Mission : Berlin Waltz.
Mission Quote: You all sure you want a piece of this?
Meta Quote: Never split the party, never split the party, never split the party...
The Plot: First of all let me just point out that space is warped and time is bendable. This is the only explanation for how this mission can pick up with you and the Dragon I'll just be calling “Perry” are still on the plane back from Denver when the last mission ended with you having already gotten off the plane to get paid.
Anyway, when you get back to Chicago Kat explains that she has another mission for you involving your newest friend Perry. It seems that Perry has some business in Berlin that he would like us to take care of.
Perry somehow managed to convey this fact to Kat seemingly without ever getting off the plane or us noticing half of the conversation while he was making a comm call (hell he probably didn't even have a comm on him in prison) so I guess he used magical dragon powers. It's not like it really matters, anyway, I just like to playfully nit pick pointless inconsistencies sometimes.
It is at this point that our motley collection of runners discovers that due to said previously mentioned dragon magic we took off for Denver with a face and came back without one without anyone dying on the run itself (clearly we missed a run where we are forced to land in Mane only to discover that time had stopped and barely get out of there with our lives while escaping form gigantic many toothed floating brown orbs) and so someone who is less than optimal at the task will have to negotiate.
Longshot having nothing in negotiate and a might two in charisma stands still not wanting it to be him.
That would be a sound strategy, except every other runner chose that particular moment to take a step backwards.
Which was how Longshot ended up spending a point of edge and rolling his mighty seven dice to try and land our group with some extra cash above the flat 10K offered for this job. I got a whopping two hits but the in character explanation I gave impressed the GM enough (that or he was just taking pity on me since I was getting screwed by my teammates for daring to have edge that I could spend on non essential combat rolls) that he gave me back the point of edge I spent back though pay stayed the same.
We accept it all the same and it also happens to be that Cane is loading some ammo crates into his plane which we can buy some off so that we can refill our guns for the ammo we used up in Denver.
In addition to that, there happens to be at least some extra room in the plane for the drones that our new rigger (who wasn't with us when we left Denver) wants to bring with him. So we fly off to Berlin and unlike flying to Denver nothing interesting at all happens on the way there.
When we do finally arrive, the rigger finds a storage location to keep his drones, and then a extra big extra fancy limo pulls up. Perry says that it is his and then he's going to go to a club that he owns in Berlin.
The drive starts out okay but then we start to get a sense that something might be going on. One of us (I believe it was an magic user having gone astral) notices a group of guys who have set up some kind of road block ahead of us (basically a bunch of stopped cars across the road with people standing behind them), possibly even a spirit as well.
Luckily Longshot is paranoid enough that he keeps his gun on him in the limo whereas our sniper needs us to stop the vehicle so he can go get his rifle out of his trunk and then we continue to roll out.
At the same time we ask our driver for some information about who these people could be. It seems that Perry is unlikely to be the target as it instead most likely a gathering of the local anarchist style movement.
If we can convince them we're tourists they'll probably only ask us for a bribe but otherwise they'll try to roll us for everything we have. Given this groups complete lack of faces we decide we'll resolve this problem in a more martial manner.
One of the group's other street samurais (“Pixie” a female troll who was mainly designed primarily for melee combat) sticks herself out the limo's roof and starts hollering about what a good time we're having and asking them what they're doing.
Somehow the sight of a huge troll in an armored jacket popping out of the sunroof of a limo fails to convince them that we are just tourists, though I am at a loss to figure out how they saw through this deception.
They start to slap leather and so do we.
The elf combat adept named Impulse who was with us in the first game (he and Pixie were with me for all four missions) goes first and shots a guy hurting but not killing him.
Our adept sniper bales out of the car and using it for cover shoots one of the enemies and, well I'm sure you guys have all seen what happens in 4E when a random mook gets shot by somebody with a gauss rifle, suffice to say it has not changed noticeably come 5E.
At this point a character who I'm going to call “Lenny” gets to go. I'm going to call him “Lenny” because, I'm not especially fond of the character (honestly I'm not sure if the guy playing him was trying to rp something of a loose cannon or was just not taking the missions as seriously as the rest of us did) so this way I will be preserving his anonymity, especially because I don't even know what the name of the person playing that character was. Anyway Lenny draws his gun and does nothing.
After that Longshot finally gets to go and he goes out the other side of the car to our sniper and blows away the closet enemy with a long burst. Then Pixie goes and she starts screaming about the guys should consider taking up a new vocation.
They decide that this is good advice, and start running.
That would be the end of it except for a few things. One of them is that Lenny happens to have Spirit Bane for air spirits and the spirit these guys have along with them is an air spirit. Not only that, but Lenny decides to use his held action to draw his gun on the Limo's driver and tell her to drive.
He rolls well enough on his intimidation roll that she puts the car in drive, even though there is no where that she can possibly go other than right into the cars parked in front of us. As we get to the 5th edition equivalent of the next pass the spirit which had materialized on its first turn tries to engulf Lenny who manages to avoid getting suffocated by it.
When Longshot goes again he decides that given the fact that the spirit is right next Perry him (Longshot) using ADPS ammo to try and shoot the spirit attacking Lenny is a less than brilliant idea. So instead he just makes an acrobatics check and effectively leaps into the moving limo.
The spirit is eventually defeated by... honestly I don't recall of the top of my head so I'm going to guess that it is Pixie punching it out as having her swing an axe around inside the limo would certainly open up the door to all sorts of possible problems. That, or it getting shot by the sniper adept.
With the bad guys defeated. me and Pixie manage to push aside the vehicles that are parked in front of us. And with the road clear we drive on over to a fancy club that Perry owns.
Inside there's a bunch of random stuff piled around which when moved followed up by some magical words reveals a trap door. We all take the trap door downwards, and eventually it leads us to a long passageway which finally takes us to a huge room filled with all sorts of cool stuff.
One of the smarter members of the team realizes that right now we're probably standing in Perry's horde. He has just about everything in there, actual records of the Beatles preforming, film reels of Casablanca, and a rare first draft of the US Constitution with the words “suckers” in it!
Perry tells us that we can do whatever while he does some... whatever it is that dragons who have been stuck in human form do in order to get their ability to turn back into dragons. So Longshot wanting to keep as little distance as possible between him and the dragon he's suppose to be guarding, decide he'll stay in the horde.
So he starts looking around to try and find something he can use to pass the time. Luckily Perry being a dragon of excellent taste has at least four seasons of the original My Little Pony Friendship is Magic (and that weird movie where Twilight turns into a human) with his version of Friendship Round Up being uncensored!
So suffice to say Longshot (who is a fan of Horizon's newest show My Little Pony Friendship is Emergence) knows how he will spend his time. Our rigger decides that he is going to have his drones brought here from the airport so that he can help defend the place, while Pixie goes upstairs with him for reasons that I'm not quite sure of.
A large delivery van eventually drives up and an ork gets out saying he wants our rigger to sign for his drones. He goes back behind the truck to make sure that his drones were not damage in the trip and the ork opens up the back of the truck.
“CLICK”
He finds himself staring down the barrel of four other orks with assault rifles.
It is at this point that the riggers makes the wise choice of faking a heart attack before promptly jumping into... I don't remember what but I'm sure there was something nearby that he could jump into.
Now, this is the kind of defensive strategy that I would normally expect to see accompanied by a laugh track, but he must have gotten lucky on his con roll because they decide not to shoot him a couple of times just to be on the safe side.
Granted it might just be the fact that Pixie is still up there also and she's busy drawing her assault rifle. She starts shooting up the general area with suppressive fire (luckily since our rigger is busy hacking he's obviously already prone at the moment) to keep them tied up while calling for reinforcements on her comlink.
So we race out of the horde room to try and get to the shooty shooty going on upstairs. We would have gotten there sooner but a pair of spirits happen to pop up in the tunnel leading to Perry's horde. Lenny decides to stay behind based on the principle of making sure somebody is still there to keep Perry safe.
This would be a good idea if it weren't for hindsight, you see Lenny's introduction card only says “Just a Troll” (granted mine says “Street Samurai” but the fact that my characters name is “Longshot” should make it pretty clear that I blow people away with guns) and as I would discover in the 4th CMP I played, Lenny's big thing is grenades.
Grenades are NOT The thing you want to have the guy in an enclosed room (even if it is a dragon sized room) with the person you're suppose to be protecting using. That doesn't even take into account the fact that we would probably be blowing up at least some of Perry's horde, something else that he wouldn't look kindly on.
While Pixie keeps them busy our rigger hacks the bad guy's van and puts it in drive to run over the people who are hitting the dirt (but hopefully not his own comatose body) to give them further problems.
Rather than switching clips, Pixie decides to draw her axe and once again bellow her best war cry at the somewhat intimidated orks as our sniper is busy trying to climb up a hundred meters worth of lader as quickly as possible with a sniper rifle strapped to his back. The orks decide not to stick around and fight a pissed of troll and since there are no other interruptions to Perry's ritual, everything else goes off just fine and we get to get paid, end of story. (Oh and the actual drone delivery truck shows up about the same time the bad guys bug out, cue the WAH-WAH-WAAAAA..../everybody laughs and iris out)
The Pro's /Things I liked: It's nice how the second mission of Dragon Song builds on the first. Last year I played a sort of random sampling of CMPS and other what not and the closest I came to real continuity was doing Hung Overed after Domestic Tranquility, though I neglected to do Hopping the Fence before either of them. Also all the way back in season 3, I can recall back in a mission called Monkeywrenched that my group of runners managed to break into a facility by posing as people delivering drones (granted we had actually brought some drones with us since we were doing a sneak in and hack some stuff job rather than a shoot up the place job) so it quite amusing to see NPCs following in our footsteps.
The cons/stuff I did not like: One of the apparent big changes that was going to happen with 5E was that rigger was about to become a viable character design again, at least that is what I heard. There's noting wrong with that at all.
However I've done enough work alongside some technomancers who dabbled in rigging to know a thing or two about how they tend to work. To start with, a rigger needs to have his drones. Also these drones typically need to be modified to high heaven and back in order to be truly effective.
To take an example at random (not really random) there was Arnold T (Talos) Muderbot.
He had once been a standard Ares Talos (assuming there is such a thing as a standard one when it seems like Shadowrunners keep stealing the prototypes) but then we slapped some mimic skin on him so that he would stop causing people to piss themselves in fear upon catching sight of him, installed a concealed minigun in one of his arms, built as much armor into him as possible, had him wear as much actual physically possible, and gave him a persona-fix that would cause him to speak with a bad Austrian accent.
This fact makes playing a rigger sort of problematic at a time and point when not even the GMs let alone the players had a copy of the rules in front of them. This was further compounded by the fact that the theme of these four missions was each one takes place in a different city and different country as well for that matter.
Riggers are a character type who are especially prone to getting screwed over when the run involve the runners operating someplace other than their normal home town because of the difficulty involved in getting drone's from one location to another over any distance that they can't walk/fly under their own power. Either due to security (“Excuse me sir, you seem to be made entirely of metal and have a gun in your arm...”) or the space they take up when your clandestine travel vehicle doesn't have enough extra room in it to pack all your murder machines in it.
While due to a lack of rules knowledge due to a lack of books I would not have expected the Gms to be aware of what was “strong” and what was “weak” in 5E, however I would expect them to be aware of what the missions they were going to be run would be like in at least the generalities. Since the selling point of these missions was that you'd be in a different city for each one, the GMs probably should have warned the player ahead of time about the difficulties of taking a Rigger.
On the other hand, all of the above is just a lot of pointless bitching based on the possibility that the player in question did not know in advance this could/would happen and was willing to play something that was temporarily suboptimal either because they thought would become more optimal once they got into fifth edition proper, or because they just thought it would be an interesting character concept or because they wanted to play a rigger and this was their first real chance.
So long as they knew about what they were getting into ahead of time I do not really have a leg to stand on when it comes saying the other players at the table were doing something wrong because there characters were not super-de-duper optimized.
At least not in this mission.... (DUN-DUN-DUN!)
Anyway, I just hope that Mr. Rigger got a warning that he was making a difficult life choice ahead of time, lets move on.
Also I think the final battle for this mission was only made at all interesting because of the fact that my fellow runners decided to do some very stupid things. Things like splitting the group when they had to defend an area with only ONE entrance.
If the rigger had left it to the service crew of the club Perry owned to bring him his drones when they were delivered we could have had a fight with all of the bad guys at once with all of us together when the tried to get into the horde instead of them getting to take us on piecemeal.
The moral of the story is that while I may be playing a 2 logic troll, clearly I need to dump all of my knowledge skills into “small squad battle tactics” and then whenever anyone makes a suggestion about going their own separate ways to do any particular task, I will whack them over the head with my first and bellow “DON'T SPLIT THE PARTY!”
