Odd jobs.

Runs that made no sense.

Weird Johnsons.

We have all had them.

The run that might make sense if one steps waaaaaay back to see the big picture but for the guy on the spot it looks like a Jackson Pollack come to life?

Or the Johnson who just seems.... off. The Hawaiian shirt was nice but no.. just no.


What's the Oddest / Way Out There Run or Johnson you and your team have had deal with?

1. Preparation is half the adventure
Back in my teens, with the first group I ran with, the designated GM was ... a bit ill prepared.

GM: "You all revceive a call from your fixer. Mewet's at Lucky Luigi's, codeword is 'Gordon's birthday patty'."
Players: *characters show up*
GM: "The Johnson nods to each of you a curt greeting. 'Very well, let's get to the point quickly, because this job has to be done fast; in fact, it has to happen today. I want you to extract a chip from a corp. 10K each, 2500 up front for expenses and stuff. You in?"
Players: *agree*
GM: "Johnson nods. 'Very well. Here's my com number. Call me as soon as you have the item.' Johnson then gets up, drops a checkstick for each of you, and leaves."
Players: "Waaait. Aren't we supposed to get information about our target?"
GM: "Uh. Uhm. As ... you walk out, a shred of datafax is blown your way. The headline is: Fuchi unveils new chip design tomorrow ..."

2. Suddenly, nuclear explosions
The job was relatively simple: infiltrate the Negev quarantaine zone and extract data from an old research complex. Unfortunatly, the intrepid runners found out the complex was the target of another tream. Who ... had brought a nuclear weapon to wipe their traces, apparently. Because ... we never really knew. Before we arrived at the location (being stalled by an aggressive lion shifter), the place suddenly went up in a mushroom cloud. We decided to just run, and never really looked back.

Turns out our GM hadn't planned on the shifter to stall us that long.

3. The elven race would like you to sacrifice yourself for us, underpaid criminals-for-hire
This one was downright bizarre. The group was hired by a Johnson we had worked before - an elf who loved to make references to his life in the middle ages, but who actually was a free spirit (which we found out in this run - the hard way) to escort a group of elves to Ayer's Rock in the Australian Outback. Our previous jobs invilved stirring up and rooting out an insect spirit cult behind a construction company, stealing various old junk from Europe and Asia, and a few generic extractions and infiltrations and snatch&grabs. It was a long campaign, and this was to be the conclusion. It ... didn't go well.
We were to protect them and help them in any way needed. The elves all die - exceept one - in a scripted event a few minutes and two in-game days into the outback. Demoralized, but stubborn, we pushed on, the surviving elf (I think it was a bunyip attack) going on about how absolutely necessary and important this mission is. We then enter a system of caves below the rock (because why not) and find a word inscribed on the wall.

Rigger: "What does this say?"
Mage: "MXLPTLK*. It's an ancient dialect."
Physad: "MXLPTLK? Is that a name?"
Mage: "I dunno. MXLPTLK could be anything."

Suddenly, Johnson poofs up next to us, looking mildly distressed and rather angry. We never really understood why he (or someone) wrote his true name on that wall, though.
Well, after some assurances, a pissed Johnson, the Elf survivor, and us march on, and eventually and reach some chamber. There, Johnson turns, enters a five minute monologue about elven spirits, the cycle of magic and how important it is to keep things going. Then, he asks us to sacrifice ourselves to the cycle so the next age will also have metahumans. The surviving elf, happily, throws himself onto a blade and dies on an altar.

The GM isn't prepated for the PC to all reject this offer.

A bit of passive-aggressiveness later, he tells us we kept missing clue to his grand metaplot (like a book we didn't loot, or a datastore the decker didn't hack because it was not part of the job), and hence now our characters know shit. We talk it out a bit and in the end we all lose some goodies the Johnon gave the characters, Johnson sacrifices himself and we're dumped into the outback with memories wiped. The GM never ran anything for us again.

*Not the actual name, but I have forgott4en what it originally was; it was a DC reference though

@Hermit. RE: #3.
Screw the elves. Also, best excuse to frag the Johnson I've ever heard.

This, so much. Also, even if you had known about it in advance, what motive would your characters have had to commit suicide on Johnson's say-so?

Well, it's not impossible to come up with motivation like this...

"Do it, and your <people you care about the most> will be set for their great-great-grandchildren's lifetimes."
"Do it, and <community you've been throwing every spare credit behind> will have more support than they could ever need."
"Do it, and your name will be memorialized for all time as a hero and savior."
"Do it, and <Elf you care about the most> will become an Immortal."

But yeah, for a lot of strictly-mercenary-in-it-for-myself-and-nobody-else types, there isn't going to be a motivation for this.


[e]Also...

I don't get to play much.

One that stuck in my head, though, was a game that lasted precisely one session.


Obvious suicide mission is obvious.
So the group barely knows each other, but we're called together by acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance-of-a-Fixer, to meet a Johnson somewhere.

Johnson offers us a job to hit a corp black facility in the wilderness. We ask about the money and the job. The job is extermination: every moving thing that isn't us has to die. The pay is excessive, but entirely upon completion. And the timeframe is "immediately." As in, he literally had a helicopter waiting on the helipad on the roof to take us to the job site.

I messaged the rest of the team privately (in-character comms,) and let them know that I was smelling a set-up and a suicide bug-hunt. They agreed. We told the Johnson we were out. He offered us more money. We told him there was no amount of money that could get us to take a job like that, on notice like that.

We walked. The GM was livid that we walked away from the obvious suicidal bughunt, and left, saying he'd have to come up with something bush-league for us next week. We did some IC roleplaying, and left. Surprise surprise, we never heard from that asshat again.

None. And frag him over we did, it ended with us being deported and mind-wiped after all.

"Do it, and your name will be memorialized for all time as a hero and savior" came up actually. The GM had sadly miscalculated that Shadowrunners are not epic fantasy heroes. Same goes for becoming an Immortal. Which all characters became during the ritual, now that I think about it ... including the dwarf who hated elves. Haha. We retconned that, then. Except that the shifter's human form now was an elf form, because the player thought it was the shizz.

My most colorful Mr. Johnson was back in an online game (on Shadowland, woot woot). Inspired by a recent television interview he'd given, I modeled Mr. J on a celebrity. An actor, to be precise. You see, this actor had mentioned (on Conan, I want to say) that his unique speech pattern game mostly from ignoring "all those little squiggly lines and things," punctuation marks. He'd ignore them all.

"So what I did was take everything this Mr. Johnson said and remove all the punctuation marks capitalizations! Sentence breaks, paragraph, breaks and things like, that, and then I'd add new ones seemingly at random and also? Sometimes bolding and italicizing all while...explaining that this Mr. Johnson had been carefully corp-tailored through gene-crafting and cosmetic surgery! To mesh up with a popular cinematic figure that surveys and focus groups showed managed to intimidate quite a few people very effectively even though his movies were decades old and he didn't often personally engage in overt...acts of violence nor was he himself very large or scary looking."

Christopher Walken was my group's favorite recurring Mr. Johnson.

There was a Missions event where the Johnson is a rather well known celebrity and corporate figure, and the "job" he wants done is apparantly for the runners to go out clubbing with him...



-k

It's not a one-size fits all approach, honestly. Though really, if you tell the Runners that the job is to sacrifice one of every metatype, they're likely to be able to find you an appropriate sacrifice. Especially if the rewards are things like "Agelessness and Awakening*."

*Into the IE magical tradition as a Mystic Adept.




That sounds fun, actually, though if he has to hire people to go clubbing with him... Is he looking for covert bodyguards who can pretend to be clubbers and then club assassins upside the head?

Or is he just so socially terribad that he has to literally hire people to go clubbing with him?

Or maybe he wanted to go partying with real Shadowrunners and was willing to pay for the privilege?

Reading this stuff, it just occurred to me that it has been a really long time since any game I have played in, or run, actually had a Mr. Johnson in it as the adventure starter. Kind of bummed, as the game I'm currently running isn't exactly a fertile ground for a Mr. Johnson to be involved in such a role.

But one game I played had a transsexual, transvestite Troll (actually a full hermaphrodite and not from Transylvania, I'm afraid) fixer that was pretty awesome. Think of a Troll RuPaul fixer with a great personality, a code of honor, and the ability to be almost completely ruthless when you push their buttons.

I've had ones that likely party a lot more intensely than he would find fun, those with whom everyone would have a good time, and those whose idea a fun party involves a few kirins while rebuilding a lift engine on a flying tank.

I hope you're talking about the beer and not the paracritter.

I went on one run where the GM intended for us to surrender and subsequently sympathize with opposition. We managed to get the job done anyway. As punishment, each player got only one karma point out of the entire thing.

.....

I would've told that GM to stick that shit where the sun don't shine.

Yeah, the beer. She only had a couple of barghest puppies.

+1

We once accepted a mission from a J we'd never met before to execute a hit on ourselves.

We completed it and got paid, too.

He thought was hiring Group A to go kill Group B and ended up hiring Group B to do the job. We then murdered some hobos and passed them off as "those guys you asked us to kill."

As a GM, I once sent my PCs out to get a man's nose.


As in their Fixer, who was a Dwarf mechanic running a chop shop in Renton, handed them a big pair of rusty bolt cutters and told them 'Bring me that fraggin' drekhole's nose, and I'll patch up your van on the house'.

Surprisingly, they went along with it with no questions asked. It was a lot of fun, and I did quite a bit of chewing on the scenery both as the angry fixer and as the terrified little pornomancer who had decided it was a good idea to slip a roofie to a very angry man's daughter.

Now that I think about it, the last thing one of my characters heard a Mr. Johnson say was, *sounds of multiple running feet* PAF! PAF! *sounds of a body hitting the rain-soaked concrete, a few rasping coughs "It *gasp* wasn't personal..." *a few wet coughs and then a death rattle*

One thing that I had noticed about many of the older published adventures we converted over to 3rd and 4th and run in our group is that the writers: 1) had no idea at all how to deal with players that have some inkling as how to handle their shit when it comes to gear selection and tactics, 2) were meaner than a cat messing under your bed, and 3) had a seriously overdeveloped sense of vengeance.

Mmmmh. Being torn between two tempting courses of action - tracking the J after payment and exacting revenge on him for putting a hit out on you - and using the opportunity to come up with new identities and disappear - must have been hard.






He's lucky it was his nose the Fixer wanted, and not something (or two somethings, or even three somethings) located considerably lower!

(Also, what kind of pornomancer needs to use a roofie to get a woman/girl to sleep with him?)

Nah, we were kinda small-time at the time. And it's not so much having a J put a hit out on us, but rather we messed some folks up and they wanted us dead. We just happened to get hired to do it.

That game was actually documented and written up in some pretty good prose. have a read. The hit is somewhere in the middle of the second post.

Dwarf girl. Good Willpower. She was having none of his shit.

Nothing actually happened, because the friends she was out with took her home instead of letting her go with the douchehat, but her Dad is one of those guys who believes in making examples.

Much more reasonable, aye.