My first Shadowrun, as something other than a runner.
I started playing Shadowrun with a few friends who tend to do a round robin style GMing. After being on half a dozen runs or so I finally decide that it was more or less my turn to GM so away I went at it.
I was running SRM3-04 Monkeywrench, and of course spoilers follow.
To start with, I look the run over and wince as I glance at the Horizon side mission after reading everything else, because there isn’t any clear way mentioned in the pdf how, exactly, the runners are supposed to go about finding out exactly who Phrex is besides doing contact calls/browsing the matrix, which on its own shouldn’t be enough to find out that he’s an AI or that he’s planning to break out of the special node that Horizon built for him.
Other than that the adventure looks interesting and I promptly decide that the part of Phrex in today’s shadowrun will instead be portrayed as having the exact same personality as Wheatly from Portal 2. Of course the joke would have worked better if any of my runners had played Portal 2, or I could do a convincing British accent, but none the less some ideas just so hilarious / awesome that they should be acted out just because.
So to start the mission out, I have the runners get contacted by a fixer who in turn says that she learned about their names through Chell, the dwarf girl from Block War. The team was really taken Chell, and ended up killing Robert Breham after finding out that he was the responsible for killing her father. So the team was more than willing to go and meet Mr. Johnson and hear his offer.
They were shocked/surprised that for once the meeting spot would be a virtual themed bar instead of a regular themed bar, and were very interested in trying out the Mandle BLT (its fractal bacon, the closer you look at it the more there is!) and since there was nobody their whose icon said “Mr. Johnson” it didn’t take them long to inquire around the place if anybody had seen someone by that name in this place recently.
The team goes to his private node there and standard runner-Mr. Johnson interaction happens. He makes them an offer, they make a counter offer, and then their jaws drop when it turns out with five net hits on negotiate, the pay for this run is going to be 16500 nuyen, which is about six thousand more nuyen then they’d really expect to get paid for a run, especially considering that this was supposed to be nothing but a security testing run.
They weren’t especially interested in his offer of gel rounds, planning to use their traditional stick-n-shock for gun slingers and stunball & stunbolt for mages when it came to dealing with people non-lethally. However once they find out that they won’t have to pay for these clips they ask for them anyway just in case as they can always be used on a different run.
During their legwork things get slightly tricky as they ask about magical security in regards to Sciencia labs. To keep them from having their astral spirits just astrally roam the entire place at will and making me need to come up a lot of stuff that isn’t in the book, I tell them that the higher up building they go the more stringent the magical security and start starting with floor six there are spirits patrolling the place. Sure enough, that convinces them of the importance of restraining themselves to the lower floors. After doing some standard legwork they go to Crazy Eddie, get the van and drive over to Sciencia Labs.
Their plan is it arrives around 5:30 PM when the actors who will be playing the parts of Horizon employees will be thinking more about clocking out and less about watching out for Shadowrunners. Along the way, they drive in the delivery lane and go slow so that their technomancer has time to crack floor five’s node, and edit their delivery logs to make it look like indeed the place has a delivery scheduled. Not only that, but it’s set up so that the delivery is for a bunch of utility drones that they decided to get their hands on by ransacking their own high lifestyle hideout.
They’ll need to be cleaning their own rooms and making their own coffee for a while, but the brilliance of this plan is that one of the drones they’ll be ‘delivering’ will be a utility drone which will be taking care of the rewiring portion of the mission (by having a Machine sprite in it). Then the technomancer makes sure that he’s got control of the camera logs so that there isn’t any direct proof left of who was responsible for this particular run.
When they arrive at Sciencia labs, the technomancer (Mastermind) will be staying in the van and accompanying them through jumping into the utility drone. The two faces (Gumbo and Hummer) along with the Fomori mage (Bishop) will be doing the delivery. They chat with the actress Phrex hired to play the part of a secretary and she thinks that they are a valid delivery team and after being told where they’re suppose d to deliver the drones to, she points them in the direction of the lab where they can find most of the data they need along with the wiring box.
I assume that there’s a fake employee working there in the lab at the time, but luckily Gumbo manages to distract her long enough to slip a repeater drone onto the nexi where the data is stored. After they’re done with that, Gumbo then proceeds to convince the employee that as part of the delivery process they need to make sure that the drones will be able interface with their node correctly and so they have one of their drones “inspect” the wiring while they all stand around whistling awkwardly. After that they have to get into the executive’s office.
It being a Horizon facility (well a mockup of a Horizon facility) I assume that they’ve got an open door policy, though of course an actor hired to be a faux executive is going to be in there. More con rolls are made and they convince him that they’re there to install his new coffee maker and/or copier and or printer drone. While Hummer is selling him on this, Gumbo plants the repeater drone, palms the optical discs, then grabs the repeater drone again before he notices it.
After that they head on over to the main Project Paracelsus research lab to retrieve the final bits of data that they need in order to escape. It’s at this point, since there’s nothing left for do other than to escape; so I decide it’s time to kick this run into high gear.
My runners being well versed in the nature of shadowrun missions (they’ve played through all of Denver and three of them are on their second character) were more or less expecting this run to turn out to be a holodeck adventure (in the sense of them being stuck on the holodeck when the safety measures malfunction) from the start so I’m glad that the twist to this particular adventure is something a little more dramatic and interesting than “Oh the guards are using actual bullets… LULZ!”.
The floor explodes and my guys manage to soak the damage fairly well with nobody taking more than 2P. I let them know that once the smoke clears the can clearly see the Ares Logo on the walls of fourth floor with a ramp leading downwards.
Then I let them argue over what to do next for about a 90 seconds real time, and then decide to spring the Talos on them. Upon hearing that something vaguely human, but not quite and leaking some weird fluid is heading their way, they decide to react the way most PC’s do when frightened, with firepower, lots and lots of firepower.
Gumbo makes the necessary perception test to see this thing, the composure to attack it, and then opens up with his automatic pistol, and throws in some edge just because he has no idea what he’s up against. He ends up scoring nine net hits and the Talos somewhat predictably fails to make its “don’t taze me bro” check, having to roll 9 hits on its 18 dice (4 body, 8 armor, 6 for table rating) and promptly collapses sputtering sparks.
Now that they know it is a drone, the others make a few movements toward restraining it when the other shadowrun team shows up. They’re willing to negotiate to get the Talos, but Bishop being a follower of the dark goddess fails the roll to avoid escalating the situation.
He escalates it to the tune of a surprise force 8 stunball (with a point of edge to reroll his missed dice to rack up a huge number of net hits) and floors all three of the other runners. Then no sooner can Mastermind’s drone First Aid him then the Horizon guards show up as do the Knight Errant ones. The Horizon guards wants to know what the hell is going on, and Knight Errant wants the fallen Shadowrunners and their drone back. The team decides this is another situation which violence can solve quite handily.
Initiatives are rolled out and Mastermind/his drone goes first. It opens up with its built in gun and it manages to knock out all but one of the knight errant boys. Gumbo goes next and takes out the last guy with a purposely under powered attack just to make sure that nobody ends up dying.
After that comes Bishop who stunballs all the horizon guys. Everyone goes down except for Lieutenant Crispin, who then gets dropped by a stunbolt from Hummer. (The Knight Errant guys rolled really well for initiative but just not well enough to go first, and sadly Horizon rolled really poorly for it) and that left our guys with some time to think about what should come next.
They have Mastermind hack into the Talos to take it over and then go downstairs and see Headshot and a fellow runner bleeding to death. They decide to stabilize her but not wake her up. After that they toss all four unconscious Shadowrunners along with the Talos into the container they brought with them to carry the drones (professional courtesy on their part) and have Bishop use levitate to help lift it.
Since Mastermind has enough control of the node to make sure that Horizon’s drone support didn’t/doesn’t show up there’s nobody left on floor five but a bunch of actors who started cowering under their desks in the wake of the explosion.
Once they got to the van they retrieved their heavier weapons from its smuggling compartment (since they figured what’s the point of having smuggling compartments if you don’t stash your extra big guns in them) and head out back toward Crazy Eddie’s. Along the way they get approached by the Knight Errant helicopter.
As soon as they hear that they’re supposed to slow down and get searched Bishop decides to cut loose with the team’s standard anti-helicopter procedure and has a spirit he’s summoned up use accident on them. Sadly the rigger who’s flying the chopper actually knows what he’s doing and manages to keep it in the air while his mage lets him know just who is responsible.
Roll for initiative and then three people (including the rigger in the copter) spend Karma to go first. Mastermind, who just narrowly beats out the Rigger with 17 base 13 over the Rigger’s 17 base 12, opens up with his drone’s built-in gun, firing a HV wide burst targeting the helicopter (depleting its entire dodge pool). He used edge and rolled 16 hits.
The rigger uses edge but only gets to roll 8 dice due to being at a -11 from the burst settings and only gets two hits which means that the attack scores 14 net hits against the copter. So it has to a threshold 14 “don’t taze me bro” check. It has 28 dice (body 14, armor 8, table rating 6) and the results were about what you might expect (11 hits). When that happened, the copter’s gun promptly ceased to function as did the rigger’s ability to control the chopper which did a 25 meter nose dive into the pavement, inflicting 25 P damage to everyone onboard reducing them to a red and pink paste.
After that it was smooth sailing back to Crazy Eddie’s place where the team promptly declared Phrex the best Mr. Johnson ever for giving them 6,000 nuyn hazard pay without them even needing to ask for it.
It didn’t say anything about it in the mission pdf, but I decided to have him offer the team 45,000 nuyen for the Talos drone since it was the same amount that they would have gotten offered from other people for the Ares Nexus if they’d bothered to steal that.
They think it over and tell Phrex that they’ll get back to him if they want to take him up on it. Then they decide to finally wake up Headshot (and just Headshot) and ask her what exactly was going on with her. They give her a whitewashed version of what happened (one that doesn’t involve them stunballing her friends) and asks her what she knows about the drone.
She admit she was hired to steal it but after getting nearly gutted by it, she’s can’t wait to see the last of it and isn’t about to try and take it back from the group by herself. The team drops her and her still unconscious partners off at a coffin motel and head back to the abandoned Police Station that is their headquarters.
Then they begin to gleefully make plans for exactly what they’re going to do with their new pet drone (it’s either going to end up being known as “Slendy” or “Tall-y” due to the composure test it inflicts on people who are catching sight of it for the first time). For flavor I add in a news report on how Ares stocks take a minor dive after they admit to pushing back the release date for their newest medium drone after their prototype was stolen from a testing facility.
So there you go, what do you guys think and is there anything I should have done differently?
