Hello,
I am a experienced GM who played first and some second edition long ago. My group has recently picked up 4th edition and I am wanting to send the group up against a vampire and ghouls as part of a cleaning mission (cleaning out a future base of operations).

I am wanting to get the feel right and am looking for any input about how to best set up the mission and any suggestions that people may have concerning any part of the mission.

Thanks in advance.

Your group like dungeonning or wanna make it somewhat more original?

We all have played various games together and are playing SR in an alternating schedule with a 5th Ed D&D game. I am wanting to keep the game very "Shadow heavy". I liked the idea of the Vampire/Ghoul thing since it will give me a reason to allow them to take over a location as a base (old warehouse).

You should be very careful when sending ghouls as opponents.
The disease rules as they are make them highly contagious and very deadly. I recommend Patrick Goodman's unofficial errata for his rules in Running Wild: click me!

I figured that ghouls would be a good reason for a warehouse to be abandoned and give the characters something to strive against to claim it. If anyone has other suggestions I am open to them.

Why not squatters in the vampire's thrall?
He could use them as juiceboxes and give them ecstasy and food in exchange. Look up the Renfield rules for how that works. It's a parasitic relationship, but fanatic gangers make pretty clear-cut enemies.

Edit: Or you could of course handwave the ghoul-rules. Brainless ferals are unambiguous, too.

For added fun, have the Johnson hiring the team be a front for Tamanous who want the local upstart nipped in the bud.

Nothing gives you that warm glow like eliminating one evil so a bigger evil can move in.

..what about large TerraFirst! eco-terrorist cell with nutzoid Mage/Shaman as big boss?

Plus, if the vampire has a clever escape plan, potential for a long term nemesis.

Always think ahead!


-k

Where does one find the Renfeild rules?

Running Wild, p. 68

Ghouls in Shadowrun aren't the same as zombies elsewhere. You can play them that way, as cannon fodder, but having intelligent ghouls with cyberware and/or magic is much more interesting.

Tanamous was mentioned earlier: they're a criminal group run by intelligent ghouls, who specialize in organlegging and body trafficking. They have a reputation for viciousness that makes the other organized crime cartels take pause. Luckily, they're also business people, so you can talk and bargain with them. They also support ghoul rights, and funnel money to political organizations to support ghoul-related causes.

My suggestion would be that the vampire is holding a bunch of ghouls in thrall, both intelligent and bestial. Tanamous doesn't like that someone else is controlling ghouls, so they want him gone. Thus, they hire the runners to take him out. The twist is that Tanamous wants the ghouls back in their fold, so the team isn't supposed to kill ghouls if possible. That sets up a number of interesting possibilities.

I like that twist on my suggestion about Tanamous backing the run, plus it keeps the players from just blowing the whole lot up or some other mass destruction option...



My ghoulfriends back and your gonna be in trouble......hey ya .. hey ya... my ghoulfriends back.

The infection rules are beastly - like, a troll or a dwarf absolutely optimized for resisting disease has at best a 50/50 shot at resisting HMHVV.

I'd seriously consider the fanatic gangers option instead, especially if it lets you play up something unexpected. Not all vampires are, after all, raging psychopaths or heartless predator types. You want to mix things up, make it like, a scared elf teenager who got turned without realizing what was going on, wandered out into the barrens in a daze, got grabbed by the gangers for fun times, and used her/his newfound power to enthrall them all.


On the other hand, maybe you want to throw an unambiguous villain at your players. If so, go for it. Every Shadowrunner who isn't completely sociopathic (coughClockworkcough) needs an opportunity to stomp on an unambiguous villain at least once in a while.

Would it seem off to have the ghouls that have been enthralled to be non-contageous? Perhaps due to some tampering by anti-ghoul efforts or some other mutuation of the disease. I like the idea of exposing the players to the concept of the HMHVV disease but since none of them as players know about it (and it would give away a lot for me to prep them on it). If they do their homework before hand then when the Ghouls seem to be non-infectious it might raise some questions, which could lead to more stuff, but I don't want to make it that bad.

Well, if they, as players, don't know about HMHVV, you should make sure to give them a short overview. It is a thing in Shadowrun, and not a secret. People know about it.

I am just concerned that by doing so I will be screaming "This mission is going to be dealing with these things so make sure you are prepared". While I don't mind educating I don't want to give that much of a glowing sign to the mission. I hope that makes sense.

Well, I'm not sure if I understand that correctly.
Here's my assumption, just tell me if I got something wrong:

Situation is that the group of PCs needs a hideout and is scouting for locations.
Or either, their job is to clear out the location on someone's behalf and they might just get to keep it for their base of operations

Either way, they should do some minimum amount of legwork beforehand, right? Like, actually looking at the thing, asking questions about why it needs to be cleaned out, and so on.
At some point of this (assuming they don't just rush in gun's blazing), the word "ghouls" at least should come up. Why is it wrong then to give them the information so they can prepare before they die horribly as either ghoul fodder, vampire tetrapak, from ghoulification or some combination of this?

Then make it part of side information during a mission prior of actually doing that particular HMHVV run. There are rather easy ways of doing that ... like a sudden and for the current mission totally unrelated news cast on trideo you mention a current uprising in the ghoul nation of Asamando or having the news folks talk about a higher than usual infection rate in a different town that lead a mega (like Ares) to send in troops to either kill or try to test a cure for newly infected people (at least some of the previous editions had means of avoiding a full ghoul transformation after an HMHVV-II infection, HMHVV-I is a different beast). If you're lucky enough your players will pick that up and try to learn more about HMHVV. If not? Bad things will happen to them.

I have no problem providing those kinds of details per the player request. I was more worried about giving a HMHVV "briefing" before the game and it giving a prelude about the mission.

Ah, gotcha.

No, I wouldn't do that. But if they ask, it would be a bit unfair to let them go unprepared, because their characters should know about the implications, even if the players don't.

..no problem..just have your players test their charc. againts different things..
.to teach game mechanism before the campaign start..
first woulld be Troll ganger (or 2),then maybe mage, then Ghoul and so on..
..players then know how rules work..

If they know they're going up against ghouls, brief them on all the public particulars and remind them that they can always query the shadows for more.

If they ask about ghouls, same.

If they don't ask about ghouls, then the first time they see a ghoul, pause the game and narrate the particulars that everybody should be aware of, and that they can always query the shadows for more.


Remember to stress long and hard how insanely infectious HMHVV is, and that nobody, but nobody, wants to get into melee with a ghoul, unless they're a robot or a non-metahuman of a type who is immune to the virus, are already infected with HMHVV (like vampires, banshees, other ghouls, etcetera,) or are wearing hardened armor with full body coverage.

Personally I'll suggest that you stay away from using Ghouls, unless the players have a chance to REALLY prepare for the encounter. RAW the players have precisely ONE chance of surviving an encounter with that type of opponent. Taking them down before they can get anywhere near them. If the Ghouls get in touch range, the PCs are done. Even if they survive the melee combat with the Ghouls, they will, excluding grotesque amounts of luck, end up as Ghouls.

The edited rules in the link earlier in the posts above improve the chances to survive the infection, but I still wouldn't put money on the average character shaking the disease without turning into a Ghoul.

Vampires are "fun" enough, and using enthralled gangers or something similar ought to make for a nice group of opponents as well.

well, coming out of it without HMHVV can certainly suck, but is far from impossible.

most characters will have to burn edge for a critical success on their disease resistance test to pull it off, though (in really unpleasant situations, they may need to do so twice).

still, certainly a very nasty thing to spring on someone new to the game... if you're determined to use them, I would suggest you go a step beyond telling them how nasty it is, and actually let them actually do a mock resistance test before they even start the fight, just to make it clear: it's not just "really bad for ordinary people", it's also "really bad for everyone, including the most disease-resistant build a PC is capable".

I think you need to take a good hard look as to why you're wanting to use ghouls because I ain't buying this reason at all.

So I decided to go with the Vampire controlling some gangers. The main reason I was leaning toward Ghouls was that all the runs so far have been against corp security or some such, and I feel like there is another side that we are missing. Also I liked the idea of further plotlines that were suggested by Sendaz about the Johnson being a front for Tamanous. I may have something with Ghouls in a future mission, and ensure that the Vampire escapes so he can re-occur. Does anyone know of a published or at least posted mission write-up that I can compare what I design against so I know if I am on the right track?

most of the earlier SR4 missions were free of charge, if i'm not mistaken. at least, the first mission in season 3 is (season 3 links: http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/missions/...loads-season-3/ )

and i think the season 2 ones might have all been free? pretty sure that was all SR4 as well (season 2 links: http://www.shadowruntabletop.com/missions/...loads-season-2/ )

I mis-spoke in my request. I was meaning a mission that is in any way similar to what I am wanting to write up. I have downloaded the missions that were free from the Shadowrun Missions system. Speaking of that is it dead now? I know that they moved to a sale format with Drive Through RPG, but I only saw 2 (or maybe it was 3) for the 5th season.

last i heard, bull was in charge of missions and still has a job.

which is good whether you play missions or not, because the missions FAQ is about the closest thing we're ever likely to get to errata for many things.

Jaid. RAW HMHVVIII is a contact vector, Power 8, Penetration -6, Speed 1 day (10), retrovirus. You get infected by simple skin-on-skin touch. Using Body + (the rating of
any protective systems, implants, or medicines - 6) you need to roll at least 10 tests on which you have to get at least 8 hits per roll, in order to get through unharmed. That's 80 hits on 10 attempts, in order to get through the disease unscathed. Every time you leave Power unresisted, it carries over to the next day, and you get to roll for resistance every day until you've reached 80 successes in total. Every time you leave as much as a single point of the disease's current power unresisted, you loose 0.1 point of essence. Go below 0,0 Essence, and the character dies. Lose 1.0 point of essence, and you become a Ghoul. Statistically you'll need to be rolling 24 dice, in order to be "sure" to get 8 hits. Actually make that 30 dice, as you need to compensate for the Penetration of -6. Few characters who are not specifically designed to be able to make this kind of roll is going to have even a fraction of a chance of making this roll. Edge reduces the number of required dice a bit, as do better than average rolls, but I doubt that any characters are running around with an Edge of 10, and bear in mind that the Edge pool only resets when the GM says so. Personally I doubt that many characters are liable to be rolling more than 6-8 dice to resist the disease, making it mildly put unlikely to get 80 hits, without failing to reduce the Power to 0 or less more than 9 times.

The amended version that was linked to somewhere in the threat reduces the HMHVVIII to Injury, Power 6, Penetration 6, Speed 1 day (10). It's 20 hits less and only half the official penetration, but even with that situation you are looking at 18-21 dice on the resistance roll, in order to be statistically "safe".

I'm sorry buddy, but either you and I read the rules very differently or have significantly different levels of dice pools in our games, 'cause in my book, having a character contract HMHVVIII is basically a "Game Over" sentence for that character. And burning Edge a time or two isn't enough to get through it alive.

Last I heard, Bull has been buried under a severe case of Real Life. As a result, Missions hasn't done a whole lot recently.

As for HMHVV, if I were the GM, I'd simply handwave it. I may or may not tell my players that, but I would definitely arrange things so they didn't get infected. I've known some players who would try and deliberately get infected, so they could get the bonuses.

successes reduce the power, do they not?

first day, burn edge for a critical success (4 net hits) and you get the power from 8 to 4. still hard, but not unbeatable. burn edge again and the power is down to 0. you still have it for 8 more days, but the risk has been drastically reduced at that point. furthermore, even one successful resistance means it won't convert you to a ghoul; you have to lose 10 essence, and if you succeed on any one test (with the first one being absolutely crucial to your chances of that happening) you will not become a ghoul unless you get it again.

..or everyone plays Shape shifter, they are immune to hmhvv..

Power of 8 each day, adjusted by any missed hits previously. You have to reduce the full power each and every day. Any power remaining from the resistance test is added to Power 8 on the following day. Repeat.

I once had a run where my character had to herd two shapeshifters (jaguar and wolf), one of them was at least mostly socialized with human society. It still was very interesting, but kind of a challenge until we solved problems by disguising the wolf as a guard dog Later, we infiltrated a high-class pet shop by faking the request of "returning" the jaguar to get a replacement with different fur markings for a rich socialite. It was a crazy and fun run

As for the run, the vampire and the ghouls: Reward good legwork. A vampire can wreak havoc on ordinary people, but if the characters plan accordingly, they can take the thing down. Their powers of Mist Form and Regeneration are their biggest assets. The latter means they can take a few shots, the former means they can get out of a bind.
Once people start packing weapons made of wood (even sawdust), things turn very ugly for vampires. The clever mages among them learn a spell to alleviate allergies... those guys are nasty.

hmmm... obviously been too long since i've had to use the disease rules. either way, you do have to lose a full point of essence, so even a single success is enough to avoid turning into a ghoul (though obviously, if you are ever facing ghouls again in the future you've got all kinds of problems).

It's surprisingly easy to fail 10 disease resistance tests if there are 80 hits necessary with (usually) only BOD.
Besides that, good luck if you're a highly cybered street samurai
In this case you just die. May be the better option, though, depending on your inclinations.

ok, just looked over the disease rules again. net hits do reduce the power of the disease.

(augmentation, 130, "The Disease Resistance Test"

"Every hit reduces the disease’s Power by 1 point."

if you do not reduce it to zero, you add the power again and keep going. if you do reduce it to zero, you do not.

this is further hinted at later on the same page:

"If the Power of the disease has not been reduced to zero by the last test..."

(this indicates that it is possible to reduce the power of the disease to zero before the last test, otherwise you wouldn't say anything about achieving this "by" the last test, it would only matter if it happened *at* the last test)

a critical success is the minimum required hits plus 4 more beyond that. burning edge therefore gives you 12 hits on your resistance test, reducing the disease's power to 0. you still have the disease until enough tests have been made, but as those rolls will be against power 0, that's a relatively minor consideration. whatever you do, don't critically glitch them (also, don't touch anyone else and burn everything you touched while diseased, because you still have the disease for those 10 days and officially it's spread by contact).

HMHVV is a horrifically bad disease to get... if you don't have edge. even then, it's pretty nasty; losing a point of edge can be quite unpleasant. ideally, spend your edge to avoid being touched in the first place.

My thought to make this slightly better" is to make cure disease add it's success as success to a character's roll, rather than adding dice. Meaning that anyone with a properly prepared mage has a much better chance of not getting infected. It also make cure disease a spell worth taking.

For the OP, I think using infected Renfields is a much cooler idea in general. Remember that everyone in this situation is smart though. If you just want dumb bad guys that you can plow through, ghouls aren't a bad choice, they're just more dangerous than you were originally thinking.

That is not how it works.
Each test is against the original power + any leftovers.



The only issue with that is that even magical help is specifically ruled out.

not if you reduce the power to 0.

you add the power >>>>>>>IF<<<<<<< they do not reduce the power to 0.

"If the pathogen’s Power is not reduced to zero, it is added to
the pathogen’s Power when rolling the next subsequent Disease
Resistance Test."

so, hits reduce the power of the disease.
*if* you don't reduce the power to zero, you add in the power again. if not, well, no such clause exists; you've reduced the power of the disease, and you don't add it again, so the disease is going to sit at zero until something goes wrong.

however, even if we go with your assumption, that simply changes when you need to burn edge. day 10, burn edge, reduce power to zero, take no essence loss, don't turn into a ghoul.

Hm. Good point, actually.

However:

There'd be no point in rolling tests if the test were made against a TN of 0.

The paragraph "The Disease Resistance Test" on p. 130 also seems to be clear to me, stating:


In other words: Each and every test is made against a disease's Power (+ possibly escalating Power rating from earlier tests) and Penetration, until the requisite number of tests has been made.


Yes, all is not lost. Still, ~0,9 essence lost and one burned point of Edge is very pricy in my mind. It is simply too easy to ruin a character with a simple touch. Thus, I greatly prefer the vector as injection, the power as 6, and the penetration as -3. This way I'm be able to use ghouls as opponents without PCs running the other way as fast as they can (which is likely not fast enough, as ghouls tend to be rather quick on their feet).

rolling against a power 0 disease still allows for critical glitches. for the average person, rolling 3 dice, that's not unheard of. for someone below average, say, body 1 or 2, it's actually quite likely (1 in 6 for one dice, 11/36 for 2 dice if i'm not mistaken). this also does a good job of representing diseases that are mentioned as being impossible to fully recover from and which merely go into remission. you get the power down to 0 for a while, it has no effect for a long while, and then you crit glitch your disease resistance test and suddenly it's back again (that being, imo, the most plausible negative result of a critical glitch on a disease resistance test).

also, i would refer you to your own second quote:

"Every hit reduces the disease’s Power by 1 point."

the disease's power is reduced. unless something adds to it again, it will presumably stay reduced. it isn't "effectively reduced", nor are the effects lessened... the power of the disease itself is reduced.

of course, burning edge is not by any means a small cost, and is only available to that small portion of the population of the world that actually have edge to begin with. and there's also that minor detail that even if it doesn't turn you into a ghoul, you're still diseased and can presumably transmit the disease for the full 10 days...

I was under the assumption that each time you resisted, you started with the whole power + any leftover from the previous test. But, I think I was wrong. Reading the last paragraph:

"After the minimum number of tests have been made, the infection has peaked, and Power will no longer accumulate. The effects of the disease will continue until subsequent resistance tests finally reduce its Power to zero."

tells me that unless you do something to add to the power, like fail your resistance test, the power doesn't go up. Because the only thing that changes after the infection has peaked is that the power no longer accumulates, yet the total goes down like an extended test. So, yea, I guess once you've beaten it, you have to keep rolling, but it's against a power 0 disease. Don't glitch and you'll be fine.

Jaid. I'm sorry buddy, but you misunderstand the disease rules. If you read the example from Augmentation pp. 130-131 they clearly illustrate what I wrote earlier.

Copied from the example I refer to above, in Augmentation:
...he has to make a Disease Resistance Test. Chun rolls no hits and suffers the debilitating effects of botulism at Power 4...At the second test (12 hours after infection), Chun rolls his 8 resistance dice and gets 3 hits. Unfortunately the Power of the disease is 8 for this test (Power 4 plus the unresisted Power 4 from the first test), which means that Chun only reduces it to 5...After the botulism’s Speed runs out (the third minimum test) again in 6 hours, Chun makes another resistance test, rolling 8 dice thanks to the antibiotics again. He gets another 3 hits, but the botulism is now peaking and its accumulated power is 9 (Power 4 + unresisted Power 5 from the last test). He only reduces it to 6...The disease has now run its course, though, and all that is left is recovery. On the next test, Chun only gets 2 hits, but he’s only facing Power 6 now, so he reduces it to 4...In another 6 hours he makes a final test, getting 4 hits, reducing the remaining Power to 0, and finally kicking the disease.

If you roll to resist against Power 8 on day 1 and get i.e. 4 hits, then you roll to resist against Power 8+(8-4) = 12 on Day 2, and so forth. Even if you resist the full Power 8 on Day 1, you still have to resist Power 8 on Day 2-10 + any unresisted amounts that carry through. For the same reason, you can end up still having several days worth of tests against the remaining unresisted Power. RAW, if you get infected by HMHVVIII you are rolling to resist a total of Power 80. If you can get 8 hits every day, you only need to do it 10 times, but if you only get 1 hit per day, you'll be rolling every day for 80 days, before you finally kick the disease (though if you fail to reduce the Power to 0 or less more than 10 times, you turn into a Ghoul, or die if your Essence hit 0,0 or less before then).

Also, the rules in the Speed section seem pretty clear to me:

The number in parentheses is the minimum number of Disease Resistance Tests the character must make. Even if a previous test reduces the Power to 0, the character remains infected and must make another test to resist the effects again after Speed duration has passed, until the minimum number of tests have been made.

You argue that you can make a resistance roll against "Power 0", but that makes the sentence meaningless, and doesn't make sense in context of the rest of the rules of the game. I mean you wouldn't have to roll to resist 0 damage from a gunshot hit. You don't get to roll dice against a target number of nothing. That's simply no test. And in this case, the rules are pretty specific in that you need to make the resistance test the number of times indicated in the duration, plus whatever time it takes you to "stack down" whatever remaining Power of the disease you haven't managed to resist during the initial duration.

I can see where you're coming from in terms of the interpretation, but read it all together and think about it in relation to the rest of the rules, and hopefully you'll see what I mean. HMHVVIII is ungodly nasty RAW.

it says you must keep making tests. as I pointed out, even a test against threshold 0 is very important for someone with a small dicepool. and when you're rolling unmodified body, very few people roll anything that could be described as a very large dicepool.

the average person is rolling 3 dice. many will be rolling 1 or 2.

your chance to critically glitch is not insignificant at that point.

like I said, it even does an incredible job of representing diseases that never fully go away, but which can be controlled for periods of time after which you suffer a relapse.

the rules very clearly say that you add the power of the disease again *if* the power of the disease was not reduced to 0. if it is supposed to be added no matter what, why would they put an if in there? you don't use if statements for something that you expect to happen all of the time, you use it for something that you expect might or might not happen. for example, IF you always add the disease's power, you wouldn't include a clause that states you only add the power some of the time.

instead, it could have just said "add any unresisted power to the threshold of the next test", without any if statements at all. but it doesn't. it says to add the disease's power again if you don't reduce it to zero.

Simple.
Because one is the description of what happens when power escalates and adds up, and the other is the base mechanic of how a disease test works.

Those are two seperate, but intertwined mechanics, the first part of which is always the same Disease Resistance Test (how this works is quoted above, directly from Augmentation). The second part is then the situation if power is not completely resisted.

If you put it as is into a computer algorithm it works exactly the way the book, Kyrel and me have described.

To illustrate:

Line 1: Roll Disease Resistance Test with $Body (+ applicaple bonuses - penetration). Reduce $Power by $number_of_hits.
Line 2: IF $Power is reduced to 0, do NOT apply any ill effects ELSE IF $Power is NOT reduced to 0, apply further effects AND set $Power - $number_of_hits = $remaining_power AND add $remaining_power to next Disease Resistance Test.
Line 3: Check for $minimum_number of Disease Resistance Tests
Line 4: IF $minimum_number >0, GO TO Line 1 AND reduce $minimum_number by 1 ELSE GO TO EOF
EOF.

I don't need you to write pseudocode for me. I understand what you're claiming it tells me to do.

but that isn't what the book tells me to do. in the disease resistance test, it tells me to reduce the power of the disease. again, it doesn't say that it reduces the power of the effects of the disease, or the effective power of the disease for this one purpose, it flat out tells me to reduce the power of the disease.

in the accumulation rules, it tells me that it only accumulates if the power is not 0. if the power is 0, no accumulation occurs. instead I make the next test against the power of the disease, which is presently 0, since that's what I reduced it to and nothing says to increase it after reducing it to zero.

as I said, it makes no sense to include an if statement there, unless it doesn't always happen. if it happens every time no matter what, you don't need an if statement, because if statements are for things that are conditional, not for things that always happen.

the example in the book does not actually deal with this case at all, since it does not in fact include any instance of chun reducing the power to zero before the minimum number of rolls have occurred.

We'll have to agree to disagree, then.