Shadowrun
Shadowrun Missions Living Campaign => Living Campaign Discussion => Topic started by: jamesfirecat on <06-21-12/2218:24>
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Since last night's review went over so well, here's another one. This one was my brother's favorite and while I can't say what he liked about it, I can say what I liked about it!
[Spoiler]
Run :The Hung Overed
Mission Quote: “Is it okay if I take a moment and call up a local booky?” “You’re sort of in the middle of a firefight right now…” “Well that’s why I have a built in hands free commlink!”
Meta Quote: “Somewhere out there in that city is someone who screwed us over, and I will not rest until I’ve found them and gotten revenge!” “That’s good because once you get out of the hospital you get a call from the Prince, he wants to pay you to beat up the guys who knocked you out last night!” “Well that’s awful nice of him!”
Plot: The plot starts up with the team (which in this case is made up of me, Gumbo, Hummer, Bishop, a hacker, Kaz/Mistakill (troll bounty hunter), and Zara (combat mage) (at least that’s who I recall playing I could be wrong) waking up in a hospital. We’re all dressed in nothing but hospital gowns with no idea where our equipment is.
We also quickly hear a nurse talking to some police officers outside, with them explaining to her how these John/Jane Does happened to have enough firepower on them to start a small war. Kaz manages to prove that he’s a surprisingly flexible kind of troll as while I’m unable to wiggle free he can. Then he goes around freeing the rest of us, just in time for the nurse to come in and start screaming her head off.
The guards/police race in, and Kaz knocks one out while I grab the other and put him in a submission hold. The nurse starts to run away but Hummer stops her with his commanding voice power. Gumbo then calmly explains how he popped cops before, and done it for as little as 300 New Yen. Meanwhile all of our gear happens to be around 200,000 New Yen and a few fragments of Hummer’s soul.
With everything put in perspective, the guard coughs up the location of our stuff which is only one room over. So we race over and put on our armor back on, and get our weapons locked and loaded and then try to figure out what is going on. It seems like we’ve been taken to a fake hospital and that we’re wanted terrorists now or something along those lines.
They’d tell us more, but all of a sudden a cranial bomb goes off in the guy’s heads head. We decide that the time has come to search for a more productive source of information. When we finally manage to get outside the fake hospital we find a familiar looking SUV and our comms start beeping. It’s the same Prince from our last run, and he wants us to know that he hired us for a job recently, even if we don’t remember it.
He managed to get the hands on the toxicology reports from our arrest, and found out that there was a pretty concentrated does of laes in our bodies, a chemical designed to cause forgetfulness. Sure enough the last 24 hours are a complete blur to our characters, by dint of the players having no idea what we did either.
He tells us that we were doing a delivery run for him to four separate locations with an important case he wants us to retrieve for him. Also his diver Mr. Johnson has gone missing and he needs to be recovered. He lets us know that now is not the time to negotiate, but if we can find the case he’ll see that we get paid for both the job we did before getting our memories wiped and this one.
Hearing sirens in the non to great distance, we quickly agree, and book it. Hummer summons up a spirit, and then has it go look for Mr. Johnson, since after all we know his face. Then we decide to start doing research in person and head on over to a small bar, figuring that it will offer the fewest opportunities to surprise us.
Our hacker takes control of their camera and we take a look inside before going in. We see a bunch of guys sitting around the bar, and based on the fact that we’re in elf country, and the there are a bunch of people of several different metatypes sitting around we figure that they’re a shadowrunning team. So we go in and sure enough they recognize us, and promptly call us over to the bar and start smarming up to us like it’s going out of style.
Still, it could be worse, since it’s pretty clear that they’re not so much an actual shadowrunning team, as a bunch of guys who want to be a shadowrunning team. We tell them that since the last deal went so well, we were wondering if they would be interested in another one. They of course are and start gushing over how well it worked out.
We convince them to fill out a verbal customer survey report and they tell us about how the drugs we sold them out of a shiny suitcase were at a very reasonable price. Also apparently we put the money they paid us in the suitcase, so now at least know why recovering the suitcase is so important. We make our departure and then decide the next place to check out is an auto repair place turned chop shop by the ancients.
We show up, hack the security trid which doesn’t show us getting jumped in any way shape or form, so we go in glad hand, and make it clear that a certain prince wants them to make sure they stay in his good graces. As we’re leaving that place, Hummer’s spirit shows up to let us know that he’s found Mr. Johnson our former driver, he’s in a locker room at the stadium.
The stadium just so happens to be one of the four places we need to visit so we have a distinct sense of who it was who ended up stabbing us in the back recently. Just to be sure we try to have our hacker get control of their node, but sadly he screws up slightly, and the cyber security program shows up.
The two start matrix fighting and our hacker starts to win but then an even bigger cyber security program shows up lands a few good hits and our hacker decides digression is the better part of valor and dumpshocks himself out. Since they obviously know that they’re coming we decide we might as well make the most of it.
So we get out of the van, and approach the stadium at a casual walk, sniper rifles, and submachine guns, slung over our shoulders “cool guys don’t look at explosions” style. As we burst in we find ourselves confronted by men in sports uniforms armed with hurling sticks.
My character promptly needs to make a composure test so as not to break out laughing at the idea that professional shadowrunners with all their gear are about to be attacked by a bunch of guys with fancy sticks.
The fight that follows is understandably one sided, and our team promptly starts using our tacnet in order to get in touch with our bookey and start placing bets against the team. They are certain that I with my edged long bursts are going to end up killing someone, however I insist that thanks to using Stick-N-Shocks the worst I’ll do is end up giving them a very long nap.
Mista Kill/Taz however only has normal ammo for his sniper rifle and, well let’s just say after his turn a lot more people were placing 200 new yen bets against the team. Eventually we manage to find the team’s captain/Super Star who happens to be an adept. He manages to get in close with Kaz and almost hurt him, but it’s hard to hurt a troll.
Then he goes down to still more firepower from me which almost BUT NOT QUITE kills him. The driver we’re looking for shows up and grabs an assault rifle but I give him a light tazing just to unsteady his hand and then he gets feared by a spirit and stunbolted by our mage. A quick little search of the place helps us find the briefcase we need/want and with all of the enemy combatants down/killed we go about restraining them and wake one or two of them up in order to get some answers.
It turns out that Mr. Johnson our former driver wanted to get out from underneath the Prince and thought the drug money would help him do it. We politely inform him that this was a really stupid idea and that he cut us deep by betraying us and lealing us, so in turn we’re going to have to cut him deep right back.
Unpleasant things happen to him.
We call up the Prince and let him know we have his drugs and his drug money back in our hands. He and Gumbo do a little back and forth then he agrees that since we did two jobs for us he should pay us 20,000 New Yen. Having collected our pay and a few spare doses of leal that the sports players still had laying around we pat ourselves on the pack for a job well done.
The Pros/Things I liked: This mission manages to do a great job getting the players into the shoes of the shadowrunners that they’re playing. You wake up and have no idea what you’re going on and you have to pull it all together one bit of information at a time. Also a lot of the humor from Domestic Tranquility was present if not quite to the same degree.
I also honestly rather appreciate the twist in regards to who exactly it was that got you lealed in the first place. Given the way that the last mission involved someone getting magically mind controlled, we honestly didn’t realize that Mr. Johnson (the driver not the prince who hired us) was in on the whole thing until he started cursing us out rather than thanking us for rescuing him when we woke him up after getting stunbolted at the stadium.
Despite the fact that Shadowrunners are by nature paranoid and mistrustful people, we never suspected that the driver who was such a cool and enjoyable character in the last mission might be plotting to betray us. Clearly buying deepweed together is no longer quite as much of a male bonding experience as it once was sadly….
The Cons/Things I didn’t like: Having completed the mission and looking at it in retrospect, it doesn’t all hang together quite as well as it could have. For one thing, we never ended up actually finding out what sort of horrible nasty thing we did/got framed for that would get us branded as terrorists.
For another, what was going on with the fake hospital and the cops with cranial bombs in them? That’s the kind of security measures to try and keep us in the dark that I’d expect to get if we were up against an AAA corp, not a sports team, and what probably isn’t even a very prominent sports team unless hurling is a lot more popular in the 2070’s than it is these days.
Also, why did they bother to stick us in a fake hospital, what did that achieve that a real one couldn’t have? Also after we had been knocked out, why did the driver decide it would be better to come up with some sort of elaborate plot to kill us/stick us in jail rather than just finishing us off when he had us directly under his power? It seems like he came down with a somewhat serious case of Blofields Disease (named for Ernst Stavlo Blofield obviously) at exactly the wrong time.
Now of course there obviously couldn’t be a run if he had killed us, nor would the run have been as fun/interesting if we were a new shadowrun team brought in to find out what happened to an old one that got killed, but the mission should try and make it more clear why he didn’t see fit to flat out murder us when he had the chance.
Finally, the sports team probably would have heard about us breaking out of the fake hospital (we were supposedly public enemy’s 1-6 at this point) and used some of the time we spent searching to booby trap their place or otherwise try and prepare for the possibility that we would come gunning for them, or else the inevitable curb stomp battle you would expect to see occur when people armed with military grade firearms take on people with sharpened sticks takes place.
So in that regards the mission may have ended up taking things just a little too easy on us. Also I feel like the various groups that we could visit need to have a little bit more personality. The wanabee shadowrunners at the bar were fine, but the ancients felt flat, and we never had time to go to the other group.
On the other hand the reason we didn’t have time/decided not to go was because the GM had our spirit come back and tell us where the hostage/mastermind was. It was a good choice of his to leave us enough time for the final show down, but it still means the mission is either too overloaded with stuff to do or we just played to slow. Honestly I think that the hospital escape part of the mission should be trimmed down some, as I previously mentioned it seemed to clash with the rest of the mission and eat up time doing things that aren’t funny and don’t make sense when all is said and done.
[/Spoiler]
So there you go.... now what was I doing again... and who am I?
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Hmm. It sounds like your GM was winging it a bit with that one, in some ways simplifying it (taking out some choices and options), and in some ways overly complicating it (adding a few red herrings, almost, and cutting down on a big datadump that would've given you something to actively do at each sight).
It's not originally a fake hospital you wake up in, no one's got a cranial bomb, and there's supposed to be about two more scenes in the adventure as a whole; one that introduced another whole band of NPCs, and one that would've given you a fun cameo from an old-school NPC. He may have been running low on time, and as such cut it short, maybe? I dunno. Not sure why there was the curveball/paranoia-inducing fake hospital part early on, though.
Oh, and yes, hurley is a lot bigger deal in the 2070s -- in the Tir, that is. It's actually described as "the national obsession," for instance.
Overall, it sounds like you still had fun, though, so that's cool. But, yeah, your GM threw a couple monkeywrenches in there, from the sounds of things.
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Hmm. It sounds like your GM was winging it a bit with that one, in some ways simplifying it (taking out some choices and options), and in some ways overly complicating it (adding a few red herrings, almost, and cutting down on a big datadump that would've given you something to actively do at each sight).
It's not originally a fake hospital you wake up in, no one's got a cranial bomb, and there's supposed to be about two more scenes in the adventure as a whole; one that introduced another whole band of NPCs, and one that would've given you a fun cameo from an old-school NPC. He may have been running low on time, and as such cut it short, maybe? I dunno. Not sure why there was the curveball/paranoia-inducing fake hospital part early on, though.
Oh, and yes, hurley is a lot bigger deal in the 2070s -- in the Tir, that is. It's actually described as "the national obsession," for instance.
Overall, it sounds like you still had fun, though, so that's cool. But, yeah, your GM threw a couple monkeywrenches in there, from the sounds of things.
I know for a fact that we did miss a scene or at least an optional scene, since there are four places we did deliveries, (the bar, the stadium, the chop shop and some run down apartment place and we only visited the first three that I mentioned) so that covers the one with the other team of NPCs that we didn't get to meet.
Also thanks for explaining the Hurling situation in the Shadowrun world or at least that particular part of it, that would explain why our guys were able to get 5 to 1 odds in favor of the visiting team as opposed to the home team that we had just pumped full of stick and shock rounds and in some cases turned into red smears in the wall.
None the less yes I did have fun.
So yeah, was there ever a clear reason behind why the villain decided not to off us when he had a chance?
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So yeah, was there ever a clear reason behind why the villain decided not to off us when he had a chance?
Mostly because Johnson (a) isn't an entirely bad guy, just fed up with his current employer, (b) he'd worked with the team before and preferred not to heartlessly murder them all, and (c) didn't think he'd have to. A good dose of Laes, laying low until he could move the briefcase full of stuff, and he figured he was good to get outta town.
Plus, yeah. If everyone died in the pre-scene, no adventure (and lots of pissed off Missions players). ;D
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Also, for what it's worth, I'm hoping someone, anyone, gets the joke about Padraig's Tavern, and the gang of narcissists and troublemakers that own the place and hang out there. If no one mentions it by GenCon-ish, I'll have to spoil the Easter Egg myself.
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Also, for what it's worth, I'm hoping someone, anyone, gets the joke about Padraig's Tavern, and the gang of narcissists and troublemakers that own the place and hang out there. If no one mentions it by GenCon-ish, I'll have to spoil the Easter Egg myself.
If it was suppose to be...
[Spoiler]
It's always sunny in Philadelphia...
[/Spoiler]
...then my team got it.
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It was. Hopefully the GM let y'all read over their stats (or at least character descriptions), because I worked a lot of fun little references in there. ;D
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Well, that fits then. I guess my russian eurotrash pistol adept Yuri had sex with Dee in the supply room....
It was. Hopefully the GM let y'all read over their stats (or at least character descriptions), because I worked a lot of fun little references in there. ;D