Welcome Ladies and Gents, Today I have a story of Foolishness and Luck that makes my head hurt. So I decided to share with you.

"The Rush Job" - An Extraction and Counter-Assassination.

Extraction Target - Ares Arms Weapon Designer, Currently Assigned to Knight Errent Weapons Testing Facillity Tacoma Wa.

Counter-Assassination Mark - An Unknown by the name of "X".

The runners are given a complete Dosier on thier extraction target and a pair of pictures of X. They are informed that they have reason to believe that "X" has been contracted to remove "The Weapons Designer." The Job is to make the extraction and remove the Assassin from his chosen line of work forever. The Catch (they have 24 hours before X has guarenteed Her death).

Characters :

1. Cinder : Human Female Str. Sam
2. Sinclair : Human Male Professional Thief
3. Max Karnage : Human Str Mage (Added to the Run late)

So Where was I? oh so after meeting with the Johnson, Cinder and Sinclair decide to just waltz their way into the Corp Housing Building in Tacoma, can you say AA Security. They drive past the place and decide its going to be tough so they call a Contact : Decker named Angelica and ask to have her mess with the system and help them get inside. I know what your thinking... That wasn't so bad actually pretty smart... but it gets alot worse from here. so after managing to bluff their way past the gaurds and passing Retinal and Thumb print scan thanks to Angelica thye are inside. So taking the Elevator to the fourth floor they bypass the Locking and Alarm on the Door and Shazzam they are inside the Weapon designers High lifestyle Apartment. After realizing she's not home they decide to trash the place looking for info or anything of value. That when Cinder finds the Colt Manhunter in the sock Drawer... HMMMMM any alarm bells or Red flags going off in your head? well not in theirs they just think great anouther gun for the Collection. After about two hours of rifling through the Apartment they decide that there is nothing more of Value and Decide to just wait for her to come home. Now mind you its 2:30 AM at this point, and they have noticed that there is not alot in the way of personal Effects in the apartment just close take out food and a Tooth brush... (Corp Lady is busy and almost never home).

So during there time trashing her apartment they decide to call anouther contact and ask his assistance... ENTER Mage... They tell him that they are registared to room 412 even though they are in 414, because the decker set them up as residence of 412 even though some old woman lives there. So the mage shows up on the door step of the Building and tells security he is here to See the resident of 412 the guards don't recognize him so they ring 412... The old woman answers and says she doesn't know him and the guards make him leave... So Max calls the other runners and asked them "what the DREK?" So Cinder walks down to the front lobby and escorts him up... Now the Knight Errent Guys watching the door are not exactly Dumb... So I rool a perception test to see if they remember her from earlier... and NOPE I BOTCH THE ROLL. So now there are Three of them in an Apartment in AA security Waiting for a Corp Weapons Designer to come home.

3:15 AM The Corp comes home and walks into her apartment to find the group waiting for her. Cinder pulls her Predator 3 that she somehow managed to slip past security and tells her to freeze. Meanwhile Sinclair and Max argue over what to do with her....

Cinder decides to have her sit quietly with her hands in her lap... Corp lady makes defaulted Stealth roll to activate her wristphone and call the security desk.
Meenwhile they are trying to decide how to get her out of the building. Cinder realizes after a few seconds what is going on and takes the phone and destroys it. But when security checks the number in their records they realize it is the number for the resident of 414... "hey hasn't there been alot of movement on the fourth floor tonight?" "yea now that you mention it" , and so security pulls up the cameras for the Fourth Floor just in time to See Cinder pushing the corp lady into the Elevator. They scramble a squad of four Guys in light security aromor to the Parking structure and force the elevator to skip all floors and go directly there. Meanwhile Sinclair and Max have walked out the front door easy as pie due to not having been seen on Camera and the fact that the door guards have changed shift and are paying more attention to keeping people out then keeping them in.

Now I know what your thinking... security in light Armor with Assualt rifles equals one dead SAM... Yea you would thinks right. NOPE did I mention that they had managed to get through security with 2 Grenades and a Predator 3... I couldn't beleive their luck. So security has an ugly suprise when the elevator opens... going first cinder thrown the grenade under the patrol car and covers the corp womans body with hers. BOOM, Lots of injured Security guys lying on the ground around the remains of the Vehicle they used. Cinder takes a moderate wound in the blast and walks casually over to her Motercycle which is parked in the structure.. Climbing on her Aurora she tosses her other grenage at the gate and rides out free and clear... Lone star resonse was 3 rounds and she was gone in 2 so no pursuit... however her face is all over the internal security monitors...

I shook my head and called it quits for the night and now I'm waiting to see what they will do next...

Hey, if they got away with it, it doesn't seem quite so foolish. And what didn't they learn?

I don't really see the big deal. I think I'd have given it to the target straight ("we're here to protect you" and all that), but otherwise what's the big deal?

I've seen worse runs... and been part of them, much to my shame.

Eh, there's one or two things I'd have done differently, but fair play to the lucky runners. Kudos to you, Noctum, for not fudging rolls.

I hear that, Tinkergnome.
This was a swiss fraggin' watch compared to some runs o' mine.

Things are supposed to go wrong on runs. People are only human, after all, and can't forsee everything.

You, the GM, appeared to do a good job deciding what the guards would do when things went wrong.

However, when the elevator doors opened, I'd be hard pressed as a GM to see any way Cinder could pull a grenade and toss it before the Guards with Delayed Actions fired upon her. After all, the guards have been told that there are two women in the elevator, and one is presumed armed and dangerous (otherwise why the Light Security Armor). Shooting someone when they reach for a weapon/grenade is SOP in the guards training, after they've ordered the subject to halt. Ordering the subject to halt is a Free Action for one of the guards, while the others continue to Delay Actions.

I'd let anyone with a Delayed Action, with gun ready and pointing, to go before someone could Ready Grenade and Throw Grenade.

I'd have been more likely, as a GM, to have the guards just getting into position when the elevator doors opened, or to have had the elevator stop completely while the guards got into position.

Yeah for some people its hard for them to understand what being a criminal is really like. For others its easy. Of course movies don't help much since if anyone ever tried anyhting in a movie they'd be busted in 2 minutes. PLus its hard to cover all angles when dealing with a Snach n grab on that scale, especially since they didn't have time to do any legwork for the most part, to find out where corp lady likes to hang and what not. I do have to say that they were very lucky however. Did they do anything drastically stupid? In my opinion they didn't, they just didn't plan too well or have a contingency plan from what I could tell. You always need a plan B and even a C can never hurt. Cause plan A almost never goes exactly right.

Also are these al new players to SR? If so of course they made a few mistakes hell even most veteran players don't know all the local Security ratings, or every possible security measure that can be in place in a Corp building. A

Anyways thats enough rambling from D.G. Noext time they should call me in for help, I'm a Pro at these things.

Thanks for the Advice guys... and your right the Delayed actions should have gone first didn't even think of it.

Actually, I think it's a really good exercise to figure out what the PCs did wrong and go from there. Their mistakes as I see 'em were:

• Calling the mage in late. If you're going to pay a spell slinger, you might as well get a whole run's worth of work out of them.
• Not neutralizing the cameras. With a mage, this is relatively easy, or have the decker do it. Worst case scenario is that the guards figure something is up. At least they won't know what.
• Too much focus on the mark and not enough on finding and neutralizing the assassin. If they could have found and geeked X, they wouldn't have had a deadline any longer. Can you symbolically link off of a photograph? If so, astral tracking would have done the job pretty fast.
• Looting. It's not professional, but if you're going to loot, at least be neat about it. Also, for the love of god, wear gloves (which I don't know that they didn't).
• All-in-all, going through the front door probably wasn't the best idea. If they could have found an alternate entrance (rooftop, sewer, maintenance) that would, more or less, compensated for their other problems.
• Letting the mark call out was just bad planning. A decker watching the callcenter could have solved it, as could more diligent guarding.

On the elevator thing... I wouldn't have had the guards automatically hose the Sam. I would have called for the standard ambush/surprise roll with the guards being the ambushers, though. I'd have had them loaded with gel rounds or a freeze foam tank and ready to hose the elevator. After all, if you stop an extraction and don't kill the person you're saving, it worked out for the best.

I don't have SOTA on me right now or I'd check. If you can, it's a huge TN modifier. You probably need an object link, though.

This is just a personal thing...if I'm trying to SNEAK through the front door of a Corp apartment building, I wouldn't be toting any of my big artillery. I might try sneaking in a knife or a hold out-light pistol. If you get caught with a heavy pistol or grenades, you've pretty much just botched your assignment. If you are going to take in some of your larger toys, then you definately want a different way in. Loke I said, just a personal thought on this.

Depends on your assessment of the security. If you're looking at a standard MADS-based setup, then take the biggest thing you've got with ceramics. For the rest, you can come up with a better way to get it in (levitating mage works well, particularly if you can get someone else to the window from the inside.

Oh right... forgot to add that you need symbolic linking metamagic. Its page 47 in SOTA.

Photographs are really bad for linking, it seems. They're between +6 and +14 to the test, depending on the skill of the photographer.

Still, it'd probably be worth a shot if you have the capability.

Good lord, that's horrible. I'm pretty appalled that ever made it in. Practically makes it impossible for a person to go to ground if the people after him really want to find him. That's just retarded.

Well, because of the way the symbolic linking thing reads, a GM is within the rules to disallow photographs to count. However, a stick figure drawing by someone who saw the character once, 10 years ago will work (badly).

They didn't geek the X guy.

What's the problem with the Colt Manhunter, btw? I know that's supposed to be obvious from the context, but maybe I'm just not seeing it.

I don't get it either.

I think it's another classic example of one of those "brilliant GM clues" that really aren't that brilliant or that much of a clue. I mean, how shocking to find one of the most common handguns on the market in a weapon designer's sock drawer. Who woulda suspected something like that?

Well maybe I just strange ...

But I kinda like their approach .... just a KISS* work.
If they got the skills and help to walk directly through the front door, why not do it?

The only thing I got against their work is that they didn't have the decker make some vidoe loops, when he already had penetrated the system.

Well and just sitting and waiting ... with a clock ticking for a comming assination, I would have been looking for her calender, perhaps with the help of the decker. It might have shown a much better approach to grap the target, instead of going for "I guess she'll be home soon".

* KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid

Personally, I've seen people do a LOT worse on runs...and I've even done badly myself (I've been eaten by Perianwyr, shot by Lone Star for "resisting arrest", and been killed by casting Hellblast (imagine a Fireball on crack) inside a condemned building which fell on my head)...but the worst I've ever personally witnessed was the idiot who got upset that someone who happened to be walking into the same restaurant as his meet (Eye of the Needle) didn't get out of his way...even though the other guy had two guys flanking him and a secretary with him...and even after he made the Intelligence roll to recognize the guy as Richard Villiers, one of the top three at Fuchi...he STILL draw his gun on him...

The Abstruse One

I don't think there is anything wrong with going through the front door. The guards were a bit careless though it would be interesting if she actually had a good method of smuggling the weapons. ("You hid the grenades where?") Though an attempt to prevent her picture from being taken might have been nice. And I wouldn't have had the guards just fire into the elevator. ( They wouldn't want to risk the hostage. ) Actually throwing a grenade as soon as the doors opened was a good move. ( She got out of there remarkably fast. I've actually seen runners waste time after getting into a firefight in a high-security building ) Its also highly unlikely that Grid Guide would have caught them. The first lone star response would be a few cops to access the situation.


All in all the runners got lucky........
Lucky that building security didn't catch those weapons.
Lucky the target didn't press a PANICBUTTON rather than her Wristphone.
Lucky that building security didn't sound a full alert the moment they received the phone call.
Lucky as hell that building security didn't stop that elevator!
Lucky that Lone Star wasn't clued in fast enough to stop them from leaving the neighborhood.

( Those security guards are so fired. )

Of course now the hunters become the hunted.


Lone Star will probably blame Knight Errant and simply issue an alert.

Knight Errant on the other hand will likely either send out an elite team and/or hire a group of shadowrunners ("sometimes it takes a rat to catch a rat") to track down the target and her mystery abductor whose face they have.

Then of course there is the assassin whose reputation is on the line.

Finally the Johnson may not like how this run was handled and may take steps to cover his trail or correct the runners' "mistakes".

Yeah, what's with the manhunter? In my head, after you said it was a big hint (i.e., I wouldn't have thought of it as a player just then), I thought COLT weapon, ARES designer... why isn't she packing Ares weaponry..? So I figured they had the wrong room, but that doesn't seem to be the case. So what's with that?

And also I have to agree that those players did things pretty good. I'd consider this a success.

I'm fairly positive that it was in shadowtalk in an older sourcebook that Ares owns Colt as a subsidiary.

Not that it matters. It's not like there's some law that states that simply because you work for one company, you can't own products of another company. The last time I checked, black-garbed government men didn't storm into a Compaq employee's house because he owned a Dell.

Yeah, and if you don't want to be obvious, you want to use all the equipment of a diffferent company, that points people the wrong direction if they're gullible. Equipment use is rarely a clue.

Too bad, as previously mentioned, Colt is owned by Ares, huh?

Of course there's also the bit about it being in the character's sock drawer, or that they're a weapon designer who (apparently) should never have access to any other companies weapons so that he can actually know what he's doing. <nods> Good call.

All that aside, the "obviousness" of the "clue" is apparently beyond most of the people here.

I have to agree. Lime may've been a bit brusque, but this really does feel like a classic Big GM Clue That Wasn't.

Answer these for me original poster:

1. Can the manhunter be used as a link to track by magic or something?
2. Why was it there in the first place?
3. What happened to X?
4. What happened with the Lone Star response?

It's crucial for a GM to be able to step into the players shoes. Ask yourself what you would think if you had no fragging clue what was going on as a player.

In my game it means you would think that the bad guy is someone who mentally bitchslaps Keyser Soze. But I'm a bastard. Confusion is a weapon sometimes!

Kaiser Soze

I'm pretty sure it is, in fact, Kaiser Söze, if you really want to be picky.

Keyser Soze - At the bottom of the credits.

I think it's supposed to mean something in Hungarian. At least, that's what the DVD extras said.

Well, either that's a multiple transliteration effect, or they really didn't care to support the "German lineage" aspect...

I can see it as a consequence of different areas deciding how to spell the same word.
[edit]
Nothing here
or here to support it as a Hungarian word.

more edit:
nem kóser dolgot tervel ki = to be up to some hanky-panky

You left the umlaut out. IMDB clearly says Keyser Söze. So none of us was right. Or maybe you know it's Söze, but couldn't find umlauts on your keyboard.

Who knows? But that's what's in print. Movies are always screwy with other languages anyway.

Edit: and I don't know how to add an umlaut. Thanks for the benefit of the doubt.

It doesn't have to be a word, though. Although the fact that there seem to be several people in Hungary with the first name Kaiser but none that I could find with Keyser would suggest the scriptwriters were just as confused as we are now.

[Edit]Nëïthër dö Ï, ön än ämërïcän këÿböärd. Ï'vë göt ö äs ä sëpärätë sÿmböl ön mïnë, and Ï cän ädd ümläüts övër äll öthër vöwëls, töö.[/Edit]

Vowels?

as for the un-American letters...
if using Windows, there's a trinket called the character map, it shows every letter in any font and lets you copy them from there.
Or, if you are a maschist (or geek, or just bored), you can create any letter by learning their ASCII value and typing that in the number pad while holding the alt (or local equivalent) key (example: 251=√)