[Fizzygoo]

This post contains Spoilers for the adventure On The Run





Playing one night a week (though often closer to 2 nights per month due to schedules and what not) for approximately 3 hours a session I finished running On The Run last week. We started in February. One aspect was the learning curve; all the players, including myself, relatively new to 4th edition mechanics. Another was a one-night mini-adventure that I threw in between Scenes - a little "when it rains, it pours" kind of thing for getting jobs.

Things the players did that I was not expecting and twists that I threw in;

The mage of the party used the Occult Investigator (SR4A 106) character as his base template (with only a few minor tweeks), so when the adventure got to sneaking into Nabo's concert and searching his commlink, the mage says "hey, I have a Fake Press Pass..." which led to the phys-ad and sammie staying out to enjoy / watch the crowd while the mage and hacker walk in to get an interview with Nabo, the "last Seattle interview before Nabo goes on his European tour. " While they wait for Nabo, they quickly hack his commlink and get the info they need. The mage then goes on to sell the interview to an entertainment magazine.

The team decided to find and search K-Spot's apartment for copies of the disk or any other information on how K-Spot had originally gotten the disk. There was no reference to a time frame on when K-Spot died or when his son, Kerwin, got a hold of the disk from K-Spot's place. Even though the prologue mentioned Kerwin having to get a plane ticket to go out to K-Spot's residence, I decided on the fly to just have K-Spot's old apartment in Seattle. It was a dead end, the apartment was getting ready to be cleaned so as to be habitable again. But they took their time searching the apartment while the 17-year-old Scottish girl phys-ad played "intimidate-the-apartment-manager."

When the team went to retrieve Delphia's BTL from the Tacoma Triad, since the party played it cool with the Triad members, I had the team jumped by some low level Yakuza thugs on their way back who had gained word of the BTL merchandise as to be handed off.

On their way back to Delphia's a part of the freeway was closed down, with Lone Star cordoning off the section and routing traffic around on city streets. As the players searched for reasons why, they found a blog was live streaming a standoff between Lone Star and a group of people inside an overturned APC, the blogger stated that she thought the APC must have been stolen from Fort Lewis. As military vehicles could be seen driving up from the south the blogger's drone cut out (either due to electronic warfare against it or it was destroyed, the party isn't sure). Later that evening the party looked into it more and the blog had been taken down and there was no mention of the APC or firefight on the local news, only that the freeway had been closed down but was now reopened.

The team decided to negotiate with Risa (the artist's representative) for a cut of the profits from the sales of the disk when the contents are released instead of giving the disk to the Johnson. They won on their negotiations though it will be several years (maybe a decade) before the contents are released.

On learning that the disk was not stolen from the Johnson's employer but in fact was legitimately gained by Loomis after his father's death, the team - especially the hacker/face who's a pacifist - felt betrayed by the Johnson, "he lied to us." Of course on my level of what constitutes Johnson-betrayal in Shadowrun...a Johnson lying about the legitimate ties to the object he wants retrieved barely registers. But it was that information that led to the team making the deal with Risa's group and not giving the disk to the Johnson.

With the run over, the current campaign date is 20-Jan-2070. The next run will incorporate one of the adventure seeds from the beginning of Emergence. My overall plan is to move swiftly through 2070 (unless the team gets heavily invested in Emergence-related issues) and then into Ghost Cartels and Tempo in 2071. The mini-adventure I ran between On The Run scenes was the team was contacted by a Dogmen smuggler to ride over-watch on a shipment handoff to the Komun'go which foreshadows their later involvement in Ghost Cartels.

Questions, comments, concerns are welcome

[StarManta]

Playing one night a week (though often closer to 2 nights per month due to schedules and what not) for approximately 3 hours a session I finished running On The Run last week. We started in February.

Holy crap, seriously? In mid-July, I ran On the Run with two separate group, each of which contained 4 and 6 newbies, respectively. One team finished in one night (~4 hours), the other in two. Now, admittedly, we didn't run the scenario to the end - both groups elected to turn in the disc as soon as they had it. But still, that's only about half the adventure short-circuited, if that. So let's see, carry the one... I estimate my newbies would've taken around 16 hours to run the whole thing... if you've had 14 game sessions at 3 hours each you've run 42 hours. For one 'run? Your players have the patience of saints.... I might start trying to speed runs along in your place, especially given your short playing sessions.

With the run over, the current campaign date is 20-Jan-2070. The next run will incorporate one of the adventure seeds from the beginning of Emergence. My overall plan is to move swiftly through 2070 (unless the team gets heavily invested in Emergence-related issues) and then into Ghost Cartels and Tempo in 2071. The mini-adventure I ran between On The Run scenes was the team was contacted by a Dogmen smuggler to ride over-watch on a shipment handoff to the Komun'go which foreshadows their later involvement in Ghost Cartels.

Of the two groups I mentioned, one is running Emergence, the other Ghost Cartels (for that one we just decided that On the Run took place early 2071). I'll be happy to share notes as this goes (I've got a couple of my own Emergence-related adventures that could be tweaked for your group as well, if you're interested), but so far, IMO Emergence is the more interesting storyline; I'd stick with that one before simply blowing past it. Which adventure seed are you starting with? I started with Dead Man Hacking, and that one is highly recommended.

[Fizzygoo]

Thanks StarManta, this is the kind of feedback I'm looking for (without having really known what I was looking for at the start of me posting my synopsis).

Yeah, 42 hours. Minus one night (3 hours) for the inserted side-run, and minus one night (3 hours) for the surprise Yak attack after picking up the BTL. So actual, as written, 36 hours (12 nights).

A break down (as best I can remember) is as follows;

Night 1. The meet with the Johnson was a full night (3 hours), included lots of role-playing (party had to go shopping for Infinity-appropriate clothes, as well as background checking the Johnson afterward.)
Night 2. Track down Nabo, figure out plan to get in to concert, evening ended with Nabo interview (heavy role-playing night).
Night 3. Set up the sale of the Nabo interview, track down Zipper to Cathode Glow.
Night 4. Confront Zipper, turns into a stand-off between bar patrons and PCs, lots of RP but no combat.
Night 5. Head out to Find Loomis, chase + combat with strike team, get disk.
Night 6. Interrogate Loomis, search his father's old apartment (a PC instigated wild goose chase).
Night 7. Hack disk. Head to Carrion Studios, fight rats, heavy RP with Stanley and the Secretary, get info on Delphia.
Night 8. Track down Delphia, pick up BTL, RP with Delphia's goons, Delphia, and the Triads (Yak fight next night, not included)
Night 9. Marli house, then meet with Risa and set up sale of disk to her.
Night 10-11. The end fight took two nights (6 hours)
Night 12. Wrap up with Johnson, end run.

The group is heavy on role-playing, but where I feel I'm bogging down is in the legwork section. On The Run has 10 scenes and 7 of those largely required legwork to move on from or in to. I'm trying to figure out a way to pace legwork to make it quick but still add tension (you're contacting people and asking about something that you've been hired to find and be discrete about it so now you're risking letting the cat out of the bag and so on).

Also the end fight was huge and I threw everything into it. There was 6 individuals on the enemy strike team, 10 individuals on Risa's team, and 4 PCs. Add to that, mages on both the strike team and Risa's were summoning spirits. The strike team had two LGM equipped drones. I tried to use every rule in the book I could. Mage's going invisible, suppressive fire, the strike team hacker hacking the hacker PC's commlink while the PC was hacking the graveyard's system. I'd like to think that once I'm better with the rules (and not having to look up every single action other than shooting) I'd be able to run that end fight in one, 3 hour, night. But getting into a semi-evenly matched to large combat means that's what is happening for the night (which I'm fine with), but is that normal, are other people running 4 PCs against 4 NPCs and the combat takes 2-4 hours?

Thanks again for your imput, StarManta.

Yeah, I'm running a variant of Dead Man Hacking tonight. Instead of the NPCs listed, I'm using Zipper from On The Run and having the other (kidnapped) character be her lover (the other, un-named, female dwarf she was hanging out with when the PCs visited her at the Cathode Glow). I just have to figure out the legwork aspect of how the PCs can find the DocWagon vehicle that was carrying the dwarf and then how the PCs can find an MCT Black-ops safe-house.

It's not that I want to blow-through Emergence, it's more that I would like to get up to using the Artifacts series of modules. Really, I'd like to do it all at the same time, but I need to be patient. But 7 months on one run..."le ug."

[StarManta]

Also the end fight was huge and I threw everything into it. There was 6 individuals on the enemy strike team, 10 individuals on Risa's team, and 4 PCs. Add to that, mages on both the strike team and Risa's were summoning spirits. The strike team had two LGM equipped drones. I tried to use every rule in the book I could. Mage's going invisible, suppressive fire, the strike team hacker hacking the hacker PC's commlink while the PC was hacking the graveyard's system. I'd like to think that once I'm better with the rules (and not having to look up every single action other than shooting) I'd be able to run that end fight in one, 3 hour, night. But getting into a semi-evenly matched to large combat means that's what is happening for the night (which I'm fine with), but is that normal, are other people running 4 PCs against 4 NPCs and the combat takes 2-4 hours?

Although I haven't yet had a combat actually take two nights, I have had one large combat take about 4 hours (for about 15 seconds of in-game time). Combat in Shadowrun is pretty slow, and with 3-hour timeslots I'm not surprised the final fight from OTR took two nights. That will get a little better as familiarity with the rules improves, but it is and always will be pretty slow.

Thanks again for your imput, StarManta.

You're welcome.

Yeah, I'm running a variant of Dead Man Hacking tonight. Instead of the NPCs listed, I'm using Zipper from On The Run and having the other (kidnapped) character be her lover (the other, un-named, female dwarf she was hanging out with when the PCs visited her at the Cathode Glow). I just have to figure out the legwork aspect of how the PCs can find the DocWagon vehicle that was carrying the dwarf and then how the PCs can find an MCT Black-ops safe-house.

Oh, that's a good idea. I kind of wish I'd thought of that....
I foresaw the same difficulty in that run, fortunately, and so I made the Johnson (Bowman's mistress) be a medical lawyer who could open some doors for the PCs. (She couldn't do that legwork herself, though, because she didn't want to lead his family back to her.) She was able to call ahead to the DocWagon hospital and convince them to allow the team to see the ambulance. Of course, the team still had to jog their memory with a few nuyen to make them remember the call.....
My solution to the "finding the black ops team" problem was less elegant though (it amounted to "here's a bullshit way you can find their safehouse because the plot demands it; play along, guys") mostly because I didn't see that one coming ahead of time. You might suggest your team call some of their fixers and have one of them recognize the van on the ambulance's sensor records. Something like that.

Expediting legwork is going to be one of the things you as a GM will benefit from most, especially with your short play times. The thing about legwork, is that the longer it takes, the more boring, tedious, and frustrating it becomes.
I've tried applying a "rule of three" to legwork my team conducts: if the team is coming up with nothing, then roughly the third (or fourth, but not much more) legwork inquiry gives the team something (unless they're being exceptionally stupid about the legwork). Even if it's the barest of hints, it's enough to spark the team's imagination and get them to keep looking. While my team was doing the initial legwork for OTR (finding anyone that had heard about an optical disc), their first couple of inquiries came up dry, so I had the next person they called recall a conversation they overheard from the next table at a restaurant a couple nights before; the team was able to bribe the restaurant staff into telling them who was eating there (Nabo) that night. Leads sometimes come from strange places.

Further, since your team has many newbies in it, giving them direct advice and pointers for where they might go next wouldn't be too out of the question. If it speeds up legwork in the future, you'll get more plot done and have more fun doing it.

[Fizzygoo]

Luckily I've been gaming with this group for about 10 years now, so I know if I don't hit combat by about 8:30 in the evening then I just need to call the session before it starts. Which means most fights are finished in one night, but yeah, that end fight was huge (and yeah, in total was about 6 combat turns or 18 seconds, heh)...

Here's my working synopsis & timeline for Dead Man Hacking (the parts in quotes below are either paraphrased or taken wholly from Emergence pg 20);

Synopsis

Zipper and her lover, Matilda “Matty” Bowman, were hired by Corbin Takashi from Evo to "hack an MCT run branch of a local hospital to acquire patient histories of a handful of people who had been through the system in the past 4 years." The majority of these patients were "part of an MCT AIPS outreach program. MCT managed to backtrack the intrusion and flatline Bowman. An MCT black ops team, sent to clean up, then intercepted the DocWagon ambulance and discovered Bowman had been revived by the EMTs. The black ops team eliminated the DocWagon crew but didn’t have time to destroy the ambulance before DocWagon HRT units responded. The ambulance’s Valkyrie medical unit and smartsystem will reveal Bowman was resuscitated and even yield usable ritual samples. The black ops team has taken Bowman to a safe house and is awaiting the arrival of an interrogator to make sure she hasn’t hidden compromising backups somewhere (namely Zipper’s commlink)."
   At the time that the MCT black ops are taking down the DocWagon ambulance, Zipper contacts the PCs and requests a meet ASAP. She offers to pay the PCs to find and save Bowman.

Timeline of Events
7:46 PM, 3-Feb-2070 (Monday): Zipper and Matty hack the Overlake Medical Facility’s system.
7:54 PM, 3-Feb-2070 (Monday): Zipper gets disconnected by IC while watching Matty engage black IC.
7:58 PM, 3-Feb-2070 (Monday): Zipper can’t get a hold of Matty.
8:01 PM, 3-Feb-2070 (Monday): DocWagon pics up Matty
8:15 PM, 3-Feb-2070 (Monday): MCT Black Ops intercept DocWagon.
8:28 PM, 3-Feb-2070 (Monday): DocWagon HTR Team picks up Ambulance and takes it to Tacoma HTR center (see Ghost Cartels, pg 75).
8:30 PM, 3-Feb-2070 (Monday): MCT Black Ops brings Matty to safe house in Auburn (roll 3d6 x 30 minutes for when interrogator [“Ni,” MCT Mage] arrives at safe house).
8:41 PM, 3-Feb-2070 (Monday): Zipper contacts the PCs for the job.
9:40 PM, 3-Feb-2070 (Monday): Soonest the PCs can get to the Cathode Glow (based on their residences).

___ __, __-___-____ (_______): Time MCT Interrogator gets to safe house (after 2 hours, they will kill Matty)

We didn't "start" until 7:30 tonight and had about an hour of character update/upkeep due to ending OTR last week and them finally having karma and ¥ to spend.

So in the hour and a half of running Dead Man Hacking we got through the meet with Zipper, analysis of the data she got (to figure out it's AIPS related), get to Bowman's residence and search it (as well as recover house security video that revealed the DocWagon ambulance and EMTs coming in and taking her away), discover from a contact that word is a DocWagon ambulance got hit about 3 blocks from Bowman's residence about two hours ago (from when the team is at Bowman's), search the scene of the ambulance hit and find a nearby residence with security cameras (the mage PC with the fake press pass paid the resident 300¥ for a copy of the recording) which reveal a DocWagon Osprey II landing, its occupants taking out the ambulance and whisking away Bowman. That's where it ended tonight and in about 40-minutes-game-time one of the PCs' contacts is going to call back with information that they heard of an MCT black ops theft of a DocWagon Osprey about a week ago.

I took a queue from you, StarManta, and had Zipper as Bowman's emergency contact with DocWagon, "I've been expecting a call, but haven't heard anything," she says at the beginning and later on via commlink, "I'm on hold...back, they told me they can't release any information at this point. They won't even confirm that they picked her up." So should the PCs still wish to get into the clinic they have Zipper as a lead, but I think they'll be able to skip it since they've figured out that it's a false DocWagon that has her.

I've just one big rough patch tonight, at least as a GM, and that's for the physad of the group. Killing machine with her broadsword. Socially & technologically inept. There was a bit of background stuff to focus on the character at the beginning of the evening, but once the run started...sidelines (except for some nice roleplaying, "So what, why all this data on apes?" "Not apes, AIPS." "Right, that's what I said, what do they want with monkeys?" "Not monkeys, AIPS" "What's the difference?" ...). I know the player knows that his character is built for combat and accepts the sidelines...but I hate to see it.

It's set up so once the PCs are pretty sure that MCT took Bowman it's one last bit of Legwork to find the Safe House; then it's a race to get there and get Bowman before the interrogator gets there and ends up killing her after extracting all the information he thinks she has. I'm hoping this will take less than half an hour for next game so, if, the PCs have to fight to get Bowman back (which I don't think they're sneaky enough to do otherwise, but one can be surprised) we can finish this run by the evening's end.

[StarManta]

I've just one big rough patch tonight, at least as a GM, and that's for the physad of the group. Killing machine with her broadsword. Socially & technologically inept. There was a bit of background stuff to focus on the character at the beginning of the evening, but once the run started...sidelines (except for some nice roleplaying, "So what, why all this data on apes?" "Not apes, AIPS." "Right, that's what I said, what do they want with monkeys?" "Not monkeys, AIPS" "What's the difference?" ...). I know the player knows that his character is built for combat and accepts the sidelines...but I hate to see it.

The best I can suggest for this is to pay attention to what everyone else is doing during his sideline times and see what could be added to that without much expenditure of Karma - likely culprits would be contacts or special gear. That said, it's true, combat bunnies are likely to get some downtime.