So, somehow I wound up GMing an online (IRC) game of Shadowrun, having somehow recruited entirely from Exalted players. (Go figure, huh? Nobody can resist Shadowrun. )

If you happen to be one of my players - Canuck, I'm looking at you - please don't read on.




The group is mostly-firmed up, at least the core of it is, and I need some advice, because I've got some fairly exotic characters/plans in the workings here.


The first problem is that nobody took a Fixer contact. I'm not sure how that happened. Two were Hung Out to Dry, but the others... Well, anyway, I'm planning to start dropping real Shadowrunning (rather than meet and greet sessions) on them in the next week or two. Anyway, many of them have other Runners as free contacts - backup characters within the group's social circles who can step in if a particular character has to go lay low for a while or gets himself killed. I was thinking of having one of them be contacted by the fixer, their group is unavailable or booked and/or they decide that the job's too small-time for them and drop it on the group I have now.

What kind of complications can I throw at them for this, though? The fixer might get greedy and demand more of a cut than is normal, but I'm probably already going to have to tune the run's reward up so the players can cover expenses. They're not going to go commit felonies for less than they could make by carjacking a Ford Americar and having a troll negotiate the sale, after all. I'd like to come up with something other than just jabbing them in the wallet, though.


Secondly, one of the players has a rather impressive Lifestyle. Specifically, he owns a well-defended junkyard in Redmond wherein he trains critters and paracritters for sale as companion or guard animals. I okayed this, but it seems like I should probably make him take the Day Job flaw to represent the time he's spending with the animals instead of out doing legwork and stuff. The big question is, though, how much is he actually going to make for each sale? The prices for selling stuff in the core rulebook suppose that you're selling hot goods you lifted off a steaming corpse, not something you legitimately own and invested time and effort into raising and training. What kind of rates would be more reasonable for the sale of his animals, and how often should he expect his Vet contact to be able to push business his way?


Third, one of the players is an AI. I said I'd allow one crazy character (crazy being defined as 'not metahuman' or 'metahuman but having some kind of wacky quality like Drake,) and that's what I got. Aside from the obvious facts that this thing lives on a hardware nexus (instead of something the others carry) that is likely to either be installed on a drone or left sitting in the junkyard/in the car when the group goes to do something, what problems am I likely to face with her and what can I use to give her some good fun complications?

(The player asked for a pre-game hacking run, so I had a Mr. J give her a job to get a schmuck fired from his job at Stuffer Shack for twelve hundred nuyen and then an additional 200 nuyen for every week he could make the walking drek's life a living hell without hurting him or being seen by him. The AI promptly framed him for hacking into the Shack's HR files, then posted a bogus, but extremely convincing, story about the guy shagging a Sasquatch on the guy's blog. Now the mages want in on the action, so I expect this will be highly amusing.)


Fourth, one of the players decided to live on the wild side and take the 25-pt Amnesia flaw. So, after carefully consulting with the players to be sure they were okay with it without giving away too much in advance, I crafted a character who seems to be a young teenaged elf from the UK. (She's not, she's actually 24, she just picked up the Neoteny negative quality back during the Year of the Comet.) The character was mysteriously dumped by "a suit" in the Redmond Barrens, basically on the doorstep of junkyard animal trainer guy and his pals, and he's fairly well known for being willing to take in people who will pull their own weight around the yard while they try to figure out what the hell to do. (Three of the other players live with him, if you include the AI, before the girl showed up.) While I find it amusing that the player of this character is gleefully coming up with possible backgrounds for this character which are all far more grim'n'dark than the truth, I'm trying to figure out what hurdles the character will face because of this: obviously, she's not going to be able to walk into a bar to order a drink, or into Infinity to meet Mr. Johnson, without one of the wizards putting a spell on her to make her seem older. This is kind of important, since she's the Face. (Tailored Pheremones, Glamour, high Charisma and Influence.)


Also, what spells would work for disguising this character as not-a-young-teenager? One of the players has Physical Mask, but I think that might not work since it specifies similar height and build, and the idea is to increase the perception of both.

Interesting background, all Exalted players, my, my, my...


IMHO (Since this is what I'd try and swing with no-one having a Fixer/Johnson contact - that really throws me) is have "dual" faces.

Note: I've never had an AI in a team.
Hovever, I assume they can spend a huge portion of their time looking for work, in that the best runs are the self-starting ones. Easy high-values items that can be moved, sold or substituted but involve a lot of planning and finesse? Set the AI to it - that's groundwork and pretty damn vital if the runners are going to make it happen. Be discrete, be picky, be careful, get wealthy:) And as an online presence, the AI could certainly handle a LOT of the legwork and contact-determination stuff a lot better than the meat members of the team.
Hell, ask if it could do in-depth psychological profiling on viable contacts, where their hooks are and you're going to be making some firm friends - as long as the AI remains quiet about this:)

As the neoteen face? Physical mask could work, especially if made to look dwarven. Even the "face in a can" nanodisguise stuff and some bulky coveralls could be fine in a pinch. Or insist on doing your meets astrally - I read that a while back and thought it was an awesome way to get around the tailored pheremone/furby-the-mindreader toolset that everyone dog and his crew had to use.
Yes, it's going to render some of her augments not very useful (and might get them addicted to dat deepweed) during the initial meet, but any Johnson worth his expenditure account is going to rub their hands at the thought of taking candy from a baby (I assume that 4th ed hasn't changed mundane appearence in the astral - they look "normal") which may result in profitable mindgames when they do the meet/exchange in person and the pheremones do their work.


As no-one's got an "in" they can use (and you, as GM, can exploit) make them work for one.
Odd jobs, pro bono work, favours for different parts of the community they live in (or want to live in), maybe organised crime (But that's chancy at the best of times) the entertainment industry, porn, military (even supply grunts need a little something now and then) smugglers (A player runs a junkyard and doesn't know a smuggler contact or 5?) and every other thread they can pull.

Sure, the players might not like a few suggestions, or have the collected charisma of Bubba the Love Troll (before the lube) but networking is a big part of this, not just, "I spend all my actions shooting the suit in the face." They may strike out with the pretty receptionist, but the ugly one might know more and be a little more amendable to certain types of persuasion and may have always wanted to do it on her bosses desk with 3 trolls, an elf and a hellhound.(This can lead to horrifingly-funny roleplaying, And games of legend.)


Oh, and if your junkyard dog is making some scratch from his efforts, that's fine. Give him the "day job" disadvantage and make sure he gets market rates for his efforts. If the player/s whine about the disadvantage, let them know that thir character may view it as a necessary evil to ensure that their real work habits remain undiscovered. And as a professional, they'd like the idea of a "paying coverstory"


-Tir

Hey Tir, a 1000 yen Olfactory Booster can edit out Tailored Pheromones and a Camera Burner will kill Furby.


As to the AI, does it have the Piloting Origin quality? That's a pretty basic way to get the AI into the action. Either way, Command still works for controlling drones and such.

Really though, it seems like you wandered into a situation where everyone has Big Timers Syndrome. All of your people want to explore these bizarre options to build "really interesting characters," but none of them know how to make any of their characters real people that fit into the world yet. They ought to slow down a bit and play an archetype or two before they get esoteric.

Junkyard guy raises paranormal animals? I've got to assume unlicensed, because the gov wouldn't want Old Man Simmons out there monster breeding. Picture the kind of shit you'd have to go through to try and open a tiger farm in the USA. Now make those tigers breath fire. Not legal. Only people he could sell these unlicensed animals to are underground fight rings and gangs. Does he have any contacts like that?

Miss Pre-teen sex queen? 25pt Amnesia means you build the character for them, and they don't know their own capabilities, right? So, I guess this is your doing? I'm going to back away now...

Especially since you've been out of the game for a bit...I would talk to them and see if they would be cool with doing a run or three with 'basic' characters before they go hog-wild with the raising firebreathing tigers, preteen assassins, and AI in a trashcan.

This is lifted directly from the campaign I'm running now. Have someone threaten the junkyard. Maybe some gangers want it for some reason or have there be something in the junkyard of value that they don't know about. The fender of that wreck that was just hauled in is packed with 10 Kilos of Deepweed (Depending how much a dose is, that can be worth a lot. If a dose is 100 grams, that could have a street value 40,000 nuyen) and the guys who were originally expecting the deepweed want it back. Then they have to figure out what's up, fend off break in attempts, butt heads with goons, maybe recover some goods or work out what the guys are after. Then they've got to find a place to unloaded all those drugs, if they manage to keep them.

Re: Junkyard Dude, just use the money earned from the Day Job quality and abstract selling animals. The economy of Shadowrun just Does Not Work, and you are best off abstracting it and trying to ignore it because as soon as you start thinking about it too hard, the bottom falls out.

Re: No fixer contact, I think you should simply make them work to get an "in" with people who might hire them. Alternatively, instead of "your fixer tells you XYZ wants to hire them," have it be something like "I heard XYZ is looking for someone" and let the PCs then have to get in touch with XYZ and offer their services - ie, make them "self-promote."

Quite a wall of text there. I'll try to give some quick comments, as long as my lunch break lasts ...



First, give them a simple mission complicated by the fact that they don't have a fixer. If they show they're smart enough to live without a fixer, carry on. If it becomes evident they need stuff, make your next mission one where a fixer chooses them. They have to run a mission just to be able to deal with him, and they don't get any preferential treatment. Over the campaign, the fixer knows they're in a bind, so he can pitch them very odd or very low-paying jobs (or modifications to their current jobs) they HAVE to take, because otherwise they're out in the cold. He will pay them and he will take care of them, but they're on a leash until they find a fixer of their own.



Did he pay the points for it? If so, I wouldn't stress about it. If you need to raid his house later, I'm sure you'll be able to, paracritters or not.



Down this road lies madness!! I had two characters who went into dayjobs and basically exploded the game. Shadowrun isn't Pet stores and Pensions. Stay away!

(Can't comment on AIs, never dealt with them.)



Not sure what's 'obvious' about this. Why can't she go to meets? Because she looks like she's 13? Pad her bra and use some make-up. In a world where people are paying millions to look 16, looking like that naturally is hardly an issue.

(Also not sure why she can't order a drink. Is she poor?)

edit: Never mind, figured it out. It's because she's an elf. She should wear a hat and maybe pick up the disguise skill.

Well, I was getting in way over my head GMing Exalted (Put together the campaign, but it wound up being more 'what I want to play' rather than 'what I want to GM,') took a break over Christmas hiatus, one of the players mentioned Shadowrun, I started rereading On the Run for S&Gs, and it kind of snowballed from there. Turns out all of them were either also Shadowrun players, or were interested.




Basically tell them that they're going to need to find their own contacts, then? Hmmm... That might work. Might work...




Well, something in one of the books mentioned the Plastic Jungles possibly having trouble with gangs raiding them. That might be a good piece of work for a proper introduction run, though it won't do much to help the character with debts pay them off, it might cut down on Lifestyle costs if they get in good with those guys.




That is twisted. Somehow, I love it. Bwahahahahaaah!




Hmmm. Day Job isn't a bad idea...




Okay, I'm confused. What does everybody mean when they're referring to "Furby?"




No, it doesn't. The player didn't want to spend the 5BP for it, and wanted to be an evolved computer virus anyway. Command works, but drones on their own are expensive pieces of target practice rated just below mages on the "shoot it first!" hierarchy.




The thing is, though, many of the players are experienced players. Junkyard Dawg and the one who accepted my challenge for someone to take the 25pt Amnesia Flaw are very old-hat at Shadowrun. Junkyard Dawg is also a player who always thinks big, no matter what game he's playing. His idea to make money raising critters and paracritters is probably the least grandiose idea I've ever heard out of him. Telling them to slow down wouldn't work, because they've already played out the wannabe from the gangs and the bounty hunter. I'm just glad one of them made an honest-to-goodness street samurai.




He picked a vet. The idea being that he could filter any paracritters he does raise through her to channels that aren't concerned with whether the UCAS approves of the creature's source, like corps and stuff, maybe gangs.



You got a smutty and accusatory mind, and I don't think I like it. Where did you get "sex queen" from what I wrote, anyway? Just because someone's a female Face doesn't mean they're a sex queen, in any way, shape, or form.

I should probably clarify: the junkyard isn't actually running as a junkyard anymore. It's a junkyard for the space and the fact that the smashed cars can be used to create barriers however and wherever you want them, but it's not accepting wrecks or selling out parts or acting as a chop shop or anything. It's more like he established a small zoological breeding facility in an old junkyard, and is more than happy to use all the wrecks as sources of metal and to create walls.




Yeah, he's gonna wind up taking Day Job for it, unless he winds up selling something truly spectacular, like a lion cub. (He actually bought a breeding pair of lions...) Still, making them self-promote. That's not a bad idea.




They seem well-set-up to take care of themselves, other than the fact that one of them is indebted to the corporation that sponsors his talismonger.




Yeah, he's paid for everything. I'm not so worried about raiding it, though the paracritters (and some of the regular critters) are big and tough would be potential complications for would-be raiders.






Because an awful lot of meets happen in relatively nice places. Get too nice (Infinity, for example, the meeting place for On the Run,) and they're actually deep enough into something approximating civilization that the bouncers and bartenders keep out and won't serve kids, respectively.

"Furby" tends to be the name people give the, oh hell, I can't remember the name for it, it's a little animatronic doll that sits on the shoulder of the user and acts as a lie-detector/stress analyser/psychologist and adds a few extra dice to the social roll pools.

Personally, I'd rip the guts out of one and have it slaved to my comlink setup with the various spyeyes installed in smartglasses, necklaces, etc Rather than wear such an obvious affront to a good negotiator.

Lets just say they're abused in social settings as much as Enchanced Artwinkulation was in SR3

The thought of using an Olfactory Booster to filter out the pheremones makes the science geek in me cringe, but that's also a valid RAW foil.
(Saint Slithney - When I mentioned the existance of such things, it was another reason our players stick to SR3:)

-Tir

More to come!

I don't actually have a problem with the Face using Tailored Pheremones - after all, that's what they're there for. I was more thinking about social/physical obstacles they'd face trying to take her along to do the face thing.

I usually give a fixer contact but hint that players may want to spend BP in upping the Loyalty

GM has final veto rights. Players pick crappy qualities like Hung Out to Dry because they figure its up to the GM to figure out how to bring all the players together, not them. In other words, not their problem.

This is almost as annoying as the Amnesia quality.... GRRRrrrr.... *shakes fist*.

- J.

Certainly an eclectic bunch of characters. A few thoughts on your comments/suggestions.

1) No Fixer contact
Someone suggested giving them all a free fixer contact, and you can do that if you want. I personally would make the PCs revise their Char sheets (as I would if they had forgotten to add a commlink and/or fake SIN), but then again I use the house rule where PCs get free CHAx2 contact points so they have no excuse not to take a (common) Connection 3 fixer.
Even if they've been Hung Out to Dry, the first thing they are going to do on arriving at a new town is find someone who can fix them up with jobs appropriate to their skills ...

2) AI PC
I too have no experience with this, so good luck. How will the AI travel with the group would be the $64,000 question to me - jumped into a drone, or piggybacking on a PC's commlink, or even living in their own commlink they ask one of the PCs to carry?

3) Paracritter trainer, Day Job and living in a junkyard
I don't allow Day Job or many of the other RC qualities in my game, but if you do make him take that quality, make sure the time constraints hurt him sometimes, and throw him some tricky business curveballs sometimes. Perhaps a local gang have an initiation of sending a new member in to mess with/be messed up by a paracritter of his, have a mafia guy coming around for "rent" and/or "tax". Definitely an interesting character, so try and tailor some adventures around his job - perhaps the vet contact asks him to save an exotic animal that is being treated cruelly by a rich owner etc.
I like Thorya's idea of a drug stash in the junkyard; it doesn't have to be a junkyard currently, perhaps the guy just got out of jail and wants what's his and hidden in a rusting car. Could be an interesting flip-side view of a run, first some guy and his mates try to break into the junkyard and the PCs don't know why etc etc.
I too would paper over any profits from his day business, perhaps to save bookkeeping you could say it pays his lifestyle but nothing more, perhaps you could give him the "salary" suggested in the Day Job quality. Entirely up to you, but I like my PCs to run because they need the money, and the Grand Theft ShadowRun arguement doesn't wash with me at all, but YMMV.

4) Elf girl
Not sure what you're worried about in terms of her size and apparent age. Disguise skill and nanopaste work wonders, Physical Mask is good as well (if there are no wards). Not all grown women are 6 feet tall y'know, and a bit of make-up can make a 16 year old look in her early 20's quite easily, especially if she has the face skills (i.e. confidence) to pull it off.

Oooh, I like that one. Actually, I like to snicker and joke that Hung Out to Dry gets you far more than the 10 BP it's worth - it gets you 10BP, and saves you however many you would've spent on contacts.



Well, the Street Samurai - ex-Japanacorp Cyber Samurai who must have fucked something up and got told by the company not to bother coming back - did make a new contact - the Bitter Old Man, aka the Junkyard Dawg. The other one was Hung Out to Dry immediately before the game. They'd better start getting contacts, though, yeah.




I suggested that she live on a Commlink one of the other PCs carried, but nope, it had to be a Nexus for her. How they settle that is up to them, now.




Ooooh, I like that one. You don't mind if I steal it, do you?




That's a good one, too. It doesn't actually have to be modern, since I figure this place hasn't been being used productively since the Glow City incident. Perhaps it's an enormous stash of old-school (IE, modern-day) drugs that a guy who wound up doing very hard time and somehow survived all the stuff that's happened since then gets out of prison and hires some thugs to come after? Even in 2072, a hundred and fifty kilos of cocaine or whatever has to be worth something, if only as a novelty to sell to the leonized old successful businessmen who did it back in the day. Charlie Sheen would probably buy it.



It does for me. If you think about the scale of the crimes they're committing, there had better be some significant dough being shoveled their way for it. You're not gonna commit multiple felonies for beer money, after all. Not if you're someone who can actually be called a Shadowrunner, instead of some schmuck punk ordinary criminal who gets pinched by the Star holding up a Stuffer Shack with a pissant light pistol for 250 in cash.



Her apparent age isn't 16, her apparent age is 13. She was born in 2048, was 13 when the Comet hit in '61 and picked up the Neoteny quality. It'll have to be a pretty damn good disguise to even pass her off as a Dwarf, which is why I was wondering about what kind of spells could make it easier for her appear to be one of the ubiquitous adult Elf Faces running in the Shadows...

Still, it could be a pretty good disguise, depending on how many modifiers they can stack.

We has a PC AI in my last campaign. He used another PC's PAN initially - the AI had Rootkit and wasn't detected until it took temporary control over the PAN, including the other PC's wired reflexes and skillwires, scaring the crap out of the other player! Haha. Eventually it moved into a dedicated commlink they carried around and *eventually* moved into human looking, bipedal drone and could move amoung metahumanity with relative ease. This actually worked a treat. If you use an AI NPC I think it could work well.

We also had an NPC human hacker on call, but I didn't want the players to use him for every random hacking job (the AI player turned up sporadically). So I made it so the NPC hacker would happily schedule jobs weeks in advance, preferred to work 9-5 only (was a family man basically and his family didn't know what he was doing, but they didn't know that). He would only do jobs over the Matrix and never face to face. OH and if you called outside hours it would be very sketchy if he'd answer the commlink or not (I'd roll 50/50). If he did, he would pillage them on his fee (triple hourly rate, two hour minimum - more if the caller pissed him off or it was interrupting family time). He was a very competent and skilled hacker but I made sure the PCs would bleed financially if they ever called on him. It really made them think "how badly do we need him? is there another way?".

I had an alternative they could use too. Their alternative NPC hacker was an young elf party animal with a shaky rep and drug habit (read: tempo). She was as skilled, but much cheaper, usually drop whatever she was doing for a job, but she was not always reliable (read: known for being high on a job, or just plain "forgetting"). They never used her in the end.

- J.

Paracritter Problem:

Day Job is a decent negative quality. Make him take it or totally write off the cost and benefits of the junkyard. Shadowrun is a game about shadowruns, not animal husbandry. If they want the money, take the negative quality and enjoy the extra cash it gives them and move on. Pretty much everything from there on out is just fluff. Fluff is fun, have at it, but don't reward it with huge amounts of cash or karma unless there is a serious challenge involved.

Speaking of challenge, the poster that suggested that the day job become a source of challenges and opposition is onto something. If they really want to make their We Bought a Zoo thing into a major part of the game, have it cause some serious problems. This can lead to some good RP and provide a lot of angles from which to deliver a Fixer to the team.

I'm just waiting for him to train the lions (he bought fragging lions) as attack animals and take them on runs to scare people. Not really a good idea anywhere the bad guys have any real amount of discipline, but gangers should probably be pretty damn intimidated by a guy with a couple of lions following him around. Though the animals he really trains for sale are Newfoundland dogs - a good general-purpose breed, really, big enough to train as guard dogs, friendly enough to train as companions and protective enough to train as service animals..

You're more than welcome to use Thorya's and my ideas, that's what this forum is and we are here for!

Don't want to sidetrack this thread with the great GrandTheft ShadowRun debate (there are a number of long threads about this already), but you gotta remember the supply demand dynamic, and the fact that your average shadowrun is only a few days work. Given the number of wars and disasters that have taken place, the shadows are awash with ex-soldiers, mercs and gangers with varying degrees of skill and a hunger for the cash to survive. Sure, high end assassinations and AAA corp runs should pay well, but smaller jobs not so much, at least until the PCs have built up a reputation for success and reliability. Like I said, YMMV ...

As to your elf I see what you mean, although disguise and Physical Mask should help her to look like a small but adult person.

She could also disguise herself as a human child (rather than an Elf child) and claim to be a gnome.

Only that a gnome is about as tall as a 2 year old human child

I'd go with the Gnome metavariant (RC) than the dwarf. That might be easier. Side note, she could always just pretend that one of the other runners is her brother and if the J asks about her age and EXP she should say something to the effect of "I'm much older than I look, I am sure you understand that not everything always is as it appears. Otherwise why the frag are you comming to us?" Getting into those places is another matter, but as long as she doesn't behave like a 13 year old she should be fine. Now if she had the appearance of a 5 to 8 year old then she'd have serious difficulties. The other angle of this though is she is easily reconizable.