So I’m getting back into Shadowrun now and taking a serious look at GMing. I’ve had an idea for a plot in my head for a long time, a wetwork job with a very heavy investigation element. The basic plot goes like this:
The team gets a call to meet Mr. Johnson at, of all things, a psychiatric hospital. A really, really nice one. The runners are a bit nervous, expecting a sting as they (likely) surrender most of their weapons at the front gate, but Mr. Johnson is playing it straight. Once they get there, Mr. Johnson tells him their prospective client needed them to come to the hospital so they could see something. His client, Mr. Johnson says, needs them to understand the gravity of what he’s asking them to do. Mr. Johnson takes them to a cell where they see a woman in her early forties, once beautiful but now completely traumatized. She’s completely catatonic and uncommunicative.
After gawking at this poor woman for a bit, the Johnson starts the actual meeting. He plays for the group a piece of security footage, very grainy and of poor quality, dated a year and a half ago. It’s footage of a gallery showing in tiny, hip art space. Wealthy-looking art patrons mill about, looking at paintings, sculptures, and multimedia pieces. The woman in the cell is among them, wandering around drinking a martini and wearing a silk evening dress. After a few seconds of this, panic spreads through the crowd as several of the patrons and wait-staff transform into animals. Some transform into rabbits, others transform into wolves. Most don’t transform at all, but panic ensues. After about seven minutes, the transformed metahumans change back, but the damage is done. In particular, the woman from the cell turned into a wolf and attacked a server that turned into a rabbit. The footage ends with her staring down at the (now human) partially devoured body, looking traumatized.
Mr. Johnson explains that he represents the husband of the woman in the cell, who after a year and a half of no discernible progress from Knight Errant or Lone Star has turned to the shadows for justice. He wants the team to both find out who did this and then kill him, her or them. He’ll want evidence both of the kill, and that the person killed actually committed this act. The runners are given the full security footage, a copy of the guest book from the art event (“Plasticrete Jungle: Emerging Voices in Traditional and New Media”), and the name of the catering company that worked the event, but that’s it. They’re basically working a year and a half old cold case.
So what happened? One of the pieces in that art showing was actually an alchemical preparation, timed to go off during the show (I know no actual spell in SR5 would do what was described, but it’s basically “baleful polymorph”). It was snuck into the show by an egotistical aspected alchemist who fancies herself a “reality artist.” She believes that, as an Awakened individual, she is one of the few people that can truly see the world for what it really is. She’s basically a whack job and a moral relativist who believes that if you disagree with her crazy, dangerous, immoral actions then you “just don’t get art, man!” She’s a sneering art school hipster with significant (about Magic 5 with Initiation Grade 3) magical power… if that doesn’t terrify you, it should!
The basic plot will involve a LOT of legwork with a few false leads and red herrings as the team figures out exactly what happened a year and a half ago, and why somebody would do it. Eventually they’ll investigate the “reality artist” suspect, who is still active in the local art scene, and after they investigate her apartment they’ll realize she’s the one. Depending on how subtle the party was in their investigations, they might capture her at her studio or have to hunt her down from there, but really, figuring out who launched the attack is the real difficult part. Her studio will have alchemical traps in it, and she herself will have some preparations on-hand to defend herself, but I see a runner team easily steamrolling her once actual combat starts.
Things I still need help with:
1) Planning for and plotting out the investigation. I’ve always been bad at investigation-heavy games, as both a player and a GM, so this is where I think I need the most help. If you were playing a game and saw that clip and had that information to go on, how would you start looking into this? What would the primary suspects be in the SR universe? What clues should I plant to make sure things point to the “reality artist,” and what can I do to make the false leads and red herrings interesting?
2) I also need help figuring out the exact details of the “reality artist.” I’m not too worried about her mechanically, but what tradition should she be? Is she twisted, toxic, or just a real jerk? What Mentor spirit, if any, seems appropriate for her? And, most important, what sort of “art projects” would she work on? A major clue for the party is that magical phenomenon have been having sporadically for the past couple of years that roughly matches this M.O. This wasn’t a one-off piece… so I need some more ideas for dangerous, magically-enhanced art she might employ.
3) If you have special perspectives or ideas on how the art world works in SR, I'm all ears.
4) I'm also interested in ideas for particular alchemical traps for the studio.
