So, this week saw our fourth session and my attempt at running Ghost Cartels. I chose this over Dawn of the Artifacts because a poster on the previous thread advised it. I was a bit unsure about being able to run a more open-ended campaign of this type, rather than the fairly precisely scripted type of adventure such as On The Run, which is why I wasn't at first considering Ghost Cartels to be an option. But I figured that I might as well give it a try knowing that I had the more scripted adventures to fall back on if things went wrong - rather than running through all of them, being left with nothing but the Campaign books, and having to cop out completely if I couldn't keep up with running them.

So, as we kicked off, the runners were still dealing with Kermin Loomis staying in Zod's apartment. When I reminded them of this, they dropped Loomis back off at the burned-out Coda, but after some protests, Dawg gave the 10,000ny he got from selling the disc to Loomis to help him get started again. The runners then started to discuss what to do next; they had some interest in tracking down the vampires who had bought the disc, and also were still interested in going after Tamanous at some point. However, they then got the call from Kane's fixer asking them to meet Dae at the strip club. Down they drove in the infamous armored car, parking a little while away, but not finding it necessary to actually bring weapons into the meeting with Ms. Johnson this time - although they were still wearing some obvious armor. Fortunately, Dae shuttled them past the bouncers and they met up with her in the club's back conference room, receiving the pictures and names and details. Zod suggested that they should just try to shut down the entire gang because "they're scummy drug dealers", and Dae quietly reminded him that he was a shadowrunner himself..

After some discussion the runners decided to have Dawg cast invisibility on Kane, and he'd go and infiltrate one of the safehouses, while the others stayed behind in the back of the strip bar since they couldn't infiltrate if their lives depended on it. Kane pointed out that a motorbike riding itself down the highway might be a bit suspicious (although not impossible in a world with remote controlled vehicles), so Zod agreed to lend him his car which he could drive around with shields behind the windows to prevent anyone noticing him. Kane was halfway to the Verge when Zod pointed out that, since they could all hide inside the car, there was no point in them staying behind in the club when they could all be in the car - so Zod remote-controlled the car to come back and pick them all up after all, to Kane's surprise and complaint..

So, they pull into the Verge, where Dawg's Detect Enemies starts to fleck up a few points from the various scum wandering the Verge recognizing that the car isn't one they know - but although Zod is in favor of hopping out the car and killing anyone who pops up on the Detect Enemies, most of the low-lives just run away. They pull the car up and Kane, still invisible, heads over to the safehouse (which I decide is a broken-down warehouse - hey, you can never have too many broken-down warehouses, right?). He decides to hide next to the entrance of the warehouse and wait to see if anyone comes. So I conveniently arrange the coincidence that Adam pulls into the safehouse at that point in his car, with two Orks along as muscle, to pick up two cases of Tempo - one to trade to Caine and one to deal himself in the clubs that night.

At this point I also decide to give the runners a little scare and a bit of a tip as to what's going on. Alex's profile mentions that he has a mild addiction to Tempo, but I figured he probably wouldn't be actually high on it while working - one of his Ork goons, however, didn't feel that way. Meaning that he immediately started calling and pointing out to Alex about how he could see "rainbows" next to the warehouse entrance. Since I didn't want Kane actually getting caught at this point I also decided that since Tempo was so new, nobody was really sure exactly what it did yet, so Alex just ignored him and chalked it up to him being high as a kite. The two orks guarded the door while Alex slipped in to get the drugs - and Kane slipped him after him (with the great idea of standing behind the other - non-high - Ork and waving his arms around to make the other Ork's aura look chaotic)

While Kane was doing this, a couple of random low-lives wandered up the car parked in the verge and started prodding at it, trying to open the doors or possibly jack the thing. Zod poked his assault rifle through one of the gun ports and shot one of them dead on the street, causing them all to flee.

So, Alex picked up the drugs, locked up, and they headed back to their car. Kane then realized he had no way to track or pursue the car, so he grabbed a picture of the car with his cyber-eyes and commed it over to Faceman in the team's car. Dawg summoned up a Spirit of Man to follow the car. Now, I figured this would make the high Ork really freak out, but he still wasn't be trusted on listened to. Soon enough, the Spirit of Man reported back that the car had arrived at the "club in Tacoma" where the meeting with Kaine was due, which I randomly named The Silver Edge (when I tried to come up with a nightclub name on the fly all I could think of was The Bronze out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - so I fudged it to "The Silver" and then added something cyberpunky sounding on the end. Technical process, right?)

The runners started driving off - and at this point I decided to throw in another mix-up in the works. The runners had mentioned wanting to go after Tamanous, and the campaign mentions that Tamanous are active in the Verge. The runners just left the dead body of a low-life lying in the middle of the road. So, they saw another car pull up behind them and stop. When the runners drove away, the other car moved forward a bit, but stopped rather than following them, and two men got out. Zod jumped out of the car and full-auto bursted the two men, killing them both instantly, running over to them and then shooting up their car. When the shooting caused a Freon leak, Zod inspected the car and found that the back of the car had a refrigeration system installed. Zod was rather confused as to what this was about, and took the commlinks from the two men, but none of the runners had enough hacking ability to even get past their PIN screens. Now, I have no idea if Tamanous would actually be that unsubtle about picking up a body, or even if they would want that body, but figured I could always retrofit it that these were not actually Tamanous themselves but a bunch of random gangers thinking they could throw in with them or at least make a little money on the side.

So, the runners pulled up at "the silver edge" and Kane again snuck in invisible (although he was noticed by the tempo-heads inside the club). Because of his low Perception, he took a while to spot Alex and Caine and didn't spot the Yaks at all. He stayed out of sight - invisible in a crowd with stupidly high Infiltration - until Caine got up and started heading out, waving some other Ragers to leave the club with him. Alex, meanwhile, remained in the club, hoping to sell some tempo directly there himself. Kane commed Faceman again, telling him that Caine and the Ragers were leaving the club and had some connection with the deal.

At which point Zod spun the car around and the team proceeded to open fire on the Ragers as they left the club, killing Caine, his lieutenant, and all the muscle within a single Initiative Pass before any of them could react.

Zod then decided that they wanted to take the case for themselves. Panicking, he commanded the car to Chameleon to look like a Lone Star patrol vehicle (doing this in front of people - saying that he wanted them to believe that the car had been a Lone Star cruiser all along, but had been undercover before), and Faceman got onto the car's speakers to try and convince them they were actually the police. Thanks to a stupidly high Con roll, he made this, and the car pulled up. The bouncers immediately blocked the entrance to the club to prevent anyone "disturbing the crime scene", and Dawg cast Trid Phantasm on Faceman to make him look like he was wearing a Lone Star uniform. Under the illusion, Faceman got out, dragged the case and Caine's body into the car, took the weapons from the other bodies, told the bouncers that the "corpse wagon" would be along for the remains, and jumped in before the car headed off at top whack.

Meanwhile, Kane was still in the club, and expressed a wish to continue tailing Alex to see what he was about to do. The runners drove "around a corner", dropped the police camouflage on their car, and opened up the case, revealing a stash of tempo derm patches.

At that point, we stopped for the night, as it was a convenient spot and I also needed to work out what the heck was going to happen now. I can see at least three open points now:

* First of all, obviously the Ragers are going to want to know what happened to Caine. They won't have heard of the runners, but they _will_ know that Caine was going to meet with Alex. That could be interesting if Kane continues to tail Alex, as sooner or later the Ragers will want to have a few words with Alex in private. More importantly, it's not clear how this is going to affect the Ragers' role in the Tempo market. Essentially the market will now be dominated completely by First Nations until the Yaks decide to get involved. It's also not clear if the runners were planning to tell Dae what they did.

* Secondly, there is the matter of the case of Tempo the runners picked up. They have not yet said what they are planning to do with it. Obviously selling it could be lucrative but would essentially make them the new competitors with the Nations and the Yaks for the Tempo market. Alternatively they might end up giving it to someone - possibly to Dae, which would mean it ends up with Kaz, which could be interesting. Meanwhile, the Nations might well want it back, and any number of random addicts might rather like it, too.

* Finally, as fooled as those bouncers might have been by Faceman's Con skill, they're going to notice when the "wagon" doesn't actually turn up. So that's murder and impersonating an officer at the very least..

Sounds like your runners are getting into the SR groove - albeit a rather Mohawk-ey groove. What better kind is there, anyhow?

Things are all jacked up and are only going to get worse. What could be better?!

This is the fourth session you've posted on here, your play style is obviously working for you to some extent so i'm not going to knock it but at this point I need to ask the question:

If Zod's answer to everything is full auto bursts and killing people in the middle of the street why isn't the opposition responding in kind. Why arn't your bad guys behaving a bit smarter, why arn't they being more paranoid, why arn't they being better armed and armored?

At this point I'd pretty liberalyl start screwing with them for their lack of subtlety, they took the tamorious guys comlinks? THeir buddies can track them by those comlinks. At some point the murder car should be boxed in by few bulldog step van that hungry ghouls come pouring out and trying to flip the car and eat the tasty tasty guys inside. Tamorious should literally have more ghouls then they know what to do with so you can make sure this kind of encounter is something they don't spend a lot of time or trouble on but something to send a message. If you want you could have the runners contacted by Hannabelle (profiled in Street Legends, in broad strokes she's a ghoul hacker, who is nominally affiliated with the Tam, she doesn't like them, but their an easy meal ticket). The contact can explain that if they continue to screw with Tam operations further the Tam will actually ahave to do something about them.

Personally I tend to take pains to discourage my players from picking head on fights with underworld syndicates. The syndicates have more guys, guns, and money then the underworld does.

It's ok, I'm keen on advice or comments as I'm still getting a feel for what's supposed to happen in Shadowrun. I hope I'm not getting on anyone's nerves by posting these logs.



This is a fair point. It's worth mentioning that Zod's player has actually been complaining, "This game seems broken, I just kill everything instantly" to which my standard reply has been "You spent hours working out how to maximise your character's ability with guns, it worked, why are you complaining?"

The simple answer is OOC, namely as follows:
a) I'm not seeing that the "mirrorshades" style of play is actually that much better in terms of fun and engagement, in fact it could be worse. Yes, Zod's Automatics is obscene but at least he only kills 4 people or so when he rolls it whereas Kane or Face can make a single Con or Infiltration roll and finish an entire scene. I mean, I'm having to introduce combats to prevent other players from getting bored, so if I discourage fighting won't that get even worse?

b) I'm not sure how to make combats more challenging without making them lethal. This is especially the case when the runners are using their armored car. Pretty much nothing short of a full-on military weapon will even dent the armor and if I put one of those against them, chances are it'll kill the entire runner team in one shot. I mean, I remember seeing a post here discouraging the players from going for 4 IP because "the fight is mostly over by the third", so it seems the only alternative to having Zod kill everyone is to have Zod killed in the first or second passes.

c) And aligned with that is that, if I just want to kill the runners I can drop a meteor on them. If I set up a corp hit squad or whatever that's specifically designed to kill them that I'm pretty much just doing the same thing but more slowly. I need to find some kind of convincing way they could appreciate the problems, and I'm hoping that now they've thrown some major spanners into a gang war that's more likely to happen in a reasonable way.



It's an Armor 20 car, the ghouls would just be mulched by full auto before they could dent it. This is one of the problems.

Nothing in SR is un-kill-able if you piss off the wrong people. Armor 20 isn't going to save them when a high force fire elemental materializes inside the car and cooks them alive.

All that's supposed to happen in Shadowrun is that you and your players have fun. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The conversations are interesting and I, for one, welcome your continued logs and the discussions they encourage -- but if you and you buddies are having a good time, screw Dumpshock, keep doing what you do. It's a game, not a religion. There's no right or wrong way to play.

Heretic!

But yeah, I agree. Don't mess up the group's fun with too many "logical" consequences. On the other hand, if the driver of the murder car is bored, then you should think of ways to challenge him. If the car itself puts you in a dilemma (anything tough enough to affect it will destroy it, at best taking away his primary toy, and at worst killing the entire party), then play up the fact that it's a car. Not a person. There are places it can't go, or follow. It needs a level surface to run on. It can shoot things up, but actual barriers, or gaps in the road, are another thing altogether. He should still be able to machinegun some things, but it shouldn't be an instant problem-solver for everything.

By the way, it's too bad Caine bit it so soon. You could have had a lot of fun with people talking about Kane, or Caine.

I more or less agree with Critias and Glyph, to an extent. I wasn't suggesting that you should just TPK the party with a fire spirit. I was merely noting that if the team has just one answer to all questions then maybe you need to reframe the discussion. In other words, think outside the box (or the heavily armored Murdermobile, as it were). Glyph said it better than I did tho...

Where I might disagree is in the need for logical consequences. I think thats alright if you're shooting for pink mohawk, but I don't think you can run a black trench coat game without any consequences. All that paranoia has to mean something.

So? If That's the game that zod has chosen to play that's the game he's chosen to play, the game is breaking because you are treating them as special little snowflakes, anything they can do the opposition can do. Part of what makes SR work sometimes is a wierd level of detente.


The step vans, also similarly armored pull up covering the gun ports. Problem solved, or a hacker hacks the cars system (since they pilot the car remotely it's reasonable to assume they leave the wireless on unless they have a some ranks int eh cracking group. If their major asset is a 20 armor vehicle it's entirely reasonable to assume the bad guys will find ways to neutralize said vehicle. The nice thing about the ghoul rush scenario is no matter how many ghouls get chewed up by full auto it costs the Tam very little and as long as one ghoul gets up to the car and starts working on the door locks with a crowbar and their own considerable strength the car's 20 armor doesn't last long. The idea is the players survive but get that from here forward just rolling around in the murder car isn't going to work.

I've read your posts and your problem basically seems to boil down to you are treating the characters like they have a magical PC tag that protects them from consequences because killing them might hurt their feelings, so they in turn are always using the same approach to everything because nothing ever goes wrong with it. I hate to say it but that's no one's fault but your own.

I concur.

@Hyphz: In part I think that this may be your D&D background causing you problems. The initial steps towards this were present in 3E and became even more prevalent in 4E when WOTC essentially built the game and large sections of the rules on the assumption that the player characters should survive combat with a great amount of predictability, and while using a great amount of resources. Most other games are actually predicated on the concept that combat is something to be avoided or planned for in great detail, or else the player characters will suffer greatly. Your players are definitely approaching this from a dungeoneering perspective or rather a kill first ask questions later view. Also the scale of damage is very different. Pretty much any damage in Shadowrun rapidly creates a situation where the penalties quickly makes things worse. It is not a slow slide to death with no penalties easily averted by a healing spell, one minute you are fine and kicking ass, the next you have a serious gut wound, the next Doc Wagon is trying to resuscitate.

It could be interesting to have the team go up against one or more armored-up vehicles as a counter to their own murdermobile. Not unreasonable for one or more of the gangs to have something like this. Maybe not rigged and sporting machineguns, but certainly something tough enough (oooooh, or BIG enough! Semi-tractor FTW) to survive at least a couple chase rounds worth of murdermobile fire while trying to run the team off the road.

Also, expect things to get more interesting when the players can't just get the drop on people. In fact, I'd go out of my way to make the players WORK at getting the drop on people. Criminals are often paranoid... often for good reason. They should have lookouts and defenses just like the corps. Might be cheaper, more obvious, or more manpower intensive, but there is a REASON that the cops don't patrol the barrens unless they're going in in force.

In that vein, I like the way you played up the tempo-head's ability to ee the invisible guy. Good thought, for an early-game sort of thing. When the gangs start to figure this shit out, the player's job is gonna get more difficult in entertaining ways. Don't be afraid to have things go terribly wrong for the team at least once. Starting characters in shadowrun are quite powerful... so if someone has to make a new character they're not stupidly behind the curve.

As long as it happens in an awesome or funny way: character death=learning experience.

I see what you mean about the DnD background issue. The real point, I suppose, is that character death isn't really all that much of a penalty to be honest. There'll be some OOC banter about how different the character needs to be to the previous one, the player makes a new one, and the GM has to bend over backwards to fit the new and potentially underpowered character into the game. Heck, if Zod got killed outside of his car, he'd be cheering because the other runners could take the car over and he'd make a new character who'd still indirectly have the benefit of the car without spending any nuyen on it.

On the hacking issue, the runners usually turn the wireless off when their whole team is inside the car. Zod generally has his commlink off all of the time, saying it doesn't matter if he can't get calls because missions and/or any critical information will get to them somehow as otherwise there would be no campaign.

I like the idea of having an armoured car sent after them though. I'm not sure I'd go for the ghoul thing because I'd like to keep Tam in the background for the moment - finally actually making an assault of some kind on Tam is starting to look like a good campaign closer.

On the fire spirit issue this made me think of another question, if a materialised spirit can take physical damage from bullets then presumably there has to be space for it to materialise in? How big are they?

(By the way, Zod's player also wanted me to ask if he could blind-fire tracer rounds at a penalty of only -3...)

Blind fire is blind.... Seeing where his rounds are going ain't gonna help him hit a target he can't see in the first place, although I might give him a break on saturation fire.

I think you should have the party get hired for hits on go gangs. Shoot, some of the go gangs might get hired for a hit on the party, or may just see the party as a fun challenge. When's the last time Lord Togo (of the Spikes) needed to play with whatever he uses as a nutcracker?

Well, if it's really the car that's the problem, and the team sometimes has the car operating remotely, then you can take the car out separately from the players if it becomes too much of an issue.

Heh, if your players are just turning off comms instead of actually investing in security, there are ways to screw with them there, as well. For example, your car can't call you to tell you someone is messing with it.

Character gets in the murdermobile. Murdermobile pilot program says: "Sir, I'm sorry to inform you that a car bomb has been installed in your absence; I tried to call you about it earlier..." [boom]

It's probably been a while, since he was in prison for several years and then died.

But the point still stands, yes. Some Mad Max anti-go-gang action might be just up this party's proverbial alley. Either they get some high octane fun in an over the top chase/fight all rolled into one, or they see that the other guys have armored vehicles, too (and RPGs), and maybe they'll tone it down a little after this.

This Zod guys sounds like a douche.

If Zod gets killed off, the team parks the car and spends the night somewhere (ANYWHERE!) and wakes up and the van has a boot on it / is towed / was stolen / is on blocks and the engine is gone etc.

If Zod decides that he never needs to have his commlink on, start degrading his contact's loyalty ratings until they are 0 and the contact disappears. Surely, he can just rely on Faceman to do contact stuff, but that'll at least demonstrate that in a gameworld where who you know is often more important than what you know, having your freaking cell phone on is a good idea.

Fire spirits size would probably range based on Force. I'd imagine that a force 4 or 5 would be the size of a very large gorilla. Maybe?

Finally, tracers don't help for blindfire per se. Per SR4A page 324, full auto bursts do provide a +3 dice pool bonus, though.

A courier run way out into Puyallup or Redmond Barrens would be an absolute blast for a group with a murdermobile and a sociopathic nutjob named Zod whose problem solving method is 'use gun on man'.

That's what Lone Star wants you to think! Actually, since I've pretty much stuck with 2/3E and haven't read but a couple of the novels, when did they kill off Togo? At least he got a better run than Darth Maul.

Ok first off, you either need to have an out of character talk with them about this sort of behavior or punish it in game, honestly I opt for the former, people have to be willing to suspend their disbelief and work with you, if their going to game the metagame there really isn't much point in running for them. Just my two nuyen.

Just don't invite Zod back to the next session, tell the player his character doesn't can't get the call, so there's no reason to show up. He'll get the point.

That sounds like a great way to screw up a friendship, game or no.

As for dealing with the murdermobile, a zap strip will screw it up royally without auto-slaughtering the PCs. Given the ram prow and gun ports on the thing, how did he disguise it as a cop car anyways? Chameleon paint is one thing, but all the rest of the details still suggest he stole the thing from Dethklok. Plus the fact that automatic weapons make a sound (and mess) rather different from police pistols.

I do wonder though, does Zod go on his killing sprees because you're using pregenerated scenarios, and so he knows that you can't inflict consequences on him without destroying your own roadmap? Or does he understand that murder doesn't equal extra XP like D&D? I'm surprised the other PCs haven't killed him yet, because he's bound to bring down FRTs and worse.

Hahaha. I see a great recurring NPC here always showing up to bum off the PC's. "Things just haven't been the same since...you know..and it gets hard keeping quiet when my belly is grumbling". Loomis is a coward, but he's also a snake, let him play victim for all it's worth until the players find themselves in a new moral dilemma.



Consequently, I think Zod shows up on everyone's Detect Enemies spell (even mine).



That's fun! Work in that paranoia. On a side note, it's probably not a bad thing to bust up the invisibility schtick now and again, lest they get to comfortable using only one solution.



No witnesses? Used a silencer? No guy screaming in the street a block from the warehouse they're staking out?

Seriously, you're way to easy on this guy. Dice says he can kill anyone, and the rest of society is just a-ok with that. Theres not even a point to the "shadows", this guy does his dirt in full daylight but gosh darn isn't he just the cutest player!



Yay three bodies! And more Murder Car footage. Nothing to see here people, it's just Zod (ooooooooooh, silly us)



Also killing any chance they'll be hired for anything other than smash & grab and wetwork jobs. Even if they were pretending to be lone star, there weren't any bystanders caught in the ambush fire? Mobs of party goers tend to dislike the police, especially when they shoot at the general public.



Yea but it's your job to challenge him...sorry, as a fellow GM I understand the complexity of trying to balance fun, but what other proof do you need that fun just isn't when there's not a challenge or even a consequence to sloppy actions.



Not really about fault, but this is all very true.



Also true...




Course not, what dumpshock is for. All entertaining reads too.

So the take away is, it doesn't matter what you do, long as everyone is having fun. But it probably wouldn't hurt to start giving the players opportunities to exercise some grey matter and come up with some more subtle solutions to problems. At this point it feels (to me) like a combat simulator with three options. Shoot! Invisibility! and Con roll! then everyone back in the tank!

Make them earn it, they'll never recall all the fights they won in one roll. But they'll never forget the time they almost (or did) die.

As for passing off gear to each other, come on man, that's classic metagaming, you should know better than fall for that kind of gayness.

Have fun!

Yeah, there is that. But of course with him dead, who is to say that someone or thing doesn't take posession of it cause they are owed that much for real or imagined debts. Also, at that point, the vehicle might hit Lone Star or Adversary X's radar. And the opposition could use it to track down the other players. Warn them this may happen though, call it a common sense check/shadowrunning 101 check.

I find your posts interesting since it is a different perspective from someone who's been running the shadows for decades (NOW GET OFF MY LAWN! ).
As to lethality, yeah, this game can be lethal. Get used to it--and note it does work both ways.

PS: ARM20 does noththing to a force 8 wreck vehicle spell........

The word "possession" in a thread about how to deal with a Murdermobile? This portends madness...

hehehehe, possesed Murdermobile...... that just gives me the giggles.

I don't know if this post applies, since I'm not sure what vehicle Facevan is (based on). But in case it does,

Honestly there's a lack of evidence to properly judge, but one guy in the equation already sounds like the "does not play well with others" type.

Thanks for all your replies!

On the line of "Zod's player being a douche", he isn't. Honestly. I was probably a bit too brusque about his attitude when I wrote the previous post (that's what I get for writing detailed posts on a mobile). Basically, he follows the D&D attitude that he's the shooty guy on the team, and therefore he must be best at that AND therefore must avoid as far as possible doing anything that isn't shooting. So he keeps his Commlink off because he has no interest in the Matrix and he never deals with any social things because he doesn't have those skills (in fact I believe he has no Contacts). The players generally don't seem to be hugely interested in the Matrix aspect of the game and I don't really want to penalize them for that. I don't know if he's "metagaming" or not, really, that was probably just my irritation at it being so hard to deal with the problem of "you must do X, or the campaign won't work"

I'll check the limit on the van armor in the book.

As for Zod's blatant obvious murder of people - yes, there most definately is going to be a response to that. Shooting the low-life on the Verge I didn't jump on immediately because it's actively described in the adventure as an unpatrolled "Z-Zone", but that little slaughter outside the club is definitely likely to come back to haunt the group. Simply put, though, people aren't jumping on him immediately because he's made it blatantly obvious that he's a psycho with an armored car and an assault rifle. That takes some prep to take on.

Plus, of course, there's every chance that dropping Caine at that time has resulted in the Ragers having no idea about Tempo, which could change the course of the plot - that seems like an interesting thing to explore, both so that the death has consequences plus, hey, exploring stuff. Are there stats for Moloch or HardRain anywhere? Or, you know, the rest of the First Nations, or the Yakuza, or any of the people whose radars they just hit in a big ol' way? I'm betting some of them have armored cars.. (I'm not bringing Tam in at the moment because as I say I want to keep that long running and I don't think I can convincingly say that the guys in the car in the Verge, who were blatantly acting like obvious muppets, were Tam. Maybe Steppen Wolfs or just punks. Don't know. Plus, of course, when they do the next tail they risk getting into conflict with the Dogmen who most definitely _are_ involved with Tam..)

(By the way, one problem I'm really having is that so much information is distributed across books. Ghost Cartels sends the players to the Verge, but there's no mention of a Verge in Seattle 2072 that I could see. Also, Seattle 2072 says that the events of Ghost Cartels result in Lone Star being ousted from Seattle in favor of Knight Errant but it doesn't say anything about this in Ghost Cartels. Don't even get me started on how there appear to be two different versions of the Ragers in Ghost Cartel and in the corebook.)

Yeah, you'll have that. Friends are friends and they're great guys, fun to game with, but can cause problems in games a plenty. I've GMed for gamers in the past that consider SR4 to be a test in submarine construction. By that I mean that every single cubic centimeter of design must maximize efficiency. Character generation, for them, is just a thought-problem whose solution is maximizing the dice pool for one (or, rarely, two or three) tests. The extent of that play has been, in my experience, much like Zod: players pick up a mitful of dice, roll them, count the hits / success etc. and then do whatever the heck they say they do... And then the game moves on. The trouble with players like this is that they break down the 4th wall of gaming in a big, big way. Huge dicepools allow players to accomplish tasks that are generally absurd and impractical, even insane... and get away with it without any real justification, context, story. It would be one thing to do this in a context of group fun, high adventure, and general pink-mohawk-badassery, but I've found over and over that it works just like you describe. Player X says 'I shoot them. *rolls dice* They die. Next?' If that is fun for them - and for the rest of the group - carry on.

If they don't understand that having their commlink off, especially with out of game metagame statements like 'you'll have to give us adventure seeds and information somehow, just not through my character', is pretty cheesy without a background justification, then whatever. DnD players / power gamers making the transition to SR4 have a long, winding road of it.

So long as everyone has fun, then you are doing it right. Like my first response to your adventure log: sounds GREAT thus far.

The 2nd part: One of the hardest parts of GMing Shadowrun is having sufficient background to figure it all out, as it were. At any given moment, players can and will do things that make you suddenly need to answer questions like 'what is over there?', 'how long does it take to get from A to B?', 'are there cops here? how many?', 'I need a nightclub... and fast...' etc.

Getting all of those parts to work in a cohesive, meaningful way is really hard. And, as you described, much of the information disseminated on the topic of the gameworld is spread around pretty handily.

Vice, I believe, has information about organized crime and gangs in Seattle and abroad. You might try nabbing a pdf of that and taking a gander.

I have found that the best way to keep track of stuff that comes up (and isn't detailed in the module I'm using, or I haven't thought out ahead of time) is to keep a exposition notebook right handy during the game. The each game start a page with the game date, (module or run name is using also) and then I can jot NPC names, bar names and anything else I need right quickly. Plus it has the added benifit of MAKING the players keep notes because they see me making notes and I don't use my notebook. If they don't know chances are their character doesn't know.

I think I have probably about 40ish notebooks scattered over 4-5 game systems with detailed and not so detailed notes.

Note about the murdermobile : one problem is how to deal with the thing without fragging the party inside. Some suggestions on how to achieve that :

* the most obvious is to go at it while the PCs aren't inside. One nasty trick could be to drag the thing into an enclosed and wifi-proofed semi-trailer. Or just put some gasoline-soaked used tires under it and torch them for a cheap and dirty destruction.

* if the car is left to it's own devices with intructions amounting to 'pop out the turrets and frag anyone who interferes', a car's pilot program is dumb enough to cause all sort of problems with that. The nicer the area, the more embarassing it can be. Fragging the hobo who puked on it in the Barrens is unlikely to cause more than some laughs. Fragging the police drone giving it a ticket for parking downtown is another thing.

* you can pull a Ronin-style trick too : it sounds like the murder mobile is a large car. Have them chase some smaller car they can't affford to just shoot into stopping (something fragile to recover inside or the like can work). The chased heads for the backstreet and alleys, in increasingly tighter spaces. At one point they notice the chased car folding down it's rearview mirrors. If they think fast and stop, no problem, if they keep on chasing, they'll end up jammed between two buildings. With the car's armor and if they were moving fast, there's no way the car will get unstuck without lengthy efforts...

Screw that.

Make them pay out a couple of months rent and other upkeep before their next job, and make it a crappy one.

"Oh hai, guys, there you are. Been trying to get you for ages but you've not been answering calls. Sorry, I gave all the good work to more reliable runners, but I got a little something for you if you need the cash..."

***

Or, as its just him... do these guys live with each other IC?

If not, have the others (or him) attacked in "downtime" where being able to call the guy with the murdermobile would be really useful. Do it sequentially so that even if calling for help wouldn't have been useful, being able to warn the others would have been.

I got a few!

Could be fun to have a hacker gang take over the car and go on a rampage. Not only do they have to face their own murder car (without destroying it) to get it back, but risk it becoming even more visible to the public by the gang's mischief.

Have it impounded by the star and let them do a run to spring it. Course they just mayyyyyybe want to be more subtle on that run, video footage and all. Plus those no neck peacekeepers tend to be as bad as gangs when it comes to losing one of their own.

Have it run out of gas at an inopportune moment. LOL

and finally, have a resident AI make a home in the Murder Car's node that can lead to all sort of hilarity and plot threads.

At some point though, definitely should have Murder Car mimiced in a trid show that way overcheeses it.