So, I'm giving the players an easy-enough job to start off. One of them is going to have spent time at the Plastic Jungles, and so when the Jungles start to have their problems with gangs really starting to raid them, they decide they need to hire some outside talent.

Half of the job is that they want the player group to act basically as security consultants, now and in the future (in exchange for basically never having to paying for fresh fruit and vegetables again;) upgrading their security measures, training more of their members to act as defenders and guards, and so forth.

Their budget isn't tremendously large - 15,000, minus whatever the group themselves manage to take as their fee. (Their opening offer is 2.5K, which I expect the players will vigorously negotiate up.) Obviously they're going to want armaments, since a handful of Sandler TMPs and an old guy with a rifle aren't going to go far, even with a troll BowAdept backing them up. I expect they're probably going to go for AK-97s, since they're basically the cheapest assault rifle you can get and they're likely to be able to lay their hands on large quantities of them in a hurry just by driving to the Crime Mall in Puyallup.

Labor's not an issue, so any kind of earthworks should be simple, and the Jungles themselves have stocks of timber and scrap on-hand, as well as a big old flatbed that they can use to scavenge more scrap from the barrens if need-be.


So, what are my players likely to do with this kind of a situation? What would you do?

The number #1 issue isn't going to be guns or armor, it's going to be drugs.

Cram, Jazz, Kamikaze, Nitro, all are cheaper than 100, available in core, and huge boosts to a basic unaugmented human. Of course, how trustworthy a drug-dependent militia will be is a raging debate. To keep it simple in your game, I'd make it a Leadership roll. With a good enough leader drugs won't cause any lasting problems, if you're just randomly passing out kamikaze to people, there will be long term consequences.

Also, I'm assuming one of these security consultants took Instruction, in which case a lot will depend on what skills he can teach and how fast.

Grenades.
Cheap.
Easy.
Effective.

Preposterously cheap, alas. Automatic weapons are still very inexpensive, though. I agree with drugs, if you don't care about them.

Combat Chemicals!
CS and Pepper Punch can cripple enemies and are as cheap as 10 rounds.

Personally, I'd just kill all the gangs myself, though. Amateurs.

None of them have Instruction, which is going to be problematic. They won't be able to raise a serious militia in short order, but this is the barrens. Most of the people there above the age of 15 or so probably already have Firearms 1 as a baseline, so at least they won't be facing penalties.

As for drugs, that idea would be vetoed right off the bat. They're in to clean living in the Jungles, so that's not an option. Grenades are, of course. (And since ball games are a popular pasttime in the Jungles, they probably have more skill at Throwing hanging around than they do with firearms.)

The goal isn't to go to war all over the other guy's faces, though - if action needs to be taken outside, that's what the 'runners are for. They just want to present a hard enough target that the gang that has been giving them serious trouble and staging raids on them (as an initiation rite and as a way to get food) look elsewhere.

Basically, I wanted to mix in some stuff in an otherwise-simple "fuck up these guys we don't like" job for the Face and the guy with high technical skills to get some spotlight time, and I figure that everybody loves a good tower defense game.

Shadowrun TD

FUND IT!

Crate after crate of surplus russian bolt-action rifles. Also grenades, LOTS of grenades!

Grenades are dirt cheap, as i mentioned a bit upthread.
how much are they now? 20 to 50 nuyen a pop?

Grenade Bomb Vests and Drugs?

Hot, Knock-Off AK-97s bought in bulk?

Organization, then. Small groups [one experienced hand, one up-and-comer, a few newbies] monitoring neighborhoods, always in communication with the other groups. If the gang comes in, the first group to make contact just delays until other groups can get there: soon, a raid turns into a rout, and the gang's days of easy pickings are over. They could win, if they started a war, but that leaves them vulnerable elsewhere. As you say, you just have to look like a hard target, and you can do that with organization, a few armaments, and communication.

Also: rocket launchers. Typically fairly inexpensive [in terms of return-on-investment], and tremendously psychologically affecting. Also falling in this category would be miniguns and mortars, but these things are typically pretty expensive, and very likely to attract more attention than desired.

If this is pretty hardcore post-apocalyptic Barrens, then barricades and IEDs would definitely be in order, but not everyone's settings allow for this extreme. If it's time-sensitive - like, during the day, cops might be around, but at night, we need barricades - then buses and trucks are time-honored mobile defenses, and easily stealable.

It sounds as though manpower is an issue. I would work hard on solving that, in whatever way I could.

This Comic Book.

Getting them communicating shouldn't be too hard. It may be the barrens, but I reckon even the folk in the barrens have cheap commlinks, which should function well enough as walkie-talkies.



Hmmm. You may be on to something there. The price of two AK-97s at retail is the price of one AZT striker, though the missiles cost a lot per-unit. Still, the gang isn't exactly swimming in resources, either; losing just one of the technicals they use to stage diversionary runs would probably make them back off and think twice.



I reckon the cops don't go into Redmond unless trouble is happening near the tourist trap part of town. The Plastic Jungles are way out in the sticks, though, nearly up to the Rat's Nest, so nothing short of an air war erupting is going to get Knight Errant out there.



The Jungles actually have a significant manpower advantage over the average area gang. I reckon the 3LBs (the gang in question that I made up) have about 10-20 full members and 15-30 wannabes, and they don't tend to all congregate at any one spot. The raids' success has mostly been because of a particular tactical genius who got the bright idea to stage a diversion out front while the sneaky bastards among them cut through the fence out back and grab whatever they can/shoot a few people/dogs before leaving. Meanwhile, the Jungles themselves have between 175-200 able-bodied adults, depending on whether you want to give guns to the folks who've seen a few too many winters (or a few too few,) or not, with around 50 or so being too old or too young for that shit.

If I had a small budget and needed to arm lots of people, I'd go online to J&G Sales and get all the Warsaw Pact surplus weapons with cheap, steel cased ammo.

Think of how much fun it would be to implement online Warsaw Pact surplus weapons dealers in SR!

How big is the area they have to protect? Are any of the characters [or the locals] tech-savvy, even in the slightest?


Yeah, missiles ain't cheap: the hope is that you can use one or two, and make them think you have more. [I would never in a million years suggest that it's entirely possible to show someone the empty case of a disposable rocket launcher (quite inexpensive, and readily available) and bluff them into thinking it's still live.] If you do need to use more than a few, then you don't want a disposable launcher, you want a reusable one with inexpensive ammunition.

In Shadowrun, rockets and grenades aren't that different from each other: it's entirely possible your players will just want grenades.


Oh. I would kill them all, then. If I were four or five criminals helping protect a neighborhood against 10-20 full members, I'd just kill every single one of those full members in the most public and unpleasant way possible. You probably wouldn't have to get very far on that list before the problem disappeared.

I also cannot help but notice that if you kill all the gangers, you then have your guns AND their guns...

Yeah, consider the condition of the gang guns. Gangers aren't exactly known for good weapon's maintenance. On the flipside, spare parts if they're the same as yours.

Well, it's pretty large. There's like, ten greenhouses, each of them half a klick long by a klick and a half wide. It's all been fenced in already, Mad Max palisade-style, but that could use some shoring up. And of course, you preferably don't want your enemies thinking they can just walk up to the wall, so some kind of a moat might be in order...

Several of the players are tech savvy - there's an AI, a technomancer, a technical wiz-kid, and the Face has a commlink that's 4s across the board with 3 hacking and computer, so she's not too awful.




Hmmm. The picture of the AZT Striker suggests that it's actually more like a re-loadable one-shot rocket launcher than a true fire-and-toss panzerfaust. If it is disposable, you'd think that it would mention that it comes with its own rocket pre-loaded. Even so, 1,000 strikes me as a bit pricy for a true "fire-and-toss" rocket launcher. Frankly I'd say that shouldn't be more than 50 more than the rocket itself, since it's just a tube to direct the gas away with an electric firing mechanism and maybe a safety pin.




Yeah. I expect they might go for some grenades.




Yeah, true, but that smacks of wetwork. Also, one of the books mentioned that runners who make a habit of wiping out small gangs get that reputation and find doors closed to them. More importantly, if you just whack all the bangers today, you'll leave a power vacuum that will just result in a new bunch arising in the next few months. Also, the Jungles would prefer to avoid that kind of a resolution if it's at all possible, which is good, since the players themselves seem to be sticking to the ethos of lethal force only-if-absolutely-nessessary.

Still, it will come to that. At the very least, they're going to have to take out the Tactical Genius amongst the 3LBs and some of the sneakier members.

And that's a choice they may have to make.



Which, potentially a smart group can help fill with people they control. But you're quite correct this can be a seriously dangerous possibility.

The simplest way to arm them is going to be:

AK-97, Tripod, and Gas-Vent 2. That's enough recoil compensation for an ordinary dude to use the AK properly, and is only 1000Y each. Getting them smartgun systems and glasses is another 925Y, which may or may not be worth it, depending on how much they suck - it's well worth that to get people out of the critical glitch danger range.

Armor! Adding armor is huge, and it's not super expensive. First, it greatly increases the odds of your side having injuries rather than deaths (which if you care about long-term, matters a lot and increases morale) and making your soldiers take an extra shot to drop is significant. For 3 body dudes, Urban Explorer Jumpsuit is the most cost-efficient armor at 500Y for 6/6.

Grenades. Specifically, a 200Y gas mask and a few chemical gas grenades. Pepper Punch grenades are cheap (25Y each) and more effective than anything you can get for reasonable prices (Ringu and Warp are better but are way, way too expensive for this). The gas mask is important because grenades scatter like whoa and you are giving them to semi-trained soldiers.

Other useful guns: the Remington 990 is 550Y and a step down in effectiveness from the AK-97 with a tripod and gas vents. If you're not able to afford enough AK kits, the Remingtons are much better than off-the-shelf AKs because they do 1 point more damage and have built-in RC 1.

Hrm...

I'm thinking that the best way to defend a static point from ganger scum like this is probably to get enough stacking modifiers to make them unable to do anything useful and will leave them easy pickings for even semi-trained militia. You make a good point with the gas masks and Pepper Punch grenades. I also have to wonder what a system that acts like a pre-installed wall-mounted Flash Pak that dazzles anyone trying to look at it without protective eyeware would look like in terms of cost.

Wait, what? Let's do the math on that. A building five hundred meters by fifteen hundred meters has (nominally) 750,000 (yes, seven hundred and fifty thousand) square meters of floor space. Ten of them add up to seven and a half million, leaving thirty-seven thousand, five hundred (37,500) square meters worth of plants to tend every day for each of two hundred people. Are these numbers coming out of a published adventure or did you make them up yourself?

Hrm... I see your point, those numbers may be excessive. Here, hang on...

Here's the official description, out of Seattle 2072, relevant to area:
"... Acres of dirty grayish and tattered canopies of bioplastic ... A series of massive greenhouses in northwestern Redmond, near Echo Lake. The tent-like buildings were several kilometers across ..."

If anything, I might have lowballed the size of each jungle, though I probably highballed the number thereof.


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v323/Sha...sticJungles.png

This is Echo Lake today, with a line around the area that I reckon the Jungles probably stand on, as a low figure, though it could easily be larger.

[e]Evidently Dumpshock brooks no image tags. Fixed.

This confuses me. Clearly your team is not right for the job. If you're going to pull this off at all, you're going to need Street Samurai. Several of them. In fact, you're probably going to need 7 Street Samurai. Preferably a mix of real characters, not just hardened cybered up killers, but hardened cybered up killers with hearts of gold each with a distinctive set of skills or style.

Edit: Though even with this team, you can expect that 3 or 4 of them will probably not make it through this mission. You're a cruel GM.

If you don't have problems with wework, kill the current leader, make it look like an accident, preferably an embarrassing one. When the fighting among the lieutenants is over and a new leader has emerged, contact him and prove to him that you did indeed near effortlessly offed his predecessor and tell him that unless he ceases to hit a number of specific targets among them the greenhouses he will suffer a similar ignoble fate. I'm pretty sure he will see reason, otherwise repeat step one.

As a twist on that tactic, offer the new leader money, equipment etc. if the gang does jobs for you. Now not only have you saved the greenhouses, you have a gang in your pocket.

@thorya: lol

The size of the buildings is not necessarily unbelievable; this being 2072, even (what we would consider) advanced building materials might be cheap enough to scrounge. 175-200 people to tend seven and a half square kilometers of foliage is definitely unbelievable, however. I think the lowest reasonable number is twenty-five hundred people, each tending a three thousand-square meter plot; and even that assumes widespread mechanical assistance or heavy use of draft animals. If all work is done by hand, however, you're looking at ten thousand (750m^2 per person) to fifteen thousand (500m^2 per person) farmhands. The Plastic Jungles can be anywhere from a very small to a middling town, but a community of 200 adults it ain't.

Edit: And that's just the people actually tending the crops. Add in all the support they need, plus the businesses that will have grown up around the farms, and you can increase my estimates by 50% to 100%. Basically, there's no way a 20-person gang is a serious threat to these people.

The group does have a Sammy, actually, and a damn good one, along with two mages, one of whom is more than happy to summon up enough spirits to wipe out the gang by themselves.


The Lieutenants are actually brothers (as in born of the same mother and father,) so there wouldn't be any of that; the next-oldest brother takes over when the leader is whacked, and then they'd be out for revenge.

I mean, whacking the leader is a valid strategy, but you'd best plan to whack him and his whole family at once if you want to send the gang into a spiral of cannibalistic power struggles. This is certainly an option, depending on how much explosives they feel like laying their hands on.




Hmmmm. You're right. At those numbers, you'd pretty much need the Spikes or the Cutters to take exceptional to the existence of the Plastic Jungles to give them trouble enough to warrant hiring Shadowrunners, and if that were the case, they'd have both the resources and the need to hire experienced prime runners, not a gang of newbies.

How does it work if all of the Jungles aren't exactly tended full time? Say, three of the jungles only have tree farming going on, and only need a person to swing by every few weeks or so to check on things, and many of the rest are allowed to grow half-wild, with most of the community basically focused in one Jungle and getting food from another? Also, those plots are big enough that you could actually drive tractors and such through them, making them more easily-tended by a small number of people.


I'm guessing that I'm going to have to reduce the number of Jungles by a lot, though, either way. Maybe to about three or so?

OK, if only one greenhouse is actually tended full-time, that gives each of 200 farmhands 3750m^2 to tend; easily done if they actually have the tractors you mentioned. Hell, with machines the manpower requirement (obviously) goes way down. You might be able to get away with only half the adults actually doing the farming and the other half taking care of the myriad other tasks in the community. But yes, while there may be ten Jungles all told, 200 people cannot tend all of them. Three (one under full agriculture, a second half-wild, and a tree farm) sounds reasonable.

Hrm...

Tanegar, how do the numbers start to look if you throw in mystical support? Lots of shamans among the group, not only in the adult range but also in the "too old for manual labor" range as well, who can summon up spirits to help with making things go smoothly and all? Say, 15-25 spellcasting-summoning types?

(Also, aside, I wonder what a Farming Adept could do. Farm him the shit out of some land, I expect.)

Also, the population of the Jungles is nearly all metahuman, so if they have a lot of orks and trolls, I imagine that would have some effect on the amount of land any one farmer could tend, if only out of sheer endurance and the willingness to work longer hours than a typical dinural schedule would allow.

Fifteen magicians is getting back into the realms of "you need a small army to threaten them" territory. A passel of Beast and Air spirits will make short work of virtually any mundane opposition. I quite like the notion of a farming adept, for flavor purposes. Maybe he's the head farmer. A high proportion of orks and trolls in the population will probably make a difference, but nothing outlandish: twenty, maybe thirty percent.

With access to magic and spirits they can do some very nasty things to the gangers - summon a few low force spirits with power like fear or confusion can really make the gangers easy preys. Accident power can also be nasty for low-powered gangers.

Something else nobody mentionned : the humble sandbag and trenches (what you fill the bagss with has to come from somewhere, you may as well make it from somewhere usefull). A few sandbagged bunkers (preferably with top cover against grenades and an open face toward the fallback position) can do wonders for the defender's survivability.

If someone is skilled with explosives, cook some ANFO (ammonium nitrate - a cheap and common fertlizer - and fuel oil) and plant some remote-controled landmines and boobytraps outside the defender's perimeter. Things like picking a bucket, filling the bottom half wit the anfo, the upper half with scrap metal, put a sealed lid on it. Bury that horizontal and when it fires you get a dragon-sized shotgun blast.

Ooh, homemade claymore! Damn, I wish I had a game to play in so I could use all these lovely ideas.

Hmmm. It might be that their shamans almost exclusively follow traditions of nonviolence - good for support stuff, good for working, healing, living on the land, but not much help in a fight...

And yeah, I'm totally going to make one of them a Farming Adept.

Having just bought 50 Ares Alphas, 130 rounds of EX-EX per gun, 300x HE grenades and 300x CS grenades, I can say through experience ammunition is - and always will be - the most expensive component of arming groups of people.

- J.

[irony]That sibling rivalry got out of hand is a totally new concept and never happened before...[/irony]*cough* Cain, Abel*cough*

Now if the leader and his two brothers are so close and a play for power among the remaining two is absolutely out of the question, this might be a piece of information that the runners can obtain. Then they could either plant the seed of suspicion among the brothers or simply eliminate all three.

I wasn't making fun of your group. I was making a reference to the movie Seven Samurai. It has a very similar plot to this adventure.

Five brothers, actually. (Orks.) And they're pretty damn devoted to one another. I mean, that's possible, but it wouldn't be too hard for the boss to restore order with a leadership check and have everybody start comparing notes.




Oh, heh... I... Totally did not get that. My bad.

http://youtu.be/HqtTPxWzjk4

Play it in the background and see if anyone picks it up.

That's, like, eight square kilometers, which I see you're re-thinking, but assuming that as a worst-case scenario, communications could be a problem if there's not already a wireless network there, and if everyone has cheap commlinks. As a player, I'd definitely look at the minimum Signal of the devices I'm dealing with, look at the Signal Rating Table on SR41 p222, and do the math from there. I'd either keep my groups at distances from each other calculated never to isolate anyone from our homemade mesh [complicated and distracting and fragile] or buy a bunch of high-ish Signal commlinks and seed the neighborhood with them, making my own pre-planned mesh [slightly more costly].

Information is an unbelievable force multiplier. The difference between sending a squad of people out to patrol an area and finding out when they don't come home that night that something's going on, and seeing instantly that they're under attack and being able to coordinate between them and the other groups in their area, is an asset of indescribable utility. If they had to give up half their weapons in exchange for the ability to put a camera and a microphone on every soldier, it'd be a bargain.


Whichever of them is best suited to it [presumably the AI] should concentrate on overwatch. Whatever drones they have, whatever cameras they can buy, whatever commlinks people have, the AI should monitor, and feed the important bits of that information to the Leader, whomever that should happen to be, as well as funneling the important bits to other individuals and groups. This spider should not make the strategic decisions, because despite its situational awareness, it's really very busy: the Leader should almost always be a separate individual.


I couldn't speak to that. I was just speaking conceptually, in real life, about the utility of disposable launchers: I'd not translated that into specific SR gear requirements yet. That said, without getting into how wacky the Striker [or the Arbelast II] are, what your guys want is an M79B1 LAW [Arsenal p32].

Given these guys are going to have pretty cruddy firearms scores, you're going to have to play to their strengths; there's lots of them, they know the terrain, and they can spray lots of bullets.

So I'd equip them all with detection and communications equipment, as well as signal flares and such. If nothing else, they can warn your PCs about approaching trouble.

I'd do drugs, but I understand that's not an option. They can do some basic building, so set them to work reinforcing 'pillboxes' and defensible locations so at least they'll live for a while in a firefight. Then give them autofire weapons. Suppressive fire, especially en masse, is probably their best option for actually hitting something (or at least slowing that something down). Maybe buy a few skills in forward observer and rig up a mortar somewhere the PCs can operate. Get them some long-reach melee weapons. If they mob an elemental, they can still take it down (if it consents to fighting). Unfortunately, I can't think of much that'll make them effective against a sneaky mage or a vehicle.

edit: Maybe design some fire-and-forget jammers?

First off,
Killing the Gangs isnt really an option. Even if it looks like one.
U kill them and 2weeks later theres a new one, but the farmers dont have any money left.
So equip them and prepare em or bargain with the gangs seem to me as the only options.

Plan A
I would bargain with them and make the gang into a semi prof gang train em up and let them protect the farmers in exchange the get food and alcohol
(fruits and such are easy to turn into alc and good alc is rare in SR)
Only thing theres left to do is stay in contact with farmers and gang to make sure they dont enslave em to get more Alc.

if the gangs dont want to cooperate
Plan B
i would spy a little on the gangs, what are theyre options, what weapons have they, if.. what vehicles and such.
after that setting up an trainings plan for the farmers, after work they receive Melee and shooting training.
And building teams, preferred with 1 troll or 2 orks and some norms. if possible an mage or spirit which only does defensive/healing

also dont forget to find out who are the deckers in their community, there are always deckers or at least wannebes
make them overwatch(protect) the communication and coordinate them

then do some shopping
cheap armor should do the job, most gangs dont own huge firepower
(as said before jumpsuits are great and cheap, i would go for used armor from runners)
a few ballistic shields, mobile cover is always great and with an Troll sized shield theres enough cover for an whole team
(relative cheap and give huge advantage)
Grenades (as said before cheap as hell and great)

Fireweapons,
really depends on what is aviable, reliable and cheap in munition
i would go for sporting rifles and pumpguns, also used
preferable all the same fabricate, so u only have to train all of em on one weapon
which leads to specialization and they can use spare parts from broken weapons and all the munition.


So imagine one Troll (or two orks) guarding his team with a ballistic shield, while holding a fucking huge axe
while one or two dudes cover u in a rain of HE grenades
and two norms shoot at ya while remaining in cover of the shield.
and an spirit guards them or shaman backs them up

if i was a ganger i would search easier prey ^^

Somethimes I just think I am too evil. But the hell with it.

You need to control the gangs with minimal effort.

Kidnap Gangleaders, their wifes and childeren. Install crainial bombs in everyone and tell them that they do not want you to get upset with them at any time in the futur.

This is the most fun, if you get this plan with half of the group, while the other half is discussing the loss of humanity if picking up the fight.

You come back and tell them, there is no need to fight anymore and everybody will life peacfully side by side.

"They say, evil prevails if good men fail to act, what they ought to say is: EVIL PREVAILS!"

Ahh

forgot about surveillance, if youre team has a rigger take all the standart cams (every rigger changes first the cams) and build a surveillance grid.
Even if youre team doesnt have an rigger, contact one he will be glad to make some nuyens and u have cheap cams

Only an option if u have the money and plan on using the gang later
Crans are way to costly for simple gangs..
But if u would do that with say an Knight Errant team

Mhm, I thought they were cheaper than 2k. (Since datajack and cybereyes were down to 500)

The expense of cranial bombs aside, Shadowrun has plenty of mind control magic. Plus, we've been using people's loved ones against them without cranial bombs for a while: you can just start cutting the fingers off kids or whatever fits with the flavor of the campaign.

If you're really set on using cranial bombs, you only have to buy one. If everyone has the incision, and you blow one person's head off in front of the others, that will often do the trick.

But cyberware scanners are so cheap.