I once ran a tournament at gen con where I had a group run against doc wagon and steal the DNA samples of several numbered lots. They were given the coded numbers to extract the numbers from a high security center in seattle.
The run was high paying difficult job with doc wagon high threat response teams coming to defend the facility and almost mil spec matrix security. After a hard fought battle they have the 6 numbered samples in their hands and turn them over to this johnson and are counting their money when they get a message informing them that their doc wagon samples have been "damaged" and they will need to come in and resubmit samples...

Wait for it, wait for it, they stole their OWN samples and turned them over to a corp,

Round two of the tournament was tracking down who they had worked for and getting the samples back before the ritual sorcery fries them all.

There was cursing and oh you son of a B***h I can't believe this. after round one.

Good luck killing a mummy with Anti-life shell up while a golem-crafting First Lich blasts you with Prismatic Spray (they're not even the bosses).

I don't think the dungeon can be solo'd.

But hey, have fun.

Ran a session once where the team was hired to destroy a piece of sculpture in a park. The team thought it was a piece of applied art criticism at first, as the sculpture was ugly - really, aggressively, actively ugly. So ugly it bordered on malevolent. So ugly that a shadow spirit had taken up residence and was draining the neighborhood children. When the team saw all the neighborhood children coming by at night and feeding the sculpture their teddy bears with the eyes bitten out, they realized something was very wrong.

It was a really silly run idea that only worked because the players bought into it. They took it far further than I ever planned, traveling around the UCAS to find the original sculptor, raiding the offices of the construction firm, etc. The shadow spirit so freaked them out that their ultimate solution involved an overcast offensive mana barrier that nearly killed the team mage in the casting, a dump truck, a more kilos of high explosive than I care to think about...and a JDAM.

The team were firm believers in the principle that judicious application of C4 can solve most any problem. Unfortunately, they were also big believers in overkill, so they also solved the problems of too many standing nearby buildings, the lack of craters in the park, the pesky eyesore that was the jungle gym, all those glass windows in the area...

That is an excellent idea. Do you mind if I use it some time?

But it was worth it to get rid of the statue, eh?

BTW, I'm going to use this one as well, I think...

I so wanna take that bet. One gestalt warforged arti/whatever(thinking rouge/warmage) here WE go I deffently think I could do something with two PCs. Now assume all 18s the big deals will be wealth and EXP however I think a thought bottel and a few portable hole, the I always craft golem thing ect will help there. If I get up to making inane one-million and one template effergies I'll be happy as the added HD/CR dose not effect the how powerful it can be rule can easly getting to to 40+ in all stats with flying ect as a mount. Taking spell sealed warforged at some point is a must if I go warmage at any point. I think this might just work need soem escape spells/abilities tough.

This is the craziest Shadowrun game I've ever heard of.

What's this 'Warforged' nonsense?

Although, 'World's Largest Corporate Facility' might be fun to plan. The runners infiltrate Gunnerkrigg Court.

Naturally, one part of it would have to involve retrieving some exceedingly rare plant from inside a greenhouse on corp grounds... No idea why there are so many eucalyptus trees in there, though... nope.

Runner 1: Man, why all these trees in an HMHVV research sector?
Runner 2: I dunno, I--AIEEEEEE
Drop Bear 1: *nomf nomf nomf*

...Let's reign in the infinite combos, shall we? And "18s in everything" stats, because at that point you're not playing the game.

last four chars I've played have be night on 18 base every thing I think the lowest I rolled on one was a 15. Reign in the combos maybe but I have dice luck in that regard though not in any other roll 1s love me abit too much in play.

Yeeeaah, you kind of already lose at the word 'Gestalt'.

I can play I one class char as well. In fact it would be quite similar us less spell umph. How ever this is still taking one PC in to a dungeon made for 4-8 IIRC

Point buy, please. Dice rolling doesn't make for a good "oh yeah, I can build a character do to X" when, while possible, isn't probable.

Ooo, that's evil.

I approve.




-karma

Humm haven't play point buy for ages but sure. I shall make the OP one and the point buy and singal class and see how much an improvement the former is over the other in this seeing as the main might is golem and item spam.

Remember that crafting costs exp, and you can't be higher than 14th (before crafting).

I'm sure the lvl requirement is slightly wrong. I recall crafting scrolls/oils/potions at lvl 2-4. Also I believe thought bottles are craft-able and the craft reserve helps on the exp costs.

So, strange Run stories from Shadowrun?

I am SOOOOO going to use this for my campaign. I love this idea.

You could craft potions at 2ish, probably (I wasn't our crafter. Crafting pool is very limited, but does offset the cost somewhat (it does NOT grant you 101 stone golems "free") but you'll run out of resources extremely quickly.

You also have to solo a cockatrice at level 3 (good luck!).

Yeah I know roughly what I'm up against. I'll have the two PCs and such done soon and then we'll see how far I get.

I'm confidant I can do it without gestalting.

EDIT: Also I'm fairly sure I can do it without crafting, or any items really. Which point-buy? 32, 24..? I can do it with 32.

I sent my group once to grab a elephant from the Seattle Zoo. It was a new sensation in the zoo cause it was a Awakened elephant of a even greater size then the normal ones.

They where hired by a rich eccentric middle european collector and after getting the elephant out of the zoo where opposed by a militant radical african heritage hippie group led by a Lion shaman that wanted to free and return it back to the steppes of africa. Also the elephant started casting illusion spells to confuse the players ( it was semi intelligent so the images where all from it's known homeland, like a Lion attack or things like that ).

Decent run. Many rememberable things happened, like when the big troll gun guy was lucky with his first aid roll (untrained) and got like 4 6's in a row on a exploding die test ( this was 2nd or 3rd edition ) and saved his mate who was shot in the head by a sniper ( I explained how he kinda pushed his brain back in bound the wound ).

Starting at what level?

There's tons of ways to break that game with any class combination. Doing so at level 1, though, is the hard part.

No it isn't. CoDzilla, anyone? You can do it easier, but CoDzilla is the strongest, Core or expanded sources.

(Cleric or Druid - zilla)

Dont forget your one level of rogue for trapfinding Personally I would say Druid, just remember though your a summoner not a fighter.

Can we move 'That other game' banter to another thread, I look forward to reading all the ingenius (speeeling) Johnson ideas that have come up earlier!

I'd personally limit you to entering the dungeon at level 2, as that's what my group did. It's written to start at level 1, but advises that all players have a minimum of 2 backup sheets ready to go in case of death.

It's also written assuming only core-3 books, but we ran through it with many many others.

Ill start a thread in genral gameing about this soon-ish. CoDzilla bah you can get pun pum at lvl 1 if you know what your are doing. However I'm a fan of the warforged artificer. It's like a combat cleric but not with all the buffs and such. Plus the abillty to on they fly add temp enchantment to weapons always help bane as needed and or protection as needed.

Beautiful. Just beautiful

What is it with all these Mega Man clones? In any event, if you do in fact start a thread off in General Gaming I won't be following - I already spend enough time monitoring the SR tab here.

Back on topic:

1) (I forget if I already posted this - I don't believe I did) I actually had a Johnson hire a hit out... on his wife's favorite pet dog. It was one of those little yappy rat-wanna-be-s, and he couldn't stand the thing, but because his wife loved it so much he couldn't just get rid of it, so he had to get rid of it. This involved infiltrating a corporate housing facility and firing on the dog. They could have done it a cleaner way, but that's what they chose.

2) I also had another Johnson hire a wetwork for his own daughter. She had Awakened and took up an urban druid tradition, not going hermetic and getting involved with the 'corp like she should have. In order to prevent what he considered to be a public disgrace, he ordered a hit on her to prevent his peers from finding out. There also needed to be no traces of a struggle, and no way to trace her.

My group could have abducted her as they did, no problem, and stick her behind a mana barrier until they figured out a way to prevent her from being chased... But they instead killed her and fed her to ghouls.

Yeah, it seems when playing SR the players rarely take the moral high ground.

More like they drove past the moral event horizon going 110 MPH while shooting at the bus full of nuns they just passed...

That's just murder on order and corpse disposal. Certainly far from any sort of moral high ground, but in my opinion still a safe distance from the moral event horizon. No torture or the like, just plain murder for cash.

Back on topic, a scenario I'm currently writing has the players hired to snatch a coffin from a mortuary and replace it with an identical looking one. The coffin to be stolen is occupied by a fresh corpse awaiting the funerals - which will have to be moved from one coffin to the other. The Johnson tells the players he wants to steal some 'hot stuff' hidden in the coffin to let the heat about cool off. The substitution means that the theft won't be noticed before he has covered his tracks.

Of course there's a catch (oh well, even several catches): the stolen coffin if perfectly normal, the substitute has been prepared with enough explosives and metal bits to turn the burial into a bloodbath... Then the corpse is a maffia don's wife. The Johnson has planted false pointing him as a columbian, while in reality he's an italo-amreican working for a maffia member eager to clean up the hierarchy to improve his positions Who will of course take the lead in the maffia's hunt for the PCs that will follow the explosion.

While it was a really crappy job GMing, I still take a point in pride that, when my group had to go to LA again, they ended up having to extract...

Batman.

From ComiCon. Which is now a year-round event. In San Diego, Aztlan, near LA.

We once got a job from a seriously high-ranking Azzie executive who wanted us to steal something. Specifically, he wanted us to sneak into a building with ridiculous security and exploit a twelve-minute system maintenance window to get something out of a safe. A hidden safe in the bowels of the facility, surrounded by leech walls and constantly watched by several spirits that would immediately alert people if they saw anything suspicious. In fact, the whole run had to be done without leaving a trace that anyone was even there, much less who it was and what they did.
We eventually got around the Awakened security problem by disguising an anthroform drone as a security guy and having the rigger pilot it into the vault with the object of the run. An object the Johnson hadn't said much of anything about, besides that it was important, and got huffy when we asked why. Said object also had to be returned in -pristine- condition, untouched, unchanged, not even with any tags it may have had on it erased.

The object? A slightly bent tin can.


It -did- turn out to be important, but it was very WTF at the time.

The first game I ran was based on Dunkelzahn's will.

The group had to break in and steal the prototype for...

JIFFY POP!

I still have the popcorn hanging in my pantry.

I GM'd a game where the runners were hired by an undercover Lone Star officer to get a wooden crate 1.5mx1.5mx1.5m wrappen in paper and then keep it safe for a few weeks. They werent allowed to open, damage or even probe the crate (which also was warded) while they had it.

The way they would recognize the "johnson" was that he would be at the aquarium holding a Betty BigBoobs doll on his arm.
Both the Yakuza and the Triads were holding for the crate and they had ways of tracking it.

It turned out to be a tea set from way back in Chinese history, which the cop had stolen from the Triads, framed the Yakuza for doing it and hoped he could spark a mob war and then "discover" the set and get it back to the triads to buy his way in.

Was fun seeing my team telling to figure out ways to gain knowledge of the contents of the crate, but also keeping it unscratched through all the rolling firefights as they transported the crate around town.

My team actually converted a barbie doll into a Betty Bigboobs doll and gave it to me on my 25th birthday.

I also always wanted to do the "You want me to do WHAT in this cup!?!" type of run ^^

I had some weird runs.

One Johnson had a special adept power that was essentially acid spray, but actually vomiting. He also had us go on a metaplane that looked like Mars. He killed a PC like that when the PC didn't like his terms. We didn't take any more calls from that guy.

One had my character watch over and record a staged wild west shootout tournament in the sense of for some rich New York dude, which he staged for his enjoyment. The shooters all were other runners, among them other PC. It was fought with live bullets.

One time, we were hired to kidnap a corper and deliver him to a certain location. Easy peasy and standard until it turns out we're actually delivering the guy to his birthday party where all his colleagues jump from behind cabinets and yell "SURPRISE HAPPY BURTHDAY" and start throwing confetti and stuff. Needless to say we all had to make surprise checks to not start shooting the people. Oh yes, his boss also was a dragon.

And then there was this weird run where we had to protect a transport carrying several barrels of nitroglycerine through half of Algeria from islamic terrorists.

Necroposting this, as I'm hoping there's new tales to be heard...

I have one.

I gave my players a little run outside of town, once. To a little cabin on a lake, in order to do an investigation on recent events, and keep it out o the media.

In order to get there, they had to hire a driver (out of 4 players, no one had a vehicle that could transport more then one or 2 people. And only one of them had a bike), then not kill the driver (he was a sexist Ork, and two PCs were female), then they found out the cabin was owned by the governor. That had them excited...

They get to the cabin, and a few minutes later, they hear a crash from the direction the driver left in. When the closest person investigates, she finds a large person (taller then a standard Troll) in the woods. She attempts to communicate... and gets a machete in the shoulder. A long stalemate of a fight involving all the runners later, including the creature going down twice and getting back up, and it runs into the lake and disappears. They hold off exploring inside the cabin until morning.

They enter the cabin, and find it a mess. with 5 dead teens in various poses, and magical after effects (mainly a couple ghosts re-enacting the final moments of the teens, including a screaming one being thrown out the window, and another appearing to fight, and lose, to a huge, humanoid creature).

Jason?

Of course. Giant inhabited by a spirit (used PC rules to reliably, and reasonably give it regeneration)

Edit: That particular thread of plot is still very open ended, and the Jason-spirit is still around, though oddly laying low, or out of the media

Was that before SR4? I'm surprised the players agreed to it if it was SR4 or SR4A...

Hmmm, where do I find those rituals? Street Magic? Because this sounds like a perfect run for when the players really get on my nerves.

Ritual Spellcasting, core book.
You need a link to the target (and genetic material counts: counts so well you don't even have to know WHO the material belongs to).

Are we talking about SR4 or SR4A? Because after reading the appropriate section in the former, I can't see any use for Ritual Spellcasting whatsoever. And the question of "links" is not as easy as you say.
Now why did I have to buy SR4 instead of SR4A, I seriously wonder.

Ritual Spellcasting is so that you don't need to be in LoS to cast on the target. You can also use multiple spellcasters together with it for a more powerful effect. You make up for this by sharing the drain between casters, a much longer casting time, and the required use of a sympathetic link to your target. Meta-magics are available to initiated casters to broaden the range of material links you can use.

Ha, metamagics. Now that makes sense, as without that you'd still have to have an astral observer keep an eye on your target. And 18P drain split between 3-4 casters isn't that scary - it WILL hurt, but whatever was on the other end of the spell won't get any deader.

Using a genetic sample with ritual magic (Blood is typical, but hair, skin, nail clippings, spit, urine, whatever will work.) is handled by Material Links (Street Magic, Pages 28-29), does not require any Metamagic.

Sympathetic Links (Using an object connected to the character, a favorite T-Shirt, part of the seat from a car they've had for 20-years, a coffee cup used just that morning) does require Metamagic to work. Symbolic Links (Same Metamagic), can use a picture, sculpture, or doll.