Hey, we've all had it happen. Between bad decisions and bad luck, you get the quintessential Run From Hell™. I have here one such run that I GM'd that I would like to share.

It had been a while since I played with this particular group, so they all had lost their old character sheets. So, they whipped up some new ones for this session. Here's the cast of the run:

A cybered up drug distributor in the employ of a Ghost Cartel. His specialty: dual revolvers.

A slightly-less-cybered-but-not-by-much ex-Lone Star negotiator. He's so paranoid he has to roll willpower to pick up the phone.

A stealthy ork adept swordsman. He's a new player, just asked to me to make him a magical swordsman with stealth, so...

Last, a slightly cybered elf sniper. He has a single cybereye outfitted with just about everything a cybereye can have that he usually keeps covered with a patch.

Things start out fairly well. The drug distributor is told by his higher up in the Cartel that he is to off a local Yak officer who is dealing the same type of drugs (i.e. narcotics) to eliminate the competition. He is given 100,000 to assemble a team, along with a specific parameter: the Yak had to die by a blade.

So, the distributor goes through his contacts, mainly dirty police. After talking to a couple of contacts, he makes his first mistake. After getting he number of the ex-Lone Star negotiator from a corrupt Lone Star chief whose station covers the area of the targets residence, the distributor decides not to pay him. The chief asked for some "lovin'" as he called it, and the distributor said "Here's an e-hug" and hung up on him. As he just spent 1000 on another dirty cop just before to get the number of this guy and thus still had 99,000 to go, I was rather mystified as to why he would decided to stiff this guy. As it was, this chief now knew of the assassination plot against the Yak, who also "donated" regularly. Moreover, he wasn't happy being stiffed like that...

The negotiator passes his test to pick up the phone and is recruited. The other two guys are recruited by the negotiator, and they all head to the distributors house in a nice neighborhood to meet. I don't know about you guys, but when heavily chromed runners all gather in a nice neighborhood, I get worried. Fortunately, the neighbors didn't see/notice the three as they came to the house. They're all establishing a plan, and things are going ok, when the drug distributor gets cocky, and decides to prove his marksmanship with (rather loud) revolvers by shooting the wine glass out of the hand of the sniper. Somehow, despite rolling 12 dice, he manages to get no successes. He misses entirely, not hurting the sniper (but only because he jerked his hand away).

The paranoid (who was talking with the adept) wasn't looking when the distributor shot the gun. He failed two consecutive willpower tests, immediately swung his slivergun around and popped off two shots at the distributor at point blank range. Exit distributor.

So, the runners quickly try to administer first aid. No luck. With a body rapidly cooling on the table, they begin to wonder if the neighbors heard the revolver shot (mercifully, they didn't). After a brief search of the house, they leave. Guess who found the credstick? That's right, the new player. Whistling, he stuffs it into his jacket and leaves along with the other two. Score one for the newb. Of course, even if the distributor had lived, the place would have been swarming with lone star cops as soon as the drug distributor showed his face or there was any threat to the Yak. You just don't slot off the corrupt Lone Star chief and get off scot free.

Pathetic, no? But wait, there's more.

After the allotted week, the Ghost Cartel sends another guy to "take care of" the first and take over his mission. Incidentally, he has the exact same skills and contacts as the last drug distributor! Yes, I was too lazy to make him start from scratch. Sue me.

Anyways, this guy gets to the first guys house, and find the dead stinking body on the table. He calls his boss, and told him that he killed the first guy. Why he lied, I don't know. He buries the rotting carcass in the back yard. In the middle of the day.

Did I mention this was a nice neighborhood?

About 5 minutes after burying the guy, he gets a knock at the door. It's a Lone Star cop, called by rather scared neighbors. The new distributors reaction? shoot the cop- with his unsilenced revolver. On his front doorstep.

I don't think he really knows what a nice neighborhood meant.

Naturally, Lone star was called, and things ended up on the freeway. However, 3 car dice is not enough to outrun 3 Lone Star cruisers. The outcome? One big fireball.

So, can anyone top this?

no but i can come close

Its simple:

We're trying to deal with gangsters moving into a new section of the Barrens, don't ask why its complicated enough to cause major hold ups and this is just about one sentance long. Two vans loaded up with Gangers drive down the road to the area where our team head set up an ambush. The sniper took one heck of a shot, dropped the driver of the front van. The second van schreeches to a halt behind the first. at which point our rigger has a Briliant idea, lets shoot the gangers through the back of the van with a minigun. You all can guess what happended. he opened up and in one round blew off the doors of the back van. The gangers were all too busy wetting themselves to do much of anything but sit there and wet themselves. Next action he took was to fire again, into the van at the gangers. He successfully rolled about 6 successes and completely destroyed to van with his minigun, resualt giant fireball, group of runners poping out of the wood work and one sniper who was very quickly packing up his things to get the frag out of there.

i'll submit this one i did whilst fairly fgreen before my group do it first:

Basically my character was a walking tank, now I mean bad ass mo fo full military armour and six points of hardened on his cyber torso (2nd ed rules) he was carrying a sniper rifle and had a rocket launcher on his left shoulder and an assault rifle on the right. Anyhooo we were on a run and had to attack a base in the middle of a jungle clearing and me being quite cocky thought i was pretty much bullett proof so I ran towards the base and heres what happened.....

Me: running towards building screaming "Army"
NPC Mage: Mana bolts me
Me: que my brain melting and going down like a sack of crap!


Needless to say i still get ripped about this every week and it happened three years ago!

I remember healing you a few times, how about the one with the helicopter or the lift or being melted on the steps! there are af ew for you.

I remember healing you a few times! how about the one with the helicopter or the lift or being melted on the steps! there are a few for you.

Oh yeah thanks for the reminder Legend, on a different run i tried to fly a helicopter in an attempt to escape someone, sadly I didn't have a helicopter piloting skill so it kind of went up up upside down down down boom as it hit the ground. Fortunately there was always an able mage to heal me!

The ghoul I've mentioned before tossed a grenade at a citymaster last night. The citymaster was trying to ram us and we were all standing in a relatively small hallway. The grenade was IPE OFFENSIVE! 15S, -1/M. In a HALLWAY.

I have funny story, albeit a D&D one. This adventure tought us the importance of character redundancy. Our party was tasked with taking out a goblin stronghold several days march from the nearest civilized area. We marched for a couple days towards the stronghold, with a donkey carrying some of our gear for us, when we were attacked by a sizable group of goblins. The goblins were pretty disciplined for goblins, standing in a formation with sword and axe users in front, spearmen behind them, and bow and sling users in back.

Our wizard got the bright idea of using the donkey to break up their formation. He cast a mind control spell on it and made it charge the goblins, trampling a few and scattering them a bit before getting killed by multiple spear wounds. That allowed us to rout the goblins. We thought this was pretty cool at first, until we had to divy up the gear the donkey was carrying. It turns out the donkey was the only really indispensible member of our party. We could have gone on without any one of our player characters, but without the donkey we couldn't carry all our equipment. We had to abandon our tents, some of our food, and a couple lengths of rope, and when we kiled the goblins we could only take about half of their treasure horde back with us. From then on, we always took two donkeys with us.

Now thats funny.

Panzergeist, that is funny. Not real confidence building for the characters to know that they are individually less important than the donkey, but hey, still funny!

Hey we all know that when you build yourself a nitch character you exell in your area of expertise, and Donkey is a hell of a nitch.
I say the Donkey was the best munchkin of that whole group and will endeavor in future games to pattern myself after him

We've never had any problems with donkeys.


Jackasses, though...

I know it's been posted before, but 'nuff said.

~J

Relatively small citymaster, maybe?

When drawf mods go too far....

It was the... umm... Alleymaster variant. It's the same general area, but it's half as wide and twice as long. Or something.

Kage: How exactly was that CLUE worthy? Honestly, it looked to me like they had a good plan, they just botched a bunch of rolls once they got in over their heads. They didn't screw up left and right...

...like the time my PC decker decided to start throwing softball and soccerball sized chunks of C12 down the hallway of an office building in the middle of the day...he put remote detonators on them and started blowing them. Ended up taking down a 4-story building on his own.

Or the D&D game when they get to a room with several holes about 4 feet off the ground spaced every 5 feet along all four walls. Three PCs (the smart ones) start examining the holes trying to figure out what they're for. Two other PCs (the dumb ones) got bored and said "Yeah, I'm going to check out the next room." AND OPENS THE DOOR!! 500 arrows start criss-crossing around the room, killing 3 PCs.

Or the time I decided my mage would get into a drinking contest with Perianwyr and ended up being eaten after insulting his mother.

Or the time two weeks ago when they were playing Mercurial and, after the first shoot-out in the back of the club, they decide against every NPC's recommendations to GO OUT THE FRONT DOOR after all the PCs did something illegal (Elf mage: Force 6 Manabolt, Decker: Fires off a handgun he has no permit for, Elf Turbo-Samurai: Fires off a submachine gun, Troll: Has about 6 different illegal implants, plus just killed a man with his bare hands). (And speaking of which, dear GOD did we bog down...they spend 3 hours doing a lot of stuff, but NOTHING which advances the adventure or gets them any additional information whatsoever...blah, I'm going to start dragging them around by the nose next game...)

The Abstruse One

I'm backing Abtruse on this one. It sound's like the one guy couldn't roll to save his life. At least he walked away in more or less 1 piece. Not anything against you or anything, but that run shows me more and more why I don't like running internet games. It's in the flesh for me; not to cheat or anything, but I like 1) physically rolling the dice, 2) being able to knock them off the table and swear at them when they come up pathetically.

But that was bad luck and also out and out wonkyness. It went downhill from the stunning.

Don

That thing kage posted reminds me of this one instance in AD&D that made me love my monk forever. Sure I couldn't do diddly squat in combat but can YOU fall 150 feet and not die?

My group was in a tower of doom, despair, etc, etc. We enter a hallway. There's a dropchute that no one is able to spot. I, being daring, a newbie, and therefore a total retard, fall down the chute.

In the chute there are sawblade type deals that slice me up something fierce. I then get spat out and fall 150 feet to my doom. Well, I was high enough level to slow my fall by around 20 feet. I take 13d6 damage in falling damage. the DM rolls badly and I don't die.

I'm at I think, -8HP with 3 more to go. I botch my first stabilizing roll. The group has no chance in hell of getting to me. Second roll and I stabilize. My abjectly shitty dice rolls paid off as I rolled exactly 10%. I then spent the next hour or so (in game) lying down staring up at the flock of vultures with my glazed over eyeballs while the team rescues me.

Loved that monk.

Did I mention Beast was the wizard in that game?

I guess my infamous "professional" group is much closer to CLUE files
But yes, they have potential, they just need a little more insanity added.

I don't see why http://www.sotsw.net/RunFromHell/ was so bad.

The PCs all got away. No one died.

If I were the GM I'd have hit them with a lot more security. I mean, there could have been sentry guns and guards with APDS-loading SMGs who used actual formations and police small unit tactics. There could have been, you know, a security mage or two with maybe an elemental or two on tap.

All things considered the PCs got away okay.

They were captured on camera torching a security guard. That character's face was on the evening news.

There's also one more detail, which I guess I'll let my players find out about.

Remember that guy who just showed up and rolled dice every once in a while? He was on a parallel shadowrun for the same objectives, hopelessly outmatched, but thanks to some insanely lucky rolls (two of them) and, more importantly, the distraction posed by the main team, he got away with the items. The team didn't know that, so if it weren't for the fact that they abandoned the run they'd've had no way to know it was gone.

~J

Yes, I have a history of killing jackasses. It was funny how the group changed its battle tactics after that. For starters, the one guy who died in that goblin mission made his next character a half-ogre fighter, so he wouldn't have to rely on pack animals to carry his stuff for him. So, our party after that consisted of a wizard (me), a ranger (Panzergeist), the half-orge fighter, a rogue, a cleric, and two donkeys. Our first fight in the next adventure was against some orcs, who had the support of an ogre. Here's a rough transcript of the begining of he fight.

GM: You see a band of about 16-20 orcs, with an ogre at their rear hefting a large rock.

Me: I cast barksin on donkey #1.

Fighter: I position myself between donkey #2 and the ogre, covering the donkey with my tower shield.

Cleric: I get between the two donkeys, where I can heal eithe of them, and cast bless on the party.

Panzer: I use my talk to animals skill to warn the donkeys not to let the orcs near them, and shoot an arrow at the orc who is closest to either of the donkeys.

Rogue: I look around behind us to make sure there aren't more orcs trying to sneak up behind us and take out the donkeys.

In the end, we all managed to survive, though a couple of us were almosst killed. The donkeys were fine though.

Hehe. Your killing me

I once had a decker who carried around a huge trash bag full of optical chips with him. During a raid on some computer building, he wanted to take all the chips with him. I don't know how that fits into the topic, but I just remembered that for some reason and found it hilarious. A guy going to a meet with a huge trashbag full of optical chips. And he won't tell anyone what's on them.

The Abstruse One