The SR group I regularly play with has the vast majority of our runs being things chosen by the group and not commissioned by anyone else, maybe one in five runs is commissioned (if that).

For example, our game last night consisted of using a previously established hack into Lone Star's personnel files and carefully analyzing them before choosing a Lieutenant as our mark. After that we hacked his, his wife's, and his two kids comlinks, broke into his house and bugged it, bugged his cop car and his families personal vehicles, hacked the children's private schools network and uploaded an agent to keep an eye on things, and then spent a week studying the family to find the best way to befriend them. It turned out that the LS Lieutenant (Matherson is his name) liked to rock climb at a local climbing gym and our face just "happened" to run into him there. Over the next 3 weeks our face carefully wormed his way into Matherson's confidence and the man is now quite convinced that he has found a buddy and friend who is a high level, freelance, facilitator that travels alot for his work.

While the face was doing that the rest of the party was creating a large collection of fabricated evidence that proves that Matherson was taking bribes from Knight Errant for privileged Lone Star information.

It was all to establish a contact that could prove useful in the future.

At the same time we were carefully manipulating the news media and public opinion with the rumor that Radiant Labs (a high end software R&D outfit) was going to be bought out by NeoNet and had a bleeding edge Firewall program in development that would likely be worth hundreds of millions. Even both of the companies involved thought they were in secret talks with one another. That is when we shorted Radiant Labs, got ourselves hired by Mitsuhama to destroy Radiant and provide them with a copy of Radiant's technical database. Using FlySpy's equipped with small amounts of plastic explosives we simultaneously assassinated all 234 employees of Radiant Labs, raided their R&D facility for a full copy of their database, and then unleashed several applications of Demolisher nanites to completely destroy Radiant's entire computer system. We then faked a copy of the tech database so that it didn't actually include anything particularly valuable and altered the comlink of Radiant's CEO to show that they whole thing was basically just a scam and that while they had some nifty programs they weren't anything special. In the end we made about a hundred K from the short sale after expenses and another two hundred K from Mitsuhama for delivering the faked tech database while also making off with the real database.

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Most of our runs are that kind of thing, where we decide what to hit, carefully plan the run (to the point of running full dress rehearsals in a VR simulation of the entire run), and then carry it out. These runs are either for money or to lay the ground work for future activities (making contacts, pre hacking databases that may be useful in the future, setting up infrastructure around the sprawl for future runs, etc.).

---
So how many of your runs are self planned and how many are requests from others? And any interesting stories or ideas from runs of yours?

How do you stay off of law enforcement radar? The mass murder of 234 people is not the sort of thing that even the most dedicated spin doctor can just wish away; that's a lot of families who want answers, and who want to see the guilty parties brought to justice, to say nothing of Radiant's investors who probably lost millions of nuyen when you destroyed the company. I'd say you just made a large number of pretty damned powerful enemies.

Indeed... I was wondering the same thing myself...

Your going rate is 1250 nuyen a murder, I think at those prices you would be able to find lots of steady work and not need to plan anything yourselves. With Gangers. With corps. With an old lady in the barrens that wants to keep those damn kids off her lawn. With the homeless guy on the corner that thinks the light poles are alien spies.

I think my group has a different understanding of "carefully planning" a run.

Most of the jobs in our game come from Johnsons.

Upon further reflection, I think the OP's group just made themselves Public Enemies #1 through #X, X being the number of PCs. They have committed an act of terrorism (which is how it will doubtless be defined in the media and by law enforcement) comparable to the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings (202 deaths), the 1998 US Embassy bombings (224 deaths), and the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing (270 deaths), among others, and half again as deadly as the Oklahoma City bombing (168 deaths). This is the kind of crime that kindles massive public outrage and results in elite task forces being formed, and rewards offered in the millions of nuyen for information leading to the capture or termination of the guilty parties.

Depending on whether the Radiant Labs offices were located on extraterritorial property or not, the PCs may "only" have to worry about Radiant's parent megacorp's internal security/law enforcement and possibly a spec-ops wetwork team or two, or they may have to worry about all that, plus the same again from Knight Errant (or whoever the local police contractor is). Radiant's parent corporation cannot be seen to be indifferent to so many deaths, plus the loss of all those trained workers and other assets, and so has a very strong motivation to want the PCs, dead or alive. Knight Errant cannot be seen to be indifferent to such a massive crime, lest they jeopardize their contract with the Seattle government, so they also have a strong motive to hunt the PCs zealously.

Bottom line: If I were Emperor Tippy's GM, I'd make the entire rest of the campaign about the fallout from this one operation. He and his cohorts have placed themselves at the top of some very powerful people's hit lists.

By not existing. Our GM doesn't just let people find you, they actually have to do the leg work and when you plan well enough and meticulously enough that doesn't get them very far.


No, our going rate is a few hundred thousand per run. Want us to assassinate a single target? That's at least a hundred K. Want us to remove an entire gang? That's around 500K. Removing a corps worth of civilians? Two hundred k.


So what's your understanding of "carefully planning" then?


We are Shadowrunners, we are all already terrorists. As for being public enemies, that requires that the police can trace who did it.


Who said Radiant had a parent corp? They didn't, they were a small independent corp.


You only make it onto those lists if they know that you exist. No one outside of our team knows that *we* pulled the job. Mitsuhama knows that someone did but they don't know who they hired, in point of fact they think they hired a team local to Tokyo that has done good work for them in the past.

We needed to find every point of exposure and negate it if we wanted to survive and live, and that's what we did.

Or do your GM's just force enemies to find you even when they have no place to even start looking, much less a way to succeed? The assassinations were carried out by Fly-Spies stolen from a UCAS shipment 3 months earlier and piloted by agents. The agents used were deliberately coded to not match the normal style or choices of our hacker. The furthest you can trace on that end is to where the Fly-Spies were stolen. The raid on the labs was done after we owned their security systems and by a team in sealed, milspec, armor that was already the recipients of a genewipe. The vehicle that we used and the base that we operated out of for this run, along with every bit of gear involved in it, was disposed of by Demolishers afterwords.

We are runners, if we can be traced or tracked then we have fucked up spectacularly and the GM should come down on us like the hammer of god. What's going to happen is that after 2 weeks of trying Lone Star's top brass is going to realize that they have nothing, grab a dozen SINless off the streets, wire them up with Move-By-Wires and a few other bits of ware, equip them with milspec armor and weapons, set them up in a base in the barrens, and then come down on them like the hammer of god. After a shootout that results in one dead LS officer and the deaths of all of the opposition LS will find some datafiles on sight linking this group definitively to the Radiant job and then make this public. They have to catch someone and when they have no idea who to catch it's easier and cheaper to just frame some random people as responsible and deal with them.

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.

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. 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.

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.)

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.


This, as well. Level of planning aside, this was an amateurishly wasteful operation.

Sounds like whatever the motives for the post, Tippy had fun playing this out. We all like talking about our games

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)

A corporate/law enforcement/secret service counterstrike starting with pressure put on your groups contacts could be fun for that style of play.

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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.

KE has entire teams of professional combat mages who can and do cast effective combat magic in -6 to -8 mana levels. I'd expect that they can do rituals too. Plus every government and AAA has a team of high level ritual mages who constitute a magical version of MAD.

The only thing that not having a really great link does make it take longer before the target suddenly dies.

Incorrect, you have to have a link in the first place to target the ritual. It's the first limit of sorcerey. If you lack a material link you need a sympathetic link. Unless the object is a favored or often handled object then a sympathic link is good for a maximum of 30 minutes (Essence x 5 minutes). Symbolic links require that the creator already know who they are trying to target, they can't create one for "The runner who hit our building." or even for "The dude wearing the milspec armor in this picture.".

Anywhere on those pages of notes, did it say, "Sell the stolen property for 60% or more of its face value and make more profit than this entire job combined with the bonus of not having to destroy everything we own. With the additional bonus of still being able to make money on a stock short when everyone realizes that the rumors about Radiant are crap."

I'm curious. How have you gotten protection against a resonance realm search from a technomancer? It isn't beyond the means of a large corporation to hire a technomancer to recover invaluable data. From what you have described, your weakest point seems to be matrix trails, since they can never be completely erased.

Really? Can you show where in the rules it actually says that? Oh, and you most certainly can create a link from a murder implement to the murderer.

Selling the drones at market prices would have made us approximately 500K. to split 8 ways.

The rumors weren't crap, Radiant did have a bleeding edge Firewall program that was worth a billion nuyen easily. The negotiations with NeoNET were only crap in so far as neither side was negotiating with who they thought they were.

Instead we made out with approximately a hundred thousand nuyen each from the rise in stock prices, a hundred thousand nuyen each from the short on the stock prices, got an R&D labs entire technical database including some bleeding edge stuff, got MCT's primary Johnson to appreciate our information source more (and continue paying his retainer), got him happier with the alias team that he knows us as and thus more likely to hirer us in the future, and got him to eat the expenses for the run (including 400K for drones, which is more than we could have probably fenced them for).

Sure, in the end the net worth of each of us runners only went up by 125,000 nuyen; but that doesn't change the fact that we picked up enough cash to replace all that destroyed gear. Most of it will end up reinvested into gear for future runs but it will be spent on things that we will find more useful then a few hundred drones.

Which part?
Limits on Sorcery page 159 of Street Magic
Sympathetic Links page 29 of Street Magic.

The only viable links to a living target are:
1) A tissue sample from the target.
2) A Favored Object from the target, which is "which the target frequently wears or carries on his person and have significant emotional value to him. A dead lover’s locket, a scrap of a childhood security blanket tucked into a pocket, and similar objects fit into this category."
3) An Oft-Handled Object from the target, which is "frequently worn clothing (a daily-worn company uniform), a familiar weapon (a katana used since training days), a favorite pen, and other such
objects.".
4) A Recently Handled Object from the target, which are objects that have been used by the target for at least 5 minutes and "can only be used for a number of minutes equal to twice the target’s Essence."
5) A Symbolic Link to the target, which is "a symbolic
link: a picture, sculpture, or doll bearing symbolic likeness
to the target."

Please tell me which area you think a disposable drone goes into.


Our Technomancer does a resonance realm search to erase data about us every month and after the run. That is in addition to the data already being practically non existent, false trails being laid down, actively working to remove data, etc.

Sure, an AAA mega might be able to find a Technomancer that can do the search and recover enough information to track us down but it would be easier to carry out Crash 3.0 or bring down Zurich Orbital. There is maybe one Technomancer on the planet with the skills to do it. To use Unwireds analogy for a RRS, it's like finding a single leaf on a single tree in an entire forest.

And well, whoever had that kind of Technomancer is far more likely to be using him to, say, find out what Damien Knight has stored on his personal com link.

Those are examples, they are hardly an exhaustive list. It certainly never says what you think it does. The concept is that you are creating, from essentially nothing, a symbolic connection between an item and the target. So if you have, or create, an object that can be said to have a connection to the target an appropriately skilled magician can use that to create a symbolic link. It doesn't matter it it is a drawing, a picture from a camera, an wax doll, a murder weapon or even the picture of a crime scene. It's essentially converting an idea into something concrete. That's why it's hard to do.

That would be a house rule. The rules list only three possible symbolic links; a picture, a sculpture, or a doll. And creating any of them requires that you *already* know the target. You can't create a symbolic link to "The dude who hacked my comlink".

Ritual magic is such a MAD weapon because virtually everyone important is a public figure, they are easy to qualify as a target. Want to off Damien Knight? Grab his picture off the Matrix, make a Symbolic Link at Threshold 16, and then cast a ritual at a -6 dice pool to incinerate him.

I guess that makes sense at your table. It's not the type of game I would be interested in, but whatever floats your boat. I assumed when you laid out your original, we made 300K off this awesome job we planned that it was total, not per team member. It still seems extravagantly wasteful and obvious for my taste. Not saying your wrong for playing that way, just doesn't sound fun. It sounds like Epic levels in that other game.

I've never run or played in a game where a Johnson would shell out 400K+ for equipment on top of 200K in pay and get nothing in return and be happy about it or where there are billion nuyen firewall programs lying around in facilities where the team's hacker can simply "own the security". Or where NeoNET could have ongoing negotiations with a company and never contact the company directly. I don't even know what the team's motivation is at that point in the game. If you're throwing a million nuyen worth of equipment out like yesterday's soy burger wrapper, why haven't you taken over a small island somewhere and retired? Or decided that it's time to put some Dragon's in their place and taken on one of the big ones?

With a 4 person team a Johnson should be laying out at least fifty thousand per run just on expenses. A rating 6 SIN costs you 6K per person and it's burned after the run. That right there is 24K in costs. Then you are looking at 500 per day for a safehouse, that's another 3K if the run takes 6 days. Burn a metalink each and that's another 400. Then you have licenses, vehicles, drones, guns, bullets, etc. If you are running in the big leagues then you are looking at another 30K per runner for a genetic reprint after the run.

Burning a million on gear and three months of time on planning and preparation isn't unlikely for a run that is picking up a hundred K per runner. And a hundred K is 10 months of a high lifestyle. You can also expect, if you are lucky, a job every 3 months.

That is what being a prime time runner for and against megacorps means in 2070.

As for our hacker owning the security, he's pretty much the best hacker and programmer on the planet. Our technomancer is, again, one of the best on the planet. Our mages are, again, two of the best magic users on the planet and have some of the most powerful foci around. Every single one of the runners on our team could walk into any mega and be pulling down a million or more in salary every year. As a group we play SR with the players being as skilled and rare as the skill and attribute descriptions indicate. Have a 7 in a skill? Then you are one of the two or three best people in that area who have ever lived, and in your area of specialization you are the best who has ever lived.

All of our characters are that good. It's what that BP, Karma, ware, and gear mean. And that means that we only get called in for the "impossible" jobs.

As for why we run, the end goal of our team is to create or take over a megacorp. And we are very slowly getting there. Take the Radiant Labs database that we got, we are probably going to sell it through our tech company to NeoNET for a good chunk of shares.

NeoNET was talking with the company. That's one of the side effects of owning someones com link, redirecting the calls to your own.

In my opinion the cold-blooded planning of a 234 person mass murder is likely to be enough to generate at least some sort of symbolic link between the characters and the deed. It's also likely that some of the go-between and fixers used will be a bit embarassed by the scale of the action. Getting possibly linked with a database theft is one thing. With and act of mass terrorism another kettle of fishes, and likely to have them quite nervous with their new status as 'possibly flagged as evidence to be disposed of'. Depending on what they wre told, they may also feel they've been betrayed by the association with mass murder and have their loyalty toward the PCs challenged.

There's also some little problems in that several person both in Mitsuhama and whoever the real database was sold have at least an idea of who they were dealing with - and if the rumors surfaces that the real database has been sold ever reaches Mitsuhama"s ears, they're going to be mightily peeved. They also have a keen interest in making sure the PCs never, ever surface (well, except as floating corpses), as they're an embarassing link to a mass murder.

I also find it odd that neither EVO nor the target ever found something odd in negotiating a deal with peoples who acutally didn't exist - that sort of deals usually gets negociated face-to-face, and the target's is small enough that NeoNET at least would know exactly who they should deal with. Especially when rumors start leaking all over the place about the deal, they would want to find the leak and plug it. Or do their own counter-rumor campaign.
Last but not least, the scale of the attack is likely to generate a frenzy of activity by the cops and various alphabet soup agencies that will be a serious inconvenience to just about every organised crime group in the area, costing them a hefty penny. hope they don't ever find whom they owe the bill to.

Oh and one last comment : how do the characters feel about the deed - killing someone in self defense or shooting a security guard is one thing, a cold-blooded murder on that scale is another. Especially since most of the victims will be average Joe and Janes offcie workers, programmers and janitors.

That opinion is utterly incorrect under the rules. You can't create a symbolic link without knowing who you want to target.


Who said we made any use of go between's and fixers?


No, only one person in Mitsuhama knows who he hired. The corp doesn't want to know, the whole point is deniability and cutouts. MCT also knew what they were getting, they wanted everyone involved with the project dead so that they could be sure that NeoNET didn't get their hands on the people. And the database is never going to be sold, bits and pieces of it that have been thoroughly reworked are going to be sold by one of our many fully legitimate companies (in this case our own technical R&D lab)


NeoNET not EVO. It was face to face meetings with the people that were supposed to be meeting. As far as NeoNET was concerned they were meeting with Radiant's agent and talking with the CEO of Radiant fairly often (twice in person). In point of fact they were meeting with and talking with our face. Radiant was fully convinced that they were talking with NeoNET's agent, again it was our face. Neither side really minded the rumors since they were helpful to both sides stock prices.


For about a week. Once LS realizes that they can't find and capture the people responsible before the media frenzy dies down they will go and grab a dozen SINless people from the Barrens, rip out their nervous system to replace it with a Move-by-Wires system loaded down with rating 4 autosofts and a personafix chip, outfit them in mil spec armor and weapons, set them up a base in the Barrens, and then hit them with their high threat response team. A heroic shoot out will occur that tragically results in the death of every terrorist (who will be in the labs having their cyber ripped back out so that it can be sent to a KE city and sold on the street) and one of the officers (who was pilfering company equipment and selling it to the yaks without giving the corp their cut). LS's PR department will play up the amazing police work and the end of these terrorists while their hackers are laying in all the supporting evidence to support their story, including a little judicious editing to make it look like KE might have been behind the the whole thing to win the cities contract. It's cheaper, easier, makes them look better, and makes everyone happy.


It's only a few hundred dead. That doesn't compare to their run to hack Tokyo's GridGuide system and cause massive accidents (that really looked like accidents and flaws in GridGuides code) so that a competitor would be hired to replace GridGuide in the city. That had a death toll of upwards of a hundred thousand. None of the characters in the group care. When I say that everyone of them (including the elf) could serve a day in jail for every capital crime they have committed and still die in jail of old age, I'm not lying. Just the list of acts of war would run about 5 pages.

As far as all of them are concerned, people are eminently disposable and the only time not to kill them is if it benefits the team more to leave them alive.

To be fair at least one of the Shadowrun: Missions was just as bad (and the pay kinda sucked).

Your campaign seems way too OTT for my taste, and on my table you wouldn't get away with that sort of thing (2 huge holes I can see; (1) the face negotiating with two separate megas as the other side [at that level they would be calling up/texting each others' corps all the time, and there would be a whole bunch of people from both sides involved, so the face's cover would eventually be blown], and (2) the data trail or lack thereof on the short-selling [each electronic new yen has its own serial no, so no matter how much you try you cannot wash the cash, it can be traced]). But it seems you guys are having fun, so more power to ya.

As to your question, the group I GM usually get jobs through the standard fixer-Johnson set-up, although I try to weave in the PCs contacts or hooks from their backstories as much as I am able to make things a bit more realistic. We don't game too often, so the PCs are currently at the stage where they have established a rep and are getting more high-pay high-risk AA (and twice to date AAA) runs. My PCs seem to be happy enough with the jobs I offer them, so haven't ever really done anything on their own initiative, although I do make them work their contacts and their contacts are sometimes asking them for favours as well as the other way around. Very different in flavour and substance to your campaign, I know ...

Five Words for you...

THE RESONANCE REALMS NEVER FORGET...
You cannot simply Erase data from the resonance realms. Just Sayin'

You want to leave no loose ends behind, you set up for blackmailing the guy from the start. If your mark is a really great person, you might hesitate pulling the plug. More so if he is doing stuff like deleting speeding tickets on the side. Then some day he learns about your dark secret, and starts to write reports on you. Should make for a fun story.


How long is your campaign running?

It's actually one of the listed options, and it specifically makes a Resonance search to find that data far more difficult. There are seriously maybe 5 people on the planet who could pull off the RRS in that instance, and everyone that a corp had access to would be finding information that is worth billions or trillions of nuyen.


I suppose that it could happen, unlikely buy I suppose it's possible.


A little over three years. Becoming a megacorp with a seat on the CC takes time, in story our current estimates put us at least a decade away from making our move. In RL we figure between another year to two years to finish.

We already often pull in more money from our legitimate business activities than we do from our runs, but most all of that money gets reinvested in building up the corp. Our big project last year was setting up a cloning farm. Nothing like the 18 year lead time on building an army. This years big project is setting up a real, ZOG approved, bank. That would make laundering money much easier but it is quite a pain and is probably going to require multiple, difficult, runs.

The last time a mas murder was committed in the US that killed over 170 people in the US the government spent something around a trillion dollars dealing with the attackers, their organizers, supporters and funders. And 10 years later people shown to be actively involved with the organization responsible still get surprised when an anti-tank missile flies through their car windshield or kitchen window and detonates in their lap.

Runner's Companion has some fiction of Netcat doing a resonance realm search for 100k nuyen, taking 3 days. For research worth a billion, wouldn't a corporation be willing to spend a few millions, and a technomancer willing to spend a week to get that money? It's even fairly risk free for the technomancer, since there shouldn't be anything linking her/him to the incident.
For added goodies, set it up so it's your own technomancer who does the job of retrieving the research

Leaving everything else aside, the payoffs quoted seem way over the top. Clearly, this is a different game of Shadowrun.

That's the US government. It has a vested interest in dealing with such things. Lone Star? They have a vested interest in looking like they are dealing with such things.

When it will cost a trillion nuyen and 10 years of effort to track down and eliminate those responsible and LS (or KE or any mega that hasn't been personally hacked off) can spend a few million to frame some random gangers for the crime and have them taken down within a month at the outside, what do you think happens?

Corps, absent really special circumstances, only care about the bottom line. Being seen as ineffective could cost LE their contract, catching those responsible would take long enough that LS would already be branded a failure in the eyes of the public and cost a not insignificant amount of LS's budget, framing people will be done fast enough to make LS look like they are really on the ball and will cost a few million nuyen.


Does it have the data she was after and how hard it is to find? Was she facing technomancer opposition? Did she know what piece of data she wanted specifically or was it just a more general trawling? Much like everything else in SR, you have to know what you are after to some extent.

And again, it's far more efficient to hire her to recover that internal report on Ares black ops for last quarter that is sitting buried on a system in a deep vault that would take an entire army to penetrate; and that is honestly an easier search because you are after a single discrete piece of data that is sitting on a single server.

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At 300K per run it would take you 34 runs to buy a Luxury Lifestyle. At a run every 3 months that would be about 9 years of constant running.

At this point in story though we aren't running for direct payments really. We are running to achieve objectives that help our long term plans. We do entire runs to get a spy program loaded onto a secure server so that we can then use the data to our corps benefit. Next weeks session is actually going to be a run on a law office that handles a fair amount of Seattle's more high end legal issues, and the whole mission will be to bug their offices without leaving a trace that we were there.

what sort of insane moron devised that plan ? Reaching that sort of death toll would involve getting juste about every car in Tokyo doing a high-speed frontal collision with each other - airbags and safety belts means city-speed car crashes result in very, very few fatalities. Even more so in a crowded metropolis like Tokyo wher the trafic usualy moves a very sedate pace. No way this would ever pas for an accident as it involves an almost complete rewrite of the GridGuide software and possibily the byopassing of safety ovverides from the cars.

To add insult to injury, let's assume a generous one in ten death rate, that would leave tokyo's treets jammed closed by something like one million wrecks - weeks of cleanup and sorting out.

If whoever was behind the job was a japanese corp or even had a siginficant presence in Tokyo, the losses from the disruption, loss of personnels (having a car hints at low to mid level mamagement personnels), insurance claims along with assets loss from the Tokyo stock market's hit will wipe out every shred of profit the corporation might gain from it's GridGuide substitute subsidiary for years, maybe even decades.

Even worse, merely causing the grandmother of all gridlocks and maybe a few hundred fender-benders would have done the job just fine... As I said, what kind of pyschotic moron comes up with a business plan like that unless he's after genocide rather than money ?

From what you say, the corporations (and the players) seems to be more interested in performing aggressive population control through excessive and pointless brutality than in making money. Which also raises the questions as to why the PC's rapidly expanding corp isn't the target of that sort of agressive actions. The PCs might be godly, but their underlings, researchers and whatnot aren't. If a megacorpo is willing to cause the death of one hundred thousand peoples from a first world country with a still strong government for merely snatching the GridGuide managment contract for the capital, they won't think twice before pulling the nukes out for a juicy prize like the PC's fast-expanding business.

Note : and as a sidenote : the PCs seems damn good at pulling out Winternight-style atrocities, but how good are they at boring business stuff like management, finance and the like ? Or more esoteric skills such as money laundering, corporate court rulings, complex investment vehicles and similar things the AAA use very specialized and expensive peoples to deal with.

I have to aqree Manunancy.
It all smacks of PC's let loose with aboslutrely no controls or consequences on what they do.
I, too, thought that the things you posted would have been painfully obviuous, but apparently it is not. *shrug*

It's just a power fantasy rpg game where you run around kill things like a god and marvel at the brilliance of your ability to squash the insect NPC's and be the best there is. It's the same sort of thing you see in a lot of computer RPG's and escapist/pulp fiction. Sure there are many better ways to accomplish the various scenarios he's thrown out and if they were going for realism that would be an issue, but they're not. Don't beat up on him for playing a game that's cartoonishly violent, it's not what most people on here play, but some people enjoy it. More power to them. It's a system that can support both. Heck, I find gangers going down the freeway with rocket launchers fun sometimes and leveling a building as a back up plan is something my first character would have planned regularly.

Besides you're not going to convince him that they play wrong (and they don't, just different).

I think Tippy's post style might also be a problem, since he tends to be a bit vague in his descriptions of these fantastic scenarios he lays out. So that when people point out the flaws it seems like he's just fabricating excuses, denials, and covers (at least that's the way it reads to me, but I don't think that's actually what he's doing) rather than explaining what he meant the first time.

They should definitely do whatever's fun for them. It's just very hard to *compare* anything from that to the very different SR variations that the rest of us play, and the thread is roughly about that comparison.

What I don't like is the 'look at how genius and badass me and my pals are for pulling out over-the-top-crap' feeling I get from the posts, when it seems the GM is had basically turned on the god mode for them.

Of course, but it won't help to say anything. I remember this time when someone was saying how powerful their D&D character was because he'd beaten a dragon… by collapsing a building on it? I'm like: yeah, the *GM* did that. But it's not a competition between tables or PCs in the first place.

I haven't read many of the replies in this thread, but I'll try to answer the topic's title, and what I feel is at least some of the idea behind asking it:

Most of our games start as ideas I propose to my players In Game, In Character. They discuss this both In Game, In Character and Out of Game, Out of Character. Often the OoG/OoC discussions revolve around what they think their characters rationale behind accepting or denying a job is. My players won't take a suicide mission if they're not playing a suicidal character. I can dangle a lot of carrot and that may change their minds, but if a character has a solid core value, he or she won't violate that easily. (A pacifist just doesn't take an out and out murder for hire gig. A hard core Humanis member is unlikely to take a job whacking David Duke at the Idaho mountain resort of death; drekcetera....

As for the ideas I take the inspiration for them from any number of sources-TV, Movies, Comics, Books, Ideas inspired by reading various Shadowrun books and materials, media headlines, real life scenarios, ideas my players express that they would like to explore, etc....

It was a relatively simple change actually, the hard part was making it look like it was actually an accident. Half of the cars were simply told that they were the only car on the road at the time, which caused all their idiotic rating 1-3 dog brained pilots to start moving full speed while the other half were told that they needed to stop moving. What do you know, every car on the road at the time ended up crashing into one another.

And the point was to make it a spectacular failure.


The corp doing the paying didn't have any real presence in Japan at the time, that was why they wanted the run; so that they could break into the market.


The A that displaced GridGuide for the Toyko sprawl in a trillion nuyen per year contract and managed to break their strangle hold on Japan while also making several trillion nuyen from all the disruption caused and saw them win every contract they competed with GridGuide for in the next 2 years. Fender benders are forgotten after a year or two, a hundred thousand dead because of what 3 AAA corps and the Japanese Government claim was bad code is a black mark that sticks around a whole lot longer. GridGuide is tanking in that game and will probably be bought out by Absol (the A that paid for the job) within the next 2 years in game.


Nah, all the corps care about is money. Unless something is a personal inconvenience or affront to a major player in one of the Mega's or the corp it's self then money is all that matters. Thousands dead doesn't bother any of them.


Who said the PC's are a rapidly expanding corp? They are dozens of relatively small corps in multiple nations that all appear to be owned by different people, companies, and organizations. And those small corps of ours do get run against, we just tend to make them all as secure as possible magically, in the matrix, and physically. There simply aren't that many teams world wide that could hit them successfully, and those that could are usually being used for more important jobs. We still do get hit though.


Very. Besides having most of the relevant skills naturally across the group as a whole, rating 5 knowsofts and rating 6 datasofts are relatively cheap and we have pretty much everyone of them that is remotely useful. Give a R6 Agent a few relevant R6 datasofts and an R5 Knowsoft and well, it is a better accountant than most anyone you could hirer (for example). Or a better lawyer (at least in technical terms).

----
Violence isn't the point, the Tokyo operation was the most deadly by far and most of our runs involve no one (or very few people) dead.

Yes, I'm being somewhat vague and incomplete. When a run can be 8 hours of real time play and involve 3 months or more of IC time with us going so far as doing things like breaking into an employees house and hacking his cyber eyes to upload a program that stores everything he sees and then using that information (along with the same information from everyone else in the facility with cyber eyes or similar ware that we can get access to) to create a Mapsoft of the entire facility before hacking and datamining to figure out who built the target, specifically, and getting records of what building materials (and how much of them) they used along with (if they exist) their construction plans before figuring out who they hired to construct their magical defenses and what exactly they put up (and who did it, kill a mage and those bound spirits of his are gone), and then getting the psych and employment records (along with running full background checks) on every employee at the sight, before using all that data (and dozens of other bits and pieces of data) to create a full VR model of the target complete with guards, magical defenses, matrix defenses, etc. to get a simulation as close to the target as possible before running the mission repeatedly until we get it perfect and fix any flaws that we find. Only then do we perform the real run.

One time, for example, we were hitting a facility that gave all of it's guards Move-By-Wire systems and over a period of a month we managed to hack each of them when they were off sight and buried a little virus in the expert system controlling them that caused those experts to behave very badly at a specific time. When it came time to do the run every guard in the facility went into a full body seizure and died.

The thing is that our GM will let us do whatever we want, he plays the world and we play ourselves. That facility might have 5 Force 15 wards, a dozen bound force 10 spirits, a nexus or two filled with IC as the first gateway system, a dozen hackers running 6/6 gear with bio and cyberenhancment, 50 cybered to the gills guards on sight, and a hundred or so drones of various types on sight. If we can figure out how to bring down, evade, or penetrate that security then we are free to do so.

We are also free to die if we make a single mistake. We may be powerful, we may be rich, but we survive because we are all incredibly paranoid, incredibly detail oriented, plan very well, and are willing to invest in the infrastructure.

Our hacker and technomancer, with physical and magical support from the rest of the team, spent well over a year in game penetrating and creating back doors in all of the various systems needed to create a Fake SIN (or to scrub a SIN). We hacked every LS vehicle in the city, along with their dispatch computer, so that we can keep an eye on where the Star is at all times. We have access to the public transport systems database so that we can track anyone using it in real time. We have access to GridGuide so that we can track cars in real time. Several in game years spent breaking into the infrastructure of the city and the world so that we can stand a chance at succeeding and surviving runs that would kill most teams easily.

You can see how someone would call this godmode, though. In most games, even pulling this off would be an extremely temporary achievement, as everything got relatively quickly discovered and fixed. Your game is simply and definitely more on the cinematic side, the way Hardison always magically owns the security everywhere the Leverage gang happens to go. These things represent enormous long-term advantages, regardless of how much time you invested, and they're all things the GM had to invent and regulate (not in the rules). Personally, the thing that defies belief for me most is that this team of hyper-competent uber-runners have stayed cohesive for years and years, slowly enacting their master plan.

I'm thinking of a name. Monty something. ...

It would probably work on a highway, but definitively not in a city center. Especially one as busy and crowded as Tokyo. With cars moving at maybe 20 mph in town and a few meters at best between them, there's simply no way for the moving cars to get enough speed to generate casualties beyond the odd pedestrian. Even without that you would have to alter the speed limits - with in-city speed limited to something like 30 mph, not much potential for multiple death. And any car with even a modicum of onboard sensor is likely to have it's autopilot to give the finger to GridGuide and stop if it dectect an obstacle rather than blindly follow the directions. If the car starts behaving weirdly, the organic backup sensor and piloting system (aka driver) is also likely to hit the brakes and cut the ignition. When starting at 30 mph, he's got some time before reaching a fatal crash speed - supposing there's enough launch space for that.

And finally I don't think the Gridguide contract would be a 'trillion nuyen' affair - like most infrastructure projects, it's likely to be the sort of high-capital, low-margin, long duration and low liquidity business that is a slow and steady cash flow but a far cry from a fast returns-high profit affair. Especially with both the japanese government, Tokyo's mayor and three AAA japanese corps willing to bitch if the rates gets too high.

I also wonder how the altered code would match with Gridguide's changelogs, development reports and the software in the other cities under their management - things I'd expect them to display in a hurry to clear their name and prove someone messed up their code. I'd also expect them (and the competition) to start adding some extras features like hardwired software, WORM-backed logs and similar unhackable features after a disaster of that scale. Both to protect themselves and with pressure from the states to keep a repeat performance from happening.

Also a comment about the security level of your corporations : that level of security costs a bundle and tends to get noticeable - which is likely to raise quite a few eyebrows. Having two-bits, noname, not even A, corps sporting security 'proof against all but a few runners' will probably attract a lot of attention to determine who or what they're fronting for, since there's no way they could afford that sort of security on their own and keep in the market.

I take issue with this statement. While I don't expect my players to be lily-white champions of justice and puppies (and in fact, if they start to display that kind of naivete, I will make sure it comes back to bite them), I don't buy for a second that the default assumption of the setting is that all runners are omnicidal maniacs.

No, they are in the rules. Rules exist to create an Admin account on a system that appears fully legitimate. Rules exist to hack Cyberware. Rules exist to hack comlinks. Rules exist to hack vehicles. Rules exist to hack the bus lines computers. Our GM doesn't just alter the world to screw with the PC's or make them weaker. He knows the security of the nodes involved, he has written out the procedures used, and he plays them straight; do everything right and he won't just screw you because it's "too big an advantage". Especially not when it's a game like this one. It might be different in a low level street game with the explicit goal of always having the PC's a week from starvation with the world kicking them every 30 seconds and every Johnson screwing their runners left and right; but that is a game that is more GM fiat then this kind of game.

Anyone who limits hacking to hacking on the fly and short term hacks is drastically underusing the system. A hacker who is willing to invest the time, effort, and money can be just as powerful (and overpowered) as the best spirit binding mages, the best pornomancer faces, etc. A hacker isn't particularly useful in combat, in point of fact that's about the least useful place for a hacker to be. He is useful before combat, when he has already hacked that enemies smartgun system so that it won't fire on the runners, when he has already hacked the guards contacts so that they will black out (and stay blacked out) exactly 2 minutes after the alarm goes off, when he has already hacked the alarm system at the corps facility on the other side of the sprawl so that the high threat response team is on their way to that facility instead.

Burying backdoors and hidden accounts in systems is the hackers bread and butter.

It might be "cinematic" in the sense that the characters are doing all this leg work and planning runs down to the second, but that's also how it's done in real life. Look at the SEALS who got Bin Laden, they built an entire facility identical to his own (as accurately as they could make it) and then ran through that missions day after day, dozens of times, for upwards of a month until they were perfect. Do anything less and you will fail if the GM is running your enemies competently and to their abilities.

A facility with research worth billions of nuyen in it will have hundreds of million in protection, very in depth protection. To get through that protection it's something that someone can pull off in a day, it's months of careful research and planning and then multiple assaults that can be continents apart and timed down to the second after several preparatory runs on other targets.

As for staying cohesive, that was part of the original premise of the campaign. The mage invented a spell that could only be used on willing individuals and soul bound an oath or contract between multiple parties. Betrayal would result in your soul being shredded and you being dead. That was admittedly a bit of an ass pull but when we started the game and knew what our end goal was (become an AAA corp) we needed a way IC to ensure that inter team fighting and betrayal didn't happen.


*shrug*


That's why it was an entire major run. We had to go through and alter all of that. It's not like our hacker sat down one day and decided to do this in an afternoon, it was an all hands operation that took months and hits on multiple targets. Along with our technomancer doing multiple Resonance Realm Searches to Erase bits and pieces of data.


Your corp worth a few billion nuyen? Can you locate most of your R&D and critical infrastructure at a single location? If yes then not dropping a few hundred million on security is idiotic. Your competition will hirer runners to hit you if they think you are an easy target. Especially if the security can largely be sunk costs. Hire KE or one of the other big security corps to put up your Wards and buy a dozen bound spirits. Invest 10 million in upgrades for your security staff, with the right ware and skillsofts you don't need anyone particularly exceptional as your starting stock. Spend a couple million to get SOTA IC and computer support along with hiring a couple of really good on-sight hackers and contracting with one of the big firms for back up hacker support.

Most companies don't have anything like this level of security, but then most companies are small and worth a few million at most. The thing is that those small companies aren't going to hirer runners who's average expense bill can run a million nuyen and who won't even meet with you without a 10K down payment. Those companies hirer street level or a bit better runners and put out runs on one another. The companies that are willing and able to drop millions on a run don't care about the small fry; they hirer prime runners to hit the targets that no one else can, the targets that the rank and file runners would take one look at and say can't be hit.

Sure, the players can and do run against those lower level companies anyways. Either because they are doing someone a favor, because an individual or the company has something they want, because they need to frame a fall guy, whatever the reason (they might just feel like a break from those high stress jobs). That doesn't mean that they are anything special or up to the runners level.

Running against an average corp's security (3/3 matrix security, maybe half a dozen guards with minimal ware and normal gear, a few watchers, a lower force bound spirit or two from the local mage, a low force ward, a single average hacker on sight) is stuff that a team can pull off with less than 3 hours notice and with no real risk. The sniper offs the local mage to disperse the watchers and spirit. The mage sends a spirit to spot the hacker for him and pulls off a ritual to Control Thoughts the Hacker and have him shutdown security before killing himself. The Adept and Street Sam go in under improved invisibility and gank the guards. An entire facility taken with no warning, no alarms, and on a few hours notice.


It's the definition of Lone Star, Knight Errant, UCAS, and every other important entity in the Sixth World. Running is terrorism and runners are terrorists, even in the real world that is what almost all runs would count as; terrorist attacks. Merely existing has most runners committing at least 4 felonies. Picked up by the Star when you aren't doing a run? Odds are that you are looking at at least 20 years. Fake SIN, multiple counts of illegal weaponry, multiple counts of illegal 'ware, multiple counts of illegal bullets, illegal jammer (if you have a tag jammer on you), illegal tag eraser, probably multiple counts of illegal programs on your link, probably a dozen counts of fake licenses, illegal possession of smartlink capability on your contacts.

The GM has to invent all those systems. Only the general hacking rules exist. It's not altering the world to screw the PCs—that *is* the world. It's GM fiat to allow these things to work and stay in place (in a world full of more competent individuals with better budgets). It's fine if that's fun for you.

No, it's GM fiat to remove them. If you create a legitimate backdoor and a legitimate admin account they stay around. The people you are running against also aren't more competent. When you are talking about a hacker on par with ours or our technomancer, think "Could FastJack do this?" if your answer is yes then you should be ok with it. Because that is the level that the character is playing at.

Just because someone calls you a terrorist doesn't make it true. You and your friends are choosing to play monsters; not just ordinary monsters, either, but monsters on the level of the nineteen men who murdered three thousand people one autumn morning not that long ago. If you're having fun with that, then by all means carry on, but don't delude yourselves into thinking that the game is "forcing" you to play that way or that it is the only option.


No, they don't. They really, really don't. You talk a lot about realism and what security would realistically do. Any IT security guy worth his paycheck is going to check the legitimacy of any newly created account, especially a security or admin account. He's going to call up the person whose name is on the account and say, "Hey, Bob? Did you create a new admin account last night? No? OK, thanks." Then he's going to delete the account, close the backdoor used to create it, and go through the whole system with a micrometer-toothed comb to find what you changed or broke. Backdoors and hacked accounts are good for a limited time; if the security team are doing their jobs, a severely limited time.