After way too long a break allow me to finally present my "Jumping the Fence" mission review.
This is the last review I will put up before Origins though I promise I will do reviews of all the missions I run at Origins just like I did last year, enjoy!
Mission: Hopping The Fence
Mission Quote: Well the stainless steel package is that for four thousand new yen you can drive these trucks through here, but the platinum package is that for eight thousand new yen you can we've got some day old milk you can have....
Meta Quote: Honey, honey... HON-EY!
Plot: The mission begins with Longshot getting to know the newest Member of the Brotherhood of Changelings, Plissken also known by his runner name of “Sidewinder.” Sidewinder happens to be a naga. Luckily the brotherhood of changelings accepts paracritters as well as changelings, even if Plissken is prone to starting wars over thermostat.
He also luckily knows physical mask and magic fingers spells so he's normally able to get around the fact that he doesn't have hands let alone arms or legs. Sidewinder is with us because his player's old character Gumbo retired after season three and having picked up considerably more than just the traditional 150 karma.
Anyway, to get onto the mission itself we get called out to the nasty run down barrens region outside of Seattle where there are no police and he who has the biggest gun (and is the quickest to draw it not to mention the best shot with it) makes the law. There we meet up with a shadowrunner named Rook. Rook apparently has some big high up support somewhere, but none of us are well enough connected/smart enough to recall/figure out who.
But either way, what really matters is that Rook is willing to pay us half of the total amount he is going to pay us for the mission up front. Clearly this is a sign of shadowrunner to shadowrunner mutual respect, since I can't for the life of me recall the last time that I got paid half of money I had coming to me up front. So clearly the moral of the story is that we need to get involved in subcontracting runs from other shadowrunners more frequently as they make great Mr. Johnsons.
As for the run itself he has a couple of trucks of this that and some other stuff that he wants to sneak into Portland. The plan involved is drive through the badlands, and then the next step is us driving through a gigantic farm thanks to some people he bribed. After that, we hook up with some orks who will provide us with a helicopter in order to fly the stuff into the magical elf kingdom of Portland.
Not wanting to get ourselves caught up in a game of “hot potato” with something especially dangerous (like finding out mid-run that we're trying to smuggle some nuclear, chemical, biological or super duper evil magic) related weaponry or at the very least forewarned is forearmed, I take advantage of my goggles built in x-ray functions in order to take a look inside the trucks we'll be driving.
Luckily it turns out that we're dealing with nothing but some random food goods with a couple of rocket launchers buried underneath. You know, the kind of stuff that a shadowrunner brings with them if they want to have a good time on Saturday night. This turns out to be rather unnecessary however because Rook is cool enough to let some of us ride in the back of the trucks if we want to so long as we don't damage the goods.
This is a very good thing because it gives me a place to put my Gnome Pod. For those who have not bothered to read my Elevator Ride to Hell review, the Gnome Pod is basically a modified BMW Blitzen 2050 (kind of motorcycle) with a GE Vanquisher Heavy Autocannon with a small drone mounted on the gun so that it can switch between a pair of ammo belts one loaded with armor pirecing flechette and the other stick and shock.
So I'm riding in one of the back of the trucks in the gnome pod, while Mastermind and his anthroform drone Arnold T (Talos) Muderbot ride up front of one truck and Bishop and Sidewinder ride in the front of the other truck. Our trucks are just sort of driving along when suddenly a group of go gangers decide that they want to go all Mad Max on us.
We are not impressed.
Intiativs are rolled out, and Bishop goes first firing off a couple of force five stunbolts which manages to knock off a few of their stunboxes. After that it's my turn, and after pulling off a... well name the early 80/90's cartoon show of your choice, I'm sure you can think of one where somebody drives a vehicle out of a bigger vehicle.
After that, I open up with some suppressive fire to take advantage of the fact that Miniguns do damage and a half when used for suppressive fire. Half of the gogangers charging at us go down. Mastermind introduces one of the gangers to the hilariously lethal crash rules thanks the “accident” power. That guy ends up getting turned into pink paste. Sidewinder uses stunball himself, and manages to finish off the group that I didn't.
After that the drive goes much more smoothly and as we approach the farm Rook displays some sort of weird built in camouflage for the vans which causes them to display the logos/colors of the farm we'll be driving through. As we drive closer and closer Mastermind who actually has the finance skill takes the time to calculate exactly how much each one of those actual cows which produces actual milk is worth.
The answer is a surprisingly large amount.
Such a large amount that honestly it would probably be worth it to buy big fancy hats, spurts, and then steal ourselves some cattle.
Seriously, I'd love to go “shadowrustling” at some point and given the amount that real live cows go for it would be entirely reasonable. On today's run however the cows are extremely well locked down and there are lots and lots of heavy ordinance armed at us if we try to shove bessy in the back of a truck and make a break for it.
So we are on our best behavior and we talk with the guard. Said guard makes a few things clear to us, that he knows that we are “on the level” and in exchange for a small bribe he'll let us through. In exchange for a slightly larger bribe he'll let us also pick up some day old milk that is still reasonably sellable.
Once again Mastermind does his finance thing, and we realize that this is a good deal. After some moderately successful negotiation checks we manage to make it an even better deal by cutting down the price for either bribe in half. So we decided to go with the more expensive bribe (chiefly because Rook was also kind enough to provide us with a reasonably sized pile of money to use for bribes and what not, especially after we had taken the time to check with Rook that we'd be able to store the milk in his trucks until we found a buyer for it.
So we load up with milk, go on our way and eventually get in touch with the orks we are suppose to hook up with, They have they helicopter that we need ready for us, but they also happen to have a few offers for us. Chiefly they're willing to lend us a helicopter pilot, or the necessary skillwires to let us fly the helicopter itself, various weapons for the helicopter, and various refrigeration units for the goods that we're going to be sneaking into Portland.
We decide just to be on the safe side we'll buy the most expensive refrigeration unit possible which also comes with built in parachute in case something horrible happens to our helicopter. We don't bother to buy any sort of pilot of piloting software since we can just have Mastermind crate a sprite to pilot it for us.
Also rather than buying a simple large machinegun for the copter we instead attach the Gnome Pod's minigun to the helicopter we're going to be flying. So we take off and start flying. About three fourths of the way to our destination we suddenly start getting a comm call.
We open it up and here someone chatting to us in Sparethial/fancy elf speak. Luckily Bishop grew up in Ireland so he speaks at least some of that language and let us know that the message involves the phrase “violate” “airspace”, “barbarians” and “suffer” which needless to say does not sound like they're about to invite us over for Brunchfast (the ever so important meal between breakfast and brunch) which Rook confirms.
Being an elf from Portland he knows the language even better than Bishop and says that these people are basically whacko elf blood purists who have a truly impressive amount of hate for anyone other than the elves who they grew up with. This is accompanied by the sound of a missile locking onto our helicopter.
Our sensors are now picking up two helicopters, three air spirits and eight drones closing in on us at about eight hundred meters away horizontally while we are at “F*** YOU” levels of high up in the air. Rook at this point decides to take some time to helpfully strap on one of our copter's parachutes at this point to make sure that they fit correctly.
So initiatives roll out and both me and Bishop decide to spend edge to go first. Bishop because he now likes to sustain increase reflexes spells on himself has a higher actual imitative score than me and goes first and manages to shoot out five force five stunbolts to tag the spirits hopefully banishing or at least weakening them.
He manages to destabilize two of them but not the third.
Then I go (having also spent edge to go first), and decide that it's time to take advantage of the hilarious rules for attacking multiple people in a vehicle. Because even with a minigun you're still limited to hitting four people at a time, unless they're in a vehicle.
If they're in a vehicle than you can hit each and every single one of them!
Granted they get to add the vehicles armor to their own, but on the other hand the fact that Longshot got knocked out his first and only time was due to massive amounts of automatic fire assailing a vehicle he was in. So I do a pair of long wide bursts one on each of the two helicopters were are up against. I also edge each roll and manage to do enough damage (having loaded the APF ammo after getting in the copter) that both pilots find it necessary to burn edge so that they can successfully bail out of their now crashing helicopter GI Joe style.
So I guess my plan to simply disable everyone inside the helicopter was a bit more successfully than I originally expected.
After that, Mastermind has Arnold bail out of his helicopter so that he can use his own now built in minigun to take out the last air spirit. The drones guns have a range limit of 600 meters so we basically kite them in our copter until Mastermind is able to hack them all and take them out of the fight.
With those problems dealt with we manage to land our helicopter unload the stuff and finally whose Rook's father is comes to the forefront of our minds when we see that Prince Even Parris is there to help us unload all of the goods. He takes care of paying us the other half of the run fee as well as giving us the necessary travel visas to make it so that we can spend some more time in Portland, obviously with it going unspoken that we'll be doing some more favors for him. But hey, so long as we get paid for those favors there's nothing at all wrong with that in my book.
What I liked: Now that I stop and think about the other two Portland Mission's I've done (Domestic Tranquility and The Hungovered) both had the same general sort of conflict resolution, there are four groups of people you need to talk to, talk to them in any particular order and then resolve some over arching problem.
That it makes nice that this one decides to take a somewhat more linear approach to things with you needing to get from point A to point B, and running into some problems along the way. Also, it was nice that for once some NPCs were here and trying to sell us their platnium package for a change.
It was nice also that we had been given some money to spend and the NPCs actually had to things to buy that we might want/ find useful mid mission. Also, honestly if nothing else I really do have to give this mission props for laying down the ground work necessary for a “Shadowrustling” mission which really needs to get around to happening at some point, even if only as another CMP. Finally it was nice to have a run that was based primarily around vehicle combat.
Things I didn't like: On the other hand, the this mission also does an excellent job showing off exactly why vehicle to vehicle combat tends to be a bad idea in Shadowrun. Chiefly because it tends to come down to a game of “who has the bigger gun” since that person will then use the bigger gun to completely and utterly destroy the other person's vehicle and turn them into so much red mist or burnt cinders.
That, or if you have a technomancer (and the other side has not properly bothered to guard their vehicles) they will get accidented, and manage to somehow crash into itself (don't ask me, as far as I know nobody understands what that is realistically supposed to represent) and get turned into a smoking ball of wreckage.
In short, as deadly as shadowrun combat normally is, it gets even more deadly once you have people in vehicles, especially vehicles moving at a very fast speed. On the other hand, vehicle combat is the other time that Street Samuri's really get to shine since the tinted windows that just about all combat vehicles come with mean that mages aren't able to floor the entire team with a well placed stunball/floor particular targets with a well placed stunbolt and typically need to move onto their sub optimal combat spells that deal P instead of S.
That or they need to work on having them and their spirits take on the enemies spirits so that the spirits in question can't fly inside your vehicle on the astral plane, materalize and then start fearing or stunballing or influencing everyone in sight.
Finally the only other complaint that I have with this mission is that honestly as amusing as I found the entire milk thing was, it was a bit too much of a “milk run” (please forgive the pun) where you just spend some money to buy the stuff and then in the next scene instantly find someone who is willing to buy it. Granted on the other hand, making finding someone to buy the milk a proper side mission might have taken this run outside its normal four hour window. But yeah, considering this was the first real smuggling /courier job I've done in shadowrun its always fun to do something new for a change!
