Mission: Ain’t that a kick in the head?
[Spoiler]
Mission Quote: Okay that’s it, I’ve had all I can stands, I can’t stands no more, it’s time to initiate plan horrible horrible murder, Longshot, Hummer, get in the car!” “Can we at least wait till my box o’ guns shows up in four hours?” “I said, get…. In… the…. car!”
Meta Quote: Listen ninja girl, I think I may have a combat that drug that might help you some, how would you feel about experiencing the joy of… K-10!
Plot: This was the second to last mission that I did and sadly probably my second least favorite. It wasn’t as bad as Swing Vote, but it suffers from some of the same problems; has a disappointing climax (so disappointing that I didn’t even realize it was the climax until afterwards) and leaves some members of the party with nothing to do.
It starts with the team going to a show of Barry Mana’s in Vegas, and because we’ve got special backstage passes (as a reward from a mission that I didn’t play, though this didn’t bother me much Runners get paid in in weird shit all the time) to a Barry Mana show. Since we have those passes we’re able to bring some moderate firepower with us and for me that means my Ares Protector though at the moment it just looks like a briefcase.
So we get taken backstage to get to meet Barry Mana in person. Except that after that happens, we promptly notice a few things are out of place, like the two guys who are unconscious and stripped down to their underpants in a not quite closed closet. Gumbo asks what’s up and a new security guard who had taken over watching us after we were lead into the room pulls a tazer on him.
Before he can use it, I properly draw my protector (using one simple action) and fill him full of stick and shock rounds. (with my other simple action) Two more guys race in and hummer tells them to give up with the aid of his commanding voice. It works, especially when combined with a quick stunball from Bishop to help convince them that being conscious is a sucker’s game.
At this point Barry Mana comes in and asks us what the hell is going on. Some well-placed threats later and the guy who gave up while still conscious is quick to spill his guts enough to let us know that he’s a racist who hates trolls. Bishop does not take this kindly, and the rest of us take it little better.
Gumbo takes the opportunity to point out to Mr. Mana that clearly his security team is a bit lacking at the moment, but before he can get to the point about how we don’t have any other business in Vegas he beats us to the punch and offers to hire us. We naturally accept since the pay will be good and it will come with continued backstage passes to all of his shows!
We also find out that he’s not going to be going anywhere for the next week at the very least which will give us plenty of time to get to the bottom of this without needing to worry about setting up any sort of rolling convoy to get Mr. Mana from point A to point B without issue. We place an order with the front desk to have some of our gear shipped over (chiefly my Supermach and Ares HVAR) before dragging the one still conscious attacker to a private room for a little polite chit chat.
He doesn’t tell us anything at first, but luckily one “influence” spell later he’s suddenly feeling much less tight lipped. We find out that apparently this won’t be the only attempt made on Mr. Mana’s life and if we want to get the bottom of it we’ll have to go to a place called the Coal Pit.
Figuring that this is most likely a racist bar, we send in the most human looking member of the team we have (a rigger/hacker I had not met before) with our equally human but oriental street sam blade expert next in line, and possibly Gumbo as well based on how they feel about human changelings.
Except that surprise surprise the Coal Pit seems to be a multi-ethnic place, which also happens to be running a “death pool” or betting on if famous celebrities will die in the next week or so. The odds on Mr. Mana passing away are 1 to 125 against, so if somebody bet big on Mr. Mana dying then he could stand to make himself a VERY big pile of money!
Conveniently, a guy just so happens to walk in and seemingly place a bet on that possible event, so our oriental ninja and hacker follow him out. Meanwhile Gumbo goes in (luckily the metal detector security system only seems to care about if you’re bringing guns in with you, not how much chrome you have in your body) and goes to talk to the owner of the place who happens to be an orc explaining that he wouldn’t like to pay out at 1 to 125 odds and we don’t want to have our Mr. Johnson die.
The ninja and hacker follow the guy in a pair of cars, while I get in another car back at the casino and Hummer has a spirit follow me around and use movement power on me and any vehicle I drive. The two manage to keep following the guy but just as I’m about to arrive on the scene, and knock him out so as to find out what is really going on he gets out of his vehicle and heads down an alley.
Our ninja girl gets out of her car and follows him while our hacker tries to follow in his car to make sure he doesn’t pop out of a different alley further on down the street and get into another cab (as he changed cabs around 3-5 times while they were following him) any time soon. Just before I arrive however our hacker gets sideswiped by another car with a bunch of armed guys in it.
I race onto the scene and fire a burst of stick and shock at them but the angle is wrong and I only hit the car’s dashboard. Fed up with this I hold my other simple action (the first shot being only a long burst) and watch what happens.
What happens is generally a lot of the bad guys shooting at our hacker/his car and hurting him some but not too much, (basically none of the characters involved are optimized so they’re only capable of exchanging love taps) while the ninja girl watches helplessly because her weebo powers are useless against vehicles.
Then at the end of the round I eject my stick and shock clip and load in an E-Ex one. At the start of the next round I full auto narrow burst the occupants of the car with edge. Thanks to the way shooting up vehicles work I only need to spend one point of edge to introduce everyone inside that car to the magic of 17 P -1 AP and 12 hits for them to dodge at -2 dice due to them being in confined spaces.
A lot of rolling later the car is still moving but all of its occupants are dead. However two more cars are showing up so I decide that me being armed only with my protector (which only has 7 points of recoil comp instead of the 10 my main combat guns have) it might be time to book it.
After all I’m not feeling especially confident in either of my fellow runners at the moment, and Bishop, Gumbo and Hummer are all back at the Casino. So I jump into the somewhat beaten up car our rigger is in and focus on driving it while he hacks the now unoccupied car the bad guys used to occupy before I shredded them and uses it to pick up our ninja girl and has it drive back to the Casino.
It’s about 6 AM in the morning now (six hours having past from when we got hired) and Bishop decides that enough is enough.
He summons up a force 8 spirit of man, has it locate the guy who we all saw place a bet in a casino and it promptly tracks him down an abandoned building in Vegas. Bishop then makes it very clear that the time has come for Team Brotherhood of Changelings (Gumbo, Hummer, Bishop and of course me) to get in our car, drive over to this place and murder/stick-N-shock/stunball the f**k out of everyone there who doesn’t surrender the moment we ask them to.
So we drive over there, and find out that the place is full of empty people. Bishop uses a different spirit to track the guy again and we get confirmation that he’s on a plane getting the f*** out of Las Vegas as fast as he can.
We drive back and find that my guns have finally arrived.
And nothing else out of the ordinary happens for the rest of the week at which point Mr. Mana’s new long term security team arrived, we got paid and were able to move on with our lives.
The pros/ Things I liked: Any Mission where you get to taze a racist into submission inside the first 30 minutes of the mission starting has to have something going for it. Also it’s hard not to find some enjoyment in situations where Shadowrunners end up hanging out with celebrities due to the inherent “snobs V slobs” factor.
Actually now that I write that, I would honestly love it if there was a Shadowrun based around protecting a Mr. Al Czervik while he attempts to buy out an honest to goodness golf course (probably one of the few left in the modern UCAS) and bulldoze it to build low rent housing for SINless changelings, thus earning him the ire and death squads from the golf courses current patrons! Possibly hit squads made up of ninjas wielding explosive golf balls, that they try to put/drive into your midst with special titanium golf clubs!
You guys already turned “The hangover” into a Shadowrun mission, you can do one based on Caddyshack I know it!
The Cons/Things I didn’t like: There’s a famous saying in RPGs, don’t split the party.
There are two very good reasons for this theory, the first one is that if you split the party it makes it more likely that one of the two smaller groups of PCs will get attacked and wiped out because they don’t have as much firepower to dish or bodies to absorb punishment.
The other reason was sadly rather painfully highlighted in this mission, if you split the party; it also means that there is likely to be times when one party has nothing to do.
Such was the fate that befell Hummer and Bishop in this mission as they essentially spent the entire time making sure that nothing happened to Barry Mana, which while critical was not very interesting or fun.
This is the essential problem with any “protect” mission where you’re expected to take a somewhat proactive approach to things is that you need to have somebody draw the short straw and stay behind with the guy who needs to be protected while the rest of the team goes off to do interesting stuff.
Either make it clearer to the runners that Barry Mana will be safe for a given period of time (so that everyone can go off to track down the bad guys) or make it so that the runners having been hired to protect Mr. Mana just protect Mr. Mana and any time when they’re just watching him preform or what not can be fast forwarded through in order to get to the times when they need to defend him against attackers.
Since this was a $4 dollar, and 4 hour gaming shadowrun, nobody should end up feeling left out (it not only costs them money for no fun and they could be using their time to do something else) and it seems as if this mission was set up so that it would be impossible for somebody not to end up feeling left out.
The next problem with this mission as its climax. What turned out to be the climatic fight was something that in any other adventure I would have assumed to be nothing more than a warm up to get the evil villain good and pissed off before we finally managed to bring him to justice.
Now I’m not sure if the mission ended the way that it did (it might have been because we were taking too long and so the mission had to wrap up quickly, which honestly would not have surprised me given the fact that we were all pretty warn out from the Shadowrun Scramble) just for us or was designed to end that way for everyone, but if it is the later, well that was not a very well written mission.
I mean, I know in shadowrun, not every mission will end up with the villains being properly punished, but the way the mission ended left us with the most underdeveloped mission I’ve seen next to that ghoul from Swing Vote.
We never learned what the villains name was, we never learned why exactly he decided to kill Barry Mana in particular, was he the only nearby celebrity in the dead pool, did he have the best odds, did this guy have something against Mr. Mana personally?
The team was left with no clue at all, and so while we may have managed to complete our mission by scarring the shit out of the bad guy and getting him to skip town, our victory still felt rather hollow since we didn’t know what exactly we’d managed to triumph over in the first place.
So yeah, as I mentioned before Swing Vote was the only mission I liked less than this one. I grew disenchanted with Swing Vote halfway through the ball and in through the uninspiring climax, but this one at least managed to keep my interest while I was playing it for the most part.
The problem is that a soon as I stopped playing and started thinking about it, a whole bunch of problems became rather painfully obvious. That said, I was at least somewhat vaguely involved in doing things while I was playing, for say Bishop who didn’t get to do anything besides throw a stunball at the start and summon a few spirits at the end the problems and lack of fun he was having during this mission were much more obvious.
The problem with this mission is that ultimately it ends up writing a check it can’t cash. Barry Mana is an interesting character (or at least I got the impression that he was) but we didn’t end up spending enough time/doing enough stuff with him for him to do anything interesting.
Likewise, I was rather pumped with the idea of taking on a bunch of anti-troll racists, because every so often it’s for shadowrunners to be up against somebody other than ordinary gangers or corporate security. Gangers represent what shadowrunners probably used to be before they graduated to a higher class of crime, and corporate guards represent what they could have been if they weren’t morally opposed to that sort of thing, suffering from some sort of personality defect or other than makes them ill fitted for normal life.
Racists on the other hand, well they’re like the Nazis in the Blues Brothers, you never have to feel bad about what you do to them! For pure honest to goodness catharsis factor, nothing beats getting to inflict bodily harm on people who do so obviously deserve it. So I felt just a tiny bit cheated when we went from “there are a bunch of racists out there, go try to drive your car over them” to something a bit more standard with racists only being used as catspaws. While that’s not exactly surprising (racists are not as a group known for being the most intellectually rigorous people out there) it still denied us the fun of breaking into a racist bar, pummeling everyone in there, setting the place on fire, and walking out humming/singing “Cool guys don’t look at explosions.”
So in conclusion, the mission needs to figure out a way to be played that doesn’t require the shadowrunners taking a leap of faith or splitting the party, and it needs to establish the evil mastermind behind it all better.
[/Spoiler]
So now that I think about it, that was more like a kick to the nuts for some people.
