I just finished reading through Ghost Cartels - it looks awesome, and hopefully I'll get to run it soon. One particularly memorable bit is the attack on the Black Chrysanthemum complex inside Kowloon walled city - for those of you who don't know it, the rival triad throws hundreds of armed, drug-addled maniacs against the compound's defenses, and the players have to fight a desperate holding action while evac arrives. But wait! Before they get to the choppa, one of the motherfucking YAMA KINGS shows up and ruins everybody's shit.

Sounds awesome, but I'm having trouble imagining how to run it. A combat of this size would run incredibly slowly - you'd have to improvise some sort of mass-combat rules, but in general, Shadowrun doesn't do too hot with that sort of thing. (In fairness, neither do most RPGs.) Furthermore, how the hell are you supposed to take down that Yama King? It's a Force 9 shadow spirit, it's got 14 Armor and INW. You can't even let the mage deal with it, since Kowloon has a BC of -3! It seems to me that unless you're specifically prepared for fighting badass spirits (which maybe you should be before entering Kowloon?) or you have a phys ad, you're completely SOL and will probably get TPKed.

So, who has run this? How did you do it? Any suggestions on mass combat and/or getting to the choppa?

...A physad troll throwing an electrically charged telephone pole at it?

Throwing a cannister of boomer bi- FAB III Force 10 at it?

i banished him with banishing 1. pretty cool

mass combat comes ever so often. One option is to not so much care about the individual combatant on the "horde" side of things. Just stack the damage up, and each time it reaches enough to reduce the horde by one, do so.

Remember, grunts in SR4 use a combined track, thats 8 boxes + the higher of body or willpower. Also, there is the professional rating to consider. I am not sure if drugged up grunts should be considered untrained or semi trained. In either case once enough of them are taken out, they will run away.

basically, have maybe 3-5 of the horde actually get into combat each round. If its ranged combat it works as normal. If its melee combat, consider adding a friend in melee bonus to them to represent the increased number of them around. Thing is, there may be many of them, but the drugged up courage they are running on also probably makes them ineffective fighters, getting in each others way and so on.

this is more or less an adaption of feng shui brawl management suggestions, with SR4 grunt rules. In feng shui, the "mooks" drop whenever a attack comes up with a good enough result to do damage and only a few of the actual enemies are sent into the fight at a time.

edge in action, or favored by the dice gods?

both of course . used my last two edge points, and my phys damage track filled pretty well...

You can also treat the horde as a kind of gestalt creature - instead of treating it as hundreds of people, you have a Crowd monster. As the Crowd monster takes damage, its attacks become less effective and numerous.

Don't worry about rolling for everything. Deal with things in the players' immediate vicinity with the dice mechanics and make everything else narrative backdrop.

This would be my suggestion. With that many people involved, keeping track of every single body is impossible. Focus on the one immediately around the player characters, get cinematic in describing how people claw over each other and how even the shots that "miss" end up hitting and killing people in the howling mob.

This isn't a fight you stick out and win.

I'm inclined to agree with you from a GM perspective, and I've done this sort of thing using other systems, but the problem is that I think that individual 'runners can affect the "big picture", so to speak. Spells, grenades, etc. I don't have a problem with saying "Okay, roll Throwing... the grenade bounces into the middle of the alley and takes out a dozen crazed junkies. The teeming morass surges into the gap, trampling their bodies." but as a player, would you want to see... I don't know, more dice? I don't want to just dictate the action - then I'm telling a story, not playing a game.

Well, that's the thing with RPG's isn't it? They exist in this curious space in between telling a story and playing a game: they are not wholly one or the other. Personally, when I am a player, I get annoyed when the GM spends a bunch of time on actions that do not affect me (eg. combat between 2 NPC's). If your players really want to see more dice, then figure out some sort of "short hand" for the situation. For example: your PC throws a grenade into the ground, calculate the damage based on his successes then just pick some number which is the collective hits rolled on the damage resistance test for the targets, or roll just once for all targets in the area. The key is: keep it moving and focus on the action, focus on conveying the feel.

Personally, the reason I play RPG's is for the story element. If I just want to roll dice and see what happens there are a host of other games I could be playing. I think it's never a bad thing to convey more story in an RPG.

A respectable assertion. The best I can suggest is a cooperative storytelling bit - give the players a chance to affect the situation, but remember that for all their guns and bombs and magic, there's still a thousand junkies on the street. You can't kill ever orc in this horde for the XP.

Which is way a fundamental aspect of the SR system is giving character advancement awards for completing objectives and following the story, and not simply wracking up the biggest body count. ("I need to learn to pick locks better... I think I'll go into the forest and kill orcs for awhile.")

in these kinds of situations i keep thinking flowcharts. Have some kind of chart set up or have some pieces that can be slotted into the general flow as needed.

maybe after they take down x grunts, a lieutenant steps up to fight them, and if said one is not taken down within y rounds, something negative happens. If they take him down tho, the following event is instead positive.

my personal take on things is that thinking story in the middle of a game is basically wrong. The story comes into view once the session, and campaign is reviewed after the fact. So rather then trying to set up some kind of grand scene, like in a book or movie, the pieces should be flexible, available to be used when it would make sense.

Also for that battle, take a look at the map. It's pretty tight quarters and the bad guys can only come at you from one place in the beginning. Later in the fight when they come from the rooftops it becomes room to room fighting and is more manageable. All you are doing is a fighting retreat to the rooftops while the 2 gangs battle it out until the Yama King shows up on the rooftop. Grenades and cover fire and area spells rule the day here. Well not so much spells with that background count.
The Yama King isn't as tough as he looks as he only has 3 edge, so he is banishable. We did it with an 8 dice pool and a lucky roll (7 hits). A mage with a power focus would do even better. For the unawakened may a suggest a Ruger Super Warhawk with APDS. -6 AP and a 6P base damage is pretty good here as the Yama King only has 14 armor (yea, I know force 9 with only 14 armor?).
We ran this as cinematic when it was the drugged out hordes and only really worried about the nitty gritty when it came to the Yama King.

14 Armor, and ITNW... That's 32 armor, 18 of it hardened, against a ruger. I'd say that if the players can't banish him then they'll have to rely on either big guns with stick n shock rounds or direct spell after direct spell with the mage just eating the drain.

No, the total including ITNW is 14. This is how I ran it anyway. The spirit stats are a little wonky in Ghost Cartels. I ran that particular Yama King as a force 6 spirit with a power boost from the aspected background count for a total force of 9 and boosted his ITNW to 18 hardened armor. You can just run him as is and it is 14 hardened armor from ITNW. I believe there is a little asterix by his stats saying the armor total include ITNW.

Oh. Admittedly I haven't looked at that part of Ghost Cartels so your probably right. And people still keep insisting that Ghost Cartels is RAW...

This was my favorite part of GC. I'll let Prime Mover, our GM, give his take on running it,but as I recall he used pretty much what has been said above.

We ended up outside the target, trapped in the street, in a retreat action. The hacker was spraying the nearby buildings with a lmg on the rotodrone.My rigger,Tick-Tock, was sending Suicide Ferrets into the crowd and blasting away with machine pistols. Our mage was igniting every thing in sight. Physad was mono-whipping limbs off anything that moved. It was glorious!

Actually, yes you can. You get extra karma for threat level and for right skill, right time, playing in character, etc. Always! kill all the opponents when you have the opportunity, the means and the ammo.

Seriously, I have played characters outnumbered 50-1 before in shadowrun and prevailed. If your team co-operates and uses it's multiple initiative passes and edge to take out swaths of opponents each turn it can be done. You just have to ignore all the people saying, "They ounumber us! Run!" Only do that if you lack initiative passes and the ability to take out multiple foes in a pass. Of course if your team's built that way in this adventure you're screwed anyway.

Of course the best tactic is to take out the Yama King while all those junkies are able to see it, then use your badassness to turn them into your own personal short term army. Oh the havoc you could wreak..!

I agree.

The aspect I like about open ended scenarios is that while you are not supposed to be able to kill every orc in the horde, you may be able to. I dislike those scenarios that mandate only 1 or 2 outcomes. If running away is an acceptable solution, I think that slaughtering everyone in the mob is also an acceptable outcome.

I just kind of wish that the book recognized that running a fight for hundreds of combatants might be a little bit of a GMing challenge. They just kind of throw it out there like it's no big thing.

I don't expect to have my hand held - it's only an adventure framework, after all. But a few tips (such as the ones I'm getting here - thanks, guys!) would have been nice.

Also, the programmer in me is tempted to write some kind of simulation for the whole battle. How hard could it be?

(famous last words)

I used a machine pistol with Stick-n-Shock rounds. That 1/2 impact armor for electrical damage works wonders INW. And, they EXIST!

Honestly, the more you think about it, the harder of a time you're gonna have of it. Too much demand for realism leads to breaking out the minis. If I had room for another sidebar for "How To Run Mass Combat" I'd have slipped it in there.

The book and the developer - me - assumes that the spotlight of the story stays firmly on the characters (and their wards) thus narrowing the narrative focus of any action/dice resolutions and making the rest of the apocalyptic showdown a colorful and explosive backdrop. From the start the GM should be aware that the players are performing an epic holding action, and the players should gradually become aware that his fight isn't to victory but just to stay alive (if they're competent enough to hold a position against such serious numbers and aren't overwhelmed, have another one nearby be overwhelmed exposing a flank). What the context provides is an apparently infinite supply of mooks for the GM to throw at the characters. However, since simply throwing bodies at them will ultimately get boring for everybody we included some heavier hitters (Gang/Triad members) that can help soften up pockets of resistance - such as a tough team of runners - with molotov cocktails, the odd grenade, or a gunman firing from an upper storey window. Limited line-of-sight down the alleys, the crowds of fliphead mooks on drugs, background count, and smoke and debris from the conflict should mean the attackers will be right on top of the defenders very quickly (even if it means climbing over the bodies of the ranks that go down first). Melee characters should have some fun. The potentially difficult element for the GM to manage isn't the overall conflict (that's narrative and goes whichever way he finds convenient) but making the players feel their characters are overwhelmed without actually overwhelming them (and killing them in the process). The reason we didn't include further guidelines, besides lack of space, is because different groups will draw the line at different points and react differently to the fight (not only because they have different builds and playstyles, but also because they may simply under-equipped for a battle this big.)

My playtest group was so used to having combat superiority that they held out in the first position outside the compound walls (they'd packed most of their usual urban guns but no grenades or explosives) until every single one of them was hurt (3+ physical wound boxes), from that point onward it was a running battle as they didn't even try to hold any positions all the way to the roof... and then, of course, when they thought they were finally safe with the helo in sight, the Yama King made his appearance. The street samurai actually sacrificed himself to buy everyone time to get away. This meant that only the first segment of the combat was actually a standup fight. The rest of it was me throwing obstacles and moving targets at them as they went up. Everything else going on was narrative background for them to feel the fighting was almost on top of them.

Another playtest group started running as soon as they realised their mage wasn't going to be taking down huge amounts of targets that they had expected (cumulative cover modifiers, smoke, background count, and limited LOS means a magician's pools are going to be drained and unless he has a bunch of high-force - now low-force - spirits Bound he's nowhere as effective as usual). They headed for the roof as soon as they met up with Sacristan in the courtyard, and had a similar struggle as they went upstairs, but were in much better condition to face the Yama King.

Finally a third group - apparently min-maxers and COD:MW fans according to their GM - tried holding actions all the way up. They were doing so well in fact that nothing short of grenades/molotovs or surprise flank/rear attacks (people climbing in through the upper floor windows) managed to dislodge them. According to the GM their one big problem was that by the time they got to the roof most of the building was ablaze and they were running low on ammo (for the first time ever!) to face the Yama King.

I ran 2 teams through this.

1) The first team was a more social/finesse team. They quickly realised that they were outgunned and straight up fighting was a losing proposition. The pornomancer with his huge Social dice pool managed turned the parts of the mob on itself, diverting manpower that was supposed to be attacking them to attack the flanks of the other parts of the mob, while the other team members helped to serve as command and control for the Black Crysanthemums. Since the mob wasn't an elite army, and with substantial parts of the mob constantly being turned on itself as well as the force multiplier effect of the runners on the Black Crysanthemums, I was getting the evil eye from my players for railroading them into retreating. I had each wave of attackers on the runners' positions at 10+2D6 guys per wave. The pronomancer himself directly neutralised 8 waves with those members of those waves diverted to attack their allies, which I conservatively estimated to have taken out half as many as themselves. So in all, the pornomancer alone took out 12 waves for a total of approximately 200 odd members of the mob.

2) The other team was hardcore military/special ops. With their own pornomancer - a former hostage negotiator. I had to recycle the glass beads that were representing the swarming horde more times than I could track of (I had about in excess of 50 beads - my and a player's VTES blood banks) The very first thing the guys did was gather intel/do recon astrally and physically and then ask to roll their Tactics/Security/related skills and used Edge on those rolls - one guy Critically Succeeded his roll to find a way to "do a Thermopylae and walk away with Xerxes women". In the end, all I could do was say, "Sorry guys, well done, but the scenario says you guys got to retreat." The mages did pretty well because they were trained to operate in Background Count. Their team mate Datum has Astral Hazing (they even have a code phrase for Awakened members to fall back into the Astal Hazing - Hard Datum).

I could see that happen in my group as well =) Then again, my campaign is currently set in Lagos...

toturi - The developer in me has to ask: could you clarify what the pornomancers were doing to turn the mobs? I don't believe any of the playtest groups had a social adept of that ability, plus it's not immediately obvious to me what powers would be effective in that situation. Was the pornomancer allowed the chance to talk the raging mob into changing targets/convince them that he was a friendly, this whilst they charged the runners in the midst of the chaos of Kowloon going up in flames? - Note this is in no way a criticism of how you handled things, just curiosity about the circumstances . Consider it playtest feedback. I plan on writing/developing another toolkit/framework style campaign for Shadowrun (though probably not for Catalyst.) and real play feedback is appreciated.

I've made similar requests of people who had trouble with the Yakuza carpark firefight in Seattle (a lot of people were coming back to me with how easy it was for magic to overcome the Yaks, thoughl I do point out that the exceptional amounts of cover (on both sides) and lighting conditions could/should reduce the Spellcasting hits significantly.

A combination of Influence(spell), Infiltration and Disguise(skill) and Commanding Voice(adept power) and high Social Skills dice pools (IIRC, the pornomancer went with Influence skill group instead of picking one specific Social Skill to max). "Those guys there are stealing our stuff!" "If we don't kill them, there'd be nothing left for us!" "Kill them!" (points to other groups) "Let them break through, then we kill them and the loot will be all ours!" "Those are the fucking traitors! Kill them!"
It helped that the PC snipers were taking out the people with the heavier ordnance (rifles/shotguns/etc) who were the "leaders" of the mobs.

Incidentally, if you were the dev in charge of Dusk, the second group of guys weren't pleased with the ghoul ambush scenario either.

Ok, seriously, I've seen all the talk about how Pornomancers can talk the knickers off a nun and the gleam off gold, but really? Are you seriously going to allow tailored pheremones to work when cordite is in the air, and gangers are too far away to smell? Is he pulling an emotitoy out in the middle of battle, and if so, why wasn't he fired at because people think he's pulling a weapon?
The more I hear about how ungodly awesome Pornomancers are, the more I think people are neglecting to add appropriate modifiers, as well as allowing bonuses that are not justifiable.
Now I'll be honest, I haven't read the campaign, maybe there's an explicit part about how right before the waves of drug-addled orks overrun you, they all line up in front of a podium so Tony Roberts can sell them on a drug-free life. But otherwise, something seems to be seriously wrong with this.

ETA And this is why I should refresh the page before posting.

Commanding Voice, Pornomancy, and megaphone = the strangest 10 second orgy you'll ever see, depending on their willpower (and cuteness).

Just a small request... Mind removing "Ghost Cartels" from the thread title. Some of us have players who lurk around DS and haven't hit that point in the adventure yet.

Imperialus: Sorry! I didn't think of the spoiler possibilities. I will change the topic name... except I don't know how. Can anyone help me? (Can non-mods change topic names?)

Everyone else: Thank you for the feedback; it is extremely helpful to know how this sort of thing will actually play out. My group is the kind that would be content to stand around shooting gangers 'til the cows come home, so I plan on preparing a host of complications. (Snipers, grenades, buildings collapsing around them, etc.)

As for groups who refuse to retreat - I know this isn't technically part of the adventure, but couldn't you just start throwing more Yama Kings at them? It seems to me that they would be drawn to the battle like flies on a carcass.

Worst case scenario you can start to chunky-salsa them just from the press of the 'mob' that's constantly closing in around them...

I would think that having that in the title makes it more obvious that it contains spoilers, rather than leave it out and have unsuspecting players lose out on the surprise of having the situation completely decay.

No worries. I think a Mod needs to change it. Maybe PM Bull. I'm sure he'd be thrilled to deal with something other than the CGL thread.

As for the retreat problem... That should resolve itself, after all PC's will eventually start running out of ammo, or the 1 or 2 boxes of drain here and there will start adding up. Most of the guttertrash they are killing will be coming after them with streetline specials or AK knockoffs that don't have compatable ammunition with the teams Warhawks, and Ares Alpha's

If it doesn't occur to them to safe and hang their Alphas to collect an AK that they can scavenge spare mags for, then they probably also won't retreat until it's way, way too late.

I added the emphasis.

I totally disagree. You could have done something other than tell them they had to retreat. You just didn't.

Seriously, though, in the end you were the GM, playtesting or not. If they found a way to crack the adventure then they did their jobs. They should have been rewarded for it, not have defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. I hope they got a nice 5 karma bonus each.

Oh, how I loathe deus ex machina!

Well, in the alternate history version of Ghost Cartels, that group really did "win" the scenario.
Eh? Why hang up their Alphas when you can use the AK's ammo? Weapons of the same class use the same ammo. The runners can scavenge ammo from fallen allies (hell, if you are going to have an infinite supply of goons, at least have the decency to allow the Black Crysanthemums to have an infinite supply of ammo) Anyone using SMGs/shotguns/machine pistols/heavy pistols can pick up ammo from fallen enemies.

Haven't read the thread, but found this kinda interesting, since it tied in. io9 did a little story on Kowloon...

http://io9.com/5512888/the-walled-city-whe...t-couldnt-reach

Bull

I just ran this scene about a month ago. It was very interesting but difficult.

Basically the players didn't come equpped with bags of ammo and I made them keep track. While they caused significant casualties to the Smoke Circle Triads, they realised they couldn't survive a protracted battle and begun to plan their escape.

That was when the Yama Kings arrived.

Basically my players chose not to fight them - a world first for them (they're used to blowing up anything that moves). They barely escaped.

While this was a dramatic scene I do agree with whoever said to keep it lose and fast. I wouldn't let it drag out like I did in retrospect. This scene, and a few others (first adventure in Tokyo springs to mind) reeked of massive railroading. If you have a problem with the railroading, then you may need to re-write or ad-lib significant sections of Ghost Cartels for it to work.

- J.

I haven't looked at this encounter before, but was there something restricting the players from improvising area attacks? I mean, sure, if all they did was sit up on a balcony and ping people with their firearms, they'd run out of ammo and be screwed in short order. But improvised explosives, napalm, hacking, spells like Mob Mood, and whatever else surely could have been of use, no?

Isn't there this chase scene in the original Ghost in the Shell films running through this part of Kowloon?

That's a... novel way of looking at it. You get XP bonuses for completing the mission, not for killing everyone who opposes you (that's rarely the true goal of a shadowrun, IME). "Threat level" bonuses are for completing and surviving dangerous missions, not for killing enemies, and "right skill, right time" doesn't usually mean "knowing how to shoot when there are people who can be shot".

So, someone who went through that fight by escaping as soon as possible would get the same threat level bonus as someone who insisted on staying and fighting until there were no more people to kill. And since the mission included protecting a certain person from the rampaging mob, letting that person die would prevent any mission-related XP rewards, even if they did win the fight without retreating.

As for the "right skill, right time" bonus, I'd reserve it for someone who successfully managed to banish the Yama King, or use Demolitions to set up clever barriers. These things are less obvious, not possessed by every character, and would be a big help in the situation. Shooting someone in the face, on the other hand, is a skill possessed by every shadowrunner, and they never need to be reminded they can do that .

Heck, retreating because the client ordered them to is as valid a reason as any. I wouldn't see that as "railroading" if it happened.

Bull: Awesome article, thanks.

Dr. Funkenstein: The limitation there is that Kowloon is a maze of twisty passages, so even when everyone is bunched together, you're not going to get LOS to that many people.

EDIT: Quick question - I was looking over the Banishing rules in SR4A. If I understand it correctly, each net hit on a Banishing test reduces the number of services owed by the spirit to its master by one. How does Banishing work against free spirits like the Yama Kings?

Free Spirits have the power Banishing Resistance Street Magic p.99

Sure...
But the question was how do you Banish them if they have no effective services to declinate... makes it a bit hard, as Free Spirits do not normally track Services...

Keep the Faith...

well, you should read the description! i even told you where to look...

Well, Whaddya Know... Thanks Makki...

Keep the Faith

Yea that was why I said the Yama King wasn't too bad to deal with as he only had 3 edge or 3 services total. When we fought him one of the team managed to get a lucky shot off with his warhawk/APDS combo and forced him to use a point of edge to avoid serious injury.
Synner, could you explain why the Yama King stats are so .... well weird I guess. Specifically the lower armor value, the weird essence value (16) and his crazy low initiative score (3). I'm guessing some of it is just layout mistakes, like the initiative should be 16 and 3 IPs or something except those don't make sense either. I'd just like to know what sort of spirit template the Yama king is based on.
I think we ran this whole thing pretty much the way it was intended. Even with our mage and sammie holding off the hordes at the first position, the hordes streaming in from above forced a retreat since the face providing sniper cover with Sacristan couldn't hold them off by herself. One of the things preventing really hardcore area effect is that that courtyard is only about 4 meters to a side and with all the windows up to the second floor bricked off you risk harming your own team as much as the hordes. I enjoyed running this one, except for the weird Yama King stats. I've actually enjoyed most of these adventure frameworks and so have my players.
Oh yea Bull, why couldn't you have posted that article 2 weeks ago? Would have been nice to show the players what the place used to look like and its a pretty good look at how its supposed to be in Shadowrun. Good article.