I’m going to be doing reviews of all the runs I did at Origins in the order that I did them, if this isn’t the right place to post such reviews let me know and I’ll take them down/move them to the correct spot
Also my review will be spoilered for the sake of those who have not run this adventure yet, though if you haven’t why did you click on this topic in the first place?
[Spoiler]
Shadow Run Mission Reviews:
Swing Vote:
Mission Quote: “Who the bloody hell are you?” “I’m Lord Hellington!”
Meta Quote: Since I am in London I’ll let loose with what I understand to be an ancient traditional British battle cry…. YOU’RE ALL FUR COAT AND NO KNICKERS BITCHES!
Plot: This was my first mission at Origins and it was also my least favorite ones for better or worse. I understand (or at least believe to be the case) that the guy who did the first draft of this mission dropped off the face of the earth/internet before being able to do revisions more or less, and sadly it rather shows, as the thing seems to spend too much time focusing on all the wrong things. This was also the only run that I was doing with the entire Brotherhood of Changelings, myself (Longshot, Street Sam gnome) Bishop (Fomori burnout mage), Gumbo (human street sam changeling, with a surprisingly charismatic personality for being little more than a human head and fleshy organs encased in chrome from neck to toe) Mastermind (human technomancer), and Hummer (elven facey adept).
We also had another two other runners along with us that we had not met before, a pixie mage, and a human hacker. The mission started out fairly normal, we get a call from a Johnson asking us to come meet him at a themed bar named the Crusted Pike. A little use of google-chu (summon up a sprite with data search and info-sortilege powers and let them do their things) by Mastermind finds out that the theme of this bar happens to match the theme of London perfectly. It’s old, it’s incredibly respectable, and has a history of some very dark deeds going down related to it.
We arrive there and get led up some shadowy stairs to the dank area of the bar and taken to a “Mr. Artholemew Johnson” who kindly explains to us what is going on. In a few days’ time there is going to be a very important vote in Parliament on whether the London Underground (or at least it’s 2072 equivalent) should be expanded to lead out to a region that apparently got nuked at one point so that clean up can finally begin, or if it should lead to a large underground base run by Renraku.
Renraku just so happens to be one of the companies on my character’s shit list right below Aztechnology due to the things they had done to Technomancers in the past. “Art” wants us to find out which way the vote is going to go before it actually does and let him know, after all knowledge is power, and if you have power it doesn’t take too much effort to get money.
Speaking of money the pay starts out a little on the low side, but Gumbo manages to convince him to raise it to the “traditional” 10,000 New Yen for a job.
There is also a possible bonus if we find ourselves in a situation where we can decide which way the vote will get cast. At this point we end up wasting some time doing google-chu on the subject of British Parliament and how their system works both in general and in the dark future.
It turns out that there’s this guy whose job it is to be as impartial as possible, and he gets “promised” the votes by the other members without voting himself. If we can figure out what he knows then we’ll be golden. The problem is that this guy is straight as an arrow, and thus not likely to be subverted by anything short of a massive amount of brutal beatings or out and out magical mind manipulation.
Those are of course options open to us, but him being a member of parliament it would not be easy to get him alone and out of sight long enough to do such things. Luckily Art has managed to get us tickets to a fancy ball party where we can meet up with the Prime Minister and most of the other members of Parliament to try and talk some info out of them.
Even better, it seems like our primary target’s aid is a bit of a loose cannon and far more likely to be open to blackmail. Even, even, luckier he tends to a have a me-feed running all the time though he takes time to edit it himself to prevent people from seeing things that they shouldn’t. That feed could provide us with a wealth of information if we manage to get access to the uncensored version of it.
So long story short, Longshot, Bishop and Mastermind are getting into the party posing as security personnel while the others are going to be the actual diplomats from some shell corporation or other. The ball as one might expect has the kind of security that would make bringing a gun in a quick way to commit suicide, so we don’t.
Once we get there, Mastermind and the hacker go to the bathroom with Bishop guarding them while they pass out to do matrix stuff. Gumbo
and Hummer chat with various people while I guard them.
The bad news however was that all was said and done, the Johnson meeting, and the ball itself ended up eating up three of the four hours scheduled for the event. But after a lot of having Gumbo and Hummer chatting to various people finally Mastermind and the other hacker managed to own the aid’s commlink hard enough to bring up those portions of his me-feed that he hadn’t gotten around to fully releasing or editing yet, and we manage to catch glimpse of a reflection of a list of the promised votes in his eyes.
The Renraku proposal is just on the cusp of passing/failing, and there is one guy whose vote will make all the difference. One guy, and a little asking around lets us know that he has not been seen in about four weeks because apparently you’re allowed to use some kind of retina scanner system in order to cast votes in the British Parliament in the 2070’s.
We dash out of the party, roll by our hotel to load up with weapons and gear and prepare to burst into his mansion in order to get some answers. Sadly the GM feels that forbidden weapons should be out and out actually forbidden in London, so Longshot ends up needing to work with nothing but his hands, feet.
Either way, we pull up in front of the missing guy’s mansion and it has some big important looking gates, our hacker goes in, gets found, cyber combats with the cyber guard, beats him and opens the gate. Then I and a few other’s stealth around finding one guy and a pig along with a refrigerator full of fresh meat. That guy gets to have an influence power used on him to convince him to go take a nap and then we descend into the basement of the place.
I use my Scatter-X-ray goggles to see that there are a couple of ghouls behind most of the doors. Bishop summons up a spirit of man to deal with them as the feral ghouls can bite, scratch, and go down like chumps against a force five spirit. We continue to pound down the stairs until we locate a door with something behind it that isn’t lurching around.
When we burst it open we find a guy with the missing Member of Parliament tied into a chair in a Clockwork Orange like device to keep his eyes open and two spirits.
Initiatives are rolled out with Longshot who still has five points of edge left spending one point to go first as does Bishop. Longshot having no guns, disengages his foot spikes (good for more than just recoil compensation!) and then leaps across the room and delivers a major kick to the guy’s face since he knows he doesn’t have a chance against spirits in hand to hand combat.
The guy’s physical track is nearly filled and then Bishop stunballs him nearly filling his stun track. At this point, Gumbo uses his restricted gun to blaze away with some stick and shock rounds that end up filling both tracks and flat out murdering him thus resolving the issue of how to handle the spirits.
We talk to the captured member of parliament who judging by the amount of “GAAAHHHH” and “ERRRRSSSS” he emits, we suspect he is now a feral ghoul. So we call up our Johnson let him know we can cast the deciding vote (with the Lord’s eyes and a little mind influencing magic) and he tells us to cast it for Renraku. Since he’s giving us about a 50% raise for doing it, we do it, and then mercy kill the parliament member turned ghoul and leave. A few days later on the news the entire place is said to have accidently burned down, so clearly somebody pretty high up felt that the less said about this the better.
The Pros/Things I liked: Go to exiting places meet interesting people, and shoot/kick them in the face, that’s always a good set up for a Shadowrun. Also honestly for better or worse it was kind of cool to be getting a basic briefing on the nature of British Politics. Just to be clear about the long list of cons/things I didn't like below, I did not feel this was a "bad" mission just an awkwardly written/carried out one.
The Bad /things I did not like: I feel that this adventure is all over the place and some info should have been given out by the Johnson rather than left to find for ourselves. To be exact, a quick run down of the nature of British Parliament would have made more sense coming from a guy who is hiring what is a team of primarily American Runners rather than having us look it up ourselves. That’s important to mention because if it was coming directly from the Johnson I feel the GM would have better been able to better control the necessary info dump and keep up from obsessing over little unimportant stuff like trying to find out what the guy who we need to get data from used to vote for back when he still voted.
Also to make sure I didn’t run into a situation like the one in this adventure again I made sure to buy a restricted gun and a fake licensee for it costing me about 2/3rds of the pay I made on this run. That turned out to be unnecessary however as the other GMs running London adventures didn’t mind my character having forbidden weapons in public so long as I was only doing it when engaged in thoroughly illegal activities.
I’m assuming that was either a GM’s choice or another sign of the adventure being not fully finished since it portrayed different rules for weaponry in London that the other two runs I went on there did.
A
nother thing that stuck in my craw was that casting the “yes” vote for Renraku at the end felt like something that we should have been more ashamed/upset about, but the lack of time to debate the issue, combined with the fact that it seemed as if all the main people who were opposing the bill had not actually attended the ball drained much of the emotion out of the decision.
Honestly I feel like it’s a bad idea to have the runners go to this big fancy ball and clearly intended to have three dimensional and fully developed characters there (we got to meet members of the green party and conservative leaning dwarves for a start), then have the runners rush out to somewhere else to have a shootout with some two dimensional villains. It also didn’t help that to a certain degree it felt like the people at the ball who we talked with could have just as easily have been modern politicians with pointy ears or one of those diseases that prevents you from growing properly, yes the more things change the more things stay the same in politics, but if characters are going to engage in facey facey face, talky talk with NPCs, the NPCs should be interesting people to talk to.
Honestly the solution that I would suggest for making this run better would be to ditch the entire mansion, instead have a bunch of ninjas or whatever attacks the ball while the runners are there. Maybe halfway through the ball just as the runners find out how just one guy can cast the deciding vote the missing member decides to show up and a group tries to kidnap him before he can go on the record over which way he is promising his vote.
At this point have the place’s automatic security system kick in which causes guns/swords to rise out of the floor/pop out of the wall so that the street samurais are not at any more significant disadvantage than the mages who obviously were able to bring their magic slinging fists with them into the room. I think this might be a cool idea because however silly/stupid/nonsensical a “in case of ninjas, firearms will descend from the ceiling” security system is, at least the adventure would be able to start and finish in the ball.
I feel that having a shootout there would have made for a much more interesting situation and would have allowed the runners to possibly better play up against the old American stereotype in England of being big, loud, and deadly. Fewer things are funnier after all than having a British Gentleman cry out “I say” as bullets are flying around and one of them breaks his monocle chain causing it to drop into his drink.
At least that’s my two cents on how to improve this particular adventure. I had some fun playing it, but it could have been more fun if the run hung together better and we were either able to leave the ball sooner, or meant to spend more time there. Granted some of this may have been our fault as players, but if the GM was paying attention to the clock and worried about how he had one more entire act he needed to role out for us complete with a new location, he probably should have brushed aside Gumbo and Hummer’s facey face stuff to focus on Mastermind and the other Hacker getting us the info we needed through their digital mastery of the Matrix.
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And that’s what I thought of it.
