The comments along the lines of "ooh, how are we supposed to do it?!" "ooh, our guns run out of ammo!" and etc.

This is similar to what happened in mine - but change Pornomancer to Hacker.

I had it that the Smoke Circle were communicating via commlinks (given they had bugger all magic, the assumption they had access to decent weapons/tech seemed plausible). The team hacker traced the signals to several commlinks from those who were giving orders. He then jammed their signals, spoofing his access to that of the commanders and diverted their resources. Using smoke grenades (instead of snipers) the hacker was able to divert significant numbers of Smoke Circle triads into traps. He also transmitted the position of the commanders to the other PCs via the Tacnet so they could take them out (a couple of PCs slipped over the rooftops nearby to get the drop on some of them).

Long story short - they basically whittled down most of the Smoke Circle Triads and would have survived by the skin of their teeth. Then the Yama Kings arrived, and watched as one of the Yama Kings took out straggling Smoke Circle and Black Chrysanthemum Triads, shrugging off gunfire like it was raindrops.

At which point the PCs knew they were already running on vapour and couldn't survive (most of the PCs had ran down to their last clip of ammo, accumulating damage from overcasting, etc).

- J.

There's no chance the police are going to turn up in Kowloon - it's a literal hellhole, ruled by literal demons, and generally infested with criminals. The scenario here is that you're escorting a VIP from a given criminal syndicate to meet with members of a Triad for a large drug deal. The Triad is, effectively, one of the local authorities. A rival Triad gets jealous that all the juicy merchandise is going to the competition, and manipulates a very large crowd of armed, drug-starved maniacs into rushing the safehouse where the deal is going down.

This attack is supposed to be something unexpected - it's massive overkill compared to what the "friendly" Triad expected its rivals to pull. And unless the PCs are always planning to fend off an army, this will also be unexpected to them. You have a few hundred lunatics storming your building, supported by a handful of better-trained Triad snipers and such. Heavier weapons here are helpful, but, again, unless your PCs are expecting this kind of opposition, it's probably not something they'd have brought, which is supposed to be part of the challenge. If they do bring these weapons for some reason, and manage to keep from making the friendly Triad from getting jumpy at the sight of them, then they're welcome to use them in the fight. Clever tricks like Molotov cocktails and improvised barriers are also cool, and should be rewarded. Large deployments of chemical weapons don't really fit with the type of game I like to run - I wouldn't play with a group that considers that a viable option for a typical shadowrun. Emergency drone care packages are kind of a silly, Rube Goldberg thing to do, as well. There's probably a lot of more dramatically appropriate solutions.

The goal here, I feel, is not to kill every last one of the attackers, but to hold out until you can be airlifted. Staying until the bitter end is, well, a possible choice, but it's suboptimal. This is a hard fight, and you have to play it smart. It's the GM's job to play up the air of desperation and keep the player's adrenaline high. If you can survive this unscathed, then you're pretty badass!

The question is what is reasonable armament to bring along when going through some of the worst areas of the Barrens. Kowloon Walled City is perhaps Hong Kong's answer to that. Do you bring the heavy arty to those places where LS/KE fear to thread without heavy SWAT support? Won't you?

Would you consider everyone except your team and the principals to be hostiles/potential hostiles? Won't you bring along enough firepower to hold off a small army? You may have vehicles to convey you to the areas where you are going - if not, that means Sacristan is walking and she is vulnerable, even if there wasn't going to be an attack. If shit goes down and your erstwhile allies turn against you, you need to defend your principal and fight your way out. Let's put aside the Smoke Circle attack and just focus on the Black Crysanthemums. Do you have enough firepower to hold off the Black Crysanthemums?

This. All I did was roll a d6 every few combat turns, on a success they had to deal with d6 random attacks. The rest was just "blood, smoke, fire, fog, spirits, flying drug addict parts, explosions, more flying drug addict parts, GIGANTIC SHADOW SPIRIT CARVING A PATH OF DESTRUCTION". I've got a bad habit of rolling a lot of dice.

It's a delicate balance - you don't want to be defenseless if things go sour, but you don't want to look so threatening people will assume you're attacking them and shoot you on principle.

Why would you provoke someone just because they looked dangerous? They're bodyguards. It's their business to look dangerous.

Also, salvation by Deus Ex Machina makes for a great scene, but a poor strategy, imo. I count on players to take whatever steps they deem necessary to guarantee their survival, up to and including acts of terrorism.

But, just for perspective, my games are old school cyberpunk where SINless aren't afforded basic human rights unless the media is present. Basically no one would care about any of those junkies scrambling up the building, or the Kowloon bottom feeders who would die as collateral damage. If anyone cared about them, then they wouldn't live there. I'm not trying to convince anyone to run their games the way I run mine. I'm just lamenting over the fact that I'd have to beef up this scenario to keep from seeing the players run up 8 flights of stairs and then blowing up the ground floor access or dropping gas down behind them.

It also comes down to the individual player and their character's role. If you're playing a gun-happy redneck guy then yeah, you're gonna bring your assault rifle. You'll just bring your bullpup one that can sort of be hidden under your longcoat and you'll have pockets full of clips and grenades. If you're the sammy that loves his Ruger Thunderbolt and specialized in it, well, it might not occur to you to bring anything else other than three or four of these. If you're playing a pure face, well, you'll probably have a single heavy pistol at best and a few clips of ammo, one of which is non-lethal.

If you're a drone rigger, well, all bets are off. Those guys can set up their drones to carpet bomb blocks!

Easy way out.

The group your VIP is dealing with has guaranteed the safety of the VIP. They generally don't go back on promises like that. It's bad for business.

The PCs don't get to bring panther assault cannons, napalm cluster bombs, and Sarin nerve gas. It's an insult to the honor of the "protecting" party. They can load up reasonably, but they can't roll in with everything.

As far as what you'd take in with you, again, if it's anything like historical Kowloon, some of those alleys are 3 feet wide. A big troll would have to inch through sideways. No way his vulcan minigun is going to even fit through those cramped corridors.

The identifying sashes and not getting shot at while passing through their territory are as much a guarantee of safety as you are going to get. You got here safely, now we "renegotiate" the terms of your departure.

If the PCs don't bring the heavier weapons to such an obviously dangerous territory, it is a sign that they are weak and thus the VIP is not so much Very Important Person but a Very Impotent Person. A PAC, napalm bombs and nerve gases are reasonable. The troll carries the PAC, not likely that someone else is going to carry a second. Napalm bombs on the rigger's fast response drones. Sarin gas grenades - which isn't likely to look much different from a normal grenade and it isn't unlikely that you can't keep them discretely hidden under your jacket/overcoverings.

Remember before this, you could have already helped out the Black Crys on a job. If you did that and have a reasonably good face, not even pornomancer 50+ dice level, I do not see why permission cannot be gotten from the 438 or 426 to carry the heavier ordnance. Afterall you have proven your good faith by helping them out and they have your word you will not to use it unless to defend your "honor", and they are making your VIP walk which is no guarantee of safety. The sashes are tokens of safe passage, not guarantees of safety.

There's a very practical reason as to why you wouldn't bring Sacristan into Kowloon via a vehicle - there's no way you could fit anything bigger than a motorcycle through the narrow, twisty streets. If you've got your own aircraft, then go nuts, but if you've got your own aircraft this mission probably won't be that much fun.

What rigger worth is salt doesn't own an aircraft??

There's dangerous, and there's looking like you're about to start something . Maybe a machine gun or two can still fall into the first category, but enough Whitestar to "make Kowloon uninhabitable for years"?



You think an airlift out is "Deus Ex Machina"? It's not like the ghost of Dunkhelzahn is descending from heaven to save your hide. It makes perfect sense that the PCs or Sacristán would call her backers and tell them about the attack, and that those backers would be able to hire a rigger on short notice to get you out of there. Heck, with the right contacts this is something the PCs themselves can do.



I'm not pitying the junkies, I just think using chemical weapons or something equivalent in that situation is plain stupid. There's no guarantee the thing won't get out of control and hit the PCs or their allies as well as the enemy, and that's likely to compromise the mission as much as losing the fight is.



Blocking ground level access is a valid tactic. It would work. You'd be more prepared for when the enemies started pouring in through the roof, or climbing up the windows. That's probably worth a Karma reward for cleverness. A few CS gas grenades could work too, at first, if the PCs can keep the clouds away from themselves, their client, and the friendly Triad. I'd definitely make the evil god that shows up later direct them towards all of those, though.

There are a few confounding factors here. Foremost among them is the fact that if your group is in Hong Kong, then they were smuggled there by the Olaya Cartel, and so are going to be limited in what gear they could have brought with them. (This is assuming they start elsewhere, of course - if your group is HK native, then all bets are off.) Granted, you can always pick up more stuff from the Hong Kong black market, but aircraft are difficult to procure with short notice.

Ghost Cartels is actually not a great campaign for riggers, since the second stage involves a lot of traveling around, and you'd have to make special provisions for a rigger who wants to smuggle big drones along with him.

I always have trouble rationalizing riggers with large drones or obscure vehicles anyway. It seems to require a ton of handwaving in my head. I mean, if the sammy can't walk around with a Panther Assault Cannon on his back without any troubles, why should a rigger be able to run around with a fleet of Steel Lynxes and Nimrods at their beck and call? Not to mention full-sized aircraft twinked out with stealth technology and more armor than a light tank that they can, apparently, park anywhere they like without trouble.

Which actually saddens me because, conceptually, I love the idea of riggers, too. Stupid overcomplicated thought processes.

This is my new favorite sentence!

The aforementioned Federated-Boeing Kull aerial resupply Drone (or bomber if you prefer ) can be upgraded with an extra Fuel Tank and Suncell to increase its operational range to roughly 9000 km and allow it to recharge should it need to fly for more than 24 hours using smuggler's routes to keep up. A long-distance modified Kull (and the Man-3 which Dumori was suggesting to stock it on demand) would cost less than 15k total to buy out the gate, or with a total unrestricted availability of 4-6, take roughly an afternoon to piece together. If the team aren't honorary globetrotters, they've likely not considered this, but if they are funky enough to be counted among that globetrotter number, they'd be well rewarded for their preparation. At the very least, one could expect any smuggler contact to be able to arrange this in a snap.

Not familiar with that drone. Can it carry people? How easy would it be to shoot down with small arms?

its un-maned light armored but why have it fly low?? Its designed to air drop resupply for trekkers and such so have it fly high drop its play load and go back to get ready for a new playload.

Even if that's what its designed to do, I don't see it being able to do so with the kind of accuracy neccessary to drop a crate of supplies from an extreme altitude into one specific location inside Kowloon Walled City. Actual drops usually assume that the recipients will be able to go to where the supplies land don't they? Not that supplies will land exactly where they're needed.

Time for the characters to do a door to door search for which living cubicle had a crate drop through its roof, and possibly its floor. Hope those sarin gas canisters you are dropping are packed well...

I'm a big fan of using Kulls to drop things like active Ares Heimdahls. Slap a rating 6 non-standard wireless link on the missile and the drone, then put a satellite link on the drone and you've got on demand close air support anywhere in the world, loitering up at 8 or 9 miles in the air. The only downside is the flight time of the missiles, but when you're not allowed to carry anything other than a commlink and a pack of gum, a 12 second delay on a pinpoint accurate AVM strike is hardly game breaking.

As an amusing aside, their 18km flight distance means you can put them on launchers in the wilds of suburban Jersey or the wastelands of the Bronx and Brooklyn, fire them straight up in the air and have them land 11 kilometers away, giving you standoff fire support anywhere in Manhattan.

You sir have just given me an epic idea about how to get my inhabited military grade armor into combat more often

The assumption I was working with was that you would be delivering your own heavy gear in advance of the meet rather than calling it in on queue. In other words, you're headed to HK? Have your big nasties waiting in their crates already when you arrive. Pick them up and take them with you into the bowels of Kowloon. If you're planning to deliver anything during an O SHI- raging firefight, it'll likely be 40-60 kg worth of bomblets from a low altitude sweep.

OK, so now we're talking about two separate issues - getting gear into HK, and getting gear into Kowloon. Both of these can be resolved fairly simply with drones, etc. It seems to me that if your group is the sort that would bring along canisters of sarin when they're bodyguarding a VIP, then you probably shouldn't give them that job. It's the same reason you wouldn't give a group of hackers a job to collect some reagents in Amazonia - it probably wouldn't be fun.

hehehe I love that drone. ITs so often the best way to summgle or resuply. I mean gettign a drop drunign the firefight wouldn't be that hard just make sure you add a few stealth mods to your drone. Then get it to fly high then drop down in the the walled city huggin the narrow spaces to avoid detection till its can get close enought to give a drop with 20m of where you are. Sure might take a few mins to get you gear to you whiel you despreatly tryign to get the survices of a rigger that will get you out XD

I think you're underestimating the precision that would be required to drop supplies for your side during the battle. I'm AFB but IIRC the compound is not large, probably smaller than 20m radius. Don't forget that if you miss, you're supplying the other side.

Aye but all you need is to get it with in the compound and drop and tbh you coudl likely land it before dropign the payload or at least get it quite low to the ground. The only hard part would be makign sure its still in one peice to get to you. But i cant recall its stats but then again adding armor is quite cheap.

Heh, or get a two for one... aim for the enemy with your package and 'roll' it to you... bowling down the opposition at the same time.

Or make the cargo containers traped in some way. Disarmed by hidden stealh tag ect. SO if its opend by soem one not you nurostun/breath taker gass hit?

have the team mage levitate it once it's reasonably close. or make the cargo container a limited-maneuverability drone.

This thread is taking a turn from the awesome to the also awesome.

I'm liking the limited maneuverability drone part. I'm just think what trap would work best on the container its self. The 10(s) shock trap and some form of gas in combo would be nasty. Shock for trying to open gas if breached. On top of maybe making the gear impossible to reach quickly with a lock down system as well. Sure paranoid but. It SR ffs.

Personally, I'm all for the container being round, spiked, and have jets that trigger spinning randomly it around an area like a giant hamsterball of death if the wrong code is entered.

On the subject of air dropping onto a 20m target, shouldn't say a normal Rigger with a Math ACU, some physics knowledge, and a weather report be able to chew through the necessary math in a few seconds?

Further why not have the cargo pod preloaded with some micro drones to protect the hardware as well? Would certainly hate to see what happens to anyone thinking they can get valuable loot off of a stray cargo pod, only to get his face ripped off by a couple of bladed H-K Dragonflies.

Honestly no. 20m is damn high up, an 18-20 story building, in an area of enclosed buildings most likely subject to random surges of wind. I would say the crate scatters a minimum of 5m or so even with all the Math Fu without considering the possibility of it getting snagged on a roof or some other object above the group's position. Dropping it without a parachute would probably solve those problems, although raise some of its own.

Just to weigh in on the conversation with some facts, the entire compound is a square about 25 meters to a side. Getting it on the roof probably won't do you much good, though - there's Yama Kings up in them thar rooftops. So the area you're really going for is the interior courtyard, which is 8m x 8m.

That's small.

What? 20m is a 8 storey building, max. And that is stretching it even for asians who are generally shorter. 6 is more likely, even in Hong Kong. 5 if we are talking buildings that need more space for the AC/lightings/fittings/etc.

20m for a 20 storey building, who are staying there? Pixies with dwarfism?

Sorry, you're right, glitched my basic math roll . So 20m is more like 60 something feet, which is still a little bit much for calculating gusts of wind but it's doable. It'd probably mechanically act like scatter for grenades.

Where are you guys getting that these buildings are 20m high? That's not an unreasonable estimate, but I don't think the module makes any statements about the heights of the buildings...

20m was just the number mentioned by Oehler in his original post and it is a reasonable number to base this on considering we don't have anything specific from the module itself.

It was mentioned previously that the defensive position was 20m in diameter, building height would..well I really don't know.

This is truly brillant

Gonna start running a Ghost Cartely campaign in a couple weeks probably, and I'm really interested to see how it turns out, I think the Kowloon Massacre will hit my characters and players right in the face like it's supposed to. At least for me and my groups, things like this don't happen regularly (or rather, not at all) in Shadowrun, so I really can't imagine an average runner team carrying military assault weapons and chemical WMDs "just to be on the safe side"

For reference buildings in Kowloon ranged between 8 and 18 stories, with 10-13 being typical. The buildings were so closely packed that streets (alleys)were typically less than 2m across at street-level. Given the density and height of construction (and the inevitable leaning at height) from above Kowloon was almost continuous, and the roofs were as chaotic as the streets. An airdrop to the streets is unfeasible at best, while payloads dropped at roof height are going to take a good long while to filter down to the street levels. (Some pics including an overall map here,here and here.)

Actually, I had read that the maximum height was 14 stories due to the proximity of the airport. Picking nits with that little of a variance, but just sharing nonetheless.

I wish this had still been around when I was in HK. I would have brought a tape measure had I known.

"Excuse me, can you hold this end of the tape measure for me please?"

WOW! I hate to break out visual aids during my games, but I am going to have to use those pictures when my group gets that far. That is... impressive.

K.

Yeah, the Kowloon Walled City is a very unique environment. Which is why I just had to resurrect it for the Shadowrun setting. Note that with the real-life version of the Kowloon Walled City, there was a limit to the height of the buildings because of the nearby Kai Tak airport. Kai Tak was infamous for being a hair-raising experience to land at, with airliners coming in just above the roofs of buildings. Since the Kai Tak is no longer an active runway in 2070's Hong Kong, technically buildings in KWC could be taller, though shoddy construction is probably another limiting factor.

In 30 more years, 2100, it'd probably look like the world's largest Jenga game as people built a new building across the tops of two of them that had leaned together.

Talk about the craziest dungeon crawl...

Technically yes, though several blocks went over that limit. In fact, a Kowloon block in one of the pics in the first link I posted has 15+ stories visible (it's cut off).


Whether you use them as visual aids or as references for your own scene setting descriptions, I thought it was important that people visualize the environment the Kowloon battle takes place in. Now imagine those streets crowded by hundreds of drugheads clawing their way past the make-shift barricades the Triad has put up. Consider the dangers of smoke, fire, and enclosed spaces.

We were "unfortunate" with the art in that chapter of Ghost Cartels but I sent the art director these links as visual references. (You should see some of the pictures of Lagos that I sent round as references for Dusk:DotA and Feral Cities.)

I still think an air drop would be quite easy sure no from hight but with the amount of cover in the city getting the drone in and out of the court yard witch I assume has direct sunlight (huge status symbol) would be easy enough if slightly risky. I mean spotting a drone in that mess would a bitch yet alone going "thats hostile shoot".