[Writerski7]

Okay, let me go on to say that our GM tends to play pretty fast and loose. We're at session 8, and suddenly Drek has hit the fan. Let me begin:

Our group consists of four main characters. I play a Life Module Decker-Face, a matrix celebrity who runs the shadows on the side. Fixer tended not to need decking too often, so I branched out into drone commander. We have an ex-Knight errant Private Investigator (Hermetic Mage), a street samurai on the run, and an excessively flashy physical adept. Also I have a decked out Ares duelist that I armored up with a katana, riot shield and SMG that the team treats as a fifth party member.

Session begins with our fixed being murdered by a high-ex sniper rifle round downtown, shot taken from two miles away. The investigator and adept are brought in for questioning. Someone who looks like the investigator kills his girlfriend and two cops (with Magic), but he's at the police station when it happens. They leave, and find our fixers home blown up with high grade explosives. Somehow the footage of this attack was leaked from within Knight Errant, and a 15,000 Nuyen bounty put on his head by Knight Errant.

The plot thickens as the decker's attorney is put in jail for murder, and all the evidence points to the decker ratting him out. My decker runs a bar next door to the police station (literally, I was pirating off Knight Errant's Wifi), he's there when someone gives two gangs across town a bunch of one use missile launchers and tells them to have fun. This leaves the station and bar mostly abandoned. The decker lucks out and drives away from the bar, passing two HTR teams on the street sent to kill him and blow up the bar (SUPER LUCKY there). He watches in rear view mirror as the bar gets blown up. Nobody recognizes the vehicle, so he is presumed dead.

Investigator and Adept call in some favors and manage to slip away into a basement. Meanwhile, the decker picks up the Sam and just circles town for a few hours to buy them some time. We learn that everybody who worked with our fixer (who was actually the leader of a team of UCAS Marshals) was quietly killed, and all his assets seized. The Investigator's doppelgänger shows up and gets killed by a mercenary assassin.

A BTL chip epidemic hits the poor and homeless of the city as the Decker picks up the Investigator and the Adept. We learn that the BTL epidemic is somebody using the homeless and the poor as a massive surveillance network to find us through the BTLs. Luckily they don't recognize the Decker's car, and the four of us make it to a sewer cistern repurposed as a safe house to figure out our next move.

To recap: Everyone's home has been blown up, the Decker and the Investigator are considered legally dead. Our enemies think the decker is dead but know the investigator is still alive (the doppelgänger is dead). There is ten thousand homeless people scouring the city looking for us, and most of our contacts are burned, dead, or unavailable. When drek hits the fan it pours in this game.

I need some advice on how to disappear from the grid, and figure out whose doing all of this. We suspect it's a coalition of enemies working together but don't know for sure. We also don't know who our enemies really are, only they have crazy resources, and are going full slash and burn on us. What would you do to survive this? How would you get off the grid and keep yourself alive? How can we lure out our enemies and see what exactly we're dealing with here?

[Reaver]

You lose ALL your SINs, dump any WIFI gear you have, you use nano paste to disguise what you look like, and leave town.

No Matrix enabled gear, no way to trace you that way. With the nano paste Visual recognition is hard to impossible. One you are out of town, you keep going until you are across country. Then start again under a new name and handle.... And you smarten up

You CLEARLY did something to piss off the wrong people (and yes, its PEOPLE as in PLURAL!), and you best figure it out or it will happen again!

Once you have some resources to spare, and enough time has passed, you can make some covert inquires into what happened in your old city to find out what went down and why, and who is behind it. From there you have 2 choices.
Continue on in your new life, OR get some payback!


OR there is a third option:

Your GMs a dick and trying to screw you all, Because:
A) You have pissed him off
B) He's a sadist, and finds this fun to dick you over
C) He's a very poor "team player"
D) he's going somewhere with this plot line (but based on what you have said, hard to be sure)
 

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

And this is why you always keep a bug-out pack and vehicle stashed in a U-Rent-Space unit in a part of town to which you almost never go.

Reaver's right.  Burn the bridges behind you as you leave town.  Try to start up in another country if at all possible.

[Senko]

To be fair if the fixer was a head of a team of UCAS marshals and this is happening to everyone he was involved with it may not be their actions that triggered this but something else he was dealing with either officially, unofficially or accidentally.

That said I agree with reaver and the wyrm given the difference in resources and the fact they're trying to kill not capture dump everything, run in disguise across country get gender/facial/dna/species changed start over in another country.

[Stoneglobe]

Agree with everything that's been said by the others but have a couple more things to add. It very much sounds like someone, and by that I do mean multiple someones, have implemented a scorched earth policy to clean up something that you may not have even been a part of. The only way to really deal with this is to implement your own scorched earth policy.

Dumping ID's etc has already been covered but you really need to go beyond that. Any contact who doesn't have at least a loyalty of 3 (and even they would be debatable given the level of opposition you seem to be facing) should be dropped as the chances of them selling you out is now very high. On the flip side any contact who you truly trust should probably also be dropped as making contact with them increases the likelihood of whoever is after you coming down on them hard as well.

As it currently stands it does sound like pretty much everything is compromised. That means not only burning ID's but you're now looking at full replacement of all gear, including cyberware, not making use of any form of magic that will leave a signature that can be read (time to start initiating and learning some new metamagics if you haven't already done so) and for your decker having to completely redo his persona, harder than you realise as your persona is intrinsically tied to your own personal psychology, and lose his celebrity status somehow.

I also really hope that none of you have real SINs as then you've got major problems trying to burn those.

Even if you make it to another city, though country would be even better, you've then somehow got to restart yourselves and build up a new network of contacts, find a way to get jobs and begin all over again. At this point you'll pretty much be left with the work no one else wants to do because it's too small fry or considered a suicide mission.

Another option, though it is very risky in it's own right, would be to try and align yourselves with one of the major syndicates (and hope that they're not the ones coming after you) and get them to take care of getting you out and reset. If you manage it expect to be indebted to them for a long time but you'll have a source of work and access to both contacts and gear you otherwise wouldn't have when you start up in a new location with new faces, ID's etc.

This can of course also work with corporations but to pull that one off you'd better be in the big leagues already and have something to offer in terms of reciprocal services that they pretty much can't get anywhere else. Just being deniable assets isn't enough because they can get those from any pool of shadowrunners in any city already.

Of course all of this assumes you have the levels of personal finance/resources available to cover all of these costs. If you don't then you're really up the creek with no method of propulsion and basically your best bet is then to just cut your losses and try to disappear into the wilderness and hope you can learn enough survival skills/bushcraft to get by.

[Writerski7]

Alright thanks everyone for the advice and helpful tips! Yea, it seems like we really are up shit creek without a paddle.

Six of our eight sessions were directly related to providing cover stories for our fixer and/or extracting people and putting them into UCAS Witness Protection. Everyone but the street samurai had real sins. The Decker's fame was tied to his real sin, and both the Decker and the Investigator are listed as dead on their real sins. The Decker's fake sin, in an ironic twist, wasn't burned. He literally led a double life, a celebrity in the public eye and a Shadowrunner in private. Even the other party members didn't know the Decker and the "Face" were the same person (AR hacking and a ton of Composure tests not to mix reality with matrix). The only two people were the Lawyer (under attorney/client privilege) and the Fixer (who is now dead).

To be fair, the Decker did have a bug-out pack and vehicle stashed at his safe-house (we're staying there right now). It was why the HTR teams didn't stop and mow him down when he drove right past them on the road away from his bar. We have less than 50k nuyen between us, so we can't really afford new gear. The Decker has been modifying current gear with blank RFID tags and erasing serial numbers to clean our current gear. Furthermore, we suspect our enemies have access to blood samples of both the Investigator and the Adept. They're currently at Knight Errant, so if we want to erase the magical trace, we'll need to break into the police station before the blood samples are moved to secure storage.

Only the Decker has a clean ID right now (he got one for a Caribbean League trip that never happened), so technically he can up and leave for Cuba whenever he wants. The Adept doesn't even know what a Fake SIN is, and the Investigator is still wrapping his head around the concept of "Off the Grid".

This is our list of potential enemies we think are involved:
 - The Russian Mafia - the Adept made an enemy of them when their man challenged him to single combat on live TV and the Adept cut him in half
 - The Mexican Cartel - This was our session 7 mission, extracting an informant from Florida from right under the Cartel's nose.
EDIT: A good number of the guys who saw the operation take place got away. One of the guys recognized the adept because he screamed his name at the top of his lungs when he saw him
 - "The Knights of the Bloody Thorn" - Don't know anything about them, only that nobody has matrix searched that titled and survived.
EDIT: We suspect it's part of a shadow war between the two Elven Homelands.
 - The Decker's "Evil Relative" - Something about a contest between the Decker and an unknown relative to see whom is a worthy heir. The man who delivered this message literally STOPPED TIME (for at least half an hour) to do so. And that was the guy looking forward to working with us should the decker "Win" (Because, according to Mr. Time Stop, the other guy is an ass and a villian)

This is who it isn't:
 - Any of the Big Ten, or their subsidiaries. Scorched Earth breaks the number one rule of the corps: Though Shalt Be Profitable

[kreblach]

Don't be a bunch of wimps.

Find out who is doing all this, then, hunt them down like dogs and find out who they are worrking for. Then hunt them down and find out who they work for. Rinse and repeat until people stop coming after you or your all dead.

This all sounds like the intro to an action movie; so, do what any action movie heroes would do. Also have fun doing it.

[DeathofVirtue]

When you say do what any action movie hero would do I assume you mean die a pointless death fighting insurmountable odds with no idea whats really going on?

  I mean seriously, they have little to nothing to identify their attackers wheras their attackerrs CLEARLY have at least semi detailed info on them, point to attackers.
  They have had acess to resources and contacts effectively severed, their attackers have not, point to attackers.
  They have no idea what their true objectives were/are, point to attackers.
  If they have blood samples of any members of the current group that makes those people vulnerable to ritual link, point to attackers.
  They have been targeted in a way that makes 3rd parties side against them, point to attackers.

  You can't find out anything or get revenge if you charge in like a btl addict and get yourself or your group killed.  Sometimes it's best to swallow your pride and read the writing on the wall.  You arent helping anyone but them with a bullet in your head and the classic kneejerk reaction is the one they are most likely to expect.

  Like I always used to say, "dont go spare, wait untill you have sufficient intel to get a good idea whats going on and who you are up against, THEN go spare, with precision."

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Now, now - 'action movie hero' is translateable as 'pink mohawk game'.  Which is fine, if that's what you're going for ...

[Writerski7]

Yea the only reason we're alive is the Decker's last shadowrun game was extremely Black Trenchcoat and it carried over into this game. Paranoia is a positive quality. But now that I've had some time to think about it I've come up with some left field ideas. One, given the Decker's electronic witness quality and his throwback records (seriously, what the frag is Blu-Ray?) he can blackmail Knight Errant into helping us. Let me explain:

The weapons provided downtown for the gang war were recorded as dropped by Ares. The explosion that destroyed our fixer's home was also using Ares products/vehicle. Hell those guys crit glitched their demolitions roll and blew themselves up (leaving some bodies). If we anonymously submit these videos to certain individuals within Ares we could spur them into hunting our attackers down, as well as (most importantly) making it profitable to do so.

The other idea is to send this data to certain individuals within the UCAS military/intelligence. Basically by controlling the data-flow we can make the UCAS interpret our opposition as a criminal/terrorist attack, which would make them also start hunting down out attackers.

Third, we can take it to the Media. This will be a wild shot in the dark, but by focusing on the Decker's "death" in the public eye we could spur some groups within the community that resonated with him into action. This might be the weakest response but it would also give validation to the other two ideas, so it would really depend on how we use this data

[KarmaInferno]

I'm just wondering what message your GM is trying to send.

Is he wanting to star over in a new setting?

is he expecting a rip roaring ride of vengeance?

Something else?

Yes, it's a bit meta-game thinking, but where is this heading?



-k

[DeathofVirtue]

I'm just wondering what message your GM is trying to send.

Is he wanting to star over in a new setting?

is he expecting a rip roaring ride of vengeance?

Something else?

Yes, it's a bit meta-game thinking, but where is this heading?



-k

Your missing the common"my  group screwed up and didn't cover their tracks thoroughly enough and now there are consequences I need to include"  side of things too.  Trying to second guess how the gm is playing things out in a situation like this is a risky game, you don't have the same level of situational knowledge about events as he/she does so trying to determine intent is going to lead to some potentially wild and unsubstantiated speculation that can lead you a long way down the wrong path...

[Tym Jalynsfein]

I think that you are missing KarmaInferno's point.
Just ask the GM what he envisions the endgame to be. Is it a reason to start over again, or is it geared towards a rip-roaring over the top wild ride?

[DeathofVirtue]

I think that you are missing KarmaInferno's point.
Just ask the GM what he envisions the endgame to be. Is it a reason to start over again, or is it geared towards a rip-roaring over the top wild ride?

Ahh you mean actually asking the GM rather than just speculating what his/her intent was when creating the situation.  I mean you can do, but in my opinion that tends to make the entire experience feel like it's on rails for pc's.  Half the fun of shadowrun is how the characters choose to respond to the situation they are in, one of the first things you learn as a gm is that trying to expect your pc's responces or make them take a specific path will often lead to you being suprised as they will almost never react entirely the way you expect, and thats a good thing, otherwise the gm is basically just telling a story with pre-determined outcomes.

  But that's just my opinion, take what you will from it.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Every mission, every adventure, every story, every campaign in every gaming system can be like that - feeling like it's on rails.  But knowing the basic thrust of the idea means the players can lean in the direction the GM wants to go.  Had this just recently happen in a Pathfinder game, playing a modified Kingmaker adventure path - the GM wants us to go to the Stolen Lands with our 'escape route' cut off, but he also wants us to literally be pursued (2 hour head start with wagons, vs. infantry/cavalry behind us), and so instead of saying 'I have a set piece encounter I want to do', after a lot of prior craziness he basically declared GM fiat that 'even after you knew - 3 hours ago - that the Surtova general and his army are coming for you, and even though it only takes 45 minutes to pack up the biggest thing in your camp (and you have lots of people to do the rest of the packing), and even though you have plenty of space to 'hastily pack' stuff, you can't leave for those 3 hours.'

It ended the game, because the GM was neither flexible nor told us what he wanted.  Which means we beat our heads against a wall and, at the last, were realizing that the only realistic way the thing was going to go down was to find ourselves going out in a blaze of glory ...