It is amazing the places that a ShadowRun game can take us! I knew pretty much nothing about dressing game before this (My mom grew up on a subsistence/dairy farm, but despite or because of that no meat came into the house that wasn't already butchered, and she always held a good butcher in very high regard. And I never got into hunting or backyard chicken raising, so, yah, I know how to stalk a good butcher shop or vaguely how to clean a fish and that is it).

Funnily enough, I didn't think you all wanted to know in detail how to dress a deer - I certainly never liked watching my grandpa do it...

But yes, Shadowrun is very useful to educate yourself about all kinds of things. One of my first games about 23 years ago made me look up details on how to disarm WWII bombs and how to bake a multi layered wedding cake.

Yeah, one of the downsides of running a game about supercriminals is that my browser/search history is a mess. I was trying to be semi-accurate when describing the explosives at the beginning of Chapter 8 and I kept thinking, "Hello FBI, hello NSA, I know this looks bad but I swear I'm just researching a story here..."

I've heard professionals writers have this same problem. This one writer had a character that was a pedophile but how do you research pedophilia (to write it accurately) without looking like a pedophile yourself?

Yeah, that's a tough one - psychology textbooks are likely the only safe source for that.
For bomb disposal there are quite a few army handbooks available (I think I got them at a LAN Party in 2002)

Writing about it overcomes most of the aesthetic difficulty. I wouldn't have wanted to see it - but I have no problem to read it.
Just makes the story more detailed and rich IMO.

Oo, a cheese raid! That sounds fun (except that Mato is in no condition to raid cheese so I'll have him sleep while I adjudicate the raid for everyone else)!

What's a cheese raid?

Ever noticed how a lot of things get funnier if you put the word "cheese" in front of them?
Likely, because it prompts you to smile...

Ok, I'm letting myself out

Its a cool name

You think you can go cheese shopping WITHOUT getting shot?? In the Sixth World?! Oh ho ho ho...

How are people doing? Do we want to fast forward to a certain time or place? We can linger or we can skip forward to party prep on IC Friday.

I'd put up one post for the evening and then we can move on to party day

Was intending to advance to the next day but the post took on a life of its own and ended up elsewhere.

Beta, did you have a thought about when/where to introduce Tamarind? Did you want her to overlap with Jawsey at all or did you want her stepping in the door after Jawsey steps out?

I'd been thinking of finding some way to have her at the party, but nothing really natural came up. So I'm good with some period passing after Jawsey's departure, while SIS looks at what to do, before Razak suggests that they interview her. (which we could play through, or we could just jump forward to the next chapter and she is there, and handle her introduction with flashbacks)

Flashbacks are good - if you actually play the interview, you always run the risk of tanking it

I thought maybe she could come as the guest of someone we invited, like Lysander or Cutty. But I wasn't sure if Beta wanted to RP two PCs at once.

I haven't used flashbacks much but I've heard other players rave about them. I think the context was Karma in the Dark, or one of the other Blades in the Dark hacks, which uses flashbacks to handle the legwork so that a run isn't derailed by a tremendous amount of preparations and recon.

I've got Blades in the Dark lying around, but never got to try it out. But I imagine it would be very funny to invent annecdotes how our new member learns about the quirks of her coworkers (e.g. "There are sometimes two cats around and both aren't cats")

In my home game I've experimented with letting edge be used to 'buy' a useful flashback. Basically to head off some of the obsessive prep work. Spend an edge, run a short scene where you arranged for a piece of gear or matrix overwatch or whatever. It has only actually been used a couple of times, but knowing that it is there let's us move to the action a bit faster.

But in general use flashbacks can be fun, for exactly why Jack said. You know it works out OK, so can make up whatever stories about it. You never have to spell out all the details and make it all go together, but can just make up the highlights.

I'm good either way, playing it out or just having her there and doing flashbacks. Maybe depends on how the beginning of Gilga's mission is?

I admit that I am not following the point of the flashback debate. Does that mean that you would like to start the mission and carry on the interlude as a flashback, is it purely theoretic? I am lost here.

It was more about how to handle Tamarind. Do we introduce her and RP all the getting-to-know her stuff, or do we start the next chapter with all that in the past and then fill in the blanks with flashbacks? That's the question.

Well, I can get Taramind to be part of the story if that is interesting and not intruding on character freedoms. The story is about the arcana cards to sort of make sense of it all and wrap it up. I can place her either as a person of interest in the story, perhaps. In that case, we'll need some flashbacks to imagine how she got to the point of start.

I was assuming Tamarind as being part of SIS for the main part of the next chapter, the question really was whether we are playing through her introduction, or start with your chapter with her as part of SIS, and we just refer to how that happened in flashbacks as we wanted (on an informal basis)

Another possibility is to do another Interlude with Tamarind. This Interlude is already double the length of a usual one. We'll have the dinner party and say goodbye to Jawsey. (How is he actually leaving anyway? Car? Bus? Boat? Plane?)

This wasn't my original intention but it's been a minor annoyance for a while that the Chapter/Interlude counts don't align. Chapter 8 being followed by Interlude 7, for example. Another Interlude would bridge the gap. If we go that way, it would start with Tamarind showing up and maybe bring interviewed. Or it could be instructions from Razak to sign her on if we don't to lose his support.

I am alright with another interlude as well as with sort of hitting the floor running in the sense that Taramind is integrated into the chapter and needs to establish trust. What kind of story do you prefer?

Story for the interlude or for the chapter?

For the interlude, I was just thinking about Tamarind's arrival, perhaps interview. Maybe a minor task.

For the chapter, I think the arcana cards would be great. Bobby will have to shine as the arcanist.

At some time, we'll also need an interlude for our move

As for arcane duties: 90% is just being able to perceive the astral and identify it's phenomena - it will be fine

Last IC post came to me in the shower a few minutes ago. I don't know how AM would react but Mato would float the idea.

It would be a good excuse for a karma-to-nuyen exchange.

Mato will like the hydroponics idea.

The current thinking about moving is keep the HQ in Redmond as an office but sleep elsewhere? Is that what we settled on?

That was my thinking so far, yes.

Just btw, Jawsey was covering the costs of the food. Part of his good-bye.

Everyone's got permission to go full-GM for this party. RP whoever you want however you want. I don't have anything planned for this.

Sharing around a contact, in case anyone is interested in buying her as one. She hasn't played a role yet, but having an astral forensic investigator available might be useful?

It is an interesting choice of contact and she has to be just a bit corrupt to work with us though.

Or perhaps pragmatic.

I have some ideas for Adeline Peters. I'll write them up later today.

She never did show up, so nothing is set in stone with Adeline Peters. My intent with her was that she had made use of Jawsey for some off the books astral observation a time or two, after originally meeting in the astral. Trope of cops having a slush fund to hire someone to do something they can't or aren't supposed to do.

(It also never really came up in play, but it is briefly mentioned in his background that Jawsey had been trying to make a go of being a private detective before joining SIS. He couldn't have been doing too well, but had survived doing it for a while)

We're going to play her as a pragmatic get-it-done type rather than a by-the-books idealist. Very much the type to bring in outside consultants when she's stuck either intellectually or administratively/politically.

She'll be a hermetic, using a Logic-based approach to both her magic and her investigations.

Beta, what metatype is she? Human? Elf?

I'll let Beta reply with the story of how Jawsey and Adeline met.

@gilga
Can you remind us (or me, specifically) about Kira Benson (a.k.a. Black)?

What name would Kira use in a public setting like this? What name would she use for AM?

Kira Benson is the current SIN she goes by and 'Black' is her secret decker identity.

Okay so she'll call herself Kira at the party.

What will she call AM?

I imagine everybody calling her Am -(pronounced like the letter M).

By the way Tec, I just love Huxley she is so colorful.

She's colorful! I think from being uninhibited, which is a byproduct of her self-medication.

Doc Painless isn't that intoxicated. Yet. She'll get there later in the evening, but right now she's just buzzed. I left the chemical in question ambiguous so that someone could fill it in if they had a strong opinion. Probably not a hallucinogen tonight. eX (p. 180 Chrome Flesh) would be a good candidate.

I toned down the reference a bit so it does not feel off to you.

Sorry I neglected to check in for several days. Full Summer is here and I was just forgetting about screens once I logged off work. I'm getting my routines back together and should be getting back on posting regularly.

My schedule has been goofy for similar reasons. The biggest contributor is the kiddo not being in school and so juggling different camps and summer child care schedules.

I had no such excuse, just leisurely walks and bike rides and patio sitting while the weather is in that perfect not-too-hot-not-too-cool stage.

On a mostly unrelated note, I've been having mild ShadowRun burn-out, between the long-running game I run for my son and a couple of online games. But we are turning things around and my son is going to GM me through a Call of Cthulu adventure as his guinea pig in preparation for running the game for his friends (it is new to all involved), so I'll have a nice break both from GMing and quite so many ShadowRun thoughts. I hope that will help up my thoughts for this game.

And finally, I too am loving the Doc.

I just noticed that I missed Bobby's post (I started writing my response to Tec and then had a meeting). So I updated my post to include a quick text to Bobby.

Oh, man, Jack, great setup.

Now, what to do, what to do...

Per his knowledge skills, Mato's two great passions are drum music and classical music.

It would probably be funnier to do a classical music piece, but OOCly I would spend hours wringing my hands trying to make sure it was the perfect selection.

So I'm going to take the easier way out and go with drum music because there's a piece in my mind that Mato would love.

I'm very wary about anachronisms in Shadowrun, and the fact that most people wouldn't be into music from 70-80 years ago, so I'm going to say that this is the spirit of the piece, or maybe a remake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn_tGe5jeu0

(The drums kick in around 15 seconds.)

Separately, I'll be at a cabin in the mountains until Tuesday for the Fourth of July weekend in the US. I'll only have my phone so posting will be slow and limited. I'm packing up the car right now so the IC post will be short and sweet.

Have Fun

I drove through a significant piece of Salish-Shidhe yesterday. The landscape is really remarkable and would make for a grand setting if only I could convey it verbally. Long drives give me a long time to think about storylines and potential plots.

I haven't been in the area (the closest was SF) but it is on my bucket list. Hopefully, once I get better I'll find some excuse to travel there. Enjoy your trip.