I will openly admit this review is a little different than most of the ones I've done because I let a lot of time elapse between doing the run and writing this review, chiefly because of how unimpressed I was with it. Anyway, spoiler time folks!
[Spoiler]
Mission Quote: Okay Mr. Crack Sprite, it's time to start f**king some goats.
Meta Quote: “You find a brand new car parked outside your hideout. There's a note attached to steering wheel. It says 'Do not do that again, we were not amused me Mr. Smarty Runner.' Then there is a very big A and an even bigger frowny face next to it.” “You know what? I think I'm gonna have a drone turn that car on for the first time, while I'm a very long distance away from it.”
Plot Synopsis: This mission honestly was one of my least favorites, but lets take it from the top. We get contacted by Peaceman who has a job for us. We drive on down to his place of choice which is a small food store that is not part of any corporate chain.
Once we get here Peaceman explains that things have not been going well for him recently. Evidently he managed to get his hands on a shipment of grain recently from some Aztechnology subsidiary and started distributing it among the SIN-less. That's a pretty impressive feat for him given the way that we recently jacked a shipment of new super grain from an Aztechnology subsidiary and turned it over to Ares for 80,000 New Yen each. (To be fair to get that money the GM made us fight two full shadowrun teams at once, one of those teams getting +10 to all their opposed dice pools (+4 on top of their normal +6 from TR)
Whoops.
So already this run feels a little “off” as if we're operating in an alternate universe because of a friendly deviation we made from a prior mission.
But anyway, the problem is that everyone who started eating this grain started getting sick, and yesterday the first person to eat the grain died from the sickness. Peaceman is majorly pissed of about this, so much that we discover he's a bear shaman when he starts to fall into a mindless rage. Luckily we have Gumbo on hand to calm him down with his oddly high charisma skill for a man who is little more than a skull and a bunch of squishy organs encased in chrome.
Once Peaceman has been safely calmed down, he tells us that he wants to hire us to track down the person responsible and bring them to justice.
He also offers us a painfully low amount of money so Gumbo feels it is necessary to resort to drastic measures. He pulls out a whiteboard and a dry erase marker and explains how the Brotherhood of Changelings are not just a group designed to fight anti-changeling bigotry, we are also a non-profit group.
All our runs are made possible through grants by Mr. Johnsons like you and 100% of the New Yen we get paid gets put back into making us more effective Shadowrunners so that we can better serve the public at large.
Then he draws an outline of a bomb and draws a red line going through it about halfway up explaining that this represents paying us 4000 New Yen each. If he wants us to plant a bigger bomb in the desk of whoever is responsible for this, he's going to need to offer us more money.
Peaceman raises it to 6,500 New Yen each with 3,000 New Yen (split among all of us) for bribes. That still falls short of our Platinum Donation Level and doubly so considering that looting is not going to be on for this mission. Since he failed offer up 10,000 New Yen each Peace Man will not be getting a free Brotherhood of Changelings tote bag to show his friends.
Anyway he gives us the one thing he has going for him, the Com Link of the guy who was driving the truck that he hijacked. That guy ended up getting shot in the head unlike the guy who was driving the truck that we hijacked who ended up being let off at the side of a road with a 10,000 New Yen “sorry but we need to steal your truck and its contents for the greater profit” payment.
Either way, Mastermind our hacker summons up a google-chu sprite and has it easily max out all the possible legwork checks which basically finds us everything we could possibly need to know. We go visit “Breeze” who was a hacker involved with the unsuccessful attempt at hijacking made on our truck, and now is owned by/works for Aztechnology.
We knock on his door and explain that we're shadowrunners, and he buzzes us in figuring that it's cheaper than paying for the door to be replaced after we shoot it to pieces/kick a hole in it. So we talk with him about what he knows about where the grain came from and who hired him to try and hijack the truck in the first place.
He tells us that we're going to need to pay him 3,000 New Yen if we want that story. A lot of negotiation goes on and for once Gumbo fails us (probably because he didn't spend edge) and so we have to pay the full amount.
A lot of inter group arguing goes on based around the prospect of us wanting to see if he lowers his price after we tip over his wheel chair and rough him up some. After way too much argument for my liking I decide that I'll just pay him out of my own personal funds just to keep the run train on the rails.
Breeze explains that he was hired by a guy named Kenji Vlastimil, who was planted in the Nutritional Research Associates (the Aztechnology owned corp) by another corporation named Pulaski Food Technology Corporation which has no clear ties to any AAA level organization. He wanted to have the truck hijacked, and when that failed Kenji sent a hit squad that murdered the rest of his team (as we only knocked them out with S&S bullets) and crippled Breeze from the waist down.
He believes that Kenji must have known that the grain was poisoned, otherwise react so harshly to failure? Also he would probably have removed all evidence linking him to the grain, other than some that he could keep directly under his thumb like having it stored in some chrome implanted directly in his head
To his credit our GM makes this info dump by portraying Breeze as Mr. Plinkett of Red Letter Media.
Then we head on over to the driver's old place and proceed to find out absolutely nothing other than that it's been ransacked, and the old lady who lives next door doesn't feel like opening the door for shadowrunners even when Gumbo tries to talk to her.
So with that waste of time dealt with we decide to go check out Pulaski. The place looks normal enough and Mastermind manages to own their node with a less than strenuous amount of effort. That gives him camera access to the entire place... expect for basement. The basement that one of our mage's Bishop's spirits detects is surrounded by a powerful ward.
Suffice to say, if Kenji is anywhere on sight, he's in the basement. So we need to get a way to that basement.
Given how gungho the security is about keeping people out of the basement, clearly a level of strategy will be involved.
We decide to have the fact that Mastermind owns their node to shut down their elevator when it's in between floors with some people trapped inside. They obviously call in elevator repairman, and due to our control of their node we arrange for it to be us.
Some disguise and physical masking later we manage to sneak the team on site, and they tell us to go right ahead as long as we don't use the elevator to go to the basement. Naturally, we use our control of their node to make it look like we're going to different floors than we really are and head down to the basement.
Having past through a ward we re summon spirits recast combat spells, and then have Mastermind hack a lock we are staring at at the other end of the room.
This ends up alerting the two armed runners on the other side of the no longer locked door so no surprise round. But we trounce them when it comes to rolling for initiative.
Also, they made the horrible life choice of becoming shadowrunners without getting an edge stat.
They go down in a hail of stick and shock and then we have a nice long chat with Kenji.
He argues that he's innocent but Mastermind hacks his head finds a locked data file full of information about the poisoned grain. When we confront him with this he says that there's still proof he is innocent and that all of Pulaski's testing said the grain was safe. All we have to do is break into the data storage place where the records are kept. He can't come with us there because he's sure that if he leaves this ward Aztechnology will use ritual magic to kill him.
Bishop and Mastermind argue firmly that we should kill Kenji and blame it the poisoned grain on him and call it a day.
I not wanting to possibly play into Aztechnology's hands again the way I ended up doing back in Burning Bridges say we should keep Kenji alive and go investigate his story. Gumbo is also good with us inspecting the place and after a lot of inter party arguing Kenji get's knocked out (don't worry Aztechnology can't kill you with ritual magic, we're all pretty sure that it doesn't actually exist) and we manage to leave with him in toe.
Then we look up the other place where the data is stored, and it does not look too like too hard a place to break into. We hack the entire building’s node and cause the air conditioning in the business one floor above the data storage place to break down.
We get in with the help of a girl who seems like a rat shapeshifter (but we're also pretty sure that rat shapeshifters don't exist either) and accepts a thermite bar for payment. Luckily we happen to have two thermite bars on us and use the second one to burn through the metal grating that got welded in place over the entrance we wanted to use.
None the less, we manage to get in, convince the people in the business with no air conditioning to take a long lunch break, cut a hole in the ceiling (with some help from my foot spikes) and then remove said section of the ceiling.
With some help from Mastermind we manage to find out which of the umpty dozen security storage devices they have on hand holds the info we want. We leave with it and get it back to our base. Mastermind decodes the thing and it proves that the grain passed all the tests and that Aztechnology was responsible for the grain being poisoned through and through.
So eventually we manage to compromise that everyone can equally hate. Kenji is left alive but he does get blamed for the grain being poisoned. He gets blamed as an agent of Aztechnology, and we use the info from Kenji's head to help work on creating a cure for the people who already ate the grain.
That leaves just one more thing thing that we need to worry about, REVENGE!
We drive back over to Breeze's place, shove him in the trunk of our Bulldog Step Van (wheelchair and all) and then drive him over to a lodge own by a prime runner friend of ours. A prime runner who is a maxed loyalty contact and happens to know the spell mindprobe. One mind probe later we find out that indeed Breeze did know in advance that Kenji was innocent of poisoning the grain and mislead us on purpose because Aztechnology wanted him to.
At this point he makes the wonderful life choice of giving us back the money we bribed him with and then begs us for help to get out from under Aztechnology's thumb.
So long story short we end up doing a two for one fake death special staging a car accident that “kills off” both Kenji and Breeze so that they can start new lives as Neo-Anarchists whether they want to or not.
The good/stuff I liked: There were at least some moments in this adventure that gave me a really good laugh most of which I detailed in my breakdown of the plot, so I honestly can't be sure if I should reward a mission for humor that was chiefly the result of my and my group's occasionally perverse sense of humor. Other than that.... off the top of my head... I've really got nothing...
The Bad: Strap in this might take a while.
There was only one gunfight in this mission (at least the way we played it) and that was with two guys. I have Base Initiative 15 and three passes and I did not get a chance to fire my gun once. Any adventure where the group's fastest street Samurai (Gumbo is 13 I and 4 passes) doesn't get a chance to fire his gun his rather painfully combat light in my opinion.
Also let me make this clear, inter party conflict is not really all that fun in Shadowrun. If I wanted inter party conflict I'd be playing Paranoia.
It does not help that it is extremely easy to figure out who would be able to beat who in a Shadowrun fight. If me and Bishop threw down against each other then I'd spend edge to go first, spend edge to shoot him with one long narrow burst then spend another point of edge to shoot him with a second long narrow burst. Since he has only one point of edge that would not wind up well for him.
Likewise if I was taking on Gumbo then the fact that he has eight points to my five means that if I do not manage to knock him out with one single full narrow burst then he'll eventually get me during the second pass as I will have exhausted all my edge (one to go first, one for the narrow burst to attack, two to soak his return attacks, and then my last one to go first again second round) which is why I actually just spent thirty karma to go up to six edge so I will have enough to edge to spend on a second full narrow burst.
But whatever the system, there's nothing really fun about having me say “I don't think we should kill him” and then having one of my partners say “I think we should kill him” repeat add nasuem.
Even worse since there were four runners in our group with two voting to keep him alive and two voting to kill him, there is really no fair way to resolve the issue. I understand why Mastermind and Bishop had to argue the way that they did (they wanted what was in the mystery box that Aztechnology had offered them) but it was still a far from fun way to blow a good ten to fifteen minutes of game time.
Other not fun things in this adventure include going to places where we don't learn anything we didn't already know from our legwork checks, and honestly having legwork checks more or less spoonfeed what was going on to us.
Firestorm did a much better job with setting up a trail of breadcrumbs that the runners needed to follow rather than just one big legwork info dump.
Low pay and no chance to make up for it via looting is never fun as I have already touched on. Though seriously, does the Changeling Shadowrunners association have to expand our union to cover all of New York to drive home the message that for table rating six runners the expect pay level is 10,000 New Yen without looting or 6,000 with looting.
Other problems I had with this mission would be that it is heavily depend on events unfolding in 03-06 Jackknifed exactly as they adventure wants them to. Now, expecting them to sell the grain to the Neo-A's is perfectly logical given that according to the way the mission was written up the Neo-A's are the only game in town who won't back stab the runners.
However insisting that Lewis had to have died in Jackknifed seems like a pretty big leap of logic on the mission writer's part. After all, our team (correctly) hypothesized that he would be the first one to draw agro if we kept him around too long, so we handed him over to the Neo-A's after having hacked his truck so that it could be driven without his DNA key. Having this mission kill him off for a plot hook that would not really be necessary feels like it is undoing all our hard work back during that run.
Finally, the last big problem I have with this mission is that the run needs to more clearly established how heavily Breeze is owned by Aztechnology, how they are keeping control of him, what kind of protection are they giving him, and if he wants to let them have control of him.
So yeah, not the most challenging or fun of runs to be on in my opinion. But you know what? That's okay because it's only the second to last mission and hopefully Elevator Ride to Hell will be a much stronger run to close out season three....
[/Spoiler]
And there we go, finally have it over and done with.
