I came back from college and started up a game with my old high school chummers whom I had originally cut my teeth on Shadowrun with when we were 15 years old. These were the guys that I would spend at least one weekend night playing from 6 pm to 6 am with and over the course of six months, at the end of high school, had some of the greatest runs with. I was the GM then, so when I came back I GMed as well. In starting this new campaign there was no "new blood," these were the guys from the neighborhood, we had grown up together.
Before I came down, I asked them what kind of campaign they wanted to run. "You choose," they all said, "do what ever you want, surprise us." That was their first mistake. There was about 5 of them, I created 10 characters and had them randomly pick from the pool. The only thing they could change was gender and name.
They didn't count on me gearing to run a 15-16 year old newbie gangers' campaign. Before coming down, in addition to the 10 pre-gen characters, I had mapped out a 4 x 4 city block region where their gang was focused along with writing up gang leaders, second in commands, business owners, local law, interested corporate and underworld agents, rogue elements, and a general campaign plot. My intent was to hit key, formative, adventures and largely accelerate them to standard build point levels in addition to aging them by 2-3 years. They just didn't like the idea of playing "kids." So we scratched that and sat around brain storming.
By the end of the night they decided to run military characters. I encouraged them to all be from the same unit, working covert ops and general on-demand in-house runners for UCAS intelligence. They liked this idea. When the evening ended they had character concepts worked up, baseline skill sets they all had to take to represent basic training, and by mid week I had written up an intelligence briefing for them (
can be found here, note it's part of my site's older format and so backgrounds and images have stopped linking correctly) which also served to bring the group up to speed on the Shadowrun timeline since the current game date was about 2060 and the last time they had played the nuke went off in Chicago.
The first mission was to find and capture a decker (hacker) that had stolen sensitive UCAS military data. The team tracked the decker to a safehouse, a second story apartment in a middle class neighborhood in Bellevue. Their intell said the decker was home.
One team member watched from the front in their vehicle. One team member was in the back alley. One stayed in the lobby of the apartment complex. The other two went up the stairs and busted down the door. The lead player
1 went left into the living room. The other player went right towards the kitchen (with the intent on then searching the master bedroom next). The lead player rolls high perception and sees a timer counting down and some C4 strapped under the decker's desk. On the desk are several CCTV monitors, one of which is trained on the PCs vehicle. There's only seconds left on the timer.
"What do you do?" I ask the lead player.
"I run out of there."
"What do you say to the team?" I ask, implying over their radios.
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nope. I'm out of there."
I'm shocked. Horrified. All that time in figuring out team rolls, background stories on how long they've been in service together with each other, figuring out the ways in which they've fostered that brothers-in-arms mentality...gone. Wiped away.
The mat comes out at this point as I now have to determine where the other player will be in relation to the bomb going off. The other player makes it (slowly searching/sweeping for the hacker) into the master bedroom, and finds a fireman's pole in the closet. The decker had rented out the apartment below to use as an escape route. The second player was able to hear the hacker below exiting the apartment as the player in the lobby sees the hacker coming out in an attempt to slip out the back. The second player gets his hands on the pole, ready to slide...
Boom.
Second player is wounded both from the blast and the fall. But no one died. The other team members get the hacker and bring him in. The game group, however, didn't survive.
1 I've found, especially in longer running game groups with a static membership, that one player generally emerges as the group leader by default and even when that player doesn't make a "leader" character, he or she still serves as the group leader, often through force of personality alone.
