I’ve got a legwork session with a complication set up, I think it has the possibility of being a lot of fun …. but I struggle with legwork generally and am hoping for tips.
However: If you may be playing the adventure in the Seattle Box set, you should probably stop reading here, because there will be a touch of adventure spoilers below. (although i'd accept general ideas about making legwork interesting)
For that matter, if you haven’t bought the Seattle boxed set yet, but plan to, and don’t want to know much ahead of time, you should also stop reading now.
They’ve all left now? Good.
OK, here is the situation. I combined the lightly sketched out adventure thread in the Seattle boxed set with things that were anyway going on in my campaign, set up a cool situation …. And am now drawing a blank on how to make it really interesting.
It is a one player campaign (with some fairly regular NPC support). The PC is a motorbike racing street shaman, whose big secret is that he was born to high level S-K managers (the more karma rewarding corporate sinner negative quality). He’s had no contact with his parents for several years now, having made a break for the streets while still in high school. But he knows that he is still technically wanted (the corp doesn’t like ‘their’ magical assets running away. He was just lucky to have been in a high enough ranking family that bio samples for ritual spells hadn’t been harvested yet)
The shaman (along with 3 supporting NPC) have recently arrived at a luxury corporate resort stage of the adventure, where they are trying to track down Brackhaven’s aide (currently being tortured in a basement, but they have no idea that he's fallen from grace). There is also some happenings from a few years back that they would like to figure out (although that can be gotten from the aide, if they extract him). They are checked in as guests, and have a reasonable enough cover/IDs to circulate pretty freely for now.
The place seemed fairly quiet when they first arrived, but after their horse back riding session (they wanted to get a feel for the area), ferries and shuttle flights started disgorging S-K senior management and aids, here for an annual planning session. Of course some of them might recognize the shaman, and of course his parents could be there somewhere. Also in there somewhere is a Johnson that the shaman doesn't know works for S-K -- if he investigates the gathering he'll see him, if not he won't.
OK, great, they’ve got an objective and a complication. But as I said, I struggle with running interesting legwork sessions at the best of times, and juggling keeping things moving while keeping up the tension of being identified has me drawing a blank. Any ideas for incidents/encounters, or tips on how to run something like this well?
I tend to get bogged down in conversations, and am not good at steering things in a way that help the player figure out where to go next (and with only one player, don't have that depth of minds to pick up on clues)
(if it matters, the three NPC are a charming elven gun nut, a dwarf (drone) rigger, and a security/intrusions expert – all with much less than their usual gear, due to security measures on the island. In terms of specialized gear they have one pistol, one laser pistol (on loan), a cyberdeck, and a few non-armed spy drones between them. I can use them as needed to keep things moving, or to get info that the shaman can't, but obviously the shaman should be the star of the show, and they all supports)
