Today I collaborated with my GM (Damien Knight) to create this excellent run Idea. If any of you could take the time to read this and let me know what you think, I would appreciate your ideas.

Update:

After hearing some positive feedback, It sounds like some GM's might plan on using this idea. Thats GREAT! I encourage everyone to use and expand this idea (if you could mention joker and Damienknight that would be nice).

Because of this, I ask that if you are part of a static group (one consistant GM) you might want to let your GM read this first and see if he wants to use it. Dont spoil the fun for yourself with player knowledge

Anyway, on with the telling:


THE JENNER STRAIN:

A group of scientists working for Shiawase has been researching a cure for the HMHV Virus. They know that if you get any strand of HMHVV, it makes you immune to all strands of HMHVV, so they are trying to create a ‘sterile’ version that has virtually no side effects, but still makes you immune to HMHVV. In order to tackle this task, they have enlisted the aid of a magically gifted Native American Owl Shaman. They have had moderate success in getting many of the traits out of the Vampiric strain of this virus, including eliminating allergy to light, and essence drain. This new strain was named the Jenner Strain (named after the English physician who bravely (and illegally) used a child as a test subject in order to create the first vaccine for Small pox). They thought they had rid themselves of all traits, and decided they wanted to upgrade testing from living fetuses, to actual people. This did not go well.

They quickly found that subjects still suffered from slow essence loss, were still immune to normal weapons, and were still contagious and eventually weakened and killed from essence loss. During the testing, their corporation suffered from an attack by runners on a data steal mission. In the ensuing chaos, the test subject was able to infect one of the runners.

The Owl Shaman was seriously injured, but the rest of the scientists got together and decided to cover the incident up. After pooling their resources, they hired a detective to track down the infected runner, and found that he had retreated to his home village in the Rocky Mountains of Sioux Nations. They want to hire the runners to kill the infected subject, and his entire village (of 6 innocent native American Families).
The scientists will offer the group a modest amount of cash, and access to a Delta Grade cyber ware clinic.

Meanwhile, the Shaman, who was barely saved by his Totem, is trapped in coma. In his coma, his spirit drifted to the Owls plane of existence, where he is trapped until his body recovers. While there, he convinces a low power free owl spirit to go and find out what happened. When he learns of the other scientist’s plans of annihilating the entire village, he sends the spirit to the scientists to beg their reconsideration. The scientists reject the spirit, being more concerned with covering their own jobs and medical licenses, than saving anyone’s life. He then sends the spirit to the runners. The spirit will try and convince the runners to travel with it to the astral plane to speak with the shaman (the spirit itself, being force 2, isn’t intelligent enough to convey the shamans thoughts itself). If the runners agree, the spirit will take them on a short astral quest to speak with the Shaman.

The Shaman will offer an alternate plan to killing all of the villagers. He wants the runners to go to the village, take only the infected villagers (leaving the uninfected alive) and have them cryogenically frozen (and magically put in stasis) until a possible cure can be found. The Shaman however, will offer no reward, except for the honor of doing the right thing.

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Thanks for reading through all of that! Now let the comments flow like a sweet necture of GM inspiration!

...I like it.

...I really, really like it.

I like the dual options, but I have two questions:

a.) Is it going to be a campaign where you award karma for moral actions, but not immoral ones?

and

b.) If the runners help one party, is the other party going to be pissed and retaliate? I can see how the corp, at least, would. And it might piss of the totem if they went on and killed the villagers. (Never a good thing...)

That reminds me, there was a vaccine for HMHVV mentioned in Psychotrope. I should update my Infected page.

For a blood bath of that magnitude approx 20-30 people, your modest sum of had better be in 5 digits for each runner and some free deltaware...

On the other hand, for preventing an HMHVV outbreak and not massacreing so many people, I think it deserves quite some karma (maybe a initaitory Deed equivalent).

Now if you have a cyber sam and an Awakened on your team, watch them tear each other apart...

I you're the kind of group that would take the job of wiping out a village full of people for money, you aren't too likely to be interested in doing the right thing for free.

DamienKnight: Good observations kitsune (and sweet name, Kitsune was the coolest character on the Shadowrun Nintendo RPG).

We have already discussed this, and decided that there would definately be Big Karma awards for doing moral actions, and big penalties for doing the wrong ones (hopefully balanced out by the delta grade clinic).

Also, the Clinic access was thrown out as a great temptation for party strife. Many Cybered characters will want to say screw the village, i want my delta grade wires 3, while magically active characters would be more enticed by the karma award for doing the right thing.

As a house rule, killing other Characters gets you -3 karma, and assisting gets you -1 karma. (this is aside from penalties for doing the wrong thing). There should also be an all around 1 karma bonus for characters who experience strife but work it out (or a leadership bonus for a peacemaker character).

As for retaliation, its limited. If they blow the lid on the whole thing to the media, the corp may be ticked off, but there is limited value in revenge (its all about dollars and sense they say.)

As for the totem, he may invoke a spirit to fight them, but I think their real threat would be relatives and native american governments who might want to track them down and get revenge.

Great points, thanks for all the quick replies!

Hell, I got some players would take the run for cheap, and throw in the civvy kills for free.

Actually, I used this name before I ever played that... Name of my first Shadowrun character, who I still play in Kagetenshi's online game (SOTSW).

Though actually... Couldn't helping the Shaman at least win him as a contact for the team, with the potential to get favors in return? Something of the sort?

Don't forget to sell the bodies to a dog food company as 'raw materials'.

If you don't leave any evidence, how are they going to ID who did the deed? The team goes in at night, kills everyone, then leaves. There may be some camera footage of guys in black body suits with HKs and some spent shell casing and stuff, but the team will ditch all of the gear used. Just having the 'good guys' finds you because you did something really bad always strikes me as poor GMing technique.

If the team has already accepted the offer to wipe out the village, I would assume that the team members were ok with wiping out the village to being with. I will assume that the Johnson for the run just said:
job: wipe out everyone at place X, burn the bodies.
reason for job: they like eminem, so they just plain need killin' (but does it really matter?)
Reward: XXX + the following extra stuff.
And then the team said yes they're pretty far off the Straight Path already.

DamienKnight to Kitsune:

Really, thats awesome. I didnt mean to undermine your creativity, only to reminisce on good old times. If you were a fox shaman, I would raise my eyebrow, but being a Cat Shaman lends credit to your originality. Nice signature btw

Just slaughtering 20-30 innocents isn't much of a job. If you can handle the Immune to Normal Weapons ex-runner, slaughtering the civvies shouldn't prove a problem.

I was mostly commenting to toturi, because I disagree that just killing 20-30 civvies should net you a lot of cash. I know my team could slaughter them without much fuss (the ex-runner excluded).

I personally like the run idea, and it's possible I might plagiarise it. Largely because I haven't introduced any HMHVV-nastiness into my games yet.

First off, great idea--I only hope my players haven't read this thread.

I do have a critical question though: what are the locals doing about this infection, aside from waiting fo the PCs? I mean, surely someone's noticed something going on here. Are there any medical professionals or Awakened in the village? What about a regular person who's reasonably perceptive? Maybe the local spirits notice something's up and manifest to alert the mundane locals...

However it happens, I find it hard to believe that no-one notices anything amiss until the hard-asses from the big city show up to clean house.

Otherwise, I'm really digging the idea--good on ya both.

Isn't HMVV blood borne, I don't expect too many people there to have it.

Well, according to the SRComp, wetwork is 5000:nuyen: so... 20*5000 = 100000:nuyen:.

Now we're cooking with gas or at least what could have been our paychecks

If the PCs come into town in a car, you may want to have the 'only road into town' be blocked by a landslide (with maybe a the bodies of a chewed up utility crew). This means that the PCs will have to hoof it into town (it also prevents them froms taking one look at the place and then driving away. Make the town around 30min to 1 hour walk past the land slide, so any running back to the car can be an extended chase scene.
If they are comming in in some else's chopper or LAV have then agree on the time that the chopper will come back (so they'll need to survive until then).

If the PCs have a drone rigger, they may try for a high recon or similar of the town (or an astral one). Be sure to think up what they will see.

Maybe make them deal with one or two crazies first (and see if you can get them to shoot at anything that moves, even if they had earlier made the 'moral' choice) This way, when they meet the people who are still in control of themselves, the meeting will be that much more tense. Notice that any surviors might be pretty close to shooting anything that moves too.

Don't forget to add a level of background count or 2 (recent mass murder).

If you feel the characters are having too easy a time (or you are saving the people and the gun bunnies are unhappy), you can throw in some infected animal life (dogs, cats, mountain lions, bears).

If you PCs fly (via levitate, or drones) make sure you have some ideas to threaten them (otherwise, it will just be: hover over town, cut yourself a bit to draw out the crazies, then gun them down. All from safely 100 feet up). Maybe they get super-leaping too?

I... actually quite like this run idea. I think I will steal it in large part as well... with a few minor modifications. Good job. Give yourself a star.

As for getting the PC's to accept the run if they are in any way moralistic, you could simply have the person hiring them say that the village is the source of a new dangerous viral outbreak, and that they would like it quietly contained for X . That way even morally-minded characters might think theyre doing more or less the right thing by protecting others from infection.... and those morally minded characters would then be more inclined to listen to the owl spirit.

You could even have the scientists offer the runners a *vaccine* that *only works if administered 3 days before infection* This "vaccine" could be whatever they want, be it nothing at all (if youre a nice GM) to a dose of carcerands/Ebola Plus (if youre a particularly mean, evil GM).

With Bob's and Jason's addition, this run just seems to perfect to be true! (Or maybe I'm getting too damn tired to think...)

Oops, what if our enterprising teams wants to 'roll in a couple canisters on CN-20 and nerve gas the whole nest?'. Thay wouldn't be too much of a run. Hmm.

If they managed to get their hands on enough of the stuff and a way to use it effectively, I wouldn't mind. Perhaps not a whole lot of karma though...

I'd imagine it would be:

summon great form sky spirit to control wind.

Deploy gas via smokescreen generating drone upwind of town.

Wait...

Roll in and clean up.

The government of whatever country this is done in would suddenly generate a lot of interest in the particular spot of real-estate... I can't think of any good reasons why that wouldn't work though. If the runner team really doesn't care about destroying just about all forms of life withing a few (dozen?) square miles, and the fact that it'll be really high profile. Even more high than just going in with guns blazing would've been.

Yep, I just seem to be bloody minded today and am itching to kill 20 or 30 people.

There aren't that many ways you can kill 20-30 people without attracting much attention. But that's OK, makes the team think more.

To attract minimum attention, would the best approach be to leave no clear evidence of the runner team having been there (which makes killing them pretty darn tricky), and then making the corpses disappear completely? A few barrels of some good corrosive substance and then dump the chemical/human mixture into a nearby lake or something. Make sure to clean up any clues that might lead people to suspect something HMHVV-related.

It'll still attract attention once everyone figures out that a small village has suddenly gone missing, but this might take a while, and they should optimally not have any clues about the involvement of the runner team or the lab/firm in question.

Making the slaughter not attract much attention should be a good challenge for the team. There are several ways they might want to play it, and giving them hints may be in order.

They are dealing with primitive native americans, maybe a good ghost story would serve them well. They could ditch the bodies and maybe carve in some Sioux symbols of some totem, and make people think that a spirit got angry at them.

Maybe they could just leave a few mauled bodies behind and let everyone assume it was awakened creatures that did it.

I think burning the whole place down or blowing it up would attract too much immediate attention from NAN forces, so have the scientists discourage this.

It shouldnt be too hard though, seeing as this is a remote location without any easy access except for choppers (which arent cheap to fly into the mountains, we arent talking taxi fare prices).

Maybe the need to dispose of bodies could be the trick a group that chooses the moral option needs. They tell the scientists they will need two choppers to pick them up when they are done so they can remove the bodies from the site, and when the choppers come, they could have the uninfected hide, and have the infected pretend to be dead so they can be transported back for cryogenic stasis.

What's stopping the team's resident Awakened PC from assensing a few villagers and figuring everything out real quick? I mean, if there aren't any Awakened PCs, then you've got a nifty little pressure cooker of paranoia, mayhem and desperation cooked up, à la Resident Evil or The Thing. If there is someone with the team who's capable of scanning auras (and lets's face it, every good shadowrunning team has one), wouldn't that take away much of the mystery and terror?

Here's a question... what time of year's the run at?

Joker9125, I think the scientists have to inform the Shadowrunners that the target and his village are likely infected with something. If they don't inform the runners, they should know that one or more runners is likely to leave infected and spread it further. And that angry runners might come seeking them afterwards.

Most shadowrunner teams are likely to take a job of preventing the outbreak of a terrible infectious disease, without thinking of it as wetwork. The scientists should give advice on protective gear to wear, and not to stand down-wind during the burning of the infected bodies. The moral dilemma still exists, and it's a good run.

Hmm, some other commentary:

What if the PCs say no to the job (of the killin') I assume that the owl shaman will contact them afterward, but how does he know the right town to go to?

How are they going to keep from being chewed on during the chopper ride out? Maybe KO the people?

If the PCs provide 'their own' chopper (as opposed to one being supplied by the scientists) then they probably won't have too much trouble getting the chopper to carry some more people. However, the chopper might not be able to carry 10 people and the team all at once. (Sheep, wolf, lettuce, river )

Personally, I'd probably work on the choice a bit more, so that it's not the good and the evil choice. That tends to make choosing a bit too easy. The good choice with no reward and the not as good choice with a reward is the sort of thing that tends to make people pause.

bah. as The Terminus Experiment teaches us, even a strain of vampirism which has no negative side effects--no need for bloodsuckin', no allergy to sunlight, etcetera--turns its hosts into undead spawns of satan which must be murderized at all cost.

stupid-ass book.