Sprawl Wilds Mission 4: Humanitarian Aid
Our former decker/rigger decided to go with an adept the second time around, after being greatly disappointed with current rigger rules/content. The complaints:
1) Drones are very easy to blow up. So we had a high attrition rate on drones. The rigger's costs for replacement were actually more than income from the missions. (Fortunately, they had bought extra drones to warehouse, so they didn't have to buy replacements, but they still were watching the warehouse stocks shrink.
2) Lack of costs for autosofts made combat drones far less useful. They hardly could hit anything.
Decking was fun, but there were limited decking opportunities in most missions so far other than legwork or trying to brick stuff. (Mission 3 actually had the most interesting decking opportunities that we saw, and that was right before the character died.)
So, on to the mission. This was my least favorite mission of the set, for various reasons below. It wasn't a bad mission, but after the first 3, I felt a little let down by it.
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What I liked:
1) Background Count. This came up a couple of times during previous missions, but it was a big thing in this mission. I don't really want to see background count all the time every mission, but I do like it being involved in missions since it makes teams depend on non-magical solutions more during the investigations and even more in the final battle.
2) The most challenging combat we had in the set of 4 missions.
A) Very nasty spirits with higher dice pools than anything else I recall facing.
B) Background Count 4, which was pretty crippling with an adept, a full mage, and a mystic adept in our group of 5. No astral scouting, reduced adept powers x2, greatly reduced spells, and greatly reduced spirit ability, and this adds up to major impact.
C) No drones to bail us out.
If it wasn't for some automated targeting platfroms lifted from the goblin market during the fire in mission 3, I really don't think we'd have made it through this one. As it was, we had 3 of 5 members unconcious or paralyzed by the end of the fight, and I really think the GM went easy on us holding back the biggest nastiest villain until the rest of the enemies were dispatched, and using our surprisingly useful babysitter to help us out. Considering most of our party had advanced by about 35 karma and we still got our butts handed to us, this was one tough fight. Although there were some really fun fights, I hadn't had a fight since the first mission that I ever felt we were in real danger.
3) Being on a timer. Although there wasn't an exact timer on the mission, every minute wasted could result in more lives lost. More mercenary groups probably wouldn't care, but since we play a "good" group of shadowrunners this looming over us kept things moving well, and really drove home the frustration when we weren't getting much info out of legwork. Although the 2nd mission kind of felt like a timer at times (you didn't want the killer to get another victim) this mission was the only one where we were in a real hurry at every moment from the negotiations to the final fight, and bringing vaccines back to the town.
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1) Karma Reward. Altruistic mission. Check. Lower pay? Check. Higher karma - nope. I think this mission should have been 8 karma instead of the 6 karma. I know it's a minor thing in the scheme of things, but I felt the karma reward went against the spirit of the mission. Usually, I'm stingy as a GM with karma, and I don't complain much about low rewards, but this is just one of those instances.
2) Wasted boat ride. A ferry gets used to cross boarders, then you transfer into an Ares Roadmaster. Since the final location is a bay, I'd have preferred to see the boat used more, and possibly staging an optional action scene there, since the boat creates an interesting setting.
3) More spirits. This one isn't a problem with the module itself, but I'm looking at this within the group of missions, so as the 4th of 4, this is the one that gets dinged. In 4 missions, 3 of them centered around rare possessing spirit types as a major portion of the plot. By this mission, players were joking that "someone possessed by spirits did it", so when that actually was the finale of the mission, it was kind of a letdown. I would actually say, this is the main flaw of Sprawl Wilds as a book.