Mission Mall Room Blitz.
Mission Quote: Hold on Dorothy we're going to Oz!
Meta Quote: So they're going to go at initiative twenty four and start to... “Actually I'm spending edge to go first. Are any of them?” “No....” “Suppressive fire on the front door.... five hits.” “Well they were about to charge through that door, but now I think they're a lot more concerned about the sudden deep affection they've developed for the floor.”
Plot: All of a sudden we seem to be right back at the end of mission two, on Kane's plane flying to Seattle with the Dragon who I continue to refer to as “Perry” for the ease of spelling. He is still stuck in human form (so hell if I know exactly what the ritual he did in Berlin did) but he says he's almost back to being a proper dragon again.
He needs to do just one more thing and that thing is in Seattle. But it'll take some time to prepare, so we're going to spend a night in some big fancy hotel, and needless to say, he's paying for it. We take a limo there and after some playing around /joking we fall to sleep. We wake up to discover that someone evidently cast a major silence spell (at least our mage figures it out) on Perry's room before they blew a whole in it and then dragonapped him.
It goes without saying, that will teach Perry to want to have a room to himself (he basically even said he'd eat us once he could turn into a dragon again if we went into his room) rather than sleeping with his runners.
There are also Lone Star guys all over the place, but they are here to do actual police work rather than just arrest the first runners they can find.
We start to sneak out to just get out of there before they decide that their mood is going to change, but then we decide to take a major leap of logic and hope like hell that these Lonestar cops in particular are in Perry's pocket and try to talk to them.
Indeed they are in his pocket, and we get taken to their leader. He tells us that there’s only one major clue that they have managed to find, which is a small drone. Our hacker takes some time to examine it and recognizes it that it's unique. The cop points out that there's only one guy around here who makes unique drones, a runner named Clockwork.
The cop can't out and out go running with us, but he's willing to make sure that the cops are looking the other way while we go about trying to get Perry back. So after tracking the drone back to where it came from, we find Clockwork's headquarters a semi abandoned warehouse.
Our mage says Clockwork (or some mage he has working for him more likely) has two spirits patrolling on the astral. They're air spirits and we have the troll I'll continue to refer to as Lenny who has spirit bane Air Spirits. Longshot sets up his Ares Alpha with image magnifier and tripod on the roof of a nearby building (it's my gun and I'll snipe if I want to) while Pixie a troll physical fighter and our mage go to a perfectly ordinary Stuffer Shack a few blocks away for... reasons.
Lenny gets out of the car that the group is driving in, and goes for a walk by of the place, hoping he can enrage the spirits and get them to attack him without drawing agro from the rest of the building.
He enrages the spirits but the rest of Clockwork's security forces decide to attack him also, and to do so at a time when we're down two runners.
Longshot is glad that he's a building over rather than down in the street since if the rest of his team gets themselves killed for behaving in such a stupid manner he should have enough of a head start to avoid getting killed/captured.
It is at this point that the GM decides to make what is the first of sadly man calls that I find questionable.
The fact that he was gming on the first day he had the actual book may excuse SOME of them, but not all of them and certainly not this one. He declares that the spirits materialize, go to combat.
In effect, he is giving the spirits a surprise round on us to materialize. This is manifestly unfair and honestly does not make sense in the crunch or the fluff.
In the crunch spirits get all kinds of great powers that they can use and don't have to worry about drain since they are spell like abilities rather than actual spells. Runners might also not get their magical resist dice against said abilities (I need to check the actual books to be sure of that or not) and there can be a new one summoned every time you destroy the old one, unless you deal with the mage who summoned them in the first place.
They act as a major force multiplier since not only does the mage hit you with a spell, but then his/her spirit zaps you with an ability as well. Even more than that, spirits get to have hilariously high stats (sixes or sevens across the board? Why thank you!) Which gives them incredible speed letting them go first a lot of the time.
This is counteracted by the fact that all they can do is hurl (now much wimpier in 5th edition) manabolts and other astral only attacks unless they spend a complex action materializing. If they are willing to materialize beforehand, then any runner with a sniper rifle (or an assault rifle and a decent hiding spot) can engage them dispel them via bullet to the face before they are properly alerted while they patrol back and forth.
On the astral they are 100% immune to regular bullets, but can only fight back with either a hand tied behind their back, materialized they are more powerful but more vulnerable as well, not to mention forced to give up one complex action.
The GM letting these spirits materialize as a free action/as a surprise action on us makes them much greater threats than they should have been, this mission was hard enough as written (boy there is a phrase you don't see very often) without the GM giving unfair advantages to the opposition.
It equally makes no sense in the fluff.
Because our mage had scouted this location out, and told us that there were air spirits on the astral. Longshot was effectively doing over-watch of the general area and Lenny in particular. Force six spirits are not exactly subtle when they materialize.
Now if Longshot had not known to expect spirits to be materializing than yeah maybe he would have been overawed by their presence long enough for them to act again, but when he was siting in his gun on the general area waiting for the spirits to show up.... why should Lognshot/the entire team who was present be treated as getting caught completely flat footed?
In closing, let me paraphrase Linkara “Nope, I don't buy it, even for a minute.”
Anyway the two spirits materialize then combat starts and our elf pistol adept who has incredibly high speed due to enhanced reflexes spell manages to go before them and due to him shoot incredibly well (more likely the spirit doing incredibly poorly to dodge and soak given limits) it goes down in one attack from his Ares Predator V.
Lenny tries to punch the other spirit and misses. It then engulfs him and bites off a HUGE chunk of his physical track.
Longshot goes and shots the spirit with a pre-declared edged long burst that takes it out.
Drones and guys rush out of the building at and start shooting.
Longshot at this point commits one of the cardinal sins of shadowrunning in the crunch, I refuse to take my hits like a man.
The GM rolls to attack me and tells me that its a long burst and that the guy only got one hit on me.
He also tells me that I'm at minus six dice to dodge (this is incorrect no attack gives minus six dice to dodge, fairly certain it should be minus five, which would be very important for what comes next) and because he told me he got one hit (not sure if the GM is supposed to tell you how many hits people shooting at you get before you roll to dodge but I've never heard a distinct ruling on it one way or another), I decide to try and actually dodge it.
I have reaction four intuition four, and so at a penalty that is minus six dice (oh and given that I have cover from shooting over a roof top ledge I should be rolling extra dice for that, he tells me he took them out of the bad guy's attack pool so it may even out, but it's still not how you play the system) leaving me with only two dice.
Now I only need to get one hit, and Longshot being a super lucky troll who still has five edge left I can easily “wish away” any mistakes created by this going poorly. But still, to set a good example for others (and oh boy will this be important) I should have just taken it on the chin.
Instead I roll, fail that roll (a three and a four so no harm done but no benefit) and soak as best I can. The bad guys are using ADPS ammo (first time they've done that in any of these missions) and so I only soak about 7 of the 11 hits and decide to spend edge to re-roll and soak it all.
Lenny gets hit by some of the guys shooting at him but due to his heavy armor only takes stun damage this time around and stays standing. Our rigger in our vehicle gets into a shoot out with the drones, and manages to destroy one with a full burst.
The GM promptly makes ANOTHER wrong call at this point, though I'm not aware of it till after the fact but on the other hand he's the GM he gets a rule book for free I have to pay quite a fair bit of money to get one, so he shouldn't be expecting us to double check these things. Anyway, in fourth edition drones/vehicles were flat out immune to recoil penalties. I (and I'm assuming everyone else at the table) assume since 5th is to a great deal based on 4th with a few nerfs here or there and the initiative system getting changed up, this would stay the same. IT DOESN'T!
Granted it was a bit silly when drones the size of motor cycles could be zipping around at max speed shooting off reams of ammo without it ever effecting their aim, but 5th editions rule (that they now get recoil compensation equal to their body and that's it) is equally silly if you consider that this only takes into effect how big/tough a vehicle is and not something like say the A-10 Warthog which is designed so as to use the plane's own momentum to counteract the recoil of firing its gun because the gun is built on the plane's center-line perfectly between the engines.
Anyway, in this case, the drones which are only random little gun drones should actually probably only have around 8 body, and so they would be at -1 die to fire off their first full burst and be at a huge -10 to the second long burst which they will survive long enough to get off.
Anyway the drones get into a fight with the rigger who is the truck and they attack the truck, shooting it up and damaging it while he blows one of them away.
In the -10 run through of the initiative pass the elf mage shoots at one of the mooks who ran out of the building and hurts him some.
Our mage who had gone astral when we told him about the fight on the first round has now flown over at astral speed uses the “hot potato” spell which apparently based off of that one episode of Star Trek, because it makes people belie anything metal they are holding/wearing is super hot.
I'm really not sure if this is against the rules or legal honestly. Because the mage is astral, and he's using a non mana spell, should he have to be there in person? It's something I'd like someone to find out/tell me or it'll have to wait till I eventually have a rulebook of my own to check.
It works on all the normal mooks but not the one guy with a sub-machine gun who is clearly much more badass than the other mooks. Lenny shoots a grenade at them (and it goes off before the guys who thought their armor was searing their skin had a chance to take it off so they'll survive) and destroys the ground based drones that the came out with the mooks.
The grenades are not at all very clearly explained at this point, and that's going to be problematic. Because Lenny seems to be based off of a troll in the books for the most part, I'm not sure if he happens to have the necessary DNI implants to explode grenades as a free action the way that he seems to. He also does not clearly state the fact that he's using wireless grenades, or anything beyond that he's shooting a high explosive grenade from his Ares Alpha and really much like what kind of burst you're using when you fire your gun, you should be declaring what kind of detonation method you're using whenever you shoot/throw a grenade.
We all focus on the guy with the sub-machine gun and eventually he goes down, the truck gets shot up but barely holds together and manages to take out the other flying drone. After that Clockwork speaks up over the warehouse’s system to tell us that we've done enough damage to his mercs and he's willing to pay us a thousand new yen each and hand over Perry (who indeed he had kidnapped as our mage noticed on his astral flyby) if we let him live.
We take the offer and a Doc Wagon vehicle shows up since Lenny as a free action triggered his Doc Wagon bracelet when he started getting the crap shot and kicked out of him nearly filling up both his tracks. He goes off with the Doc Wagon guys to get properly patched up and effectively he vanishes from the adventure.
This probably wouldn't be so bad except that all of that was the first fight in this mission and there's still one left.
Next fight in next part.
