And now for the final "regular mission" I took part in at Origins, I also did the Shadowrun Scramble, but that was a huge different kettle of fish that honestly it's hard to judge by proper Shadowrun standards, and the less I say about it the fewer people I am likely to offend.
Anyway, lets get down to business..
[Spoiler]
Mission Quote: “Maybe we can just beat the door down?” “Yeah Bishop you’re a toll, why don’t you take a swing at it and see what happens?” “I don’t know guys, that thing looks pretty well reinforced, I’m not sure I could do it. Longshot might just be able to pull it off though.” “You know, you’re like three times my size Bishop.” “Yeah but I’m one of those glasses wearing trolls with pocket protectors.”
Meta Quote: “Sorry for stealing the spotlight guys.” “Don’t worry about it man, this was a job that called for a silver bullet and your backstory was that either you were the Lone Ranger or a werewolf hunter.”
Plot: The mission begins with our team in London. We’re hired by a Mr. Johnson who wants us to break into an old and now defunct Ares bunker dating back to some very unpleasant time in Europe’s history and retrieve a crate for him. The bunker itself should no longer be guarded, and what we’re being asked to retrieve should not be dangerous so long as it is handled properly. The downside is that we’ll need to work our way through a Renraku controlled area, though in theory they don’t know about the bunker, and Mr. Johnson will have another team busy raising hell on the other side of the underground area to let us hopefully get in and out without problem.
The pay starts out irritatingly low (another one of those five hundred thousand new yen jobs) but Hummer talks him up to 7,5000 and we get ready to go spelunking. He provides us with some explosives to be used to breach the door of the bunker. For this mission I’m running with Mastermind, Bishop, Hummer, two guys I haven’t met before, and one guy who hasn’t played Shadowrun before and speaks somewhat broken English.
The team gears up (me with my Supermach) and head out. Shortly after we arrive our commlinks start picking up news reports about the other runner team drawing Renraku’s attention and we manage to make it to our first obstacle without difficulty. Said obstacle is a drywall Janitor’s closet between us and the outer areas of the bunker. We contemplate using the explosives we’ve been given but then Bishop suggests before we go about being too obvious, I should take a whack at it. So I let my foot anchors out to play and deliver a spikey kick to the drywall barrier which carves in a nice gnome sized hole in it that I manage to make bigger without too much trouble.
After that we head further in, and sometime later discover a metal door to the bunker proper keeping us out. I kick this one in as well (knocking it clear off its hinges) and we proceed. It doesn’t take us too long to find the crate in question; it’s rather ominously located in a room with a few completely empty hazmat suits lying on the floor.
A quick X-ray peek shows me that there’s something vaguely human skull shaped inside, and four cylindrical canisters. We hand the crate over to the drones we were given for this mission and scram.
All goes well until we start to head in the direction of our evac craft and find that some red samurai have already beaten us to the punch. Not only that, but they utterly destroyed our escape hovercraft and there are no other ships at the dock they are guarding.
Luckily we manage to spot them before they spot us, so since there would be nothing but petty vengeance to be gained from fighting them we instead double back and manage to find a ladder leading us up into one of London’s less pleasant neighborhoods. Sure that we are not being followed (as Mastermind hacked the Renraku team’s communications) we find a pair of empty buildings.
We put the crate in one, while the rest of us hunker down in the other, waiting for the inevitable bad things that will happen when we open the crate. None the less, we contact Mr. Johnson and open it up to show him what we have.
Sure enough there’s a mystical glowing skull, and four containers of FAB 3. One of said containers has a bullet hole in it (but luckily the thing was already drained slightly so none is leaking out right now) and Mr. Johnson helpfully informs us that unless we want to become the worst bioterrorists in English History, we need to dispose of this stuff on the double, and he’ll double our fee so long as we can do it quietly.
After some spirited debate on the subject of exactly how much is FAB 3 worth on the black market (nowhere near the kind of money you to make it worthwhile is the answer) we agree that rather than sell this stuff off or keep it for our own private use later on, we will neutralize it. So we call up our old friend Art Johnson (who was not the guy who hired us) and ask him if there are any nearby hospitals who don’t need their clean room at the moment.
The answer is a resounding “no” but he can locate the next best thing, a college. A few greased palms later, we roll the crate into the college’s clean room, which includes transparent but air tight walls. A drone goes in and pops one of the containers open, releasing the FAB 3.
At this point being able to see through the wall, Bishop hits the cloud with so many force six sterilizes that we could actually hear the bacteria screaming in pain. Then we repeat the process for the other containers. Killing all of the FAB 3 DEAD, DEAD, DEAD D-E-A-D DEAD we cast a few more sterilizes just to be sure, then take care of delivering the skull to Mr. Johnson and congratulating ourselves on proving that some days, in point of fact, you actually can just get rid of a bomb.
The Pros/Things I liked: This was less of a traditional Shadowrun and more of a lateral thinking puzzle. Can you break into a rundown ammunitions bunker? Can you figure out a way to safely dispose of a biological weapon? Can you figure out a way to do both of the above without anyone realizing you have?
It made for a nice change of pace from missions where the solution is to just find a person and then throw a few pounds of dice at him, either as part of a diplomacy/bluff/etiquette check or to shoot/stunbolt him in the face.
The Cons/Things I didn’t like: For being hired to do a run by a “Charles Finely” (who even was an American employee of Ares) there were no real Burn Notice references in this mission, I am disappointed by this.
Also I feel that this mission might not have been written with runners of our caliber in mind. By having me kick down the doors rather than using explosives, Renraku didn’t have a clue that we were extracting stuff from under their noses until we were back above ground, because we all expected there to be horrible shaftings the moment the chest was opened we were a safe distance away from it, even if it had started leaking FAB 3 into the air upon being opened.
Because Bishop knows the Sterilize Spell, he was able to dispose of the FAB without us having to resort to more dramatic methods like flamethrowers, white phosphorous grenades, or syphoning it into new containers, strapping it to our backs and calling ourselves the Spirit Busters.
The last one would have been especially unfortunate because I suppose it’s time to talk about the “big twist” in this adventure that the GM told us about afterwards.
We are not dealing with FAB in the container, we are dealing with for lack of better words, “FAB 4” a mutated strain of FAB 3 which will if given a chance will attack not just mages, adepts and spirits, but also perfectly ordinary people who didn’t have any sort of magic about them as well.
So the problem with this particular mission is that upon reflection the difficulty is very binary. Our play through of the mission was sort of like the movie aliens, except that we actually enforced quarantine protocols, so when the guy who had been facehugger came in, he had to spend 24 hours in deacon chamber, and when the monster burst out of his chest, we turned on the deacon’s room incinerator, burnt what came to a pile of ash and shrugged our shoulders.
If that stuff had managed to get out we would have found ourselves having to do battle with the fog monster from hell, but we didn’t so it didn’t. Any mission whose breakdown is “will you commit action A which leads you to massive shafting” is in my opinion not a very well designed mission.
Honestly most of us were constantly expecting “Lord Skelleington” the level 13 spirit to pop out of the box, either when we first opened the crate, or when we finally got rid of all the FAB which might have been holding him in check.
I’m not saying the mission has to go that way, because honestly there are only so many possible way to screw over shadowrunners and they tend to become relatively expected each time after they get sprung on the runners.
For example it didn’t exactly take a genius to figure out that when we were told that we would find our credsticks in an unmarked bag behind a dumpster instead of having the money directly wired to us, it was entirely possible that the Johnson was planning to blow us up (indeed if we had done a worse job on the mission that would be EXACTLY what they were doing at the time) and after your first hit squad bursts in through the walls of your safe house like the Cool-Aid-Man it doesn’t take long for the players to decide that their characters are going to sleep in their full armor, with their hands wrapped around their weapons, and laying all together in one big pile of shadowrunners.
So a certain amount of credit must be given to the mission for managing to come up with a new way to screw over the runners. The problem is that for maximum “screw you” effect, the runners need to keep the “FAB 4” on them for a rainy day (or at least major water spirit) and then “fun times” are sure to result.
The only problem is that then the major payoff for this mission doesn’t kick in till a few missions down the line, at which point you may have an entirely different GM. In conclusion, I guess that honestly combining the two possible ideas above might be the best way to improve the adventure. First you end up getting a attacked by a very powerful spirit, so the runners become sorely tempted to use the FAB on it, and when one of the street samurais do, they go from having one big spirit problem, to one big floating cloud of bacteria problem to deal with!
Just to be clear, I didn’t have quite as much of a problem with this run as I did with Swing Vote or Ain’t That A Kick In The Head, those two were actively irritating/boring while I was playing them. This one was simply more like a trisket.
It’s there, you consume it quickly, it’s rather bland but you wouldn’t object to having another one at some point. To speak to how quickly this run went, it’s worth pointing out that the mission started at 8:00, make that 8:10 for time that everyone spent getting together, and after I finished the mission, walked back to my apartment in the Red Roof Inn across the street and a block down, took the time to load up my suitcase with all the stuff out of my room, got my boarding pass printed, and still had ten minutes left over after to wait before the noon shuttle to the airport showed up.
[/Spoiler]
There you have it, that's all the normal missions I did at origins.
