Ultimately, its up to you how you do it. If it makes sense in your version of SR, then it works. I tend to play things more realistic, but if your going for more cinematic than your way will work just fine.

Cool, if it works it works.

I (and my group) came to Shadowrun from Exalted. Some of them are first-time Shadowrun players, even, and we're all exclusively Exalted players.

I enacted a lot of cinematic rules, including some I made myself, such as porting Stunts almost whole from Exalted.


So, yeah. Cinematic is fine by me. I love the imagery of a massive container vessel at full steam with a crane coming online, winching a crate off the top of a stack and lowering it into the hold of a comparatively tiny vessel riding just ahead of the container ship's bow wake, all set to the tune of Roll Tide, in the name of profit and smuggling.

That works, and if the ship is lightly crewed, then there's no reason they can't all be in the take so you wouldn't have to worry about them squeelin. But that does mean that they may be more watchful and distrustful of people sneaking on the boat...so thats something you could use. They may not be Vory, but they may still be tied to underworld happenings. Maybe the captain has a hacker in his pocket at the corporate office and makes sure all the smuggling type stuff gets sent on his boat and cleans up the logs so no-one asks questions. If the players doing their legwork find this out, then they'll know they have to be on the ship to make the change and prevent the hacker from changing it back. And the deckhands may also be packing since they are a little seedy.

And that sub mentioned by froggie, even if its designed to only use its loading mechanism while docked (which i imagine it is else it would take on a lot of water) With being able to take on 10 containers, it should have plenty of space for mechanisms to allow it to take that water in during loading and pump it back out after the hatch is sealed.

Which in the end is the great thing about Shadowrun, there are so many different ways to skin a devil rat.

People have asked, so, here it is.

This is my plan outline for the engagement on the ship.

This should be a cakewalk if they can keep it subtle. None of the drones or people who might possibly be entitled to a perception check are likely to be able to beat a Concealment-powered Spirit and Ninja actively using Infiltration to be subtle. If not, well...

If the AI gets cocky and says "I'm in a hurry, I'm just gonna Hack on the Fly," there's a good chance that system is going to see her before she gets on. If that happens, she's in trouble; the security spider is rocking a milspec commlink with rating 5-7 programs, so that's going to be a far more fair fight than she'd like. With the IC fighting on her side, it's a losing battle. And the Ninja is stealthy, but if he gets spotted, he'd better hope they knock him out with those acoustic stun-guns before they get around to deploying the lethal rail-turrets, because they're packing lasers. The wizard isn't any great shakes at spellcasting (I haven't determined what spells she should have, yet; any suggestions,) but she's murderous on the Astral with that F5 WF Katana; she can wipe out the Ninja's ride home if she twigs to the fact that they infiltrated by having a Spirit carry them over a hundred miles of open ocean.

I really wish this forum had a headdesk emoticon.

The AI managed to jack-booger everything before the Ninja even got his boots on the ship - hell, off the ground! She spent three hours exploiting through the ship's firewalls, snuck aboard, looked around. I told her that there was evidence that someone else had had their way with the ship's Nexus, again and again, but she found the manifest and altered it without incident.

Then she analyzed the traces of prior hacks and determined that they had all been the work of one hacker, who had left herself an Administrator account.

What does she do?

[12:11] * Dissonance downgrades the illicit admin account one step.

What.
The.
Christ. *headdesk bonk*

Not only does she go tampering with something she has no reason to tamper with, she does a half-assed job of it, and she didn't even analyze the account. It was trapped with the same data-bomb that everything else was: it alerted the security hacker. She hit the general alert button and logged on, armed for bear and under stealth, and both her and the IC started running Analyze to find the intruder.

They all failed, spectacularly so. So much so that I actually asked if she'd rigged the dicebot. At this point, she could have erased the logs and slipped away; the hacker might have presumed she was just another security hacker from the company testing her security set-up, and decided to merely demote her hacked account to the level she already has.

[12:27] <Dissonance> *roll 15d6c5e Black hammerin' that spider.

..... *gonk*

So, she blows her hard-earned stealth with the Matrix equivalent of a long burst of fire from a heavy machine gun, cybercombat ensues. The security spider starts to get the upper hand, landing two unopposed hits with Attack on the AI, then the AI whips out Black Hammer and pulls a godlike roll, putting the spider at 7 boxes of Physical damage.

The Spider responds by cutting power to the ship's transmitters, dumping the AI right out of the node. She didn't erase any logs, so they know exactly what she changed and can change it right back.

So, to recap:

She nearly flatlined a security spider who's onboard the ship.
The ship is on high alert, and since they know it was an attempt to hijack a container (which would necessitate the RFID chips being changed,) they know that part of the plan would have involved being boarded. Between that and the fact that their spider got in a good Analyze on the AI and knows it was an AI, they're taking no chances with their 200,000,000 piece of Ares Macrotechnology property, and flying a Firewatch Team out to guard the ship, with a super-hacker on the team. (Abilities of 5 and he's slinging a Transys Cybernaut with program ratings to match.) So basically, fucking with the ship is no longer an option and they know it.


So now they're back to Plan A, hijacking the Vory's truck. And thanks to that stunt, the captain of the ship is going to call the person who put the container on his ship and tell him someone stole it. So now the Vory aren't just being paranoid: they know someone has the details of the transfer, and are making a grab for it.


At this point, the only explanation for the Run not being completely fucked that I can think of is that the Vory simply do not have unlimited soldiers, and they still have to prevent Knight Errant from tweaking to what they're doing, so they have to have most of their guys in Tacoma. There won't be any human error going on, though, and they're going to be facing as many Spirits as the mage can bind.

Why don't the Vory just let the container cool off in the bonded, and heavily secured, customs warehouse for a few weeks? They obviously have a plan to get it through customs, so why not just park it there without the final clearance? That happens all the time, you just get to pay storage fees. And no, you don't want to try to sneak into a customs warehouse. It's full of very expensive stuff belonging to literally everyone, and it's really painful trying to explain how you lost a shipment to the customer and then explaining to your boss how he has to pay for it.

They're not taking it through Customs. That's kind of the point of smuggling.

The container's being transferred at sea to a smuggling submarine which is going to slip by the harbor patrol with the load, surface in Everett where a small band of Vory will meet it with a semi-trailer flatbed. The crane on the submarine will pull it out and put it on the flatbed, and they'll drive across town. Meanwhile all this is going on, the eyes of Knight Errant will on the docks at Tacoma, because they were tipped off the Vory were bringing something hot in, and the Vory have been going to great lengths to look extra-shady in the docks at Tacoma, 35 miles away.

Umm, you said there is a Firewatch team on the ship. I somehow think the transfer to a sub plan won't work now. If the Vory don't have a plan B they are screwed. And so are the players. ...

kzt, that depends on just how straight-laced the Firewatch team is. Their job is, after all, to guard the ship, not interfere in its activities. After all, it is a scheduled stop, and it's not actually illegal out beyond territorial waters. Shady yes, but not illegal.

Of course, the Vory don't have a Plan B. So really, I guess it's up to your interpretation of things.

The Firewatch team being on the way might mean that the captain decides to cut his losses, cover his ass and dump the container at sea immediately, telling the client that the container's too hot and he's gotta get it off his ship. In that case, it's a marginal win for the group anyway, since the Ancients would be happy enough if the thing never makes it to the Vory.

On the other hand, my players are getting itchy, especially the ninja. He wants to kill something.



[e]Still, I'm annoyed, because the AI doesn't know the meaning of the word 'subtlety,' let alone professionalism. She has so many ridiculous programs and dice pools that when she waltzes onto a node, she just wants to start throwing huge heaping dice-pools at everything and shout "My house, bitch!" She uses Black Hammer when Edit would be the smarter choice, among other things.

I think I may just have the captain dump the cargo at sea and call this one a wash. The players can still trade for guns, since the Ancients will be satisfied if the Vory just get denied the cargo.

Firewatch is Knight's personal baby, even more than KE as a whole. And "Questions Will be Asked" when KE control notices that the ship is stopped and the drones providing cover and surveillance shows a sub surfacing. Would this possibly amount to "out of place, unusual, or suspicious" activity?

And remember info the Firewatch team gathers goes into the same company that run the PD for Seattle, quite possibly to the same intel fusion cell.

The KE-Firewatch team is coming out of somewhere in CalFree, not Seattle, so they probably don't report directly to the same guys.


Also, I was figuring that this sort of thing frankly wasn't "out-of-place, unusual, or suspicious" activity. Good old Sixth World corruption at work.


That said... Yeah. I think the captain's just gonna make like Han Solo and dump the cargo at sea. Time to really drive home to my players (the AI's player in particular) that actions have consequences, and picking fights you don't need to pick is a bad idea.

Ok, assuming the Capt and some (most likely) were bribed. Yeah I'd dump the container, but could he. I assume it is on the top level of the container ship. Okay we had some rough seas and it fell off (it happens). THe Vory will be pissed, but there is not much they can do other than kill the captain and crew and their bloodline as a message.

However, with this being an Ares ship, and a firewatch comming on board they would probably want to know why that containers was so improtant and investigate it. THe captain and the others might get mind-probed on this one-which means the gig is up. Alternatively the Vory decide they have to come on board and take out the firewatch team (and the rest of the crew)-if you want to introduce Kane to the game you could have fun with this. Then they get the logs and find out someone was fragging with them. And tell the players via a scream sheet that an Ares Firewatch team and entire cargo vessel was sunk. Also, the Ancients won't pay them a dime cause theres no proof that the container was destroyed nor that the Vory didn't recover it. Remember the Vory play for keeps and taking out a firewatch team (while difficult) is not beyond their means.

I assure you, taking out the crew of this ship, even without the Firewatch team aboard, is well outside the means of the Vory. This ship is rather heavily defended to the tune of 55 macroscale combat drones aboard, 25 of which are armed with lasers, and 200 Dragonflies. Add on the Firewatch team (who will have an expert magician and his spirits with them) and the Vory wouldn't stand a chance in hell. It would take cruise missiles, torpedoes from an attack submarine, thor shots, or combat aircraft.

Even the Vory don't get to play with that kind of stuff. And if they did, Ares would declare open season on them everywhere in the world. Remember, this is a 200,000,000 post-panamax container ship you're talking about, with a full load of cargo which the loss of would likely leave Ares on the hook for another fifty million in damage control with their clients. You don't pick a fight with Ares Macrotechnology to the tune of a quarter of a billion like that and live. Like I've said before, they dropped orbital weapons on Art Dankwalther for less.


As for the Captain and the crew, nobody's getting mind-probed.

As for the Ancients, they're not paying the group a single for this job anyway. The deal was that if they stole the nanofax, they'd run two hundred or so AK-147s and their ammunition through in tagged feedstock to get the group the guns they wanted to arm the farmers of the Plastic Jungles. They never seriously expected them to get it, though, and even said outright they'd be pleased if the Vory simply failed to get their hands on it. So if it gets dumped, that crate's going to be tossed overboard with the crane, then holed several times, and that mother's going to sleep with Davey Jones.

It's very likely that Ares will think the AI was after getting the nanofac for it's personal use, Deus-like (and light).

But if the captain decides to ptich the container overboard, the decker will have to tamper the logs to make sure there's no trace - maybe point that the theft attempt being aimed at another container.

Oh and if the container's dumped, there's still a good chance for the vory to still recover it if has been made waterproof and buoyant. By teh time teh firewatch team will be on teh ship, the container will be several miles behind and there's no reason for them to notice it. which means the submarine on teh Vory's payroll can quietly go catch it, especially if teh captain sends them a word to say where he dumped it. sure it's going to drift a bit, but you can use the wind and current charts to get close enough to find it with an active sonar or the like.

The submarine is not "on the Vory's payroll," for the last time, it's a smuggler! They don't go looking for lost cargo; they meet a ship at a specified time and date, take aboard a cargo container, check that the tags on it (if any) match what they were told to get, and take it, unopened, back to port. If anything goes wrong, they're not going an extra inch, let alone hundreds of miles down the western coast of North America, to find it.

I think what he means is, if its been hired, its on the vory payroll. They may not be vory themselves, but the vory probably doesn't use a whole lot of different smuggling teams that run out of a sub. Which means that the vory is going to be hiring the same team over and over again...Han Solo didn't work for Jaba, but he was one of his regular smugglers, thus he had ties to the Hutt. And if they are a smugglers, then they arn't going to want to spend all their fuel money to go meet a ship and find nothing there and they certainly arn't gonna want to go chasing after a random drifting container. But they may not have a choice. As you said, they were hired by the vory and they are the ones supposed to run the last leg. If they never show up or show up without the "package" then they're the ones that the vory are gonna start hunting down, whether its their fault or not. They could always say that the ship was never there, but since they are not vory themselves the russians won't trust them and will probably think their lying and sold it to someone.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the captain doesn't dump the container, firewatch or no, and maybe the sub never finds it...instead a few weeks down the road the PCs hear that a guerrilla force has suddenly come upon some serious hardware and is now a major destabilizing force in the region and a burnt out sub was found drifting off the coast of seattle, all the crew dead or missing.

The Vory don't have that much influence in Seattle. They're still newcomers, and Knight Errant is pressing them hard because they have a (not undeserved) reputation as being the most violent and overt syndicate. If they just wipe out a smuggling team because the big ship dumped the cargo, they're going to find the Shadows aligning largely against them.

They don't have the muscle[*], manpower[*], or money to deal with getting the cold shoulder from the Shadow community, and the Yaks and Mafia gearing up to take their Tacoma territory back, and Knight Errant pressing down on them. So when the smuggler says the ship never showed up to the rendezvous and didn't give them the cargo, they haven't really got any choice but to accept it.

Besides, the smugglers aren't stupid. They're going to skip town for a while, go smuggle somewhere else. They're not being paid enough to tolerate the Vory taking this kind of thing out on them.



*That's actually why they wanted the Nanofax. The Vory weren't going to monetize it, they were going to start gearing up and putting an AK-147 in the hands of street ganger, banger, thug, and ghetto kid, they conscripted. They wanted that Nanofax to gear up for war so they could push more on the Yaks and Mafia. The ancients were just going to monetize it, and probably move it out of the country, somewhere the Vory have even less influence, like Cardiff or somewhere.

by 'on the Vory's payroll', I didn't mean on a permanent basis, but at least for that particular job, they're paid by the Vory to get the container. They're already in the same area as the ship. which means that if the container is fitted to float and keep it's content intact, the Vory can fork some extra cash and ask the smuggler to look for the container and fish it if it's dumper oveboard.

Between the matrix attack and the arrival of the Firewatch team, the captain can contact the Vory, explain the problem and they can come with the 'overboard now and fish later' scheme.

Since the smuggler is out there specificaly to get the container for the Vory, he's got no pressing commitment and can perfectly do it if he's paids dor is time and effort. Not as a favor or to avoid reprisals, but simply for cash. It also gives him a chance to show he can do some extras beyond merely going to point A, load stuff and dump it at point B, which can open extra business opportunities.

I'm dying to know why the Vory was shipping this on an Ares ship. It's much more likely that they'd use a Wuxing or Evo subsidiary. Or a fishing vessel. Not that it makes much difference, but it does change the nature of who the Runners are screwing with. Evo would probably send a bioengeneered metahuman strike force, for example, and Wuxing's backup would have a more powerful mage than a hacker.

The best way to decide what happens next is to start filling in your NPC's. We are saying a lot of "The Vory" do this and "The Captain" does this. Instead of trying to figure out what an organization might do, fill out your NPC's history and motivation. Why did he become a captain? What are his plans for the future? How does this shipment affect them? How important is it to him? What resources does he have to fulfill his will? That will make scripting the rest of the scene easier, especially given your Runner's talent for doing things you don't expect. Give him a name and a personality.

For example if the captain dumps the cargo, does he feel like he is shirking his responsibilities or protecting his crew? Would his family or career be in jeopardy if he does this? Does he feel pride in his corporation, and confidence that their strike team would be able to handle whatever threat might have emerged on his ship? Is he arrogant and ambitious, or cautious and detail-oriented? Flesh out your important NPCs and you'll be able to react to whatever your runners throw at you.

It would probably also be helpful to flesh out the security hacker, the person who is actually in charge of the cargo (probably NOT the captain), the person in charge of non-automated security on the ship, some of the Captain and Crew of the sub, the Vory in charge of initiating the shipment and the Vory in charge of receiving and installing it. It sounds like a lot of work but don't worry; if it winds up not being needed you can always recycle your characters!

It's really all unnecessary anymore. I plotted quite a lot for the ship, and now the players aren't going to get to see it because the frigging AI can't seem to do anything smart.

The Captain's dumping his load because it's too hot for him and the Firewatch team would probably look at him funny if he offloaded it to the smuggler's sub. He could probably get away with it, but he might not, and he won't take that risk, with himself or his crew, especially since one of them damn near got her brains leaked out of her ears.

I'm beginning to suspect I'm really, really bad at GMing. Every time things go way the hell cattywompus, I improvise, and when I improvise, things go weird.


So, here's the deal. I decided that the captain of the cargo ship had, indeed, dumped the cargo. The Ancients lieutenant who took a shine to the human mage came by to deliver this personally, since you don't really want to transmit a recorded call between Vory over the Matrix, lest they find out and, at the very least, secure their calls better. The Vory were going with a two-pronged approach; the Seattle Vory were sending their hired smuggler (at additional fee, no doubt) south to look for it in the ocean, while their contact in Los Angeles hired someone to look for it as well. They all had the position of the boat when it dumped the cargo, more or less, and their man from L.A. had a head-start. (The smuggler is still going to be a while sailing down.)

They sent a Spirit who Searched for it, and found it after four hours, ten minutes. I'd rolled privately to determine how far it had been swept towards shore, and determined that it had traveled more kilometers toward shore than it was kilometers from shore. So now the thing is on a beach on the Lost Coast (an actual part of California, not the the one being shelled with headcrab artillery by the Combine.)

My players, being the eternally-springing optimists they are, decided that this was, in fact, absolutely fantastic news. After I talked them down from their idea to have a Spirit of Man Possess the nanofax and then turn into an alligator which would be hustled by another spirit's Movement power and then motorboat its way all the way back to Seattle, they decided they had to get down there and grab it. The Ancients agreed to smuggle them and their gear immediately, because they still want to have a horse in this race, but they don't "do" wilderness. Once my players land in San Fransisco, it's up to them to get a boat big enough to travel 450 miles (both ways,) someone who can sail it, and head on out there.

The smart course of action, naturally, would be to hire a local 'Runner with a boat. Knowing them, they're probably going to do something crazy like steal one from a marina and use a possession Spirit to possess it and drive it.

They don't have to get the Nanofax back to Seattle, though. The Ancients can take possession of it anywhere there is "civilization," which basically means if they just get the sucker to a highway, the Ancients can pull up in a semi-trailer to take it from them.


Still, it looks like it's going to be a race. They're going to have to deal with the guys from L.A., whom are definitely going to be freelancers - that is, other 'Runners - who are probably going to show up after they've started unloading the cargo from its container. They're also in deep wilderness, so an encounter with wild animals wouldn't go amiss. They're only about 130 miles from Hestaby's lair, and in pristine wilderness, so not even a dracoform is entirely out-of-the-question, but I was thinking more along the lines of a pair of Boobrie or maybe some Lesser Rocs.


And if that wasn't crazy enough, the group is getting split up, because neither the AI nor the cyber ninja showed up for today's game, and the ninja probably wouldn't have wanted to entrust the Ancients with a complete list of his ware, anyway. I need to figure out something to do with that because the Sammie is getting absolutely restless and wants to kill something.



[e]Oh, and as an amusing aside, the human mage that the elf go-ganger took a shine too, has been acting completely awkward around her, either he doesn't take a hint or he's nervous, since she made it clear she wanted to do impure things to him at the breakfast table. (She stayed while they were Searching, because she was curious as hell.) Then he wound up making her attraction to him go through the roof because he scared the piss out of her (figuratively;) by joking around with the other mage about whether or not to pack the nuke. Then he walked past her with a pile of scrap levitated and Physical Masked into an obvious, scary nuke.

So now an elf biker is determined to make him make her his joytoy, and she's not remotely subtle about it, pulling a punch for the heart-stopping scare that was the nuke, expressing her opinion of his mental stability (or lack thereof,) then slamming him against a wall and kissing him. Boy plays his cards right, he could make a free contact. Plays them wrong, and... Well, hell hath no fury and all that.

Sounds like crazy fun.

Well, here's how it's shaping up. The players are going to San Fran to find a boat, probably. I figure they could hire a helicopter to do the job for five grand as well, but that wouldn't be much fun, would it, so I'm trying to push the boat. There's going to be options, which will be economical and not-so economical or practical. Hiring a chopper would be boring and cost them five grand which Mr. Johnson won't authorize, since he's wondering why the fuck they're in California hiring helicopters when he hired them to beef up his security. They could acquire the use of an SC Otter for a week for an investment of 2,500 , but it's a bare-boat charter, meaning that they'll have to supply and provision the voyage themselves (to the tune of another 500 ,) and one of them will have to pilot it, which is problematic because the DrivingAdept has only Piloting scores of 1, and I don't care how high the mage boosts your agility, that makes you not competent to sail a tiny boat up and down 200 miles of coastline.

I'm going to try to push them towards a thematic option that should get them a devoted, loyal friend. (So watch, they're going to hijack a boat or something stupid.) A sea captain of a fishing trawler has been laid up in San Fran for two months because his daughter is very ill, requiring daily shots of Cure Disease to keep going. She could be cured with a powerful ritual casting of it, but he just can't locate a convenient benevolent circle of altruistic magicians of the same tradition and with Cure Disease. He's at the point where he's going to sell his ship to buy the ritual, but as it happens, the players know a group of ritual spellcasters, not of the same tradition, but possessing metamagics that make that a moot point. And they're in Seattle.

So, offer this man a way to cure his daughter and keep his boat at the same time, and he'd put to sea and sail you to Seattle by way of the River Styx if you asked him to, to say nothing of stopping on a coastline along the way and picking up some contraband. None of my player's mages know Cure Disease, which is a complication, but not an impossible one. One of their contacts from Seattle has a contact in San Fran is a magician who has Cure Disease and wouldn't mind relocating to Seattle to be closer to the other contact, or they could ask one of the magicians from the Jungles to summon a Spirit of Man every day and send it out with the Innate Spell (Cure Disease) power to keep the girl going.



Of course, prepping for this has lead to some... Limitations in the vehicle rules becoming apparent, primarily the assumption that every vehicle has an operating time of six hours before it needs to refuel. This simply isn't true even for a lot of groundcraft, to say nothing of a blue-water ship which can put to sea for weeks or months on end. They're also laughably sparse in terms of describing boats - for example, the Morgan Cutlass, described as a patrol boat. Is it a small naval vessel, or is it something like a harbor patrol boat. I think it has to be the latter, since it only has two machine guns, but there's no info on it, nothing on the number of crew you need to operate it, no stats on its actual size or anything.

Is there some sourcebook I missed which I has expanded rules and descriptions on ships and boats at sea? Something the size of a harbor patrol boat wouldn't last long if the players decide to turn the trawler west and head out into the open ocean. I'm setting up for a nice, cinematic, asymmetrical engagement where the players are the ones in the position of being on the hardened, but slow, target.



One thing is bugging me, though. This encounter will be taking place in green water off the coast of the California Free State. Technically, they haven't even done anything illegal - salvage some flotsam for themselves. That said flotsam was a highly-illegal military nanofax is probably not a fact that they or the other 'runners would want to divulge.

What happens if they radio an SOS to the CalFree navy? They are, after all, a ship in distress being attacked by a pirate, and if they're on the trawler, there's not even any reason to wonder why - any pirate would love to grab a trawler and sell in an East Asian port where questions aren't asked, or even just board her to loot the sea chest.

So, if they did radio an SOS, would CalFree be likely to send help, maybe dispatch some naval aviation helicopters or even jets, or send a fast patrol cutter to intercept? I don't want to just say "no, nobody can help you," if - big if - they decide to try calling for help from the authorities.

The vehicle rules in SR4 seem clearly inferior to SR3s. Though the SR3 vehicle descriptions never managed to agree with other parts of the text, the fact that you couldn't fit into the docwagon helos the people that docwagon was supposed to have on the helo was just the most obvious issue. The SR4 "solution" was to not provide any stats for them to screw up.

Do they have appropriate contacts?

My impression is the the military is a bit of joke, considering that they have been either steamrollered or hammered by the Tir (before a dragon helped), the IJM and the Pueblo. Though there used to be an Ares military unit working for CalFree, no idea now. This doesn't mean that they can't show up, but people with severely limited resources usually prioritize.

Someone could also call for KE, since there should be a KE presence in SF, given the Ares involvement in defending the valley from the Japanese. Though range etc might be a big deal.

Remember, it was decades ago that the Californians got steamrolled by Tir Tangire and the IJM and Pueblo. Even then, I find it kind of questionable, since the number of armed fighting forces in California would be huge, and somehow I doubt that UCAS troops who have lived in, and many of whom have grown up in, California, would follow an order to just abandon them.

But hey, Shadowrun. The Native Americans somehow being both numerous enough to seize large tracts of the country, and angry enough to break away to do so, and somehow competent enough to not collapse completely, stretches credulity far more and yet it still stands. Nevertheless, Shadowrun has, on a whole, evolved from the insanity of the earlier editions into something that, well, seems more sane; the insanity still stands and influences things forward, but now things get real.

So, I figure, California has to have a pretty damn good standing military. As previously mentioned, Pueblo, Tir T, Aztechnology and Imperial Japan have their eyes on them. Frankly, even Hestaby liking California and keeping all her stuff there wouldn't stop them if they wanted to take it that bad, and California is large enough and has enough of everything in it that it's pretty much the only U.S. state that actually could stand on its own as a nation.

So I figure their military, especially their maritime patrols, since they'd get so much of their GNP from trade and the sea, are no joke.

Here's my run document, by the way.

I swear to Sol Invictus, Odin and Wolf, (Attorneys at Law), if they pull something ridiculous and harebrained that causes this to be completely invalidated, I will weep and tell them they need to come up with someone who can GM better than I can.

I've ran some runs that made me feel like this by the end. My ultimate response was "Fine! You want to play D&D? Fine. Here's a military bunker infested with ghouls. Have fun with your 'dungeon crawl'." Of course they ran in guns blazing, and of course one of them absolutely *had* to charge the troll ghoul with their monofiliment whip. Once that player, 2 rounds later, started working on their new character...things started being handled a bit more seriously/cautiously all around.

Remember, before you throw up your hands and yell "I Quit!", try just handing them a heavy dose of shadowrun reality first.

~R~

I'm still convinced that ghouls should be able to shoot guns with iron sights, because the sights block the astral too.

Well, if they manage to tangle with the pirates without killing them all, the pirates will tell the Vory who they are. Then they're going to get to have fun making port in a small dock which just happens to be infested with the same Vory soldiers and drones which were slated to escort the shipment on land.

Actually, the only one of the ghouls in the barracks (who the runners were, shockingly, smart enough to chat with rather than try to kill) was a gun adept with melee hardened weapon focus pistols. He pretty much just aimed his shiny bit at the shiny bit that represented your head and pulled the trigger. Sure the guns couldn't shoot anyone *on* the astral plane, but if he can see them, and he pulls the trigger, the bullet's still gonna go where it's aimed.


~R~

IIRC most of the UCAS pacific Navy relocated to Seattle prior to the split. Sure some of the soldiers and navy personnel were from CA, they might have stayed. They might have left as well. In any event, the CA national guard has not fared well post split. They lost Sandiego to the Aztechs, Norther CA to the Tir, and LA to the Peublo (eventually). They have no navy to speak of (relied on the now not present Japanese navy), have an entire coast (the Big Sur) infested by a few pirate gangs. The military is split on 3 hostile Nations (2 of which are serious threats and I'm sure the PCC border is a bit contentious now as well. Independence did not treat CA well.

<How I'd play it>

Also most of their trade goes through San Fransisco, so if they have any navy, it would be located there. Most likely patrol boats, and maybe a few destroyers. No submarines or carriers. They may run into one of the patrol craft or more likley one of the pirate gangs in the big sur. Also, you could have a Kraken show up or something just to give the group a little bit of a critter fight. Or some Merrow who have decided that the party might make an interesting dinner guest.

CalFree is less of a nation than a confederation of 5 states. Not much of a military; if there was a distress call, and it was answered, it would probably be by a Knight Errant patrol. Possibly a Patrol Boat, but just as likely a VTOL. It's also just as likely that pirates will come to the site of a distress call; there are a lot of them off the coast of CalFree, and they monitor the Trix for just that kind of traffic. Also likely that at least one of the scavengers has a DocWagon contract; scavenging off the coast of CalFree is dangerous work, and the government there is notoriously unreliable.