Hey there!
As regular readers may have noticed I'm very fond of sharing war-stories about runs, and not hesitant to create threads around them.
Here's another one!

Once upon a time, our group was tasked to infiltrate a Lone Star server farm. While our less subtle members created a distraction around the front our stealth experts crept in through the back, down to the secure basement, and into the security center where we disabled several guards. Then we split up, one going to do the mission while the other raided the Lone-Star armoury to lay down a fake trail. That elf was named Nitro, and this is his story.

Nitro busted into the armoury with blade in hand, ready to disguise our true purpose in coming with a shower of blood (don't ask me why, he just likes blood. he's one of those 'lovable sociopath' types). The SWAT team inside are unprepared for such an attack and fall easily before one of the best swordsmen in the world, and at the end of the round but one man remains. This officer (we never found out his name) grabbed the nearest object and threw it at Nitro, who dodged easily. The object in question? A grenade, which the officer had the presence of mind to arm before throwing.

Now being a Ninja, Nitro's first reaction was simply to backflip through the doorway and slam the door closed, waiting for chunky salsa to take care of the guard for him. Unfortunately, the server farm was lax about it's storage procedures and as a result the grenade landed next to several boxes of EX-EX... which were in turn near their stockpile of assorted explosives. The resulting bang shook the building to its foundations, ripped the reinforced steel door from its hinges and sent it slamming into Nitro, flattening him. Joel, the man who'd been busy at the computers, rushed in to see the armoury burning and Nitro unconscious next to it.
"WTF?!?" he exclaimed, slinging his friend over one augmented shoulder and running for the exit.
Once out of immediate danger he revived Nitro, and the pair fled upwards towards the main complex and freedom. At the top of the elevator shaft they encountered some panicked Lone Star employees with SMGs, who promptly sprayed the runners with a lead-based welcome that sent Nitro once again into dream land. Joel dispatched the pair but spotted their cavalry making their way through the entrance. Slinging Nitro over his shoulder once again he demonstrated his preparedness by detonating the breaching charge he'd placed before entering in the hopes of distracting the newcomers while he fled to the roof and the waiting helicopter.

Then the building collapsed.

Apparently the damage from the initial explosion had been severe enough that it had compromised much of the building's structural integrity, and that breaching charge was the straw that broke the camel's back. The entire front of the building collapsed, knocking Joel prone, sending Nitro to the brink of death, and burying the 300 or so wage slaves assembled in the underground carpark under many tons of collapsed brickwork. Joel struggles to his feet, grabs Nitro, and hauls him up to the waiting extraction chopper.

And the incident was never mentioned again. Ever. Well, until now anyway.

It was the first time we'd screwed up a run that badly.

Anyway, this thread is for stories of times that the run went completely to hell (bonus points if it's directly or indirectly due to your own actions). We pass no judgement here.

Best war story I've got. My group was hunting down a vampire (during a ghoulpocalypse scenario) when the demo specialist decided he was going to go in swinging. After having received an air-dropped shipment of Rating 20 explosives that he then put detonators into (so he could collapse a doorway in front of ghouls if need be) and then put into a backpack. When they found said vampire, our little Demoman decided he was going to punch him in the face. He had forgotten his backpack completely, and was still wearing it when he charged. The combat mage also forgot his backpack, and threw in a fireball, figuring that the demoman could take it in his fire-retardant FFBA. And he did. His detonators were jostled by the blast. Sympathetic explosion rules, things went south. Also, they were in an underground parking garage. With a hiking backpack full of armed explosives. 1'x2'x3'. Ish. So anyway, we figured that those two leveled at least the city block (and the skyscrapers above said block) and that the resulting collapse caused a LOT of collateral damage. Combine that random explosion with the ghoulpocalypse and a rather large area of Seattle ended up getting Thor'd with extreme prejudice. Which caused a couple of the cold wars to go hot in North America.

We were hired to sabotage a sweets factory outside of the city that was a cover up for somebody brewing up all kinds of interesting chemicals . .
It was supposed to be a not bloody job and made to look like a bit of eco-terrorism too.
We went in . . we took out the light guard(because why would anybody guard a sweets factory more than neccessary?). Nonlethal Take-Downs, all sneaky like . . Solid Snake would have been proud of us i guess. And then we planted some minor demolitioning charges on some of the chemical tans, intending for it to look like something went wrong with the pressure and the tanks bursting so it all leaks down to the ground . .

No, we did not think anything was amiss with explosives being placed on tanks with chemicals. What kind of chemicals you ask? Well, to be honest, no idea . . we ALL failed both our common sense and our intelligence and chemical knowledge checks . . quite horribly too, never seen that many ones and twos before . . or after, come to think of it . .

Then we went back out, took the guards to an elevated position so their bodies would not be flat in a swamp of assorted chemicals.
Afterwards, we went out of there and about one kilometer away from the plant. And then we set off the bombs. We expected to hear not much, maybe a little KRACK or something . . que EARTH SHATTERING KABOOM as it inevitably all went up in smoke. Flattened the entire complex, flattened the trees in about 1 kilometer diameter, threw our vehicle clean off the road we were on.
Stun-Damage all around, banged up vehicle too . . and a round of lightbulbs appearing above the still conscious heads. We made sure our crash did not leave any leads that would point in our direction and laid low so the people who hired us to do it stealthy would try to get us.
We did not even go to take up the rest of our money. Nobody ever talks about that. We don't eat sweets anymore, only salty snacks.

Did you all die?

Ran Dreamchipper last night for the first time when the group was going after the Genghis chip. For those who don't know this adventure, several "dreamchips" were stolen from a research facility for a simsense company and the PCs are hired to get them back. They're personafix chips that implant the programed personality over the one using the chip, like a combo BTL and skillsoft. The person with the Genghis Khan chip decided to build his own rampaging Mongolian style army by pulling a Warriors with the various Seattle go-gangs.

So he's standing up on his box giving his rousing speech with the leaders of six of the gangs hanging around (with Predators and FN-HAR assault rifles). They're whipped into a frenzy of bloodlust when the group's razor decides to headshot the closest gang member.

Sidenote: Both of these players were in my 7 month long Pathfinder game where I'm a bit of a creampuff. I give out magic items like candy and pull punches constantly to save the PCs. Only one of the players had experience with Shadowrun's combat rules before. I'm also far more hardline take-the-dice-as-they-fall in Shadowrun because this isn't heroic fantasy.

Anyway, shootout happens in the warehouse. The PCs stand in the middle of the hole in the wall and shoot at the gang leaders, the gun adept using his Predator III and the razor using the grenade launcher on his Ares Alpha. Standing out in the open.

Meanwhile, the gang members lay down suppressive fire and dive for cover. They're not moving like a well-organized unit, but they are acting like people who have survived a few firefights. First one to go down was the gun adept who, in one combat phase, went from perfectly fine to one Overflow box from death. So DocWagon's on the way, but it's the middle of Redmond so response time's a bit slow. The razor gets to act again so he decides that this cover thing doesn't suck all that much. Unfortunately, it's not enough to keep him from taking a Moderate and a Serious himself.

Razor: I use my medkit to stabilize [Gun Adept].
Me: Okay. Make the check against a target number of 13.
Razor: What?!
Me: Deadly wound is a base target number of 10. +2 because he's Awakened, +1 for bad conditions. (This was the limit of my generosity, as it should've been +3 for terrible conditions).
Razor: *rolls*. I got a six! *rerolls* Woohoo! Another six! No matter what I roll, that's a 13!
Me: You're stabilized.
Gun Adept: Awesome! How many boxes do I heal.
Me: You're no longer bleeding out.
Gun Adept: But he healed me.
Me: No, he stabilized you. From the two gunshots you weren't able to dodge.
Razor: What about me? Can I heal myself?
Me: You can attempt first aid. You have a Serious wound, so the target number's 9.
Razor: *rolls luckily*. Two successes! How many boxes do I heal?
Me: One wound level.
Razor: But I got two successes!
Me: And because of that, it only took you 7 rounds to heal yourself.

I took pity on them and had DocWagon show up soon after with a combat mage in tow with Heal. The razor decided that an eye datajack was more important than a DocWagon contract, so had to pay under-the-table to the mage to get healing. That way, we could finish out the adventure. Needless to say, my players learned a valuable lesson about D&D vs. Shadowrun. They kicked in the door and started combat expecting to be healed right up afterward, and got some burst fire ExEx in their faces for the trouble.

Next lesson I plan to teach them: Why Looting the Corpses is Bad, or Killing the Leaders of Half a Dozen Go-Gangs Then Trying to Fence All Their Guns, Ammo, and Leathers is a Bad Idea.

Well, my worst battle and run happened in a mission out of "Ghost Cartels", somewhere in the beginning of that campaign (and we haven't gotten much further), so I'll disguise the content.

We probably wouldn't have made it if our GM did not have mercy.

Yeah. Got one, too.
I was in kind of a bad mood, when I made this (SR3) character. Aptly named: Trouble. As in "Oh gawd, here comes trouble."
Human, with ... I think ALL the social negative qualities. Uncouth. Braggart. Vengeful. Impulsive. Bad Reputation. No one ever wanted to talk to him, but he was the guy to talk to if you needed muscles.
Because he was beefed up. Oh was he beefed up. Titanium bone lacing. Dermal Sheathing. Lots of armour. Bioware up the wazoo to make him even tougher: Platelet factories and trauma damper ... and high combat pool, of course.
He didn't tote that many weapons, usually just a big ass revolver (Warhawk) and a sawed of Remington shotgun.
However, Trouble was a big fan of LAW enforcement. As in: He lugged a LAW with him everywhere he went. Just in case.

I'm a big planner. I am also kind of a dominant roleplayer, and my fellow players usually looked to me to come up with a plan and a lot of my characters had leadership skills.
He was my character to play when I didn't like to either make plans or to take a step back to let the other players shine in the RP spotlight. Trouble was bad news, but he actually liked being told what to do (because whenever he did something out of his own motivation, the excrement hit the rotating metal thingy really fast, usually. I wonder why.)

Anyhow, enough with the backstory.
We played this run, where stuff happened. The rest of the team was in Downtown, AA area, in the penthouse of a skyscraper. They wisely told me beforehand to "watch the car", as I was certainly not conducive to working in such an environment. So I sat there in the getaway car: Lanky hair, bad facial scarring, 5-day stubble, smoking one cigarette after another, reeking of old sweat in an armoured duster that had seen better days.
Stuff happened in the penthouse, and the players came back down quickly. I wasn't aware, that they'd just solved the run. Later, I was told that there was a lot of sweating, as one character used a LOT of karmapool to defuse a bomb and they just wanted to make a clean getaway. Really frayed nerves.
And it would have worked, too, if they wouldn't have been seen. As they came down, through the lobby, a receptionist spotted the runners.
Our team leader boarded the car and told me, as I was still not on the radar of said receptionist, to "take care of it".
And so I did. Trouble gets out of the car immediately, seeing the nervous state of the fellow runners. He grips the tube hidden under his duster and extends it. Then fires a light antitank weapon into the lobby.

Hilarity ensues.

On this day, my fellow player learned to phrase his requests very carefully.

This is a story I want to hear.

We'll see how stupid they are when it comes to going about it next Monday.

Very. They're PCs, after all

that seems fairly abusive as far as collateral damage go for me - the World Trade Center bombing trashed only part of three parking levels and never endangered the towers. Adn they used a van loaded with explosives. Going back to WWII, leveling a city block usually required a 1000 to 2000 pounds bomb, even for old masonry buildings withotu a piece of concrete in them.

It akes a lot of abuse to bring down a skyscraper.

Hush! Thats called Dramatic License.

Apparently Tom Waits wrote a song about this...

Oh, wait, no, wrong spelling. Never mind.

Actually, that really shouldn't be such a bad idea. Unless those guns are Pimped Out (Customized Look; whatever it's called in the version you run,) the guns are just guns, and the ammo is just ammo.

Their Fence should shit a brick and tell them to cash a reality check if they try to fence leathers in gang colors, though. If they don't get it, have him explain to them, as a courtesy for the newbies, why he can't move things with gang colors on them, and consequently, why he won't pay them one goddamn nuyen for them.


As for the gangs themselves, though, unless the gangs in question are like, the Ancients or something, they won't do shit. Street gangs are held together by their leader's force of personality, and they tend to implode dramatically if the leader gets geeked.

So, don't be too hard on them, either. You can shoot up the leaders of street gangs and get away with it, because the gang's going to be too busy shredding itself to think about coming back for vengeance on you.

I'm not sure i believe that, three major gangs, at least one of them probably has a chain of command of some sorts or at least a guy who's strong enough to force the others in line with minimal fuss. Additionally nothing focuses people like vengeance. So the next guy in line just has to say "Lets get them for old Spobody!"

I don't like to generalize gangs, because every one is going to be a little different and I believe to be a succesful gang in the sixth world you have to be able to loose leaders without going boom. It shouldn't take an all elven gang to have their shit together.

And actually the biggest problem with sticking around to loot a bunch of small stuff is gunfire tends to draw all the wrong kinds of attention. Follow-on forces, vultures hoping to pick off the stragglers, ghost gators annoyed at having their nap disturbed etc.

Sure, everybody wants to go get these guys, but nobody agrees on how to do it. Gangs don't usually have a clear-cut chain of command, and even when they do, they don't usually have the history of respect for that chain of command and the traditions it entails to follow that chain of command when you think that you can do a better job.

Usually, the only difference between the #3 guy and the #2 guy is that #2 was the #1's best friend before #3 came onto the picture. If #3 has a big enough ego, he probably thinks that it should be his place to get revenge for #1, and demands that #2 let him take over control. And unfortunately, he has enough of the gang backing him (the part of the gang that he brought in, not #2 or #1,) to make it an Issue.

Chain-of-command disputes in gangs, in the absence of a clear leader that everyone respects, tend to be settled nearly exclusively with murder.

I didn't mean to imply that the Ancients were the only ones who could survive having the head cut off, but rather that a gang would need to have been around a long, long time, and have a similar respect for traditions. The Ancients have a leg up in that regard because they're elves so they're always all about instilling respect for the "old ways," even when those "old ways" were in fact, hashed out in a seedy bar in 2037 over a game of poker and a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Major gangs might actually be worse in that regard, too; if the gang is big enough, chances are a lot of the foot soldiers won't have the kind of personal loyalty to old Spobody that they would in a smaller gang, so now everybody might not be in agreement that vengeance for Spobody is the right thing to do. A lot of them might just prefer to do what the guy they see as their personal leader decides, and he might just want to go on making money and forget about this "hunting down Shadowrunners and getting a lot of us killed" nonsense.




Gangs aren't militaries. Even at the highest levels, the oldest, most successful gangs - which are now lumped under 'syndicates,' but are more accurately termed 'Mafia' - have problems with this. One of the families is going to implode when the Consigliere carks it, because he's the only one everyone universally respects, not the new Dona, whom their traditions dictate should be in charge.

Crooks only stick together as well as the guy at the top can glue them together. Remove the glue, and you have Interesting Times ahead.





Depends on how long the looting takes. Running in, grabbing the guns and rifling the bodies for things worth grabbing (commlinks, ammo, grenades,) won't take very long, especially if they do it quickly and already have an idea what they're doing. And, of course, if they're planning, they'll just toss the bodies in the back of their van and drive away to loot them later at their leisure (and, most likely, sell them to Tanamous.)

Just to nip this threadjack argument in the bud, it's going to be pretty obvious what's going on in this situation. I did a pretty straight conversion to 3rd Ed from the 1st Ed Dreamchipper adventure. That means all the stats, cyber, and guns were the same because I was lazy and pressed for time (rather than completely remaking the NPCs to 3rd Ed standards like I would've preferred). All I did was give the gang leaders level 2 wired reflexes to make them able to hold their own and change out the ammo loads.

Here's the entire story. Charismatic guy promises lots of chaos and money to the biggest go-gangs in the sprawl. He summons the leaders of those groups to a warehouse to convince them to join up under his banner to raid and pillage. He's got them convinced, but rivalries die hard so they're loaded for bear. Suddenly, someone's head goes all kaplooey from an ExEx burst. And then the shooting starts. Six dead including the leader and one runs away.

Now, the guy who runs away tells everyone what happened - a couple of guys whose faces he didn't see, a human and an elf, killed them. He gives descriptions of these guys. Most of the gangs are rather upset about the fact that their leaders got killed and are looking for payback. After some reshuffling, the various gangs want various levels of revenge. A couple are now lead by lieutenants who were loyal to their former leader and are really looking forward to cracking open some shadowrunner skulls. A couple aren't that upset the old leader is dead since they're in charge now, but still have to pay lip service to getting payback or their reputation would go down ("We can't let them think they can just come up out of the blue and hit us" sort of thing). One is actively happy that it happened because the two had a rivalry in the first place.

Just about the time the gangs settle back down and start putting the word out they're looking for a couple of guys matching this description after this incident happened, the PCs call up a friend of their fixer to try to fence their assault rifles and guns. The exact same FN-HAR rifles the gang leaders were using. With exactly as much APDS ammo (I told you they were loaded for bear) as the gang members were carrying at the time. Even if they're smart enough to paint over the gang colors on the armored jackets before they sell them, that's not exactly a bright move.

As far as the looting itself, the guys had time. The shootout inside the warehouse caused all the gangs outside to think "double-cross" and start blasting away at one another. It was in the warehouse district of Redmond, so Lone Star wasn't exactly in a hurry to show up. Even the DocWagon HTR team was taking their sweet time since their client was stabilized and outside the guaranteed coverage area. I think a guy with a Quickness of 11 and reaction enhancers could manage to grab the coats and guns off a bunch of bodies in under a minute.

Proof? Citation? Anecdotes?

There's this conceit that runs around that Gangers = Dumb, and I for one just don't get that sometimes.

If they were smart, they'd be with Organized Crime or Shadowrunners instead of gangers.

Gangs are organized crime. At least the bigger ones. Ancients, Spike-Wheels and the such.
I still don't understand why such a distinction is made. Look at the Hells Angels or Bandidos.
Or any other Gang that's active in more than one state/district.
Foot Soldiers, Leutnant, Warlord, Big Boss is the most usual kind of organization.
And the do anything from protection racceteering to smuggeling, dealing drugs, prostitution, assassinations and anything else that furthers their goals . .

I would agree with Stahseele and Lurker that not all gangs are small-time dufuses who's only role in the SRverse is to bully innocents and get wiped out by shadowrunners.

Most all gangs are in all probability linked with organized crime to some extent, and the gang culture leans heavily towards retaliation against people who don't give them the proper respect. Like mobsters, "face" is important for them, and just shrugging their shoulders if their leader is killed is a big sign of weakness. Yes, there might be a leadership struggle if the guy at the top gets capped, and yes whoever takes over is gonna want to think smart if the assassin is a murder-machine.

I am not a fan of this "Shadowrunners are the creme de la creme and therefore untouchable" attitude spouted by some dumpshockers. Shadowrunners may be good at what they do, but if a gang can lay an ambush against them a reasonably skilled ganger sniping with a Remmington 950 smartgun and EX-EX ammo could be enough to ruin most any runner's day.

I am not particularly opposed to runners looting guns and perhaps commlinks and other small easily accessible items, but doing it after a run gone wrong might be the lead that the bad guys need to find the PCs. As for Tanamous, I really am not convinced they would pay very much for an already-going-cold body, but YMMV.