I'm surprised none of your players didn't physically attack you after that one

I don't know what you're talking about. I donated a box of old clothes to Goodwill last week and they gave me a receipt for 1 karma. Good deal!

So what else did the runners acquire on the run?

Did they get hit? Did they acquire wounds? Acquire new enemies? They must turn all those over to their Johnson too...

Wow, that's devious. My other point was addressed by Necrotic Monkey.

I'd just say that if you were my gm at the beginning of the night, you weren't afterwards. Did you really screw your pc's out of everything they earned that night?

If karma counts as a possession, then so do the memories accumulated during the run. Clearly the spirit will have to read everyone's minds to acquire those, otherwise they'll be in breech of contract.

Anyways, the rules clearly state that "Karma is awarded at the end of the adventure" [Core Rules, page 242]. If their contract hasn't been fulfilled, then the adventure shouldn't be over, so they haven't accumulated any Karma to hand over.

In addition, the spirit has no way to determine what Karma, if any, the characters possess. It isn't listed as being visible under astral perception, so the characters could easily claim they don't have any. It isn't even clear if the characters know they have any Karma either.

And that assumes that Karma is anything more than a game construct, instead of being like Combat Pool or breaking up contacts into levels. The spirit has about as much business asking for Karma as it does asking for the dice the players roll.

Fascinating paragraph considering you just used metagaming and rules lawyering to excuse the trading of a purely metagaming construct. Especially since wounds, enemies, and memories are all way more tangible commodities than karma.

The spirit doesn't rationalize Karma. The spirit may not even identify it as Karma. it's unlikey in fact that he does. All the spirit know is that by putting employess in life threatening situations that they gain something he can use to advance himself. In fact, by taking things from humans is the only way he can advance himself. It's entirely unnecessary for a spirit to even know what that is. All he has to know is the cause and effect necessary to get it. After all, that is the only way in the game that free spirits can raise force and gain spirit energy is by having others donate it Karma. That's absolutely necessary for a free spirit.

Better

That sounds just like the kind of underhanded bullshit my gm would pull.

I kinda like the idea...

If they had gotten paid, why did they bother actually giving the Karma to the free spirit? This isn't an attack on your idea, I'm just curious.

Anyways, if they haven't fulfilled all the terms of their contract, I don't see how you can claim the adventure was over. I understand you call this metagaming and rules lawyering, but that's exactly what you're doing. Karma is a metagame concept, not an in-game concept. Just because players can give up Karma to increase the power of spirits doesn't make it an in-game concept.

Consider, if Karma is an in-game concept, and not just a way to allow for some level of control over the progression of PCs. Then that means that everyone, including NPCs really has Karma. In addition, as given in the rules, Karma is the only way to improve skills. In that case, no one would be able to improve their skills in anything without being an adventurer. Karma exists to limit the amount of gain that PCs can get from training. Otherwise, players would just train constantly and the game would become unmanagable. Karma is a metagame tool to balance the game. Any scenario which results in Karma being used in-game is metagaming.

There's an entire game mechanic devoted to designing new characters. That doesn't mean it would be appropriate for an NPC to tell players that if they die, they have to make their next character a Troll. Would you consider it acceptable for the spirit to tell players that they have to burn their Karma Pool in order to get a success? Giving good Karma to spirits should be roleplayed just like increasing stats/skills is. Good Karma is used for this purpose to limit the PC's ability to arbitrarily increase the power of spirits. It is an attempt at game balancing.

So they're bitter about what you did and the only reason they didn't "kick your ass" was because you bribed them. That's not exactly a selling point. Stealing something from the players simply because you can, because you're the GM, isn't good GMing. Being smarter than your players is good. Abusing the fact that you decide the rules isn't. If you made it clear to them, before the start of the mission, that Karma is considered a real, in-game item, equivalent to credits, so that the characters themselves know how much Karma they have and how they got it, then what you did is fair.

The GM is the final arbiter of the rules. That's the way it has to be. But it works much better if you address nonconvential rule interpretations before you hang players with them.

There are no rules in the game for one entity to determine the amount of Karma that another has. It's not listed as something you can learn about under astral perception, or anywhere else. Show me, using book rules, how the spirit knows how much Karma someone has, and you'll have convinced me.

That assumes that Karma is an in-game concept, which the book never claims. It makes much more sense to treat it as a metagame concept. From page 242 of the core rulebook: "Karma measures the experience characters gain when they go out on an adventure." Karma is not imprinted memories. Karma is not spiritual energy. The only thing the characters acquired was the experience, which there are no rules for spirits taking. Show me anywhere where it says spirits can take experiences. When spending Karma to help free spirits, the rules say nothing about that character losing his experiences.

Answer: listen to a whole lotta James Brown. Everyone knows that one!

Part the second:
So, supposing I'm playing 9/10ths of my PCs, and I sign that spirit's contract... sure, well and good, supposing I'm dumb enough to sign some kind of physical contract anyway. Verbal? That's much more common, I can run with that. So I do the run and some free spirit thing pays me asstons of money and then says, "Okay, time to cough up all those tricks and finesses on your skills, spells, general MO that you learned during that run," I ICly say, "Say what?" And he says, "You know - part of your aura. Like... life energy, or soul, or thing that makes you a sentient being capable of learning."

What's my response? What's the sane response?

"No."

Spirit says, "But the contract says..."

"Uh uh, spirit boy, I'm a professional criminal. I break ten contracts before breakfast. Hell, sometimes I use 'em for toilet paper, just for laughs."

If he says, "It's magically binding, you HAVE to..."

I say, "Pop-pop, take two in the head/I cut off your limbs/I lightning bolt you to crisps/any other thing that may or may not kill said spirit."

I mean, honestly. Your players didn't just straight up kill the thing? Nobody I play with makes characters that would stand for being jerked around like that by a Johnson, and I don't think the shadows would miss a johnson that A) steals 'life energy' or B) jerks a team around that hard and tries to hold them to a magically binding contract. The shadows don't like that kind of heavy-handed authority for a reason - they're give and take.

I agree with Dragonslayer on this. Also, since the PCs earned a butt-load of cash on this run that they wouldn't have gotten if it had been a normal run, they could always just trade it in using the Cash for Karma rule and get their enough Karma to leave them satisfied. It does seem a little odd that they were offered 5 times as much money as normal and they weren't the least bit suspicious that their Johnson might plan to screw them over somehow.

Ultimately, it boils down to the question:

For me, it's fun to try and think my way through the elaborate plot twists that a GM can come up with, and I'd appreciate something this devious as a challenge.