Watch our sessions live on twitch.tv/gorbash722 every Sunday night beginning at 9:30pm Central.
Read the Recap for “Not With a Whimper”
For our second Shadowrun adventure I knew I wanted to follow up on events and plot threads left dangling from the first mission, “Not With a Whimper.” The players had gained a valuable Fixer and contact into the criminal underworld in Jeremiah Redd, and this adventure kicked off with the more traditional meet and mission brief.
I’d written a Prologue to include the mission briefing and info dumping for the task at hand, as well an opportunity for the players to do any shopping or general preparedness before starting the adventure proper. This is actually new territory for us as the first adventure I simply threw everyone together and literally had a bomb explode in their faces to kick things off.
The mission picked up the pieces of “Not With a Whimper’s” finale. With Jay-T out of commission, his auto shop and garage was easy pickings for any gangers and low-lifes that wandered in. Redd wanted to box up all the various hardware and electronics and sell the lot for as much as he could get. He found a buyer, Ricardo Martin, an assistant in Buying and Acquisition for Ares Macrotechnology. Redd needed the players to help escort the armored truck full of crates to the docks near downtown Seattle, and make sure the sale went through smoothly.
The players accepted and we spent some time doing some shopping. We also went over some important features we didn’t touch on in the previous adventure such as fake SINs and how to buy and sell loot.
For many aspects of Shadowrun I modify the rules to suit our needs better. For selling loot I use an extended Negotiation test to determine how much time it takes to find an appropriate buyer (threshold of 10, can roll once per hour for items up to $10k). Buyers will purchase goods at 50% purchase cost, plus 10% for every hit rolled on an unopposed Negotiation test.
Shadowrun isn’t a loot driven game compared to most other RPGs, and I definitely don’t encourage looting of every body they take down (it doesn’t really make sense thematically or realistically; these guys aren’t hauling around backpacks full of guns). Still there will be appropriate times when a runner wants to take a fancy gun or device that I’ve planted, and there should always be an opportunity to sell it.
For buying loot I adhere closer to the rule book, which is to roll a Negotiation test versus the item’s availability. Players can add 25% to the cost of the item to give themselves +1 dice, up to 12 dice at 400% purchase cost. I was pleased to see the runners already working together to use the team member with the highest Negotiation/Social skills as their primary shopper.
The whole prologue took a solid hour, and I probably talked way too much but the players asked all the right questions and had a pretty solid idea what they needed to do. When they were done with shopping I advanced to our first real scene, and they received a rude awakening far earlier than they were planning on – Jay-T’s was under attack!
After the players car pooled and then stopped for coffee (heh, alright but that’s gonna cost ya!) they arrived back at Jay-Ts. I mentioned in my previous adventure’s recaps that reusing scenes in Roll20 is a huge time-saver as I spend quite a bit of time building them. Being able to reuse the finale of the previous adventure with a completely different situation and hostile scenario as the first exciting incident here helped speed my preparation up considerably.
The players found a hostage situation with a twist – both sides had a hostage! During the prologue I had introduced two NPCs that would be accompanying the players on the journey, one of them, elf adept and swordswoman Lapis Luzil was outside with a captive while the other, former ganger and wheelman Crank, was inside being held hostage by the group that had attacked. Redd’s night crew lay dead and Lapis and her captive were outside the building taking cover in the truck. The players had to assess the situation from her and the captive, then infiltrate the building and attempt to talk down or defeat the enemies inside.
In our previous adventure the players rarely had a chance to plan ahead, and when they did (the finale) they all kind of just did their own thing. That was technically appropriate to them having just been thrown in with each other by random chance, but they also expressed a desire to work together in the future to coordinate their tactics. I was pleased to see them do exactly that in this situation.
After gathering what information they could, they used a combination of their shaman’s clairvoyance spell and their decker’s video camera hacks to see as much of the inside as possible. The front door had been blocked by a large shelf, and the tension cords for the garage door had been severed (the upstairs window was also an option). The players’ defacto leader, elf adept and social guru Falkirk, gave orders like a seasoned commander to everyone, taking up defensive positions, and used their beefy troll shaman Ursev to lift the garage door.
At that point I had everyone roll Initiative, though of course on the Falkirk’s turn he used a Free Action to try and talk and diffuse the situation. It gets a bit awkward here as I kind of want him to get his say, but on the other hand still follow combat rules in terms of what actions everyone can perform on their Initiative Pass. Ultimately he exchanged some words with the mage, and she with another gang member but this group wouldn’t be talked down so easily.
I anticipated this to be a fairly tricky fight, but with the players incredibly prepared to rain hell on the garage it was actually very one-sided in their favor. Only one of the gangers was actually in there at the time (the mage). The leader could quickly step out of the office room and help, but their augmented muscle was quite far away in another room, and had to spend three full passes sprinting just to get to the garage. By the time he did, the other two were dead.
Damn my runners’ sniper street samurai! In an eerie similarity to our last adventure’s boss fight, Mauta managed a one hit kill with her high-powered sniper rifle on the mage on her initiative pass. She always seems to go last but her turn is always devastating. Killing the mage resulted in both Crank being freed from her Control Actions spell, and dissipating the fairly powerful Air Elemental that had just materialized into the garage. I didn’t get a chance to use him at all. D’oh!
The gang leader was quickly ganged up on by everyone else. Ironically our elf adept Falkirk used a Leadership roll to tell Lapis not to kill him after she had just sliced a good chunk out with her sword, and she begrudgingly agreed, only to have Falkirk then deal the killing blow with a huge roll on his taser. The way stun damage works in Shadowrun is once it’s full, the damage becomes physical. Since the leader had been about 50% damaged on both Physical and Stun monitors from previous attacks one 5 hit blast with me rolling 0 hits on defense took him down completely into negatives. He was on the ground with blood and smoke pouring out and wasn’t long for this world.
By the time the augmented muscle joined the fight he was hopelessly outnumbered, and after absorbing a shot from the decker, our elf leader easily talked him down into surrendering. Though his friends were dead or dying, the players had left Lapis’ young captive alive (and handcuffed to the truck), so he did have some incentive to surrender.
Even as shockingly one-sided as the fight ended up being, combat still takes a while and we went way later than our usual allotted time. It’s always awkward to end a session in the middle of combat, and I’d be lying if I said that the lateness of the session didn’t factor into the last foe’s willingness to surrender! Next week the players will undoubtedly have some questions for why this group was here, as well as what possible ties they could have to Crank, whom they seemed to know. Also of course, the actual road odyssey part of the journey will actually begin!
Watch our sessions live on twitch.tv/gorbash722 every Sunday night beginning at 9:30pm Central.
RogueWatson 