London Campaign
The format:
A team of 4-5 players will begin working in the London shadows, initially as a solo mission before joining up with the other members of the team for a series of bigger runs.
These runs will take place initially in Britain and then expand across the continent as the stories unfurl.
Chargen:No changelings/surge AT ALL. Nothing from WAR! (I don’t own it)
No TM’s: unless an experienced player who knows it inside out, hackers are totally fine though and matrix will be played as an important function of the game.
Firearms are heavily regulated and restricted in Britain and always have been.
Sports rifles and shotguns are available to those with a SiN and must be licensed (background checks taking several days). There are no concealed carry permits at all in Britain. These types of weapons tend to be seen on hunts, at rifle clubs and in the country. A small select group of freelancers also have permits for para-critter population control for the various desolation zones around the old nuclear plants from the early 2000’s, though these groups are vetted and monitored at the governmental level.
All firearms are automatically +4 avail, anything with the burst fire/full auto mode is at +8. As mentioned, rifles and shotguns are restricted. all firearm-type ranged weaponry outside this is F. all BF/FA is rated F. Heavy weapons and Laser weaponry are unavailable to purchase, no matter how good your contacts are.
Archery kit is popular amongst re-enacters and the nuvo-green movement who have taken to living from the land, these are legal to own and available through retail, though open carry in urban areas is a criminal offence and heavy crossbows are rated R.
Non-lethal weaponry such as tasers/pain inducers are legal and available for personal carry.
Rating 12 is the highest avail allowed. Restricted gear allowed on GM approval (things like response 6 for matrix specialist are cool, minigun for a troll not so much).
(GM note, I don’t want to discourage weapons specialists, I just want to reflect how difficult they are to get hold of and carry in a civilised area that doesn’t have a gun history. A gun will swing a combat at a crucial time but will draw you national headline attention should an official bite a bullet or a raging gun-battle erupt with the ‘Met Police. Due to low occurrence rate of firearms based crime, all opposition are tooled to deal with more melee based threats than firearms. London Metropolitan police retain a Firearms response unit however. Police in other capitals (eg Paris) may carry light pistols, but most forces in Britain are armed with tasers and stun batons.)
Melee combat is alive and well and it would serve you well to be able to at least defend yourself in this manner.
Interesting characters are more likely to be picked for this campaign and a healthy group with a diverse skillset is my goal with this campaign. As much as everyone loves playing mages, I’m not going to pick 5 mages for the team, so please don’t moan that a relatively unoptimized smuggler/face with scuba diving skills gets picked over your MAG 6 super-tuned augmented spell slinger. Ideally the team will have a mage, a face, a matrix specialist and the rest with interesting skills (demo, diving, climbing, electronic warfare, forgery, B&E etc etc)
Vehicles would definitely make your life in the shadows easier, London employs a version of gridguide, but much like it’s counterparts in other countries, the poorer areas tend not to work too well. London is a coastal city, split in half by the river Thames. Many commuters use the ferry up the river and private boat travel is not uncommon amongst those with cash and influence. Air travel is available cheaply throughout the country and to/from the continent. Most European capital cities can be reached in less than 2hours, even on the slowest of services, and international + suborbital services from London Heathrow International can get you to almost any population centre on the planet within a matter of hours. As well as this, a high speed Maglev rail service connects Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and London through the Channel Tunnel to Paris, Brussels and beyond, allowing travel times of one hour between London and Paris. A freight service also runs on these lines and a relative laxity of security on this route means it is the premier entry/exit point for asylum seekers and people traffickers and also gives smugglers a high speed option if taking the boat to France is too slow/dangerous.
Contacts are very very important, they will get you work, information and kit. They are human though and you will be required to treat them as such, if you have a rating 5 contact for example, you will be expected to hit the pubs and shoot some pool with them on a regular basis. Every favour you call in, they will expect you to repay. Contacts will scale with use, and can level to the point where they can assist in runs as an NPC. You will receive 2 contact points free at chargen, you may do as you wish with these, either boost your bought contacts or get a free 1,1 contact.
Anyone not picked for the main campaign will have their character sheets added to the local Fixer’s net. These people can be called on as hired help for one-off runs as I’m more than aware of how many people want to play a game on here but miss the opportunity.
The setting:The dark and dirty east end of London. The years have not been kind to the old east end. The early 2000’s saw massive regeneration of the area, with new buildings, trade zones and swanky high rises built, but after the Matrix crashes of the mid 21st century, the trade zones went bust and the affluent residents took the brunt of the unrest and upheavals. The area is now analogous to the slums and barrens found in many large cities across the world.
Official security is fairly scarce and pays a minimum of attention except when trouble spills out of the east end into more “civilised” areas. Occasionally the Serious Organised Crime unit moves in to disrupt smuggling lines and high value honcho’s, but usually the peace is kept internally by a conglomerate of “old firms”; London based crime families with hands in many pies across the capital. These tend to make their money utilising the relatively un-policed east end docks to bring in illicit goods, BTL’s and all manner of chems, as well as the usual protection rackets and running illegal factories and sweatshops.
As for the political scene, that’s run by the new druidic movement, set up in the wake of the nuclear explosions that levelled much of the country during the awakening. They woefully betrayed their core philosophies by maintaining the status quo and many radical groups have splintered off to oppose their political sway. The NDM holds the vast majority of the seats in Parliament and has tendrils throughout the financial world and the security services run by the Lord Protectors office. A considerable grass-roots movement maintains contact with the working classes however, so be careful who you discuss politics with….
The royalists are still around, and the monarchy is as healthy as it is influential with a new King at the helm and enjoys considerable public support. The crown still owns much of the British countryside and all of its international waters, and has its tendrils embedded throughout the political and financial elite throughout the country, as well as close ties to the royal families throughout Europe.
The Vory, the old Russian mob, have a large stake in the running of the docklands and combined with the eastern European gangers; mainly from the old Slavic nations, make up the bulk of the people traffickers present in the city. The Vory have the taste for all things expensive, and most of the high-end car crime and sporting event fixing is directly traceable to these boys. They hit hard, drink hard and don’t play nice with the “old firms” so watch your back if you have ties to a family.
The Yakuza and Triads have minimal street influence outside of London’s Chinatown and Soho districts, though have some financial influence through their connections to the Japana-Corps present in the “square mile” Financial district. If you do seem them down on the docklands, it’s in the markets, shifting high-end electronics that “fell off the boat” on the way in to harbour.
The night markets in the old docklands pulse with life after midnight, no matter the weather (which tends to be terrible). Any kind of goods can be procured, and with the right street cred and cash, I mean any goods.
The countryside tends to be more fraught. A growing Druidic movement post-awakening has seen a large swathe of meta’s move out of urban areas and set up enclaves and homesteads throughout the land. The re-emergence of the leylines has expressed the magical talents of many, though there are several radiation-laden desolation zones inhabited only by hardened paracritters that remain largely unexplored in recent times. Rumours of organised bands of raiders emerging from these zones are increasing, with raids focussing mainly on or around these leylines. A reliable description of these “raiders” has yet to be agreed on, but the druids are worried and are forming loose political organisations and militias to protect themselves.
Legitimate work is hard to come by for those born into this society, and many fall into the shadow employment markets, slaving their lives away for a pittance in the docklands, illegal factories and sweat shops that spring up wherever cheap labour abounds. Many turn to the “old firms” for employment, and still others choose to carve themselves a different path….
Offers have been made for slots for the following players;
raiden, as wheelman/smuggler/face
teafo, as magical investigator
domino, as a hacker
lumen, as a gilette
scawire, as combat mageall other players who applied for a slot can be called upon as "hired help" for individual missions. these guys will take an even cash reward for participation but wont have access to karma or story advancements.
(its an opportunity to playtest your characters and iron out any bugs as well as hit up a few one-off missions) Contact details for hired help will be available through any fixer contacts in game.
all rolls will be done through invisible castle (
http://www.invisiblecastle.com) so please sign up for an account if you havent already done so.
please use the following coding to make it work properly:
10d6.hits(5)
10d6 is obviously swapped out for whatever number of dice you need to roll, hits(5) makes it count the successes on your tests.
in the comments box please state how you got to your individual dice roll total, so for example my 10d6.hits(5) was made of perception 3, intuition 3, active search bonus 3 and visual enhance 1.
OOC thread will be up soon, please post your final character sheets in there and i'll give you the details of how the first chapter will pan out
