Okay, so, I've been brainstorming an idea for a run. It's only in the early phase of brainstorming, but I think it's going to be tricky enough to be worth running by Dumpshock.

The background is simple: During the last Run, there was a massive thunderstorm that was used as cover for a Run; Seattle's main power grid was disrupted with a precision blast, and in the power fluctuations that followed, some Runners slipped a virus into the Seattle LTG that propagated with the system's reboot.

Basically, this virus monitors for DocWagon emergency priority calls going out in the vicinity of Seattle, and then makes them wait about two or three hours before they reach DocWagon - but they go immediately to CrashCart. Per the reciprocal service agreements CrashCart has with DW and vice versa, if an alert for one of the companies goes out and a response team from the other receives it and arrives on-site first, they administer full care at the equivalent service package level, and the other company pays them for it - full reimbursal of expenses and half of whatever the other company would have charged that customer for that service.


Needless to say, with that virus in play, things in Seattle could get ugly. CrashCart simply doesn't have the resources that DocWagon has, so while they're poaching some customers, the ones they can't get - like the poor bastards who go down in GhoulTown - get to croak. This is seen as a win-win by the CC executive who had the run take place; they get to poach customers for a tidy sum, and word will eventually spread that DocWagon has been dropping the ball a lot, hopefully precipitating a mass abandonment of DW's customers to CC.



That's where my players come in. Johnson introduces himself as a DocWagon Johnson, and states that he wants them to investigate, find out how CrashCart made it happen, then fix it if possible, or send the details to a data-drop so DW can fix it on their end. He gives them data on the likely suspect; Dixie Flatline, a ruthless, thieving bitch of a former Street Doc who made her fortune in the '50s by confiscating 10% of whatever injured people (including Runners) who washed up in her clinic had on them. ('Fortune' is right - she pulled in enough to buy in at the top floor of the CrashCart franchise in Seattle when it started. She must have got lucky and caught a few Runners coming back from mega-scores with multi-million nuyen ebony credsticks on their persons.) Now she runs the CC franchise. He suggests that they start by finding a DocWagon customer who's an undeserving asshole and sufficiently physically imperiling him to set off his response bracelet, then tracing the outgoing call, but however they proceed is up to them.


So, there's a couple of things they could try. They could try to break into CrashCart to find paydata there; they could try to track down whatever team did the data insertion and get a copy of the virus to reverse-engineer, they could start randomly scanning nodes until they find a copy of the virus to disassemble, or they could do as Mr. Johnson says, find an undeserving prick and do him some physical harm. The virus itself is benign, no IC or anything, and they could do any number of things with it; it has a self-updating feature that lets an update be dissiminated easily and anonymously to make the virus update itself. They could send it an 'update' to disable it completely, they could deliver the information to civil authorities, or DocWagon.



The kicker (there's always a twist) comes at the end: Mr. Johsnon is going to screw them. Mr. Johnson doesn't work for DocWagon, he works for CrashCart. He's a practicing surgeon moving into the corporate ranks, who was educated outside of the corporate system before he took the job at CrashCart, and a consequence he has a conscience and an oath to do-no-harm to uphold. This play by his boss was causing people to die, and that is unacceptable; and worse, he was worried that if it went on much longer, DocWagon would catch on - for real - and initiate some reprisals, which he doesn't want. Unfortunately, because he's not actually a company Johnson, he doesn't have an expense account to pay them with; he's scraped together maybe 1,500 out of his own pocket, and he can fiddle the systems he has access to and get them a CrashCart basic contract - functionally equivalent to the DocWagon version. (Anything higher would be audited, but he has the access to put them in place under the same category the actual company Johnsons put in the clients who don't have to pay - IE, Runners who receive contracts as payment - without it being noticed.)



This one should (probably) wind up being a reasonably short run, depending on how hard they brickwall trying to figure out what was done to impair DocWagon's legendarily swift responses. Potential complications might include running into an actual DocWagon-hired team (or team of company troubleshooters) investigating the situation; or, if they break into CrashCart, they might actually see Mr. Johnson and twig to something not being right. Mainly, though, I want to see how they react at the end. So far, my players have demonstrated mercy and a good-guy streak, I wonder how far that will extend if they go through everything, only to get screwed - and in the name of a good cause.

Sounds Interesting...

My, whatever could you be referencing

So wait, the Johnson is going to mess up his own company's plot due to altruism/Hippocratic oath? Don't get me wrong, this sounds like an interesting plot, I think I'm just confused as to WHY he wants to screw over runners and/or his own company.

Instant Karma!

Sounds like he feels guilty over what low methods his company uses & wants to fix it to make things fair, but he'll screw the runner's not by choice but only because he can't actually afford what the runner's might want to be paid for said job. So the Runner's will be posed with the question: Do we let it go because it was for a good cause? (some of the characters might have docwagon contracts) or Do we deal with the J who's fucking with our cash flow.

Mostly, yes. He actually takes his oath seriously, and this plan is causing people (people like the Runners themselves, in some instances) to die awaiting a High-Threat Response team that CrashCart can't provide and DocWagon won't be able to launch for another hour or two.

Also, because he's worried that if DocWagon figures out what's going on, they won't be so gentle as simply shutting down the play, they'll send Runners to act against CrashCart; ambushing CrashCart's armed response units, breaking into their facilities and murdering staff/patients, or what-have-you.


CrashCart and DocWagon exist in a sort of détente at the moment. Their reciprocity agreements increase each other's coverage substantially; CrashCart can pull people off of Evo property without asking permission, and DocWagon has much greater coverage in the Barrens. This keeps customers of both companies alive when they might otherwise have croaked; alive, and paying fees. They also aren't undertaking Shadow ops against one another very much, and if they do it's usually things like datasteals or voluntary extractions.

He knows that if DocWagon figures out what's going on, that détente is going to escalate into a full-blown cold war, especially if the larger companies above the franchise level get involved. So, he doesn't want that, and he's willing to risk screwing some Runners to fix it.


So, like Dolanar said, they'll get put in a bind: Mister J fucked with their cash flow by paying out only a fraction of what he promised them. (The better their face negotiates, the smaller the fraction.) If they take a while on this one and/or they don't do anything that results in loot being collected, they may find themselves in the lurch on paying the rent, and needing to beg favors/take a loan/spoof their lifestyle costs. But, they could recoup their costs a number of ways; there are Shadow sources who would probably pay well for a virus capable of fucking with the Matrix to the extent of delaying calls for a few hours; they could try to sell the information to a real DocWagon Johnson; they could sell him back upriver to his boss, Dixie Flatline, who at the very least would have him fired on the spot... Or they could let it go, in which case they'd get a good surgeon worming his way into CrashCart as a reasonably mid-Contacts, high-Loyalty contact, and those who wanted it would get free CrashCart Basic coverage.

So far so devious, sounds like a reasonably interesting premise.

One thing I don't get is that DocWagon would very quickly (within days if not hours of the virus insertion) get that something was up and take steps to find out what is going on and then shut the virus down. It might take longer if it was 1 in 100 callouts or something like that, though.

I like it.

-Szygani

It's probably not really every call, admittedly; not enough that DW has figured out what's going on, but they know they've been dropping the ball, enough to worry them, not enough that they can't cover it up, for now.

But things might start to escalate when (not if, but when) a Super-Platinum customer winds up dead.




Did you log in to the wrong screen name there, Syz?

I'm pretty sure thats always been his handle here. Big Deev, as it were, goes by DV8.

This sounds like a very cool run.
Have you worked out what this guy is going to do/say when the runners show up asking for the rest of their money? Is is going to spill the beans and throw himself at their mercy or is he going to duck them? If he's going to try and dodge them you might want to work up the stats on his building/office security because the runners(my players at least) are likely going to track him down and have a come to Jesus meeting.
It looks pretty neat so far. Something I'd love to play and love to run. Post how it went if you can!

He's gonna spill the beans and confess to them, with what payment he can scrape together on-hand.

Three words friend:

KILL THE SLITCH!

Preferably, have her die on a street doc's table because she doesn't have the cred.

I would alter the virus - a blanket 2 hors delay in Docwagon's calls will be very, very noticeable and they'll probably get a good hard look at the dispatching program very soon. what I would have placed is more subtle - check the incoming calls and mix sme algorithm and pure randomization to slow down a fraction of the high profit calls with a variable timer, from 5 to 20 minutes.

A flat delay on every call will stand out like a sore thumb the second Docwagon looks into things, the semi-random routine will make it more difficult to spot a pattern and locate the problem while still biasing the game in Crashcart's favor.

Cool idea for a run, but my first thought was the same as Manunancy. The delay needs to be small enough that Doc Wagon does not immediately know they're being cut out; but just long enough for Crash Cart to get there first.

Basically I would go with the above but include just enough low profits calls that it looks like CC is just working better, not poaching.


P.S. Microsoft once did this for real, back when WordPerfect was still #1. They could not get Word itself to print faster/better than WordPerfect, so instead they added an improved print driver to Windows but kept it secret. So Word would call the new driver, WP would call the old driver, and it would look like Word had improved past WP in print speed.

Usually I go by Szygani, but here it's Tiny Deev, It's an old name.

1) Love your idea, and I'd very much like to try and play through it as a player.
2) As pointed out by others, you may want to alter the nature of the virus a bit, in order to not have it stand out quite as much. Two hours is an eternity, if you are lying hurt and bleeding somewhere. Also, a blanket delay on ALL calls will be noticed VERY quickly. A smallish delay inserted against random calls will be much harder to realise.

One option you might also want to considder, would be to let the Surgeon "amateur Johnson" be an actual low level junior exective who stumbled across the plan by accident, but who is smart enough to rather quickly realise that this can turn very ugly for the company, if it ever comes out. If he's stumbled on the plan while doing something he isn't supposed to have done, he can't go to his bosses with it (at least not without suffering severe repercussions), but if he doesn't, it can turn into an utter disaster for the company and probably the entire market. Hence he can only act on his own, trying to defuse a potential disaster he's not the cause of.

Update time!

So, my players accepted the run, and they cleverly sussed out from Mr. Jannsen the notion that, working for a medical response company, he might have access to medical supplies. So now he's slowly feeding them meds and drugs and stuff, and if they play their cards right (IE, forgiving him for misleading them about the nuyen reward and the company he worked for,) they're going to get a good high-loyalty Contact who's beholden to them to the tune of fairly regularly managing to slip them some goodies. (And not just any old goodies; Savior Medkits were explicitly mentioned as something he could get ahold of.)

They decided that, since they were already going to be shooting people right in the god damn face to get DocWagon called, they might as well get paid twice. (Little do they, they're only getting paid once. ) and they called up their Friendly Local Ancients Lieutenant for a (s)hit-list of people the Ancients would pay cold hard nuyen to have professionally beaten.

This is that list.

I'm working from the Sample Characters in SR4A, but expanding them where appropriate, and not always fairly. The Bounty Hunter, for instance, I suspect is going to be a pure motherfucker to take down, especially if he's in his RV, which is kind of a wheeled Slave 1 to his Boba Fett. I expect my players to be very tempted to steal it, especially since one of them is a troll and would find it very nice to have.

The nuyen reward doesn't necessarily line up with the expected difficulty, just the Ancients' perceived difficulty of the target and their willingness to just ride out themselves and murder the guy into the ground. After all, they've murdered trogs on much less provocation, so they're not willing to pay much to give the guy a warning to back off.

There's also a bit of a trap with Mujina: he's in Vancouver, not Seattle. Even if they get there and do the Run as demanded properly; grabbing him, giving him a sword and forcing him into a duel, and the duelist who attacks him injuring him in the right way, if they do it in Vancouver, they'll get paid by the Ancients, but it won't help them in their main run, since the sabotage of DocWagon's operations is only local to Seattle. So they'll have to grab him, kidnap him, drag him back to Seattle, and then bestow him harm.

Wow... Um, nobody poked through that list of guys to beat up on for anything to add or offer or criticize or comment on?

Just did a quick read through of anything that caught my eye. Karal looks great as a flavorful NPC... though I wouldn't put it past him to say that he was robbed by the PCs just to get some revenge.
not the smart move for him, but then neither was impersonating an Ancient as part of a long-running scam.

Yeah, there's a reason he doesn't have the Common Sense positive quality.


He's a poser; like those weirdos who read all the law enforcement trade magazines and buy kit, even though they've been turned down by police academies thirty times.

[e]If my players are smart (and they tend to be,) they'll provide the cybereyes recording of their goings-on to their Ancients contact.

I suppose if you really wanted to you could add my old character to your list of potential hits: He hates the ancients and the feeling is mutual, but he has a nasty habit of rigging warehouses and barracks to explode on the event of his death, which means that they're less than enthusiastic about killing him unless he actually forces their hand, which he's not stupid enough to do.
PM me if you're interested.