. He might also provide them with Cyberware and street doc as a payment for a mission... easy to hack a device with a hardware exploit you put in it.

A great character plot hook, assuming your players even know about it, would be to have one of the runners working for him. It's easy enough to have cameras implanted in your eyes. Even better though, would be to have a simrig, so you can go up to full sim whenever you'd like.

This actually happened in one of our campaigns, it was a good time sine it's pretty hard for anyone to really find out that you have it.

why not just ASK the characters to do it, and offer them money? can't get anywhere in the LA runner scene without serious face time anyway...

i've got an LA-based TM who works with sim, video, and audio production, and records pretty much everything. slap a high-rating sprite with Edit on a commlink to dynamically edit voices and faces and i can even stream my runs live (of course, all the shiny bits come out in post, but there's something exhilarating about raw, unedited, and live).

I considered making a character that was a SIM Rig'd and did a pirate broadcast based off the runs he went on. I figured I could use an AR Negator program to conceal the identity of the other Shadow Runners (and myself in reflections/etc.) by running the Negator during runs while SIM recording. I figured it could be configured to block out their faces, hid etheir scent, and change their voices. Maybe something similar to Ghost in the Shell's Laughing Man, or maybe something more like cops? The down side being that my character would be seeing things that way durring the run. I'd use a high rank contact or two for distributing the SIM footage.

It's still an idea I have. Something kinda like running a (less annoying) version of Rubby Rod (5th Element's talk radio in a hostage situation, broadcasting live) still speaks to me. It would be great for Hooding.

Small but fast aerial drones could work as well, if you have to capture the runners during a high speed chase or during combat.

But if they do this behind the runners backs, eventually they'll find out (at the very latest once it hits the air), and they'll probably be none too pleased about it.

Our party (before we were a group) got involved in a tiff at the Stuffer ShackTM, and the security videos got it all on camera. Kerenshara was under a F4 Improved Invisibility, but she got an email indicating somebody was interesting in hiring her... as the persona she was wearing at the 'Shack. It came to that persona's room at the hotel where she was staying. I can tell you, it shook her up quita a bit, and she only accepted the job to find out who was pulling her strings (and how) so she could decide if they posed a threat and geek them or just burn the persona. I knew about it ahead of time OOC, but the way the GM presented it really peaked her paranoia. It was wonderful.

That's actually a worthwhile plot-line to consider: the show hits goes public and then a mysterious producer calls the "stars" to get them to go a sequel. I'm not sure though if I'm going to go all the way with this and have it hit the air. If I want to be nice, then the runners will find out in time to interrupt the network bidding war, as everyone's looking for a show about shadowrunners that isn't faked in some capacity.

I like both the nanotech and air-borne drone technology. Hell, the fixer has a habit of inviting the runners to breakfast, the booth could have been smeared with nanotech paste or they could have could have been hidden in the coffee or the egg-flavored soy-gunk.