Sorry guys! The game has certainly been slow again. And I did not quite manage to change that. The long "blackout" of the website and Easter approaching certainly didn't help there either.

We are close to the end (which you are obviously aware of), and I hope that we can get things running more smoothly for that last bit.




Yeah, I also noticed that, not even specifically because of the slowdown, but also in general, that it gets hard to keep all the details in focus (and I have to look back a lot, so I do not accidentally post any conflicting information). I also have to look up a lot in the rules, don't know all that stuff inside out, especially when it comes to the Matrix.


Maybe a quick recap would be useful? Let's see...


You were hired to look into the abduction of Mr. Belenkiy, a mid-level exec at Ares, who was taken from Falcone's ranch. Falcone is a former fixer and now runs a corporate retreat at his ranch.
There was a ransom note a few hours after the fact, which threatened to expose the ranch's lack of security and even kill the hostage.
Looking into it, you found some hints to follow up on. A weird dagger (that was soon exposed as a decoy), and a feather (with a weak astral impression that did not belong to Belenkiy). Also, you realized that Belenkiy himself was rather nervous, and his commlink was left behind. There was some video footage, from cameras not linked into the host, which showed a few lithe, slender figures carrying the victim away. The rest of the cameras did not pick up anything, and it was assumed that they were avoided mostly by magic (like invisibility).
You also found the place where they must have parked their vehicle, but its trail could not be followed easily. On cameras along the road, you did not find footage of fitting vehicles, especially none with the dirt stains that they surely would have had. An attempt to use ritual magic to trace Belenkiy was shut down, likely by a magical ward.

AM hacked the commlink and found an address that was called frequently. A restaurant named Marcel's. There you learned, that Belenkiy was involved with the people behind the restaurant in some fashion, who are very tech-savvy and good at procuring information, and they helped you, since they have an interest in getting him back alive.
They got you information about potential runner teams in the area, that are experienced enough for this. The Trinity, and an associate named Frost, as well as the Black Cats.

After a bit of a scavenger hunt across Denver, you learned more about the Black Cats in a meeting with Frost, which further solidified them as the culprits.

This is what Frost told you about the individual members:
"Alright, so, this is what we know about them. There's Kyra Blackfoot, their leader. Tall, fit, the charismatic type. Late twenties. She has some augmentations, but not heavily cybered-up. Lena Walks-With-Ghosts is a little older, maybe mid-thirty. Not quite so tall, darker tone, and likes to wear her hair short. A shaman who wields some serious mojo. Definitely initiated. Very traditional and honorable. Jennifer Sundancer, now she is really tall. And strong. And fast. Early thirties at most. Very athletic. Trained in pretty much all kinds of weaponry. No augmentations, as far as we know, but her abilities are clearly beyond what is normal, so she is very likely an adept, and capable of hiding that fact. Last, but not least, Tala Blackfoot is tiny in comparison to some of the other ladies. Maybe that led her down the path of augmentations, which she has embraced in full. She is wired to the gills, twitchy and hyper-vigilant, impulsive. Also known to use a variety of weapons, firearms and close combat alike. She is Kyra's cousin. They are all sisters, but those two are actually related. A bit younger, maybe mid-twenties. They are all extremely tight. Not just friends. Some kind of life bond. Do everything for each other kind of tight. Now, if you want to get into contact with them, you probably have to go through the Hardpan. The owner, Susan 'Banshee' Johnson, knows them well. That is their turf. Everyone there will be on their side. They also like to keep to their own. Outsiders are tolerated, but not quite welcomed. Don't pick a fight there."

You contacted Captain Razak for more information about them, and he could give you a little more on Jennifer Sundancer, whose father was in the Wildcats, confirming that she is an adept. The rest of them were not in the system, though, and there wasn't much else about Jennifer, either, after she left the Sioux Nation years ago.

Razak gave you the option for an extra paycheck, if you could bring the Black Cats to agree to a meeting with him, as he considers them valuable assets, potentially, from what you told him.

At the Hardpan, you found Marks on the old computer system and followed them to the hiding place of a decker, who turned out to be the one who posted the ransom note in the system. Apparantly unrelated to the actual abduction, he lucked out by observing what happened there, as he was monitoring the ranch, hoping to get something to hurt Falcone, with whom he still has some beef related to some incident in the past. The decker looked into what was going on there and figured out that Belenkiy was taken, and then posted the ransom note to cash in on that fact, after watching the host for a while and not seeing anything of that sort being done, already. His drones had a bit of footage that also pointed towards the Black Cats. You delivered the decker to Falcone and set out again.

Back at the Hardpan, you are looking for a way to get into contact with the Black Cats. AM, Bobby, and Mato talked to Susan, the owner of the bar and also the fixer that usually manages them, and managed to convince her to give them a call. Later, AM vanished for a bit to hack Susan's commlink and broke through some security measures to acquire the commlink code that was called. Tracing that one's location, AM realized that it is not too far away and getting closer.

Tamarind's drones picked up a bike with a single rider not long after. The drone's sensors also picked up a bit of residual heat on the back of the seat, probably from a passenger, who must have been there not too long ago.

The rider is Kyra Blackfoot, and after talking to Susan (owner and barkeeper and fixer) for a bit, she headed over to AM's table to talk to her.

Bye
Thanee

Thank you so much for the recap!

Btw, I thought the site was down again, As on one computer I'm getting a 'Gateway Timeout' error when I try to log in (I sent a message about this to those I have contact with on the official SR forums). But it seems ok on my phone.

=====================

Gilga, just double checking -- I think AM is _not_ broadcasting to the team? (I don't recall you saying that she was, and of course it is not the normal operating mode). (I just want to make sure not to act on information that I don't have).

Nope she is not broadcasting.

@Gilga I love that IC post! So good

@Gilga: You did not use the feather for ritual magic. You used stuff from Belenkiy, trying to find him.

Bye
Thanee

Right
Beta: Glad you liked it - it was fun to write.

@Gilga: Maybe you want to inform the others of what you talked about.

Bye
Thanee

To be fair Mato knows and I suspect Tamarind also has a drone nearby. But feel free to assume she checks in. No luck with bobby in his shapechanged form though.

Better safe than sorry!

Bye
Thanee

Juggling some things on the homefront so I'm behind a bit. Haven't caught up with the IC yet but hope to do so soon,

Yay, site is back again! Worrying to have more frequent outages.

Indeed.



So, do you want to do anything still? Or proceed with what has been said between AM and Kyra?

Bye
Thanee

Since AM made a bargain, I guess we fulfill it.

AM has nothing more to add, RP-wise she would not go between Mato and Bobby and take a stance.

It is important to me to say though that as a player I have no problem with Bobby's plan.

From what I can gather, the actual plan is to do what AM proposed, i.e. trust that Kyra said the truth.

Bye
Thanee

Absent any additional clues or insights, that's the direction Mato is leaning.

@Beta
Tamarind is from Butte Below? Is this the first time it's been mentioned? I don't feel like I've heard that before.

My head canon has Mato growing up in Butte (Above).

AM did hack it.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?s=&a...t&p=1367750



Yes.

Bye
Thanee

I stand corrected!

We never really connected Marcel's to anything we understood so I don't think we keep them updated. (or if we did I messed it out).

AM would probably destroy the commlink so that her hacking would not be discovered. Any objections? I'd assume they'll have their discussions.

She is -- and I'd missed that Mato is too. She should have been more awkward around him once she realized (She has the 'Big Regret' negative quality associated with people from Butte, the Arikara tribe, and her former smuggling organization in the Sioux Council. Really a few different regrets that I lumped into one big ball of shame in her mind).

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it in passing a couple of times, but I couldn't tell you when. Tamarind really doesn't like talking about when she was in the Sioux, given that she is ashamed of quite a bit of it -- the exception being her time in the military, so she probably mostly falls back on that if forced to talk about things. So I wouldn't have had her mentioning it out loud, but I'd assume I'd have mentioned it in her thoughts at some point?

Also she's enough older that Mato, and from different circles, that their overlap would probably be kind of low, and she'd minimize it farther in discussion ("Turned 18, joined the army, never looked back, never wanted to go back.") which is not fully the truth but she'd be trying to hide the parts she is ashamed of.

The summary of things she doesn't like to talk about:
- Her family was poor (refugees from the anti-native bias, not plugged into the more established parts of the tribe), and never managed to bootstrap themselves, they just stayed poor
- She was ashamed of how desperate her half-native mother (half-south asian, and her native side was Arikara, a very small non-Sioux tribe, grew up in a non-native milieu) was to be accepted as Sioux
- By the time Tamarind was out of the military most of her direct family had already passed and her mother was declining/dying (a mix of poverty diseases and addictions), Tamarind used her skills to steal an ancestral medicine bundle that her mother had always felt she was entitled to (it did nothing to improve her mother's health, she died months later all the same. Tamarind still has this hidden amongst her stuff, but knows that she committed a probably unforgivable act in the eyes of most in the Sioux Council)
- Then later she was arrested by Razzak's organization (in an earlier job of his, focussed more on breaking up the powerful smuggling rings), and released to work for Razzak elsewhere after she sold out her smuggling organization

Thanks for all that, Beta. It's definitely more than I knew. Given her Big Regret, it makes sense that she hasn't mentioned it. Or maybe it came up in a chapter I was GMing, so Mato wasn't around to respond.

Mato grew up well-off in Butte (Above), with corper parents. That, plus their age difference, would suggest almost no overlap in their social circles.

Mato was too frail to do time in the SDF, but after he got his cyber he hired a bunch of military types for his 'training'. Maybe Tamarind would know some of those, but it wouldn't be a connection to come up in casual conversation.

That's it! You made it.

Sorry for the occasional delays. Certainly not quite as smooth as it could have been. But, I hope, you had some fun here nonetheless.


Here's a repost of the rewards from the IC:



And, of course, there is going to be the usual Karma reward, which is... [ # Posts / 10 ], I think, so... 71. Plus another 20 for Knowledge Skills.

Bye
Thanee

Looks like ¥160,000 total. Split five ways is ¥32,000 per team member.

I haven't thought about karma in ages. Luckily my past self left me a To Do list to help jog my memory. Good job, 2024 Tec.

I'll kick off an interlude here, probably over the weekend. It might be a two-part interlude. I liked the Prelude than Thanee ran before Chapter 12, so it might be a Prelude that transitions into an Interlude.

Evidently I ran Chapter 11, he one with Corinne Potter, although I had to dig up the archives to remind myself. Anyone have an itch to tackle lucky Chapter 13?

I have some ideas for the next chapter - and Bobby can use the time for another initiation

Also, updated my character - amazing how fast karma spends (even that part I saved up from last time):

Knowledge: Arcana 6->8, Blackmarkets 0->2 Business Management 1 Denver Area 1
LOG 3->4 (20 Karma), Initiation 4 (18 Karma, 20% less due to Group and Ordeal), Electronics 3, Cracking 3 (30 Karma), WIL 5->6

Yeah, especially when you get some points in Attributes/Skill Groups, those are expensive.

Bye
Thanee

AM Karma expenditure:
Knowledge:
2 free spirits 1-->2 RP: Following the reunion with Trouble they met plenty of friends.
6 Psycology 0-->3: her transformation makes her more self aware and curious about her psyche.
5+7 =12 area knowledge Seattle 4-->5 + specialization in Bellevue reflecting her growing integration to the neighborhood and more connection to gossip.

Karma:

18: unarmed combat: 3-->5 she is working and training at Cutty's after she gets back.
16: computer 7-->8 -to reflect her growing confidence with tech/hacking.
30: Intuition 5-->6 to simplify decking for me as it is the same as logic now.
8: New spells Magic Fingers + Vehicle mask to reflect her continuous commitment to sorcery.

She had a bit of karma leftover, and is now at 0.

Here's my thinking for Mato. He had 6 karma coming in, plus he has Jack of All Trades to reduce the karma cost of skills up to rating 5.

5: ¥25,000 (@5k/point)
17: ¥42,500 (@2.5k/point)
7: Etiquette 4
7: Intimidation 4
5: Armorer 3
5: Artisan 3
5: Computer 3
5: Gymnastics 3
14: Automatics (Machine Pistols, Assault Rifles) specializations
7: Computer (Matrix Search) specialization

He saved up ¥100K in nuyen, so he's going to take the Chapter 12 payday and the karma conversion cash and turn them into a beta-grade version of his left cyberarm. This will free up enough of an Essence hole to add:

- Platelet Factories
- Mnemonic Enhancer R3

Definitely interested in the second one, as the boost to Knowledge skills will make him feel much smarter than he did before.


To my knowledge, the price of specializations for knowledge skills has never been provided for 5E. I certainly don't think it should cost 7 karma. If anything, I would use the 4E price of 2 karma.

BUT, pro-tip, a specialization for a knowledge skill will be the reward for the upcoming Prelude, so I'd suggest saving that 7 karma for now, or spending it elsewhere.

SR5 p. 107 bottom left.

Bye
Thanee

P.S. But, yeah, 7 is definitely too much there. Should be 3 (about half of what it costs for active skills).

Huh, I never saw that clause about applying to Knowledge skills before. I stand corrected. Well, it's been a long time. I'm not reviewing the book as frequently as I did 10 years ago.

I disconnected for most of our long weekend (and took Friday off to add to it), so just catching up on the clean-up phase of this run. Have karma mostly sorted out, but have a fair nuyen reserve built up.

Did we ever establish a standard on how we deal with equipment availability? Are we assuming that it can be had in reasonable time, or save the higher availability codes for when we are GMing and the character can take a month or so to get things, or work through the rules about using contacts and paying extra to improve odds of finding it, etc? (essentially I'm at the point where I want to buy things that exceed her negotiation/contact quality, so just trying to figure out what is appropriate).

I'm fine with Jack GMing--I'd talked a while ago about running something, however in the interim I just started running a 6e run for Aria, and I'd rather not be booting up two runs at the same time.

Jack: "with the face of Belenky." just wanted to say that, this line has made my hour!

@Beta - if it is the rolling stuff... AM would be completely dedicated to help. Could make a story out of it.

@Beta
What's the premise of the 6e game? Is that over at RPG Crossing?

As far as Availability is concerned, I've mostly been glossing it over with the understanding that we've accumulated enough Contacts over time that would be able to help. Examples include:

Xavier Tien III - Well-Connected Rich Man - C7 L2
Chan Wu - Wuxing heir - C7 L1 (she might be specific to Mato but he wouldn't be shy about leveraging her)
Cheng Mu Chou (Senior) - Triad Lieutenant - C6 L1
Tony Finnigan - Chief of Security, Gates Hotel and Casino - C6 L1

If we want to be more rigorous about it, we can, but we've been playing fairly loosely for a while now and it seems to be working well.

@Tecumseh -- In this case it is just some mid-level 'ware that I'm looking at [availability 4-8], which brings up the question of an appropriate contact?

(The other option is to buy that horde of anthro drones like Jack explained, but where would SIS store them all? And how would the neighbours respond to a dozen "Bust-a-Move" drones doing the gardening?)

=================

My 6e game includes Gilga (also playing in Aria's 6e games), so I don't want to say too much. The title is "In the Shadows of Marianne", it is set in France as you can probably guess from the name. I've announced that I'm planning three sections, the first in Paris, the second in a non-Paris urban area, the third in one of the wilder parts of France. And so far the players know the the first part is stealing a bunch of now outdated (i.e. 5e era) cyberdecks that were used by the NeoNet team doing early support on deploying Marianne, but which have been sitting in limbo since due to the break-up of NeoNet. (I'm a fan of the French language material that Black Book Editions (the french rights holder for SR) has been putting out over the past few years, plus 6e in English has provided some material too).

So not at all using the ideas I had for SIS

Between teamwork, buying successes and high-powered contacts we should be able get at stuff of 16 availability pretty readily