[Seras]

Share your war stories as player or GM 

[Seras]

My favorite run so far.

I was GMing my new group. The job was to get the girl held hostage a way from the mob, without it tracing back to the father ( Mr. Johnson), because if the mob found out the would " pay him a visit". she was beeing held at a Mc Hughes in storage.  I stressed the no traces part to my players in Game.

I had prepared condition monitors and read the combat rules intencely.

The players you had contacts to the press and street witches and a local college, took Mr. Johnsons gear money and  bought tons of beer and through a  "spontanious " party at the restaurant( with girls dancing on tables and such ). Then they used someone elses commlink to call the cops. The mage astrally projected and told the girl. " Make noise the cops are here and will get you out. The mobsters were arrested for kidnapping...

The players looked at me smiled and said: " hey, it does'nt trace back to Mr. Johnson.

I totally did not see that coming and it was not the way I had planned the mission, but boy was it fun   

[Marcus]

My favorite mission's run was a mod from Denver I think. It was the second part of a two part series, where you are hired by a kid's parent to "rescue" the child. Who was being "held" hostage. While that run went super well, the end of it the child is killed, for reasons outside your control. But in the second part you get to hunt down the guy who pulled the trigger, and set right your good name. A good classic revenge story.

My favorite personal run, was in game using the SR rules but set just around WW2 as the occult war as discussed in Hell Boy. In it the team was sent to rescue princess Anastasia from a very powerful immortal elven sorceress we accidentally woke up.  We were competing with our Nazi counter parts from the thule society. We beat them in gambling, we closed the "bling gap" b/c it was clear they had better bling then our team, and then beat them down and stole all their foci. Then got massively in trouble when we spent the departments whole budget to buy Anastasia from the Sorceress. It was the funniest weirdest series of rolled challenges I ever faced on any run.

[Michael Chandra]

There have been plenty of awesome elements in my 52-run campaign and Open Events, but one that will really stay with me was the finale. I made a hexagon cave bug nest map, imported it in Maptool, set line of sight blockers and placed player and encounter tokens. Then I started a Player-Sight server and connected the laptop to my tv.

What followed was a dungeon crawl with exploring drones, area spells left behind to cover unexplored tunnels, tricks the players had used in the past used against them, a Bug Queen dodging half a dozen Insecticide grenades and more. Line of Sight exploration really remains awesome in these cases.

[Sphinx]

Universal Brotherhood. When it first came out, our GM picked it up at the game shop an almost immediately made all the players swear not to sneak any peaks at it ... not his copy, not on the shelf in stores. Some very nasty surprises and intense roleplaying ensued, up until we got our copy of the Wanderly file, at which point we broke for a week and everyone took turns reading it.

By the time we regrouped to finish the game, everyone had a shell-shocked expression on their faces, and genuine terror when we went into the hive ...

[adzling]

the back half of Splintered State where I finally got to use my doppleganger face to break the ending ;-)

Tog, Elven Doppleganger here, ran a short-con with little notice to obtain access to a corp facility, it's now a blueprint on how to con a corp for access.

Sit down and take the load off for a few and i'll clue you in on a short-con corp crack that almost anyone can run, if they're
running nova-hot ;-)

Once upon a time my team had to crack a high security floor in a corp high-rise in downtown anywhere-ville. Now this corp hive had the works, retina scans, palm print scanners, magcard readers, motion sensors, faraday caged entire floors, spirits, cameras, mono-wire, magical wards up the wazoo etc etc.
You get the picture, someplace you don't want to mess with unless you've got an inside man or some other thing in your favor.

We did have an in, it was provided by our Johnson, but, well, my personal philosophy is if it's too easy then you're the mark. And I hate being the mark.

So we had to find a way into the 10th floor to get this file the Johnson wanted, without using his “easy in”.

I did a quick bit of recce around the area to see what this particular part of downtown looked like. Turned out it was much like any other part of corporate town, which was pretty perfect.
For this con I needed a little setup, took me all of 4 hours to get the props ready and pick the right mark. So the day before the con I walked into the most heavily trafficked lunch spot right in front of the corporate tower, a little deli/ sandwich joint, the names not important, dressed in an expensive hoody, some ultra expensive runners, ripped jeans and expensive glasses. To complete the programmer bro look I flipped my face, skin, hair and body for that of a 20-something caucasian right out of college (yeah I can do that, it’s a thing for some social adepts).

“Hey mr. biz owner, how would you like to make an extra $500 nuyen a day for zero work?”

That had him hooked, all small biz owners struggle, I learned that from a trid one time, I think.

“Here’s the dealio omae, my startup runs a totally whiz social marketing service that we’re testing in <insert your town> and we’re looking for local business owners who want to make $500 to $1000 extra nuyen per day for no work!”

The hook was baited and the fish was staring at it getting up the courage to bite.

“What we do is real slick my man. We put up AR and printed signage in front of your store offering free lunches to the corp crowd. Anyone who comes in and signs up with the tablet we put in your store, well they get a free lunch, we get their marketing info and we pay YOU for their lunch. You get more customers introduced to your fine, fine deli here, at no cost to you plus we PAY you $500 nuyen a day on top of it!”
I show the biz owner the matrix site I setup the night before for my little social marketing startup and he’s hooked.
I promise our “brand ambassador” will be coming by tomorrow to setup the signage and hang out in the store to collect the sign ups.

Next day I show up in my Maria Mercurial-alike outfit (I did mention that my form & sex is mutable, right? Oh yeah I did) carrying a sign I got printed at kinkos-fedex that morning. The sign’s a prop but it’s the most important one, kinda. It’s got a huge 12” headline readable from across the street that says “Hey everyone on floor xx get a free lunch on us!” With the “xx” being a slot for inserting differently numbered cards, today I slip a “1” and “0” in there.

I jam that prop in the deli window with some ultra-tac and setup the AR sign that says the same thing.

Then I waltz into the deli, set my sign-up tablet up on the counter and wait for lunch time.

When the lunch rush starts we get all kinds of folks pretending to be from the “10th floor” of the target corp. Some are genuine, most are not. I don’t care, I let ‘em all sign up and get a free sandwich. While they are signing up I’m socially filtering out as many of the obvious bullshitters and focusing my palming con on the ones that seem to be genuine. Me-as-Maria-Mercurial-alike gets busy shaking their hands <dynamic handprints copying their palm prints>, palming-copying-and-returning their magcards and “getting them to help me get this eyelash out of my eye” <retinal adjusters copying their retina pattern> all while shaking my ass and tits in their face.
Goes without a hitch, I get a handful of good candidates for days work. For each one I have their palm prints, retina scan and copy of their magcard along with their home address (remember they signed up for the free lunch).
You can guess the rest.

Moral of the story: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

TL:DR with the right ‘ware and the right con there ain’t nothing you can’t crack.

[Beta]

My favorite run as a player was the finale of Universal Brotherhood.  Our group had been pretty rag-tag and not the smoothest up until then, but with that motivation we suddenly became a well oiled commando team.  The whole team was bought in that our survival was optional, that of the queen was not.  We loaded a hacked car with flammables and crashed it through the lobby doors and set it off, then moved in fast and hard to go after the queen (while most were trying to escape the fire).  There was that extra tight timer of the whole place rapidly turning into a death trap due to the fire.  Karma was spent liberally (this was first edition, you could burn karma in a manner akin to how edge is used now), and just pulled it off.  Sadly that was also my last in-person game as a player, just as we were getting the hang of things.

A couple of dozen years later I started running a one-player game for my son that has run up into the hundreds of karma earned level.  We've had a lot of fun, but as a GM I think my favourite was the third metaplanar jaunt to the home plane of his allied spirit.  I used the "Fistful of Karma" episode from Harlequin's Back as inspiration for much of the metaplane (especially the road trains, most magic showing up as special effects on bullets from your six-shooter, and weird cyber-ware translations), but added in aspects from some of the Mayan and Aztech cities, a bit Perdido Street Station, and six factions with different skin colors cooperating and competing in running The City and outlying territories.  His allied spirit is one of the Blacks, the most mechanical of the factions who invented and run the road trains.  Except that the Reds, the most militaristic, have started to make their own knock off road trains, and had siezed The Blacks ancestral town and home of their skunk-works, and were making off with the new experimental engine.  It all led to a train chase and classic shoot-out on a train, complete with running over the roofs of cars, dealing with low bridges, leaps between trains, de-coupling cars, and a final desperate battle through the city to try and get the re-stolen engine to the Black's pyramid, where the Minotaur Guard that the PC had helped recruit in his first visit to that plane charged in to remove the final road-block just in time for the engine to coast to safety on the last shreds of pressure left in its boiler.  It was just such a totally different run than anything else we'd done, but it worked out so well.

[neomerlin]

This one I was running. I'm not sure if it is my favourite, but it's a good one and I'm struggling to pick a favourite. Plus, it's relatively short.

Mr Johnson hired the team to make a delivery. Simple thing: take a package, untampered, unopened, and deliver it to the live in manager of a factory in Redmond. Said factory manufacturers armour worn by Knight Errant, so it's well guarded and Mr Johnson would prefer the package not be checked by security, or even seen by them. The party all assumes they're delivering drugs, no big deal. Easy money. Johnson is offering good money, too.

More veteran runners might have called the money "too good to be true" but, hey, Mr Johnson had bought dinner and paid some money upfront and even gave them some handy advice: there's a construction site next to the factory that will be empty, dark, and unguarded at night. It'll probably be easy for them to jump the fence from there.

So off they go and, following Mr Johnson's advice, they decide to sneak into the construction site. But not before they do a little tampering. A quick scan of the package reveals a GPS tracker. Well, makes sense. Got to make sure the drugs make it to the guy. So, the sam and infiltrator get into position by the fence, in the shadows. The decker scopes things out on the Matrix and gets a good lay of the digital land, even picking out where the recipient is: top floor. There's a lot of KE on patrol, though. The rigger sends in some fly spies for physical recon. Confirms guard numbers, and even gets inside and finds their target sitting on a bed in his modest living quarters, playing with his commlink. In doing so, he even finds the best and sneakiest way into the building: up the wall, through a window, down the hall. But maybe it'd be even easier to bring him to the window and chuck him his drugs.

The decker decides to hack into his commlink and leave a note. Less traceable than calling and saying "Hey, your drugs are outside." So she decks away, while everybody watches the factory manager through the fly spy's video broadcast. The decker gets through, opens up a note file and begins typing a message. The manager panics and throws his commlink across the room in fear.

Well, that didn't work. So, the rigger decides maybe he'll pay more attention to the drone, or at least try and shoo it out the window. So he buzzes over to the manager's face and tries to communicate. The manager screams and calls for security. The rigger buzzes back to the window.

Finally, the infiltrator decides to give it a go. Like a pro, he jumps the fence, runs between petrols, scales the walls, cuts through the window, and sneaks down the hall. He hears the manager talking to a knight, and finds a place to hide when the knight comes through the door to check for drones. The infiltrator takes his opening, pops through the door and says "Delivery!" and tosses the package at him. Manager screams again, knight comes rushing back, infiltrator slips into another shadow as the knight rushes past. The way is clear, the infiltrator runs, leaps out the window.

The third floor of the factory explodes. The infiltrator regroups with the sam and they rush back to the van. Suddenly, a Lone Star patrol car crashes through the fence and the bronze are on them, guns out. Back at the crew's van, another Lone Star patrol pulls up and calls for surrenders. Naturally, a fire fight ensues, cars are exploded, getaways are made. They head back to Mr Johnson for the rest of their payment and find the meeting place is swarming with Lone Star, too. They drive casual and move on.

And this is how the team became entangled in a scheme by Lone Star to discredit Knight Errant and win back the Seattle police contract. Unfortunately for them, their roll in this scheme was "loose ends".

[CanRay]

My group's first 'run in LA:  "I want you to extract this person from MouseCorp."  *Pushes across a picture of a guy in a Goofy costume*

[PiXeL01]

SR2’s Paradise Lost.

We complete it in one 18 hour session.
It’s set in Hawaii, so my group was joking all night after the possibility that their boat would be devoured by a kraken, completely unaware that there actually is a kraken written into the adventure.

[Lorebane24]

As a player:  There's one run that sticks out for me, but I won't deny it's because my character got to be a badass.  I was playing an over-the-hill street samurai ("this ware was bleeding edge when I got it installed!").  We had a run that called for an investigation into a corporate walled community, and the party didn't want my guy tagging along, because he was not the most charming individual.  He was on standby, taking a walk around the perimeter of the wall, just in case anything went wrong.  As he's walking, a few rich from Nova Rich pull up next to him in a nice SUV and start trying to provoke him to action, eager to show each other how tough they are, but ol' Grizz had nothing to prove these to guys.  He ignored them, and the resorted to slowing their vehicle to a crawl while making faces and lewd gestures at him through the window.  Then he gets a message from the party that he's needed at the front gate.  He tells them he'll be right there, puts his commlink away, and immediately turns and punches through the window of the car, knocking out the driving and tossing him to the ground, the hops in and burns rubber back towards the gate with the kid's two terrified buddies still in the rear seat.

As a GM:  This was my favorite both because of how much was going on behind the scenes and how out of left field the party's approach to the run was.  So a bit of background on this.  I was running a Boston Lockdown game, and the Party started doing a lot of work for Damon (the dragon), who, in this game, was trying to manipulate the chaos of the QZ and use it to fully corner Boston's Underworld and expand beyond the trade in BADs and nightclubs.  The party was hired via an anonymous contact to extract a middle manager from an EVO marketing and advertising office.  The job was to grab her and then leave her bound in a warehouse office on the docks.  They were given strict instructions NOT to disable her implanted commlink (adding a major hitch to the run, because she can easily call for help).  They were offered a bonus if they could restrict their use of weaponry to those specifically provided weapons (a lot of Tanto's and whatever has replaced the Deagle in 2080) and display abnormally high hostility towards metahumans during the run.  If the party had done a little more digging pre-run, though could have discovered that this evo manager was also the secret mistress of a much higher ranking exec over at Ares.  An exec who arranged for a lot of crates to fall of trucks for the local mob's Irish family.  The warehouse belonged to the Irish mob, so they were essentially framing the mafia for kidnapping an Ares exec's mistress to sour that relationship - they couldn't disable the commlink because Damon wanted her to be found, just not immediately.  They were also offered to bonus for basically using traditional Yakuza weapons (and everyone knows the Yaks hate metas).  Rumors had already been spread that the Italian family was conspiring with the Yaks against the Irish family, because neither were large enough to unseat the latter on their own, so this part of the run would point the finger at the Yakuza when the mob looked into who framed them.  They would naturally assume the rumors they heard were true, and the would be the first shots fired in a three way mob war, with Damon sitting ready to move his guys in on their territory once they'd torn each other down too much to do anything about it, and by the time the QZ is lifted, he figures he'll have consolidated his position enough to other families in other cities to just have to negotiate with him rather than fight him.

As for how they party handled it?  Well, they used the Yak Weapons but things didn't get (very) bloody.  They forged credentials barely good enough to stand up to a cursory check, basically just enough to corroborate a claim, and approached this office selling Evo everything it loves.  They were doing in independent documentary for a film festival about metahuman-corporate relations and wanted to end it on a high note with the positive effects that Evo has had on metahumans.  This got them into a room with the manager they wanted.  They shelled out about 10k to build a life-sized prosthetic troll before the meeting, insisting that it was there to demonstrate the high quality of production their studio could produce for the interview.  But it was also hollow, and they had rigged it to be a Faraday Cage.  They got into the interview room with her and a few minor investors for a brief screening of what was shot so far, then the hacker put the camera on a loop, they took out the entourage with silenced weapons and inflicted a few cruel post-moterm wounds on any that were metahuman.  They used a jammer just long enough to stuff the manager into the troll, then wheeled on out of there.