If you exclude the employees of the Mega's and their subsidiaries, who else makes up this "general population" you are referring to?

Some entire magical traditions lead to very poor corporate citizens (not alot of Wiccan Corp mages).

Not really. You do what the old navigators do. You find a place on shore that is due east and head due west. And you do it at 20,000 meters. Now you probably won't be able to go exactly west, but as I point out in a moment, you don't have to.

Your spirit buddy has 24 dice of perception. The target is in barren area, sparsely inhabited, (so +3) requiring 1 hit (large - obvious) Actively looking (+3) , stands out (+2) Far away (-3) so he has to get once success on 29 dice. I suspect he'll be successful at spotting the ship if it's in line of sight. Which at 20,000 meters is 505 km.

Sinless and non-corp citizens would be part of the general population.

Yeah, true....but how many of the children grow up in a corp enviroment with that outlook that lead them to develop such a tradition. Of course that is assuming that your mentor spirit/tradition depends on outlook on magic. Most would be hermetics or similar "scientific" based traditions where logic is part of the drain code. But that gets into corp culture a bit too.

I suspect that your group is going to get seriously mauled on this one. Purely disregarding the ships security force, and spider plus a mage if they have one; they are dealing with several thousand passengers. Those passengers are not going to all be low ranking wage slaves, a fair number will be rich and powerful with their own leg breakers. Assuming even small percentage of the passengers have noticeable support that adds up quickly. True, they are not coordinating and their job would be to keep a particular person safe, but it is still a bad surprise.

Finding the specific person they are looking for in a reasonable time will be difficult. Those ships are huge and have a lot of places to hide. Can it be done? Certainly, but time is not on their side. And when it comes time to leave they better have something faster or stealthier than a fishing boat. A nice stealthy mini-sub might work. If they take more than a few hours then at the least they can expect steady air cover/sat coverage to be an issue even if there are no ships there by then.

I would start thinking about the prison escape aspect of the campaign if you are feeling generous. Otherwise you could end up with a complete wipe here.

Which would be one of most favorite parts of Shadowrun....making a new character

For a ship like that, I'm actually thinking a ship of that size has multiple spiders running multiple aspects of a security system with drones ahoy! in addition. There will be no place they can hide, and absolutely no place to run.

Maybe. Sure SR may be different but today there are different levels of cruise ships, the ones I have been on had 0 rich and famous, the rich and famous went on much nicer cruise ships. Exactly what level cruise ship is a courier on? Is he the James Bond of couriers who blends in with high society in his Tux, I guess its possible but it seems somewhat unlikely. Though a courier on a cruise ship in itself seems unlikely to me, if I hire a courier I want the package faster than that usually.

As for the rest, I'll agree mostly. The courier may or may not hide depending on where the courier was when this happens. Lining everyone up in order to loot them pirate like gives you a opportunity to quickly go through the crowd. Still they are most likely on a short time line so it would be hard to do this before some response came in. The level of cruise ship would have a factor in this. Super luxury cruise ship would have good on board security and responses would be as quick as possible given they are out to sea. A average wage slave level cruise ship on the other hand may be waiting close to a day before a response rolls in.

I assume you're talking about the Force 12 monster here. But it does bring up a few questions. How far up can a spirit travel before it hits too much mana void. The curvature of the Earth limits line of sight to about 10 km in any direction at sea level, so the spirit would have to go up... Google Earth... plus Maths... equals... numbers...

Anyway, perception is a weird beast. Trying to find something like a cruise ship in 100 km radius is like sitting on a lamp post, trying to spot a single grain of rice in a Texas parking lot. I would say, that stuff like (large - obvious) or (stands out) are relative to the size of the area where someone is looking. So, change that threshold to impossible and kill the idea of standing out, and then were part way there.

If I'm not mistaken mana problems begins higher. Airliners are fine flying at altitudes in the 10-15 km altitude (30.000-45.000 ft) and you need semi-ballistic or suborbital trajectories to actually leave the gaïasphere.

80,000 feet, or a bit over 24,000 meters.

And when you can buy 7 successes nothing is that difficult. And yes, (high force) spirits are overpowered in SR4. Such is life.

If you consider that the physical position of the ship is know at a precision of half a meter (GPS anyone ? naval navigation tools ? this is a ship, knowing where it is 90% of the job onboard) how afar from this position the mage had to search in the Astral ?

That is not a stealthy military sub in hiding, that is a freaking commercial ship on a registered sea-lane...

Consider that some of the initial response could also come in the form of drone carriers launched from a relatively light vehicle, which would cut down a bit on the amount of sheer manpower needed to mobilize at least some token amount of backup. After all, satellite links and retrans units are hardly unknown in SR4, so it's not like you really need true wireless infrastructure (besides, this team doesn't sound like the sort that plans for "little" things like Electronic Warfare). Hell, if you're using small and fast enough drones you could literally just have them lead the spirits and have the spirits jack up everything with the Movement power on the way there.

The problem is finding that GPS Position on the astral in the first place, since, you know, GPS doesn't work there...

-CJ

Sure is doesnt, but direction do. If you have the exact location of the ship and your stating point you have a directionnal vector to find him. That's entirely other than just searching anywhere, it's this exact direction at this exact distance. Wonder if that's even not enough information to send/summon the spirit.

That would still require some Navigation rolls, which due to a lack of landmarks 500 miles on the open sea should have a threshold of around 3.

And the mage would have to accompany his spirits unless he wants to send them on a remote service, which is highly unlikely, since he can't be 100% sure of the situation onboard to give the spirits specific orders.

Imho, in this example the runners should not worry too much about off-board security responses. These will take some time anyway, before they start to become a problem. And they will have enough problems dealing with onboard security measures right now. Large cruise ships will almost allways have their own awakened security personell...

-CJ

I'm one of the players in the game (the mage) and I have to say this is going to be fun.

In none of our games have we achieved close to 5,500 kills, I'm about to win MVP of this game.

YAR!

sigh....yeah

This groups is funny. When you say you're playing Star Wars during the time of the Jedi Purge and that playing a Jedi will be difficult, all they hear was Star Wars (blah blah blah ) followed by exciting music and lightsaber sounds.

When you say we're playing a subtle Shadowrun game where you need to plan out runs and be very very careful, they hear: "We're playing Shadowrun." (followed by the sounds of explosions and the clank of raining shell casings)

If thats the game they are looking for, and everyone is having fun, more power to yah. Of course in this case, the sea monster attack on the cruise ship may fit in with the players' temperment better than the heavy strike from shore.

or maybe they have specialty cruise (like those fat people cruises), only this one is for K-10 addicts.....good luck with 5,000 passengers on K-10. I guess that type of cruise liner would probably be a much older and run down model. Probably not run by a Mega. Might even have poor off site support.

Whoa whoa whoa, it's not all of us, just one of us.

Remember the first mission with Rambo? Not OUR fault, only HIS fault.

We have fun with the whole sneaky shadowrun type of game, the problem is some of our players get trigger happy sometimes (including myself) that causes a run to go badly. Sometimes it's out of frustration, sometimes just because we had a bad week.

The real problem is one of our players continues to try to take control of the team, comes up with terrible ideas, and tries to execute them. Usually we don't listen to him, but even when we plan a good run, he always does something stupid to mess the plan up. We're playing Shadowrun and he's playing Scooby-Doo. Not that we mind on most occasions, it's at least really entertaining.

The sea monster attack was is intended to be a serious suggestion. It helps to put some of the fantasy feel back into SR. Lately, the only fantasy elements seem to be the ones under metahuman (or dragon) control, and I like to have the Sixth World occasionally show the civilized peoples that they can't account for everything.

Luckily in most of the 6th world one more random killing of street scum by other street scum barely rates anyone showing up to take a report.....

Honestly, introducing a third party like a sea monster might not be a bad idea even if it does come across as contrived, since it may give the players an "out" during all the confusion-- after all, the OP indicated that he isn't really looking to have a discouraging TPK on his hands. So perhaps the pink mohawk route of turning the whole situation into an outright debacle for more than just the players could be a fun way to play it out. Some groups just aren't really very good at, uh, shadowy shadowruns.

You could have intrigue between a third and fourth party on the ship come to a head. For example, there's a mafia don and a yakuza boss on board, and now that there's an alarm, they each think the other hired assassins. Everyone will be trying to kill everyone... (Of course, everyone is also looking for the PCs; they won't get it easy, but they'll have a fighting chance in the confusion.)





Incidentally, I do think there will be some limits on anti-pirate action. Corp A doesn't want Corp B to send some goons onto Corp A's ship, then declare Corp A's ship a pirate vessel and attack it without legal constraint.

There is no such thing as international law, it's all a comfortable fiction about how nations agree to act. If the US navy decided to capture all Panamanian ships as pirates there isn't anything that Panama could do about it. Other then complain to the UN. The General Assembly will then agree that the US is evil and spend weeks talking about how evil the US is (which is what the do when the USN isn't pirating Panamanian ships...but I digress) and ultimately nothing will happen until the US decided to stop.

In the 6th world you have the corporate court, which also doesn't really have any ability to do anything unless the AAAs decides to act. So you'd best have a protector or be able to fight yourself.

"since earliest recorded history the world has been a place where the strong take what they want and the weak give what they must."

I think there are more than a few lawyers who would disagree with you.

That may be if it's US vs. Panama, but not when it's US vs. China.

China vs the US (and Horizon vs Ares) can always choose Ultima Ratio Regum. Even if they expect to lose they can make it very expensive. And that ability is deterrence.

But yeah, there is no 911 number you can call to get the cops to show up when Iraq invades your country or a pirate attacks your little BB corporate freighter. There are no cops. Nobody has to respond unless you have taken steps beforehand to arrange that, and if they do choose to do something for their reasons you don't get to chose how they choose to do it. Defense treaties with a major power or a contract with KE are the steps you take to have some assurance of response and to keep the response under some sort of control.

The point I was trying to make is;

Unless there's a corporate war going on, corporations aren't going to be too trigger-happy to call Pirate on another corp's ships and attack them.

Corporations don't want open conflict with each other; while the Corporate Court can be slow, these are the kind of things they do actually take action against, and rather harshly. The CC has shown it's willing to attack even Aztechnology to put a stop to open defiance of its rules.

When Corp B's ship is doing something suspicious near Corp A's ship, Corp A will probably ask Corp B to explain itself before taking action, unless they have very clear proof of aggression.