So, session three! I already mentioned some of the preparations I'd done, and I planned to take advantage of some of the suggestions that were offered on that thread. That said, things didn't go how I was expecting, and I tend to wonder if they actually ever do..

So, the last session ended with the runner ripping off the gate of Marli's mansion with their car's towing witch, and then Zod being scared witless by a ghost when he tried to drive up to the front door. The player of Mr. Happy Punch announced that he wanted to retire that character and switch to a new one, since he wasn't doing all that much useful as Zod was doing all the fighting. So he created a character with high scores in the con/negotiation type skill sets, and with amazing originality named him Faceman. Faceman also brought along his own van (Facevan?), with armor 20 of course (groan).

Now, how about this for a beardy way of starting a session? The player announces that Faceman is going to drive up in his van and try to talk to Marli over the intercom, and that since Marli has never seen him before she won't connect him with the lunatics who just smashed her gate!

This seems a bit cheeky, but I let it slide for the moment to avoid getting the session stuck right at the start. He tries to use his Con skill to fool Marli into thinking that he had made an appointment. Of course this didn't work, but when she answered with confusion he happened to mention JetBlack, and then mention the recording. He was allowed in, played the recording to Marli, and got the offer for a call back.

They decided it then might be time to let Loomis out of the trunk. Faceman, with 5 or so Net Hits on each of his Con rolls over Loomis, managed to convince him that a) they had thrown him in the back of the van for his own good, and b) that it totally was NOT them who burned down the Coda. They ended up letting him crash at their place, and Kane used his autodoc to heal the damage Loomis had suffered from being in the boot at the time the car rammed Delphia's apartment building.

Now, at this point the adventure as written made some rather strange assumptions. Specifically, it assumed that the runners would want to return the disk to their Johnson as soon as possible, in spite of having messed around trying to find out what was on it for pretty much the final half of the adventure. The idea is that the PCs should be disturbed as they plan to go to that meeting, so that they go unexpectedly to the churchyard at short notice. Of course, the players had no interest in doing that - they just wanted to wait until they got the call back from Marli's contact to find out more about the decryption key. So, I had Risa's party call them at the start of the following day, telling them to meet her at the graveyard that evening. The adventure also says that references to the address only find the church, but I figured that Kane's Matrix search would at least find some messages posted by the fans who were leaving tributes on JetBlack's grave, so they did find out about the graveyard and its significance.

And sure enough.. I didn't allow for the huge changes this would result in. Specifically that the runners wanted to go early to the graveyard and set up their own ambush for Risa's group. And then they came up with the really drastic change. You might want to be sitting down for this one. They decided that while they were there, they would dig up JetBlack's grave, just in case he had the decryption key buried with him!

They did take it a bit more carefully, though. They decided to wear stereotypical work clothes over their armor and walk into the graveyard carrying poles and a fold-out tent. An optimized Con roll from Faceman cleared away the fans who were tributing at JetBlack's grave, and they then surrounded it with their tent and started digging. They were briefly disturbed by the custodian coming from the office to find out what was going on, but another massive Con roll put him off - although they claimed that they were "Zombie Prevention Officers". This, of course, could be kind of interesting if word starts going around among fans that JetBlack was suspected of being a zombie! So, they used the Levitation spell to lift chunks of earth up and then pull out the coffin, searching it and finding no decryption keys; but for some reason, Zod wanted to take a bone sample from JetBlack's body.

Indirectly, though, the players had just thrown me a huge bone. If they were working in a tent, they potentially wouldn't notice other people arriving or things going on around them. And just after the finished re-burying JetBlack and were planning to just hang around and wait for Risa, I figured it was time to stir things up a bit. Enter the Shangri-la Runner Team!

So, since the team were all outside their car I didn't actually need to modify things as much as I thought they would. Here was the plan. The Hacker, Rigger, and Shaman would stay in their car, to the opposite side of the graveyard from JetBlack's grave. The Hacker would attack Kane's commlink. The Rigger would send it his two Doberman drones. The Shaman would cast Invisibility on the other three team members - an Adept, a Dwarf "Leader" and a "Samurai" - and they would move in. He would then send a Spirit of Man to arrive first, distract and fight the team.

So, Dawg was in the middle of levitating Kane into the bell-tower of the church to set up as a sniper when Kane's commlink strobed a warning that it was being remotely accessed. Now, one thing that neither I nor the player realized up to this point was that hacking will always succeed eventually, it just might get noticed, and it isn't automatic that anything will be done about it. Kane responds by turning his Commlink off, but he isn't fast enough to stop the dumped disk data potentially being lifted from his link. At this point, Dawg fires off a Detect Enemies, and gets three clustered people outside the graveyard, the three forward team members spreading out towards them, and one ping (the spirit) moving rapidly towards them. I figured that his spell wouldn't detect the drones because they don't have "thoughts" that would identify them as enemies to the spell - is that right?

So, Zod raced out to intercept the fast-approaching ping, and initially doesn't see anything there, before the spirit Stunbolts him. (I wasn't 100% sure if spirits can affect the physical world from the astral or not - can they? I decided to adlib a bit by saying that Zod could see the spirit after it zapped him). Thanks to his lousy Willpower, Zod takes 5 Stun damage from the bolt and decides to run away.

Kane decides to use his vantage point in the bell-tower to scope out the area. He turns out Thermographic Vision. Now, per RAW, invisibility works on this as well, but I decide to give him a little bit of a break on that because it seems a bit broken to rule that basically Dawg is the only one who can do anything in the encounter. So I rule that he can see fuzzy signatures that don't indicate much about who they are, and give him a penalty to hit them. He proceeds to shoot at one of the images, which turns out to be the Adept, and he hits - but doesn't kill him.

Faceman runs for the team's car while Dawg decides to summon a Spirit Of Man of his own and command it to fight the other spirit. He only just gets the spirit (1 service), and it goes in and Astral Combat attacks the other spirit. Now, I'm a bit confused here about how this works - I figure that the enemy spirit still rolls Reaction? And then resists with Body and - um, well, that's it because it doesn't have any armor? Anyway, it does some damage to the other spirit. The other enemy team members carry on moving around, and the crawler drones come towards the team.

In the next few passes, the enemy spirit tries to hit Dawg's spirit - and again doesn't destroy it, and then Dawg's spirit finishes off the enemy one. The physical adept goes for a bow shot against Kane in the bell tower. I honestly didn't expect this to work, but amazingly it did - even though he was on something like a -6 modifier (due to range and opponent's cover) he hit Kane. The damage was reduced to Stun by Kane's armor, but because he was hit with an Narcojet injection arrow he took a round of extra Stun that left him with his stun damage track nearly full and on a -2 wound penalty. Kane's player queried this, arguing that surely the conversion of the Physical damage to Stun indicated he had only taken a blunt impact from the arrow as it hadn't penetrated his armor, and thus neither his skin. The RAW doesn't state that the damage taken must be Physical in order for injection to occur, so I ruled he had still taken the damage, but his argument seemed pretty reasonable. Was I right?

Meanwhile, Zod moved away for a bit, and then on being told that the spirit had been destroyed, swung back and blasted one of the drones, and in the next pass engaged his own thermo vision to shoot and kill the Samurai who was moving into position to attack Dawg. (I screwed up here - the Samurai could have shot Dawg from where he was rather than moving further in. Oops.) He then flanks and kills the Adept. Kane repeatedly fires sniper rounds at all the signatures he can see, damaging the Samurai before Zod gunned him down, and killing the Dwarf leader. At this point, I decide that the three pings in the distance are no longer shown on Detect Enemies as they've now decided to just escape rather than attacking - they do have the data now, thanks to the hacker, so they just bail out while the runner team are looting the weapons (but not the cyberware, anymore) from the bodies.

So after that, Risa pulls up in a car with her team, who meet Faceman in the car park, not expecting him to be there early and not having a chance to set up. Faceman eventually decided to give her the disk, pocketing the 40000ny she was offering and incurring a great deal of wrath from Johnson for selling the data and allowing it to leak. So, they ended up with a reduced Karma award for the adventure, but more money than they'd otherwise have gotten.

So.. I'm not quite sure where things go from here. For the next adventure I'm thinking of either starting on Dawn of the Artifacts, or Fistful of Credsticks. It's a shame there doesn't seem to be any official follow-up to On The Run. I'm not sure about being lenient on Invisibility, but I am starting to get the "Magicrun" complaints which I've seen posted here, and I wonder how things are going to follow up with the amount of odd behaviour related to JetBlack that the team engaged in..

Hm. Yup, nothing can cast spells on the physical *from* the astral, and yup, thermo *doesn't* work at all on invisibility. The spirit can Materialize first, and anti-invis visions include ultrasound, radar, etc.

I can tell you that neither spirits nor anything else can affect the physical world in any way from the astral plane, and vice versa. This was not the case in previous editions, but that rule allowed for some pretty broken things, so starting in SR4 nothing in the astral can touch the physical, and nothing physical can affect anything in the astral, with the exceptions of dual-natured beings and objects.

I might add that anyone who is astrally perceiving counts as dual-natured.

Astral attributes is on SR4A 192.
Astral Combat is on SR4A 193.
Other then that, I must say it was very well done, by both the PC's and the GM. The only other thing I would be leery of, is the switch in the line up. It is fairly easily explained (one of the PC's calls his fixer for a face. The other character gets pissed because he doesn't contribute.) But one should, in my opinion, make it clear that something did happen IC.

The section on Astral Combat I found really confusing as it doesn't say anything about how Astral attacks are defended against - I assumed it was the same as regular damage, but I wasn't sure. Likewise, it says Astral damage can be Stun or Physical but my understanding was that astral entities couldn't be targeted with Physical effects.

On the Spirits issue - so a Spirit can't really use any of its powers on anyone (except its summoner) without, not just Manifesting, but Materializing? Curious. That presumably means I actually misruled Zod last session because the ghosts in OTR are, if I recall correctly, described as purely Astral. Which means they could cast their Fear effect on.. um, other spirits.

Physical as opposed to Mana, not Physical as opposed to Stun. Astral combat is just like normal combat: attack with attack skill/attrib, defend with defense (so, Intuition instead of Reaction).

One other caveat, the detect enemies won't pick up a spirit that's not yet materialized, it only affects plane only.

Yeah. Honestly, you can just handwave the whole "materialization" thing for that previous session. The character didn't die, nothing was permanently broken, so make up a justification and call it a day. He didn't make his perception check, or something. Now you know, and can rule more consistently. Problem solved.

Invisibility is a BIG issue... for the unprepared. Do note, anyone who has a chance to see the invisible people gets a chance to resist the spell. May not be an issue with sufficiently high force, but still a chance. Nearly all vehicles and many drones have radar, which isn't vision based and is thus unaffected by invisibility. Also, an astrally percieving (but not projecting because he'd lose AR) character can highlight the area where he sees the spell using his commlink, so others can use supressive fire or grenades or -6 blindfire. (If the characters have a tacnet, you may consider giving a reduction in the -6 blindfire penalty.) Also, the previously mentioned ultrasound glasses/implant or the UWB sensor/implant.

TL:DR? Invisibility: big issue, LOTS of ways around it if you're savvy.

As far as I can see, your players are settling down at around the standard amount of off-the rails lateral thinking craziness for shadowrunners. Enough to be awesome, but not too much to work around. Definitely trainable, at least. ^_^

If the van is relying on the armour vehicle upgrade (Ar132) the rating of this upgrade is restricted to 6 at character generation (and can be upgraded higher once in play). So if the van's armour becomes a problem for you planning and executing runs, just remind the player that it can only be a maximum rating 6 mod until sufficient tools, time and extended tests are spent to upgrade it fully.

Mages cannot do that. They have either physical perception (including AR) or astral. You need to be permanently dual natured for that. Dual natured metahumans (so they can use trodes) are not many: some Infected and that's about it.

Actually, They can. He uses his astral perception to pinpoint something. Then uses his Free action to update his Tacnet with that information. Perfectly legal.

Which interface with a commlink can be used while assensing? If you're saying that he switches back to physical perception before updating the tacnet, I agree, but that's one more simple action.

So he has to switch back... Big deal. Just as a note, though, you can drive and be Astrally perceiving at the same time, so I don't see a problem with Astrally perceivieng and Appending your Tacnet information. Especially if it is voice or DNI activated.

The Trodes. All he'd need to do is focus on that area, and the Commlink will update the Tacnet.

I'd suggest running the first arc of Ghost Cartels for the next campaign instead. From what I understand, the Dawn series is meant for experienced characters/players. Don't know much about Fistful, though.

Repeat after me:"No Plan survives Contact with Players!"

The only comment I have on this one is that Jet Black ain't dead (yet... unless CGL killed him off in one of the 4E adventures?). Most of the Sixth World is mistaken about this since Jet Black faked his death to keep from getting swarmed by a bunch of Twilight groupies. (It's from one of the old modules that I can't remember the name to.) I see no reason why there wouldn't be someone in his grave though- it adds to the fraud.

I think most of us do know that. Although, I'm not sure of his fate after On the Run, he does make a short appearance at the end (or at least he did when I went through it. Haven't actually read the module, though).

Yep. I just got the impression the GM wasn't aware of that. No offense meant to him or others. He is new to the universe, after all.

Fair enough. Sorry if I seemed short with your comment.

That kind of adds to the fun...

"Somebody has been digging up my fake grave? They must be on to me, better have them taken out before they tell anyone..."

Hmmm. Very true. If I ever run my team to Seattle, I may run "On the Run " just to see if they do that.

If things go, as you where expecting. You may have an railroading problem.
See it as a good thing. Would be boring, if everything goes as expected.

This!

I don't even try to "plot" out 'runs anymore, I just come up with what is going on in the background in broad strokes, and roleplay the NPCs in my head depending on what the players do. Much easier to do when you are running your own stuff, not so easy when you are running a pregenerated adventure. I am running Ghost Cartels at the moment, and I also swing between "OMG! The players wrecked the plot!" and "Crap! That felt railroady!". Overall, GC is less nailed down than On The Run, though.

I agree. That's why I don't generally use pregenerated adventures. That said, it's nice to have some stats done up before hand for a few things, even if you don't use them. Yet.

Ditto on this. I tend to hammer out and outline of what should proabaly get done, the NPC's, and several avenues for the players to go about it, and Wing it from there. Seems to work out pretty well if they left field it

I tend to have a timeline of events in my head of how things will happen without player intervention and then just concentrate on getting a really good feeling for where the NPC's headspace are. Once i've got that I can build legwork and other things for the players to find. The place I tend to skimp is NPC stats and instead jsut have a competence rating in mind everything from "Morons swimming with sharks" (6-9 dice in their primary, usually a combat skill) to "Threats in numbers" to "Threats on their own" to "Threat on their own plus backup".

A lot of time spent stating up NPC's, especially grunts just seems like a waste.

For most NPCs, all you usually need is either their score in their vocation/area of knowledge (for contacts such as armorer, fixers, bloggers, etc.), or their attack and damage resistance pools. And gear.

Even for things like a rival street samurai, you don't need to go into too much detail. Just rough something out like: 4's in physical stats, 3's in mental stats, has wired reflexes: 2, cybereyes with smartlink and other standard goodies, dermal plating: 2 and muscle replacement: 2, combat skills are 4 plus specialization for dice pools of 12, 14 for smartlinked weapons. Social dice pools are 5 dice pool except intimidation is 7, perception is 3, and relevant knowledge skills are 5 dice pool. Has an armored jacket, a smartlinked SMG with 4 points of recoil compensation, a katana, and a heavy pistol with a silencer. You don't need to stat an NPC out in the same kind of fine detail. Heck, some GMs would have less detail on the aforementioned sammie - just gear and some dice pools.