So, I was grasping at straws for a 'Run I could throw my players on, and a friend of mine gave me an idea:

A hospital in the Barrens needs supplies critically, hostile gangs have hijacked entire shipments three times running, and they're basically out. They don't have enough money to just airlift the supplies, so they need a good-guy group that can arrange heavily-armed transport for the goods.

My group currently have an Ares CityMaster, and an Ares Roadmaster, so... They definitely have the "heavily-armed transport" thing down pat.


Basically, the idea is that they would transport the goods, fight off a few light attacks from the hostile gang, and then deliver the goods. But while the goods are being delivered, an unpleasant surprise arrives: the hostile gang has goaded an entire ghoul nest into besieging the hospital, thus putting them all in a bind, and forcing them to defend a hospital in the Barrens until the cavalry shows up to run off the horde.


In this case, I figure the hostile gang should be the Spikes (since I've made them the "pitch black" part of the black and gray morality going down in Puyallup,) and the hospital that needs supplies is the one in Tarislar. They'd rather hire Runners than ask the Ancients for help because, well, the civilian populace of Tarislar are said in Seattle 2072 to be sick and tired of all the gangs, even the ones that nominally formed to protect them back in the day. Might have something to do with the fact that better than half of the junkies who find their way to the hospital are tweaking and jonesing for Ancients product.


So, my players are hired to provide escorts for a rigger's big-rig carrying the supplies; they'll fight off a few half-hearted attacks on the way in, and start to unload, then the hell shows up. The Rigger they were hired to escort disconnects his tractor from the trailer and does a legger, leaving them desperately trying to fortify a hospital against ghoul attacks.

I reckon it needs to be troublesome, though; not only would the ghouls attack, but they might have a few magicians in their ranks who summon possession spirits. So that ghoul you just shot down might rise again, as a possessed corpse.


So, they'll need to hold out until the Cavalry - in this case, Ancients, led by a Contact of theirs - show up in force to drive off the ghouls. But there's some worries I'm having as a GM that just makes me think it might be simpler to go with a more conventional run.

For instance, they'll have access to some heavy firepower, and probably bring it along on a run like this. There need to be hostiles big enough and bad enough to justify their heavy gear (such as a rocket launcher, three gun-armed rotodrones and two gun-armed land-drones, in addition to the trucks,) but I'm at a loss as to what might comprise such, short of metahumans in armored vehicles.

And, if they unleash the rotor-drones, the horde would pretty much get mowed down, unless they're like, Helms Deep numerous. What, if any, shortcuts are good for handling such situations, beyond just straight fiat?

Is there anything I could use for this kind of stuff that isn't ghouls or bugs? HMHVV is pretty much a character breaker, and Bug Spirits are something you just don't want to deal with.

What would there be for the hacker to do, besides taking control of some of the spare drones?



And lastly, any other thoughts on the idea? Am I mad to even consider it?

Have you considered a hacker/technomancer gang? That would negate much of the heavy artillery you're using, or making it at least less than reliable. Your hacker'll have his hands busy fighting them off.

That could be how they've been jacking the shipments and tracking it too. Throwing in ghouls in a gangwar with armoured vehicles though sounds like fun. But it may not be fun unless they get to kill them in droves, and then it could end up being boring.

sounds like a fun run, not big on gang lore so IDK how much mojo the "evil" gang would have, but you could throw in some mages and some sentient ghouls with guns/armor/mojo. horde of ghouls could be from 20-100 or so, let me get back to you on this.

Armored troll ghoul adepts. They're tough enough to take a large amount of fire and still not go down. Adept abiltities should be maxed out Combat Sense and Mystic Armor.

War Ghoul

Some of those trolls though would have 33/31 dice to reduce damage with just Body and Armor and their Willpower is respectable enough to make them more resistant to spells, especially if drugged up. Add on top of that their 10 dice to avoid getting hit in the first place and you've got some fairly scary combat monsters. By the way, the above is an average-stat'd troll ghoul. The gear is simple enough and the adept abilities were extraordinarily basic. Increasing its skills or adding more skills may be a good idea also (like Unarmed skill increase with a specialization or adding Blades if you want to go with the Snap-Blades). Alternatively you could reduce their Magic by 1 and give them two Cyber Spurs.

I figure they'd be a lot like the Armored War Trolls from Dawnguard.

I would def, use a mass horde, make it feel VERY threatening. have the ghouls overrunning any position not covered by the team so they have to keep moving. throw in a few of the above combat monsters as mini bosses or the like.

Why are the ancients riding to the rescue? Personally I kind of hate the ancients so perhaps my own bias is showing but I'm kind of curious. The hospital has an antagonistic relationship with them, ghouls are very bad juju to mess with, there's little profit in it for them unless they plan to raid the hospital after. Why would they get involved and save the day.

If you wanted to preserve black and gray morality I would suggest instead of the Ancients rolling in perhaps a force of professional ghoul bounty hunters? Their not concerned with the hospital but their not going to rob the place because presumably their mostly sinners paid on the ghoul scalp by the territory.

Also nothing to say that the ghoul horde doesn't have some vehicle support of it's own.

My recommendation is to give them a reason NOT to bring the heavy gear, then leave them cursing their bloody sandals that they didn't. Having to keep the escort low key should help: no citymaster. I like the Hacker gang idea. If they have them on rigger standby, having to have them leave it at home (or well away) to keep things low key, and then have them wait for it to show up when they need it, might lend a nice "survivor" Left4Dead feel to things.

Would you mind terribly if I hijack this idea for my players? It sounds like a blast.

Silly, I always bring my heavy guns with me :3. just sometimes I wind up not using them

You have a trunk for a reason don't you?

Yeah, light armed is one of those relative terms. For us that would mean everyone only carrying Alphas with a dozen mags and a few cases of grenades. For serious threats the steel lynxes and roto drones with MMGs loaded with APDS/tracer get put in the armored van's trailer and half the team (the ones without stunball) has rocket launchers with assorted warheads.

A full out ghoul breakout is also the kind of thing that would be likely to pull KE or the military into the barrens. They would certainly prefer to use the heavy firepower as far from taxpayers as possible, and they would bring out the big sticks.

I second Marwynn's suggestion about giving the gang an up and coming technomancer or hacker to try and hack the PC's drones and vehicles. There is no reason the gang can't have a few drones of their own, too.

The gang is quite likely to be outgunned (in quality if not quantity), so they're gonna probably try and come up with a plan. How about a roadblock?

As for the ghouls nest, I like this twist! Even ghouls ain't suicidal, so perhaps they could plan to take the hospital via sewer access to the basement?

Played fallout 3 have we?

"Sewer Access" was my initial thought exactly, you should definitely bring this into play. Preferably, on surprise.

I would let this happen at Halloween. A master Shedim tries taking over the hospital, when the Chars deliver the supplies. The master-shedim has taken over a bunch of ghuls for the start and now tries to take over the hospital with this forces.

Now ShadowDragon, add some Shedim to that and you're group's golden. Or screwed. Either way, a good time will be had... by someone.

An Orc go-gang dedicated to the murdering of every elf they can find, with virtually all of their other activities considered supporting endeavors to provide them with the means to continue murdering elves, goading a horde of ghouls into attacking an elven hospital in Tarislar (the Ancient's homeland.)


Even if the civilians of Tarislar have been getting more and more annoyed with the Ancients lately, I imagine there'd still be plenty of them who'd see that as a worthy enough cause to play Riders of Rohan for, especially since even if the hospital doesn't like go-gangers, a lot of them likely have family who go to that hospital.


The way I reckon it (someone poke me if I'm wrong, but, I think I'm still going with this) the Ancients go-gang formed from the angry youths who were displaced into Tarislar during the Night of Rage when all those elves got run out of the rest of Seattle. They formed largely to protect the families, etcetera; but that was almost half a century ago, and along the way the Ancients got big, got powerful, expanded to an unbelievable degree, and financed themselves the traditional biker gang ways; and largely stopped being the protectors of Tarislar. Then the Laésa formed and they began doing much the same things, but on foot and on a smaller scale, and eventually the people of Tarislar said "Enough," and scraped together enough money to hire Knight Errant to police the place and suppress gang activity to the usual minimums for more civilized parts of Seattle.

But, this might be seized upon as an opportunity by the Ancients to re-win some hearts and minds in Tarislar: a dramatic rescue against an unambiguously Evil Force of Darkness that has gathered on the borders? Hell, who wouldn't love 'em for that? Especially if there's a chance that any of the local Ancients have family who might be in the hospital at the time.




A big enough armored troll is something you'd want to use an anti-vehicular weapon on, too.


Maybe an Infected Giant? Would be enormous and deadly.

Or Infected Gnomes. Small, nasty little bastards that are physically fragile, but probably pack a whallop, and may have a natural Concealment power? Hrm...

changing the avenue of attack for the ghouls could discourage the use of high explosives, and make the rotor drones nigh useless - for example, coming up through the sewers, into a sub-basement or even a different wing of the hospital.

the gangers could even have sabotaged some of the last shipment of supplies they "let through" so that some of the patients are infected as well.

you could place some sort of official checkpoint en route to the barrens to at least make it more difficult to bring heavy fire-power.

split up the attacking hordes so even if the drones might be useful keeping the full-frontal assault flank pinned down, the players will still have to personally deal with the group coming in over the skyway from the old research building.

Honestly I think your painting the ancients with entirely too noble a brush. Your world your choices but regardless of how the gang started their primary business right now is being a go-gang and proxy element for the Tir (and remember much of the population of Taristar are people exiled fromt he Tir, so that angle is negligible at best.). They might know it was the spikes that caused the ghoul horde problem, but they also might not. I can see a not insignificant numbers of the gang reasoning the hospital isn't worth protecting, because presumably they arn't paying protection. If the people of Taristar want Ancients protection they shouldn't have hired KE goes the discussion at the club house. They don't have to win hearts and minds by playing riders of rohan, they just have to ride up once the dust has settled and say "this is what happens when you trust breeders over your own kin."

I'm not saying that some members might not assist the PC's out of a personal stake like their contact, but the gang as a whole wanting to get involved? I guess the ancients are the noble elven hero gang and the Spikes are the evil trogs which does bad things for the lulz because they are not noble elven heroes. That's the point i'm trying to make. Black and grey morality is kind of lost when one side acts likes mustache twiling villians and the other acts like the riders of rohan.

The thing is, I don't to discourage them, I want to encourage them.

My players spent good nuyen (or in some cases, employed big brass balls,) to get their hands on the heavy stuff, like the Steel Lynx and the Doberman, the LBED-2 and the twin Mixcoatls, and the custom shoulder-fired missile launcher.

That's enough drones to constitute a significant fighting force, and this is exactly the sort of situation in which they'd be really, really good to have.

I'm just worried about the effects. Rolling out the effects of two long bursts at a shoulder-to-shoulder pack of ghouls, fired from a high-velocity submachinegun mounted on a drone, would take goddamn forever. Shadowrun doesn't have any kind of mass combat rules that I'm aware of, typically because combat in Shadowrun doesn't involve twenty people charging into a wall of machine gun fire, which is exactly what's going to happen when a pack of feral ghouls are sent through the front doors into an overlapping field of fire from a Steel Lynx and a player with an assault rifle, or the Ares-Stoner LMG on the top of the players' CityMaster opens up.





It's the barrens...

I imagine that the plan is going to be that they dismount the guns from their trucks and haul the drones inside as cargo to Puyallup, where they will get out, remount their guns, deploy the rotordrones, and drive to Tarislar. That's how they usually get their firepower into Puyallup. It's not illegal to own a CityMaster, just an armed one, and if the cops complain about the turret - hey, that came with it, we're gonna put a camera in it sooner or later.




Well, maybe the back door... Basically, this is the poor place I've chosen to represent the Tarislar hospital, largely due to the fact that it's big enough to have some meat to it, small enough to be reasonable for use as an RPG, and it has floor-plans with useful internal details without being too cluttered. No room for a research building, though.




My players took down an Ancient who raped a girl and handed him off to her parents. I'm trying to paint it both ways - some of them are decent people (their contact, the LT, even went out on a limb and pulled the clout necessary to get the rapist, who was not in her group, beaten and ejected from the group,) some of them are rotten, and most of them are just gangers trying to make a living the way gangers do.

Whereas the Spikes I'm painting as absolutely pitch-black evil, but their interactions with the Ancients are largely with the one who's befriended the group* who's rather mellow.


As to them riding to the rescue, I imagine it would be their contact; in combat form (IE, with the sidecars attached,) her bike (an Horizon-Doble Revolution) carries that nasty automatic grenade launcher from War! in one sidecar, and extra ammo (or a machine gun) in the other. It also has gecko tips, so since it's a monocycle, I like to reckon that it can actually climb up the side of sturdy structures, and adjust its pitch/elevation to fire down below. Hospitals would tend to be sturdy. Since she has command of a squad, she'd be bringing them, and in a fight they probably mount machinegun sidecars, in addition to whatever small (or not so small) arms they carry on their backs.





The entire ancients organization is globe-spanning, and probably wouldn't care. The local Seattle chapter members mostly came from Tarislar, though. Even if they're not so welcome there, this would still represent a vicious terror attack (and what else can you call setting a horde of ghouls on a community but a terror attack) on their childhood friends, their parents, their siblings...

I imagine if the global gang's org came out and said "go help them and you're out of the gang," a significant number would toss their colors on the ground and ride off anyway. Compared to that, letting one LT take her squad and ride to the rescue - and taking the credit for it as a whole - seems like a good idea, yes?


*Their contact is an LT, mostly in the arms-trading side of things. When not selling armaments to people, her squad acts as the Ancient's local combat arms branch; they don't just sell the good stuff, they know how to use it, too. They're the guys that would get sent out to send a message if some gang or group of 'Runners has taken a notion to flip the Ancients the bird, or if the Spikes have been getting too aggressive lately and need to have their stockpiles destroyed. Unbeknownst to my players, she's getting tired of being an Ancient: she doesn't really care about metatype or not (hell, their last 'Run had them doing a favor for her and concealing evidence of her orc lover,) and doesn't like selling brainbenders, just guns. She's only sticking around because she was enough of a firebrand in the early years (she's a first-call-to-arms Ancient, who did join when they were all about protecting Tarislar,) to rise to a nice rank that comes with perks (like an upper-Middle Lifestyle) she wants to keep, and because a number of the riders are her actual friends.

I had misunderstood, I thought you were saying that you were worried that with the amount of firepower your players were likely to bring it would render your proposed challenge less challenging.

Slightly modifying some of my proposals would still enable you to handwave the mechanics of the massive firepower while still engaging in a more SR-level players VS NPCs


But in the Barrens they could have easily (and most likely did) co-opt an existing structure. Like a small part of this. My favorite thing about hospital complexes is all the ways the buildings are connected (skyways, underground tunnels, etc) which might make defending part more interesting.


But presumably they're meeting the convoy elsewhere. Granted, they might go from the pickup to the border of the z-zone with only some of their weapons and have the rest meet them on the other side, but that's still a level of additional complexity. Even if it doesn't stop them entirely. (But this is a meaningless suggestion since you've said you want them to have all their heavy ordinance, so really disregard)

ENcourage the heavy ordinance?

That one's easy. Rumor and hearsay.

Hopefully my gaming group has figured out that every piece of information they get from my NPCs is filtered through what I'd consider a personality. It's rare to get a straight 100% factual recounting from a person, and thus my NPCs vary in terms of reliability.

With that, you can swirl rumors of anything you want, and escalate their imagination waaaay past Rambo. Scare the piss out of them, and they will plan, arm to the teeth, and jump at anything that they didn't plan for.

When I'm not GMing, I am the paranoid one, walking into things with a plan, a backup plan, a fall-back plan, and a oh-crap plan, already set up. It can slow the game down (I'm trying to tone it down) but as a party with nothing but theories, we walk into things shaking in our boots, and are usually surprised by how smoothly things can actually go.

Better scared and prepared than brazen and dead.

And if they don't listen to the rumors, MAKE IT A NIGHTMARE. If they live through it, it will be the last time they take rumor lightly.

Hrm...

I just had a thought. What if the Infected in question aren't a local ghoul nest, but are in fact biological weapons - metahumans, infected intentionally with custom-engineered strains of HMHVV, and equipped with biodrone like goad modules that let handlers control them in the field?


Could be a weapons test, one the Spikes are being used as a front for...

Seems kind of a pointless way to test things.

What better way to test a deniable terror weapon meant to destabilize and sow chaos than to let a pack of folks out to cause mayhem front-run them?

Because KE will be very interested in this and will be able to back track it. For example, every synthetic ghoul is a link to the creator. Not to mention that while the elves were all kicked out of elfland, it doesn't mean that they don't have friends and relatives who will be very irritated at this and can bring a lot of resources to bear.

You have a limited amount of time after you deploy this the first time in a populated area before you and everyone near you mysteriously catches fire or gets shot in the face, so this is not a wise way to start the clock running.

When you say link, what exactly do you mean?


Do you mean material link? Because that genetic therapy that renders skin cells/hair you leave behind useless as forensic and material link to you would also work for whole corpses.

And any cyberware in them could be specially manufactured to be absent of identifying markings, and to melt down (acid) when they flatline.

Exactly what effect does electrical damage have on vehicles? It's hard to find. Is it intended to shut a vehicle down so folks on foot can storm it, pull the driver out and shoot him and claim the vehicle? (You know, standard Lone Star operating procedures?) Or is it more permanent than that?

It shuts them down for a few rounds. that said, if you're targetting a combat vehicle heavier than a body 3-4 drone with full armour then the odds of you doing anything to it quickly become negligible.

What if you had something bigger than Stick 'n Shock, though? Like say, a Stick 'n Shock rocket, or those electro-zap feelie strips?

I really doubt that you are going to get and pay for people to go into a tank for a month before hitting them with some sort of magical/biological transform. And it doesn't matter anyhow, the person who created them is obviously causally linked to the target. Hence a ritual team can find them in short order.

Nah, they're clones. Born and bred Infected with but one purpose in life - to kill people and scare the living daylights out of the survivors. Think Gnomes that look suspiciously like Greys and shit.


And honestly, the setting breaks down if you say "a ritual team can find the guys who made this and nuke them." Did a ritual team nuke the scientists who made Surtr? No. Did a ritual team nuke the guys who invented Thor shots after one was used on a target in Downtown Seattle? No. Did a ritual team... I could go on.


Lots and lots of horrible things are created in Shadowrun, and Ritual Teams don't nuke their creators.

Very few of the writers and even fewer of the developers understood how the various elements of the setting would interact. AFAIK, all the ones who did have quit or been fired.

The fact that ritual magic can't be used effectively by PCs doesn't mean it doesn't work very well. Ritual magic is crazy, crazy powerful. It's whole toolbox, ranging from research tools to magical nuclear weapons, though these nukes are much more usable against people who can't retaliate than traditional nukes due to the reduced signature.

And remember that in the 6th world, a corporation got away with setting off an actual nuclear weapon inside the 3rd largest city in UCAS. Not only did they get away with nuking it, they got paid big bucks to clear up the mess.

You might not be able to pinpoin the peoples who supervised the proces, but in my opinion it's very lilkely you could find the facility where they've been crafted, equiped and probably at least somewhat trained and tested if they were up to spec. It also seems like a failry pointless waste of time of money for something intended to hit soft targets. I mean if you want to terrorize unarmed (or at leat very poorly armed) civilians to get them out of your ways, gangs like the Halloweeners are far cheaper and just as effective. Just give them a few crates of the 2070's declinaion of chinses AKs and ammo, a good dose of their favorite booze and drugs, maybe spiked with a few unlabled extras to make them even nasiter than usual and voila, quick and ready atrocity for a dime and with very, very little to trace the problem to you (a bunch of guns that were stolen from a chinese army depot 20+ years ago and have moved through a few dozen traffickers and a batch of drugs cooked by street-level chemisty won't exactlu pinpoint who's behindthe affair).

Also without the problems of a bunch on freshly infected feral ghouls to complicate your takeover or leak all around and draw the sort of attention you'd rather do without. Sure the UCAS prefer to catter favor from the corps than their own citizens, but crafting a horde of remote-controled ghouls to send them munching on thousands of peoples is the sort of thing that can drive them to bring out a governement-sized and wrighted boot to stomp on the problem. Hard. Particularly as it's the sort of shenanigans that can bring an Omega Order on the offender's head if you sounds like you might be planning a repeat performance, which means the other corps will stand aside and record it all for their own proganda mills to tar an feather the offender.

Honestly, ritual magic enabling a scry-and-fry is one of those things that has no place in the setting. You want to scry, use a spirit or a spy satellite. You want to fry, use a spirit or a cruise missile - both things which reasonable precautions can be taken against. Or hell, use a THOR shot - not something against which a reasonable precaution may be taken, but potentially something against which unreasonable precautions may be taken.



Also, the idea was explicitly not to use ghouls, because ghouls are infectious. Destroying ghouls with an area is easy, just round up a bunch of ghouls and extract bodily fluids until you have enough, then crop-dust the area with HMHVV III. Hell, put 'em in weaponized nanites that introduce ghoul matter straight to victim's hearts and brains.

The problem is that ghoul-bombing a place pretty much area-denies it to pretty much everyone forever. The idea behind this was to just sow panic and chaos and make people want to leg it when the creepy little things with innate Concealment (Self) show up and start eating their family members in dark corners, but since you know what they are, you can easily control them, by, say, releasing the chemical triggers that make them go docile.

I just don't want to use actual, normal ghouls, because one scratch from a ghoul is game over, roll a new character.

No, then Ares dumps their cute little bioagents and all the magical threats rapidly become dogfood.