QUOTE (Tymeaus Jalynsfein @ Mar 30 2012, 02:34 PM)
Divinatory magic can make all of your carefully planned obscurity go away.And pray to whatever deity you hold holy that NO ONE left any material traces anywhere. There are enough ways to track you down given the scope of your crimes. Shadowrunners do not survive long by performing runs of this magnitude. You only exist at the suffrance of the Corps. Irritate them enough, make it worth their while to track you down (and you have), and they WILL catch you.
The inability to affect someone without a link and the inability to view through time make most divination less than useful.
Not really. There are no physical links, no sympathetic or symbolic links, the astral has been cleansed in the area, all of the gear used and not extracted with us can't be traced to us (drones came from a stolen UCAS shipment that UCAS doesn't know they were supposed to get, explosives were created by one of our team, the Demolishers used in the lab were lifted from a construction company, etc.).
We didn't irritate any of the Mega's. NeoNet will quietly find out that Radiant was trying to scam them, Mitsuhama ordered the run, and no other corp is really involved. Shadowrunners also only survive so long as they (as individuals) do not become linked to their crimes. And we go out of our way to avoid that.
QUOTE (thorya @ Mar 30 2012, 03:13 PM)
But you left massive amounts of evidence. No one's going to overlook a corp getting wiped out, but even ignoring all the magical ways of finding you. You have some record of financial transactions related to Radiant and so have something to gain in their failure, so someone looking for motivation will find that eventually, even if it was all done with fake SINs.
It's a corp of less than 300 people with assets worth under a billion nuyen.
Over a thousand separate financial transactions each done through nearly a dozen cutouts without any of the cutouts even aware that the transactions occurred, with agents that were set to erase every trace of those transactions and lay is false trails that look fully legit before erasing themselves as we performed the run. With all the gear used on our end physically destroyed.
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You killed everyone in the building,but there are still surveillance systems, a swarm of flyspies (it's unclear to me how they used "small amounts of plastic explosives" since by RAW anything much less than a kilo is pretty much harmless and anything that big would probably have drawn attention from office workers, even if a swarm of flyspies didn't, but I digress) and explosives that can be traced even if they were stolen to another possible set of leads, Mitsuhama must be the most trusting corporation in the world if they don't bother to do any checking on the people they hire for illegal activities, your fixer knows it was you, there is a data trail leading back to you in creating the rumors about the fake deal to begin with, there is surveillance that could have captured your fleeing vehicle, since you left a big wrecked sign at your hide out that says "We were here and hiding evidence!" there is surveillance that could have spotted you fleeing, there are people that could have noticed you hiding in your warehouse and practicing paramilitary raids for a month before the job and that sort of thing tends to stick with people, the guy that sets you up with mil spec armor on a monthly basis probably remembers you or would recognize his hardware being used in a corporate raid. I'm sure there are others. There is no such thing as a perfect crime.
There were less than a dozen people in the building when we hit it, the rest of the people were at home in their beds asleep. The explosives were created by us and can't be traced, the fly spies, assuming that a mega felt like giving access to it's records would be shown as delivered to UCAS while UCAS's records would never show the drones being ordered in the first place. Mitsuhama, like every mega in the world, has a habit of refusing to work with anyone that they can trace on the theory that if they can do so then whoever they want the runners to hit can do so as well. Our fixer wasn't involved. We contacted a Mitsuhama Johnson as an information source that he has used before (and has a standing contract with to provide new information) and informed him that NeoNET thought that the deal with Radiant would go through and could potentially be worth billions (Radiant supposedly having an entirely new approach to Firewall design). That Johnson has worked with our team before (thinking us a team native to Tokyo) and we are his go team team for delicate operations. He hired us to get the Radiant database and destroy the company (along with ensuring that NeoNET didn't get a copy).
The rumors were created using multiple cut outs and a lot of dupes, any trace on them dead-ends at the comlinks of random civilians that supposedly started them, or at PR outfits with known links to NeoNET or Radiant.
All of the surveillance cameras around Radiant's site had already been hacked and were under our control. As far as GridGuide is concerned our vehicle got on the road at the exact same place and time it always did, 5 blocks from the site of the hit.
The warehouse we based out of didn't have neighbors to see us. The practice runs were done entirely in VR, there is no way for anyone else to notice them. The warehouse was already slated for demolition by a construction company for the day of the raid and it went off exactly on schedule. Even if you managed to trace to the Warehouse, all you will find is a perfectly legitimate order from an Ares subsidiary that owned the warehouse to destroy it.
The armor had no visual way to identify it, if LS had managed to get one of the sets we used then they could have possibly traced it but those sets don't exist anymore. The arms dealer that supplied it is SK and they are used to filling yearly orders to one of our shell companies that they think is a black market resaler.
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I'll admit that you seem to have planned it more than you originally presented, but the fact is nothing is full proof. Also, if you goal was simply to ruin the company why did you kill everyone as well as destroying at least 100,000 nuyen of stolen drones? You could have done that without the mass murder and without drawing a shit load of attention to yourself. If killing all those people was important to you, you could have staged a gas leak or something that could pass for an accident.
What I meant by "careful planning" in most games I've played is: when possible, the team likes to make it look like they were not there at all instead of leaving a giant calling card of a couple hundred bodies and a swathe of wreckage behind them.
Another quick question, was this thread actually about where jobs come from or did you want to brag about how awesome you guys are at planning? (I'm not actually trying to make fun of you, I'm seriously trying to figure it out.)
The full list of plans, preparations, and contingencies is pages and pages long. The GM has flat out said that he would kill us if we did any run more risky than knocking over a Stuffer Shack without careful planning and prep work. And it was nearly 500,000 nuyen of stolen drones. The goal wasn't just to ruin the company, it was to capture it's tech and ensure that NeoNET didn't get a copy of it. The only way to do that second bit was to kill the people who developed the tech. And if we wanted to make parts of our cover story hold then we needed to make sure that no one who could dispute those parts were left alive.
As for using a gas leak, those aren't precise or guaranteed enough. And we didn't draw attention to ourselves, without claiming credit or the like it's simply an event that occurred.
Not being there at all is by far the preferred approach, it doesn't work when the mission requires the physical destruction of a database inside of a secure vault or the removal of everyone who may have a bit of information. Then careful planning becomes ensuring that you can't be linked to the crime.
Several things. 1) Where jobs tend to come from. 2) Seeing if other people do things like the LS officer job. 3) talking about the job we pulled. 4) trying to get others to share stories of jobs that they have pulled both as inspiration and as cautionary tales.
QUOTE (Tanegar @ Mar 30 2012, 03:46 PM)
This. If they want badly enough to find you, they will find you; and 234 bodies plus however many millions of lost nuyen make for a lot of motivation.
There's also no such thing as a person who "doesn't exist." Everyone talks to someone. Everyone does business with someone. Somewhere out there, somebody knows who orchestrated the Radiant Labs Massacre, and that person will absolutely sell you out when Knight Errant waves a cool million nuyen under their nose.
No, people don't just get to "find you". They actually have to have some way to do that. Unless you go to extreme measures though, anyone with the resources of a mega corp will find you if they look. And in this case, no one except LS cares. And all LS cares about is finding someone to blame it on so that they don't look bad, faking up some fall guys is cheaper and easier than actually finding who is responsible so it's what they do.
Sure, everyone talks to someone. The question is who they think they are talking to. And in this case, Mitsuhama is the only ones who know were to even start looking. And they are firmly convinced that it is a team of 5 residents of the Tokyo sprawl, residents that don't actually exist. And the thing is that the Johnson knows that the only people who knew about the run were us and him, that means that if it leaks to LS then we will know who leaked it and who ordered the hit. That isn't worth a few million as a sell out because it makes enemies and burns a team that has been useful in the past and will liekly continue to be useful in the future.
QUOTE (Ryu @ Mar 30 2012, 04:35 PM)
Very effective, a bit evil. I like. As the GM I´d now try to sell back "true friendship" to your chars.
We almost exclusively do requested runs, which we plan ourselves. We are close to street level right now, so operations of that size have no chance to succeed.
For your run: At least the powers that be at Radiant should know that there are no real negotiations. The successful execution of all employees at the same time seems both impossible to pull off and excessive.Where did you aquire the Flyspies? How where they controlled, how where they infiltrated? (Trace) Where did you aquire the explosives? (Trace) Who re-coded the database, and how much time was available? (Trace) Was your technical talent pool large enough to pick everything valuable from the database? (MAYBE at least MCT isn´t angry)
True friendship?
Yah, someone answering the question.
Ah but Radiant knows that negotiations were going on, as does NeoNET. Both sides were actually negotiating with our face. That was honestly the trickiest bit of the operation. Most of the rest of this is answered earlier in the post, but the database was reencoded by our hacker. And he is one of the best in the world. Time wise, he constructed most of the database in advance and then once we had the real database he added in enough data to make the new database look legitimate.
And MCT and NeoNET were both pleased. The first because they got the database (even if it didn't contain what it was rumored to contain) and NeoNET because the investigation into Radiant Labs destruction showed that it was all a big scam targeted at NeoNET.
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A corporate/law enforcement/secret service counterstrike starting with pressure put on your groups contacts could be fun for that style of play.
Oh, if anyone could find our team to target us then we would be dead. The laundry list of our crimes is enough that just serving a single day in jail for every capital offense that we have committed would see us in jail for the rest of our lives, even for the Elf. Hell, our list of warcrimes and acts of war runs something like 5 pages. There is a reason we burn identities and aliases pretty much constantly.