[silentninjadesu]

I'm going to be GMing Shadowrun for the first time! I have a run idea that I think is really cool, but I'm stuck on a couple plot points, and would love some advice.

The basic premise of the run is that a Johnson who they've worked with before and who trusts them, gets in touch with the runners and says that she needs them to steal an artifact from a museum in New Orleans. (Gotta be New Orleans, I'm having a lot of fun coming up with lore about it, and it's such an interesting city. Plus voodoo.)

She says that she doesn't want anyone to know that this artifact is super valuable, it just looks like a force 4 ritual focus unless you get 5+ hits on your assessing test, because right now it's flown under the radar and if everyone knows it's worth a lot, people might start trying to hunt it down, and the Johnson's employers would rather not call attention to it. So the Johnson gives the team a forgery with a fake aura on it, and tells them to swap the two out. So the team does, it's not too hard, there's a few guards, a few spirits, but nothing bad, and even if they get caught, all they have to do is steal something else to cover up what the real target is.

But when they take the artifact back to their Johnson (or is someone gets a lot of hits on assessing, but no one is very good at that) she has her mage look at it, and this artifact is also a fake! So the Johnson gives them a new offer, if you can just find where the artifact is, I'll give you 2,000, if you can actually recover it, I'll give you the full amount. She also lets the runners know that her mage assensed the artifact in the museum 2 weeks ago and it was definitely there. (The artifact is in a glass case, and none of the players can project, so they would not have been able to assense it before they steal it.)

So, the artifact was already stolen by someone before them. This person is a troll voodoo mystic adept who lives in a swamp, and the artifact belonged to her family, but was stolen by a crooked archeology student when she was teenager. So she spent years saving up, and then hired a hacker to help her break into the museum, steal back her artifact. (She would have masking, invisibility and muffle to help her.) When the runners find her they can either fight her and get back the artifact, or, as my players tend to have a pretty soft heart, let her keep the artifact as it was hers to begin with and pretend like they never found it, in which case they get her as a contact (she's actually a pretty influential smuggler in the CAS and UCAS) and good feelings karma.

My problem is that I'm not completely sure how to get the players from point A to point B. What kinds of clues can I leave to get them to the Voodoo troll?

So far what I've got is that it's a matter of public record who brought the artifact to the museum in the first place. But he left the section on where he found it blank. So if the team calls him up (he's in china now working on a different magical archeology project) and threaten him a bit, he'll admit that he stole the artifact from a teenaged troll 15 years ago, and give her old address. If the players then go there, they will find an abandoned building, but if they ask around the older locals will give the address to her brother's shop, and he knows where she lives. (But they have to be sure and not reveal why their asking, else no one will help them, voodoo troll often uses healing magic to help people who are from her old neighborhood.)(Or if they really piss everyone off her brother will come and find them to figure out why they're looking for his sister, and then if they can steal his commlink, he has her commcode.) And then the players can hire a guide to get them there, since none of them could find their way in a swamp on their own.

I also planned on having a free spirit that haunts a nearby fountain have witnessed her theft, and he'll tell the players if they ask (and also give him an offering of cake like the locals do) but he can only provide a physical description, and I'm not sure how the players will be able to connect that.

If the players do a matrix search they will find a conspiracy theory web site that claims the artifact belongs to a swamp witch, and if they get a lot of hits they would find a 20 year-old metahuman interest story in some local news blog with a picture of voodoo troll as a child with her family, holding the knife. (It's a little article spotlighting local family heirlooms.) Using the article they would be able to track down her old address.

As a final clue I would like there to be some sort of link to the hacker, but I can't find any rules about hackers leaving behind traces in the matrix from their old jobs to track them. So I'm not sure about that.

I would really like there to be a few more clues, because I want there to be a couple of ways to accomplish the goal, so that if the players fail once or twice they can still do it.

What do you guys think? Is this going to be too hard? Or is it a good puzzle?

[Fizzygoo]

The hacker could leave a calling card, AR graffiti, or the like as a signature of his/her exploits. The "mark" has either gone unnoticed by officials investigating the theft and, hopefully, the PCs will discover it if they check out the museum's host, or it can be known to those the PCs interview in their searches. Knowing the signature, can lead the PCs to check the local hacker scene to try and find the museum hacker.

You could also make the museum hacker a technomancer who left some Resonance signatures behind (possibly in addition to the calling card). If timed correctly, a TM PC may see the signature on their initial run to get the mask, or they may encounter another TM that saw the Resonance signature and can point the PCs where to look.

A matrix search for info on the museum covering the 2-week window when the original was stolen could find an uploaded "YouTube" like video from a tourist that has a segment showing in the background the troll looking intently at the artifact(dated a day or so before the theft occurred) [which then narrows in on when to search security feed for anything else that troll did during the visit].

Otherwise, hashing it out:
Johnson: Artifact is fake. Find the original. 2-week window when it was stolen.
PC1: I search for any news reports about any thefts or odd things that happened during those 2 weeks.
PC2: I'll talk to my contacts and see if anyone is moving similar sounding artifacts through the black market these days.
PC3: I'll talk to my contacts to see if anyone else has been hiring museum B&E's.
PC4: I no legwork, me smash!

I'm worried that the PCs wouldn't care about who gave the artifact to the museum (like it would fly under their radar at worst or they'd just assume it came from a legit dig at best). So somewhere in the PCs' searches have at the ready someone who would know that it was given to the museum under suspicious circumstances (leaving off "where found" on a historical item is a pretty huge "no, no" for museums in accepting said items, so I'd go with "it's stated to have been found at dig site X, but there's no site-map location for where the object was found and it was added to the dig's inventory list several days after the dig was finished for the season/semester/etc. ... which is very suspicious and I'm amazed the museum accepted it, but the magic of the artifact and the rep of the researcher/prof probably let the officials look the other way.").

Add to that, if the PCs actually start to follow up on the archaeologist...the "he's in China" part...how are your players going to react on learning that? If they're the type of people that would think, "well, let's give him a call," then awesome but I worry they would be more inclined to say, "well, that's a dead end, we aren't flying to China to interrogate him." Could be wrong, but I'd place the archaeologist locally so they can face-to-face interrogate him and ultimately learn the old address for the troll.

But then I'd make sure I had a solid reason as to why the archaeologist stole the artifact in the first place; what was the reason this guy would risk his academic cred to steal it? Getting found out, even 15 years later, would get all his research called into question, possibly removed/stricken from academic journals, and probably fired from his position. What made him feel that this artifact was so important that it had to be stolen from a young girl and then given away to a museum? (obviously these are just questions for you to think about, no need to post spoilers here if that is a risk.)

Street level contacts could also know that some weird n00b troll was asking around to hire runners for some B&E. The troll will, overall, be her worst enemy if she isn't a professional runner. She may have the magic to get the job done, but all her legwork on setting up the run probably leaked into other circles far more that it would for a standard run team. So street contacts would think it weird that a troll non-runner was looking to hire people with B&E skills but asked nothing about potential buyers/fences for the thing(s) she planned to steal (or said nothing when the street contacts asked her if she needed a fence).

Hopefully some of that helps. Sounds like a fun run.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

I'm more of the 'make there be five different possibilities, then let whichever one the players decide to go after be the right one' persuasion, myself.  Mysteries are really tough nuts to crack when it comes to RPGs.  You might want there to be more hints pointing at one, but another person being an obvious 'bad guy' sort, so they can decide either 'well, I don't like X, but it's obvious he didn't do it' OR 'nice old Mrs. McCreedy couldn't've done it, Vincent Villian must have planted evidence'.  They get out with the feeling you want them to have - truimph at solving the puzzle - no matter which way they decided.  Then you can develop things in the future based on what they decided.

[silentninjadesu]

Thanks, Fizzygoo, that was a really helpful, thoughtful reply, I appreciate it a lot.

I'm definitely going to work in some of your ideas, for instance, I like the idea of having a hacker calling card, putting the archeologist in New Orleans (I had him in China to make things harder, but I think it's hard enough as it is) and having street level runners know that the troll was asking around about building a running team. And I do have a reason why the archeologist stole the artifact in the first place! All of his classmates had found really cool artifacts in ligit digs and on exploration missions, but he had been really unlucky, so he stole the artifact so he wouldn't be look foolish. His advisers and the people at the museum suspected something was up, but were really tired of dealing with him as he was so belligerent, so they let it slide.

The Wyrm Ouroboros: I think that you're basically right, I want the players to have a lot of avenues in which they can succeed, but I'm having trouble coming up more cool characters to fit in with the plan. I really like the voodoo troll charterer concept I came up with, and I'm probably a little too attached to her, which is a bad idea. But I have 2 more weeks before my run is scheduled, so I have some time to brainstorm some more characters.

Thanks, I appreciate your input.

[The Wyrm Ouroboros]

Go watch a few crazy movies.  You'll get ideas for characters.