Hey chummers, here's the layout:

My Runners are going to be in the employ of a large corporation dealing with incredibly tightly controlled industrial chemicals. I also want them to do some traveling, and I want an excuse to get them out of Seattle and get them to Detroit, where I have another plot run for them. Instead of telling them to simply hop on a jet to Detroit, I came up with a better idea... escort a chemical shipment to Detroit... by TRAIN.

This would ideally be a run that could be completed relatively short, and one that doesn't necessarily involve a lot of firepower. I'm thinking more of a train mystery. A competing corporation is trying to hijack the train and steal the chemicals. I don't want it to be as obvious as "Helicopter shows up, drops off rival Shadowrunners who try to hack into the engine". I could use some additional ideas. Here's some of the things I've been thinking:

* This is a shipping train, and generally a shipping train isn't going to have many "passengers" on it for the Runners to interact with. I'm trying to think of ways around this. Part of the adventure should deal with NPCs on the train. One definite fun part of the adventure would be if a passenger or crew member was actually a "mole" assisting in the hijack, who the Runners could expose.

* During a stop, have the Runners encounter the dead body of one of the crew or a railway worker at the stop. This would lead to them knowing that something is fishy, and give them an additional mystery to solve... why was this guy killed, and by whom? (I don't know the answer to either of these questions but it's a fun idea!)

* Have an Agent that has been installed as a virus in advance onto one of the train car's nodes. The Agent is programmed to de-couple some of the train cars at a precise time, likely right after the train has passed a portion of track where a drone could come and steal the cargo from the cars, or hijack the cars themselves and take them to another track.

Any ideas on what sort of things I can do to spice this up? I also want to do something to emphasize that this is train travel in the 2070s, and not the 1970s.

Thanks in advance!

Your cast of NPCs could just be low-rung employees of Corporation X (whoever runs the train) that are forced to utilize "non-essential, budget-efficient, means of cross-continental transportation" -- getting hauled cross-country on a train full of chemicals and other freight.

And, if absolutely nothing else, you really need to have a street sammie or an adept get in a fight on top of some train cars. Because you just do, that's why.

Those are both really awesome ideas. I can't decide what would be cooler, a Street Sam with augmented legs jumping across train cars, or an Adept doing basically the same thing. Either way that's epic.

Dead guy surprised a saboteur, got killed for his diligence. Saboteur tries to make it look like an accident in order to still complete his job.
Maybe the saboteur is supposed to implant a virus in the closed train system?
Helicopters are cheap, agreed, but they could drop in reinforcements on top of the train, after saboteur calls for help when the runners find him out.
Other than that: Fight on top of cars. It's a must, basically.

Some ideas.

If you want a more 2070 feel, have it be a high speed mega freight train, so lots of cars but it's approaching speeds of the TGV. The unloading at each stop should be done in a matter of minutes with fully automated tracking of each box and robotic container movement. Additionally, it should be electric not diesel. Cars may even be arranged so that they can detach as your agent is going to make them do, but time so that the rear cars detach and begin to break so that they arrive at a station while the main train continues on. Additional cars could be brought up to speed and coupled while in motion with a grid guide type control. With enough computerized control you could even combine passenger and freight without too much time lost, but make the passenger cars sparsely populated and long distance. I think I would leave out casual passengers. If you need to stall the train in one location, make it pull onto a side track to let another train pass. Could always go with the cliche military transport.

For more people, the line is owned and operated by an independent company and putting in new rail lines is too expensive, so that megas have to work with them or find other cross continent freight capabilities. So each of the mega corps with cargo has a representative or two (and maybe some drones as well) to oversee their cargo and make sure that none of the others mess with it and that nothing "falls" off the car at one of the stops. Then you've got a cast of potential suspects/victims of any train job. Each is probably a rigger/face combo actively jumping in to check the status of their cars. They might be housed in a "passenger compartment" and their may be a few train company reps/hosts to take care of anything these overseers need. So you've got train crew of 2 or 3 (probably riggers), some drone security, 10-12 corp representatives from 6-9 corps, 2 or 3 hospitality staff, maybe a security director for the train and a baggage overseer. That puts you around 15 or so people, that would be what I would want for a mystery.

Enough that you can get to know a people. Identify motives, rule out some people have a red herring or two, and even have a few people there to help. The security director for the train might even come to the runner team since he doesn't trust his staff or the corp reps or doesn't want to admit there's a problem if he can fix it fast.

I would have several encounters prepared ahead of time that you can use depending on the PCs actions.

Things that come to mind immediately.

A) I like the employees and maintenance personnel being transported. I can see the train company using an old passenger car that has seen better days. It's sound enough to carry the employees but has seen enough abuse over the years that it is no longer in any shape for paying passengers. Torn and ratty seats that the padding is shot, weird rattles and noises abound, exotic and interesting stains and smells. Place it near the front so anyone can access the engine and controls for added intrigue.

B)Place the chemicals back a few cars on a train with dozens of cars between. This would require the PC's to have to climb across different car types to get to the chemicals forcing the epic train top battle. Add random tunnel heights for crazy effect rolling a d6 or more to determine the number of turns between combat and ducking for your life as the tunnel roof passes by inches overhead.

C)The virus or wiring sabotage could release cars at set intervals as the train travels along the rails with the controls locking everyone out. Plot twist: A mechanic on board has also sabotage the safety breaks on your chemical containers meaning they will roll free at high speeds into some soft target like a small town of innocents. Making the run preventing a terrorist attack and not a heist. (Have to give credit to a movie for the seed of this one. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477080/ )

If I am a CEO of a 2070's railway co, I'm not going to place ALL my faith in automation (though I will a lot). Because there is simply so mich freight at stake I'm always going to want at least one union guy on board as a conductor to think like a human when there is a maiden in distress strapped to the tracks and a split second decision needs to be made. BUT I'm not going to pay him well... not when the computer is doing all the REAL work. I'm sure thats gonna create some "employee morale" issues from time to time. Dot dot dot

Employers who fail to realize that when they put someone in a situation like that, they're not actually paying the guy to work, but to be there in case he needs to do work... Well, they're going to run into problems.

I've some misgivings here. Freight trains are much heavier than passenger trains, so they'd need a ridiculously long braking distance, which would make accelerating to top speed rather useless in the first place. And fuel/energy costs would be much, much higher, too.
Also I don't think the geographical conditions on the route given by the OP are very conducive to any high speed rail traffic. I'll assume that the train would mostly run along the former Northern Pacific line, going through Washington State, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota etc... That's a line that's far longer than any current European HST line and it's running through a markedly harsher climate which would make track upkeep ridiculously expensive. And any decent blizzard would probably wreak havoc on the overhead wiring.
Long story short, I believe TGV-speed freight transport to be at least uneconomical, if not outright unfeasible both now and in SR's 2070. So IMO if you have your AR turned off, 2070s train traffic in the region would still look very much like 1970s traffic.
Whether the OP should care about that probably depends on his group and their preferred playing style.

Overhead wiring would not be a necessity, though.
And perpetually warm trackbeds can compensate for the Snows... Doable, I would think. High Speed Delivery of goods/material is a good thing.

Third rail power transmission? IANARE* , but I've been under the impression that there are reasons besides safety which make that less suited to long-distance lines than overhead wiring, like voltage issues and IIRC they're harder to integrate with railroad switches.
Or am I missing another power source besides diesel and overhead electricity?
Anyway there's still the weight/braking issue.

*"I am not a railroad engineer"

Sometimes you don't need to have every detail right
It's not a reality sim, it's an RPG. Just sayin' ^^

Exactly...

And Grid Guide works How?
Use the Grid Guide Principle on Rail Lines, and boom, Problem Solved.

I would throw in an open-plains gang encounter like a cross between a Western train robbery and Mad Max. A middle-America go-gang could swing up in a dune buggy, blasting a high-rating jammer to prevent calls for help, and then the gangers could throw grapple lines onto the train and board it. Or drop in from an autogyro.

Ooooh. Love it. That would also explain the additional runner security. "Gang violence has become bad lately. We need you folks to bolster our sec."

Aaand .. on a huge train .. who is to say you are the only security ? 15 carriages up is a Nuclear waste container with a shed load of other runners.. what do they do when the bullets start flying ?

I love the idea someone posted about the carriages automatically undocking from the others,
keep them on their toes in a fight on top of the fourth from last .. then the back three depart and suddenly THEY are on the Last carriage .. and another load of cars are approaching to latch on ... filled with civilians or cargo... or SNAKES !
SNAKES on a TRAIN MotherFragger !

I don't think the physics of it really matter (afterall, you can set a kilo of dynamite off in your hand and have zero chance of dying as a result, have laser weapons, and the collision rules etc.). Yeah, high speed uses more energy because of higher drag, which should be improved with better aerodynamics and other "future tech". With regenerative braking you can get a lot of power back on start and stop so braking/acceleration power isn't the issue. Not to mention that braking distances shouldn't matter on this far longer route going from seattle to detroit with really only a few reasonable stop locations along the way, unless you're in the 50s of miles of stopping distance. Also, I was expecting that the grid guide controls for separating cargo and better sensors/controls would eliminate a lot of the dangers. They have control systems that let semi's make snake patterns on ice at high speed now, so similar controls on a track should be feasible in 60 years. As for the power source, it wasn't specified, it could be rail delivered or internal or solar powered or all of the above for all that it really matters, unless someone's going to try to cut the power.

Also, does it really matter? The train speed won't really effect the game play much, except maybe the options of raiders or how dead you are if you get thrown off the train. OP said he wanted a more 2070 feel. Higher speed automated trains to me say future tech.

Also, don't forget the magic. The train probably has a spirit or two as entourage. Or possibly the train corp decided to put in some haven lilies to keep out spirit troubles or has mana sealed/biofidered/warded cars for special high priority cargo. So it's a roving background count or slow moving (in the astral) ward battering ram. That alone might be enough to encourage some dual natured retaliation or suspicion of the train.

I'd say unless it looks like somebody's trying to make a go for the waste container they won't get that involved - nuclear waste containers a though enough that it would take serious antivehcle hardware to breach, and heavy enough that unles you bring along a serious crane and heavy-duty semi-trailer (or equivalent alternatives such as a cargo blimp) it's no going to go anywhere.

Well, the first step to making a good railroad adventure is deciding exactly what you want the PCs to do every step of the way...

How about a maglev?

It will reduce friction, be quieter, be faster. And if the power is cut, the entire thing comes to a crashing screeching hult, or it'll have wheels and come to a normal boring stop...

As for adding some interesting flavor to the event. Maybe the maglev's pilot program emerges and becomes self aware, the actual engineer is a part time anarchist and the pilot program reads some of his literature and becomes very upset about finding how he's a tool in the system so accelerates to dangerous speeds in an attempt to kill itself. Now the runners have to either do battle with the newly emergent AI or talk him out of suicide.

Blaine the Mono ?

paracritters.

no need for anything fancy- the train simply passes through wilderness, and the critters there may land on the train... and then chew on the circuitry or something. or perhaps a spirit gets annoyed, and a landslide blocks the tracks- keep those workers safe until we can get this clear and move the train!

really, mother nature is very dangerous in the 6th world. any shenanigans people come up with could be a side-plot to this.

This is a pretty cool idea.

Might be worth mapping out the route on a 6th World Map; figure out which political entities the train would have to pass through, try and think of the logistics of the thing. Border stops, customs officers, slower sections of track in disrepair, driver changes over different "company lines". Plenty of opportunity for encounters there.

Also, how long would it take? Is the train solely composed of cars/cargo belonging to a single corp? If not, each corp would presumably provide its own security.

What about Matrix coverage? Background count? When there's a signal drop, what happens to all the corp monitoring equipment that's there to keep an eye on employees on the train? Dark patches like this might be a good time for bandits/hijackings/etc to happen (you can decide if the train staff are in on it or not). Don't comms generally run over the matrix in the 2070s? Are your characters packing radios?

Chances are they'll soon forget whether they're on a maglev or a steam train, and the situations will become the focus. Remind them their mobility is severely limited and their schedule now set by the train company. Chances are the people they piss off on the train will be around for the entire journey...

Little bit of threadromancy here on my own thread, wanted to give a bit of an update on where I'm going with this since I've had some time to sit down, do a lot of writing and fleshing out of the idea. Still room for more input though!

I've loved the feedback I've gotten on this from lots of people so far, and I've incorporated a lot of it into what I've written so far.

Here's a very basic outline of what I have:

The Train itself is a modernized Maglev train that runs on electrical, but isn't crazy high-speed (since it carries some freight). The company operating the train uses interchangeable cars so that it can carry both personnel and freight when necessary. In this case, the train is a mixture of both.

The train has two "high class" sleeper cars for passengers who deserve some personal space. Two bunks per cell, 4 cells per car.

The train also has two "coach" class cars for everyone else. These cars essentially consist of sleeper coffins built into the walls of the train, with some chairs, tables, and trays that can fold out from the wall.

After this, the train has a few cars for the chemicals that are being shipped, and a couple of cars for more conventional freight equipment.

Here's what I've laid out so far:

Rival corporation has hired a Shadowrunner team to hijack the train. Their primary goal is to steal an advanced Drone Prototype that was manufactured in Seattle and is being sent to the final test facility in Detroit. The secondary goal is the industrial chemicals and general sabotage. Once they have the drone, they want their competitor to waste time and resources improving the security of their shipping system.

The drone is the "secret objective" of the Run. The corporation that has hired the players is more concerned about the chemicals than their drone prototype, and the players won't have any advance notice that the drone is part of the cargo unless they do some digging. If they fail in this regard, it's possible that they could show up to their destination missing the drone, but with the rest of the cargo intact. Whoops!

The rival Shadowrunner team has placed a hacker into the maintenance team for the train. This hacker has started out by hacking the Train's nodes. He has backdoors into all the nodes, and has placed Agents into the security node and the main train operational node. This way he can disable security when he needs to and de-couple the train cars when needed without actively hacking the nodes. The Players will start the run only having Security access on the train's various nodes, so it will be difficult for them to spot the hacker's agents unless they hack the train themselves. The corporation that has hired them considers them security contractors, and doesn't think they require admin access on the nodes ahead of time.

During the trip, a passenger on the train will run into the mole while he is disabling a physical fail-safe on one of the cars to allow it to be de-coupled in transit. The passenger will end up dead, discovered either by the team or another passenger. There will be a couple of clues as to how she died, and information from other passengers will implicate either a tragic accident, an argument with a co-worker, or a past lover who are also all on the train. Of course, if they do some careful investigating and discover the sabotage near the body, they'll hopefully figure out that something isn't quite right. Also the mole got punched pretty good in the face during the struggle, and is now sporting a light bruise on his face.

Current plan of attack for the rival Shadowrunner group is:

The team hacks a local track control station to switch the train onto an auxiliary train track at a certain time during the trip. The hacker on board the train has hacked the local computer so that this change is completely normal and doesn't raise any alarms.

The team then has a tracked drone that follows the train and attaches itself. The team breaks into the train car, and steals the drone prototype. Then they proceed to de-couple all the chemical and shipping cars from the train, and divert them to an alternate track. In case the runners in the chaser-drone run into trouble, they have a small helicopter on standby that will drop off another one of their group onto the roof of the train to manually de-couple the cars.

***

I really, really want to encourage the fight on top of the train cars, which is the main reason the helicopter is in play. Plus, if I was going to hijack a train, it sounds like a good back-up plan to me.

One thing I'm struggling with here is that I know my players. I think once they know someone is on top of the train, their first inclination is going to be to summon a spirit on top of the train to deal with the situation, instead of climbing up there themselves. I've thought about dealing with this by having the group's Shaman piloting the helicopter, able to counter-spell and banish from the helicopter while the Pilot Program files the helicopter.

If the team does a good job, and solves the murder mystery, then before the rival Shadowrun team shows up, they'll have been able to eliminate the mole and remove the virus programs in the nodes so that the team has a much harder time de-coupling the train cars. On top of that, they'll be able to find out about the drone prototype that is being targeted, as well as the disillusioned Wage Slave who originally tipped off the rival corp about the drone in the first place, and is planning to defect.

Using paracritters or some damage to one of the tracks is a good idea. I'm not sure I want to go that far simply from a time perspective... it'll make this run a little longer than I've planned on. At the same time, it might be for a little distraction from the mystery plot, and they might wonder if the two are related. I need to browse through Running Wild a bit and see what sort of natural creatures might be appropriate. A free spirit is a good idea as well.

Another good idea is to have an "optional" paracritter/damage to the tracks plot complication, then judge if you want to actually use it or not as the game is played and you see how long things are taking / pacing.

I'd seriously reconsider the opposition team having a helicopter, unless you're ready for the possibility that your players will have a helicopter when this is over.

Hmm, one option might be to have the roof-landing-guy be in a Artemis Industries Dawnglider from Arsenal instead, with the group's magician in the Astral and a summoned Air Spirit (providing Movement and Concealment on the glider). The Dawnglider is still nifty (and worth 55kny) but it's not a helicopter.

Since I didn't notice it being mentioned elsewhere, why not just shamelessly nick the plot (or a variant thereof) from "Under Siege II - Dark Territory" with Steven Segal? That basically gives you a hacking adversary with some armed goons, and a ticking timeclock. Fail to eliminate the hijackers, and the train will end up in a head-on collission with another train, and some major city might well end up getting pummeled by one or more Thor/Nuke shots. Or they might just happen to get blown up by a government airstrike.

Definitely a valid concern, and something I hadn't thought of. I'll have to go through Arsenal and the other Drone books to pick a suitably benign helicopter if I go with that idea. I definitely wouldn't use a helicopter that is bristling with weapons, thought my players could possibly change that if they captured it.

Kyrel, that's definitely a good idea, and curses on you for making me look up a Steven Segal movie on wikipedia I'm going for more of a classic train murder mystery for this run, with a climatic ending hopefully involving a firefight and martial arts on top of the train than I am a run-and-gun with lots of explosions and such.

This is a generally useful article for planning mysteries in roleplaying games. Sounds like you at least have the three clues for the first scene with the body, but maybe layout some further ones.

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/r...three-clue-rule

To summarize, put in way more clues than you think they need, because they'll usually only find and interpret one of those clues correctly. And if you've given them 3 possible ways to solve the mystery, at the end of the night, if they flub all three, people are less likely to feel cheated, than if there is only one clue that they missed or that you expected them to interpret exactly like you did. The worst thing that can happen to the mystery is that they stop investigating entirely, because there is nothing for them to go on.

Three possible leads to the train being hacked. 1. They hack the train themselves and find the back doors. (which you already had) 2. They discover the sabotage near the body. (again, you already had) 3. If they do anything on the matrix, with a successful matrix perception test, they notice that traffic is slow. This is due to the agents in the various nodes, but they'll have to piece that together themselves.

Three possible leads to their real target. 1. They do a thorough search of train and cargo beforehand. (which you already had) 2. The company told them to protect 5 chemical cars, but a perception check will let them notice that there are only 4 chemical tanker cars. 3. Knowledge checks about the company and what facilities they have in detroit or street rumors about the drone.

Three possible leads to the other team. 1. The murder. 2. The hacking. 3. Etiquette check if they make the rounds and talk to people to notice that one of the supposed economy passengers has a very military bearing (member of the other runner team).

Also, you don't need any red herrings. Seriously, players will supply a ton just from nit picking details you provide.

It's also generally not very nice to bring armed aircraft to battle your players when they're expecting some Under Siege 2/Murder on the Orient Express bullshit.

I mean, who even brings their ground-to-air vogeljaeger rocket launcher to that kind of party, huh?

Anyway, I'd suggest a Nissan Hound (Runners' Black Book, Page 30, probably also in Unfriendly Skies) for the opposition team's whirlybird.

It's a lot of helicopter on the very cheap, makes a good airborn "Party van" in the way the GMC Bulldog does. As armed-or-potentially-armed helicopters go, it's one of the slower ones, but it should be able to keep up with a train, and with a ridiculously cheap price-tag for that how much helicopter (a quarter of a million nuyen and change, in a field where the other entries generally cost a full million,) which also keeps down the price the players could get for it if they decided to sell it instead of keeping it. It has four weapon mounts that the opposition team may or may not have installed guns in, and lock-on countermeasures 2, allowing it some defensibility when and if the players bring an air-to-ground rocket launcher to shoot at it.

And of course, in another thread about choppers, I made the observation that there's a perfectly good reason for what is supposedly the ride of the Red Samurai and the Imperial Japanese Marines being so damn cheap and having such a low Availability rating: Nissan is, at the directions of the IJM and Renraku, pushing them at a huge loss onto the black market to create plausible deniability when they use one to do some black-ops wetwork.




Under Siege II is actually a good movie. And trust me, your players will work out a way to have explosions happen.

Hell, if they're clever, they're going to come out of this run owning the other team's helicopter and the prototype drone, and Mr. Johnson won't even be able to bitch because he (a) didn't hire them to guard the drone, he hired them to guard volatile chemicals, and (b) he didn't tell them about the drone, so if he's going to get pissy about them not protecting something they didn't know they we re supposed to protect, he's going to get hurt.

You hire someone to do a job, you pay them to do the job or else.

No, absolutely that would be mean of me, and I wouldn't do that. Bringing an armed helicopter to a train heist wouldn't be very good tactics for the Shadowrunner team doing the hijacking anyways. They're being hired to steal cargo, not destroy a train and potentially kill a hundred civilians from a train de-railment.

I was actually looking at the Mitsubishi Karura. It's more of a Gyrocopter. It's small so it'd be relativeily inconspicuous, and it'd be a perfect craft for emergency backup. Samurai in one chair to jump down onto the train in case of trouble, Shaman in the other chair for fly-by magical support. Of course, it wouldn't work as well as the Hound as an emergency escape vehicle. I was thinking of giving it a few points of personal armor to protect the occupants, and a little bit of ECM. If the players managed to capture it, it'd definitely be a significant steal for them, but not game-breakingly so.



Now I guess I'll have to watch Under Siege 2

Yes, I've considered the possibility that the team might try to steal the prototype drone themselves and get away with it. Technically the team is responsible for the safety of the entire train, not just the chemicals. So a missing drone will definitely still ding them... but if they're smart about it it's possible they could figure out a way for the drone to go missing when it isn't under their responsibility, or steal the drone but alter some electronic records to show that it was offloaded from the train, then "went missing". If they go this route, more power to them. My players usually aren't that devious, so it'd be a welcome surprise.

You can put a self destruct system in the chopper if you don't want the runners to have it. Its also a nice way to get rid of evidence in case a run goes bad, or if the rigger is the hyper paranoid type. Or maybe the hacker hacks in to the chopper and just so happens to find the program to set off the self destruct, then suddenly, they're down one threat.

Why not go ahead and arm the chopper, but give it like, really shitty ordnance for a helicopter. Something like an Ingram Smartgun, nothing they wouldn't expect to be firing at them, just not something they'd normally expect to be firing at them from a chopper.




The Kaurua's a piece of utter shite, and costs 65,000 less than than the Hound. Literally the only thing it has to recommend itself is the fact that the price-tag is lower (and we're talking 'less than one third lower,) and that it doesn't have a letter after its Availability number. The number is actually higher, though.

Literally the only reason a Shadowrunning team would take the Karura over saving up a bit more for the Hound is if they got it free of charge. If that's what you want to go with, well, it's your game... But if you're going to show a team of Runners with an aircraft, they might as well have a good reason to have it - for instance, a drone would probably fit in the chopper's body, as would their whole team, so if they do it right, they don't need to stop the train at all, just decouple the train to slow down the car with the drone, take the roof off with some shaped charges, have a guy drop down on a line and winch the sucker aboard, then the rest of the team, kinda like The Train Job from Firefly.




If they pull it off, though, they'll want to sell it. A prototype drone probably sounds like a great thing to have, right up until it gets shot up and you need parts for it. Then you're in trouble.




Do not do this. It just smacks of sour grapes and poor planning combined with railroading.

From a player's point of view, here's what that trick looks like:



It's like if a GM in D&D sends a group of level 3 players to wipe out a bunch of kobolds squatting in an old mansion, describes it as being full of a bunch of old artwork and fancy furniture and rugs, then has an anneurysm when the players strip it to bare walls and floors and use the Art Objects price table to make a mint, then has a bunch of tenth-level "tax collectors" show up to make them pay their "adventuring tax," which just so happens to consist of more or less everything they made off the sale of the stuff he wasn't expecting them to notice as more than descriptions.


If you're not willing to see what happens when your players acquire possession of anything, don't put it in the game.

On a related note, we had a game session last night and my players successfully discovered a treat I'd left as a bonus... a weapons crate containing a fresh-off-the-assemblyline Ares MP Laser, a couple Laser Pisols, and some charge packs.

The team is getting off their feet Karma-wise, but I've been a tad stingy with some of my Nuyen rewards, so I put this nice little tidbit in for them to grab, if they did their digging and found it, of course.

I got about 30 seconds of "awesome!" out of the group, and then when they discovered they'd need "Exotic" weapon skills for the lasers the conversation quickly turned to a disappointing "Well, let's just sell them".

Oh well, don't come running to your GM next month when you buy a new Nissan Rotodrone and think about how cool it'd be if you could mount a laser rifle on it...

If that happens, your solution is simple:

1. Mount a battle rifle on the rotodrone.
2. Mount a speaker on the rotodrone.
3. Program the drone to yell "PEW PEW" everytime it shoots the battle rifle.

This.

If you haven't come up with a solution to getting the characters on top of the train, here's one element you might be able to use: despite that pesky "immunity to normal weapons", spirits aren't invulnerable, and they take their instructions pretty specifically when it comes to completing services. They also can't be in two places at once. Assuming your players have solved the murder mystery and forced the rival team to find another way to uncouple the cars, I'd just put some kind of manual release on the exterior of the car and have the rival team try to pop more than one simultaneously. Failing all else, it could be something really trivial, like an exterior door between them an objective being stuck shut somehow (that they'd have to open without risking blowing the train car open with explosives).

While you could (and should) remind them that they can mount them on drones...

But personally, I take away the "Exotic" skill for anything that is used like a normal weapon.

Laser rifle? Fires with the Long Arms skill, because you shoulder it and fire it just like a rifle. (Same with a crossbow.) Laser pistol? Pistols skill. Same for those injection dart weapons.

Exotic, I save for things that do not behave substantially like normal guns, like flamethrowers or squirt guns or bows or atlatls or whatever.

Thanks for that! I was sortof thinking the same thing the past couple of days about this... why can't I just let them use "Pisols" for Laser Pistol? I hadn't thought of "Longarms" for the Laser Rifle, but that's perfect. Thank you!

Also, Freya, THANK YOU! That is a perfect idea for getting them up on top of the train. I'll put some sort of emergency back-up controls on the top of the train that the team needs to access to prevent the cars from de-coupling. Sure, they can summon a Spirit up there to deal with the hijackers running on top of the train, but they can't trust a Spirit to operate some manual controls. They'll have to go up there themselves.

I also like your other idea of a door being stuck. If one of the hijackers for example physically jams the door leading from one car to the next, the team might be forced to climb on TOP of the car and transverse the train that way instead.

Great ideas for both of those! I'm not sure which one I'll end up using, they both sound great. I have to get back to writing this scene and see where it takes me.

Glad I could help! Couple of refinements to my ideas, actually. Re: manual controls, if you want to make it completely plausible in-setting, you could make it a hard-wired AR control instead of a completely physical one. Why? Spirits can't perceive AR (if I remember correctly), so even if your players find some creative phrasing the spirit's just going to shrug off the command. Oh, and if they still insist on using spirits, it'll make a nice counterpoint to the helicopter (on the condition that as mentioned upthread, buffing the helicopter to kill a spirit might mean the players end up with a more powerful helicopter at the end).

As for the door being stuck, put it in the same car as the chemicals they're guarding. "Why can't we just blow it open?" "Hey, if YOU want to use explosives in a train car full of volatile chemicals, be my guest." And yes, the idea is that in order to bypass that they'd have to leave the train car from the other end and climb across the roof.

Glad to oblige! Making weapons that are "like standard weapons, just better" require exotic weapon proficiency is assinine even in a system like d20 where it just means a -4 penalty, which is something that a really good Fighter might just be able to eat up, and since he's a fighter, can just get over with an EWP feat. (Why are you a Fighter again? Seriously, Fighters suck.) It's heinous in a system like Shadowrun, where you start off as idiotic at using them as a cave-man would be picking up a rifle.

If you've ever played it, just think of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Do your highly-trained soldiers have any trouble wielding your new laser rifles? No, they don't. Frankly, a laser is easier to use than a standard rifle. There's no recoil, it literally has the ballistic trajectory of a laser (IE, WYSIWYG.) Automatics isn't really the appropriate skill for firing a laser rifle, but long-arms is, because it fires like a long rifle: shoulder it, sight down the barrel, pull the trigger, send death at your enemies at the speed of light. Pistols is the appropriate skill for the laser pistol, because it fires just like you fire your Ares Predator: take a two-handed grip to steady your aim, sight down the length of the barrel, squeeze trigger.

(Replace "Sight down the barrel" with "sight using your Smartgun link" and "squeeze trigger" with "send fire command using your smartgun link" as appropriate for the wielder.)

Really, there's no need to use a different skill. I might impose a penalty of -2 dice if someone who has literally never fired a weaponized laser before grabs one in the middle of a firefight to use, but basically, literally any time at all to acquaint himself with the weapon's differences compared to the weapons he's used to using will erase that. Don't even make him mention it, I'd say; just assume that if they get the weapons, they're smart enough to take them to an abandoned building, set up some cans and shoot off a couple of power packs to get a feel for them. In fact, mention that to them, tell them how they're a little different (and actually, easier) to use than the usual rifles and pistols. No need to compensate for wind, no recoil, but dust and ot her particulates in the air can be an issue.