In the end of our last campaign the characters decided they all had to disappear. (Something about the Red Samurai knowing their home address, gee can't think of why they'd want to leave ) The party's solution was to blow up their home while the Sams were coming in, the party was to escape through a tunnel that went approx 1km out of the building.
All didn't quite go right. One of the players was killed when the fire elemental who was engulfing him cooked of the 2 Law rockets and 18 rounds of assault cannon amunition. The Samurai on the other hand had a worse day considering the mine field surrounding the building covered 270,000 square meters and once they got to the dorrs there was a 5,000 kg chunck of C-12 waiting to blow. (Yes I know leaving one big chunk of this in the middle of the floor wouldn't be real effective but the rules give abigger blast for a single large chunk then many small ones) The resulting crater was about 70 meters in radius.
Unfortunately the player who owned the building lost it, the equipment inside, and for safety's sake ditched his small company when he left town, so he lost something in the neighborhood of 8million
Anyone else got memorable campaign enders that they would like to share?

One of my chars got shot in the head while banging the mafia Don's sexy teasing daughter.

Interesting typo.... "Balze of glory" haha

I didn't comment on the 5000kg of C-12 because clearly Quix game's are somewhere in the same stratosphere as Sphynx's games. It's a ridiculous amount, but to each his own.

So did any of the Red Samurai survive via the virtue of having a Trauma Dampener?

Had a player (mage) jump out of a helicopter after his "nemesis" (apparently he wasn't quite dead enough) without a parachute. At night. His reasoning was that he could always levitate and save himself.

He failed the drain test (was already a box past serious), knocked himself unconscious, and the star dragged his battered, broken body out of the sound a week or two later. Bonehead.

Incidentally, the guy he was trying to kill survived.

6000 kg of c12? thats 6 TONS of c12. How does one get 6 tons fo c12, much less actually get it someplace. That's 6 standard one ton pickup trucks full of plastic explosive!!!

Egads!

I don' think blaze of glory is the right term considering you'll likely kill a few hundred innocents at least. I think Day of Infamy is closer to reality.

Such things are somewhat simple to get your hands on in Shadowrun. C-12 has an Availability of "only" 10. And, some time before the Madrid bombing, the Spanish police stopped a truck in Madrid with ~500kg of dynamite (or similar) inside; I think it's probably harder to get your hands on that stuff in RL Spain than it is in SR Whatevermetroplex.

Getting 5,000kg of C-12 in one shot would be pretty damn hard. But slowly accumulating it, over several months at least, would probably not be too hard with the right connections -- and some shadowrunners will have those connections.

There's still a matter of storage, and I think said contacts would kind of get a little bit worried about supplying after a tonne or so, at least realisticly. You have to consider that they need to worried about the characters doing something collosally stupid with it (which they did) and it somehow tracking back to them...

Barring a typo on his part, my own thoughts.

Availibilty rules have always bothered me-they seem incomplete. Sure C12 gas an availibilty of 10, and witht he right rolls and contacts, etc youcan amass an amazing amount-but does any one else think that just maybe you would get flagged somewhere for amassing 4 or so tons?

If I were the guy selling over a hundred kilos that wasn't designated as a years supply for a major Syndicate or for use in a mining operation I would consider not selling to the lunatics looking to buy. After all what do you use 4 and a half tons of C12 to do anyways?

All that said the mental image of 4 and a half tons of C12 detonating is pretty hilarious. I have to wonder how much of the surronding area that'd flatten.

I also imagine afterwards explosives would be real hard to come by, what witht he big Lone Star and FBI crack down.

[Edit]Oops. Freud too blame maybe?

I want to do some math on this but my books are still packed up, whats the rating on dynamite and whats the rating on C12?

10/48 Hours Street Index of 2, legality 3-j for C12

If I remember correctly (Too cool for Acronyms!), 1kg C-12 is 12D, with -6 power/meter blast radius.

So a 1 kg chunk goes for about 2 meters.


A 5000 kg chink goes for 10000 meters radius. Thats 10 km in all directions...

Now this is just from memory, so it's probably wrong...

SR explosives scale according to the square root of the mass. √5000 ~= 70 or 71 giving an immediate damage of 840D or 852D. at -6/meter the range is 70 to 71 meters.

[edit] thanks for pointing out the proper degredation rate

Damn confusing explosives rules! I knew I left something out!

No. Each level of explosives drops 1m/power multiplier(What you multiply the amount of explosives by to get the net power). Also, the amount for working net power is the square root of the total mass. So 5000^0.5 = 70 (rounding down decimal). Therefore, 5000kg of C-12 "only" has a blast radius of 70m.

no no, I need JUST the power rating if dynamite, and just the power rating of C12... Im going somewhere with all this =)

So where did he come up with the 2,000,000 nuyen he needed to acquire that much Plastic Compound XII? And what kind of fixer just had that much laying around? Or if he made it himself, how'd he manage to fit in the in-excess of 10,000 days/28 years needed to make it (at base of 48 hours and a TN 8 per unit, which he's not guaranteed to succeed at with every roll even with Chemistry 6)?

Okay then, so that's 6 tons of C-XII, at rating 12. Commertial explosive is Rating 3, meaing that by the weight C-XII is 4 times more powerful than Dynamite. Therefore, That lunp of C he has is the equivalent of 24 TONS of frigging dynamite.

I think everyone should sit and think about that for a minute. Yeesh.

.....Ok, I've thought about it.....cooool!

Just... oy.

Also out of curiosity, where exactly was this building at? 66+ acres, not including the building itself, seems to suggest it wasn't in a major city as there's no way they'd have that much free space around the building. And hell, where'd they find the time to mine it so elegantly considering the circumstances (ie, disappearing because the Red Samurai were coming for a visit any moment)? Or did they keep all 66+ acres mined "just in case?"

And I don't care how rich you are. It's going to take time to get 5,000 kilos of C-12. With an Etiquette(10) test for each kilo, with each kilo taking a base of 2 days to get, that's still over 25 years of waiting time. It'd have been faster if he cooked it himself. (Spending more money just lowers the Availablity and increases the time.)

It's simply ridiculous all around.

Actually you can today buy C4 by the drum, literally, if you have appropriate paperwork.

Stock level: Small stock held. Large quantities (500kg plus) available to order, delivery approximately 90 days.

P.S. Note this listing under the specifications TNT equivalence: 118%.

EDIT: Fixed the link. Oh, and since when you add up each 2 days serial for each 1kg of the product? In your SR world does buying a dozen standard frag grenades take over a month and a half (4 days * 12= 48 days)? How about 100 rnds of standard ammo, it takes nearly a week and a half (24 hours * 10= 10 days)?

I like the line substantial discount for ordering full containers (16 tonnes)!

There're no rules saying that you can only acquire one "unit" of some equipment at a time. And there shouldn't be, because many types of equipment are generally acquired in rather large batches. On the other hand, allowing any amount of C-12 to be aquired with the one Etiquette roll would also be quite silly. It could take only a fraction of those 25 years (which blakkie proved quite well above), or it could take much longer without the right contacts.

Personally, when my players are trying to get their hands on as much explosives as possible (as they have, quite a few times), I just try to use common sense instead of dice. Over a span of (I think) 5 months game-time, 2 characters with army logistics, corporate and black market contacts for just this kind of thing managed to scrape together some 500kg of various explosives, including ~100-150kg of C-12.

However, had they had a massive contact network, and enough money to spend on making sure everybody is doing their best to scrape together C-12 to sell them (like it appears the guys in Quix's game had), they could easily have collected a nice 4-digit figure.

Also remember that, because of the scaling, you actually need 16kg of TNT to get the same punch as 1kg of C-12 at the point of explosion. That's 80,000kg of TNT for 5,000kg C-12. But the 16kg might still kill someone a few meters away, while 1kg of C-12 wouldn't significantly hurt anyone who is over 1 meter away from the explosion. Which, of course, makes no sense at all, so you're always better off just fudging it. Something like 4x the explosive power of TNT seems far more reasonable -- incidentally, commercial explosives have a Power of 6 in my games, and all explosives have a Blast rating of -2/m.

I guess I need to add to more bits of info for this one. First to answer how he got his hands on that much C-12 the real answer is I wanted the campaign done with and I didn't abject to his method. For those who like in character reasons I realize this isn't good but due to my own foolishness the players had more resources then I could shake a stick at and no intentions of retiring.
The player in question also jacked me up about not telling the first phase to his plan. In short he got funding by offering Nicholas Aurelias (sp?) that he would start a war between Renraku and Wuxing. The means to doing this was that the players had earlier really P.O.ed WEuxing with a little job of theirs. So the players forged some documents to make it look like Renraku had ordered the run done, and then planted these documents into one of Renraku's systems. Step 2 was to have their decker check Wuxing's system for what Wuxing knew about the run the players did but this time instead of getting away clean he was to leave a trail back to Renraku. The hope here was that Wuxing would step up its actions against Renraku in an attempt to get back what the players stole, or merely for revenge would satisfy the PCs.
What does this have to do with the Red Samurai knock on the door. That was for something else the players had done to Renraku. And unfortunately got themselves caught on video tape. So most of this went off to plan. As far as the players could tell there was an increase in runs against Renraku shortly after they planted their document.
Unfortunately for the PCs Wuxing found out about the Samurai coming to the compound, moving Red Samurai to the Redmon Barrens not being a common occurence et al. So when Wuxing checked up on why the Samurai were getting moved they found some people who matched the description of the thieves they wanted. More drek waiting in the wings for the players.

I'm sorry, I'm still stunned by the sheer amount of explosives involved in this.

Never in all my years of Shadowrun have I ever even seen numbers that huge...explosives-mass-wise, anyway.

1) The player in question was me. And yes, I did lose many millions of equipment to the blast. Renraku was closing in and I needed to get out of there. The compound in question was out in the redmond barrens, and as I tried to keep a low profile, the star never saw it as necessary to come after me. I built up my defenses over time (I think the defenses on the place alone were probably well over a million dollars worth). And where did the 66 acres come from?? According to my calculations, my entire compound (including the kill zone surrounding it where the mines were positioned) was under 5 acres.

2) While I do have a monstrous network (I think I had 30-40 contacs written on my sheet when I retired), that wasn't the method I used to procure the C-12. In actuallity, I bought it from Ares. I know some people are going to start jumping up and down about the fact that any corp is highly unlikely to provide a runner with anywhere near that amount of C12. Normally, I'd agree, but I:

a) Was probably their most reliable runner and had no reason to damage a good working relationship with them by turning on them and

b) informed them that I was going to need it to engage in a shadow war against another AAA corp, and the idea of damaging a competitor with little risk to themselves appealed to them.

They were willing to bend their rules (especially since I had cash ready to pay for it). Since I was buying it in bulk from Ares (who WILL have large quantities of the stuff available), I hardly needed to roll my street contacts who have to try to scrounge the stuff up.

Net result, whatever sammies showed up to play got more of a bang than they bargained for. I seriously doubt that they will be able to identify all of the bodies, so we should be presumed dead, and with the ensuing corp. war between Renraku and Wuxing, both should have their hands to full to go poking around for me for a while. Ares lost their most proficient runner, but that was about to happen anyways. Both Ares and Cross now get to sit back and watch Renraku and Wuxing go for eachother in a war they helped create (with no chance of it coming back to haunt them in the corp. court, since the only person who knows about it is me), a situation I expect they and the other AAAs will try to exploit for their own advantage. I, on the other hand, am off to Berlin, since neither corp has a strong presence there and I am not known to have ties with S-K (I do, but they are small time ties, nothing on the order of what I had with Ares for example). It's a nice nuetral city where I can dissapear from radar.

And, as Quix said, a great way to end a campaign

your reasons are somewhat valid, but playind devil's advocate, theres no way that 6 tons of plastic explosives could have likely been aquired any way except like a situation above, and then when it's used it paints a giant flaming bullseye to Ares, all of it. IMHO this is the most supreme reason for them not to let you have it, but hey, to each his own.

Generally, I just wing the results for players trying to get stuff. Doesn't make sense to me for players to get all ammo in 10 round groups, so I usually let them get "clips" (with a clip being however many bullets the gun holds in one clip or mag). For something like explosives, A fixer could probably hook them up with 5-10 kilos if he rolled well ("this crate of C-12 just happened to come into my possession yesterday"), but I can and will limit it if I don't want the players to have large quantities ("Sorry chummers, I had some just yesterday, but I'll be damned if you aren't the fourth person loking for some. Only got a brick of the stuff left. 2 kilos gonna do ya?").

Disclaimer: As long as you're having fun with your own game there is no need to worry about my obsessive compulsive ravings.


Something has been bothering me here and it took a few days for me to place my finger on it, but I think I have it.

A great deal of the things you bring up in your post are covered by how the GM likes to run his/her game. Mind you that my GM would never allow this level of power or that many contacts or that many resources in my game, but hey thats my loss .

Whoa. That was weird...

Anyway, this was just a double post.

First of all, I did not have nearly that quantity of C-12 up until the very last run. It was not stored in my compound for any appreciable time, and the boys in blue and FBI/ATF have to get warrants and the like to come storming in.

Now, to adress the size of the blast. Someone said it is half the power of the warhead dropped on Hiroshima. I would beg to differ, as that was a 12 kilo[I]ton weapon. that means it had the same type of explosion as 12,000 tons of dynamite. I had 5000Kg, or about 11,000lbs, or 5.5 tons of C12. While the rules for explosives don't give us any conversion factors to go from C-12 to dynamite, I think it is safe to say that 1 lb of C-12 is not as deadly as over 1000 lbs of dynamite (as would be the case if the assertation made was correct). The blast was no where near that of a nuclear detonation (of even the smallest nulear weapons). Also note that Ares could very well make the C-12 without the tracer in it. If they are going to use it on their own land, then why bother putting in a tracer? I'd be surprised indeed if all the megas didn't have some C-12 lying around without anything to identify where it came from.

As for going to war with the corp, I was hardly going to stand toe to toe and slug it out with them. Notice the entire point of what I did was to FAKE MY OWN DEATH. I fed Ares a line of BS that it was worthwhile for them to accept (I don't doubt that they may not have believed that I was telling all of my plans, and probably had me watched).The only corp war I was involved in was the one I started by feeding corps misinformation.

In response to the comments about the compound, I didn't exactly have all of the weapons out in the open. Everything was well hidden, and I hardly advertised my presence. The locals knew not to snoop and were willing to leave me alone (heck, I went out of my way to help them out by acting as a fence for them if they had stuff to unload, no questions asked about its origin, and making the area around my compound a "nuetral zone" for the local gangs. Locals liked being able to go someplace where they didn't have to worry about being caught up in a firefight between rival street punks.) All in all, the defences were activated only 2 times in the whole campaign, with the second being when the sammies attacked (The first time a corp goon who was trying to infiltrate my place trod on a mine). Driving past my compound, all you would have seen is a large warehouse/facility of some sort with a fence around it in the middle of a lot of broken down, abandoned buildings. When I bought it originally, BTW, it was nothing more than a gutted structure. Didn't buy the facility fully operational and with defences included.

As for bashing on the game, don't worry about it. It was a power game and I have no problems saying so. Fun to play games like that every once in a while. I realize some people can't stand games where the PCs aren't scrapping the mud for a living. I find both can be fun, depending on what I feel like.

That's not entirely right, kilotons is measured in imerial tons, which is 2000 lb. 1000 kg = 2200 lb. so youre generally right but your conversion is off by 10% or so.

To adress the original question, my character Maelstrom will very probably go out with a really big bang. Why? When you have a extented area elemental manipulation spell and around 20 dice to cast it with, it is going to be a helluva sight. It might not destroy really that much stuff, but it's gonna kill pretty much anyone with out some really heavy hardened armour.

Assuming the initial information is correct, and that the /compound/ [and not just the minefield] is 270,000 square meters, and that there was 5,000kg of C-12:

270,000 square meters is about 520 meters per side, correct? 520m x 520m = 270400. So that's about half a kilometer per side, or 1,700 feet, or about a third of a mile per side, which does, in fact, come out to about 66.7 acres.

As for the blast, let's refer to Page 283, SR3: