
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.