Mission Review SRM03-10 Spin Control
Hey folks, I'm back, given that I'm doing a review of a mission that isn't even part of the current season I don't feel the need to spoiler this mission. If you don't want to learn about this mission, well don't read it.
Here we go...
Part 1
Mission Quote: “Hey Bishop, troll at the door for you.” “Male troll or female troll?” “Male.” “Awww...” “Sorry , can't win em all man. Said he had important business deal for you, anyway I claim your chair while you're up.” (Pause) “So Gumbo what did I miss on My Little Pony Friendship is Emergence while I was answering the door?” “Well you know a how a horror has just broken loose into their world?” “Yeah...” “He's started using his powers to corrupt all of Twilight Stunballs friends.” “What a dick!” “I know!” (Pause) CRACKOOOM! “Was that a natural bolt of lightning or a force six and up spell?” CRACKOOM CRACKOOM CRACKOOM CRACKOOM! “Make that sheet lightning or someone multicasting a force six and up spell?” “Don't know, but Bishop better have turned it down before the show gets back on.” (Pause) “Hey guys. I'm back.” “Hey Bishop, so what was with the troll?” “He was from Ares. He wants me to know I'm through doing side jobs for them.” “Aren't you not suppose to talk about that kind of thing?” “Well he was also hear to kill me so what have I got to loose?” “Fair enough.”
Meta Quote: “You know Bishop felt that the time had come to sever his ties with Ares, he felt he was becoming too much of a corporate stooge.” “How did he come to that conclusion?” “Surprisingly enough it was at the exact same time that he discovered that Ares was willing to trust him with 60,000 New Yen.” “In guns?” “No in Credsticks....” “They aren't the brightest bunch are they?” “No they are not.”
Plot: Like most shadowruns this is the story of a bunch of people who individually and as a collective group made horrible life choices. It starts with Mr. Johnson making two horrible mistakes.
Mistake number one is that he invites us to his place of business and then decides to give us a comlink call rather than meeting us in person. If he was not going to meet us in person why couldn't he have called us up without having us have to walk/metro/fly halfway around Neo-New York? It's the kind of things that perks a runners ears up.
If you meet with the Johnson in a Virtual reality club when all your other metes have been face to face he may be an AI. If the Johnson decides to make you go some place you're going to do a face meet but then just shows of what an awesome monitor he has for power point presentations and the like, he just might have something to hide.
He tells us that he wants us to break into a gang headquarters owned by a group called the Switchblades, and get recordings of what is going on in there.
It is at this point that Mr. Johnson commits his second horrible life choice, wen he lets us know that bug spirits might be involved in this run.
This combined with the fact that we would be going to terminal, an area of the city where police wouldn't bother to scrape your corpse off the street let alone try to track down your murderer + bug spirits instantly brought a clear image to mind of what the run would be like. Obviously there was some cult/gang that had decided to rely on bug spirits for support and were slowly expanding their power base outwards intent on taking over all of humanity one unfortunate body at a time.
Knowing what I know about this run now, this was not at all the mental image that Mr. Johnson would have wanted us to have. Not only was it nowhere near the correct situation on the ground, but us holding this particular mental image would be detrimental to the aims and goals of Mr. Johnson.
So since our group has never had to tangle with bug spirits in Manhattan before we decide to take 24 of the 72 hours we've been given to deal with our problems buying up various anti-bug spirit items. These range from the obvious like K-4 anti-bug spirit insecticide grenades, to a couple of doses of some very concentrated Alkali substances because in shadowrun screw the namby pamby medical procedure of neutralizing acid burns via exposing them to vast amounts of a ph neutral substance, in 2070 if you get some PH1 stuff on you clearly the way to stop taking damage is to mix in some PH 14 substance with it!
Chemistry conundrums aside we then set out to do the mission. Since we're going to terminal the Brotherhood of Changelings finally has a reason (make that finally has a GOOD reason) to break out the Partyvan. For those of you not familiar with my group the Partyvan is what you would get if you took a tour bus, ripped out all the sound equipment and niceties, welded on a couple feet of armor plating, attached a military helicopter grade mini-gun up top on a turret, and then threw in some stripper polls on the inside just because it's better to have them and not need them then need them and not have them. Before we launch any kind of attack/raid on the Switchblade's HQ we decide to pay our respects to the other three gangs in the area.
One them is sorta of evil because they are organ leggers and have ties to Tamanous the super evil organ legging group, but at the same time, organ legging is a fact of life in Shadowrun and as runners the most we can hope for is every so often making sure some poor orphan kid doesn't get his heart ripped out so some wizened old dwarf with more money than morals can use it to prolong his life another few years. So we pay our respects and be all nice and in the process make it clear that while we are in town to prod some serious buttock it doesn't have to be theirs so they should just live and let live.
While we are doing this my brother playing his character Bishop commits the one of the greatest “SCREW YOUS” of all time Shadowrunning history which I will explain further when its result become known to the rest of the party.
After that we visit the Kings who are into forgery and probably no more “evil” than we are except without the advantage of being protagonists. The meeting goes pretty well.
Then we visit the last group. This group has made the horrible life choice of being a gang of vaguely racist Japanese gangers. They've made even the worse horrible life choice that as we're having this discussion we find out that their leader has a person chained up in one of their headquarters. Our GM deciding that since no info is given, said person has a 1 in 100 chance of being changeling. He rolls a pair of d10s and double goose eggs come up.
Now this gang has made some really horrible life choices because they decide it would be a good idea to be torturing a changeling to death at the same time as a group of predominantly changeling shadowrunners who formed a group based around making sure that EXACTLY THIS KIND OF SHIT doesn't happen to them in particular and changelings in general.
So we drive over to said headquarters, break in all stealthy like, and what happens next is a pretty short fight given that we've got the Partyvan, Arnold T Murderbot (a stolen Ares Talos drone now modified with extra armor, human looking skin, given a vindicator minigun, and a personafix giving him a disposition to make bad puns in a heavily German accent should anyone try to talk to him) and the element of surprise. So after we rescue Pollo Loco (an ork changeling with a chicken beak and feathers) we return our attention to the main mission.
As we drive near the Switchblades headquarters Bishop notices that his magical powers just suddenly took a hit like WOAH and we pull back to examine the situation in more detail. It turns out that the area around their headquarters is being hit with a level 2 background count aspect towards toxic magic. I quickly confirm with Bishop and he agrees that toxic shamans and insect spirits are two distinct things and in theory “toxic insect spirits” are about as likely to show up as “commie-Nazis”, so at least in theory the insect spirits should be gimped by the background count also.
Either way we pull out of it so Bishop can summon up a force 8 spirit of man who will be effective force two inside the background count and then Mastermind gets to work.
He owns their system hard enough that he can actually force the guards smartguns to eject their clips when they try to fire them, which is an important lesson in why you always slave your smartgun to something more secure than your comlink (I slave mine to Mastermind's Bionode for example!)
Either way there's a parking garage leading into the headquarters and the headquarters itself has FAB 2 and wireless blocking material sprayed all over it. This conveniently means that those poor idiots in the parking garage have no way of contacting their friends if things go wrong for them.
With contemptuous ease we own a convoy that the Switchblades are running through Terminal towards their headquarters (Mastermind owns their vehicles node, makes it shut down and when they get out to see what is wrong Bishop stunballs the guys in the backseat while I walk up stick my Supermach in through the now open door and hose down the driver and guy riding shotgun with stick and shock).
After that we decide to go all solid snake on this particular problem since we will be getting a bonus if we manage to get in and out without getting detected. I being our groups stealth expert am sent in with a repeater drone in my pocket for Mastermind to make use of once I can get it inside the building proper.
I set my holoware to look like an ordinary cardboard box (okay not really) and make a few sneak rolls to get down to the lowest level of the parking garage without anyone noticing us. After that with contemptuous ease I make us a surprise round and an extended burst from my Ingram to taze all four guards in one pass before they have a clue what is going on. However designed their security made the horrible life choice of having one of its linchpins be a retina scanner and even going so far as to give it an upgrade so that it can tell if the retina belongs to someone who is alive or dead.
I will withhold my applause until they can develop one that tells if the person being scanned is conscious or unconscious.
Thus I casually (thnx to some muscle augmentation Longshot is now strength 8 ) drag over an unconscious guy and hold his retina against the scanner. That combined with some technomancer jiggerpokery from Mastermind gets me access to the facility as well as emptying out most of their files including disarming and then stealing some honeypot files for the black ice contained within that can be repurposed for our uses or at least sold. After cracking his way through three separate nodes without getting detected (stealth 12 because if you can't crack Zurich Orbital why even consider being a technomancer) Mastermind lets me know that the first two floors are fairly normal but from then on up its insect horror show time, in the sense of there are a bunch of captured insect spirits being experimented on in lots of nasty ways. I will withhold my comments on this for a while.
I'll be going in on my own but honestly this is exactly the situation I want given that it will be easy for me to complete my Neo-A mission of scattering some stealth RFID tags over the place and giving the keys to said RFID tags to the NEO-As.
I make it through the first two floors security fairly easily spending a point of edge when I worry about my five hits of infiltrate not being quite enough to get by (I'm on my own in a building that is filled with security people, if things go bad my plan is to roll over and surrender and then hopefully have my teammates bargain for my release by offering to take the data they've already stolen public if I'm not released and turn it all over to them and never bother this place again if I'm let go) and reach the third floor.
My ears are filled with the screams of prisoners and despite being willing to trust Mastermind with my life, I don't necessarily trust that what was on their computer systems is what they're actually doing.
So I stick my head into one of the holding rooms just to make sure they really are working on insect spirits and not like a bunch of changelings who have gotten vaguely insect like.
Sure enough judging from the various restraint systems I catch sight of and all the wings, pincers, mandibles and antenna laying around, yes I am now in a room with about a dozen caged insect spirits. One of them vehemently pleads to be let free or if not that kill them.
It's at times like this (or at least retroactively after the run) that a line from Doctor Who comes to mind....
“You're pleading for mercy out of a dead woman's lips.”
These insect spirits are only in fleshy bodies that can be contained and mangled as they currently because they decided to possess the living breathing bodies of normal people sentencing them to a fate worse than death. While they are sentient beings and not quite as evil as say the horrors, the fact remains that Insect Spirits by their very nature have a morality system that is incompatible with anything approaching a normal human one. Their reproductive cycle inflicts a fate WORSE upon people than those xenomorphs from Aliens do.
If you get a chest burster implanted in you then you get incredible pain for a given period of time (around 10 min from what I've seen) then it bursts out and you die. If an insect spirit infects you then you get to spend the rest of your life locked up in your own body unable to do anything as it mutates into something other than human and inflicts the same fate upon others.
Long story made short while Longshot was not so crass as to say “QQ more bugboy, I wouldn't waste the cost of a bullet or risk the sound it makes, nor do I wish to touch you even to wring your neck in the process” then flip every insect spirit in the room off with both fingers before walking out, I was sorely tempted to. Because what is being done to these insect spirits is monstrous by the same token, they wouldn't be in this situation if they all hadn't made the horrible life choice to possess a human being and try to take over the world one host at a time.
Sorry for the long digression, and I may just be getting the wrong read on this, but I get the feeling that the mission wants the runners to find what this lab is doing morally objectionable on a deep and personal level. If so I think either I or whoever wrote this mission don't quite understand how the Shadowrun world works, because as horrible as what is being done to these insect spirits is... they all did something that is way worse to someone innocent first or they would not be in this situation.
It's a rough form of justice but it's not like you see any other kind in Shadowrun do you? Granted I will feel pity/upset/morally outraged on behalf of people who may get attacked by mind controlled insect spirits with chrome limbs, so long as they aren't more insect spirits.
Either way, ignoring the please of the insect spirits I head over to the operations room where Mastermind has determined there are a whole bunch of rating one weapon focus scalples more or less just laying around and hopefully I could pocket a few. Setting my holoware to look like a human doctor (nurse scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, scalpel, SCALPEL!) but sadly once I walk in I start to have flashbacks to my fun times under the vivisection knife at Aztechnology (my character being a cybered up gnome who is the result of their hopes to make killer cyborg soldiers who could pass for children if needbe) and despite spending edge on my charisma + willpower roll, even exploding sixes can't help me roll five hits on 11 dice.
My GM is kind enough not to stick my with a disadvantage for this (which I greatly appreciate him for, if I had gotten stuck with a disadvantage out of the blue for something that was more or less completely in line with the mission (trying to steal stuff in a mission where we had been told whatever we could steal we could keep) I would have had some harsh words with him, and demanded a much greater share of the total take which would have left everyone feeling sour). Instead we settle for the quite reasonable, my character is freaked out enough hat he beats an orderly sneak out of the building completely forgetting about stealing anything else. Of course the real shame of that was not the scalples (1K each) but the fact that we never got around to pilfering any of there dozen or so biodrone guard dogs, each of which wold have sold for around 21K each!
But either way, having gotten the data we need we exit and knock out a few more guards before exiting the facility with all ten of their bulldog step vans since they were laying right there why not take advantage of them?
As we drive off a quick conversation ensues on what exactly we'll be doing with the info. Since some of it suggested that our Johnson's organization had at least one other insect spirit in it, I become mildly paranoid that Mr. Johnson might be one. I therefore suggest that when we turn over the data to him, we redact all the bits having to deal with this organizations plans for raiding various other Hives across the globe, or anything else that might be useful to the bugs for anything other than getting this facility shut down.
We turn overs the "safe" data and he still pays us and Gumbo does some facing with out NEO-A and other corporate contacts to see who else we can sell the data to and net another 10 K New Yen out of that.
We collect our karma and all seems quite and peaceful until there's a knock at the door of our safehouse. It's for Bishop and Bishop alone.
It's an enforcer from Ares who gets +4 (in addition to the 6 from TR) to all his dice pools and is here to murder him.
Luckily Bishop has yet to use his one point of edge so manages to go first and zaps him with five force 8 stunbolts to drain the other guys edge pool. Amazingly his last one which had only two hits gets through dealing 9S. That isn't enough to knock the troll out but it does give him a 3 die handicap to just about everything and Bishop manages to survive his shotgun to the face before he and the spirit he had materialize on the first past knock the guy out.
After doing that, looting the guy and shipping him back to Ares with a “better luck next time” note pinned to his unconscious body, Bishop explains why Ares felt the need to murder him. It seems that at some point he had been given 12K worth of guns and ammo in duffel bags before going into terminal. His instructions were to sell them for five times that price to a ganger named Chromedome, and then turn the money over to Ares. Bishop decided to follow through on steps one and two (take guns into terminal, sell them for 60K) but decided that for him, step three would read “profit” and decided to just keep all the money for himself.
This is such an epic dicking over a corporation that I as a Neo-A member I can't help but be impressed! It also helped that Ares as a corporation made the horrible life choice to send an enforcer to kill Bishop rather than the Gunslinger or a combat mage.
So now that I've talked about what has happened lets break things down some.
